America's Goldman Sachs Legacy

Goldman Sachs just posted higher than expected quarterly earnings of $3.33 billion – up 65%, year over year – even though they were the recipients of over $10 billion in TARP money (which they were finally ‘allowed’ to pay back).

Goldman Sachs boasts approximately 29,400 employees, and they have announced plans to give $11.4 billion in bonuses to their employees, which averages out to approximately $770,000 per employee – with top executives set to garner millions each. That bonus figure amounts to approximately the kinds of bonuses that Sachs was handing out to its people at the height of the prosperity bubble.

President Obama, shortly after the passage of TARP legislation (brackets are mine):

When I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves twenty billion dollars [only a little more than half of what Goldman Sachs alone is now intending to give its employees] worth of bonuses, the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004, at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse, and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them … that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline and sense of responsibility.

Goldman Sachs ‘graduates’ held extremely powerful positions in the American government before the economy began to visibly unwind, with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury during both Clinton administrations, and Joshua Bolton, President Bush’s chief of staff, leaping to mind immediately. Goldman graduates also serve as the heads of the New York Stock Exchange, the Canadian World Bank, the Italian World Bank, the New York Fed, etc. They hold prominent positions in much of the world of international finance.

Shortly before the economy began to visibly head south, Goldman Sachs got its foot in the door again when President Bush appointed as Treasury Secretary former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Once the economic crisis began to rear its ugly head, Paulson sat back passively in his secretary's chair and allowed two of America's largest investment banks/brokerage firms to fail: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

The Treasury Department, under Paulson, did not lift a finger to help either Bear or Lehman keep its head above water. (Footnote: Bear and Lehman were both competitors of Goldman Sachs – with Lehman posing its biggest competitive threat).

Fewer than twenty-four hours after Lehman Brothers bit the dust, Paulson made the decision to bail out AIG, the largest insurance conglomerate in the world, to the tune of $85 billion, for the sake of the American economy, which ‘would suffer irreparable damage’, should AIG fail. (Footnote: Goldman Sachs represented the biggest AIG payout -- $12.9 billion -- when AIG received its federal bailout billions.)

Hank Paulson then proceeded to appoint another Goldman Sachs crony, Neil Kashkari, to oversee the distribution of TARP money.

One of Kashkari’s first decisions was to change the status of Goldman Sachs to a bank holding company – a new status which would allow it to become the direct recipient of TARP money, in addition to FDIC funds, and money from the Fed discount window. Since Goldman Sachs was now registered as a bank holding company, they were no longer under SEC regulation, but Fed regulation. And who sat at the head of the Fed regulators to whom Sachs must answer? A man named Stephen Friedman, a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs.

Despite the fact that Mr. Friedman was now sitting in the overseer/regulator position at the Fed, responsible to monitor Goldman Sach’s dealings, he was not only a former chairman of GS, but also a current member of Goldman’s board of directors, and a major stockholder in the firm.

When complaints were issued about this blatant conflict of interest, current Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner, issued a temporary one-year waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule, allowing Friedman to continue to decide regulatory matters in GS’s behalf.

Mr. Friedman shortly thereafter purchased an additional 52,000 shares of Goldman Sachs.

Neil Kashkari was then replaced as overseer of TARP distributions by Gary Gensler, a former partner at Goldman Sachs. Gensler is now serving as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with his main charge being to regulate derivatives. When he was working for Goldman Sachs several years ago, Gensler worked tirelessly to deregulate derivatives.

Goldman Sachs has hired a new lobbyist, Michael Pease, who also serves as a Director of Government Affairs. Pease is replacing another Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, who has received a promotion to serve as the Chief of Staff of our Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner.

(Footnote: During his campaign, our president promised that he would never have a registered lobbyist serve in his administration. Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist whose assignment was to lobby in order to prevent pay restrictions for Wall Street moneymakers, is now the number two man in the treasury department.)

Goldman Sachs recently spent $23 billion to purchase ten percent of the Chicago Climate Exchange, and $1 billion in carbon assets (including alternative energy projects), while their current and former employees (only some of whom are mentioned above) – now major government decision-makers – are endorsing mandatory limits on carbon emissions included in Cap and Trade legislation.

Think about the fact that Goldman Sachs was a recipient of bailout funds (read: your and my tax dollars), and that they are about to bestow upon their employees bonuses that average $770,000 per employee. Now think about the fact that most Americans’ nest eggs consist of retirement accounts directly linked to the American stock market. Then take a good look at the performance of the general markets (Dow and NASDAQ) as compared to the performance of Goldman Sachs, since our president took office (red=Goldman, green=NAS, Blue=Dow):


Man, these Goldman Sachs people are indescribably brilliant. Their company appears to know how to turn dirt into gold. Indeed, Goldman Sachs employees appear to outshine all other financial wizards in that they achieve, at an incredible proportion as compared to other financial wizards, major government positions, with indescribable autocratic decision-making powers.

Or could there be a kind of affirmative action hiring process going on here, in that these Sachs fellows affirm the leftist agenda currently being pushed down our throats, and they, in turn, invariably garner significant increased wealth and political power?

That leftist agenda currently being railroaded through Congress? It includes all manner of liberty-destroying, healthcare quality destroying, capitalism (especially small business) destroying, elitist power-grabbing initiatives … not to mention the fact that it is annihilating the carefully-accumulated nest eggs of tens of millions of hard-working Americans, and saddling their children and grandchildren with a monumentally burdensome debt that they can never hope to repay.

The inevitable result? We are fast allowing our republic to be transformed into a caste system made up of a political and financial elite, the working masses, and the parasites and benefactors who will keep the elite in office. This generation of working Americans, and those who follow, will find themselves slaves to the state – allowed to keep only that which the state allows them to retain, and forced to share the remainder with those the state wants to see prosper.

[Coming soon: (1) How Goldman Sachs manipulates the markets, and (2) the major role that Goldman Sachs played in the American economic debacle … of which we have yet to see the worst.]

~ joanie

Time is Ruthless

Shifty Powers died last month. There’s no better way to put it. No, strike that. There’s no easier way to put it.

I was on the road last week. It was a particularly difficult trip, fraught with bad weather from Chicago going east, something this Californian is not equipped to deal with on a regular basis. The return flight was peppered with mechanical problems, missed connections, and other frustrations. I was hoping to make it back, and bask in all this glorious California sunshine that makes life with the imminent collapse of the entire state infrastructure tolerable.

Instead, I came home to an email that’s been making its way around the Internet. Some of you may already have seen it. I believe it was written by Joe Galloway – he, of We Were Soldiers, 1st Cav/Ia Drang notoriety – and very eloquently done.

It was Shifty Powers’ memoriam.

For the first time in a long time, I’m hard pressed to come up with something to add to the volumes of testimonials that are currently making their way through cyberspace. You see, Shifty Powers was caught up in the tidal wave of history. He was also a soldier in a crusade against evil when the entire world was in danger of falling into another dark age. He was a brother paratrooper, and since the Airborne community is a close-knit one, I knew him by reputation long before I ever made his acquaintance. But more than that, the one designation I hold most dear is that Shifty Powers was my friend.

I finally met him face-to-face in Normandy in June 2004 for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. An account of that experience is related in detail in Saving Private Weinmann. This commentary is not an advertisement for that one, merely to familiarize those who do not know the details of that momentous event, and to explain my passion for the greatest generation.

So, how do I eulogize the passing of a friend? Where do I begin?

If there was one thing I had to pick from the many outstanding qualities of Shifty Powers, it would be his humility. For all his wartime accomplishments, he was the epitome of the salt of the earth. Were any of us to meet him without his connection to the Band of Brothers paratroopers – a virtual impossibility since the release of the mini-series in 2001 – we would be hard-pressed to connect him to any of those events.

It’s a fading distinction in 21st century America, where an army of exhibitionists, all grimly determined to elbow each other out of the way to gain their fifteen minutes of fame, will stop at nothing in its pursuit. We live in a country where he who shouts the loudest and the longest gets the attention. And whoever wins the endurance race of vulgarity and verbosity is often the one taken seriously.

Shifty Powers sat in the back of the room – often smoking a cigarette, usually with a smile on his face – and took it all in. He didn’t miss a thing. And he didn’t have to pound his chest.

Shifty Powers stared into the black hole of human destruction. He witnessed the worst humanity could muster with the full force of 20th century industrialized warfare at its disposal, and was not poisoned by it. He emerged from his wartime experience with his soul, his character and his integrity intact. He never lost his faith. This is not to say he came home unaffected. But whatever scars he carried with him he kept to himself. In that, he was typical of his generation.

By most accounts, Shifty was diagnosed with cancer – I know not which variety – last June (2008). He died last month, June 17, 2009 if memory serves. Was it lung cancer? Possibly. I remember his singular delight during our excursion into history, when we all discovered that the smoking Nazis had not yet invaded Europe. You could smoke everywhere. And Shifty did. I never saw him without a cigarette at the ready. Did it finally take its toll? Who knows? And what does it matter now?

There is a fallacy, I think, when it comes to the death of the elderly. Just because they’ve lived to a ripe old age, somehow we believe they are somehow more reconciled to death than the rest of us. I’ve fallen into this mindset myself. I think perhaps we’re wrong to see death in such a light.

Let’s face it, our outlook on life doesn’t change much as we age. We don’t really think that differently as we grow older. Oh, we don’t move quite as fast as before. And we get more impatient with the frustrations of life, possibly because we’ve been dealing with them for so long that we’re looking forward to a little relief. But, except for a few aches and pains, do we somehow become resigned to leaving this life just because we’ve lived out allotted three score and ten and then some? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Maybe we get up one morning with creaking bones, tired from the broken sleep that comes to us when we age. We look at the calendar and wonder where the years went. When did it get to be 2009, we wonder? We interact with the 40-somethings of the world and marvel at how young they are, at the same time remembering with a chuckle how old we thought we were at that age.

But mostly this shift in perception comes from my recollection of Shifty Powers and what a grand time he had living life. No, I’m not suggesting he was some ageing, rompin’, stompin’, foul-mouthed airborne hellraiser. But he had a really good time of it from what I could see. He enjoyed life, the utter and total joy of it. I doubt he went easily. I don’t think he was finished with it, if he had a say-so in the matter. Sadly, he didn’t. It’s not our call when it comes to closing time.

As for the significance of his passing, I think that would be obvious. His was the last generation that uniformly believed in the goodness of America. Right or wrong, he loved this country, warts and all. There was no question that it was worth defending. And there was no thought to abandoning his responsibility to bear that burden, even it meant never coming home.

There are those among us who would celebrate his passing, but for all the wrong reasons. They would claim that the ethnocentricity of Americans is a tradition that the years have passed by. They would further assert that men like Shifty Powers have become archaic – antiquated holdovers whose singular vision of the nobility of America in spite of its flaws has long-since outlived its value and is well-disposed of in the new global utopia of an America not so primus inter pares.

I would suggest to these brave new visionaries to count the cost of what was lost and get back to me on that. Either that, or walk the grounds of Auschwitz or Dachau and then opine at length about the inherent nobility of man.

So, here’s to Shifty Powers – a man who made a difference when it counted the most. God’s speed, my friend. I’ve no doubt that we’ll meet up again when we’ve “all crossed over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees,” to quote Stonewall Jackson. Shifty Powers has made his last jump. I’m certain that he didn’t freeze in the door. And I’m sure he landed on his feet.

“Well done, my good and faithful servant . . . Enter into the joy of your lord.” – Matthew 25:21.

by Euro-American Scum
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)

Letting it Be in Post-America America

It’s hard to gauge the depth of another person’s suffering. Even if we ourselves have walked through the valley of the shadow, so to speak, the pain of catastrophic loss is not transferrable. We can empathize. We can speculate. We can even shudder in horror, but only when it happens to us can we truly know the searing devastation of personal calamity firsthand.

It was in just such a frame of mind that I happened to be killing time at the Chino Hills, California Barnes & Noble and picked up a book prominently displayed at the entrance to the store. It was positioned, as is always the case, to garner maximum exposure. And whoever tapped this particular publication for such a prime setting knew what they were doing. It was impossible to miss. Strange that such a coveted position wasn’t reserved for the latest Stephen King, Dean Koontz or John Grisham mega-bestseller. Not even Stephenie Meyer’s latest Twilight clone managed to snare such a choice location. Of course, such prime movers of the pop culture world have no need of such conspicuous exposure. Their disciples will find their works if they have to move heaven and earth to do so.

So, on this particular occasion, the catbird seat was reserved for a book penned by a local author, Ruthe Rosen, a former flight attendant and current stay-at-home soccer mom residing locally in Chino Hills. The book, a self-published volume entitled Let It Be: My Daughter’s Legacy, featured yet another innocent-young-girl-dying- tragically-from-an-incurable-disease. And while such tales can often be compelling, if for no other reason than most of us recoil in horror with a kind of I’m-glad-it-wasn’t-my-daughter mentality, I was wondering what it was about this sad tale of heartbreak that merited such favored status. Out of curiosity, I picked up the book and leafed through it.

I hate to say it, but there wasn’t much remarkable material from which to choose, at least not from what I could see on a cursory examination. And at $22.95 for a thin-sliced hardcover edition, I had to think twice before tucking a copy under my arm and heading for the cashier. Nevertheless, I did just that.

Sure enough, there was nothing unique about the story. But then, how could there be? Such tragedies following an all-too familiar pattern. A young, beautiful, vibrant young girl – Karla Asch-Rosen – with an extremely positive outlook on life contracts a malignant brain tumor. The family is devastated. The treatment buys her time and nothing else. During the course of her death struggle, neither the girl nor her family loses their optimism, their courage, or their faith in spite of the inevitable outcome. It’s the stuff of which inspiration is made.

Last Saturday, the author was signing books at the very same Barnes & Noble. And since the schools just got out, and, due to the imminent collapse of the California public education system, I am unlikely to be called back next fall, I figured I better show up and get an autograph while I still could. You see, Ruthe Rosen and I have a couple of things in common. Perhaps the most notable is that we both lost a daughter – hers to cancer, mine to a traffic accident. And maybe the common factors should stop there, since that’s the prime motivator that got me in the store on that gloomy Saturday afternoon last weekend.

The gathering was small, in one of the far corners of the mammoth store. There were nine chairs set up for a reading for which I didn’t stay. And the obligatory table was piled high with books, behind which, signing them as fast as her fingers could fly, was the author de jour, and grieving parent, Ruthe Rosen. Only she didn’t look like the grief was exacting too heavy a toll on that day. Her dazzling smile could light up the surface of the sun. Good thing, too, considering an army of local paparazzi was in attendance. Never saw so many flashbulbs going off since Barack Obama made his one and only appearance in the Inland Empire last October.

I got off to a rough start, I must admit. I’d been doing some work at the house, and I wasn’t exactly at my best when I hurried through the door. I also made the bad mistake of forgetting my book, which, when I got up to the front of the short line, I explained with a good deal of chagrin. The super-model-like smile faded momentarily as she no doubt pondered what the local derelict was doing, unkempt, unshaven and bookless, spoiling her coming out party. Then I explained our common bond. Then the smile came back. It was a sad smile just the same.

“I’m not going to answer the common question,” she patiently explained to me.

“That’s good,” I responded, “since I wasn’t going to ask it. I already know the answer.”

We understood each other, at least thus far. Those of us who’ve lost children inevitably come to grips with the age-old question – Is it ever going to get any better? The short answer: No. The more extended one: We get so we handle the loss better. Think about it. They’re two different coping sets, really.

So, we talked for a while. She asked me about the accident. Where did it happen? Athens, Georgia. When? Six years ago June 19. How did it happen? Her car was broadsided on the driver’s side in a driving rainstorm. She got to a T-intersection just ahead of the pickup truck that hit her. The power to the traffic signals was out, and both vehicles were going too fast. No one walked away from that one. The driver of the truck was paralyzed from the neck down, so everyone paid a price, some heavier than others.

I’m not sure what I expected when I told my version of the sad tale of woe. The empathy that springs from a shared experience, perhaps? The knowing glance of a parent that has sustained a similar loss? Something like that. What I got was an undeniable moment of definitive discomfort. She seemed at a loss for words. Suddenly, the all-American smile was nowhere to be seen. The dazzling, white teeth were uncomfortably concealed. She didn’t know what to say. Her eyes drifted to the floor. And then one of her neighbors elbowed me out of the way, and the two girlfriends dissolved into a bevy of squeals, shrieks, giggles and gossip.

Since I’d been summarily dismissed at this point, I didn’t know quite what to do. There was a reading scheduled for the afternoon. And since the turnout for autographs didn’t amount to much more than the local neighborhood acquaintances and myself, I expected it to get started in short order. That was not to be. What followed was an endless flurry of posed photographs by local reporters and eternal interviews with husband Michael, who appeared to be the choreographer of this production.

