“Let us arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time” – as Churchill said (more or less) when Chamberlain sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for a worthless promise of peace.

Now it is the freedom of the internet that is under threat, not only by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but – even worse – by Islam.

Pamela Geller – she who alerted America to the Ground Zero mosque plan – writes at the American Thinker:

Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new “Arab States” region will have five seats as well. …

This has been a long time coming.

Back in October 2009 … ICANN ended its agreement with the U.S. government. …

The new agreement gave other countries (including dictatorships and rogue nations) and the U.N. the ability to set internet use policies. …

The ICANN action in September gave the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and other unfriendly nations a prominent internet role — something they never could get during the administration of George W. Bush. …

The OIC is the main engine of the stealth jihad against the West. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 for its role in the quiet conquest of Europe by Islam, now well under way. (And see also The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, which is about the appointment by President Obama of a Muslim terrorist sympathizer as a US representative to that nefarious organization.)

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn’t… Anti-jihad sites like … AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site … will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else. …

The new “net neutrality” rules approved last week by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will just make that easier as well… [by taking] the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that has created it and [concentrating] it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy. …

James G. Lakely, the co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank … charged that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, an Obama crony, wants to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”  … [in]  an attempt to limit the freedom of internet users by subjecting what [has] always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation. In short, the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.

An internet censored by Muslim ideologues and controlled by the feds. Do you see your freedom of speech slipping away?

We see all our freedom slipping away. Obama is not even selling but gifting America to Islam.

Almost everyone is superstitious to some degree, even the most rational among us.

John Stossel, that consistently rational, commonsensical, free-marketeer and libertarian, who also has the virtue of expressing his ideas clearly, writes:

We human beings sure are gullible. Polls report that 27 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 25 percent in astrology. Others believe mediums, fortunetellers, faith healers and assorted magical phenomena. …

Whether you believe in God — or psychics, or global warming — that’s your business. …

Well, a belief in psychics will probably only harm the believer; but believers in God or global warming are dangerous to us all.

And so is belief in government, as Stossel points out:

Being gullible about government hurts everyone. Government is force. When it sells us bunk, we have to pay even if we don’t believe in or want it. If we don’t pay up, men with guns will make sure we do.

It’s good to be skeptical. It’s really good to be skeptical about government.

We are libertarians – though firmly on the small government (patriotic, conservative) end of the libertarian spectrum, nowhere near the anarchist end. And being so, we fail to see why an elected government should have any secrets from its electors except those which are truly necessary to protect the nation.

If the people running WikiLeaks – Julian Assange is the name of one we are told – have released information that identifies individuals who provide secret intelligence to America (or any Western country) in order to help national defense and security, they have committed a crime. If agents have been killed, the crime is capital.

As far as we know, no such names have been published, and no one has been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks action.

So, with that important exception borne in mind, how in general do we evaluate what WikiLeaks has done?

We do not like the hue and cry for blood. We hear Mike Huckabee’s demand that Julian Assange be executed, and note that it comes from one who, as Governor of Arkansas, commuted death sentences on convicted murderers, at least one of whom was released from prison to murder again. (See our post, The deadly danger of Christian forgiveness, December 1, 2009.)

The two most interesting opinions we have found are in contrast with each other. One is Diana West’s, with which we agree, and the other is Theodore Dalrymple’s, with which we do not agree (though we almost always do agree with, and appreciate, the articles and books of that wise and erudite writer).

Here (in part) is Diana West’s opinion:

I am still working out why I watch the high dudgeon sparked by Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks dump of a quarter-million State Department cables that has given rise to the most heated, bloodthirsty chorus I have ever heard in Washington, notably from conservatives, and feel strangely numb.

I observe the fits over “sovereignty” lost, and note that some of the same people find such emotion in bad taste when the prompt is our unsecured, non-sovereign border. I hear the arguments that our national security is hanging by a computer keystroke, and note the fecklessness of a U.S. government that hides from us, the people, its own confirmation that North Korea supplies Iran with Russian-made nuclear-capable missiles; China transfers weapons materiel to Iran (despite Hillary Clinton’s pathetic entreaties); Iran honeycombs Iraq; Syria supports Hezbollah; Pakistan prevents the United States from securing its nuclear materials; Saudis continue to provide mainstay support to al-Qaida (despite pie-faced denials come from Saudi-supplicating U.S. administrations). Everything good citizens need to know, in short, to see through the dumbed-down, G-rated (“G” for government), official narrative, all “engagement” and “outreach,” to throw the ineffectual bums out – all of them – and start from scratch.

