The video clip and the following come from PowerLine:

Immediately following today’s release of the FY 2013 House GOP budget plan, Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, spoke at AEI [American Enterprise Institute] about some of the major policy proposals in the new plan and their implications for the American people.  In particular, he highlighted Medicare, arguing that … the system must undergo drastic reform to survive beyond the coming decade without compromising America’s future economic growth. He contended that the Obama administration’s recently released budget does not adequately address the future consequences of current health care legislation … and ultimately increases potential loopholes in the system. Congressman Ryan also voiced his concerns over the budget cuts facing the defense industry and, to that end, noted that his “Path to Prosperity” plan moves to ameliorate the nearly $55 billion in FY 2013 cuts to the defense budget mandated under sequestration.

Congressman Ryan asserted that by focusing on limited government regulation, maximizing free enterprise and leaving personal choices to the individual, this [his] House GOP budget puts America back on the path toward growth. He reiterated his belief that the coming budgetary crisis is as avoidable as it is recognizable and emphasized the responsibility of the president, Senate and Congress to act according to their legal and moral obligations in the best interests of the American people.

Socialism, Communism – the terms were used interchangeably in Soviet Russia – is an atrocious ideology. Whether in the National (Nazi) form, or the International (Leninist-Stalinist) form, or even in the milder Western European welfare form, its implementation is a ruinous affliction. Whenever and wherever a collectivist ideology, whatever name it goes by – Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Marxism, Islam, Environmentalism, World Government, People’s Democracy – is implemented, ruin and suffering are brought upon the people.

The Democratic Party, whatever it may have been in the past, is now a collectivist party. It’s leader, President Obama, was raised, educated , and employed (by Alinskyites) as a Communist, and under him the country has been moved to the collectivist left.

But not far enough left to please the ill-educated, uninformed, privileged participants in the “Occupy” movement. Encouraged in their protest against capitalism by the President and other Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, “Occupy” spokesmen call for a communist America.

We have a hunch that these clueless malcontents have absolutely no idea what life under the communist system is like. Our view is shared by Lincoln Brown, who recently visited Cambodia as a member of a Christian mission, and has written a brief description of the suffering of the people when they were under the Communist dictatorship of Pol Pot, and tells how the country has still not recovered from it.

He writes at Townhall:

The legacy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can be best experienced at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh.

Now a natinal memorial site and genocide museum Tuol Sleng Prison, or S-21 was originally a high school. The Khmer Rouge transformed it into a secret holding and interrogation facility. Out of approximately 14,000 people that were brought there, only about 12 survived the hell that was S-21.

The rules of life at S-21 are posted on large signs in English and Khmer for visitors to the museum:

You must answer according to my questions. Do not turn them away.

Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.

Do not be a fool for you are someone who dares to thwart the revolution.

You must immediately answer my question without wasting time to reflect.

Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.

While getting lashes or electric shocks you must not cry out at all.

Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there are no orders, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom [the Khmer Krom are the indigenous ethnic Khmer people of southern Vietnam] as to hide your true existence as a traitor.

If you do not follow all of the above rules you shall get many lashes or electric shocks.

If you disobey any point of my regulation you shall get either ten lashes or five electric shocks.

At S-21, dorm rooms and class rooms became prison cells and torture chambers whose floors to this day still bear the bloodstains of the victims. Some rooms still contain the metal bed frames and shackles used to hold prisoners during interrogations. Children’s exercise equipment was turned into racks upon which prisoners were hung head down and were repeatedly raised and lowered until they blacked out. They were revived when their heads were dunked in pots of water laced with excrement. The porches and balconies of the buildings were covered in barbed wire, in order to prevent people from flinging themselves out of the doors in suicide attempts.

Some of the rooms at Tuol Sleng are full of pictures of those who went there to die. Photograph after photograph is on display. …

People have painted pictures from their memories from elsewhere in the county. Memories of people dunked repeatedly under water to extract confessions; and of infants taken from their mothers and tossed into the air to be shot by Khmer Rouge soldiers.

