On Dec. 9th, 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack on our forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a result, America formally joined the war against the Axis powers.
2,402 American servicemen were killed and 1,282 were wounded.
This is in memory of them.
-By Warner Todd Huston
PBS and documentary maker Ken Burns have done it again with a wonderful look at the political lives of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. But if the series did anything it revealed to a discerning viewer how Franklin rebuilt the presidency on a pillar of hate and lies and remade the Democrat Party into a party driven by purposeful misdirection and deceit.
Certainly the series approaches these two consequential presidents as good for the country. Neither were as salubrious for the country as popular opinion holds and both did a lot of damage. To Burns’ credit he does allow conservative commentator George Will to slip in a few digs at how both Teddy and Franklin tore down the presidency and turned our country from a constitutional republic built on a pretty straightforward explication of the political raison d’être of any particular party, candidate or era and into a nation run by sneaky politicians who lie straight-faced to the people and don’t care about the Constitution at all.
Teddy Roosevelt did his bit to end our Constitutional republic, granted, and was followed by Woodrow Wilson who pounded a few more nails into that coffin. But it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who really destroyed the country.
The truth is, Franklin was an utterly failed president in everything but his leadership in WWII. It has to be acknowledged that his stewardship of the war was great and maybe a lesser president would have left the US more vulnerable. But there is no doubt that he materially hurt this country in every other arena.
His domestic policy was a disaster, his economic policies utterly failed, and his disregard of the rule of law and the US Constitution was a disgusting display of arrogance and hubris. By forcing the world into war, Hitler ended the Great depression, not Franklin Roosevelt.
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FDR Invented The ‘Liar-In-Chief’ And Tore Down the Democrat Party And The Country”
-By Warner Todd Huston
I have to say, I am getting a bit sick and tired of this nonsensical lament about how rotten it is that those running for president are “rich” people. Stop it right now, America. The fact is that we’ve never really had a poor man as president so talking about it as if it is news that rich people often seek the presidency is stupid. Not only that, but today it is impossible for a poor or even middle class man to run for president anyway, so get this populist silliness out of your minds right this instant.
The latest in this onslaught of populist foolishness is the New York Times (unsurprisingly) with an article full of serious tones on how hard it is going to be for two Harvard educated, Richie-Riches like Obama and Romney to win over those “blue collar Americans.”
“Both are Harvard-educated millionaires,” The Times begins sonorously. “Both have been criticized as elitist and technocratic. Both have struggled to handle the populist anger coursing through politics.”
Of course, much of that anger is fostered by the Old Media constantly harping on that “anger” by writing daily stories indulging themes of class warfare as if it is some sort of legitimate political discussion in this, a capitalist-based society.
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Come On, People! Poor Men Do Not Become President”
The New Deal Was A Failure: Hoover and FDR Prolonged the Great Depression with Big Government
The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation explains how the statist policies of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. The video also briefly explains how reductions in the burden of government spending helped the economy recover from a deep recession after World War I and to grow after World War II.
On Dec. 9th, 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack on our forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a result, America formally joined the war against the Axis powers.
2,402 American servicemen were killed and 1,282 were wounded.
In memory of them.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Andrew Thomason of the Illinois Statehouse News agency has a pair of stores on the criminal syndicate that is unions in the Land of Lincoln this week that have to be seen to be believed. In fact, these stories and the ones like them we’ve seen for the past several months in Illinois are proof positive that unions should be illegal for government employees.
In one story, Thomason reports the tale of Michael Johnson, a corrupt teacher out to milk the taxpayers dry by collecting $209,379.43 in pension benefits while at the same time also collected $324,785 from a separate Illinois pension fund. And so far this crook has already collected $1.1 million of our tax dollars on top of the $198,105 a year he makes for “part-time work” for the school district.
This is called double dipping. Johnson was able to do this because he worked at one job in Illinois education, “retired” from it, then took a second job in the same field. This means he gets two pensions to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, likely totaling up to millions by the time he dies. All paid for by the taxpayers of Illinois.
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Abuse: Union Leaders Pull Down Millions in Public Pensions in Illinois”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In his Wednesday presser on the state of the economy President Obama several times attacked those evil rich folks flying about in corporate jets saying that the filthy rich could “afford” higher taxes. But while he spent so much time slamming corporate jets today, back in 2009 the president was pushing a stimulus bill that included tax breaks to corporate jets.
In February of 2009, the stimulus package that Obama pushed heavily as the only way to “save” the country included a provision that, as the Associated Press then reported, “sharply reduces the up front tax bill for companies who buy assets like business planes.”
So, once again we have this president talking out of both sides of his mouth. Back in 2009 we needed a stimulus package that included big tax breaks to corporate jet owners, yet today those corporate jet owners are eeeevil for not paying enough taxes.
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Demagogue In Chief Slams Corp. Jets After Spending Stimulus Money on Them?”