But what we’re supposed to see in Assange’s Internet release of thousands of “classified,” mainly non-sensational, if often embarrassing, documents (something journalists usually call a scoop in the singular) is an act of “terrorism,” say Republican leaders … [It] has drowned out all other news this week, including the murder of six American trainers by an Afghan “policeman.”

Why?

These six unnecessary, punishing deaths may well have resulted from the disastrous statecraft and policies that come under discussion in the leaked cables, but as far as news coverage went they just couldn’t compete with the leak frenzy itself. The establishment, right and left but mainly right, coalesced around melodramatic accusations that Assange did have, or would have “blood on his hands.” As I have read my way through some fraction of the leaked record, no evidence for this frequently leveled charge yet appears, certainly none that begins to compare to the blood already spilled to implement a hopelessly misguided U.S. foreign policy that, from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, determinedly ignores Islam in its prosecution of wars in the Islamic world. …

More see-no-Islam evidence comes straight from the leaked cables … but that’s official U.S. policy, as supported from the pro-war right to the Obama left. More than that, it’s part of the shambles WikiLeaks confirms U.S. foreign policy to be. Could this be why the establishment condemns WikiLeaks as the worst thing ever? The Pakistan cables alone [ of which she gives examples – JB] should stop the presses …

But the reaction instead is to kill the messenger – literally, say many. The more I read, however, the more I wonder whether the raging rhetoric is less about blood on WikiLeaks’ hands than about egg on the faces of others, including a secretive Uncle Sam.

Yes.

And here (in part) is Theodore Dalrymple’s opinion:

It is not, of course, that revelations of secrets are always unwelcome or ethically unjustified. It is not a new insight that power is likely to be abused and can only be held in check by a countervailing power, often that of public exposure. But WikiLeaks goes far beyond the need to expose wrongdoing, or supposed wrongdoing: it is unwittingly doing the work of totalitarianism.

The idea behind WikiLeaks is that life should be an open book, that everything that is said and done should be immediately revealed to everybody, that there should be no secret agreements, deeds, or conversations. In the fanatically puritanical view of WikiLeaks, no one and no organization should have anything to hide. It is scarcely worth arguing against such a childish view of life.

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say.

While we share Dalrymple’s loathing of totalitarianism, and of all government prying into private lives, we do not see how the WikiLeaks action threatens any private citizen, or how it is an attack on the principle of privacy. What a government does should not be private (with the exception we noted above). The lives of individuals must be as private as they desire. We don’t believe that ordinary people’s emails would be sought out and downloaded by Wikileaks, though we don’t doubt that an Obama government might do it. Of what conceivable interest or use can they be to the world at large?

WikiLeaks works to destroy government secrecy, not “the private sphere”.

If it makes government more circumspect in what it communicates, more aware that it is answerable to those it governs, WikiLeaks may have delivered a service to America rather than a blow.

Professor James Ceaser writes that the 2010 election result was the Great Repudiation of Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s ideology.

Here are quotations from his essay:

2010 is the closest the nation has ever come to a national referendum on overall policy direction or “ideology.” Obama, who ran in 2008 by subordinating ideology to his vague themes of “hope” and “change,” has governed as one of the most ideological, partisan presidents. Some of his supporters like to argue in one breath that he is a pragmatist and centrist only to insist in the next that he has inaugurated the most historic transformation of American politics since the New Deal. The two claims are in tension. Going back to 2009’s major political contests, beginning with the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey and the Senate race in Massachusetts, the electorate has been asked the same question about Obama’s agenda and has given the same response. The 2010 election is the third or fourth reiteration of their negative judgment, only this time delivered more decisively. There is only one label that can describe the result: the Great Repudiation.

