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Outstanding statement about what made America great, an dhow are government is destroying that greatness.  This is the full Text of Sen. Rand Paul's Tea Party Response to Obama's State of the Union Address: I speak to you tonight from Washington, D.C. The state of our economy is tenuous but our people remain the greatest example of freedom and prosperity the world has ever known. People say America is exceptional. I agree, but it's not the complexion of our skin or the twists in our DNA that make us unique. America is exceptional because we were founded upon the notion that everyone should be free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. For the first time in history, men and women were guaranteed a chance to succeed based NOT on who your parents were but on your own initiative and desire to work. We are in danger, though, of forgetting what made us great. The President seems to think the country can continue to borrow $50,000 per second. The President believes that we should just squeeze more money out of those who are working. The path we are on is not sustainable, but few in Congress or in this Administration seem to recognize that their actions are endangering the prosperity of this great nation. Ronald Reagan said, government is not the answer to the problem, government is the problem. Tonight, the President told the nation he disagrees. President Obama believes government is the solution: More government, more taxes, more debt. What the President fails to grasp is that the American system that rewards hard work is what made America so prosperous. What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith. In the year we won our independence, Adam Smith described what creates the Wealth of Nations. He described a limited government that largely did not interfere with individuals and their pursuit of happiness. All that we are, all that we wish to be is now threatened by the notion that you can have something for nothing, that you can have your cake and ea

Thank you, Gen. Mattis. One should never forget that respectful treatment of prisoners of war is the best protection you can get for your own soldiers when they are captured. Those who advocated torture should have learned their lesson when Nick Berg was decapitated in Iraq, wearing an orange jumpsuit like the ones worn by suspected al Qaeda prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, where prisoners were tortured and humiliated by American soldiers. In the decapitation video, explicit mention of Abu Ghraib was made: "We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Berg

"Dick Morris is a nationally recognized political campaign adviser, analyst and author. He was the senior political adviser to Bill Clinton before and after his occupation of the White House. He was campaign manager of Clinton's 1996 re-election, and the architect of his successful "triangulation" rhetorical ruse. Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos said of Morris, "No single person had more power over [Bill Clinton]." This week, in a message entitled "What Bill Left Out, Morris corrected the record regarding Clinton's glowing remarks about Hillary Clinton, her personal attributes and professional achievements. Morris's insights into the Clintons are priceless. What follows is a transcript of Morris's comments: "Bill Clinton talked at length about Hillary's idealistic work in college and law school, but he omits that she was defending the Black Panthers who killed security guards; they were on trial in New Haven. She monitored the trial while she was in law school to find evidence that could be grounds for reversal in the event they were convicted. "That summer she went to work for the True-Haft (SP) law firm in CA, headed by True Haft who is the head of the CA Communist Party and that's when she got involved with Saul Alinsky, who became something of a mentor for the rest of her life. "Then Bill says that she went off to Massachusetts and he went to Arkansas, and eventually Hillary followed her heart to join him in Arkansas. He omits that she went to work for the Watergate Committee and was fired from that job for taking home evidence and hiding documents that they needed in the impeachment inquiry. Then she took the DC Bar exam and flunked it, she went to Arkansas because that is the only bar exam she could pass. "He talked about how in the 1970's she took all kinds of pro-bono cases to defend women and children. In her memoirs, she cites one which was a custody case and that's it. In fact, in 1975 she represen

