What Lurks over the Horizon? Redux

I wrote “What Lurks over the Horizon?” November 2008 just before the General Election. At that time, several “conservative” outlets were routinely publishing my commentaries, but none of them wanted to publish this piece. Go figure. A few months later I started my own blog, The Millstone Diaries. It was my first blog post, and I posted it for posterity’ sake March 2009. Read it if you dare. Peace.

I.M.Kane

What Lurks over the Horizon?

America stands poised at the edge of a precipice; her next step could send her plummeting headlong to an untimely death. Yet, to even suggest such a possibility opens the door to charges of alarmism or hyperbolic fear-mongering. The chattering classes preach that a dictatorship can’t happen here; America will survive even with one-party rule and a radical socialist in the White House. The radio talk-show host, whose persistent pipes of “Let not your heart be troubled,” has done little to allay my fears for what is likely to happen to my country if the Democrats gain a super majority in Congress and Barack Obama wins the presidency.

It seems that conservative and libertarian pundits and commentators have not connected the dots to see the picture that I see, for they would be sounding the alarm and warning Americans of the radicalism that is about to bring down their nation. Then again, perhaps some have captured the image through their rose-colored glasses but are so attached to their celebrity status that they dare not point it out for fear of being ostracized and labeled a “kook” by their more “sensible” colleagues.

Call me a kook and detest me, but name-calling and rejection will not stop this watchman from warning our fence-sitting Americans of what lurks over the horizon. Facts are stubborn things; they are not opinions subject to debate, and for that reason, two plus two always equal four, not five, contrary to the slogans in Stalin’s Soviet Union or the announcements from the Party of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the media and creates the Party’s deceptive propaganda, doesn’t know for sure if two plus two equal five, as the Party claims, “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

Here we stand a divided country on the brink of entering a nightmare world, unprecedented in American politics, with an undecided electorate who are unsure for whom they will vote in this election. They see Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, six of one, half-dozen of the other, without a dime’s difference between them. Like Winston Smith, they don’t know if two plus two equal four or two and two make five.

Unlike Smith, our undecideds don’t live in an Orwellian society under a totalitarian government, at least not yet, so why don’t they know a radical socialist when they see one? Perhaps they can’t distinguish a radical socialist from a moderate conservative because they have absorbed so much conflicting information from the media making it impossible to sort out.

Conservative pundits and commentators have made a critical error in judgment by depicting Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. Obama is anything but liberal; he is a radical socialist ideologue whose worldview and personality traits align him more with the revolutionary demagogues Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez than they do George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. This is why Castro writes in a column that Obama is “the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency.”

Add the word progressive to the word Democrat and you get activists demanding a socialist agenda; i.e., massive income redistribution from corporations and the wealthy to low income workers and the poor; massive reductions in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; universal healthcare; living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and if Obama is elected, use income taxes to fund abortions.

In other words, you get the issues and causes championed by both the House Progressive Caucus (HPC), which is now the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives, and the country’s most radical socialist presidential candidate. HPC, a group made up of the most radical social democrats in Congress, is involved in symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is the largest socialist organization in the United States.is the principal affiliate of the Socialist International, which claims to be the successor to Karl Marx’s “First International,” founded in London in 1864.

During his commencement address at Harvard, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” Eric Hoffer correctly analyzed that socialist movements attract the misfits who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives, who blame their own condition on outside forces, and think that a change in the world around them will suddenly transform their identities and magically cure their problems. The people caught up in socialist movements are searching for meaning in their lives; therefore, they often hate the present and passionately seek a perfect tomorrow.

Hoffer understood that America had a vigorous and healthy society because of the quality of its common people. Until recently, most Americans have been comfortable in their own skin and satisfied with their own lives, which explains why they have not been mesmerized by socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. But now, far too many Americans are mesmerized by Obama’s words and image, not for what he’s accomplished, but for what they hope he will become.

Never before has a politician had such a captivating effect on so many Americans. Such a grandiose claim “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” by the charismatic leader of change about himself and the ruling clique of radical socialists in Congress is reason enough to give pause. Mark Levin says his greatest concern is whether the majority of voters will prove “susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue.”

