The Roberts also looks classier than the Volt.

I noticed that Chevrolet’s Volt website showed photos of the Volt in remote locations that it most likely could not reach on a 40-mile charge. True, unlike the Roberts, the Volt is a hybrid, but still…

Here is a more realistic view of this Obama administration government-subsidized boondoggle:

115-year-old electric car gets same 40 miles to the charge as Chevy Volt

By Chris Bedford – The Daily Caller

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

But don’t let the car’s advanced age let you think it isn’t tough: Its present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton Vintage Car Race.

If you didn’t know there are electric cars as old as the Roberts, you aren’t alone. Prior to today’s electric v. gas skirmishes, there was another battle: electric v. gas v. steam. This contest was fought in the market place, and history shows gas gave electric and steam an even more thorough whooping than Coca-Cola gave Moxie.

But while the Roberts electric car clearly lacked GPS, power steering and, yes, air bags, the distance it could achieve on a charge, when compared with its modern equivalent, provides a telling example of the slow pace of the electric car.

Driven by a tiller instead of a wheel, the Roberts car was built seven years before the Wright brothers’ first flight, 12 years before the Ford Model T, 16 years before Chevrolet was founded and 114 years before the first Chevy Volt was delivered to a customer.

As the New York Times reported September 5, “For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”

Like “green technology’s” most powerful proponent, President Barack Obama, the 1896 Roberts was made in Chicago. Obama, who supports the $7,500 tax credit for the Volt, is not fazed by its 40-mile electric limit — he only drove the car 10 feet.

[Source]

The vast majority of students in the economics class at Valencia College in Florida want to “tax the rich” to allow them to live on the government teat for the rest of their lives. Only ten percent wanted the federal government to respect their liberties and stay out of the way so that they could make it on their own.

“In effect, with every dollar we receive by force in order to gain our dream, we are diminishing, by one dollar, some other person’s dream.”

Will Generation ‘Gimme’ Work for the American Dream? Eye-opening insight into America’s youth

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by trilogy1956 on Nov 29, 2011

Also see:

• JackChambless.com
• Thoughts on Liberty, Economics, & Life…

This message has been making the rounds of the Internet. While the original author is unknown, the timeline and the facts are accurate and easily verified.
Please email, tweet, post on Facebook or on your own blog!

This is just a history lesson. I am sending it to all regardless of party. It is history and nothing can change it. All Americans should pass this on to everyone in their database. Both parties need to cut expenses, both parties have some blame, but this is truly what happened and Americans need to wake up and take our country back in 2012!!

REMEMBER JAN. 3, 2007

The day the Democrats took over was not January 22nd 2009, it was January 3rd 2007, the day the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, the start of the 110th Congress. The Democratic Party gained a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.

For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is “Bush’s Fault,” think about this:

January 3rd, 2007, the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:

• The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
• The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
• The Unemployment rate was 4.6%
• George Bush’s Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB CREATION!

Remember that day…

January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee.

The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?

BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!

THANK YOU DEMOCRATS (especially Barney) for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5% GDP and 4.6% Unemployment…to this CRISIS by (among MANY other things) dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac FIASCOES!

(BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 times to stop Fannie & Freddie – starting in 2001 because it was financially risky for the US economy). Barney blocked it and called it a “Chicken Little Philosophy” (and the sky did fall!)

And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac? OBAMA

And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie?
OBAMA and the Democrat Congress, especially BARNEY!!!!

So when someone tries to blame Bush…
REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007…THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!

Bush may have been in the car but the Democrats were in charge of the gas pedal and steering wheel they were driving the economy into the ditch.

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party.

Furthermore, the Democrats controlled the budget process for 2008 & 2009 as well as 2010 & 2011.

In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases. Bush should have vetoed every bill that came in front of his desk!

For 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the 2009 budget.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete 2009. Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.

In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is, “I inherited a deficit that I voted for,
And then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th, 2009.”

There is no way this will be widely publicized unless each of us passes it on.

“The problems we face today exist because the people who WORK for a living are outnumbered by those who VOTE for a living.”

Indeed he has.

From YouTube:

(h/t: Bumr50)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by sensfaninohio on Feb 22, 2009

Dr. Alan Keyes – Reagan Statesman, Constitutional Scholar – Staunch Conservative – Stead-fast Christian – Defender of the unborn, the newborn and the elderly — telling it like it is about our current “President” and how he should not be the POTUS by the one governing law of this land – The United States Constitution.