One room defies my mind’s ability to process information. It is the same room in which hangs the picture of the soldier shooting babies. The room consists mostly of cabinets, housing bones and skulls of the victims of S-21. It puts one in mind of an anthropology exhibit: the remains of distant ancestors from the prehistoric past. But these remains are the result of the bloody carnage that occurred from 1975 to 1979, and represent only a tiny fraction of the slaughter that took place in Cambodia. …

Under the Khmer Rogue five thousand women and children were shipped to Women’s Island in the center of the Bassac River to be massacred. There were at one time two trees on the island used by the Khmer Rouge. The soldiers would beat infants and children against these trees until they died …  The trees were cut down, but one of them absorbed so much blood from its victims that their blood began to appear in the tree’s newly bitter fruit. The tree eventually developed a permanent curve from the impact of tiny bodies. The women and children were not shot, as so many of the victims from that time were because the Khmer Rouge decided that these victims were not worth wasting the bullets.

Because the Khmer Rouge executed so many government officials, doctors, lawyers and other educated people, Cambodia developed a phobia of higher education. Pol Pot has cast a long shadow over the years, and education and economic development have been a long time in coming. The present generation of young people is the first in years to even consider continuing their education, and most people in Cambodia exist on less than one dollar a day. The deaths of the community leaders and millions of other people in the 1970’s left a vacuum that has proven hard to fill. The country is trying to find its way out of chaos.

In one benighted section of Phnom Penh, children walk barefoot over broken bricks and rubble. Black water trenches filled with human sewage run under the rickety patched-together shacks raised above the flood level on stilts. These homes, which would be considered slightly larger than a backyard storage shed in America may house up to ten people in some cases. When the rainy season comes, the leaky roofs make sleep impossible. The only thing the residents can do is get up and stand in the rain coming through their roofs until the storm passes, and then try to go back to bed. It is poverty on a scale none of us have ever seen. A man relieves himself in a pit as we walk by and the smell of human waste and rotting garbage is overpowering. I feel the bile rise in my throat and ashamed of my reaction to another’s plight, I fight back the urge to retch. How would I feel if someone were to vomit at my front door? The residents of this alley are squatting on government land. They have no [regular supply of] food and no clean water, and rely on the charity of others for enough food to make it though the month. Children in some cases become prostitutes, child soldiers, beggars or street peddlers.

The United States of America … remains the most successful republic in the history of the world. And … the people here, especially those Occupiers who have the gall to portray themselves as poor and oppressed with their laptops and cell phones, demanding you and I foot the bill for their condoms and their college degrees have fared far better than [their] counterparts in other parts of the world. Perhaps it would behoove these protestors to spend some time in these countries in which the ideas of Lenin, Marx and Alinsky found full flower and reached their inevitable bloody conclusions. Perhaps it would benefit them to live under such regimes before they try to establish such a nation …  for the rest of us.

Jonathan S. Tobin wrote at Commentary-Contentions on March 17:

Yesterday, John Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home. Though twice convicted of participation in one of history’s great atrocities, with the assistance of clever lawyers, liberal judges and owing to his age and infirmity, Demjanjuk didn’t pass away in jail. Upon his death, his family once again declared his innocence and, due to a technicality in German law that says sentences are not final until the last appeal is ruled on, could even claim that his death voided his conviction. The New York Times obituary, though providing voluminous detail about his case, insisted on describing his case as merely a one of “questions” and “mysteries.”

But any objective examination of his story reveals little that could be fairly termed a “mystery.” Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Red Army who was captured by the Germans. Like many other Ukrainians he fought for Hitler’s army. But he was no ordinary turncoat solider hoping to evade the grim fate that befell most Soviet prisoners of the Nazis. He volunteered to be a death camp guard. Even if one accepts the doubts that were raised as to whether he was the infamous “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka extermination facility, there is no doubt that he was a terrible Ivan who served at the equally horrific Sobibor, Majdanek and Flossenbürg camps. But though enough proof of his complicity in these crimes was brought forward to secure two convictions many years later, like many another Holocaust criminal, Demjanjuk didn’t die inside prison walls. While his Holocaust-denying fan club (among whose members we must count pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan) may claim the last laugh we must credit the hard work of activists and prosecutors who never gave up the fight to bring him to book for his crimes. In doing so, they did honor to the victims as well as to the cause of justice. We can’t help but note though that their efforts must be said to have fallen short since Demjanjuk never got the date with the hangman that he richly deserved.