He was a genial man, somewhere in his late 30s or early 40s from the looks of things. Like his wife, he bore an irrepressible smile that never wavered through all his clipped orders to photographers, print media beat writers, and television reporters. During a lull, we got a chance to talk. Yes, he was the executive vice-president and manager of operations for the Let It Be Foundation – an organization he and his wife founded after the tragic death of his step-daughter. And would I like to make a contribution? Yes, there was worldwide interest in this life-affirming new book, and would I like to buy a copy? Yes, they’ve reached a cultural tipping point where the value system of the entire world will inevitably be changed for the better on a global scale. Never had any girl lived a more meaningful life or died a death that touched so many people.

Call me crazy, but the names Rachel Joy Scott and Cassie Bernal – both of whom perished at Columbine – come to mind as potential competitors for this dubious crown.

And yes, they’ve received offers from Good Morning America, The Today Show, ABC News, NBC Nightly News, Katie Couric, Sky News London, the BBC, CNN and Fox News begging Ruthe for interviews. The only problem is none of these networks will pony up the required fee for a fifteen minute interview. And of course, there have been movie deals in the offing. But the asking price begins at a level much higher than the major studios are willing to consider and goes up from there.

No wonder husband Michael quit his job as a multi-million dollar corporate executive to manage his wife’s career. Gold mines are where you find them. No recession in Chino Hills. Happy days.

Just before I departed, husband Michael introduced me to the couple’s two surviving sons, Brandon and Cole. I’m not sure which was which, but they were both pre-adolescent youngsters of about 12 and 10. Like their parents, they bore the unwavering, indomitable smiles that appear to be a family trait. They were so polite, so well-behaved, and so measured in everything they said and did, they impressed me as little adults. No doubt these two boys will go far in life, possibly as executive managers of the Let It Be Foundation: The Next Generation.

I departed with my Let It Be (autographed) bookmark, not quite sure what to make of this carefully directed encounter. I say that, because I am hardly an objective observer of such happenings. And I am, as previously noted, a member in good standing of a fraternity which is growing much too big, much too fast. In the past four years at my church, six families have lost teenage children – five to traffic accidents, and one to a fatal disease. And since the congregation is composed of the prosperous leaders who make things happen in the local community, many have gone on to establish foundations of their own in the names of their cherished and lost children.

But none have ever made out of it the carefully staged production that I witnessed last Saturday. Its intent was inspiration. In truth, it creeped me out.

I have to be careful about what follows. Because commenting on another person’s grief is an explosive, often incendiary topic. A topic that could easily blow up in the face of the commentator. Add to the mix that I’ve dealt with my own version of pain and loss, and the problem becomes even more elusive. Being on the receiving end of that kind of agony does not provide any kind of perspective, sad to say.

So, let’s set a couple of ground rules, shall we? Call them a series of baseline assumptions which, I hope, we can all agree on.

All catastrophic loss is just that – the end of the world. There’s no mincing words when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it. Because coming out the other side, the world is significantly different than before the loss.

Different people deal with loss differently. Viktor Frankl wrote a remarkable book following his experience in the holocaust at Auschwitz – Man’s Search For Meaning. Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist and protégé of Sigmund Freud, differed with his mentor on several crucial points. Frankl believed that it was not sex, but the search for meaning which was the driving force in the lives of human beings. Frankl spent the rest of his post-holocaust life making a conscious effort to find meaning in everything. I will not debate the merits of his existential approach to life, or its pitfalls. The point is, people will go to great lengths to find significance in the wake of personal devastation. It brings meaning to the loss and somehow makes the agony less agonizing. And that includes establishing charitable foundations and going on the interview circuit.
No one heals on a schedule, or in quite the same way someone else does. It’s that simple. There is no timetable, and there is no operating manual for coping. Some people find God. Others blame Him. I’ve encountered both since my brush with tragedy. And I’ve been both too.

Having said that, I will share my gut reaction. And it’s very simple. People who smile all the time make me shudder. Right or wrong, I always wonder what’s cooking behind that all-American smile. Children who act like mini-grown-ups make my skin crawl. Do they ever wrestle and fight over some small thing, as brothers do from time to time, or do they resort to more subtle, devious ways of stabbing each other in the back. Are they healthy kids on their way to being functional young men? Or are they politicians in the making? And, in the wake of such a loss, a mother who turns into a bubbling fountain of effervescence the instant the red light comes on makes me wonder if there isn’t a darker form of denial operating not far below the surface.

Still, the Bible tells us that such enthusiasm is not only proof positive of saving faith, but clear evidence of the fruit of the Spirit.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.” – Galatians 5:22-23

For all that, I’ve discovered that people in a perpetual state of joy are often on medication. I guess that leaves the rest of us – who grieve the loss for years, see nothing good coming from it, and are coping with the devastation of shattered lives and bleak futures – in danger of hell fire. Oh well. It’s a tough old world out there.

This book was written ostensibly to provide inspiration for families enduring various kinds of catastrophic loss. From death to divorce, it was intended to provide comfort, solace and encouragement to those people who find themselves in the valley of the shadow with no way out. And it may very well succeed in that capacity. So, was I comforted? Inspired? Encouraged?

In a word, no. And my encounter with the architects of this recent exercise in sentimentality did nothing to mitigate that experience.

I find that in the post-America America, one of the symptoms of its demise has been a penchant to flounder in a pool of sentiment and sentimentality. We love a sad tale of woe. Always have. It takes many expressions. And it has been our undoing. Were it not so, there would be no Lifetime Channel. Neither would there be a citizenry that goes so blissfully about its daily business happily unaware that the country that nurtured it has vanished in the fires of political correctness, globalist values and an international citizen of the world as its leader.

The path to destruction has been littered with the bones of such a seduction throughout the recent history of western culture.

In 19th century Europe, it was an overly sentimentalized belief in the sublime nature of humanity and how man was in control of his environment and could, by reason and negotiation, accomplish anything that collapsed in the flames of the First World War.

It was an overly romanticized article of faith in the 1990s, of the inherent goodness of man in general and the Islamic world in particular that reached its terrible climax on that crystal clear Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001 in New York City.

And it is a quixotic, exceedingly nostalgic view of the country that purports that no matter what abominations are perpetrated against its people or its Constitution that America will endure for all time, simply because it always has.

Let’s face it, we love a good schmaltzy, sentimental story. And they don’t get any juicier than an innocent, young girl who dies tragically of a fatal disease.

Have you ever attended a funeral of such a child? Invariably, she is idolized in death in ways she never was in life. The girl may have been an unashamed gossip, a back-stabbing cutthroat, or a pushing slut, but in death she becomes “. . . so kind, so good, so full of life; everybody loved her. . . ”. I don’t know if either extreme applied to Karla Asch-Rosen. I never knew her. But she is certainly represented as being nothing less than a picture-perfect ideal, an angel on earth. And sadly, none of us who did not know her will ever know the truth. She has passed into the realm of the honored dead, whether she deserves to be there or not.

As for the media blitz, I can easily see why. They’ve got a hot commodity here. But there’s no novelty to it, and its shelf life is both perishable and short. It will last precisely until the next pristine youthful lass dies tragically of some fatal disease or some grad night traffic mishap. And so ends the fifteen minutes of fame of Karla Asch-Rosen and the Let It Be Foundation. The queen is dead (literally). Long live the queen.

And when it comes to marketing, there’s a very simple axiom that holds true – it’s very easy to love the hot blonde. I can see why Fox News is turning cartwheels to get Ruthe Rosen in front of their cameras. Another gorgeous blonde is just what they need. I’ll bet Megyn Kendall is shaking in her stylish stiletto heels as we speak. Maybe Ruthe Rosen and Carrie Prejean can fight it out in a celebrity death match for the next Fox News commentary spot that comes open. I just wonder if this tragedy had happened to some 300-lb. trailer trash mom living in a single-wide outside Boone, North Carolina, if she would get the same air play this group is getting. Somehow I think not.

And so, the parade marches on. But during the midst of it, I was reminded of a similar tragedy that happened during my tenure in Las Vegas. Her name was Valerie Pida, and she was a UNLV cheerleader. She also fought a losing battle with lymphoma for thirteen years and succumbed in 1992. Her attitude was nothing less than heroic. Immensely positive, she was tempered with the cold certainty of what proved to be a life cut short. Her life slowly, but surely ebbed away, one heart-wrenching tumor at a time. Yet, the girl had steel in her spine, and endured with quiet dignity, youthful enthusiasm, and defiant courage that touched everyone around her. Her passing left a void in the life of her family, particularly her father, whom I met toward the end of the ordeal. There was no inspiration to be found, just the soul-numbing loss of a beloved child, cherished and adored.

And what remains in the wake of so profound a loss is the nether world of “what if?”

You always wonder what might have been if she was still with you. How would your life be different? What would her life have become? You agonize over what you could have done while she was alive, even if it made no difference at all. You always wonder if somehow you could have done something to affect the outcome. And, during those deep, endless nights, when sleep was just out of reach, you inevitably come to terms with the non-negotiable fact that you will never see her again this side of heaven. And at times like that, no amount of inspiring stories, or charitable foundations takes away the black hole in your soul. Maybe you find God. Maybe you don’t. But you definitely live with the loss. And that never goes away.

So, I look forward to the interviews, the book promos, maybe even a paperback volume. I’ll even cough up $9.00 to see a matinee airing of the feature film. In the day of satellite television, Internet streaming video and digital movie productions, it’s all about show biz anyway.

And it’s always easier to love the hot blonde.

by Euro-American Scum
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)
Euro-American Scum can be reached at eascum@yahoo.com

The End of Reagan's America

... a lament of incalculable magnitude,not only for America but for all of humankind.

As I typed the words above, I had to backspace several times because, twice before I got it right, I had typed 'america' with a lower-case 'a'. Funny what the subconscious (or the fingers, possessing a keenness of which we are unaware?), do when we find ourselves in a less-than-optimum frame of mind.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's death. He is now in the company of the great founding patriots who laid down the magnificent vision that he revived and revered.

About ten years before he was taken from us, President Reagan observed:

... whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding your steps and opportunity's arm steadying your way.

My fondest hope for each one of you -- and especially for young people -- is that you will love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism. May each of you have the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, and the hand to execute works that will make the world a little better for your having been here. May all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance, and never lose your natural, God-given optimism. And finally, my fellow Americans, may every dawn be a great new beginning for America and every evening bring us closer to that shining city upon a hill.

The personal foundation that allowed President Reagan to lead us from darkness to light in eight short years rested upon his reverence for the United States Constitution – the most magnificent blueprint for governance ever devised by the mind of man.

In our national leadership, that reverence had been tossed aside for the better part of the twentieth century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, especially, ignored its cautions with impunity, and placed their own political agendas above its brilliant dictates, resulting in a gradual erosion of our Founders’ vision ... until Ronald Reagan successfully led us back onto the path the Founders had cleared for us.

Just two years before he left office, President Reagan issued an executive order (number 12612) on federalism in which he underlined the pressing need to limit government power, lest we lose our way again. Part of that eloquent order reads:

Federalism is rooted in the knowledge that our political liberties are best assured by limiting the size and scope of the national government ... The people of the States created the national government when they delegated to it those enumerated governmental powers relating to matters beyond the competence of the individual States ... All other sovereign powers, save those expressly prohibited the States by the Constitution, are reserved to the States or to the people.


The seed for that executive order was planted decades before, in his 'Rendezvous with Destiny/A Time for Choosing' speech, in which he cautioned:

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

Reagan’s legacy is so powerful, and so widespread, that his countrymen have tended to take it for granted as something that always existed. And yet his simple reliance on our founding principles, as delineated in our Constitution, was the catalyst that turned an ailing economy into a robust one, that re-ignited the spirit of allegiance and duty into the hearts of his countrymen, and that ushered communism – in both the Soviet Union and East Germany – down the dark road toward resounding defeat.


Under Ronald Reagan, individual freedom, limited government, and the free market system, were proved to be the cornerstone of honest wealth, widespread prosperity, and national safety and security. He reminded us all that 'socialists ignore the side of man that is of the spirit. They can provide shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill – all the things that are guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that we also dream'.

Despite media assertions otherwise, in eight short years, Ronald Reagan reversed dangerous economic trends, much worse than those that were in place when Barack Obama took office, by implementing four simple practices:

• government deregulation of the economy



• across-the-board reductions in tax rates



• anti-inflationary monetary policy, and



• non-defense budget restraint

Despite the fact that all four policies succeeded in performing a virtual economic miracle, the Obama administration is intent on implementing ‘economic policy’ that embraces none of the above.

The difference between the two ‘leaders’? The former loved America and embraced as his primary goal her security and prosperity. The latter is devoted to a political ideology in which genuine security and prosperity (the kind enjoyed by a free people) are viewed as enemies of the state.


President Reagan often echoed the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who visited America in the early 1800s and wrote extensively about what he observed, with great fascination and prescience. In an address then-Governor Reagan delivered at Hillsdale college a few years before his first election to the presidency, he observed:

... he [de Tocqueville] came here and he looked at everything he could see in our country, trying to find the secret of our success and then went back and wrote a book about it. But even then, 130 years ago, he saw signs that prompted him to warn us, that if we weren’t constantly on guard we would find ourselves covered by a network of regulations controlling every activity. And he said, if that came to pass we would one day find ourselves a nation of timid animals, with government the shepherd ... and if you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom ... all freedom.

Believing, as de Tocqueville did, in the absolute necessity of vigilance against the over-encroachment of government, President Reagan restored a nation to former greatness. He closed the curtain on an era of national weakness, diffidence, and division, and eased fears and repressions that had gripped the world for decades.

His countrymen respected him because of his faithfulness to America’s roots; they loved him because of his goodness. He had the strength that emanates from character, the stalwartness that flows from conviction, the grace and gentleness that flow from humility, and the humor that flows from being comfortable with who he is.

What more can a free society ask of a leader?

I have a picture of President Reagan on the bulletin board above my desk at my office. Each day before I turn out the lights and close the door behind me, I look at his likeness, silently thank him for the gift of ‘rebirth’ that he so faithfully provided us all, and assure him that, in spite of the fact that his beloved republic has abandoned his lofty ideals, and forgotten the noble sacrifices that made us the most moral and prosperous people in the history of mankind, there is still a faithful remnant among his countrymen that will continue to cling to the vision that he held so dear. No matter the cost.


Yet, a mere twenty years since he left office, most Americans have forgotten their heroic origins and have declared that divine guidance is dispensable. They have allowed a cadre of elitist scoundrels in Washington to muddy, beyond recognition, the phrase 'of, by and for the people', and they have vicariously written its epitaph by virtue of their eyes-diverted apathy and indifference to its brutal murder.

The majority of our countrymen no longer value:

• instilling in their children a knowledge of, and reverence for, their proud heritage

• encouraging personal responsibility as opposed to careless, parasitic dependence on others for sustenance

• respecting the rule of law and seeking genuine justice as opposed to a perverted, entitlement-oriented sense of 'equality'

• the striving for, and rewarding of, excellence

• the responsibilities, both civic and personal, incumbent with citizenship in a free society

Mankind has been struggling for more than two millenia to comprehend and retain Plato's admonition. If Americans ever successfully heeded his warnings, we have since decided that such wisdom is sadly passé. In carelessly relaxing our grip on those citizen-characterisitics essential to preserving and defending a free society, the last best hope of man on earth has sentenced its children to a thousand years of darkness.

If I could call every American's attention to one paragraph of 'literature' in these toubling times, it would be this excerpt from Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, regarding the decline, and ultimately the collapse, of the 'religious impulse' in the modern world, and the filling of the hideous vacuum that it will create:

Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behavior than Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And above all the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatsoever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.

Our messiah is now among us. But he is not the one foretold by Scripture.

Beware.

Below is a column that recently appeared in Pravda. A resident of what President Reagan once called the ‘evil empire’ sums up fairly well America’s impending demise. How tragically ironic that the enemy that Ronald Reagan brought to its knees should, a mere twenty years later, be capable of foretelling the death of the beloved country he served so faithfully and so well.

Μολὼν λάβε ...

~ joanie

America's Descent into Marxism
by Stanislav Mishin
(as published in Pravda)

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then [sic] the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind [sic] the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then [sic] Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then [sic] happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a [sic] record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then [sic] another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar [sic] Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then [sic] a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then [sic] two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored [sic] horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks [sic], a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Memorial Day Reflections

On his recent trip to France, of all places, the president of the United States declared that America has ‘failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world’ and has ‘shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive’ towards its allies.

On a campaign stint in early 2008, the soon-to-be first lady of the United States declared that ‘for the first time in her adult life’ she is now proud of her country.

These two statements were not slips of the tongue. They were not aberrational statements of opinion from the leader of the western world and his spouse. The anti-American sentiment expressed in their words are borne out everyday in their actions which are seeking (and, sadly, succeeding) in bringing the real America to her knees, and replacing it with a socialist utopia where a ruling elite reigns supreme.

