We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.

~Barack Obama, November 22, 2008

Where, exactly does Barack Obama think we live? America is not the war torn Italy of the 1950s. Nor is it a third world country struggling to modernize infrastructure. It is the United States of America. Our highway systems, our ports, our buildings and our technology are the best in the world.

However, what Barack Obama has in mind is not primarily the improvement of our "crumbling roads". It is rather, simply Obama embracing the "Obama as FDR" mantra that the media is trying to hammer home. Obama is obliging them with his very own WPA 2.0 proposal. A proposal that is laden with the dogma of dependency, just as the original New Deal was.

In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided millions of jobs for Americans who needed them. Jobs ranged from digging ditches to painting murals to building bridges or playing music. When it was finally abolished, the Project employed 8.5 million people and cost over 11 billion dollars.

There are in my community still buildings and bridges and murals that were WPA projects. I am a big fan of the National Park Posters that were commissioned as WPA work. The WPA was a beneficial (for the most part) program at that time in American history. At that time the United States was a growing economy, trying to modernize factories and cities. There was a need for highway building as the nation expanded into the west.

And yet, still, the WPA had serious shortcomings.

Incentive for quality, speedy work was low. The Program was subject to the political machinations of the FDR movement, and the projects undertaken were not always useful, needed or wanted. The program also created a dependency on the government for work. Instead of promoting free market enterprise and entrepreneurship, the WPA simply provided risk free jobs to any and everyone who asked.

Obama has visions dancing in his head of a modern, greener WPA. He campaigned heavily on his goal to create millions of "green jobs".

A stark difference in the WPA of old, and the new Obama Works Progress Administration is the method in which the program will be implemented. That is, Obama will require participation in the new WPA. He will mandate oil and gas companies to be more green and to invest and research in green technologies. He will limit the expenditures of traditional energy creation technologies in favor of unproven and costly alternative energy sources.

Obama is hellbent on "solar and wind technology". He intends to spend billions creating jobs based around solar and wind technology. But he has never asked if solar and wind can a) sustain jobs for any meaningful amount of time, b) is needed or wanted, and c) if it is a viable alternative to coal and gas.

Like everything else about Obama, his energy and economic proposals are filled with unknowns.



Obama will require car companies to meet MPG and emission standards even more stringent the what already exists. Standards that are crippling American auto-makers today. Standards that are causing the Big Three auto companies to fail. He will require them to build hybrids, regardless of the the market demand for them. In the name of environmentalism and greenery, Obama will oversee the death of American automobile production. He will watch jobs flock to Toyota and Honda, as those two thriving companies flee back to Japan where they are free of the zealotry and idealistic greenery of the Left.

And so, he may commission people to draw pictures, write music, and fix pot holes. He may spend billions of tax payer dollars for city parks, bike lanes, murals and poetry. But to require and define the technological and economic progress (or lack there of) of industry is more of the liberalism of decay that has plagued this nation since the days of FDR. If people want cars that run on hope and change, then the market will comply. If people demand cars that get 50 miles per gallon, then the market will comply. But to create a product based on the ideology and dogma of a demagogue President will lead to the destruction of the free market industrialism and innovation that has created the greatest economy in the history of mankind.

As he did throughout his entire campaign, Obama is promising the eloquent damning of personal freedom. Let the people determine what is an efficient vehicle. Let the people, and the market determine what companies live or die. Let people create the need for new technology, new jobs and new industry.

The key to productive and meaningful job creation is creating a need for those jobs. The Free Market is the most efficient creator of jobs there has ever been. Barack Obama can't create a need for certain goods and services. He will try, through mandates, laws, and policy that will bankrupt industries he disapproves of. That is the new WPA of Barack Obama. He will kill existing jobs in the coal, gas and auto industries, then propose an "economic rescue package" that puts people to work planting trees.

It is, as it always has been with the Left, the poison of dependency.

And when people are busy planting trees or installing "hybrid car charging stations" along our crumbling highways the press will swoon over the economy of greenery and the vision of the enlightened one, Barack Obama. As innovation diminishes and dependency flourishes the people will sit comfortably in the lukewarm mediocrity of government aided work projects.

Maybe Obama is right. Maybe we are on the verge of another Great Depression.

The evidence clearly indicates that our most cherished rights and interests are all a part of the American way of life. Can communism, socialism, fascism, or any other coercive system provide these priceless blessings which flow to us as a part of our American way of life? The common denominator of all these coercive systems is the curtailment of individual liberty. Surely we will all agree that our Constitution provides the basis for the only economic system acceptable to true Americans.

~Ezra Taft Benson, 1974

There is an unsettled and anxious energy spreading throughout conservatives today. With the election of Barack Obama, and his impending presidency, the question is being asked: Will Obama try to limit our individual rights?

It is a legitimate concern, even if some on the Left see it as unwarranted paranoia. The political environment that fostered Barack Obama is founded on the socialism of State dependence. It is predicated upon individuals being reliant on the State for, not only income and care, but for permission and clearance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

As Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, father of modern liberalism, and mentor to Hillary Rodham, Barack Obama and Bill Ayers wrote, "...we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace..."