The Cold War allowed many Eastern Europeans who took part in Nazi-era crimes to pretend to be victims. Demjanjuk was one such person and like many others who took part in these crimes, Demjanjuk evaded the long arm of the law after World War II ended and entered the United States where he took the name John and eventually became a citizen and raised a family. But unfortunately for him, evidence of his ties to the SS was uncovered, including an identity card with his picture. Survivors also identified him. His lies were eventually exposed and after many years of litigation the Justice Department was able to revoke his citizenship and deport him to Israel where he was put on trial.

After exhaustive arguments and extensive testimony from survivors who identified him as the man who brutally assaulted victims and killed many with his bare hands at Treblinka, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. But five years later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the verdict and set him free.

The court’s justification for this action was the claim that other guards claimed that another Ivan, named Marchenko was the “terrible” guard of Treblinka. But the court’s ruling was not so much a conclusive ruling about his innocence as a meditation on the role of Israel justice. The majority seemed to feel that so long as even a shadow of a doubt existed as to his guilt it would be better that Israel should not take his life or deprive him of his liberty. This was meant and was actually perceived in many quarters as tribute to the quality of Jewish mercy as well as Israeli justice but it may well have been very bad law. As even the Times noted, Demjanjuk had listed his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko on his U.S. entry papers. The preponderance of evidence still must be said to show that Demjanjuk really was Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

Instead of the execution that he merited, he was sent back to America in 1993. But there again, intrepid prosecutors set to work to try and convict him again, this time, for being a guard at the camps that his lawyers said he was at rather than Treblinka. Again long delays put off his second deportation and trial (this time in Germany) and his conviction on those awful charges did not come until 2011. …

Among the most shameful aspects of this story is the way some, like Buchanan, used Cold War enmity to obfuscate the guilt of Demjanjuk and other Eastern Europeans who were Hitler’s collaborators. Also shameful was the criticism aimed at the many Holocaust survivors who stepped forward to identify Demjanjuk as one of their torturers. The aspersions cast and doubts that were raised about the veracity of their testimony were deeply unfortunate. Most of all, the unwillingness of the Israeli Supreme Court to take responsibility for the case and to rule with fairness as well as mercy did little honor to that institution.

The plain fact of the matter is that John Demjanjuk never got the sentence his crimes warranted. In that he was not alone since many such criminals evaded prosecution, let alone prison time or execution. And for that we may all hang our heads in shame.

What would be justice for the Nazis and their paid sadists? What would be justice for Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kim Jong-il, Joseph Kony, Torquemada …? “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”  – though sentimentally decried by Christians and liberals – is a good definition of justice. It aims for balance, for the punishment fitting the crime. But what should be done to men who take hundreds, thousands, millions of eyes and teeth and lives?

Was hanging a just punishment for Adolf Eichmann? Oh, he had to be hanged. Anything less than the taking of his life would have been egregious injustice. It was the most that could be done to punish him, yet it wasn’t much. The Israeli court, too tender of its own conscience (a form of moral hubris typical of the Left), should have hanged Demjanjuk, yet it wouldn’t have been enough. For great crime there is no condign punishment. 

For lesser crimes justice may be done. It’s past time that Pat Buchanan were condemned for his Nazi sympathies, at least in the court of public opinion.

Food and water may from now on be allocated to or withheld from you on the decision of a single Obama deputy.

Very quietly on March 16 the President issued an Executive Order – the instrument by which he is increasingly inclined to govern – which gives him and his gang this power.

The EO grants the administration martial law powers in peacetime.

Drudge and Canada Free Press have carried this news. The mainstream media must know about it. If they choose not to report it, what are they allowing by their silence?

The issue of such an order in peacetime raises suspicion that Obama may be preparing to refuse to relinquish power if he is defeated in the November presidential election.

This is from Canada Free Press, by Alan Caruba:

An Executive Order posted on the White House website on Friday, March 16, 2012, has generated a wave of fear. It is officially about “National Defense Resources Preparedness” and its stated policy addresses “national defense resource policies and programs under the Defense Production Act of 1950.”

Its stated policy is that “The United States must have an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency.”  …

In effect, the EO allows the federal government, directed by the President, to commandeer and control all aspects of the economy and the lives of all Americans. It centralizes control to an astonishing and frightening degree. …

It parcels out control to the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources …

The Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;

The Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;

The Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;

The Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and

 The Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.