-By Thomas E. Brewton
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke apparently is misled by fictionalized versions of two economic models: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Keynesianism and Japan’s deflation and economic stagnation.
Mr. Bernanke reads New Deal economic history with blinders firmly affixed to narrow the breadth of his vision. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he holds to his philosophically materialistic, Keynesian economics faith that manipulation of monetary quantity alone is a mathematically certain, unfailing cure for any economic downturn or increase in unemployment.
Keynesian macroeconomics depends upon a simplistic faith that mathematical inerrancy can be applied to human conduct, that the behavior of hundreds of millions of people can be conformed to an academic spreadsheet model of an economy. Keynesian logic says that, if A = B, then reversing the equation, starting with B, will produce A. Implicitly for Keynesians, if A (expanding business activity) equals (produces) more bank credit and more money in circulation, then flipping the equation and starting with B (increasing the money supply) will create more bank lending and increase business activity.
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Stop Obsessing About Japan And Deflation”
-By Warner Todd Huston
We send our students to college to learn what they need to know to become good American citizens. From this knowledge we hope that they will realize useful, maybe even successful, lives. Perhaps they’ll even gain personal improvement through introspection from it all. At least that’s what we used to think. Apparently, these days we send kids to college to be trained to hate the U.S.A. and at least in the case of Brooklyn College to learn that today Muslims are treated as badly as the African Americans or the Japanese internees of our past.
Brooklyn college has assigned all incoming freshmen to read a book titled, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” by Moustafa Bayoumi. The book is a series of vignettes imparting the immigration stories of seven Muslim Americans and their claims of the discrimination they’ve met in a post 9/11 America. Bayoumi could have written an uplifting tale of the freedoms America offers, but instead it is little else but an attack on America.
The story supposedly regales us of the lives of Muslims who have “found themselves part of the newest suspect class in the United States.” Bayoumi, also a Brooklyn College English professor, absurdly claims that the Muslims in his book — and by extension throughout America — have gone “from simply invisible to being regarded with suspicion and even actively pursued” by the U.S. government.
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U.S. College Pushes Anti-American, Pro-Islam Book”
-By Warner Todd Huston
A little contest called the Dollar ReDes$ign Project has been launched on the web and I have to say the dismal design offerings being foisted on the public are a wonder to behold. But the worst ones are by Dowling Duncan.
The designs offered by Dowling Duncan envision a one dollar bill featuring a giant photo of Barak Obama and the 100 dollar bill featuring a photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Imagine that, huh?
The two presidents that hated capitalism and wealth most are on these prototypes! FDR and Obama are the most anti-wealth and anti-capitalist presidents we’ve ever had!! Obama and Roosevelt both made money the root of all evil in their presidencies. Well, except the money they were able to funnel to their pals, supporters, and party members, that is.
Roosevelt constantly kept the nation agitated against “speculators,” even as he stole everyone’s gold and enriched his pals. Obama has followed suit with his outright hatred of evil “bankers” and his constant attacks on that “greedy Wall Street” while at the same time taking millions in donations from the very people he tries to gin the public up against.
Yet these fools want to put the two most anti-capitalist presidents in history on a re-design of our money?
The irony is just thick, isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t “irony”? Maybe it’s just leftist hero worship and outright stupidity?
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Obama and FDR on Proposed American Dollar Re-Design?”
-By Warner Todd Huston
I just returned from a nice little luncheon given by the Heartland Institute (www.heartland.org) in beautiful downtown Chicago, Illinois. The purpose of the gathering of free-market supporters and like-minded individuals was to celebrate the life’s work of famed economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman.
The principal speaker was Richard H. Timberlake*, student and friend of the celebrated economist and an accomplished free-market economist in his own right.
I’ve done several such events for some of the conservative think tanks and state policy groups in the Windy City and I enjoy these events in Chicago because I always get the uneasy feeling that our little conclave of right-thinking fellows well met is the last vestige of civilization and that we are putting on the timbers to secure the gates as the barbarians mount their attack. The barbarians of which I speak are, of course, the city full of Democrats and socialists that looms on all sides surrounding our little events.
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Heartland Institute Luncheon: This Recession Caused By Over-Regulation Not Market Failure”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember when Barack Hussein Obama first became president and the left-wing Old Media universally indulged the claim that he was “just like FDR“? Of late the Old Media has backed off that hyperbolic statement, but at least in a single incident, Obama has proven indeed to be just like FDR. The similarity entails laws about which the two presidents lied to the public in order to sell them. And in both instances, the truth only came out in court.
For FDR it was Social Security. The Roosevelt Administration sold Social Security as an “insurance” program when it began to push for the policy. The truth is, of course, that Social security and its unemployment plan adjunct is in no way an insurance program. It is welfare pure and simple.
But FDR sold it as “insurance” anyway. In 1936, for instance, FDR sternly told an audience in Pennsylvania that it was an insurance program.
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Obama’s FDR-Like Bait and Switch”