Take a good look at the picture below. How does it make you feel?


I am sickened by it.

The consistency of his words and actions indicate that the leader of the free world has either little or no understanding of American heritage and history, or unbridled contempt for it, presumably because it does not combine well with his elitist-rule vision of the future of America. Neither condition renders him qualified to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Obama spoke his derisive words about America and her relationship with our ‘allies’ fewer than five hundred miles from Normandy, where, sixty-five years ago, on both Omaha and Utah Beaches close to seven thousand ‘arrogant’ Americans willingly offered themselves up as casualties of war.

Two of our current president’s most trailblazing accomplishments have been (1) abandoning the time-honored tradition of respecting the legacy of his predecessors and (2) consistently showing irreverence for those duty-bound, courageous patriots who sacrificed – sometimes with their lives – to create the most moral and prosperous nation in the history of mankind, and to stand in the crosshairs of tyrants when the liberties of others were threatened.

Such is the proud legacy that ten generations of Americans have crafted out of blood and sacrifice that spans more than two centuries, the extent of which the world had never before known.

Below is a picture of a section of the Meuse-Argonne American cemetery in France. The cemetery covers more than 130 acres, and beneath each of those little white specks/crosses lies the body of an ‘arrogant’ American – husbands, fathers, sweethearts, sons, brothers who left home and loved ones to travel to foreign soil in the name of freedom. More than fourteen thousand American World War I dead are buried at Meuse-Argonne. Look intently at the picture and think about that. Focus on those little white specks. Do you have a lump in your throat? If not, continue looking until you do.


France (remember the place where our current president spoke of America’s ‘arrogance’ and ‘derisive’ nature?) is home to eleven large American military cemeteries. Meuse-Argonne is only one of them. There are also hundreds of thousands of American bodies lying beneath headstones at Arlington National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Flanders Field, Ardennes, Normandy, Florence, Lorraine, Aisne Marne – in cemeteries throughout Europe (the allies that we ‘dismiss’ and treat with ‘derision’) ... and in countless unmarked graves in unknown places. All of those bodies embraced the vision of freedom, law and justice that defines the real America – a vision that they wanted the rest of the world to have the freedom to choose as well.

Remember our heroes, in spite of your president’s agenda-driven desire that you forget them. They are watching us now from afar, quietly but insistently reminding us of the source and precious value of our liberties, and challenging us to hold those hard-won liberties dear, standing firm against all who would remove them from our grasp.

Remember them – both those who have left us and those who are now serving on battlefields far from home, facing the prospect of death with each new dawn. Seek out a Memorial Day service in your neighborhood tomorrow morning. There will be plenty of time for barbecues in the remaining hours of the day. And, after the service, continue to honor our fallen countrymen through a determination to follow in their courageous, duty-bound, liberty-loving footsteps. There could be no finer role model for us all.

~ joanie

Dear Mr. President ...

Dear President Obama,

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

* You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

* You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

* You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

* You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

* You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

* You scare me because you lack humility and "class", always blaming others.

* You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals that wish to see America fail.

* You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the "blame America" crowd and deliver this message abroad.

* You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

* You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

* You scare me because you prefer windmills to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal, and shale reserves.

* You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

* You scare me because you have begun to use "extortion" tactics against certain banks and corporations.

* You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

* You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

* You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

* You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

* You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Reillys, and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

* You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

* Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term, I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

-- Lou Pritchett, author of:

Anatomy of an Ambush

About five years ago I began following a small biotech company called Dendreon. I did a great deal of research on the company and began corresponding with people -- urologists, oncologists, researchers and clinicians -- who knew much more than I about the products in their pipeline, the process through which one must move in order to obtain FDA approval, and the conceivable potential of the vaccines that Dendreon was developing.

I became convinced that this company had several blockbuster products in its pipeline, so I purchased shares of the stock, continued to read experts’ opinions, and kept my ear open for developments, both positive and negative.

At the time, Dendreon’s most promising product, which appeared closest to FDA approval, was an anti-prostate cancer vaccine called Provenge. But following closely behind was a second vaccine -- this one for breast cancer -- called Neuvenge. Both vaccines concentrate on one antigen and a revolutionary cassette technology that has the potential to be a powerful tool in confronting many types of cancer. The development of the second vaccine had been sidelined for years due to financial concerns. A small fledgling biotech company is not awash in cash.

The current most common treatment for advanced stage prostate cancer is a chemotherapy treatment called Taxotere, whose side-effects can be torturous – some of which include: low levels of white blood cells, anemia, hair loss, mouth sores, severe fluid retention, nerve pain, weakness, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, breathing difficulties, joint pain ... and death. And Taxotere’s life-prolonging promise is minimal, at best.

Unlike Taxotere, which is essentially a poison targeted to kill cancer cells before they interfere with regular cells, Provenge attempts to re-engage the body's own immune system, encouraging it to more readily recognize cancer and defend against it … naturally. And its main possible side-effects include mild fever and chills, lasting only a few days (end of list).

Take a good look at the comparable side effects of Taxotere, the only prevalent treatment for late-stage prostate cancer, vs. Provenge. Apologies for the inconvenient fact that I had to break the chart in two and place the right side of it under the left -- it was simply too wide to fit in the space alotted here. You simply have to read the side-effect category and then scroll down to the second image to see how the two treatments compare:



Shortly after I became interested in Dendreon the FDA was advised by its own appointed panel of seventeen experts (oncologists, urologists, and immunologists) that Provenge is unequivocally safe. The vote was unanimous, 17-0. The panel also agreed, 13 to 4, that that there was ‘substantial evidence’ of the drug’s effectiveness, as per FDA parameters.

Three of the panel members who voted on Provenge’s effectiveness had admitted conflicts of interest (which would most likely have rendered them unable to serve on the panel, had the newer FDA rules on conflicts been in effect then). Had they been barred from the decision-making process, the effectiveness vote would then have been a whopping 13 to 1.

Approximately 30,000 men die in the U.S. every year from late stage Androgen Independent Prostate Cancer (AIPC). Once a man has reached this stage, his survival expectancy is approximately nineteen months. And one analysis, performed by the principal investigator of Taxotere, suggested that the combined use of Provenge with Taxotere increased survival by an incredible fourteen additional months, as opposed to survival rates in patients receiving Taxotere alone.

Despite the fact that the FDA follows the recommendations of its advisory panels ninety-eight percent of the time, in May of 2007, the FDA declined to approve Provenge, demanding more evidence of its effectiveness, and requiring further study.

There has been widespread speculation regarding the reason the FDA did not follow its historical record of approving such a safe, effective and revolutionary ‘drug’. Those explanations in which I place credence fall into two categories: (1) the power of Wall Street big money, and (2) the power of the chemotherapy cabal.

(1) There is an historically enormous ‘short interest’ in the stock of Dendreon – big money investors who bet big that this company would fail. At any given time, the short interest in Dendreon’s stock (DNDN) has been as high as 35%. Much ‘naked shorting’ has occurred in this stock – i.e., the selling of ‘phantom shares’, presumably (at least in this case) to artificially drive down the price of the stock in order to (a) prevent those who bet against the company from losing their shirts, or (b) destroy the company itself.

The problems for fledgling biotech companies are many. They are not only required to conduct financially prohibitive research, but, perhaps even more prohibitive, they must battle Wall Street corruption. Hedge funds, naked shorting, and stock analysts with an axe to grind represent a cancer of their own kind.

(2) The deeply entrenched chemotherapy dynasty is a multi-billion dollar business, and the big pharmaceutical giants are not about to relinquish that cash cow without a fight. They have powerful connections in high places.

This past Tuesday, Dendreon announced the results of the extended trial that the FDA demanded when approval was refused two years ago. To simplify those results: the numbers released were astounding – considered by most in the medical community to be a ‘home run’. Urologists and oncologists – some of whom had been sitting on the fence – are now clamoring to be able to use this new tool, and the medical world is describing the expected approval of Provenge as the dawn of a new era in the treatment of prostate cancer. Skeptics have been won over. Numbers don’t lie.

The trial results were announced on Tuesday afternoon. Shortly before those results were made public, a criminal manipulation of DNDN stock occurred on Wall Street. Many are calling it ‘The unexplained DNDN Crash’. Take a look at the chart for DNDN stock that day:


Trading in DNDN was halted by the SEC at 1:27 PM. Just minutes before, the stock fell from $24.60/share to $7.50/share in just over one minute’s time. There were over 4,000 trades placed during that one minute, with about 3 million shares -- about half of an entire day's volume ‘changing hands’ in one minute's time. Keep in mind: this all occurred shortly before blockbuster results of Provenge’s clinical trial were announced.

This is nothing short of Wall Street terrorism.

Many honest retail investors lost a great deal of money in this criminal bear attack -- especially, but not exclusively, those retail investors who were trading in options, and those who had stop loss orders in place. And many back stage Wall Street big-money people covered potential losses. That 'unexplained DNDN crash' decimated the stock's short to mid-term rally.

Had the crash not occurred, once the trial results were announced new buyers and short positions needing to cover would have easily put the stock close to $30 a share and sheer momentum would have taken it higher over the next few days.

The optimism in the stock over the previous few weeks, pending the trial results announcement -- especially on announcement day -- was akin to a balloon being gradually filled with air, and the pressure was at a point where the balloon was about to burst. The 'crash' instantaneously let the air out of the balloon, affecting the stock price not only that day but for weeks to come. Ask yourself how this chart might have looked, had the 'powers that be' not interfered. I suggest that the broken line to the right of the precipice would have had a positive slope, and there would have been no breaks in the ascent. The dotted red line is my speculation as to how the stock price would have trended, post 4/28/09, without the manipulators' interference.


The ‘regulators’ at NASDAQ ‘examined’ -- for all of ten minutes -- the precipitous, unexplained drop in share price and allowed the trades to stand.

I was heartsick when I witnessed the latest blatant attempt to ambush this company and its products – but I, personally, have little to lose but money. Men (husbands, fathers, brothers, sons) worldwide are enduring indescribable physical and mental agony, and are losing their lives to a horrific disease, at the rate of more than eighty of them every day, while this company and its life-enriching product are being played with, as if they were nothing more than plastic disks in a game of tiddly winks.

Is there anything more vile and repugnant in this world than injustice? And is there anything more evil than injustice brought about by human greed and corruption ... and resulting in agony and death for thousands upon thousands of innocent others?

I remember, decades ago, a time when the American people possessed an innate assurance that, no matter what kind of tragedy occurred or what brand of unfairness we had to weather, there was always the promise that someone in power was out there to at least listen to our grievances – and there was a justice system that would, more than likely, see to it that those grievances would be addressed, resulting in ultimate ‘fairness’.

That was a time in which those in power – in the three branches of government, and in the higher echelons of the free market system – had the good of the country, and its citizens, at the top of their list of priorities.

Such is no longer the case. Justice, and the concept of ‘fairness’, have been co-opted by self absorbed men, posing as ‘leaders’, with an unquenchable thirst for wealth and power.

... which is the reason those of us who believe in good science – and, more importantly, good science that appears to have the capability of improving the lot of humankind by alleviating suffering – are having difficulty believing that that science will be allowed to achieve its promise in this unsettled, uncertain era.

Two years ago we witnessed the triumph of greed and corruption over scientific innovation and success. And, in the two years that have elapsed since that infamous ‘triumph’, we have mourned the deaths, and lamented the torment, of nearly sixty thousand men who might have benefited from the science that remains in a greed-and-corruption-authored log jam.

Over the past two years, enemies of Provenge have continued to make end runs around the approval process by lighting brush fires outside of the normal channels -- by using the print medium to stir up controversy. Financial ‘analysts’ and ‘journalists’ continue to quote incorrect facts and make bogus future projections in an effort to stymie approval as well. Conflicts of interest on the part of medical professionals, and huge potential dollar losses on the part of hedge funds and short sellers, appear to represent the stuff of which an alliance continues to me made. And that malevolent alliance appears bound and determined to see to it that reasonable doubt is manufactured as to the credibility of the completed trials, and the future promise, of Provenge.

Now we sit here … having read the amazing numbers that were revealed on Tuesday … numbers that offer continuing proof of this revolutionary technology and its promise in the battle against one of history’s most dreaded diseases.

Dendreon has announced that it intends to file its amended BLA (Biologic License Application) for Provenge to the FDA in the last quarter of the year. They intend to be meticulous -- to cross every T and dot every I, so that nothing can be found amiss in their data or its presentation.

Between now and then there will no doubt be additional sniper fire, and outright ambushes, by those, both on Wall Street, and in the chemotheraphy cabal, who intend to continue to place roadblocks in front of a revolutionary medical breakthrough.

We need to pray that those who know the truth, and whose motives are to alleviate human suffering, are armed to the teeth with the facts – and that the new FDA decision-makers see it as their duty to use those facts to the benefit of the people whose very lives depend on their integrity.

~ joanie

Al Gore vs. Marsha Blackburn(Lying Arrogance vs. Honest Humility)

Take a good look at/listen to this brief Youtube clip of Al Gore being questioned yesterday by Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, representing Tennessee’s 7th district (and keep your eyes and ears open for mention of her whenever the conservative wing of the republican party gets serious about seeking out new leadership). Congresswoman Blackburn simply seeks to have Al Gore clarify his association with a company that benefits from Cap and Trade legislation.

Gore’s behavior toward Blackburn, and her behavior toward him, serve as a microcosm of the struggle occurring between the ‘climate change’ cabal vs. Americans who simply want to know the truth about the ‘science’ of global warming, and those who stand to profit, both financially and by amassing substantial political power, through its acceptance.

Congresswoman Blackburn is courteous, sincere and honest in her questioning. Mr. Gore is rude (even to the point of sneering and laughing at her heartfelt concern), derisive, condescending, and angrily defensive in his answers.

Yet another example of the monumental attempt to quell any kind of dissention (even from an elected American representative who simply wants to ferret out the truth) as regards leftist propaganda/demagoguery.

Al Gore is a stupid, pompous megalomaniac to whom free speech represents an insidious threat to rampant leftist indoctrination. And he is simply one of a growing power-hungry group of ‘leaders’ in Washington that has the suppression of free speech near the top of their list of essential political priorities.

~ joanie

Another One Bites the Dust

Rick and I watch very little television. What programs we do watch (perhaps a half dozen) we watch faithfully. And among the small handful of programs on our ‘must see’ list has been ‘24’ -- a well-directed, well-acted thriller that has us sitting on the edge of our seats during virtually every episode.

The series began, seven seasons ago, with a surprisingly conservative viewpoint – portraying both our government and other governments/terrorist organizations (‘fictionalized’ depictions that often bear a striking resemblance to actual groups) in a very accurate light. The main characters always confronted major national security crises with a boundless sense of duty, courage and integrity. And, despite the best efforts of those who would bring down our republic, the ‘good guys’ always won out, after overcoming a riveting and indescribably suspenseful series of dangerous obstacles.

At the beginning of this year’s episodes we began to notice a marked difference in the subliminal messages that were being delivered – the most marked of which had to do with the viability and positive results of stem cell research, and the fact that this year’s most notorious character appears to be a staunch American conservative who has gone over the edge and become a renegade domestic terrorist.

In a commercial which frequently airs during the program this season, Cherry Jones, the actor who portrays President Allison Taylor, is also the spokesperson for ‘climate change’, passionately urging viewers to accept the [bogus] theory and adjust their lives accordingly.

One of the newer actors who entered the series in 2008 is Janeane Garofalo, playing Janis Gold, a high-level FBI analyst. I had heard bits and pieces about Garofalo’s leftist tendencies -- including the fact that she refused to meet, or have her picture taken with, Vice President Cheney when he visited the set of ‘24’ -- but I did not allow those bits and pieces to deter me from continuing to watch the program, since the suspense and intrigue that this year’s episodes create is superb.

I allowed myself to overlook Garofalo’s political views ... until today.

After having been urged by countless friends to do so, today I witnessed Janeane Garofalo’s bitter, vile, vitriolic characterization of all modern American patriots who have attended, and will attend, the tea parties that are springing up around the country.

I have not attended any of these tea parties, and probably will not attend any future ones, having sadly reconciled myself to the fact that I can no longer waste my time and energy attempting to win a battle whose outcome, barring Divine intervention, is now a foregone conclusion. But I do have many friends and family members who have participated in tea parties, and who will continue to do so. These people are the salt of the earth. Each one of them is well acquainted with the genuine definition and source of our liberties. Each one of them is well-versed in the history and noble foundations of our republic. And each one of them believes that we are running out of options to reclaim our republic from those in ‘leadership’ positions in Washington who place wealth, power and adherence to a political agenda above the sovereignty of our country and the safety, security and prosperity of its people.

If you haven’t already seen Janeane Garofalo’s portrayal of the modern American patriot, have a look. Warning: you may want to cover your keyboard with a waterproof covering, because you’re going to be spitting all over it momentarily:

Arrogant Leftwing Vitriol at its Worst
Highlights of Ms. Garofalo’s commentary:
_______________________________
There is nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry about a speech where they’re not quite certain what he’s saying.