Comments [on the YouTube page] are now closed due to over 100 racist, hate-filled, profane and utterly disgusting comments from liberals who felt it their “duty” to defecate all over this video clip with their immaturity and inability to read simple English. Not one single liberal managed to speak intelligently without using profanity, racist comments or just trying to incite a flame war. And of the 80+ comments posted, I also had to delete 8 from conservatives who also used profanity – which I will not allow on here.

Sorry gang but the immaturity of hundreds means you all will have to understand that people can’t read English and can’t make an intelligent argument without using profanity and/or racism.

God Bless!

Originally published on 2.0: The Blogmocracy.

By Rodan

Polls show that most Americans think the False Messiah understands their problems more than either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney. I, for the life of me, don’t get the benefit of the doubt this man is given. Clearly it has to do with him being Black and too many Americans don’t want to admit he’s a failure. This perception is not the reality.

At his Google town hall, the False Messiah is confronted by a woman whose husband is unemployed. Believing his own Obama Boom hype, he is stunned and taken aback. Obama said the economy was fine and that her husband should find a job. The women doesn’t back down and takes Obama to task for wanting to increase H1-B Visas. Obama then asks for her husband’s resume!

During his Google+ hangout Pres. Obama tells a woman that her husband shouldn’t be unemployed from the growth he has seen in the economy. Obama said he finds it “interesting” because he is getting “the word” that someone in her husband’s job field “should be able to find something right away.”

Obama offered to do something if she would just send him her husband’s resume.

The woman wants to know why Obama is extending visas for foreigners when there is tons of demand for American jobs by Americans.

“I don’t know what your husband’s speciality [is], but I can tell you that there is a huge demand around the country for engineers,” Obama told the woman.

“I understand that,” she responded. “But how am — given the list that you’re getting, I mean we’re not getting that. You said in the State of the Union address for business leaders to ask what can they do to bring jobs back to America.

There is demand for engineers in America. Its just businesses don’t want American engineers, they want cheap foreign labor. Does this sound familiar (Illegal immigration)? This has been very detrimental to the US economy. With declining wages and foreigners getting preferences, Americans are not interested in the Engineering field. There’s no longer an economic reward to justify the high costs assorted with attaining that degree. The H1-B visa program needs to stop. If someone wants to immigrate here, cool. I do think educated foreigners (Non Islamic) should be given a speeded up process, but to bring in people specifically for certain jobs has been a disaster in the IT field. Unlike farm work, these are jobs Americans would love to do.

This incident shows the delusion Obama lives in. Clearly, his own administration thinks the economy is doing fine. That woman is a patriot for hitting The False Messiah with a dose of reality. The job market sucks, no matter how much the Regime lies.

Update: Carolina Girl expressed my feelings on this matter.

Well said!

by E.W. Jackson Sr. – June 16, 2009

Like Obama, I am a graduate of Harvard Law School. I too have Muslims in my family. I am black, and I was once a leftist Democrat. Since our backgrounds are somewhat similar, I perceive something in Obama’s policy toward Israel which people without that background may not see. All my life I have witnessed a strain of anti-Semitism in the black community. It has been fueled by the rise of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, but it predates that organization.

We heard it in Jesse Jackson’s “HYMIE town” remark years ago during his presidential campaign. We heard it most recently in Jeremiah Wright’s remark about “them Jews” not allowing Obama to speak with him. I hear it from my own Muslim family members who see the problem in the Middle East as a “Jew” problem.

Growing up in a small, predominantly black urban community in Pennsylvania, I heard the comments about Jewish shop owners. They were “greedy cheaters” who could not be trusted, according to my family and others in the neighborhood. I was too young to understand what it means to be Jewish, or know that I was hearing anti-Semitism. These people seemed nice enough to me, but others said they were “evil”. Sadly, this bigotry has yet to be eradicated from the black community.

In Chicago, the anti-Jewish sentiment among black people is even more pronounced because of the direct influence of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Most African Americans are not followers of “The Nation”, but many have a quiet respect for its leader because, they say, “he speaks the truth” and “stands up for the black man”. What they mean of course is that he viciously attacks the perceived “enemies” of the black community – white people and Jews. Even some self-described Christians buy into his demagoguery.

The question is whether Obama, given his Muslim roots and experience in Farrakhan’s Chicago, shares this antipathy for Israel and Jewish people. Is there any evidence that he does. First, the President was taught for twenty years by a virulent anti-Semite, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the black community it is called “sitting under”. You don’t merely attend a church, you “sit under” a Pastor to be taught and mentored by him. Obama “sat under” Wright for a very long time. He was comfortable enough with Farrakhan – Wright’s friend – to attend and help organize his “Million Man March”. I was on C-Span the morning of the march arguing that we must never legitimize a racist and anti-Semite, no matter what “good” he claims to be doing. Yet a future President was in the crowd giving Farrakhan his enthusiastic support.