The obvious question is why is this EO necessary in the absence of any threat of an invasion or even an attack? [And] why should the President of the United States, in the run-up to a national election, feel that this is the time to issue such an EO?

I have frankly been dismissive of widely expressed fears that Obama would or could carry off a coup d’etat to establish himself as an American dictator. The problem, however, is that Obama has surrounded himself with Cabinet Secretaries and a shadow government of “czars” that would likely support him if he were to attempt such an audacious move.

The “legality” of such a move would be rubber-stamped by the Attorney General whose regard for the Constitution and laws of the nation is dubious at best, elastic at worst. The President’s views about the Constitution are well known and he resents the limits it puts on his powers.

Would Congress stand by and allow its powers be usurped? Imagine yourself a Senator or Representative fearful of arrest and detention. Rounding up all 435 members would not be a difficult task.

The nation’s media, with exceptions, has “covered” for this President regarding the legitimacy of his right to hold office, his absurd energy policies, and his takeover of various segments of the nation’s economic base; the auto industry, the insurance industry, and Obamacare’s attempt to takeover the healthcare sector.

That is why this EO has evoked such fear and concern and that is why Congress has to assert its Constitutional powers before this President is permitted to overthrow the legislative branch of government and seize control through an EO that is so broad that it is a breathtaking seizure of power that could only be considered if the nation was, in fact, under attack.

This EO is about “preparedness”, but for whom?

Is this unwarranted scare-mongering? Or is it valid cause for fear?

Arguments for totalitarianism are crowding thick and fast on one another as the Left grows daily more arrogant, and at the same time more afraid that its days in power may be coming to an end.

The latest to reach our ears issue insistently from a Princeton professor, Peter Singer. He has worked himself up, like Michelle Obama, over the shape of other people’s bodies, how much they eat, and what they weigh. Also over manmade global warming. Also over an itch he has to redistribute your money to foreigners.

The aim of people who think like Professor Singer is to set up a global Politburo, consisting of control freaks like him, to keep the rest of us doing what they know is right for … for what or whom? For the planet. Yes. And for … for … whatever. Never mind for what or whom. The point is you must be controlled by those who know better than you what’s best for you. Your betters.

Okay, so maybe you won’t like it. No one is promising you that you’ll like it. Why should you? Stop being so selfish as to believe you have a right to pursue your personal happiness. You must do what you’re told for the Greater Good, for Society, for the human and geographical world as a whole.

This is from Front Page, by Daniel Flyn:

Flyers feeling violated by airport x-ray scanners or TSA pat-downs may find a new proposal just too heavy an intrusion. A professor wants to add scales to airports for carriers to weigh passengers. The pounds on the scale would determine the price of the ticket.

“Is a person’s weight his or her own business?” Peter Singer asks in a Project Syndicate article. “Should we simply become more accepting of diverse body shapes? I don’t think so. Obesity is an ethical issue, because an increase in weight by some imposes costs on others.” The Princeton bioethicist notes that a plane’s load factors into the fuel it consumes.

But some 747s weigh 1,000,000 pounds. Does the 230-pound woman sitting in 11C really make such a big difference?

Singer tacitly admits it doesn’t by shifting the discussion away from the ostensible subject of the piece, fat passengers weighing us down with heavy fuel costs, to eclectic matters more germane to his interests. The bioethicist argues that the increased fuels burned to propel large people to their destinations emit a spare tire of greenhouse gases around the earth, which contributes to global warming. He further justifies elephantine ticket prices for rotund travelers by noting the corpulent health-care costs of obesity. Singer reasons, “These facts are enough to justify public policies that discourage weight gain.”

The unfocused reasoning is a staple of the Australian’s argumentation. He finds no “ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one” since the money for the better television could have been used to help homeless Brazilian children.

What a reasoner he is! You have to admire the breadth of his vision, his capacity to connect widely separated and apparently disparate events.

He argues for a $30,000 cap on income to pay for life’s necessities but not its luxuries.

Who will decide what is necessary? They will.

Luxuries – ugh! (Remember, for all their talk of tolerance in sexual matters, they are the new puritans.)

He wants to take away the right to bear arms, to smoke tobacco, and even the right to life for babies.