"The Clinton Foundation is a "massive spider web of connections and money laundering implicating hundreds of high-level people," according to an anonymous insider who revealed why the FBI stopped short of indicting Hillary Clinton. Before FBI Director James Comey announced the FBI wouldn't recommend pressing charges against Clinton, an insider with "intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case" hosted an little-publicized AMA session on 4Chan, and the statements he made on July 2 corroborate with later developments of the scandal. "There is enough for her and the entire government to be brought down," he revealed. "People do not realize how enormous this whole situation actually is." "Whether she will be [indicted] or not depends on how much info others involved gets out, and there are a lot of people involved." Since then, both the FBI and the DOJ declined to press charges against Clinton, and other sources revealed the Clinton Foundation is now under scrutiny. "The problem is with the Clinton Foundation as I mentioned, which you should just imagine as a massive spider web of connections and money laundering implicating hundreds of high-level people," the source said. "Though I do not have a high opinion of Hillary, she is just a piece - albeit a big piece - of this massive sh*tstorm." Those implicated extends to the Justice Dept. "The DOJ is most likely looking to save itself," he continued. "Find everyone involved in the Clinton Foundation, from its donors to its Board of Directors, and imagine they are all implicated." This would explain why Bill Clinton forced himself on Attorney General Loretta Lynch's plane at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport last week; Clinton insider Larry Nichols said blackmail was likely involved. "Bill Clinton met with Lynch, and he was there to assure her that when Hillary gets to be president she'll be able to keep her job," said Nichols on the Alex Jones Sh

Assange justifiably fears that if he submits to extradition to Sweden, that nation would in turn hand him over to the U.S. for prosecution under the Espionage Act. It is known that a grand jury handed down indictments in the case involving a leak of massive numbers of State Department cables by Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Wikileaks received and published those documents. Soon after, a prosecutor in Sweden began a rape investigation, despite both women involved saying that they were not raped. No rape charges have actually been filed. The British courts later granted Sweden's extradition request, despite there being no charges pending, at which point Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador and has been effectively imprisoned in that nation's London embassy ever since.

"Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)  today advocated "a straightforward and bold, positive agenda to inspire the young, to inspire women, to inspire Hispanics, to inspire everybody" during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Here are the ten items he called on Americans to do going forward:"

excerpt: "While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises. Nuggets Gleaned Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from days spent reading Frank's handiwork: -- For all its heft, the bill doesn't once mention the words "too-big-to-fail," the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12- stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery. -- Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for "no-more-bailouts" talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate's health-care bill look minuscule. -- Oh, hold on, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary can't authorize these funds unless "there is at least a 99 percent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back." Too bad the same models used to foresee the housing meltdown probably will be used to predict this likelihood as well. More Bailouts -- The bill also allows the government, in a crisis, to back financial firms' debts. Bondholders can sleep easy -- there are more bailouts to come. -- The legislation does create a council of regulators to spot risks to the financial system and big financial firms. Unfortunately this group is made up of folks who missed the problems that led to the current crisis. -- Don't worry, this time regulators will have better tools. Six months after being created, the council will report to Congress on "whether setting up an electronic database" would be a help. Maybe they'll even get to use that Internet thingy. -- This group, among its many powers, can restrict the ability of a financial firm to trade for its own account. Perha

excerpt: "Personal Freedom or Political Paternalism? The real issue facing the United States concerns the soul of the American people. It is really about the kind of America that we will have in the 21st century. For decades the country has been moving away from it historical roots in a political philosophy of personal freedom and drifting further and further in the direction of political paternalism. The noose of government control has been tightening around the collective neck of the nation. More and more aspects of our lives have come under the supervision and manipulation of the government. The government educates our children; it provides us with retirement checks; it increasingly manages our health care and medical matters; it redistributes wealth from those deemed to have too much to those considered not to have enough; it regulates the food we eat, the places where we work and the way we produce, as well as signing off on the goods and services we buy. Government tries to ban what it decides is harmful for us to do or use, it oversees how and with whom we interact, and for what purposes, and it increasingly surveills every move we make and every phone call we take. Size of Government and Dependency In 1913, one hundred years ago, just before the beginning of the First World War, all levels of government - federal, state and local - taxed away and spent only about 8 percent of national income, leaving the remaining 92 percent in the pockets of the American people to spend as they considered best. Today, all levels of government siphon off and spend over 35 percent of national income. But what is important is not merely these numbers, however significant they are in understanding the drag of government on the productive private sector. More important is what they indicate about a psychology of dependency among the American people on the activities of the government. This is not simply those who may receive welfare checks, or who are directly emp

So the cure is supposedly "better messaging" rather than substantive reforms in Israel. Anything but behave as a civilized nation. 