What accounts for the great repudiation? …

The main Democratic explanation going forward … [denies] that the election ever had anything to do with “change.” It was instead all about the economy. The stimulus bill, alas, did not stimulate quite as promised. So the administration now claims that there was no fix possible for the economy, in the sense of being able to achieve a recovery as fast as Americans came to expect. The blame rightly belongs to the previous administration, although President Obama now understands that pressing this argument, a year and half in office, looks petulant. The new line is therefore simply to blame “the economy,” as if it were an alien force dropped in from the outside, with no connection to his policies. … The notion that “the economy” is an actor in its own right, impervious to the change, has led some analysts to float the strange argument that Republicans should have won more convincingly than they did.

The real purpose of this explanation is to limit this election’s meaning in a way that leaves the president and his agenda untouched. The election was voters’ anguished response to the economy-nothing more. It was the Great Protest, not the Great Repudiation. This position, which Obama embraced in his post-election news conference, allows him to join up with the spirit of the election and participate in its message. He will now concentrate on the economy like, dare one say, a laser beam.

Republicans have agreed on the economy’s importance as part of the explanation for their victory. Yet in their account the anemic recovery is not unrelated to the core elements of Obama’s “change.” The president failed to appreciate what generates productive wealth, which comes not from bigger government and more spending but from the activity of private businesses and entrepreneurs. Economic “philosophy” in this large sense was in fact the main voting issue in this election. …

For many Republicans, and especially the Tea Party movement, the economic issues were linked to a deeper concern. The size of government and the extent of the federal debt represented not only a burden on future generations and a threat to American power, but also a violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution. The Tea Party, in particular, with its Jeffersonian ideas, has reintroduced the Constitution into the public debate, a place that it has not held in the same way for over a century. This theme is what connects the Tea Party to the American tradition and makes their concerns matters of fundamental patriotism. The stakes in the 2010 election for these voters went far beyond economic questions, and for Democratic leaders to reduce everything to frustrations about “the economy, stupid” represents a final act of belittlement.

There was an additional factor in this electoral outcome, then, that was hardly noted or tested in the polls. It was a cultural clash between an elite and much of the public, between liberal intellectuals and the Obama Administration on the one hand, and the Tea Party activists on the other. The one has shown disdain and the other has responded with indignation. It is impossible, then, to say that Barack Obama was not a major factor in this election, for when he was not himself the leader he became the frequent enabler of this dismissal of middle America. That Obama would have to descend from the lofty heights that he inhabited during the campaign and after his election was something that no sane observer – and no doubt Obama himself – could fail to have foreseen. But this loss of bloated charisma has never been the real problem. It has instead been his demeanor as president. Obama modeled himself on Abraham Lincoln, and it is painful in retrospect to draw the contrast in how they have behaved. One showed humility, the other arrogance; one practiced sincerity, the other hypocrisy; one made efforts at cultivating unity, the other seemed to delight at encouraging division; and one succeeded in becoming more and more a man of the people, while the other, despite his harsh populist appeals, has grown more distant. …

Although the essay doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, or provide any new insights, it goes so directly to the heart of the matter, and so well describes not only what happened in the 2010 elections but why it happened – especially the role of the Tea Party – that it seems to us a document worth preserving. Read it all here.

High taxes do nothing for the prosperity of a nation. Never have, never will.

High-taxing governments immiserate the people.

Unless the lame-duck Democratic majority in Congress suddenly decides otherwise in the next few days, taxes will go up steeply next year.

And Thomas Paine is indignant about it.

Or put it this way: if Thomas Paine had written today this passage from part of his introduction to The Rights of Man, it would be just as apt as it was when it was first published some 220 years ago:

From the rapid progress which America makes in every species of improvement, it is rational to conclude that, if the governments of Asia, Africa, and Europe had begun on a principle similar to that of America, or had not been very early corrupted therefrom, those countries must by this time have been in a far superior condition to what they are. Age after age has passed away, for no other purpose than to behold their wretchedness. Could we suppose a spectator who knew nothing of the world, and who was put into it merely to make his observations, he would take a great part of the old world to be new, just struggling with the difficulties and hardships of an infant settlement. He could not suppose that the hordes of miserable poor with which old countries abound could be any other than those who had not yet had time to provide for themselves. Little would he think they were the consequence of what in such countries they call government.

If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretences for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey, and permits none to escape without a tribute.