Babies are a luxury?

In Rethinking Life and Death [!], he writes that “in the case of infanticide, it is our culture that has something to learn from others, especially now that we, like them, are in a situation where we must limit family size.”

He hasn’t noticed, or has chosen to ignore the fact that fertility rates are sinking so low that whole nations – Russians, Italians, Spaniards … – are dwindling to extinction.

While he advocates legalizing the murder of newborns, Singer condemns eating hamburgers, imprisoning whales at Sea World, and what he describes as the Auschwitz-like conditions of chicken coops.

Feeling sorry for chickens has been an emotional staple of the anti-human lobby for the last half century or so.

“Many of us are rightly concerned about whether our planet can support a human population that has surpassed seven billion,” Singer concludes in the Project Syndicate piece. “But we should think of the size of the human population not just in terms of numbers, but also in terms of its mass. If we value both sustainable human well-being and our planet’s natural environment, my weight — and yours — is everyone’s business.”

If such a private matter as one’s weight is the public’s business, then the question arises as to what, precisely, remains one’s private business? One’s finances, one’s weight, one’s choice of doctor, one’s plasma-screen television, and even the meat on one’s plate all become the business of Big Brother in Singer’s expansive vision of the state. Singer’s is the logic of totalitarianism. Since any private action can be rationalized as having a public consequence, all becomes the interest of the government. Singer advocates copious limits on private behavior. Where are the checks on the state’s gargantuan appetite?

The enormous arrogance required to force people onto scales as a prerequisite to boarding a flight is a natural consequence of Singer’s philosophy. The Ivy League philosopher is an heir to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill …

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is the phrase used to sum up utilitarianism. But you can’t achieve a compilation of a commodity where there isn’t any of it to compile.

If everyone in the grand scheme is personally unhappy – except of course the members of the Politburo who will have their dachas, their special stores, their limos, their engorged egos – there won’t be a general happiness. But never mind. Thing is, the rest of us will be equally unhappy.

Ah, drab new world that has such monsters in it!

How did it come about that academia, the media, intelligence agencies, and eventually government became positively supportive of Islam and opposed to the American ideals of individualism and liberty?

The answer has much to do with the baleful influence of two dim “intellectuals”, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

Michael Widlanski explains what happened in his book Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat, which we confidently recommend.

It is discussed in this video:

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was hosted by President Ronald Reagan at a state banquet in 1980.

Documents of the occasion were released last year by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation after the required 30-year delay.

Here are excerpts from the toasts (as selected by Commentary-Contentions):

[The Prime Minister]: Mr. President, an earlier visitor to the United States, Charles Dickens, described our American friends as by nature frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. That seems to me, Mr. President, to be a perfect description of the man who has been my host for the last 48 hours. (Applause.) …

Charles Dickens, like me, also visited Capitol Hill. He described the congressmen he met there as “striking to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Americans in strong and general impulse.” Having been there and agreeing with Dickens as I do, I’m delighted to see so many Members of Congress here this evening. And if Dickens was right, relations between the legislative and executive branches should be smooth indeed over the next four years. After all, “prompt to act and lions in energy” should mean, Mr. President, you’ll get that expenditure cutting program through very easily indeed. (Laughter. Applause.) …

California, of course, has always meant a great deal to my countrymen from the time, almost exactly 400 years ago, when one of our greatest national heroes, Sir Francis Drake, proclaimed it New Albion in keeping with the bravado of the Elizabethan Age. This feeling of community and curiosity that we have about California exists in the present age when another of our household names made his career there, one of the greatest careers in show business. I refer to Mr. Bob Hope, who is here this evening, and whom we like to claim is partly ours because he was born in the United Kingdom, though he decided to leave when he was only four years old. (Laughter.) …

I hope you didn’t feel ill at ease as you came up the stairs and passed under the gaze of George III. (Laughter.) I can assure you that we British have long since come to see that George was wrong and that Thomas Jefferson was right when he wrote to James Madison that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” (Laughter.) …

It’s not the time, Mr. President, for me to talk at any length about the relations between our two countries except to say that they are profoundly and deeply right. And beyond that, we perhaps don’t have to define them in detail. …

There will, of course, be times, Mr. President, when yours perhaps is the loneliest job in the world, times when you need what one of my great friends in politics once called “two o’clock in the morning courage.” There will be times when you go through rough water. There will be times when the unexpected happens. There will be times when only you can make a certain decision. It is at that time when you need the two o’clock in the morning courage. … And what it requires is a knowledge on your part that whatever decision you make you have to stick with the consequences and see it through until it be well and truly finished. …

I want to say this to you, Mr. President, that when those moments come, we here in this room, on both sides of the Atlantic, have in you total faith that you will make the decision which is right for protecting the liberty of common humanity in the future. You will make that decision that we as partners in the English-speaking world know that, as Wordsworth wrote, “We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake.”