Of course he's a socialist. The real question is, how does he feel about America? His favorite Sunday preacher for the last twenty years is simply obsessed with a frothing hatred for this country. His good buddies Bill and Bernardine have been expressing their rage loud and proud since the Sixties. As president, O is trying to put Chas Freeman in charge of the National Intelligence Estimates, a man who is neither competent, nor temperamentally suited, nor emotionally able to restrain his animosity against American Jews who love Israel just as they love America (... because, for one thing, they love democracy, and can recognize fascists even in drag.)  Newsweek tells us we're all socialists now. That's an obvious lie, because the Newsweek socialists like Evan Thomas suffer from regular nightmares that American conservatives will find another Ronald Reagan. But that raised the question of socialism. Obama danced away from it, of course, when a NYT reporter actually asked him. Whoooo me? Socialism is internationalist, and that means a genuine dual loyalty for a president of the United States. Marxists are convinced there is an inevitable contradiction between love of country and love of humanity. That's why it's called the Socialist International, and why the anthem is the Internationale. They haven't made a secret of it. Internationalist fervor controls their actions, including very successful efforts to whip up black feelings against whites, women against men, and everybody against capitalism, no matter how many billions of people it has raised out of poverty. The whole point about the global warming scam is to empower the internationalist Ruling Class.

Nails it.  This is exactly what is happening in my neighborhood.  And i'm at the epicenter of Silicon Valley;  about as liberal, far-left, marxist-statist-socialist as it gets.  Yet here we are.  As Lady Thatcher famously once said, " 'The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".  "Eventually" has arrived.   excerpt:  America is on the verge of something unprecedented in history: the peaceful, constitutional replacement of our country's entire political establishment. This is what lies behind the decisions of so many elected officials, at every level, to step aside rather than fight for reelection. And it explains how the Tea Party movement can exert so much political leverage without nominating its own candidates or even without formally choosing its own leaders. Most of the time, we Americans don't pay much attention to politics. We focus all of our energy on our jobs, our families, and our faith. We work hard, play by the rules, and wish only to be left alone. We love our country, consider ourselves blessed to be living here, and ask little from the men and women we elect except to keep from screwing things up. But in just the last decade, Americans were shocked by two catastrophes we hadn't imagined our political establishment would allow to happen. The first was 9-11, when nineteen terrorists successfully attacked our homeland, and by doing so revealed that for years, al-Qaeda and its allies had been waging holy war against us. The second was the 2008 financial crash, which revealed that our economy is a house of cards built on a pile of debt so high we cannot possibly repay it.

The decimation of our health care system under Obamacare begins with government mandates, regulations, bureaucracies, and controls. The House and Senate health care bills that President Obama and the Democrats refuse to take off the table create close to 100 new health care bureaucracies, boards, commissions and programs. This is the government takeover of health care. These new authorities arrogate to the government the power to decide "what works" in health care, and what doesn't. The code words they use include "best practices" -- a government bureaucracy in Washington is going to decide what are the "best practices" in providing health care for you and your children, not you and your doctor. Another code phrase is "reward doctors for quality not quantity." Government bureaucracies in Washington do not know how to do this. But they will make a huge mess out of your health care in trying to. These government bureaucracies will also have the power to cut off your health care when they decide it is no longer worth the money. We have already seen a glimpse of this in the declaration by a bureaucracy, to be expanded with more powers under Obamacare, that women over 72 should not have mammograms. What they are saying here is that if you are over 72 and get breast cancer, they don't want to know about it. Just take the painkiller and go home, to paraphrase President Obama. They believe they can buy more votes taking the money for your care and spending it somewhere else. This is called "cost effectiveness." The destruction of the health care system is then expanded through the payment system. Among the code words here are "pay for performance" and "accountable care." This is how the bureaucracy will enforce its dictates concerning what works and what doesn't, best practices, cost effectiveness, and termination of health care no longer deemed worthy. Doctors and hospitals will be rewarded through payments if they follow the centralized bureaucracy's dictates; they will b