The classic left wing view is that Israel is the oppressive occupier, and the Palestinians are Israel’s victims. Obama is clearly sympathetic to this view. In speaking to the “Muslim World,” he did not address the widespread Islamic hatred of Jews. Instead he attacked Israel over the growth of West Bank settlements. Surely he knows that settlements are not the crux of the problem. The absolute refusal of the Palestinians to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is the insurmountable obstacle. That’s where the pressure needs to be placed, but this President sees it differently. He also made the preposterous comparison of the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation”.

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of “The Muslim World” is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world. It is rather odd to hear an American President use it. In doing so he reveals more about his thinking than he intends. The dramatic policy reversal of joining the unrelentingly ant-Semitic, anti-Israel and pro-Islamic UN Human Rights Council is in keeping with the President’s truest – albeit undeclared – sensibilities.

Those who are paying attention and thinking about these issues do not find it unreasonable to consider that President Obama is influenced by a strain of anti-Semitism picked up from the black community, his leftist friends and colleagues, his Muslim associations and his long period of mentorship under Jeremiah Wright. If this conclusion is accurate, Israel has some dark days ahead. For the first time in her history, she may find the President of the United States siding with her enemies. Those who believe as I do that Israel must be protected had better be ready for the fight. We are.

NEVER AGAIN!
E.W. Jackson is Bishop of Exodus Faith Ministries, an author and retired attorney. Email: bshpjksn@gmail.com

Thanks Froike. If you email me at standamerica@cox.net, I’ll put you on my email the list to receive my national commentaries which air on Radio America. I am also President of STAND, Staying True to America’s National Destiny. One of our tenets is support and protection of Israel. Never Again!
G-d bless you too. Bishop Jackson

“Freedom Fest” – NORFOLK, Va, – Bishop E.W. Jackson speaking at FreedomFest2010 at Old Dominion University. –”This group does not disagree with the president because of the color of skin, but because the content of his policies!”
Website - Bishop E.W. Jackson – “Exodus Faith Ministries”
Book - “Ten Commandments to an Extraordinary Life”

Dear Colleague,

As you know, President Obama has REJECTED American jobs to appease radical environmentalists by refusing to approve permits to go forward with the Keystone XL Pipeline. The permit process has been going on for three years, and now the actions of the Obama Administration have postponed it again, delaying a project that would bring thousands of jobs to Americans and more energy independence.

The Obama Administration had until February 21 to look at the facts and make an educated decision on the Keystone XL project, but instead, he chose to jump-the-gun and have the State Department announce it will kill the permits necessary for work to get started on the pipeline.

This is a blatant political decision that postpones Obama having to make a real decision on the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline until after his re-election campaign, putting his own job ahead of the creation of American jobs and economic improvement.

Americans NEED the jobs from Keystone.
Americans NEED the energy from Keystone.

The good news is that its still not too late to revive the Keystone XL Project.

Keystone is resubmitting their application and needs us to do our part to speak out in support of American jobs and American energy independence.

Resourceful Earth is going to take the fight to the President. We will make him hear loud and clear that the American people want jobs and reliable energy now.

You can sign the petition at the links below and use these sample posts to share with your networks:

• [FACEBOOK] http://on.fb.me/yomDu2
  Sign the petition! Urge the Obama Administration to approve the Keystone XL pipeline by the February 21 deadline.
• [TWITTER] Sign the petition: http://bit.ly/A8K2mV
  Urge #Obama to approve the #KeystoneXL pipeline by the February 21 deadline! #YesKXL

Please pass this information and petition links on to your readers, friends, family and colleagues.

Over 78 percent of Americans want this project to go forward. Please do what you can to make sure the President knows how strongly we feel about American jobs and energy independence!

Thank you!

Beth Shaw
Resourceful Earth News
beth@resourcefulearthnews.org

Also see:

• Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) Pushes Ahead on the XL Pipeline

Our readers have a simple question for you: How much did Romney pay you for your endorsement? Please don’t lie.

Or are you hoping that Romney will ensure four more years of Obama? Obviously, you could sell many more books and speaking engagements with Obama in office than you could with President Ron Paul, President Rick Santorum or President Newt Gingrich. All three would make much better presidents than Romney ever could. But ONLY Romney can afford to pay for these endorsements.

Yes, the Republicans have three credible candidates this year and a real loser–true, he is a rich loser–in Romney.

While all of the candidates have some baggage, Romney is by far the worst. He created the blueprint for Obamacare. He has been on both sides of too many issues (the same was true of his father). He will simply say and do ANYTHING to get elected.