It’s regrettable when any nation’s people surrender their hearts and minds over to a despot; but when the electorate of the freest people in the greatest nation on earth do it, “[t]his prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” What happened in Germany with Hitler, happened again in Cuba with Castro, and can happen here in the United States with Obama. It was the ordinary people who carried out the leader’s heinous crimes and murders believing in the glorious tomorrow promised them. “Of all tyrannies,” writes C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

The Germans had enormous war debts and a terrible economy, so they believed the charismatic leader who personified hope and went on to elect the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) that promised change. The Cubans also supported a young, charismatic leader who promised change, and they openly embraced his idea without asking what kind of change or knowing the price they would have to pay. The upshot for our undecided electorate to ponder is that freedom is not free and “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

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DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION, DON’T AMEND IT

Defend the Constitution, Don’t Amend It

By Jerry A. Kane

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”— Thomas Jefferson

Many Americans are too intellectually lazy to act as vigilant citizens, so they have deferred that responsibility to lobbyists and activists promoting an Article V “Convention for proposing Amendments,” a.k.a. the Convention of States (CoS) Project.

Article V of the Constitution establishes two ways for proposing amendments to the Constitution: “whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states.”

The CoS Project wants to convene a convention to propose amendments that will “impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”

The problem is America’s tyrannical federal government did not arise due to a defect in the Constitution; leviathan arose because the Constitution is not being enforced and obeyed. That is to say, the Constitution is not flawed but the enforcement of its provisions is. And quick-fix repairs offered under the guise of “reining in the federal government” could backfire and open up the Constitution to revisions or wholesale rewrites.

“One of the most serious problems Article V poses is a runaway convention. There is no enforceable mechanism to prevent a convention from reporting out wholesale changes to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Moreover, the absence of any mechanism to ensure representative selection of delegates could put a runaway convention in the hands of single-issue groups whose self-interest may be contrary to our national well-being.”—Arthur Goldberg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, op-ed Miami Herald, 1986

We don’t need a cadre of politicians, pundits, media personalities, and establishment elites to “fix” our Constitution with their words and amendments when the Constitution is not broken. The Constitution should be preserved, protected, and defended from tinkering by these tinhorns and their moneyed interests.

Our Constitution is a historical miracle and a one-of-a-kind document that is the envy of the world. To convene a convention to alter it is not only foolhardy but it is tempting fate.

“Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.”—Daniel Webster

In “Dangers of an Article V Constitutional Convention,” the 55 minute video below, KrisAnne Hall and Peter Boyce explain the problems with the Convention of States idea.

“For one to fundamentally transform America, it would take structural changes to the Constitution.”—Peter Boyce

A CoS would provide the structural changes that are needed to complete Barack Obama’s transformation of America. Listen carefully and weigh the arguments presented by Hall and Boyce to understand the inherent dangers of the CoS Project

Americans need to realize that once the CoS application triggers an Article V Convention for proposing amendments, the entire Constitution will be subject to amendment. The truth is a Convention of States will destroy our Constitution if it is not stopped now.

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The Democrats Must Go This November

The following speech was delivered at “Freedom Celebration for We the People” Tea Party Rally Saturday on the steps of the Indiana County Court House in Indiana, Pennsylvania October 2, 2010.

 

The Democrats Must Go This November

By Jerry A. Kane

How yuns doin’? Living in the belly of the beast and in the People’s Republic of Maryland for the past twelve years makes me long for Western Pennsylvania and use that plural pronoun again.

I.M. Kane, I write social and political commentaries and report goings-on at my blog, The Millstone Diaries. I’m married with three kids in their thirties, three grandchildren, and one wife who thinks I make George Costanza an appealing catch and Cosmo Kramer a towering intellect. So there’s really only one reason why you should pay any mind to what I have to say here today, and that is it’s the truth.

Now that I’ve dispensed with the pleasantries, let me say upfront that I’m not a motivational speaker, nor am I here to ingratiate myself to any political party or even to the tea party movement for that matter. Think of me as someone back from a reconnaissance mission with information that describes the situation at hand. Therefore, if you find what I say offensive, remember to keep the message separate from the messenger. That is, don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player, not the piper who makes mice dance. 

In 1933, Winston Churchill tried in vain to alert his countrymen to the dangers of the charismatic corporal and the Nazi Party that had come to power demanding German “living space” from neighboring countries. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis built super highways and affordable cars for the common man and won the affection of many Germans. But at the same time, he was building munitions factories, tanks, ships, submarines, and airplanes in preparation for war.