[The President]: Bob Hope will know what I mean when I speak in the language of my previous occupation and say you are a hard act to follow. (Laughter. Applause.) … And may I say that I do know something about that “two o’clock courage,” but I also know that you have already shown that two o’clock courage on too many occasions to name. (Applause.) …

[Y]ou know, Prime Minister, that we have a habit of quoting Winston Churchill. Tell me, is it possible to get through a public address today in Britain without making reference to him? It is increasingly difficult to do so here, not just because we Americans share some pride in his ancestry, but because there’s so much to learn from him, his fearlessness, and I don’t just mean physical courage. I mean he was, for instance, unafraid to laugh. I can remember words attributed to Churchill about one somber, straight-laced colleague in Parliament. Churchill said, “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” (Laughter.) …

When he addressed Parliament in the darkest moments after Dunkirk, Churchill dared to promise the British their finest hour and even reminded them that they would someday enjoy, quote, “the bright, sunlit uplands,” unquote, from which the struggle against Hitler would be seen as only a bad memory. Well, Madam Prime Minister, you and I have heard our share of somber assessments and dire predictions in recent months. I do not refer here to the painful business of ending our economic difficulties. We know that with regard to the economies of both our countries we will be home safe and soon enough.

I do refer, however, to those adversaries who preach the supremacy of the state. We’ve all heard the slogans, the end of the class struggle, the vanguard of the proletariat, the wave of the future, the inevitable triumph of socialism. Indeed, if there’s anything the Marxist-Leninists might not be forgiven for it is their willingness to bog the world down in tiresome cliches, cliches that rapidly are being recognized for what they are, a gaggle of bogus prophecies and petty superstitions. … I wonder if you and I and other leaders of the West should not now be looking toward bright, sunlit uplands and begin planning for a world where our adversaries are remembered only for their role in a sad and rather bizarre chapter in human history.

The British people, who nourish the great civilized ideas, know the forces of good ultimately rally and triumph over evil. That, after all, is the legend of the Knights of the Round Table, the legend of the man who lived on Baker Street, the story of London in the Blitz, the meaning of the Union Jack snapping briskly in the wind. Madam Prime Minister, I’ll make one further prediction, that the British people are once again about to pay homage to their beloved Sir Winston by doing him the honor of proving him wrong and showing the world that their finest hour is yet to come, and how he would have loved the irony of that. How proud it would have made him.

Sadly, in this prediction, Reagan and not Churchill was wrong. Britain has been steadily declining since the end of World War II, and it would take an incurably irrational optimist to deny that it is now beyond hope of recovery.

The Reagan-Thatcher era was an all-too-brief silver age.

Politically, and in international relations, the whole world has greatly changed for the worse since they, together, won the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

*

For contrast, go here for an account of what Prime Minister David Cameron said when toasting President Obama at the White House state banquet on March 15, 2012.

And squirm.

After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live. High gasoline prices are a major political problem for Obama. They are not just a pain at the pump, however. They are a constant reminder of three years of a rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy that has rendered us scandalously dependent and excessively vulnerable. – Charles Krauthammer (here).

*

Motivated by an irrational hatred of fossil fuels, President Barack Obama likes to say, “We’re not going to be able to just drill our way out of the problem of high gas prices.”

Yet it is a simple law of economics that if  the supply of something is increased, its price falls.

And yes, it is even the case with oil.

This is from Personal Liberty Digest:

President Barack Obama said: “We’re not going to be able to just drill our way out of the problem of high gas prices.” Actually, to a large extent, we can. For proof, let’s compare what’s been happening in California to the extraordinary accomplishments in North Dakota.