Romney could NEVER get the pro-life community behind him. In the latest primary in South Carolina, his support from people who considered ending abortion their primary concern, Romney finished dead last. In fact, his support was in single digits. Clearly, the massive pro-life faction of the Republican electorate will stay home, vote third-party, or even vote for Obama, so they can put a pro-life President in the White House four years up the road. For that reason alone, it will be almost impossible for Romney to beat Obama!

So, please, let us know. How much does Romney pay for these endorsements?

One other thing, please don’t ever call yourself a “conservative” again. Your endorsement of Romney proves you are NOT a conservative and never were.

CzechRebel
Administrator 1389 Blog

Emailed to Ann Coulter via Townhall.com.

The “New Class Elite” demographic that Obama relies on for campaign funds are the mortal enemies of America’s middle class and working poor.

This leftist/pro-jihadi/radical-eco elite are the ones perpetrating class warfare, and they consider themselves accountable to no one. As members of this elite see it, their quality of life and, indeed, their continued existence, depend on their use of government power to deny opportunities to the rest of us. They have become America’s Soviet-style nomenklatura.

They are killing the American Dream.

Volokh Conspiracy: The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility

Kenneth Anderson • October 31, 2011 11:27 am
Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay. The angst is partly income, of course — but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.” [emphasis added]

The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google. [emphasis added]

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors. It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class — as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined. As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two. As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first – but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy. Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access. [emphasis added]
[...]
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets — leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents — to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified — to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide — access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism. [emphasis added]

“Crony capitalism” is nothing more than a euphemism for government pork-barrel corruption. “Green jobs” were a scam from the get-go. For just one example, see: Big Government: George Soros Helped Craft Stimulus, Then Invested in Companies Benefiting.

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem — they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
[...]
Read it all here.

Neither the working poor, nor the middle class, are to blame for perpetrating class warfare during the run-up to the 2012 elections. The blame for that belongs to Barack Hussein Obama and his many supporters among the leftist power elite:

Rush: Obama Publicly Writes Off White, Working Class Voters as Advertisement to His Base

December 01, 2011

RUSH: James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal. He’s got a great blog called The Best of the Web Today, and he wrote about this yesterday.

This New York Times story, this column by Thomas Edsall on Monday where the regime, the Obama campaign says to white working class families: We’re not interested in your votes; we don’t care. Now, Taranto’s point yesterday was (summarized): “Okay, fine. If after election strategery, why advertise it? Why talk about it? Why assign one of your minions to go out and write an op-ed about it in the New York Times? Why get people like Limbaugh talking about this?” And, frankly, it’s a great point, and I, El Rushbo, I must admit, I hadn’t considered that angle. I did raise a question: Imagine if the Republicans had done something similar. Imagine if whoever the Republican nominee is, after securing the nomination, says, “You know what? To hell with the Hispanic vote! We don’t care. We’re not interested in it. We’re gonna win this election without them.” Can you imagine the hell that would rain down on the Republican Party and that nominee?

Here you’ve got an assigned editorial, no doubt from the White House or Plouffe or whoever is running the campaign for Obama. They put it in the op-ed page of the New York Times, which guarantees it gets out. It guarantees it gets discussed just like remember that picture of Hillary and Bill dancing on the beach down at the Virgin Islands somewhere in their swimsuits a couple of weeks before the Monica Lewinsky story hit? The picture ran in one paper. It ran on the cover of the LA Times. At the press briefing somebody stands up and asks McCurry, “Wa, wa, what’s the story behind that picture?”

Everybody said, “What picture?”

That’s how they got it out. They wanted that picture out, and it was later discovered that Bill and Hillary were dancing with no music. The whole thing was staged just like the rocks on the beached at Normandy. It was all staged. So here you have this guy Thomas Edsall, he used to write to for the Washington Post, now writes for the Huffing and Puffington Post, and whatever liberal publication will have him. He’s out there saying, “We’re gonna win this election without white working-class voters.” Why advertise it? Why advertise that? Well, the theory to explain it, the theory in answer to the question is that Obama’s in such bad shape with his base that that’s how he’s going to rally them.

He is in such bad shape, they’ve got to roll the dice. In order to secure the base — the takers, the people who aren’t doing diddly-squat, the people who have been made dependent on government for everything — he has to run against the bitter clingers; keeping his coalition of artists and professors and professor assistants, so forth, all that intact (plus the 47% that don’t pay taxes and all the people on welfare to one degree or another). The theory is that it’s so bad you advertise that as a way of getting the minorities that make up your base locked in. It’s another example of division, of course: Promoting hatred, resentment, envy, all of that.