... Let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.

... You can tell these type of right-wingers anything and they’ll believe it – except the truth. You tell them the truth and it’s like showing Frankenstein’s monster fire. They become confused and angry and highly volatile.
_______________________________
Ms. Garofalo then goes on to describe the actual systemic ‘neurological problem’ (resulting in a kind of ‘pathology’) with which most conservatives are cursed, and the ‘anti-intellectualism’ that conservative news outlets foment (they seek to ‘disinform, coerce and dumb down’ the electorate). She also arrogantly describes the American conservative movement as based on ‘ignorance, apathy, hate and fear’.

I had a great deal of difficulty maneuvering through the 2000 presidential election, in large part because I deeply resented an agenda-driven schemer, with an IQ most likely lower than most men on the street in the town in which I live, talking down to me in a perpetually arrogant, condescending manner. I also truly believe that Al Gore’s knowledge (as opposed to rote-memorized leftwing propaganda, and conveniently manufactured ‘statistics’) of the science behind climate aberrations could fit in a thimble, with significant room to spare.

Yet, nine years later, observing Janeane Garofalo’s nearly identical patronizing, arrogant pontificating somehow cut even deeper. She is, after all, simply an actor – and a mediocre one at that. An actor with the audacity to condescendingly characterize with a broad black brush that last remnant of the American citizenry that still gets it.

I suspect that anyone reading my words here knows light years more about the foundations of our republic than she. I suspect that the reader has also sacrificed significantly more than she in order to see to it that the magnificent vision of our Founders is not betrayed. I suspect that he is more capable of independent, critical thought; more concerned with his fellow man; more acutely aware of the threats to his nation’s safety and sovereignty; and more capable of at least entertaining opinions that are in conflict with his own.

There are surely hundreds of actors in Hollywood who could play the role that Janeane Garofalo plays on '24' -- and many of them could render it better than she. So I suspect that Ms. Garofalo was hired for a reason other than her acting ability. Just as I suspect that the viability of stem cell research did not have to be a critical aspect of this year's story line; nor was it necessary for one of the series' major actors to regularly insert into the programming a commercial glorifying the 'science' of climate change.

Because the above list represents one too many 'coincidences', tomorrow will represent the first (of many) Monday(s) since this season began that I will no longer be watching ‘24’. No one but me (and now you) will be aware of that fact. Yet, during this sad, watershed era in the history of mankind, we have to learn to find joy in the little things. I will be finding new joy in discovering a more uplifting, productive way to spend 9-10 o'clock on Monday nights. I may just learn to knit. :)

When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, and when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality ... Thomas Jefferson, letter to Madame de Stael, 1807
~ joanie

Barack Obama: Pied Piper of the Plethos

Ignorance, illiteracy, stupidity always have been relevant social factors. This has been the case in any historical human social organization one cares to name — from clan to nation-state.

In every civilization, there is a very thin upper stratum of the people who are concerned with questions of truth, justice, the good — in other words, with the life of reason, or of the human spirit if you prefer. Historically, such people have tended to believe these ultimate values have a claim on every man in terms of the constitution of the good order of his soul, and on the direction of his actions as they translate into the social sphere.

Such people are surrounded by a vastly larger mass of “stupid people” who simply do not see the world that way, generally because they are ignorant, thus personally disordered/disorderly, thus irresponsible — and (thus) ever needy. This mass of “stupid people” has been called: “slaves by nature.”

In Aristotle, we find the distinction between the mass of the people, the plethos — who basically function on the “stupid level” — and the spoudaioi — the prudent, virtuous, public-minded “mature men.” It is the latter class that actually maintains the civilization.

Nowadays, however, progressive educrats like Barack Obama’s old friend, Bill Ayers, teaches teachers to teach their pupils that these spoudaios characters are really nothing but a reactionary, usually male, usually white gang of fascist thugs who are selfishly trying to preserve their own interests against the just claims of disadvantaged people, who are usually either women or “people of color.” The spoudaioi are oppressors you see.

Regarding our present era, Eric Voëgelin had a warning for us:

If the establishment of the spoudaioi is disrupted by external events, then the civilization breaks down very rapidly within a generation. And that is the problem we have to deal with…. When certain disruptive events occur, civilization breaks down, and the plethos in the classical sense — the mass of passionately directed people who are more or less illiterate and who do not know what they are doing — come to predominate. (1)

In the American experience, an excellent example of the spoudaioi class would be the Founders and Framers themselves. The foundation of our rule of law was laid by these brilliant, classically-educated Christian men. Their magnificent legacy, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, has been conveyed to us over the generations by other spoudaioi, including certain great presidents, jurists, and representatives of the people, as well as public-minded private people. That legacy is what created and sustained the freest, most just and prosperous nation in the history of mankind. The problem is, that line of genius is obviously running out.

For the fact is, America has become “a government of the plethos, by the plethos, and for the plethos.” Certainly, this was not what the great spoudaios Abraham Lincoln had in mind.

Case in point: Barack Obama is President of the Plethos of the United States, not of the whole People of the United States. For there is still a substantial majority of the people who, while not necessarily spoudaioi themselves, are well content to live by rules that promote liberty, personal autonomy, initiative, self-reliance, thrift, production, creativity, risk-taking — provided they aren’t being systematically looted by the State. We’ll just call this group “the middle class.”

The State’s interest in the matter, however, is to claim as much of the fruits of the labor and genius of the productive members of society as it can get away with, and then to transfer the loot to the unproductive, ever expanding politically-dependable (and dependent) plethos — to grease political “friends” that help it (1) gain power; (2) stay in power; and (3) expand its powers.

The Framers were very clear about this: Individual liberty (the person’s power over himself) vs. State power is truly a zero-sum game, in which one side can increase its power only by decreasing the power of the other. The very people who demand an increase in government benefits (i.e., expansion of the State) of one kind or another seem blissfully unaware of these dynamics. They do not realize they are “on the road to serfdom.”

It is quite clear that Barack Obama on his record is a socialist of the most progressive stripe. I gather he believes his great presidential mission is to “organize” the American “community.” But then, what would you expect of a man, whose résumé lists “community organizer” as his main professional experience?

Now, to organize the American community the way Obama wants it organized is going to cost a whole lot of money — so much that, if the entire U.S. productive economy were put up for sale tomorrow, the proceeds likely would not cover the projected costs of “organizing” America into the type and scale of healthcare, energy, education, cradle-to-grave income-maintenance, and God-knows-what-else policies that Obama says we Americans “deserve.”

Now Obama’s not going to hold a fire-sale of U.S. productive assets any time soon, for a very simple reason: He wants the entire productive base of the economy to be “nationalized” — that is transferred to State ownership — so he and his cronies can run the whole shebang as they see fit. So the strategy is to expropriate the wealth held in the hands of productive people. To do this, you have to hide the expropriation behind a screen of well-sounding words, which conceals the enormity of the extraordinarily opaque financial restructuring of the national economy, using the banking system as leverage, being transacted behind it. Yet smooth words of reassurance — or alternatively, the frequent calls to hit the panic button — cannot disguise the fact that a good deal of the net worth of many Americans — mainly the middle class — has melted away since Obama was elected.

One thing that community organizers get the hang of pretty quickly is how to mobilize the plethos as shake-down artists. ACORN specializes in this sort of thing, and Obama is an expert at it. He’s out there ginning up demand for government programs, which your average plethos person believes will come to him at little or no personal cost. Meanwhile, he’s being relieved of his personal responsibilities; increasingly it is the State that looks after his needs. He’s been “educated” that this is a proper function of the State; indeed, that it is his right to have all his needs and wants supplied without any trouble to himself. And not only that, but to think as he is told to think, to have no opinions that have not been blessed by his political “benefactors.” In thus rejecting his own humanity — which he probably doesn’t miss too much — he reveals he is “a slave by nature.”

And just plain dumb as a box of rocks, ignorant of American history and heritage — about which he evidently cares not a fig:

José: What a crazy world! The rich, who could pay cash, buy on credit. The poor, who have no money, must pay cash. Wouldn’t Marx say it should be the other way around? The poor should be allowed to buy on credit, and the rich should pay cash.

Manuel: But the storeowners who give credit to the poor would soon become poor themselves!

José: All the better! Then they could buy on credit too! (2)

Lest anyone claim the above dialog is “racist,” may I point out that, while “José” is obviously a card-carrying member of the Plethos Union, “Manuel” is not. Possibly “Manuel” is a storeowner himself. If so, regardless of his apparent Hispanic heritage, as a small businessman, Obama would fleece him just as badly as any White or Black or Asian proprietor.

It appears that President Obama is no friend of small business, the backbone of the economy and the engine of the middle class — which is the strength and genius of the American system.

Wealth has a tendency to accumulate in an even smaller number of hands of the ruling class; the number of independent proprietors, the mainstay of liberty, will decrease; and the end is an economic despotism of a small minority that rules the people for its private interest. (3)

“Manuel” has the common sense to understand how the world actually works. Unless someone is creating wealth through productive activities, there is no basis for credit formation. Wealth usually sits in banks, forming the bank reserves that must be there to back up the issuance of credit. When storeowners and other people who create value in the economy become poor themselves, there is no wealth generation, no bank reserves, and lending dries up. Not to mention that wealth-creating productive activity dries up as credit becomes unavailable. It’s a vicious cycle.

Marxism assumes that one can still get golden eggs from a dead goose. It just never explains how this is actually to be done in the real world.

But Obama and Geithner have got it all figured out: The government issues more taxpayer-obligated debt and gives it to the banks to secure their capital base/reserves. But now we are issuing public debt that taxpayers must repay as the basis for private (so far) bank lending. Considering that taxpayers are not only responsible for financing the bank bailout-out, but are also responsible for financing the trillion-dollar-a-year deficits in Obama’s federal budget, plus the trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities in the Social Security/Medicare system, in what way is the “Geithner plan” effectively different from a Ponzi scheme? One that’s likely to come crashing down on our children and grandchildren? After having impoverished this generation, the Obama policies will impoverish our progeny as well, and for generations to come.

Meanwhile, Obama plays Pied Piper to the growing mass of the plethos. They see no danger in following him, thinking only to receive “free” goodies from the State. They rarely pay income taxes themselves these days. They think all the other taxpayers are going to be “good for it.” Always. Forever. Even while the Obama administration seems to be doing everything in its power to ensure that they won’t be: You can’t get blood out of a stone.

In the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, whatever or whoever followed the Pied Piper met with doom — whether it was the rats, which he drowned in the river, or the children that were forever lost to their families when the Piper “disappeared” them after they followed him out of town. The point is, both the rats and the children were utterly unsuspecting that the Pied Piper deliberately meant to harm them. After all, he wore “a coat of many-colored, bright cloth,” and played delightfully on a small fife. He was there to impress, delight, and to charm….

After absconding with the children of Hameln, the Pied Piper was never seen again. Alas, but the same cannot be said of Obama who is still very much with us, evidently doing everything in his power to transform the greatest nation on earth into a Third-World banana republic, with himself as its Dear Leader, by any means fair or foul.

And on the record so far, it appears he prefers the foul.

Citations:

(1) Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes, New York: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 162f.

(2) Eric Voëgelin, “Autobiographical Statement at Age 82,” in The Drama of Humanity, Vol. 33 of The Collected Works of Eric Voëgelin, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004, p. 437.

(3) Eric Voëgelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume 26 of The Collected Works of Eric Voëgelin, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999, p. 78.

by Jean F. Drew
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)
©2009 Jean F. Drew

Strangers in a Strange Land

Thanks to many faithful readers for e-mailing and asking about the dearth of essays here on Allegiance and Duty Betrayed. I have no answer as to why the scarcity, other than the fact that I have had no desire to write about the state of our republic.

The main reasons being ...

(1) A sense of hopelessness and futility, even as regards the pen and the ballot box, to make a difference in the direction in which our republic is being steamrolled. Rampant ignorance and apathy brought us to the brink, and evil men in leadership positions are gleefully providing the final push.

(2) Where to begin even attempting to bring about activist solutions anymore? We daily awaken to new and incomprehensible affronts to our intellect and our sense of belonging. We are beginning to feel like strangers in a strange land. I have no use for my fellow Americans who voted for ‘change’ that was beautifully gift wrapped, but about whose contents they knew nothing. Nor do I anymore grant credence to those well-meaning but delusional patriots who are chanting ‘Sarah in 2012!’ and the like. They are living in a dream world in which they believe they can still work within a system whose foundations have putrefied, and whose rule-makers are corrupt to the bone

Not only those two segments of our society, but also the remnant of rational American patriots, are being led down the road to oblivion by a man whose qualifications to lead at all, and whose genuine accomplishments, are no more impressive than those we might read on the resumé of someone applying for a job as a junior executive. This junior executive wannabe, in office for fewer than six weeks, is ruling with an iron hand, steamrolling over, and demonizing, anyone who attempts to stand in his way.

Talk about surreal. The Cheshire Cat would envy our predicament.

And what are this junior executive’s qualifications for doing this to a nation that has prospered unlike any other in the history of mankind? A complete disregard for the United States Constitution and the American people, a puppet/puppet master relationship with the mainstream media, the support of powerful international moneymen and special interest groups, and a terrifying anti-American background that evolved through intimate association with mentors who despise the foundations of our republic.

This junior executive wannabe has allied himself with movers and shakers in Chicago, D.C., and God only knows what other anti-American enemies of liberty outside of America’s borders. He has implemented as his ultimate goals: (1) the destruction of (what remains of) America’s capitalist system, (2) the implementation of Marxist rule whereby (3) incrementally more ‘Americans’ (in name only) will seek and accept dependence on a nanny state for the necessities of life, and (4) the bastardizing of the concept of what it means to be an American.

In what now claims to be ‘leadership’ in Washington, all of what passes for governing in the best interest of the people of America now boils down to a carefully-studied mastering of the art of deceit, courtesy of the likes of Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky.

Our ‘leadership’ claims to be concerned about the average American’s pocketbook, the average American’s peace of mind and economic well-being, the average American’s quality of life, and the average American’s ability to wake up in a country in which he feels secure and free.

Yet virtually everything that our ‘leadership’ is doing – and at record speed since January 20th – not only flies in the face of that pseudo-concern, but bespeaks quite the opposite.

Spending our republic into literal oblivion, on the pretext that not doing so, and not doing so immediately, would result in instant economic/societal catastrophe for us all … is a LIE.

We are spending ourselves into literal oblivion simply because the majority of the requisite spending is focused on the implementation of a Marxist agenda, and that the realization of that agenda will simply serve to accelerate our demise as a world economic power is of no concern to those at the helm. Not coincidentally, our current course will result in an enormous increase in the number of American citizens who must rely on the government for their very existence. And so enormous will that increase be that the opportunity to turn back the tide will vanish forever.

An American president and congress that are sincerely determined to cure what ails us would be hyper-focusing on those fiscal and monetary cancers that are eating away at our economic foundation, to the exclusion of other politically correct issues. The fact that they are not doing so, while still feigning concern about the economic cataclysm lurking over the horizon, renders their concern about America’s future a convenient masquerade.

Rather than muster all of their resources to confront the problem of our ailing economy, they are instead using that illness as an excuse to impose all manner of Marxist dictates – most of which will simply hasten our demise, and none of which will derail it. Their concern is bogus. Their duplicity is frighteningly real. They are like an adult child, having administered small doses of arsenic to his mother over a period of time, sitting by her bedside in the hospital, shoving a myriad of papers at her as she lay dying, and demanding that she sign over everything she owns to him, so that he can find her a better doctor.

There is no rational connection between environmental extremism (i.e., ‘global warming/climate change’), the ‘need’ for universal healthcare, or the ‘need’ to nationalize private industry, and a cure for what ails us economically – other than the fact that the shackles that will unavoidably be placed on every American’s liberties as a result of the implementation of all three agendas will create additional and completely unnecessary economic hardship that will make today’s nightmare seem like a walk in the park. At the core of fascist doctrine is an economic model in which the state shackles what is left of private enterprise with monstrous bureaucratic handcuffs, and orders the utilization of privately held assets to realize public policy agendas.

Voilà!

Precisely when our president and his minions in congress should be spending every waking hour attempting to solve the looming economic catastrophe, they are instead choosing to arbitrarily throw money at it, so as to appear to be doing something, while simultaneously crafting all manner of tyrannical legislation aimed at suppressing our freedoms, redistributing wealth, destroying our economy, erasing our borders, and amassing unprecedented power for themselves.

Oh to be a fly on the wall in one of those smoke-filled rooms.

There are many things about the demise of America that speak to an evil so insidious as to be incomprehensible to most of us.