Founded by G. Edward Griffin of Jekyl Island - Federal Reserve fame, Freedom Force International has become a vast network of men and women from all parts of the world who are concerned over loss of personal liberty and expansion of government power. They are not mere complainers. They have a plan to do something about it. They also share a common belief in The Creed of Freedom, which is a statement of principles that guide them in their mission to build a better world. Totalitarianism is on the rise everywhere because advocates of big government have taken leadership control of the power centers within every society. Power centers are organizations and social groupings - such as political parties, labor unions, church groups, media centers, and professional societies - that hold political power based on their claim to represent their members and on their ability to lead public opinion. It has taken many years for them to achieve this dominance over society, but they have succeeded. It does no good to complain or to theorize about what should be done. As long as advocates of big government hold the power, nothing will change......

"As economist Julian Simon observed, people always produce more than they consume and always better the human condition of themselves and their neighbors - if they are free to do so. Why was Simon able to make this observation based on American experiences and other more brief episodes in human history? The answer to this question is elegantly described by George Gilder in his book "Knowledge and Power: The information Theory of Capitalism and How It is Revolutionizing Our World." Gilder teaches us about the "economics" of human advance. Establishment economics is, of course, a somewhat murky forest of "supply" and "demand" and "micros" and "macros" and all sorts of other abstractions. Within economics has arisen a sort of political contest as to whether "demand" or "supply" is most important. Does the market respond to "demands" for certain sorts of goods, or are goods unexpectedly "supplied" to the market by inventors and entrepreneurs - as surprises which then create market demand themselves? It is clear that the "supply" side trumps the "demand" side in this controversy. As George Gilder elucidates, potential advances - products and other goods - arise first in the minds of entrepreneurs who, using information, existing tools and skills in assembling and utilizing capital, bring these advances to the market. If the entrepreneur is right about the demand that will arise when his new product becomes available, he is rewarded with the fun of providing it and with profits. In order to do this, the entrepreneur needs a relatively quiet, noise-free environment, where the information comprising his innovation can express itself. His environment needs easily available capital in the hands of free men, so that he has rich opportunities to seek that capital and utilize it. The entrepreneur also needs a system of justice that protects his efforts and his coworkers. He needs a system of individual liberty where the

Highly recommended reading. But note that, while I've never had occasion to correct Tom Engelhardt before, he errs in attributing the beginning of U.S. involvement with what we now call Al-Qaeda to the Reagan era. In fact, that honor belongs to the Carter Administration, specifically to then National Security Advisor and arch-anti-Communist Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, who wanted to give the Soviet Union its own "Viet Nam moment."  

I get so expasperated by "thank you for your service" that I usually just respond that it would be good to inquire how someone feels about their "service" before they say "thank you for your service." There are many veterans who haven't fallen for the "hero" and "patriot" propaganda constantly being spread about "our troops" and "our veterans." Many of us are far less than proud of what we did in the military and the wars we fought. Anyone who repeats that horrible "thank you" slogan is in reality displaying just how ignorant they are of the reasons the U.S. goes to war and in my experience just as ignorant about how many millions of people we have killed and maimed, both military and civilians alike. Example: We killed over 3 million Vietnamese. The men and women we fought were true patriots. We were foreign invaders. I sum up the wisdom I gained from 27 months plus one day in Viet Nam as follows:  "When you find yourself part of an invading force in a foreign land fighting patriots, it's time for a reality check on your world view." The same could be just as accurately be said of those who say, "thank you for your service."   

U.S. demonstrations were blacked out by MSM. But American Israel Firsters are complaining about them. I gather there was a minor dust-up between them and pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Boston.  Latest casualty figures I've seen are over 170 dead and 700 wounded in Palestine, 2/3 of the wounded being women and children. No casualties in Israel so far. The U.S.-supplied "Iron Dome" missile defense system is swatting aside missiles headed for populated areas and military targets. The hopeful news is that this time there are demonstrators, in growing numbers, supporting Palestinians globally.