Now, you stop and think of it. Insane? It is. I’ve thought it’s stupid from the get-go. I never did understand why advertise it. That was part of my incredulity. I just never expressed it ’til I saw Taranto wrote about it, but that was the one thing about it that had me curious. Aside from the act itself. I mean, the idea that they really don’t think they can win if they pursue policies that will be supported by white working class voters? Imagine that, just by itself, and then they go out and advertise it.

More here.

Environmentalism has turned out to be not only a scam and a vehicle for corruption and government tyranny, but also one more club that the leftist elite can use to hit the middle class and working poor over the head. After all, they are not the ones who will be freezing in the dark.

Spectator: Environmentalism and the Leisure Class

By William Tucker on 1.20.12 @ 6:08AM
[...]
This week President Obama handed down what may prove to be one of the most fateful decisions of his entire administration when he rejected the plan to build the Keystone XL Pipeline carrying oil from the tar sands of Canada to the refineries of Houston. The decision did not win him one new vote but was crucial in protecting his environmental flank. The movie stars and Sierra Club contributors were getting restless and had drawn the line in the sand.

In turning down Keystone, however, the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs — who are established in the environment, so to speak — are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer. [emphasis added]

Environmentalism has spent three decades trying to hide this simple truth. How can environmentalists be motivated by self-interest when they are anti-business? Doesn’t that align them with the working classes? Well, not quite. You can be anti-business as a union member trying to claim higher wages but you can also be anti-business as a member of the aristocracy who believes “trade” and “commercialism” are crass and not attuned to the higher things in life. Environmentalism is born from the latter, not the former. It has spent decades trying to pretend it has common cause with the working people. With the defeat of the Keystone Pipeline, this is no longer possible. Too many blue-collar and middle-class jobs have been sacrificed on the altar of carbon emissions and global warming.

In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper’s called “Environmentalism and the Leisure Class,” my first story for a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time — born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 — but had already achieved a seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew Young, Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the sun’s rays.

My story in Harper’s was built around the devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction, the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to speed.

Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of irony:

The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference] quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands’ spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]

Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The battle to “Save Storm King” was the nation’s first great environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited. Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Throughout the campaign Scenic Hudson insisted they were not opposed to electricity but only this particular way of generating it…What became obvious, however, was that at bottom they were opposed to everything. Industrial progress itself was the enemy…

What finally focused my attention on the aristocratic roots of environmentalism, however, was a chapter in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the book is justly famous for coining “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste,” there is a lesser-known chapter entitled “Industrial Exemption” that perfectly describes the environmental zeitgeist. Veblen posed the question, why is it that people who are the greatest beneficiaries of industrial society are often the most passionate in condemning it? He provided a simple answer. People in the leisure class have become so accustomed affluence as the natural state of things that they no longer feel compelled to embrace any further industrial progress… [emphasis added]

My article generated 150 letters, including a response from a member of the Federal Power Commission who said that construction of new power plants wasn’t necessary. I was often criticized, however, for claiming only affluent people are concerned about the environment. The one response I ever got from the press was in the middle of Three Mile Island when National Public Radio called to ask, “What do you say about all those farmers worried about radiation? They’re not aristocrats, are they?”

But that was not the point. It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else. Most people see the benefits of pipelines and power plants and admit they have to be built somewhere. Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, “We don’t need to build any pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine.” [emphasis added]

Environmentalists have spent decades trying to disguise these aristocratic roots, even from themselves. They work desperately to form alliances with labor unions and cast themselves as purveyors of “green jobs.” But the Keystone Pipeline has brought all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the “two Americas,” the knowledge-based elites of the East and West Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of the Great In-Between laboring in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material life. [emphasis added]

It’s going to be very difficult to erase that line during the election.

Read it all here.

Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by BattleBornPAC on Mar 18, 2009
Barack Obama: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” (January 2008)
http://www.BattleBornPAC.com

Update: Great minds think alike…

• Jeffrey Klein: Obama Preventing Our Catalyst to Exit Recession Now
  (h/t: Noisy Room)

  President Obama’s refusing to permit the Keystone XL Pipeline last week has nothing to do with “environmental concerns” arising from it crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, and everything to do with an even more sinister agenda that could keep the middle class in economic straits for a generation or more.

  First, he wants to keep [fossil fuel] energy prices high, according to Thomas J. Pyle, CEO of the American Energy Alliance, in his January 20, 2012 FOXNews article.

  “The reality at the White House has nothing to do with protecting the environment — it’s about reinforcing a myth of energy scarcity on the United States and driving up the price of energy…

  Read it all here.