(1) The spark for the economic, and soon to be societal, destruction of America began decades ago, but it was purposefully fanned into a flame by the American left (see the Community Reinvestment Act and the Cloward Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis). The bursting of the home mortgage bubble, which served as the major catalyst for what we are enduring today, and which will eventually prove to have tentacles far beyond anything we imagine, is simply a carefully-manufactured crisis. It is a manufactured crisis that scoffs at and derides America’s work ethic and America’s concept of personal responsibility, and has succeeded in confiscating a good portion of the life savings of every hard-working American, as well as condemning the quality of life of his children and grandchildren to third world status.

None of those three considerations (work ethic, personal responsibility, thrift) are of any significance to our current leadership in Washington. And the value of all three is being premeditatedly eradicated in order to increase the power of the state and foster dependence on state largesse.

Yet our president, and his minions in congress, daily wring their hands and claim to feel our pain – while, behind the scenes, they are authoring all manner of Marxist legislation that will further trample on our liberties, increasingly rob us of the fruits of our labor, and incrementally install a brand of government tyranny that will have our children and grandchildren gratefully accepting the fact that they must ask government permission, and pay a tax, in order to breathe in and out, and put one foot in front of the other.

(2) The people who are purposefully crafting the demise of the most moral and most prosperous civilization in the history of mankind are actually the most base among us. They are bottom feeders.

I, and I believe most conservatives, believe that the measure of a man is his character, and that yardstick is especially important in our leadership.

Picture yourself in a foxhole somewhere in a war zone, or stranded on a deserted island. Who would you rather have in that foxhole, or on that island, with you in order to ensure your survival and obtain some peace of mind in a harrowing situation -- your neighbor across the street, or Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid?

One of the things that so maddens me about the through-the-looking-glass nature of this travesty is the fact that the people whom the Marxists in the highest positions in our government choose to demonize, demoralize, and criminalize are the same people who are willing and able to do the kinds of work that these Marxists are truly incapable of doing. Our 'leadership' is meticulously following Saul Alinsky's credo that, in order to seize increasing power, one must 'frame a villain'. In the eyes of our 'leadership' in Washington, the 'villain' of their creation is anyone who seeks to make a profit, anyone who seeks to benefit from the sweat of his own brow, anyone who believes that one is responsible for one's own actions, and anyone who wants to be free to determine the focus of his own charitable giving rather than sharing his wealth with those who choose not to create their own.

Faith, duty, honesty, industry, personal responsibility, and ingenuity made America what she was in her finest hour. Most real Americans still possess those traits. Our 'leadership' possesses none of them. They are simply schemers with connections – unqualified to shine the shoes of those they demean and degrade, and yet somehow delusional enough to believe that they are a part of a chosen elite whose destiny it is to dictate how, and whether, the rest of us should live -- and powerful enough to make that delusion a reality.

(3) Hundreds of thousands of Americans, from the last part of the eighteenth century through the first part of the twenty-first, have voluntarily laid down their lives in the name of liberty. I daresay that all of those hundreds of thousands of Americans placed more value on allegiance and duty than any of those now in leadership in Washington.

We know almost none of their names, and yet they purchased with their lives the freedoms that ensured that we transform, with a sense of historically unprecedented conviction, thirteen beleaguered colonies into Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill.

And now, fewer than six hundred self-serving scoundrels, incapable of comprehending the powerful measure of love and devotion that wells up within the heart of an American patriot, have succeeded in stealing that precious, hard-won inheritance and turning it into something black, dimensionless, and without a soul. And they are seeing to it that there will be no turning back. Expanding their base. Answering mightily to their special interests. Demonizing, even silencing, their opposition.

And we have no one but the American citizen to blame. His apathy. Ignorance. Self-centeredness. Ingratitude. Hedonism. The fewer than six hundred were placed into power by a band of adoring mental adolescents, who simply want to be allowed to go to the mall, download music/noise, and worship celebrity.

Mark my word: The mall/noise/celebrity fountain will continue to pour forth, while the nuts and bolts of a free society, the sanctity of individual liberty, the concept of personal responsibility, and the belief in reward for thrift, ingenuity and hard work, are breathing their last breaths.

So who is to blame for our current crisis, scheduled to transform into a full-blown global cataclysm?

(1) leftist politicians who bullied/extorted banks into making loans that the banks knew full well were bad business,

(2) Fannie and Freddie criminals who contributed mightily to those same leftist politicians and then cavalierly sucked tens of millions from the engine before the wreck occurred, and

(3) bankers who were too lazy to take a close enough look at the sub-prime-backed securities they bought up.

The above three groups, perhaps the most powerful forces in the history of our republic, combined greed, incompetence and ignorance all into one neat package that has destroyed the savings of tens of millions of the people they claim to represent, and that threatens to bring America to her knees, as our ideological enemies wait in the wings to wrest the ‘super power’ banner from our hands. When that final insult occurs, this planet will prove uninhabitable for moral, honest people.

Avarice and ambition would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other ... A Constitution of government, once changed from freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever ... John Adams

The Patriotic Resistance
God bless you all. It has been a genuine privilege to cross paths with so many modern American patriots!

~ joanie

Merry Christmas

⁸And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby,
keeping watch over their flocks at night.
⁹An angel of the Lord appeared to them,
and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were terrified.
¹⁰But the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid.
I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
¹¹Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you;
He is Christ the Lord.
¹²This will be a sign to you:
You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.'
¹³Suddenly a great company of hosts appeared with the angel,
praising God and saying,
¹⁴'Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests!'
... Luke 2:8-14
This Christmas, many American patriots look forward to the New Year with fear and uncertainty, believing that, for the first time in our lifetimes – for the first time in the history of our beloved republic – America’s future holds little, if any, promise of a return to the foundations that made our nation the most moral and prosperous in the history of mankind. I share that austere and unsettling view of what lies ahead for us all.

Yet we tend to lose sight of the fact that there is a bigger picture ... that man on earth enjoys free will; and that many among us have used that precious gift for evil. Yet God is here among us, and ever watching. His presence is not defined by man in man's words, or in man's artistic renderings. Nor can His presence be forbidden by law or edict. He is here among us ... now and forever.

He abhors lies and oppression. He reveres truth and justice. He knows a man's heart. He is unimpressed with false words ... or counterfeit motives ... or disingenuous façades. He will not be mocked. He cannot be fooled. And those who believe otherwise would do well to revisit, and revise, such beliefs.

Last weekend, Rick and I attended a Christmas concert performed by the Booth Brothers, a young southern gospel group whose concerts never fail to provide incredibly beautiful music, Christian witness, and spiritual uplift. The concert was held in a local mega-church; there was not an empty seat, with probably a thousand people in attendance.

About halfway through the beautiful musical program, in the middle of an especially meaningful Christmas piece, many in the audience, entirely spontaneously, began singing along with the performers, and, at that point, something stirring gradually began to happen in the sanctuary.

Moved by the Spirit, Michael Booth began extemporaneously talking, in a very tactful, but impassioned manner, about the way in which America has abandoned her Christian, and foundational, principals. It was most definitely a personal accounting of his own heartache, as he sees his country wandering so far from its original noble path.

After which the remainder of the program became completely impromptu, with the lead-in group returning to the stage and performing together with the Booth Brothers numbers that were not rehearsed. The audience also joined in on those numbers that they knew. Much was said, and sung, with all thousand-plus people participating in the communal sharing of faith and concern for our country.

At one point, more than a thousand voices joined in an impromptu four-part harmony rendition of 'Amazing Grace'. It was an experience unlike any I have ever known.

Much laughter, and many tears, were shared. And the words and music that caused such an outpouring of emotion were completely unrehearsed, unplanned. It was an act of Providence.

The concert lasted more than an hour longer than scheduled, simply because no one wanted the evening to end -- least of all the performers themselves. We left the church at nearly 11:00, a full five hours after having arrived there -- feeling renewed and revived, with the knowledge that God's promises will be kept, despite man's foolishness.

The Lord was definitely present in that church last weekend. His presence was palpable. And, when it was time to go home, a thousand people exited through those doors in virtual silence. I would be doing the experience an injustice to say that words are insufficient, and I am still experiencing the residual joy to this day.

The Lord is good. And His promises are eternal. All we need do is look to Him for the strength, wisdom and comfort to face what lies ahead, and He will provide ... if we but isolate ourselves from man's cacophony, and listen for His whispers.

He expects His followers to hold fast to His teachings, but He does not always promise us earthly victories. More importantly, He prepares a place for His believers, where joy and glory are eternal, and the heartache and pain that the evil of this world creates will become nothing more than a faded memory of a time when men believed they reigned supreme.

⁴Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
⁵You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies ...
... Ps 23:4-5
As our celebration of our Savior’s birth approaches, we are called to focus on His love. On His sacrifices. To set aside the cares and concerns of the world, and remember that His promises, alone, are eternal.

In wishing all of you a blessed Christmas –- filled with the warmth and love of family and friends -- I offer the following beautiful rendition, performed by Bronn and Katherine Journey, of what I believe to be among the most meaningful of man’s Christmas creations, in the hopes that, as it has for me, it will help you to release your burdens (cast them on Him), and spend some quiet time reflecting on His goodness, grace and love.

Although put to paper more than 160 years ago, the words are a timeless source of encouragement, strength and solace in times of trouble – even unprecedented times such as these. They are as relevant and meaningful today as they were back in 1847; it is as if they were written this very morning.

Simply close your eyes in peace, listen, and reflect:

O Holy Night

O holy night! the stars are brightly shining.
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!

Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born!
O night divine! O night, O night divine!


Led by the light of faith serenely beaming,
with glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming,
here came the wise men from the Orient land.
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger,
in all our trials born to be our friend!

He knows our need, to our weakness no stranger.
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King! Your king, before Him bend!


Truly He taught us to love one another.
His law is love and His Gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother.
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we.
Let all within us praise His holy Name!

Christ is the Lord! Sing praise to Him forever!
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
Heartfelt wishes to all for a blessed Christmas, and a New Year filled with personal peace, joy and contentment!

~ joanie

Return of the Prodigal Warriors

Author’s Note: In previous commentaries, I’ve never considered the need to fudge the facts, stretch the truth, or resort to any other means of manipulation to capture the interest of an audience. And so it is with this offering. However, as you read along, I’m sure you will agree that the subject material is extremely sensitive and requires a certain level of discretion to protect the privacy of all concerned. Hence, the names have been altered, with this purpose in mind. – E. A. Scum

“And when they get to heaven, they will know each other with the nod of the head. The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac will greet each other as kindred brothers in arms . . . The veterans of the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and all fighting men who came before and have come since will occupy a special place of honor reserved exclusively for the brotherhood of the warrior.” – Captain Ron Drez, U.S.M.C. (Ret.), London, England, May 31, 2004.

He went to war fifteen months ago. He returned a week before Thanksgiving to a subdued, yet poignant family reunion on a chilly night in Ontario, California. Those of us who watched him grow up were astonished by the change. It was more than simply watching a boy become a man. That process was finalized when he completed Ranger training in advance of his deployment to Iraq. No, there was more to this transformation than the passage from childhood to the adult world. There was something much more profound at work.

Sgt. Sean Andrew Christopher stiffly greeted his father, tentatively embraced his mother, and quietly reached out to his younger siblings, astonished at how they had grown in his absence. As it was for those of us who walked a similar path coming home from past wars, he was, for an instant, overwhelmed by the surreal nature of the moment.

A Ranger’s homecoming 2008.

Sgt. Christopher’s father has always been a powerful, magnetic presence. An enormously successful businessman, he is the type of alpha male who draws the attention of everyone when he enters a room. He has been my friend for many years, and it never fails to amaze me how the conversation will quiet down and heads will turn at offices parties, conventions, family gatherings, or any other get-together where large groups of people congregate. He’s just that kind of man; supremely confident, highly compelling, and undeniably self-assured. On this night, he looked tired, old, and intimidated.

His mother is a striking woman, even in her late 40s. A former cheerleader at Auburn University, she can still garner glances, attract wolf whistles, and cause traffic jams in the local mall parking lot. On this night, she looked her age and then some. The streaks of gray hair were all too visible among her long, chestnut tresses. The worry lines were prominently displayed on her features. The tension permeating her persona was strained to the point of contorting her normally lovely face into an angst-ridden caricature. The release of a burden carried far too long, and the limits of a mother’s endurance were clearly visible in how she carried herself on this momentous evening. When she embraced her son, she became what she was – a middle-aged matron whose child had come home safe from distant battlefields.

I invited myself along to the airport. It may have been an intrusion, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be there to see it. And I would have been content to stay where I was – off to one side and behind the family, content to be an observer. Except Sgt. Christopher noticed me standing there alone, disengaged himself from the frenetic embrace of his mother and sisters, and approached me with his hand out.

“Good to see you, sir. Glad you could come,” he told me, shaking my hand. His grip was like iron, and the eight-year-old boy I remembered from years gone by is now a 23-year-old combat veteran who stands an inch taller than I do.

Like the prodigal warrior, I too was a sergeant. And like him (I’m sure) I hated being called “sir.” But, the returning veteran has a lot of latitude in my book. So I accepted the designation in dignified, albeit uncomfortable silence.

Normally, I have a generic greeting for returning servicemen – “Thank you for your service. And welcome home.” It’s a popular salutation, expressing the proper sentiment simply, and with appropriate pathos. It’s a greeting that many of us who served in Vietnam would have given our hearts and souls to hear just once. And so, it has become something of a battle cry, especially from those of us who came before and returned only to fight a different war at home – a conflict of hostility, apathy and scorn.

On this night, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. This man . . . this soldier . . . somehow deserved something more, something significant. Before I could think better of it, the words were out of my mouth:

“Welcome to the brotherhood,” I said in return.

Sgt. Sean Andrew Christopher and I are joined. We’re connected. And we both know it. His hard, intense blue eyes, met my tired, old brown ones and we understood each other. We are brother paratroopers, brother infantrymen, brother combat veterans. We’re the same. We know each other, with the nod of a head. As a child, young Sean was a quiet, awkward boy who grew into an introverted, teenage slacker. As a man, he keeps his own counsel, which is good. But we both realize we now walk common ground, without so much as a word passing between us.

For all his stoicism, the young man is remarkably perceptive. In his silence, he notices things. He knows that his service puts him in a select group of men who have been tested in ways most of us are not. But I wonder if he realizes that many of his civilian compatriots will look upon him with envy as the years go by. Combat veterans often take a certain level of satisfaction in their service as they grow older. They’ve stood the test of fire, and survived, after all. Those who didn’t often look back and wish they had. For both groups, they’ve each crossed their own Rubicon, and once traversed, there is no going back.

The due bill for such confidence comes high. I don’t know if Sgt. Christopher will be overwhelmed by the horror of what he saw during his tour. It may take time to surface, but if there are any demons lurking within, more than likely they will gain expression in the fullness of years. He survived when others didn’t. That does something to a man. It’s called survivor’s guilt. How he processes that will come in time. He may have blood on his hands. And if so, that burden has a way of coming home to roost no matter how he may want to push it away.

Or he may have come home without a scratch. Psyche intact. There’s nothing written anywhere that mandates all combat vets must be scarred for life. But they will be different men, going forward.

While he is connected to that elite corps of men who’ve trod the killing ground of distant war zones, Sgt. Christopher is also separated from the remainder of his countrymen who did not. And that includes family, friends and even his closest loved ones. How he chooses to bridge this gap, if he so chooses, also remains to be seen. What he saw, what he did, what he experienced, are questions I would never presume to ask him. But I would be at his disposal if he chose to confide them.

How does he view his country, coming home, I wonder? It’s the one question I would want to pose to him. Does he see it as a great nation? Does he view his service as defending a cherished way of life against a determined enemy? Does he expect a nobler America, a country of promise, whose young people value what came before, are committed to what comes ahead, and a generation of leaders who share the vision, the promise and the hope of the last, best nation of fallen man? Is he disappointed with what he sees? Do the Christmas lights comfort him, or alienate him? Is he connected to the country he went so far from home to serve, or does he walk its streets a different kind of soldier on just a different variety of combat tour?

It’s unlikely I’ll ever get an answer to any of these questions. I have a simple policy when it comes to the treatment of returning servicemen – the veteran gets whatever he wants. Period. That includes the comfort of solitude if he so desires.

But for the moment, it is a joyous holiday season indeed. At least for one family. The prodigal warrior has returned. A very thankful Thanksgiving ensued, and a very Merry Christmas is in the offing. But it may be a short celebration for this family after all. Sgt. Christopher’s younger brother reports for induction into the Marine Corps in San Diego the day after Christmas.

I did not share in their celebration. About the time of the joyous homecoming, I got an email from one of the Marines who came to saving faith in Jesus Christ when I spoke at Camp Pendleton a few years ago. In the interest of brevity – something I’ve been accused of, but deny with all the fervency of an evangelist – I won’t go into the specifics of that speech or how it came into being. Those who are interested can peruse Saving Private Weinmann which Joanie may still have floating around in the archives, for more details.