Thanks to years of placating environmental extremists, California’s anti-drilling regulations make it almost impossible to drill for new oil anywhere in the State, onshore or off. As a result, its production of oil has fallen by nearly one-third in the past 20 years. As oil production has declined, so has tax revenue. Even with several gigantic tax increases during that period, oil revenues in the State are down.

Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed solution? Raise taxes even higher.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that wealthy Californians are fleeing the State as fast as they can. …

Let’s contrast the near-bankruptcy of the People’s Republic of California with what’s been happening in one of the most independent and entrepreneurial States in the union: North Dakota. …

Thanks to vast improvements in recovery technology as well as the discovery of vast new oceans of underground oil, estimates of “recoverable” oil in the Bakken Shale have tripled to 24 billion barrels. That is more oil than is being produced anywhere else in the United States, including Alaska’s famed Prudhoe Bay. But it’s a small fraction of what is possible.

Experts say that current technology can extract only about 6 percent of the oil they know is underground in North Dakota. Total estimated oil reserves are thus around 500 billion barrels. And new discoveries are happening all of the time.

Let me include an interesting footnote on the subject of “reserves.” In 1980, the oil reserves in the United States were estimated at 30 billion barrels. Yet in the intervening 32 years, this country actually produced 77 billion barrels of oil. …

Today, the numbers are even more staggering. The amount of “technically recoverable” oil in the United States is estimated at 1.4 trillion barrels. (Please note that is “trillion,” with a “T.”) Unfortunately for us, most of that oil is located in areas Obama says we can’t search for it: in portions of Alaska and in waters off our shores.

Combined with known resources in Canada and Mexico, total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels. How much is that?  Let me put it in perspective: It is more than all the oil the world has used since the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Penn., 150 years ago.

So far, all I’ve discussed is oil. When natural gas and coal are added to the total, the numbers are clear: We have enough energy reserves in the United States to fuel all of our needs for 100 years, even if we never made another discovery. …

Back to North Dakota … The State has the lowest unemployment rate in the Nation, at just 3.3 percent. California’s, by contrast, is 11.1 percent. That doesn’t even count the unemployed people who have simply stopped looking for work. The true unemployment number is probably closer to 20 percent.

And while the State of California can’t begin to pay all of its bills — it even issued IOUs last year in place of tax refunds — the biggest argument in North Dakota’s State Capitol is how to spend all of the money that’s pouring in. …

What’s happening in North Dakota is a classic example of the one thing that would solve our energy problems everywhere — and most other problems in the economy, too. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing Obama and his team won’t even consider. … Let the market work.

Rather than foster energy independence, Obama wants to make us all dependent. Dependent on government, that is.

Want to reduce unemployment? Increase tax revenues? Get the economy humming again? Truly foster energy independence?

The answer to all of them is the same: Get government off our backs. Let the market work. The results will be amazing. Maybe next year we’ll have a government that’s willing to give it a try.

*

Why do gasoline prices vary so much from state to state?

Not because “the price is set internationally” as Obama would have you believe.

Find out the answer here.

Ion Mihai Pacepa was “one of the top members of the Soviet bloc espionage community”. 

He writes:

One of our main assignments was to turn the UN against the United States. We in the Soviet bloc poured millions of dollars and thousands of people into that gigantic project. Virtually all UN employees and representatives from the communist countries — comprising a third of the world’s population — and from our Arab allies were secretly working for our espionage services.

Our strategy was to convert the centuries-old European and Islamic animosity toward the Jews into a rabid and violent hatred for the United States by portraying it as a country run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (the Kremlin’s epithet for the U.S. Congress), which allegedly wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.

Unfortunately, we succeeded. In 2003, the UN expelled the U.S. from the Commission on Human Rights by the overwhelming vote of 33 to 3, and it appointed the tyrannical government of Libya to chair that body. A year later, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided to secretly make the UN even more anti-American.