• Sultan Knish: Food Fights and Class Warfare
  

  …Conspicuous conservationism has made America a poorer country, destroyed millions of jobs and outsourced them overseas. Now it’s beginning to make America a hungrier country. In a moment of horrifying tone deafness that makes Marie Antoinette seem enlightened, the left is cheering that fewer Americans are eating meat, without seeming to understand that it’s because fewer Americans are able to afford it because of their economic policies.

  What the left’s food police can’t accomplish with nudges and shaming, they can finish off with policies and regulations that end up raising the price of food or by making it too difficult to sell. As the left tries and fails to sell the general public on conservation as a status symbol, it moves in the heavy bureaucratic artillery.

  It isn’t unusual for elites to use the legal system to enforce their own values on the general public, though it was the kind of thing that the universal franchise was supposed to put a leash on, but there is something grim about their growing preoccupation with the habits and mortality of the population. It’s the kind of concern that has a habit of ending in eugenics and the more medicine is universalized, the easier it is to start cutting off access to medical treatment for those who haven’t been nudged far enough in the right direction.

  Social medicine politicizes food consumption and a globalized economy politicizes food production. And the politicized American plate has less on it and at a higher price. While the left obsessively pursues its mission of destroying fast food in the name of lowering social medicine costs and being fairer to farmers, what they are truly accomplishing is to take affordable and filling food off the shelves, as they have done with countless other products that they have targeted.

  By the time the left was done with Russia, it had gone from a wheat producer to a wheat importer and many basic food staples were hard to come by even in a country filled with collective farms. Finding modern day examples of that isn’t hard. We only have to look as far south as Venezuela to see empty store shelves under the weight of government food policies. But one day that may be the local grocery store if the left gets its way.

  Read it all here.

• Angelo M. Codevilla: America’s Ruling Class – and the Perils of Revolution
  

  As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

  When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

  Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

  Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

  Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

  Read it all here.

The Mainstream Media Buries Every Negative Story about Barack Hussein Obama

They’ll bury it and they’ll keep it buried, even when they have all of the proof on video. Under the US Constitution, our free press has the right (and, arguably, the duty) to expose public as well as private wrongdoing. Instead, our mainstream media organizations have become consolidated into a small, closed, wealthy clique that opposes and flouts the beliefs and values of most of its audience. They support and protect hard-left/pro-jihadi/radical-environmental (“red-green-green”) politicians and causes – especially Obama and his policies – while trying its hardest to clear the GOP field of any conservative strong enough to unseat him.

What story is being buried? It’s Barack and Michelle Obama’s longtime association and close friendship with former PLO operative and rabid anti-Semite, Rashid Khalidi.

American Thinker: A GOP Candidate’s Bitter Ex-Wife Receives More Coverage Than a Video of Obama Dining with Terrorist-Supporters

(h/t: Diane)

By Lauri B. Regan
[...]
However, of greater importance in my view is the silence, save for a few journalists and pundits on the right, regarding exposing a videotape recorded in 2003 of Barack Obama at the farewell dinner for terrorist-supporting Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. News of the videotape’s existence came to light while Obama was a candidate, and the free pass given to him by the mainstream media was only just beginning to come to light when the enamored Chris Matthews’ shared news of the tingle up his leg.
[...]
But there is a videotape sitting in the vaults of the Los Angeles Times, and every American should be screaming from the rooftops for its release.  In light of the Arab Spring, Obama’s endless attempts to bully Israel into succumbing to all sorts of unprecedented and unsafe demands in the hopes that he would go down in history as the POTUS who made peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the administration’s ineptness in addressing Iran’s nuclear program and military threats, exposing this videotape is of utmost importance.

In April 2010, Roger L. Simon published an article on PajamasMedia entitled, “Why is the L.A. Times Burying the Obama/Khalidi Tape?”  Of further consequence is why the media — and Americans — are not demanding that the L.A. Times immediately release the tape.  Simon wrote:

The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama’s views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign[.] …

So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned “Islamism” and all related words, even “Islam” and “jihad” from our national security documents. They’re completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer. Rashid Khalidi should be happy. And, in fact, he is.

Sometimes I want to yell and scream. What is wrong with the Los Angeles Times? Are they a news organization or the propaganda wing of some leftover unit of the IWW? No wonder subscribers are deserting them in droves.

While I am sure that Simon’s questions were rhetorical, I will answer the obvious.  Of course the paper is a propaganda tool.  Were it not for the internet and cable television, true news organizations would no longer exist.  It was recently reported that Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde quoted Bibi Netanyahu calling The New York Times and Haaretz Israel’s two main enemies because “they set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world.”  Netanyahu denies making this exact statement, but there is no question that both papers’ reporting reflects a bias that can be characterized only as anti-Israel propaganda.  Taken a step further, there is no question that the mainstream media as a whole has become completely entrenched in propaganda, bias, anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, and indoctrination based on liberal, progressive values that are completely out of the “mainstream.”