Churchill repeatedly warned his government and the British people to prepare for war against the rising tyranny, but he was derided by Parliament and mocked by the media. The majority of the British people were weary from fighting the First World War and worn out from striving to survive the Great Depression of 1929, so they denied the truth about what Hitler and the Nazis were planning and refused to confront the approaching tyranny.

Today, a majority of Americans are weary from the war on terrorism, worn out from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and live in denial much like the Brits of the early 1930s. A majority of Americans reject the truth about Barack Obama and the Democrat Party and refuse to confront the approaching tyranny.

You heard it right. I am comparing the current situation in the United States to Germany in the early 1930s and Barack Obama and the Democrat Party to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and for good reason.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party could have been stopped July 31, 1932, in a special election had a majority of Germans read Mein Kampf and comprehended the outline of what he planned to do. But not enough did, and the Nazis won 230 seats and became the largest political party in the Reichstag.

On the basis of that special election, Hitler demanded to be appointed chancellor in control of the state, and six months later President Hindenburg met his demands. What’s interesting is that the Nazis never captured more than 37 percent of the national vote or gained a majority of seats in the Reichstag. However, with Hitler in the chancellery they were able to consolidate power and take control of the government with relative ease.

Hitler and the Nazi Party were driven to change Germany and that change brought down the republic and established a fascist state and dictatorial rule. The Germans instinctively knew that Hitler and the Nazis were bad news; they just didn’t know how bad the news would be.

Obama and the Democrat Party are on a mission to transform America, and that is bad news; yet far too many Americans remain clueless to the significance of that fact. Back in 2008, they heard the word change and turned the nation over to Barack Obama and the Democrat Party to take the country in a different direction from where George W. Bush and the neoconservative, RINO Republicans had been taking it.

They just assumed that Obama and the Democrat Party meant to change the direction of the country; they didn’t stop to think about the parsing of “is” during the Clinton years or Ronald Reagan’s signature phrase—trust, but verify.

Now they know that change didn’t mean direction; it meant speed. Obama and the Democrat Party haven’t changed the direction of the country; it’s still on the road to ruin. Only the arrival time has changed and the throttle shifted from impulse power to warp drive. But not to worry, dutiful Democrats have promised to manage the nation’s decline every step of the way.

So let’s rummage through Obama and the Democrats’ management handiwork over the past 18 months:

• They managed to push through the largest spending bill in history, an unread $787 billion porkulus package purported to jump-start the economy and create jobs; however, it served only to jack up the national debt 23 percent to $13 trillion. The bill failed badly, but that hasn’t stopped them from boasting that the stimulus “saved or created” 3 million jobs even though economics offers no quantifiable way to calculate the number of “saved jobs.”
• They managed to nationalized General Motors and the student loan industry, and meddled in the closings of thousands of General Motors and Chrysler dealerships.
• They managed to transform the American health care system in a way that harms taxpayers, health care providers, and quality patient care, and administer a stranglehold over the health care industry, forcing every American to buy health insurance.
• They managed to increase government control over tobacco and food, and under the pretense of fairness have been ruthless in their efforts to regulate political speech over talk radio and the Internet.
• They managed to seize TARP funds meant to bailout the banking system and redirected them to Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ husband’s bank that didn’t qualify, the cash-for-clunkers program, teacher unions, union supporters, and blue states that supported Obama.
• They managed to increase federal control over finance and mortgages causing housing prices to plummet wiping out equity and making it harder for people to move and take a job in a different city or state
• They managed to place a moratorium on off-shore drilling that is destroying the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico and wreaking havoc on the region’s economy.
• They managed to add jobs in the public sector while jobs in the private sector declined.
• They managed to foster an environment where more Americans are now working for the government or are on food stamps than ever before.
• They managed to quadruple the deficit and spend the nation to the brink of bankruptcy.
• They managed to have Justice Department officials sue the state of Arizona for passing an immigration law that mirrors the federal immigration law, and turn over the sovereign state of Arizona to the United Nations for prosecution of potential human rights abuses.
• They managed to allow Justice Department officials to dismiss an open-and-shut voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party and to adopt a no-prosecution policy for blacks who violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  

In 18 short months, the policies implemented by Barack Obama’s Bread and Circuses Salvation Sideshow Administration and the legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress have made the current Democrat Party the greatest enemy of economic liberty and personal freedom in American history, and this is why the Democrats must go this November.