There are certainly places in the world, both historically and currently where power is "given" to the people by the benevolent government. The United States is not one of those places. In the United States, it is the people who give power to the government. The individual is granted certain inalienable rights, not by the government, or by a Dear Leader, but by God. That is, just being a living, breathing person grants you the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The Constitution of the United States did not create these rights, but rather it recognizes and protects them. The Constitution guarantees these rights.

However, to the Alinsky pupil the Constitution is not absolute. It can shift and adapt according to the current social agenda. The Alinksy student views the Constitution as a "living, breathing document". When, in fact the document is just the opposite. It is absolute, clear, and subject to only the interpretations of those who govern. Indeed, the Constitution fits into the world view of the Alinsky model the same way any other truth does, that is, it is relative and shifting. No truth is absolute. Alinsky declared that:

An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth -- truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations or society presents.

Barack Obama, steeped in the Alinsky ideology, is the ultimate example of how this model works. He declared that it was time for change, without ever explicitly stating what he meant. He left that up to the interpretation of the people. Change was for Obama, whatever the people demanded it to be. His entire campaign was based on awakening the people to a sense of their awful situation. His tireless proclamation for change, and a "fundamental transformation" of the American way of life was easily adapted to whatever demands the masses were making. Whether to end the war in Iraq, or to lower taxes or to provide health care, "change" was all that Obama had to promise.

And what is the American way of life he seeks to change?

Capitalistic individual freedom. The freedom to succeed, or to fail. The freedom of risk. Without risk there is no failure and no success. And without failure and without success there is no liberty, no freedom, no prosperity. There is only universal unhappiness. There is only universal poverty. There is no growth, economic or otherwise. The great open secret of America's success is that the individual citizen has embraced the idea that any one of us can take a risk, walk out onto a sheet of thin ice, and succeed. Even failure is not a deterrent to success. Because in spite of and in the midst of failure, the experiment can be repeated, again and again. Until at last, like Edison and his light bulb, the triumph of the individual trumps the inherent pitfalls of risk.

The dependency doctrine of Barack Obama and Saul Alinsky seeks to curtail, even eliminate the individual's freedom to take risks. They do this by pitting the rich against the poor. They agitate those who have less (many of whom have never risked anything) into believing that those who have more (often obtained at significant personal risk) are responsible for the plight of the poor, and as such owe a great debt to society. Alinsky was crystal clear in explaining this tactic:

A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism.

Barack Obama, as one marinated in this sort of dogma campaigned heavily on the gap between the rich and the poor, and on closing that gap through increasing taxes on the rich and giving that money to the poor. In other words, he'd make everyone poor. Equal, but poor. He said:

What [Bill Clinton] wasn’t able to do was address the emerging structural imbalance in our economy — partly due to globalization, partly due to technology and automation — where increasingly the benefits of economic growth were accruing to a smaller band of people.

Or, as Ezra Taft Benson described it:

...during the past few years, particularly, loud voices have been calling attention to the weaknesses of private enterprise without pointing out its virtues. We have been teaching our people to depend upon government instead of relying upon their own initiative as did our pioneer forefathers. Our freedom to work out our individual destinies has been abridged. We have been looking upon government as something apart from us and have failed to realize that we, the people, are the government.

Barack Obama seeks to expand the role of government into our personal lives. He seeks to become a soft dictator, in that he will require our dependence on his government if we are to be successful. No success can come without his permission.

He has proposed required community service for students, suggested limits on how often and far we ought to be able to drive our cars. He has pointed toward limiting our energy consumption through price signals, designed to "change human behavior". The result of such price manipulation would cause energy prices to "skyrocket". He doggedly pursued voices of dissent during his presidential campaign, threatening to shut down the radio stations, newspapers, and television channels of those who did not speak favorably of him.

He has mocked the capitalist system of government that has created more individual wealth than the world has ever seen while pursuing the implementation of an economic policy which has never, and will never succeed.

We must remember that government assistance and control are essentially political provisions, and that experience has demonstrated that, for that reason, they are not sufficiently stable to warrant their utilization as a foundation for sound economic growth under a free enterprise system. The best way—the American way—is still maximum freedom for the individual.

~Ezra Taft Benson

The most interesting, most controversial, and most watched ballot item after the race for the White House was California's Proposition 8. The initiative to amend the California Constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage. It predictably came down to a battle between religion and secularism. At least, in general. There are of course religious people who opposed the measure, and secular people who in turn supported it.

The Proposition is in reaction to the California Supreme Court overruling a previous initiative that defined marriage as "between one man and one woman". The court tossed that notion out, and legalized same-sex marriage in the State.

Several churches banded together to support Proposition 8 including the Roman Catholic Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Knights of Columbus, and the Union of Orthodox Jews of America, to name a few.

Proposition 8 passed 52.5% to 47.5%.