The public will never understand that the Islamists taking over the Mideast are not moderate, will not promote democracy, are not friends of the United States, and wish the ultimate destruction of the West if the public reads and relies upon only The New York Times, L.A. Times, MSNBC, or similar tools of the left for its “news” and information.  Americans will not understand the implications of four more years of a pro-Islamist president if they do not understand what Islamism is all about.  And they will not know who is sitting in the White House making policy decisions based on personal biases if the media continues to promote Obama’s agenda rather than investigate and report.

So why is the videotape of such paramount importance?  Simon quotes from an article published in the L.A.Times discussing the tape and its contents:

[A] young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”

One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”

Furthermore, rumors abound regarding additional messages that may or may not have been openly shared at the dinner in Obama’s presence.  Ted Belman reported at Israpundit that he has a reliable source that “the audio tape clearly picks up the toast ‘death to Israel’.”  Did Obama drink to the death of an American ally that he has been actively intimidating, browbeating, and dissing since he phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on his first day in office?  Does Obama liken Israelis living in the West Bank to Osama bin Laden, whose death he claims as his greatest foreign policy accomplishment?

Simon concluded his article with a request that readers send in suggestions on how to make the contents of the tape public.  Apparently Donald Trump missed this request when he wasted the media’s energy pushing for the release of Obama’s birth certificate — something with which Obama is still having fun as he mocked the birthers at the Golden Globe awards last week.

But I highly doubt that the POTUS, who had his worldview formed while sitting in the pews of Israel-bashing Jeremiah Wright and at the dinner table of anti-Semite Khalidi, will be mocking people who care enough to properly vet his credentials by urging the release of the tape.  And I venture a guess that if the videotape is released, Barack Obama will be packing his bags at the end of this year.  But that is a big “if” because until the media stops obsessing over the infidelities of the GOP candidates and starts doing its job, Barack Obama’s chances of a second term continue to scare the living daylights out of those who understand its implications.

Read it all here.

Obama’s Dream Debate | Part 1

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by WinningOurFuture on Jan 17, 2012

Romney is Obama’s dream nominee. This short video is the first in a series that will give the GOP a flavor of how a debate might play out. Part 2 will be released soon.

Flip-flops belong on feet, not in the White House.

From: Sandra Wirtz
To: 1389 Blog
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 11:29 AM
Subject: Obama Administration’s Grand Canyon mining ban has far-reaching consequences

Dear 1389,

Since your blog occasionally covers environmental and energy issues, I thought your readership might appreciate some insight on Sec. of Interior Ken Salazar’s decision to impose a 20-year mining ban in a million-acre buffer area around Grand Canyon National park from this week.

American Resources Policy Network’s (the organization for which I serve as research director and blogger) principal Dan McGroarty just wrote a column for RealClearWorld.com on the ban, the implications of which stretch beyond what the media is reporting.

Ostensibly put in place over water quality concerns associated with proposed uranium mining, the ban not only needlessly caters to environmentalists, as there is little evidence to support these claims; the decision amounts to what Dan McGroarty calls “a case of unilateral nuclear disarmament, applied to the energy sector.” Given that it would also fence off a number of other minerals on which we’re highly import-dependent as a nation, the ban stands to threaten our strategic and economic future.

Please help us spread the world on the dire consequences of the ban by sharing this with your readers. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Thank you,

Sandra Wirtz
Director of Research & Staff Blogger
American Resources Policy Network
www.americanresources.org

Spectator: Why Romney Is Weak vs. Obama

Jay Sekulow on Fox News discussing Presidential Primary in Virginia

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by OfficialACLJ on Jan 2, 2012

Several candidates failed to meet Virginia’s legal requirements to be on the ballot in the state’s Presidential primary. Is such a high bar to be placed on the ballot for president constitutional?

“Free” Elections?

Oh, I can still remember those public school teachers telling us about “Communist elections.” They used to tell us that, in Communist countries, “You can vote for Joe or you can vote for Stalin.” We were supposed to quiver and think of that Joe Stalin fellow, the Mr. Wonderful who helped us win World War II and who later became Mr. Evil, our first enemy in the Cold War. But they always told us how “free” our elections were. They would tell us how we could “vote for anyone we want.”