To put it succinctly, I spoke to a large group of Marines a little over two years ago, after which some one hundred fifty accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Now, the message was not evangelistic. Yet it carried an intrinsically powerful Gospel message. I didn’t do an altar call – because the speech was more historical and cultural than faith-based. Yet faith was a huge part of it. Finally, I may not be shy about getting up in front of a crowd, but that does not a great speaker make. The Holy Spirit was moving mountains that day. And of course, the message would (and did) resonate with a group of combat veterans, of which virtually all the Marines in attendance were on that day.

So Gunnery Sgt. Eric Fiore, U.S.M.C., came up to me with tears in his eyes and thanked me for my presentation. Unlike Sgt. Christopher, Gunny Fiore was a career Marine, with ten years service behind him. He had one tour in Iraq under his belt, and another one ahead of him in the not too distant future. He was a hard man, but also a man of great compassion, and deep commitment.

He emailed me shortly after the presentation to tell me he had found God. We exchanged something of a correspondence for a few weeks after that, and then the emails just stopped coming. But Gunny Fiore was a man anyone would remember. And when I saw his email address listed in my inbox before Thanksgiving, I anticipated getting an update on what was going on in his life, and with his walk with God during the last two years.

The email was not from Gunny Fiore. It was sent on his account, by his wife Kimberly, to inform me that he had been killed in action in Afghanistan. She went on to tell me how much it meant to her – a committed Christian all her life – to see the dramatic change in her husband’s life after he came to Christ. And she thanked me for my part in that process.

I liked how she put it. No one of us brings anyone to the Lord. The Holy Spirit does that. But we can be His instruments. I’ll accept that role in the process. I’m not an evangelist. Never have been.

She concluded the email by informing me that this was her family’s first holiday season without Eric, and would I like to join them for Thanksgiving?

That’s where I went for the holiday. And that’s why I didn’t join in the joyous celebration of a Ranger homecoming. When we play a part in leading people to Jesus Christ, we have a responsibility to stand by their loved ones in times of tragedy. Besides which, there’s a simple rule of thumb when it comes to such requests.

1. Never turn down a Marine (or a Marine’s widow).
2. Any questions? See rule 1.

They live in a suburb of San Diego about equal distance from M.C.R.D. and Camp Pendleton. When I finally met her, Kimberly Fiore looked like she sounded over the phone. Usually, my mental image based on a telephone conversation is not even close. This one was dead on. She was tall, blonde, in her late twenties. But the years had taken their toll. In the prematurely old woman she had become, I could see the high school homecoming queen who fell in love with the tall, dynamic Marine not that long ago.

But Marine wives have steel in the spines. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s there. This woman was no exception. In her grief, there was strength. It came at great cost, but there was no mistaking it. She was burdened, but coping. And in the midst of a loss so devastating, she gave strength and comfort to all around her – her children, her family coming from Texas, even yours truly.

I handled things pretty well on Thanksgiving Day. If the 24-lb. turkey fried in peanut oil is typical of the holiday in the Lone Star state, I’m moving to Dallas on the next available flight. For a taste sensation, there’s nothing like it.

Watching the children was something else again. I almost lost it watching nine-year-old Michelle alternating between moods of animated fun and deep grieving that sprung from the cellar of her soul. Five-year-old Jeffrey didn’t quite get it. He couldn’t quite digest that his daddy wasn’t coming home. And eighteen-month-old Danielle will grow up never knowing her father at all. Watching this heart-rending scene sent me into a tailspin that has lasted to this day.

After dinner, Kimberly asked me to teach from the Bible. Now, I could have used a little advance warning to prepare something, particularly in a room full of Southern Baptists who knew The Word better than I did. But, there was no turning them down.

So I came up with Chapter 6 of John’s gospel – the bread of life sermon. It’s not typically offered at funerals, or memorial gatherings. But I’ve always liked it, because it cuts to the heart of the matter of who we are and how we define ourselves. And considering the state of the nation, and the profound nature of the loss this family was enduring, it seemed an appropriate offering at the time.

I’ll leave it to all of you to review the text. Basically, Jesus was preaching to a Jewish congregation in the synagogue about how He (Jesus) was the bread of life, and if they ate His flesh and drank His blood, they would never hunger or thirst. He managed to lose the entire room.

Now, I’ve laid a few eggs during my abortive speaking career. But I’ve never cleared the entire gallery. Jesus managed to do this. Then he turned to the twelve and addressed them, with the crucial question. And it was for this reason that I chose the passage:

⁶⁷ Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” ⁶⁸ But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. ⁶⁹ Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” – John 6:67-69

It’s a simple question, really – “Do you want to go away?” In the burnt-out shell that used to be America, maybe we should all take a step back and examine how we define who we are. If what used to be a country is just another stop on the roadmap of the global village, then where does that leave us? What does that make us? How can we view ourselves as Americans if . . . there is no America?

A loss as overwhelming as the one that befell the Fiore family is often a time when faith puts down deep roots. Except she already has that faith. It served her well in the months since her husband’s death. But it will not ease the pain in her heart, the longing in the night for the way things used to be, or provide the loving father for three children who will grow up without him.

So the question of “Do you want to go away?” was moot for the extended Fiore family. They know who they are. And they know their fallen Marine is at home with the Lord because he took Christ into his heart on a gray day in a drafty auditorium after hearing how one Jewish veteran of the Second World War found absolution after sixty years of torment in the very same way.

But for the rest of us, the question stands – “Do we want to go away?” Now that America is practically an afterthought, what do we hold on to, if not God’s only begotten Son? And if our commitment to Him is tenuous, then we better decide right now just who we are and where our priorities lie.

Maybe, for the consummation of God’s plan for human history, America must be swept away. Not in some dramatic fashion involving fire, thunder, weapons and death. But simply by the erosion of America’s identity that by now is all but complete. In fact, there’s no maybe about it. Count it as a virtual certainty. I can think of no person better suited to complete the fait accompli of delivering this nation’s coup de grace than America’s first global president, who now stands poised to assume office next year.

However we choose to define ourselves in this global realignment that is currently underway, we better be quick about it. Because good men, committed men, strong men like Gunnery Sgt. Eric Fiore, U.S.M.C. won’t be here to lead us. They will have paid for their commitment in blood and passed on to something better that awaits all of us if we have the good sense to claim it while there is still time to do so.

And so it goes. A tale of two cities, if you will. Certainly a tale of two families. One celebrates the return of a beloved son. One mourns the loss of a loving husband and father. In what passes for a once great nation, we forge into the Christmas season, blissfully unaware of the Ranger who came home and the Marine who didn’t.

And that’s not merely a tragedy. It’s contemptible.

¹⁵ “And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” – Joshua 24:15

by Euro-American Scum
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)
Euro-American Scum can be reached at eascum@yahoo.com

The Stranger

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was in town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger ... he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to our first major league ballgame. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home ... not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished.

He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked ... And NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name?

We just call him ‘T.V.’.

submitted by B4Ranch
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)

The Last Christmas

Joanie – This commentary was put together on Veteran’s Day. I got sidetracked by pneumonia (again), so it’s late getting to you. Rather than change the text, you might want to point out the delay to your readership. Thanks.

It happens to all of us, sooner or later. We’re out and about, taking care of business. Halloween is over and Indian Summer, what there was of it, is but a fading memory. Except in California, of course, where summer goes on forever, by rule of law.

Thanksgiving is nearly a month away, but we haven’t given much thought to its preparation. After all, we’ve got three weeks or so to get our ducks in a row. Then we hear it. Could be we’re in a supermarket or a department store. Maybe we’re waiting in a dentist’s office to get our teeth cleaned in advance of the fast approaching Olympic eating season. Wherever we are, you can rest assured we’re bombarded by the cacophony of ubiquitous white noise otherwise known as elevator music that assails us everywhere we go. Only this time it’s different. Hovering above the din of human activity, we pause to digest something familiar, evocative of simpler times, childhood memories and dreams misplaced.

We’ve just heard our first Christmas carol of the season.

It comes earlier each year. In the olden golden days when I was a boy, we didn’t see so much as one Christmas decoration or hear a single note of Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Even then, it took a week or so for retail merchants to ramp up for the December crush of consumers. No longer.

In its most extreme expression, Christmas decorations along with mechanical Santas and synthetic snow have gone up in retail outlets as early as Labor Day weekend. Thankfully, that level of vulgarity has dwindled to a minimum since the wild and wooly 1980s. Come on, now. It’s hard to get in the Christmas spirit when it’s still 105° out there.

But the unwritten rule of Thanksgiving Day being the kickoff to the Christmas season is a thing of the past, all the same. The holiday promotional campaign tends to drift onto our radar screens right about now – in the nether world between Halloween and Thanksgiving. And for the lack of a more definitive benchmark of years gone by, I have always marked its onset by the hearing of the first Christmas song of the season.

That happened today. At Borders Books.

When people ask me what I do for a living, rather than respond with something like . . . “Well, I’m an underemployed bum, whose high-tech career went to India never to return,” I counter with a more measured response. “I kill time.” And when I think about it, that’s most of what I do. I’m a professional time killer. Piece of cake, right? Not really. In order to proceed in such a unique endeavor, it must be done with a certain amount of finesse, creativity and flair. And when you’re in the business of killing time, there are two places that are ideally suited for the pastime – libraries and bookstores. You can linger for hours in both, undisturbed.

Today, it was the bookstore. I tried the library in the morning, only to discover it was closed. Then it occurred to me. Aha! It’s Veteran’s Day. It slipped completely under the radar out here in the Golden State. Between the marathon Obama victory parties, still in progress, and the liberal media still popping champagne corks, I guess the public information channels forgot to cover it this year. No matter. I haven’t had Veteran’s Day off since I’ve been one, and today was no different. Being a professional time-killer is a full-time job. There is no respite in its pursuit.

So, in the absence of the three public libraries in the immediate vicinity, I opted for the bookstores. Fortunately, we have two primo stores right here in the neighborhood. Barnes & Noble rented a huge outlet in the Montclair Plaza, and Borders Books has a stand-alone store immediately adjacent to the shopping center itself. Both are excellent if you find yourself all dressed up with no place to go.

I originally planned to kill the afternoon at Barnes & Noble. It has the novelty of being new, having opened a year or so ago. But driving into the mall parking lot, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of world-weariness. Ethan Allen, Circuit City, Macy’s, all gone, out of business. Boarded up, graffiti-riddled, windows smashed in by roaming bands of late-night thugs, these once-thriving retail establishments carried with them all the ambiance of cattle skulls bleached white in the desert.

The mall itself was no better. Somehow, with ⅓ of the floor space disgustingly available, and the remaining vendors posting advertisements exclusively in Espanól, I wasn’t exactly filled with the holiday spirit. Watching the local undocumented guest workers gaze longingly at the baubles, bangles and beads they couldn’t afford if they cleaned a thousand toilets a day just made me depressed. But then, that’s a consequence of life in the global village. If the wage slaves aren’t paid sufficient compensation to buy the cheap, Chinese junk we sell in our stores, then the whole roulette wheel of global commerce comes up 00. House spin. The chatter among window shoppers was a smattering of Spanish, Arabic, Farsi and various Oriental dialects. And as they gazed into the brightly lit holiday windows, the lament was the same – “We can’t get there from here.” Funny how some sentiments remain the same in any language.

So, I opted for Borders. It had the advantage of a respectably vibrant clientelé, along with a sufficiently cozy, intimate atmosphere. That I could not hear my footsteps echo for lack of other patrons made this destination all the more appealing. And a Seattle’s Best Coffee outlet never hurt on a day that passes for fall in California.

I had just settled in with my Seattle’s Best decaf mocha latté, fully expecting to pass an uneventful afternoon with Robert McCammon’s book, Swan Song, an epic saga of the end of the world, and the struggle for dominance that follows in its wake. It’s dated, with an original publication date of 1987. And it certainly doesn’t hold a candle to Stephen King’s The Stand, to which it bears a striking resemblance. But it seemed appropriate when I picked it up last week in the wake of what happened on November 4.

Then I heard it. The melodic strains of the first Christmas carol of 2008.

It matters what the song is. I’ve never been a fan of Jingle Bell Rock, truth be told. And for a card-carrying member of the vast right wing conspiracy, Mannheim Steamroller has always left me cold. I know, I know. Rush Limbaugh will personally repossess my Golden EIB Mike lapel pin and cancel my lifetime pass to the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Still, I’m not a fan of holiday music of that sort. No. You can keep all this newfangled, contemporary, new age holiday faire. Give me traditional Christmas music every time. And so it was today.

What coursed through the sound system at Borders Books was Linda Eder’s version of Silent Night. If ever there was a rendition that could bring tears to your eyes and a chill to your spine, this is it. Hearing it was like being washed clean as an overture to a six-week run at the end of the year when we take a break from our grim, ruthless struggle to claw our way to the top no matter what, and for a short season, we are actually kind to each another.

It’s an imperfect practice, I’ll admit. There have been so many boom years leading up to this one, that the Christmas season often morphs into just another event in the Day Planner, something we have to get through in the midst of closing the big sale before the close of the year. We have to make sure little Janie wins the holiday queen competition at the local middle school (even if she has to step over dead bodies to do it), and everybody, but everybody has to get the most expensive gadget, lest they think poorly of us. And we have to prepare for the frantic holiday travel season – either to hit the road, or dust off the convertible sofa – to gather with family most of us never see the rest of the year, and never give a second thought to between visits.

Ah, but there are moments . . . Some of us, in the midst of the holiday hysteria, get what it was all about.

¹² “And this will be a sign unto you: Ye shall find a Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: 14 “Glory be to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” – Luke 2:12-14

Tell the truth now. How many of your first heard this passage on A Charlie Brown Christmas? You remember? When Charlie Brown cried out in his frustration, “Doesn’t anybody know what Christmas is all about?” And the lights went down and Linus stood alone on the stage at the end? How many of you choked up when you heard it? Come on now, admit it. I know my hand is up.

Happily, and hopefully, some of us get the message. Indeed, a lot of us get it. For six weeks at the end of the year, we are civil, considerate, kind and thoughtful. We find it easier to tolerate the intolerable, simpler to extend a gracious hand, effortless to render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. We put into practice what Abraham Lincoln so aptly referred to as “the better angels of our nature.” For a short time, we put on Christ. Only for a season, it’s true. But better a season than not at all.

Linda Eder’s version of Silent Night conjured up all of that this afternoon. The Bible tells us Jesus wept. So did I today.

This season figures to be like the ones preceding it. Let’s face it, the perfect storm of wealth redistribution hasn’t broken on our shores. Not yet, at least. We’re standing firm at only 6% unemployment and most of our wallets are full, along with our bellies. But the people I see as I go wandering through my days, busy going nowhere, doing nothing and killing time, have a wariness to them that hasn’t been there in recent memory. They huddle closer, are more pensive, more cautious than in past years. They’ve cast their lot with a charismatic unknown quantity who will soon occupy the White House, and they know not what will come in his wake.

People are worried, concerned, uncertain. The dark, empty business outlets near the local mall bear silent testimony to what may be on the horizon. But even Rome was not destroyed in a day. The Stock Market may have crashed on October 29, 1929. But the nation did not wake up on October 30 to find a third of its workforce unemployed and people starving in the street. That took time.

All the same, Herbert Hoover’s response over the following two years was to raise taxes (as a budget balancing measure, an article of faith in his administration) and choke off international trade with the passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariff law. It only made a bad situation worse. Franklin Roosevelt threw money at the problem. That did little to alleviate the suffering of the populace and nothing to end the Depression. WWII accomplished that.

Barack Obama has proposed differing versions of the same thing. Raising taxes on the wealthy will certainly do nothing to assist lower income earners. As many issues as I have with Ayn Rand, I believe Atlas Shrugged is prescient in its account of what would happen if the innovation so desperately needed from our highest achievers is strangled in the cradle by confiscatory taxes and punitive government regulation. In that, Rand was right on the money. (No pun intended).

But we stand on the precipice of an unprecedented secularization of America. We witness a nation that is tired, scared, broke; a country unsure of itself and uncertain about the future. We attempt to build solidarity in the midst of an avalanche zone. We are a nation of followers. We want to be told what to do. In every revolution, there is one man on a white horse, one man with a vision. And we are a nation who, when we are hurt, tired and scared, will follow anyone who offers a way out, provided he is charismatic enough, speaks to us in comforting generalities, and assuages our pain. A generation ago, we blazed a trail and tamed a continent. Now we want to be provided for and taken care of.

Hence Barack Obama, a candidate who would have been incomprehensible if we had a remnant of a nation that understood life is hard, bad things often happen, and the way out may be long, painful and difficult. We once were a nation of faith, but that too seems to have gone on hiatus. Too bad, too. Faith in God is a fundamental requirement in these looming times of trouble if, as William Faulkner so eloquently remarked, “Man will not only endure, he will prevail.”