Today opponents of the amendment descended upon the LDS temple in Los Angeles. The people were furious at the LDS church for its organized and influential support of Proposition 8. Despite the ballot passing with millions of non-LDS votes, the church is being demonized for its rather organized and successful fund-raising efforts to support the amendment. The bitterness directed toward the church is nothing short of what can always be expected from the megaphone classes of the Left.

The Left loves to come unhinged at supposed violations of human rights. And they have no more favorite target than religion. Bill Maher has made a career (and an awful movie) mocking the sacred lives of millions of Americans. The only answer to what the angry Left has bitterly labeled as bigotry, is bigotry.

To equate gay marriage to the civil rights movements of the 1960s is an insult to the people who put their lives on the line during that volatile time in American History. But history for the Left is simply a tool to be manipulated for their own personal and political gain.

However, the beauty of the United States is in the freedom people have to determine public policy. As Lance Starr wrote concerning Proposition 8,

It is my stated belief that if the citizens of a certain state feel that they wish to extend the benefits and privileges to same sex partners, that is their legal right, and while I think it makes for poor public policy, the right to enact bad public policy rests with us all. I do, however, vehemently object to imposition of same sex marriage on a populace via judicial fiat.

He goes on to point out that,

There is no question that the state (meaning a democratically elected government) has the right to try to encourage behaviors that are beneficial to the state while simultaneously trying to discourage behaviors that are not. This fact is so ingrained into our governmental fabric that no one even notices it any longer.

The people of California have, yet again, voiced their opinion on the matter of same-sex marriage, and once again the majority does not favor them being legal. Will the court this time honor that voice?

In fact it can be argued that Proposition 8 was less about same-sex marriage, than it was about the Rule of Law, and maintaining constitutional principles. The issue behind the proposition could have been school vouchers, a hand gun ban, or a mundane change to when and how often the state congress should meet. The issue was, frankly irrelevant. It just happened in this case to be a very emotionally driven subject that is often debated not with reason or logic, but with passion and conviction.

Proposition 8 was, in effect, a chance for Californians to tell the activist judges who disregarded the will of the people to go to hell. It was a chance for citizens to stand up for the Rule of Law, for the democratic process and for citizens rights. Real rights. Not imagined or fabricated.

Marriage is not a right. It is a custom and tradition. The government does not determine the validity or legality of custom or tradition. The people do. That is the right of the people. A right protected under the United States Constitution. And when the people speak, the government is bound by their voices to listen.

Which is why activist judges are a threat to the Rule of Law.



For the minority in any issue to be angry, disappointed, or to feel disenfranchised is normal and expected. But screaming bitterly into the air, proclaiming that the majority is evil, rotten, hateful and ignorant is fruitless. Such behavior undermines any merits to the original argument, and furthers any stereotypes that the minority is such because of their inability to recognize the ideological superiority of those who oppose them. Regardless of what ideology (if any) is actually superior.

The success of Proposition 8 has not ended the same-sex marriage debate. And neither has it ended the judicial stomping of the Rule of Law. But it was a significant victory for the principles that bind this nation together. If the Rule of Law fails, then so will the Republic.

Campaing workers who canvassed for Barack Obama are learning to be more patriotic this morning.

The line was long and the crowd was angry at times.

"I want my money today! It's my money. I want it right now!" yelled one former campaign worker.

Easy now. No need for shouting. The One needs your money as well. After all, when you spread the wealth around, it is better for everyone.

"They gave us $10 an hour. So we added it. I added up all the hours so it was supposed to be at least $120. All I get is $90," said Charles Martin.

"I worked nine hours a day for 4 days and got paid half of what I should have earned," said Randall Waldon.

Your patriotism has been duly noted. Barack Obama and Joe Biden thank you.

In this retreat from freedom the voices of protesting citizens have been drowned by raucous shouts of intolerance and abuse from those who led the retreat and their millions of gullible youth, who are marching merrily to their doom, carrying banners on which are emblazoned such intriguing and misapplied labels as social justice equality, reform patriotism social welfare.

~W.C. Mullendore

It is impossible to establish communism as the immediate successor to capitalism. It is accordingly proposed to establish socialism as something which we can put in the place of our present decaying capitalism. Hence, communists work for the establishment of socialism as a necessary transition stage on the road to communism.

~John Strachey

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

~Barack Obama

In order to achieve a great object, an important social object, there must be a main force, a bulwark, a revolutionary class. Next it is necessary to organise the assistance of an auxiliary force for this main force; in this case this auxiliary force is the Party, to which the best forces of the intelligentsia belong. Just now you spoke about "educated people." But what educated people did you have in mind? Were there not plenty of educated people on the side of the old order in England in the seventeenth century, in France at the end of the eighteenth century, and in Russia in the epoch of the October Revolution? The old order had in its service many highly educated people who defended the old order, who opposed the new order. Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down. Of course, the proletariat, socialism, needs highly educated people. Clearly, simpletons cannot help the proletariat to fight for socialism, to build a new society. I do not underestimate the role of the intelligentsia; on the contrary, I emphasize it. The question is, however, which intelligentsia are we discussing?

~Joseph Stalin