Well, that was not a complete lie, in that some voters like to write in ‘Mickey Mouse’, just to push it to its illogical extreme. However, it is a significant enough lie. The United States has pretty much been locked into a two-party system since the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment. I.e., since there is no “second prize” in our national elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidates run on the same ticket, with absolutely no fear that the third most popular viewpoint can capture the second prize. Hence, the best a candidate who is not running as a Democrat or Republican can hope for is to play the role of a spoiler.

So, the Democratic and Republican parties act as great gatekeepers in the same way the Communist Party did back in the days of the USSR. Of course, in the USSR, everyone knew they had only one party and little choice. In the USA, we have the feeling we have some choice–and that is often the case.

What choices do voters actually have?

That said, the elements of dictatorship remain part of the picture on election day. For example, I’d like to ask our Democrat readers: Who will be challenging Obama for the nomination this time? Hmmm? No one? Well, I guess y’all are so happy with this dude that nobody would think of such a thing. OK, back in 2004, who was challenging George W. Bush for the nomination? Doesn’t anyone ever challenge a sitting president in his own party? Well, at least Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter. That was just back in . . . 1976. Like over a third of a century ago!

So, unless a President is retiring, we have a primary election choice in only one party–that is only half of the field, as it is pretty rare to see a partisan challenge of a sitting President. Now let’s look at what choices are available to voters in the party that is currently out of power.

Few would want to grant ballot access to anybody and everybody who signs a few papers and offers to be President. Elections are expensive to run, and ballots with hundreds of names on them would be too unwieldy and time-consuming for each voter and for the election officials. Ballot access should require some indication of a significant amount of support for the candidate. And, generally speaking, each State’s government and that State’s political party should be allowed to create REASONABLE means to determine whether a candidate has a significant enough following to allow the party faithful of its state to consider that individual for their support.

Virginia was the first colony. It was first in freedom. It produced the first President and lead the US in many ways. Leaving the US in 1861, it was first in freedom in the Confederacy, until captured by the Yankee dictatorship. General Robert E. Lee’s home became the great Yankee cemetery. Controlling and Yankeefying Virginians has been the mission of the American dictatorship ever since.

Et tu, Sekulow?

Jay Sekulow is supposed to be one of the good guys. He is a lawyer who fights abortion and homosexual extremism; he defends the rights of Christians and Jews, and seems the type of guy who makes us feel a little guilty when we tell lawyer jokes. So, when the ONLY two candidates who happen to make the GOP ballot in the Commonwealth of Virginia are Mr. Establishment, RINO (Republican In Name Only) from the quintessential all-Democrat-all-the-time-please-disregard-all-party-labels State, and an open and notorious Libertarian, you would think it might raise a red flag in Sekulow’s mind.

Of course, we have had Bachmann, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, and most recently, Santorum garnering major support in the polls. It is hard to say that any of them can be left off the ballot by any REASONABLE method. Of course, the fact that no other State has managed to winnow the field down to two candidates this year also argues pretty loudly that Virginia’s system is not very REASONABLE. In fact, it would probably be more reasonable for Virginia’s Republican leaders to decide who will be the State’s uncommitted delegates in some “smoke-filled room” and send them to the Convention. Heck, if I were a Virginia Republican voter, I would see the “smoke-filled room” as a much fairer system. If I don’t like what the leaders of my local party did, I could take it up with them, in person and/or at the next local election.

But Mr. Sekulow is out there screaming that rules are rules! He says that most years, they have plenty of candidates on the ballot in Virginia. (Irrelevant, because the ballot access law was recently changed.) He says that you Republicans can choose between a Democrat in Republican clothing and a Libertarian who has been nice enough to serve as a “Republican Congressman” for many years.

If the Sekulow the-law-is-the-law argument were absolute, we would have to apologize to the Nazis tried at Nuremberg. Every one of us who has gone to law school knows that we look not ONLY to the law as written, but the interest that the law was written to protect. Every Christian knows there is a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

Jay, if you are shilling for Mitt Romney because you feel he is “the most electable”, I can respect that, though I think you are deeply mistaken. If you are shilling for Ron Paul because you believe that the good he does by promoting libertarianism and limited government outweighs the harm that will be done by the libertines who are promoting him, I would agree that you have a point.

Of course, if you are getting paid for this, all lawyers can understand that. We all heard it during our first year in law school: “If someone is paying you X dollars per hour, you could make an argument for . . . .” So, if a wealthy client is paying you for this, Godspeed, Jay!

However, please spare us your the-law-is-the-law mechanical reaction to this injustice. The Republican voters of Virginia should have an actual Republican on the ballot. In the 2012 Primary, Republican voters in Virginia will be completely disenfranchised and Jay Sekulow is amongst the disenfranchisors.