On December 2, 2004, Annan endorsed the 101 proposals of the “High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,” commissioned by him to build a UN “for the twenty-first century.”  The panel recommended that the U.S. be further isolated by establishing the rule that only the UN could authorize preemptive wars against terrorism or any other threats. For that, the panel concluded that the UN’s bureaucracy should be significantly increased (by creating a ”peace-building commission”), its efficiency significantly decreased (by greatly expanding the already inefficient Security Council), and the treasuries of its member countries additionally raided by having them “donate” to the UN an additional 0.7% of their GNP to fight poverty. (On December 7, 2007, Senator Obama introduced into the U.S. Senate the Global Poverty Act of 2007, demanding that 0.7% of the U.S. gross national product, totaling $845 billion over the next 13 years, be spent to fight “global poverty”. 

It is hard to believe, but true, that some of the authors of these proposals for “reforming” the UN were the same communist spies who had originally worked to subvert the UN. One eminent member of Kofi Annan’s blue-ribbon panel was the nouveau riche Yevgeny Primakov, a former KGB general and Soviet intelligence adviser to Saddam Hussein who rose to head Russia’s espionage service for a time — and to sing opera ditties with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright while secretly running the infamous Aldrich Ames spy case behind her back. Another prominent member was Qian Qichen, a former Red China intelligence officer who worked under diplomatic cover abroad, belonged to the Central Committee of the Communist Party when it ordered the bloody Tiananmen Square repression in 1989, rose afterward to the Politburo, and in 1998 became vice-chairman of China’s State Council. And then there was Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League (another KGB puppet), who stated that he missed “the balance of power provided by the Soviet Union.” …

Primakov is an old enemy of the U.S. His espionage service — like my former one — used to spend every single day thinking up new ways to portray the American land of freedom as an “imperial Zionist country” that intended to convert the Islamic world into a Jewish colony. His first major victory was UN Resolution No. 3379 of 1975, which declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Officially presented as an Arab initiative, that projected resolution had in fact been drafted in Moscow under the supervision of Primakov, turned into the KGB’s main Arabist. The resolution was openly supported by the Arab League and the PLO, two organizations on our payroll. …

On August 31, 2001, Primakov’s boss at the UN, Kofi Annan, organized a UN World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which opened in Durban, South Africa. Its task was to approve new pre-formulated Arab League declarations asserting that Zionism was a brutal form of racism, and that the United States was its main supporter. Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, and the same gaggle of Arab and Third World governments who had supported the UN’s anti-Semitic Resolution No. 3379 in 1975 urged the participants to condemn Israel and the United States as Zionist powers who wanted to conquer the Islamic world. On September 3, 2001, the U.S. withdrew its delegation from Durban, charging that the UN conference had been “converted into a forum against Israel and Jews.” The Israeli government followed suit. On September 4, 2001, Congressman Tom Lantos, a member of the U.S. delegation, told reporters: “This conference will stand self-condemned for yielding to extremists. … I am blaming them for hijacking this conference.”

The September 11, 2001, attacks came seven days later. On that same day the KGB was celebrating 124 years since the birth of its founder. The weapon of choice for that horrific act of terrorism that has changed the face of our world was the hijacked airplane, a concept that had originally been invented by the KGB. …

 Most of the people “working” at the UN are probably still anti-American spies …

The peace and freedom of the world depend on the power of the United States, not of the UN bureaucracy, as was always the case.

This article is of very great importance. Historians should take full and careful note of it.

We agree of course that the UN bureaucracy is useless and worse than useless. We abominate the UN and think it should be destroyed.

Apart from that, his last sentence troubles us. The world has little peace and less freedom. Should the US try to establish peace and freedom wherever they’re lacking?  Should the US police the world? It would have to make laws under which it would act globally. It’s writ would have to run in every state. The US government would then be the world government. But could it enforce it’s laws everywhere, on all peoples? Would Americans, or enough of them, want to do that – a nation that has always resisted acquiring an empire?

Would it not be enough for the US to protect itself and its own interests against its enemies – at present Russia, China and the other communist states, and all 56 Islamic states?

Such a policy would not preclude preemptive strikes against potential enemies, such as those trying to build nuclear arsenals with aggressive intent, or any that kept vital resources from American markets.

It may be hard to accept, but the truth is that the victims of  the Janjaweed, Joseph Kony, Kim Jong-un, Boko Haram, the Taliban cannot be saved by America. It is much easier to do harm on a vast scale, as the KGB and the Arabs have proved so successfully.

An Austrian aboriginal protests furiously against the Turkish Muslim invaders of his country.

(A 2010 video from Creeping Sharia)