Dinesh D'Souza: How Obama Thinks

Via Forbes.com:

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

You will find the whole thing at this link.

So far, this is the best article I have seen yet that comes close to explaining what and who this nation voted to send to the White House in November of 2008.

See also the White House response here.

My take is, given the derision displayed by the White House over this, Mr. D'Souza must have hit pretty close to the center of the target.

(h/t: Everybody who emailed this to me)

Florida School Teaches Kids About Life Under Communism

Via HeraldTribune.com:

The line: "I will serve the glorious East German state better."

The students copied it repeatedly after watching a propaganda film depicting the evils of Western culture.

The drill was part of a history lesson taken to an elaborate level Tuesday at Pine View, where Stephany and the rest of the 2,000 students participated in an interactive lesson commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

"This was a project of the history club, and their idea was that students should really have an idea of what it was like to live in a communist state," said social studies teacher Patricia Johnston, who helped organize the project and served as the lead "comrade."

Students, with the help of a local landscaping company, erected a nearly 100-foot paper replica of the Berlin wall, complete with graffiti. It stood across the middle of the campus to mimic the concrete wall that separated communist East Germany from capitalist West Germany from 1961 to the end of 1989.

You will find the entire story at this link.

I think this is a really great idea, given today's widespread and profound ignorance of what communism really is all about, particularly among younger Americans.

What I find truly amazing about this is that Pine View is a government school for gifted students.

Perhaps this idea will spread so that the evils of the most murderous, tyrannical and freedom-robbing form of government the world has yet seen will not be forgotten - lest they be repeated.

America's Declining Economic Freedom

If, like me, you are one who pays fairly close attention to the level of freedom and liberty we still enjoy as citizens of the greatest experiment in freedom that has ever been conducted since the first historians began scratching figures into the walls of caves, you have no doubt noticed that we have been losing said freedoms at what I consider to be an alarming, as well as an unacceptable, rate.

Like me, you have probably wondered from time to time just exactly where we stack up against the rest of the world in this all-important area. Well, the people at the Heritage Foundation have been examining this, as they do each year, and have come up with some analysis that should send a chill down the spine of anyone who truly values their freedom, particularly that of the economic variety. One year ago, we were the sixth freest economy in the world, which was pretty pathetic. Now we have dropped to eighth place.

Via the Wall Street Journal (Bolds are mine):

The United States is losing ground to its major competitors in the global marketplace, according to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom released today by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. This year, of the world's 20 largest economies, the U.S. suffered the largest drop in overall economic freedom. Its score declined to 78 from 80.7 on the 0 to 100 Index scale.

The U.S. lost ground on many fronts. Scores declined in seven of the 10 categories of economic freedom. Losses were particularly significant in the areas of financial and monetary freedom and property rights. Driving it all were the federal government's interventionist responses to the financial and economic crises of the last two years, which have included politically influenced regulatory changes, protectionist trade restrictions, massive stimulus spending and bailouts of financial and automotive firms deemed "too big to fail." These policies have resulted in job losses, discouraged entrepreneurship, and saddled America with unprecedented government deficits.

In the world-wide rankings of economic freedom, the U.S. fell to eighth from sixth place. Canada now ranks higher and boasts North America's freest economy. More worrisome, for the first time in the Index's 16-year history, the U.S. has fallen out of the elite group of countries identified as "economically free" by the objective measures of the Index. Four Asia-Pacific economies now sit atop the global rankings. Hong Kong stands in first place for the 16th consecutive year, followed by Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Every region of the world maintains at least one country among those deemed "free" or "mostly free" by the Index.

You will find the rest at this link. I strongly encourage you to read it in its entirety.

I have to believe the overall decline of America is reversible, even though it flies in the face of recorded history.

What helped get us here was the spread of the idea that people could use government to loot the property of others. That idea can be eliminated, even though doing so is an extremely tall order.

History does not have to repeat itself.

Sixty-Eight Years Ago Today - December 07, 1941

President Roosevelt's speech to the nation:



Sixty-eight years ago, America saw a great evil and, in near unison, rose up and removed that evil's shadow from the face of the Earth.

That was nearly a lifetime ago, and in a very different America. I fear we shall never see the likes of that America again.

For History Buffs: Claretta Petacci's Diaries

Note: Claretta (Clara) Petacci was the mistress of Benito Mussolini.

Via Telegraph.co.uk:

Claretta Petacci's journals, which will be published this week, describe a meeting he [Mussolini] had with the German leader in 1938 after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland.

"The Fuhrer was very kind. At heart, Hitler is an old sentimentalist. When he saw me he had tears in his eyes," Mussolini told his lover.

The diaries also show Mussolini was irritated by being regarded as a junior partner to Hitler, maintaining that his fascism and anti-Semitism dated back to the 1920s, before Hitler rose to prominence.

You will find the entire article here.

Poland Marks 65th Anniversary of Warsaw Uprising

Sixty-five years ago today, the Polish Home Army launched a rebellion against the Hitlerite horde, which was carrying out a brutal occupation of their homeland. Though the action failed in only two short months, I will always have the utmost respect for the people involved, just as I have for the brave Chetniks, who kept many of our downed fliers alive during that war, despite soul-crushing poverty and the hideous danger their actions put them in:

The 1944 uprising was led by the Home Army -- commanded by Poland's London-based government-in-exile -- which secretly deployed around 50,000 fighters in Warsaw.

It was part of a series of Polish revolts behind German lines as a Soviet offensive drove back the Nazis.

Against overwhelming odds, the poorly-armed Home Army began preparing as early as 1940. It hoped to take the entire city in 1944 but could only seize pockets.

Around 18,000 Polish fighters died in the revolt, and some 17,000 Nazi troops. Around 200,000 civilians were massacred, or killed by crossfire and bombing, as the Nazis took Warsaw back street by street.

You can read the rest of the Breitbart article here.

If you are interested, you can read more about those heroic peoples and their actions here and here.

I will always hold, in the very highest esteem, those peoples who willingly risk their lives in an effort to gain their own freedom from any form of tyranny.

As history has sadly demonstrated, this brand of courage is a decided rarity among the members of the human race.