Charles Krauthammer, whose intelligence must be counted as one of America’s assets (and whose opinion we crave to hear even though we sometimes disagree with it), observes that Obama’s gorgeous cavalcade through East Asia ended up a failure, extending his record of failures in foreign affairs.

From The Corner of National Review Online:

Whenever a president walks into a room with another head of state and he walks out empty-handed — he’s got a failure on his hands.

And this was self-inflicted. With Obama it’s now becoming a ritual. It’s a combination of incompetence, inexperience, and arrogance. He was handed a treaty [with South Korea] by the Bush administration. It was done. But he wanted to improve on it. And instead, so far, he’s got nothing. …

And this is a pattern with Obama. He thinks he can reinvent the world. With Iran, he decides he has a silver tongue, he’ll sweet-talk ’em into a deal. He gets humiliated over and over again. With the Russians he does a reset, he gives up missile defense, he gets nothing.

In the Middle East, he proposes a ban on Jewish construction in Jerusalem, which is never going to happen. And what does it do? After 17 years [of negotiations without any preconditions] it destroys any chance of negotiations.

Again, a combination of [incompetence] — he comes in, I’ll reinvent the world, I know everything — and arrogance. And the result? He gets zero results.

Right. And he’s not likely to become any wiser when his White House advisers are trapped between old dreams and new incomprehension.

From a Washington Post report:

One adviser said they spent the past dozen days “soul-searching.”

Another said that … “people aren’t just sitting around doing soul-searching. They’re gaming out the short, medium and long term.”

“People have given a lot of thought to this,” said that adviser, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to freely discuss internal deliberations.

But their deliberations are apparently more of a casting about for comfort than a facing up to the election’s message of rejection:

In some ways, they said, the midterms were not as bleak a harbinger as some Democrats fear. Though Republicans took the House and narrowed the Democratic margin in the Senate, Obama’s personal-approval ratings remain high and his core constituencies remain highly supportive. Re-energizing them will be among his priorities.

So he’s happy with what he is, and will do again what he did before.

Advisers also said it will probably take months, if not longer, to develop a strategy for restoring some of the early promise of the Obama presidency, particularly the notion that he was a different kind of Democrat. …

Yeah, sure – further left than most. Though most voters did not realize that taking the country far to the left was part of his early promise.

Although Obama could benefit from a high-profile compromise – perhaps on extending the Bush-era tax cuts or on other tax initiatives set to expire before the end of the year – officials are also prepared to point out any Republican intransigence….

That they can bring themselves to do. But will they  point out any intransigence on Obama’s part?

One of the many questions Obama faced immediately after Election Day was whether he “got it” – got, that is, voters’ frustration with his governance and policies. Obama hinted that he did in some respects, noting that his failure to make government more transparent or to curb earmarks did not live up to the high standards he had set.

That’s it? That’s all? They should have been “more transparent” – whatever that means – and Obama should have lived up to some high standards that he had set – whatever they were?

So what’s his plan?

A change of advisers – though not of advice.

A series of upcoming personnel moves – coming as outside critics call for a White House shake-up – will put Obama in a stronger position to make substantive progress, especially on the economy… such as finding a replacement for economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and getting Jacob Lew confirmed at the Office of Management and Budget. … Axelrod will leave, with former campaign manager David Plouffe moving into the White House to assume a similar role … And Pete Rouse, the acting chief of staff, is about to complete an assessment of the White House bureaucracy that could lead to more personnel shifts. …

But –

“There isn’t going to be a reset button. That’s not their style,” said a Democratic strategist who works with the White House on several issues. …

Reset buttons “not their style”? Oh, we thought it was. Can we ever forget Hillary Clinton bustling about with a big red reset button to change American-Russian relations forever? Such fun and games it was, even though perfectly futile.

“They don’t like pivots,” [the strategist said] “and they also believe they’re right.”

There it is, the upshot of all the deliberations. Why should they make any serious changes when they’re certain that their policies are right? To them, it’s the electorate that’s wrong.

Obama, deafened by his arrogance, will not hear what the voters are saying to him.

When Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, she was widely perceived, even by admirers, as lacking the gravitas necessary in a national political leader.

If that was all she lacked to qualify for high office, she now qualifies, because she has acquired it. She has knowledge and sensible opinions about foreign affairs. And she has given serious thought to the nation’s economic predicament.