And so, we embark upon what might conceivably be the last Christmas season of its kind. Not because we lack the resources to make it a prosperous one, but that we can only surmise what the effects will be – both legislative and cultural – of the incoming administration that will soon ascend the heights of power.

For one thing, our wealth may be sufficiently redistributed in the coming years to render the type of Christmas celebration we’ve become used to all but impossible. That may be not altogether a bad thing. A little hardship often enhances appreciation for our largesse if and when it ever returns. But Americans are noted for being among the most generous people on the face of the planet. And if we are to continue in this practice presupposes that we will have the wherewithal to be generous with. This ability may be rendered academic if the policy of “each according to his ability to each according to his need” is put into full effect in the coming years.

The assault on religious expression – which has always been aimed at the heart of the Judeo-Christian foundation upon which the nation was built – could easily switch from the public sphere to the private arena. Long before Barack Obama appeared on the scene, one of our local pastors established a network of home churches. He did this on two accounts. He wanted to emulate the early Christian church which – up until the time of the Roman emperor Constantine – met in people’s homes. The second, less widely circulated reason for this network was that the time could come when we will be forced into the kind of clandestine worship of exactly the sort that may come about. And such observations have nothing to do with current political trends. They are right out of the Bible.

The radicalization of the judicial system could easily reach unprecedented levels. The globalization of the court system could easily occur under the auspices of what Yahoo! News describes as America’s first global president. You think the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments eroded under the conservative usurper, George W. Bush? Just wait. You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

On the positive side, church attendance is up since the economic collapse began this fall. Our own congregation at the foot of the local mountain, consisting of the local super achievers, has swelled to bursting most Sundays. The leadership has taken to reading the comment cards included in the church bulletin, and has concluded that certain excretory substances do, in fact, flow uphill. Hard times have come to the foot of the mountain. And the badge of business ownership does not preclude said owner from the winds of economic hardship that have come home to roost.

To their credit, the people have opened their wallets in the wake of unprecedented uncertainty. Would that they open their hearts as well. To the credit of the church leadership, the ensuing messages have become more mature, more substantive, more sober-minded. It could be the shift from our traditional happy-faced hamster dance to messages on the development of character, substance and faith marks a sea change more significant than the one about to occur in Washington.

Who knows? Maybe such developments mark the onset of a third great awakening. Perhaps we’ll come to the realization that hard times are part of life. We may come to appreciate the hard truth that throwing money at our economic woes only hastens the reckoning with financial as well as spiritual bankruptcy. Maybe then, we’ll realize that depressions with a “d” – as opposed to recessions with an “r” – are part of the hard edge of life in a free society. They are tangible events, with definable features. And then perhaps we’ll understand that the only way “out” is “through”.

It could be some of us will realize that in order to be free we must be active in the protection of the institutions that provide that freedom. Lincoln once said – “As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by suicide.” Maybe, just maybe, from the ashes of a once great nation, there will emerge a leader worthy of the legacy of its rich history. A leader who realizes that struggle, sacrifice and discipline are required – not just of the leadership of a nation, but of the citizenry as a whole – for a free nation to endure. And that subverting our birthright to a president who will take care of us and make us feel good is a betrayal of the inheritance we all share, and a return to a childlike dependence such a nation can ill-afford.

I plan to enjoy the Christmas season, as I always manage to do. This year, my season will be more threadbare than most, for many reasons. I’m irrelevant, obsolete, antiquated and without value. Other than that, everything is fine. There comes a time when the older generation realizes it has passed its prime. That time has finally come. We are being pushed off the stage, like it or not. And high time, too.

Still, that does not mean I cannot enjoy the season. I plan to indulge in as many culinary delights as come my way. I wouldn’t miss walking the local neighborhood, renowned for its spectacular Christmas lights for anything. Who knows, it might even not be too late to get Nutcracker tickets. I might even be civil to people I would never give the time of day to during the rest of the year. And then, there’s curling up with a good book at Borders Books listening to Linda Eder’s rendition of Silent Night. That’s definitely high on the agenda.

After all, it always makes me smile.

⁶ “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, ⁷ that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ” – I Peter 1:6-7.

by Euro-American Scum
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)
Euro-American Scum can be reached at eascum@yahoo.com

Tilting at Windmills

Many of my patriot friends – both local friends and internet friends – are ceremoniously voicing the opinion that we must rally the troops, re-focus on our conservative roots, and keep our eyes on the 2010 and 2012 elections. They believe that, if we but re-group and try harder to educate the electorate, we can wrest power from the neo-Marxists who will soon occupy the White House and constitute a near-filibuster-proof majority in congress. Others appear intent on repeating the mantra, ‘The Lord will see us through this trial.'

One of the most accurate definitions of insanity is the belief that consistent repetition of the same behavior will someday result in a different outcome.

And the Lord does not promise earthly victory for all who believe. Quite the contrary, Christians have been warned that they will be persecuted. Many a civilization that has turned away from His teaching has fallen, with believers in tow.

There comes a time when the rational mind must acknowledge when a certain point of no return has been exceeded. When continuing to expend one’s energies on a lost cause amounts to nothing more than tilting at windmills. At that pivotal ... and often indescribably tragic ... point in time, the wisest course of action amounts to simply walking away from the battle and turning one’s attention to more realistic pursuits.

I believe we are sitting at such a painfully historical point. We can turn back and keep plugging away at failed endeavors, oblivious to the fact that fewer and fewer are listening to our warnings. Or we can move forward, conserve our energy, and embrace more realistic pursuits, all of which have enormous merit, and require much dedication, time and effort:

(1) looking out for our families, friends, and neighbors by educating them about the dangers that lie ahead, developing tools with which to confront those dangers, and securing a means of defense against the violation of our God-given rights

(2) working within our individual communities, as time and opportunities permit, to inform and educate others about the nature of those essential liberties that were incorporated into the foundations of our republic, and the requirement that the citizenry be informed and vigilant if we are to retain, or reclaim, them

(3) seeking the Lord’s guidance, and relying on the power of prayer

Resigning oneself to the above does not constitute an admission of defeat. It abides by the admonition of the serenity prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.

Amen.
I have been attempting to compose an essay which would include a recitation of all of the wicked forces that I believe have led us to this watershed point in the history of our beloved republic. Yet each time I sat down to write I somehow did not feel that I could yet do the subject justice.

Providentially, the following essay was posted at Plumb Bob Blog, the day after the 2008 presidential election. (Thank you, John Cooper, for the steer there.) With a patriot’s heart, a reflection of Christ's love, and 20/20 vision, the author accurately portrays, far better than I could ever hope to do, the state of our beloved republic, the reasons for its decline, and our prospects of reclamation. I humbly defer to his incomparable insight and eloquence:

-- They Have Buried Us --

When I was small, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union from 1953 - 1964, was famously quoted as declaring to the Free West, “We will bury you.” It was taken as a grave threat in those days. I remember it being played in a commercial on TV. As a young liberal, I was fond of pointing out that Khrushchev was simply talking about the natural outcome of history from the Marxist viewpoint; he explained later, “Of course we will not bury you with a shovel; your own working class will bury you.” It never occurred to me that this was hardly less threatening, especially given the fact that our own working class was getting help from the Soviet Union’s political operative class. I suppose it’s not surprising that the actual work of burying the US was accomplished, not by the working class, but by the intellectuals; this is common for Marxism, which has appeal only to those who are pathologically detached from society.

Last night, the American people elected the equivalent of Hugo Chavez to be President of the United States. He lied about what he stood for, but he was permitted to do so by the press, which is supposed to protect us from such attacks. Even so, his lies were transparent to those of us possessing enough education and independence to do our homework; but there were too few of us, and too far removed from the centers of power.

And so, just over 50 years after Khrushchev uttered his threat, the American voting population announced to the world that we no longer believe in the capitalism that produced more creativity, energy, courage, and wealth than the world thought possible, that we’re going to join the ranks of World Socialism, that we’re going to hand our productive power to the government we once properly distrusted, that we prefer craven dependence to stalwart independence. As we turn the responsibility for our destinies over to Mommy Government, the world’s last, stubborn foil to the tyrannical advance of Marxist domination has just been removed. “Social justice,” the crippling of the effective to satisfy the envy of the ineffective, will commence at a greater pace, and be given the force of arms. The world is in for a very dark time, full of poverty, oppression, and violence.

We allowed it by permitting leftists to infiltrate and distort education, entertainment, law, and news. For at least 80 years, the children of those influenced by their thinking have targeted these arenas, creating protected enclaves into which they refuse to permit any competing ideas. Their control of these areas is nearly complete, and friends of liberty are forming no coherent strategy to break their hold, only the occasional foray into the Dark World. Home schooling chips away at the edges, alternative media permit chatter under the radar, but the centers of control remain in leftist hands, and they don’t believe in fair play or free speech. Expect those holes to be plugged very soon. President Obama (I cringe to type it) and his Democratic minions in Congress will quickly see to it that home schooling is illegal in practice, if not explicitly (probably by requiring teacher certification), that conservative speech is crippled, and that the free exchange of ideas cannot take place without government oversight and intrusion. Be assured that no discussion that has any force that might endanger their domination will be permitted for long.

Oh, and expect to be permitted to worship Christ only so long as it does not impair your cooperation with the Junta’s social agenda. That’s coming soon, too; in fact, it’s been coming for a few decades already, and is now upon us.

Will conservatives get another shot two years from now, in the public’s reaction to two years of Democratic domination? Maybe; probably not. It hardly matters. We have now raised two generations of Americans on a form of public education and a flood of popular film and music that is so thoroughly saturated with statist and world socialist ideals that no general election is going to produce a lasting victory for conservative principles. The masses in America think of capitalism as “greed,” of the robust and free expansion of the economy by individuals as “destroying the planet,” and when they say “we,” they mean “the government.”

The American experiment in self-government is over.

Ultimately, America has not rejected capitalism, it’s rejected Christ. The foundation of liberty is, and has always been, devotion to the living Christ. Liberty entered the world through the ministry of Christ, and is leaving now that we’ve jettisoned Him as our Master. As God told the prophet Samuel when Israel demanded that he appoint them a king like all the other nations had, “They have not rejected you, but they’ve rejected Me from being king over them.” (See I Samuel 8).

Sure, there are Christians among the leftists in America, and a number of them are sincere; but they no longer believe they owe their conscience directly to God, but instead to God through His appointed regents, the State. This is the indirection that America’s founders rejected when they wrote the US Constitution; in their construction, men owed their conscience to God, not to God’s anointed sovereign, the King. It’s no mistake, no accident or coincidence, that America rejected capitalism in favor of a leader who declared with messianic overtones his destiny to rule. In God we no longer trust; instead, we trust in Government. We’ve rejected God from being King over us.

American liberty can be rebuilt, but it must be rebuilt from the ground up. It has to start with the proper education of our children to believe in God, in individual responsibility before God, and in individual achievement as a form of service to God and family. It has to be constructed on a foundation of properly defined morals, and on a world-view that remembers that Man does not serve himself.

I’m not going to retreat from politics; I’m still a citizen of the United States of America, however misguided she may be. My strategy, however, for rebuilding a prosperous, felicitous nation friendly to safe families and appropriate personal achievement is to win converts to Christianity; and not just any Christianity, but a Christianity that encourages sound and sober thinking, that understands man’s place in the universe, that can articulate clearly its purpose for living and its reasons to believe.

We are entering very dark times. America’s economic dominance will end very soon, and her military dominance will not be far behind. Obama plans to make us “good citizens of the world,” meaning that our national choices will become subject to the opinions of tinpot dictators and corrupt, demented representatives from third-world nations. They will plunder us, and we will be stripped bare.

But I know how the story ends, and Christ wins. The rock formed without hands crushes all the mountains, and becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth (Daniel 2). The Son of Man is given dominion, that all the peoples, nations, and men of every language might serve Him, and His dominion is everlasting (Daniel 7). If we proclaim the truth of Christ faithfully, men will experience liberty again. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Spiritual liberty is not unconnected with political liberty; they’re the same thing. One does not exist without the other; and political liberty always results where the Spirit rules.

They have buried us, but we will rise again.

~ joanie

The Noble Experiment

And it shall come to pass afterward
That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions. - Joel 2:28
At first glance, he was nothing to look at; just an old man, stoop-shouldered, frail, wizened. Leaning precariously on a metal walker and sucking oxygen through a clear plastic tube, he paused to survey the landscape before embarking on the long walk across the parking lot that he wouldn't have given a second thought to in his younger years. We've all seen him, wherever we live. And usually, we pay him no mind. Let's face it, his time has passed. We know it. He knows it too. One foot in this world, the other tentatively in the next.

I saw him get off the bus. You know, those mini-buses that ferry our aging senior citizens on various sundry excursions? The grocery store, the mall, church, senior centers. These ubiquitous transports have dotted our landscape since the word retirement came front and center into the lexicon of the 20th century vernacular.

On this day, he was descending the steps of the mini-bus with his metal walker in the parking lot of the local Baptist church. He came out to vote.

I noticed how he refused any help. Several of his more able-bodied companions offered to assist him with his walker - which, in fact, proved to be significantly cumbersome. Others offered to help him walk across the parking lot to the polling place. He waved them all off.

I was helping myself to the traditional free doughnuts and coffee that are part and parcel of most churches - particularly the conservative evangelical variety, of which the Baptist church is one - and watched as his fellow seniors brushed past him to get in line to exercise their constitutional ballot-casting right in this latest mini-drama of slick media consultants and savvy political pitchmen.

I was about to follow the crowd as the line was by then growing to considerable proportions, but I couldn't tear myself away from this elderly octogenarian. He made slow and steady progress toward the polling place, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was about this grizzled old man that held my attention. Then it caught my eye. It was his baseball cap.

Emblazoned on the front of this red cap was the eagle, globe and anchor of a United States Marine. And so I made the acquaintance of one Irwin Kunkle, formerly of Gary, Indiana, most recently of Upland, California - a proud veteran of the 28th Marines, and a bona fide member of the greatest generation. He hadn't missed an election since 1946, he told me, and since this one figured to be his last, he wasn't about to miss it either.

We stood in line together, and I noticed that his hands and arms bore the fading scars of what appeared to be significantly severe burns. I realized men of his generation didn't give away much. They held their life experiences close, particularly their wartime service. Believe me, I know it very well. I walked the beaches of Normandy in 2004 with the veterans of that campaign, and while they were forthcoming with their personal accounts, they gave them up grudgingly.

Still, I had to ask. And Mr. Irwin Kunkle enriched me with the short version of the exploits of Lance Corporal Irwin Kunkle, USMC in the sulfurous interior of an island in the Pacific called Iwo Jima.

He led an impromptu charge with a flame thrower - a piece of equipment he was neither familiar with, nor trained to use - against a Japanese pillbox that was pouring fire on a platoon of Marines trapped in a series of shallow shell holes. He simply stripped the gear off the dead Marine whose task it was to man the burn unit, strapped the fuel tanks on to his back, pointed the nozzle in the direction of the pillbox and charged.

The problem was, when igniting the flame units of that time, the operator had to be prepared for the kick. The nozzle bucked back at him when he ignited it on full burn, and while he incinerated the pillbox, some of the fuel also splashed back on his hands and arms, inflicting first and second degree burns. He effectively turned the Jap flank and prevented a platoon of Marines from being gutted by automatic weapons fire. He wasn't even written up for a Purple Heart, let alone any decoration for valor.

It was that kind of time. Pain, suffering and sacrifice simply went with the territory.

Standing next to him, I realized Irwin Kunkle was about 5' 7. Not an imposing figure by any standard. The greatest generation didn't grow to great size. They suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition as children in the Great Depression. But looking in those blazing blue eyes, I beheld the heart of a lion and the soul of a warrior.

So we chatted about various things as we waited in a line that never seemed to move. We both enjoyed the summer-like weather that only California seemed to be blessed with this late in the season. He told me he'd gone to UCLA (oh well, nobody's perfect) on the G.I. Bill after the war. And since his wife died, he'd taken up residence in an assisted living facility in nearby Claremont. We did not discuss the election, or for whom we were planning to cast our respective ballots.

Throughout our conversation, I sensed, in the tenor of his voice, and his proud but frail demeanor, a realization that the suffering he endured and the sacrifices he made were all for nothing. He truly has lived too long, and in that moment, I believe he finally realized it. This was no longer his country.

This is that kind of time. Brimming over with arrogance and contempt, for the Irwin Kunkles of this world, from people who despise the country and everything it stands for. And they do it with impunity.

And so ends the noble experiment.

What began in the conference halls of Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Williamsburg Virginia and Boston Massachusetts died last Tuesday. What was paid for on the bridge at Concord, during the freezing night at Trenton and on the Yorktown peninsula, long ailing, has expired.

I suppose it was fatuous to expect the democracy of which we are all a part to be immune from the vagaries of history. Such governments have come and gone during the centuries since Eve ate the forbidden fruit and mankind was cursed. And once lost, there is no restoration.