Now I realize that the Tea Party movement prides itself on being nonpartisan, but neutrality in this environment is a heinous word. Obama and the Democrat Party will not stop their relentless pursuit of power. You can write letters, sign petitions, and rally in DC til the cows come home, but the combined efforts of your angry protestations will never persuade them to abandon their radical agenda to transform America. The truth is the Democrat Party is controlled by leftist ideologues and led by true believers.

Our country’s future is imperiled because too many patriots in the Tea Party movement refuse to draw a clear distinction between the two parties and blame both parties equally for the problems America faces.

Granted, the Republican Party’s neo-conservative/RINO wing deserves some blame, but the Party does have a conservative-leaning, libertarian-minded grass roots base; whereas the Democrat Party doesn’t have a conservative/libertarian wing and its Astroturf base consists of labor unions and leftist-leaning, statist-minded special interest groups.

In other words, the Democrats act like gangsters, and the Republicans like bad cops on the take. So the question before you this November is which of the two parties can be reformed?

George Soros and the leftist elite have invested too much time and money and are too close to transforming the U.S. into a fascist state under a socialist dictator to allow grass-root commoners from the Tea Party movement to gain control of their Party. Besides, real reform needs a party base to support and carry it out, and there’s no chance of that happening as long as iron-fisted union and special interest thugocracies rule the base. Like it not, the answer is the Republican Party by default.

The 2010 midterm election is as vital for the survival of our Republic as the 1932 special election was to Germany’s. Had the German people put aside their differences and united to defeat the Nazis in that election, the world would never have known one of its worst mass murderers and the Nazi Party would have faded into the shadows.

Churchill called World War II the unnecessary war because he believed it could have been prevented had the European democracies not backed down from the tyrant. When Hitler threatened to seize Czechoslovakia in September 1938, he told General Keitel that he would not enter the country unless he was convinced that France and England would not intervene.

The French and English forces were vastly superior and outnumbered those of Germany at the time. Hitler was the typical tyrant. He preyed on weakness and respected superior force. Had the French and English people not been led by weak and fearful leaders willing to appease Hitler, he would have backed down. But instead they fed the crocodile hoping they would be the last to be eaten.

World War II is the greatest tragedy of the modern era for it could have been averted if the German people had voted against the Nazis in that ’32 election or the British had heeded Churchill’s warning about the rising threat in ’33.

However, a worst catastrophe awaits us if we fail to learn the lessons from that election and Churchill’s warning. I submit that you are here today because you sense that the upcoming November election is not politics as usual, that something terrible is about to happen to our country if we don’t prevent it.

You have such a sense of urgency and foreboding that you can almost feel the enveloping inhuman repression crushing you. You sense that the dreams from Obama’s father are really nightmares for America. Inwardly you’re screaming, “Stop the madness … the Chicago-style politics … the overreaching regulations … the overbearing nanny state.”

You approach the media for redress of your grievances, and they report that you are too stupid, too uninformed, and too uneducated to understand the nuances involved in all that Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are doing to transform America.

The truth is the American media have been reduced to a gaggle of crippled weaklings controlled by fear serving up Democrat talking points and Party propaganda. They won’t recognize wickedness and immorality unless it’s to denounce those who do. You trust them at your own peril.

So the battle lines have been drawn. It remains to be seen whether or not the electorate will be fooled with Democrat attack ads, appeals to petty distractions, or cries of independent-mindedness. They are running from Obama, Pelosi, and Reid now, but never forget the cheers of “Yes We Can!” when they passed the stimulus bill, and they yelled it even louder when they passed ObamaCare, and they will scream it at the top of their lungs when they cram cap and trade and immigration reform down our throats if they are not stopped this November.

If Churchill was right in saying that “Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play, and freedom and a respect for other people” and “is not some harlot in the street to be picked up by some man with a Tommy gun” then the Democrat party is anything but democratic for it has shown nothing but contempt for democracy.

America is special, a unique country worth saving. It is not just another nation; it embodies the ideal of man’s inalienable rights. If America is to survive, it must undergo a major change in the balance of power. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the Democrat Party have plundered this nation’s wealth and destroyed its free market system long enough.

November begins the reckoning, and “we are the guardians of causes so precious to the world, that we must … ‘Lay aside every impediment.'” After all, what is the use of the tea party if it is not to strive to uphold the American ideal for those who will live in these United States after we are gone?

Wake up, Tea Party patriots. You are the hope of America.

Thank you and God’s speed.

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