The Fed announced that it would buy $600 billion in Treasury securities over the next eight months. It’s a dangerous move, and Sarah Palin has spoken out cogently against it.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Sarah Palin, delving into a major policy issue a week after the mid-term elections, took aim Monday at the Federal Reserve and called on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to “cease and desist” with a bond-buying program designed to boost the economy.

Speaking at a trade association conference in Phoenix, the potential 2012 presidential candidate and tea-party favorite said she’s “deeply concerned” about the central bank creating new money to buy government bonds. Ms. Palin said “it’s far from certain this will even work” and suggested the move would create an inflation problem.

She’s right. It will.

She went on to say:

When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it’s time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist … We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings.

Palin’s influence on public opinion is tremendous, as the November 2 elections proved.

Should she be the Republican choice for the presidency in 2012? The only strong argument against it is that she is “too divisive”. Feeling among the voters runs as strongly against her as for her.

And as that is true of Obama too, her standing against him would present a polarized choice. The contrast between them – what they respectively stand for – would be stark: collectivism versus liberty, the great political division of our time personified in the two candidates. A starker choice than ever before?

The nation would be confronted with an either/or: a commitment to one future or another.

Would it be too intimidating for every voter to have to make such a momentous decision?

America would be deciding what it wanted to be, that “shining city on a hill”, that “beacon of liberty”, that “last best hope of mankind”, if it chose Palin? Or a declining power, a shabby welfare state, beset by enemies and insufficiently armed to defend itself, a glorious ideal abandoned, a vision of civilized freedom lost, a colossal wreck, an historic tragedy, if  it chose Obama.

Rarely in history has any society been as supine as modern Britain in the face of a mortal threat.

So says Leo McKinstry in his column in the Daily Express.

We applaud him. We thought the day would never come when some Briton with a public platform would speak out with this degree of bitter fierceness against the Islamic invaders of his country, and upbraid his own people – those once courageous, hardy, proud, patriotic, powerful islanders – for lying down and whimpering instead of fighting them off.

Here’s more of what McKinstry has to say:

The fabric of our civilisation is now at risk from militant Islam which aims to destroy our way of life. Yet instead of showing resolve in the face of this challenge, the political establishment vacillates between collusion and denial.

His welcome outburst was occasioned by events at a Muslim woman terrorist’s trial. Roshonara Choudhry was convicted of trying to kill a Member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, by stabbing him.

Her deed, which led to a jail sentence of 15 years, was sickening enough. What was just as offensive was the enfeebled police response to the gang of Muslim demonstrators who gathered at the court to cheer Choudhry and denounce the verdict.

“British soldiers must die”, was one their poisonous slogans. “Stephen Timms – go to hell” was another. But the police, standing nearby, took no action … paralysed by fashionable multi-cultural dogma which holds that ethnic minorities always have to be treated as victims. …

Perhaps the most nauseating feature of this Islamic demonstration is the fact that the British taxpayer was forced to subsidise it.

For nearly all the protestors are benefit claimants sponging off the rest of us. They are hypocrites as well as parasites, since they are happy to grab cash from a society they claim to despise. … It is the height of lunacy that we should be compelled, through our taxes, to provide comfortable lifestyles to our sworn enemies.

Effectively we are paying for our own demise. … Tragically, this is the pattern of modern Britain. It has emerged that the state is now paying for more work on the expensive west London home of the notorious Islamist hate preacher Abu Hamza, currently serving seven years in Belmarsh prison for incitement to murder and racial hatred.

Last week, in another example of the establishment’s pusillanimity, a Special Immigration Commission decided that this brute should be allowed to keep his British citizenship. Abu Hamza is already estimated to have cost the taxpayer an incredible £3.5million through welfare payouts, home improvements, prison and legal bills.

Only a sick political system would think it right to lavish millions on the family of a monster whose entire existence is predicated on our obliteration … This is the hallmark of Britain’s relationship with Islam, where fear is dressed up as tolerance. …

We are dealing with a dangerous, aggressive ideology, not some minor fringe problem. “Islam will dominate the world” read one of the placards at last week’s democracy. Unless we wake up, this will become a terrifying reality.

Read it all here.