The enlightened Greek democracy disappeared into the dust bin of history, never to return. The radical egalitarian experiment of the 18th century vanished in a sea of blood that was the French Revolution. The rational liberalism of 19th century Europe exploded in the catastrophe of the First World War. Europe was plunged into half a century of barbarism, never to return to its glory of the previous century. And now it stands on the threshold of being absorbed by a flood tide of radical Islam.

How could we be so arrogant to think America would be immune?

And so the secular media hails Barack Obama as did Yahoo! News today - "Finally, A Global President." And why not? When a country loses its identity, it loses its soul. The president-elect is simply a reflection of the culture that produced him. Subtle, sophisticated, a man of the world, at home all over the world. The liberal media trumpets how respected his is among world leaders. No doubt he is. When values mean nothing, respect comes from having none. When standing up for principles draws the contempt of the world, standing up for nothing merits the world's praise.

I suppose it was inevitable. Freedom requires an eternal vigilance most human beings cannot maintain. All freedom comes due in blood - something the Irwin Kunkles of the world know very well. In the craggy volcanic interior of Iwo Jima, manhood perished not. It took future generations to fail where previous generations carried the burden of leadership and endured.

What will come when the Obama regime seizes power? I have no idea. I refuse to engage in the hysteria that is currently burning up the servers and comm. lines of the Internet. Obama may very well be the avowed socialist he has presented himself to be, bent on redistributing the wealth of the nation, and readjusting its values. He may indeed, fold our tent and bug out of the Middle East. He may abandon Israel, thus setting up the fulfillment of Ezekiel 38. He may even be the Antichrist.

I've heard it all, and it is yet to be revealed. What is certain is that what emerges in the wake of the Obama leadership will not resemble the republic that has graced these shores for the last 232 years. That government is dead and the soul of its citizens along with it.

It died because men are weak, self-indulgent, expedient and mean. It was betrayed for lack of interest, lack of commitment, lack of dedication. Irwin Kunkle knows full well the evil inherent in the human heart. He's seen it up close and personal. He knows it is not an aberration. His character was forged at a time when life was understood to be hard, cruel and short. We live in an epoch that assumes life is a fair, just and right, and we expect to be fulfilled with a sense of gilt-edged entitlement.

So the events of last Tuesday make sense, given the underlying assumptions of life in the 21st century. If we sell our souls for what we believe we are entitled to, Barack Obama is the inevitable result.

I cast my ballot in the late afternoon. I voted for Alan Keyes, whom I was surprised to find on the California ballot. I'm through supporting the lesser of two evils. That's what brought us to the point we now find ourselves in. I don't care what comes in the wake of that decision.

And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world, as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come. - Matthew 24:12-14

America or no America, the gospel of the kingdom will be preached. Who knows, maybe we should have turned in the direction the Bible indicates in the first place, instead of now, when all is lost. The road ahead will now be infinitely more difficult and the cost significantly more painful.

But there is no mention of America in the eschatology of the Bible. Maybe we're beginning to see why that is so. The country has been long down the road to becoming just like everyplace else in the world. Call it a consequence of cultural as well as economic globalism. The process cannot be reversed, regardless of who occupies the White House.

He who testifies to these things says, 'Surely I am coming quickly.' Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus." - Revelation 22:20

Amen. Amen. And Amen.

by Euro-American Scum
(contributing Team Member of Allegiance and Duty Betrayed)
Euro-American Scum can be reached at eascum@yahoo.com

Pray for America

When I was a very young child, maybe two or three years old, my Dad hung the painting pictured above on the wall at the head of my bed. Through the years as I grew, I decorated my room with many photos, pennants, pictures, and the like, but that small painting always remained in place.

Many years later, for our tenth anniversary, my husband, Rick, had it re-framed for me (the frame had come to know its share of bumps and bruises over the years), and now, thirty-one years hence, it still hangs on the wall at the head of our bed.

My Dad passed away seven years ago last month. I miss him terribly, but I am thankful that he has not had to witness the devastation of his beloved country that has occurred since his passing. His heart would be heavy with grief and mourning.

Somehow, despite its long nearly sixty-year history, and the loving memories that history rekindles, the message that my Dad's painting portrays -- of the power of prayer, and the need to turn to His Word for guidance and direction -- has intensified in significance for us over the past few months.



Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men,
from men whose words are perverse,
who leave the straight paths to walk in dark ways,
who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil,
whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways ... Prov 2:12-15
I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned.
Keep away from them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they decieve the minds of naive people ... Rom 16:17-18
... For why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience? ... 1 Cor: 10:29
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery ... Gal 5:1
Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover up for evil; live as servants of God ... 1 Pet: 2:16

Heavenly Father, forgive us for what we have done.

You have prospered our nation for more than two centuries. You have strengthened us when we were weak, provided for us when we were without provision, directed us when we were willing to follow your guidance, blessed us when we were undeserving of blessings.

We have walked far from the path you laid out for us. We have betrayed those who sacrificed so dearly for our benefit. We have become lazy, allowing ourselves to be easily ensnared by carefully-crafted words and empty promises, delivered by men who worship self, who seek to oppress and control their fellow man, and who place no value in truth and goodness.

We have transformed prosperity into decadence; allegiance and duty into indulgence and complacency.

We have taken the gifts that only you can bestow (Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you ... 2 Tim 1:14) and placed them in the hands of men whose will is arbitrary and whose agenda is tyranny. The road ahead is dark, and steep, and fraught with danger –- made intentionally so by those who intend to ‘lead’ us, deceptively, through the fog they have created, and over the minefields they have laid.

Help us to continue to have faith in our own individualism, to insulate ourselves from the cacophony that surrounds us, and to listen for your gentle whispers. For we know that it is in heeding those whispers that our future security lies.

We cling to the knowledge that you work in miracles, when it is your will to do so. We pray that, if it not be praying against that will, you would help us to acknowledge what we have lost, muster the courage to reclaim it, and look to you once again in that endeavor for the strength, wisdom, and guidance and that only you can provide.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought us safe thus far,
And grace will lead us home.

Amen.

The Incomparable Wisdom of Ezra Taft Benson

Ezra Taft Benson served as President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from 1985 until his death in 1994. Long before holding that esteemed position within the church, he served for eight years as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture.

During Benson’s tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, the press predicted that he wouldn’t last a full term, and many republicans in congress believed that he was ‘too radical’ for the party’s own good. Yet, despite vehement opposition from the media and his own party, Benson remained in his post for the full duration of Eisenhower’s two terms, consistently delivering anti-communist speeches that warned of a socialist/communist conspiracy to eventually bring America to her knees.

Later, in the 1960s, he addressed the students of Brigham Young University, warning, in part:

I have talked face to face with the godless communist leaders. It may surprise you to learn that I was host to Mr. Kruschev for a half day when he visited the United States, not that I’m proud of it. I opposed his coming then, and I still feel it was a mistake to welcome this atheistic murderer as a state visitor.

But, according to President Eisenhower, Kruschev had expressed a desire to learn something of American Agriculture — and after seeing Russian agriculture I can understand why.

As we talked face to face, he indicated that my grandchildren would live under communism. After assuring him that I expected to do all in my power to assure that his and all other grandchildren will live under freedom he arrogantly declared in substance:

You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands!

See previous related essays here that corroborate Benson’s standing as a modern-day patriot, and a belatedly-recognized prophet of much repute:

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

'The One' is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want
~ joanie

'The One' is My Shepherd,I Shall Not Want ...

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, in ‘Democracy in America’:

[The principle of equality prepares men for government that] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic character cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided … Such a power … stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd ...

One week and one day from today it appears that the people of America may elect Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States and leader of the free world. They may also be electing to the Senate and the House of Representatives a majority – perhaps even a filibuster-proof majority – of democrats from Obama’s own party.

Congress’s approval rating sits at nine percent, and yet the voters will be voting for ‘more of the same’. Why? Because their particular senator and/or congressman brings home the local bacon. Yet they resent the other 530+ ‘leaders’ who sit on the Hill and do exactly the same for their respective constituencies.

Such is the mindset of the citizenry of America 2008: What’s in it for me? and Don’t bother me with the particulars.

In past elections, whatever the make-up of the ‘leadership’ in Washington, and whatever the make-up of those who placed them in office, there was always reason for hope that America would rise above mistakes made, or errors in judgment ... next time ‘round.

I do not believe such is the case this time. An Obama election, and a democrat majority in congress, will ensure a permanent left lock on power for the remainder of America's existence. They have seen to it, by directing a left-leaning path for the past fifty years. We are on the brink of closing the door behind us, making impossible any return to conservative leadership.

Barack Obama is an inexperienced 'leader', with no record of meaningful accomplishments, and dangerous delusions of grandeur -- a self-serving ideologue whose mentors and associates embrace anything but what is best for America.

Many of them serve a Marxist god.

Most of them speak more ill of, than praise for, our republic.

Most of them despise the capitalist system and the free market.

Some of them despise the white race.

Most of them place little value on human life – those born, and those as yet unborn -- except to the degree that it can advance their ideology.

Most of them hold our Constitution in utter disdain and seek to declare its irrelevance with every stroke of their arrogant pens.

Most of them believe themselves to be members of a chosen elite, who possess the right to author oppressive laws that apply to the common man, but from which they are exempt.

Most of them believe that the right to own personal property, and the right to save the fruits of one’s labor, are gifts bestowed by the state, and they can freely be taken away, or redistributed, at the whim of the ruling class.

Most of them do not believe in the citizen’s right to defend himself.

Most of them believe that success is not achieved through hard work and personal industry, but rather through a government-authored and enforced state of ‘equality’.

Most of them believe that personal responsibility is an intolerant concept, and that we all must share the negative consequences of, and pay the price for, the foolish, frivolous, or self-serving actions of others.

Most of them believe that our children are wards of the state, and that parents must look to the state for child-rearing guidance, or answer to the courts.

Most of them believe in a borderless world in which the concepts of national identity, national sovereignty, and national pride are irrelevant.

Most of them consider a lie, or the breaking of a law, even more worthwhile than the truth, or obedience to law, if the end suits their purposes.

Most of them hold that a belief in God, and Biblical morality, serve merely as a roadblock on the pathway to self-realization.

What have these leftist ‘leaders’ – in politics, academia, and the media -- achieved over the past few decades, which will ensure their political pre-eminence, effectively rendering their power coalitions omnipotent, from this time forward?

• They have succeeded in diluting the perspective of the American populace to the extent that those who revere and appreciate our proud heritage, and, even more importantly, those who are able to define, and willing to defend, its precepts represent a minority of the population.



• They have done so primarily by indoctrinating two generations of American children into believing that they are ‘citizens of the world’, and have neglected to teach them the proud underpinnings that have kept their homeland afloat for more than two prosperous centuries. They are premeditatedly robbing us of our precious national identity.



• They have also convinced American parents that parenthood can be accomplished through absence, and through a refocusing on ‘self’. Most of today’s parents have little sense of civic duty; nor do they attempt to instill such in their children.

• They have succeeded in transforming the most effective healthcare system in the history of mankind into a bureaucratic monstrosity, teetering on the brink of disaster. Through the demonization of, and the imposition of monumental regulations on, the healthcare industry itself, the insurance industry, and the drug industry – and by allowing tort law free reign to file all manner of expensive frivolous lawsuits – they have premeditatedly driven up the cost of healthcare to the point where that care has diminished in effectiveness, and America may soon have no choice but to turn to the government for assistance. When complete socialization of the American healthcare system is instituted, they will have achieved their power-hungry goal, and significantly more Americans will receive inferior care, or die unnecessarily.

• They have succeeded in circumventing the Constitution to the point where the most magnificent blueprint for governance ever conceived by the mind of man has now been officially declared all but irrelevant. The nationalization of private enterprise, the using of hundreds of billions of dollars of public monies in order to bail out both private enterprise and citizens in financial difficulty, are but two of the most recent grotesque examples of blatantly unconstitutional law that enters into the books without so much as a question as to their obvious unconstitutionality.

• They have succeeded in filtering the goings-on in Washington, and around the world, so that, in the majority of media outlets, only those events that elevate the leftist ideology, are reported to the populace. The media have effectively become a podium for leftist propaganda. Those who attempt to expose the arrogant bias are either silenced or ridiculed. Censorship and character assassination are commonplace tactics in the media's leftist handbook.

• They have succeeded in turning military victories into defeats, both literally and figuratively – by retreating when victory could have been won, or by labeling a victory as a defeat, and appealing to their media cohorts to get out the word that such is the case. They have done so, often by portraying the American military as brutal oppressors, while at the same time refusing to report the extent of the genuine brutality of the enemy – by refusing to acknowledge the American military’s progress and relatively ‘moral’ wartime behavior, and incessantly focusing instead on minor defeats and the infinitesimal percentage of personnel gone awry – and by consistently attributing false or evil motives as America’s reasons for engaging, whether those negative motives are true or not. In short, leftists have consistently undercut America’s military, at the same time that our young men and women are placing themselves in harm’s way.

• They have sought to fill our courts with left-leaning judges who, by definition, seek to place their personal political convictions above the dictates of the Constitution. As a result, legislating from the bench, and adjudicating in conflict with Constitutional boundaries, have become the rule of the day. Soon Americans, severely constrained by unconstitutional laws, will have nowhere to turn to appeal for Constitutional justice.

• They have usurped gargantuan power for the state, handcuffed industry, made America increasingly energy-dependent on those who seek our annihilation, and taken away many of our personal freedoms, in the name of the hoax known as ‘global warming’. Our ability to provide our own reliable energy sources has been severely handicapped to the point where our very survival is at stake

• They have penetrated and perverted ‘the system’ to the extent that the vote of the ‘average American’ can effectively be cancelled out by votes obtained in a fraudulent manner. They have burdened ‘the system’ with fraud to the point where ‘the system’ cannot effectively weed out the deceivers – thus ensuring that an honest election will never occur again.

• They have cast aside the sanctity of life, and the recognition that it is God-given, in deference to the worship of self.

The power of special interests has expanded to the point where the power of the people pales in comparison. The recent actions taken by both the administration and congress in an effort to confront the looming financial meltdown were taken (1) in opposition to overwhelming public sentiment, and (2) in order to place the gargantuan bill, aimed at least in part to bail out ‘friends of congress’, on the shoulders of the American citizen (and his children). And the left played an enormous role in both the cause of the meltdown, and its proposed ‘solutions’.

Like the bailout legislation, countless other laws are passed each year (the majority of them, I suspect), not with the benefit of the American people in mind, but with either the furtherance of a political agenda, or ‘payback for political favors done’, as their intent.

America is being overrun with illegal invaders crossing our southern borders. Our ‘leadership’ in Washington is doing nothing about the invasion. Our mainstream media is keeping a tight lid on the rising cost of that invasion – ‘cost’ in terms of taxpayer dollars, violence on the streets of our cities, frequent injuries and deaths incurred by our Border Patrol agents, and the infiltration every year into our society of millions of people who bear no allegiance to our republic, a sub-group of which seeks to annex a portion of our nation for themselves. They are dramatically altering the very fabric of our society. And our ‘leaders’ continue to pander to them, at our expense. Illegal aliens cannot vote (yet), but their American-born offspring can. And these children will vote for the party that keeps the entitlements coming.

Much of the above, and much more, has been the result of the decades-long infiltration of heavy-handed, left-leaning ideology into our schools, our media, and our ‘leadership’ in Washington.

But there have always been those who sought to keep our left-ward movement from becoming an unstoppable march: (1) There were patriots in congress who sought to keep the socialists in check; (2) There were media decision-makers intent on retaining a sense of fairness in their reporting; (3) And, above all, there were a majority of the citizenry who saw it as their civic duty to be well-informed, to know the real backgrounds and agendas of the candidates, and to weigh those considerations against the most powerful one: what is best for America (as defined by the Constitution).

None of the above three conditions exist anymore -- not to the degree that they must, in order to succeed in holding back the march toward the total tyranny of the left.

If Barack Obama ascends to the presidency, the chipping away at our republic's foundations represented by all of the above conditions will increase ... in both intensity and speed. And our enemies will be emboldened because a novice (and an anti-American novice at that) will be serving as America's Commander-in-Chief.

Americans want change. And change they will get. It will not necessarily be a change in direction, but a change in the speed with which we achieve the destination so carefully laid out by our ruling elite. They have been patiently working for decades, but their patience is wearing thin, and their foot is on the accelerator. We have already witnessed the shifting of gears, in our leadership's lightning-fast unconstitutional response to their self-created economic meltdown.

Those in power will become ever more arrogant about their desires to achieve a United Socialist States of America. The socialist steamroller will be moving us toward the dark abyss at break-neck speed, and standing in its way will prove hazardous to your health.

Hang on. We’re about to embark on a dizzying national nightmare.


~ joanie