Does Obama Intend to Sue Israel Too?

The Obama administration is proving itself to be so extreme, and so extremely inept, that I, who have been talking about a split government as being advantageous, have concluded that almost any Republican would be preferable to Obama's continuing in office.

Cornel West, Princeton's African-American diversity expert, sounds like he's coming to a similar conclusion.   West says in The Boston Globe that Obamai is“a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”  I think he started reading my blog because I first said that three years ago.  West's racist Obama-supporting Princeton colleague, Paul Krugman, likely disagrees.  With a name like "Krugman" he might be concerned about Obama's eagerness to return Israel to its 1967 borders. But the Democratic Party's Judenrat is eager to defend Obama's claim that he is eager that Israel's borders be defensible once they've been returned to an indefensible position. ABC News reports that an officer of the Democratic Party's Judenrat, The Atlantic Monthly's Jeffrey Goldberg, defends Obama's statement as does the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'Rith.

The Judenrat's reasoning seems to be that Obama has been such a success at protecting America's borders that he will do an excellent job with Israel's.  In fact he is so successful at defending the US's borders that he is suing the state of Arizona.  I can see why the ADL and Jeffrey Goldberg are eager to see Obama secure Israel's borders. Obama will then sue Israel if it tries to defend itself.

On the other hand, Commentary's Omri Ceren writes:


>Having abandoned past U.S. assurances on this overarching core issue, the President is now asking the Israelis to take enormous risks—in the aftermath of a Fatah-Hamas merger, no less—based on future U.S. assurances. This frankly bizarre diplomatic and rhetorical strategy seems unlikely to succeed.

Yup. Obama thinks his Texas border policy has been so successful that he aims to transfer it to Israel.

Even worse than his Texas-in-Israel position is Obama's traitorous intent to thwart the 2nd Amendment through a United Nations treaty.  I received a call today from the National Rifle Association. The caller, an NRA member, told me that the Obama administration is planning to participate in and sign a United Nations initiative that would interfere with the 2nd Amendment.  Pajamas Media's Howard Nemerov reports:

The UN seeks a 'comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms.'

Last October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the Obama administration’s support for the United Nations plan to regulate 'convention arms transfers.' Brady-endorsed Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D, CA-10) was chosen as under secretary for arms control and international security in the State Department.

I more than doubled my lapsed membership donation to the NRA plus gave them extra to cover the membership of a serviceman.  We need the NRA to protect America from tyranny.  It is not going too far to call a president who would threaten the Second Amendment with a United Nations treaty not just a tyrant, but a traitor. 

Obama must go. The Republicans must defeat him.  Doing so will not stop America's longer term decline, which would require the election of Ron Paul or Gary Johnson plus a Tea Party Congress.  America's decline is as much due to Progressive Republicans like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush as it is to the Democrats.  But anything is better than a traitor like Obama.

The Ulster County Republicans in a Can't-Do America

I just submitted this piece to The Lincoln Eagle. 

The Ulster County Republicans in a Can't-Do America

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.*

On May 13, Robin Yess resigned from her position of chair of the Ulster County Republican Committee.  In an e-mail that she sent to the county's executive committee, which is comprised of the chairs of the town Republican committees, she wrote that the good 'ol boys' network, the GOB, is the problem with the GOP.  In particular, Yess cited five unnamed GOP county legislators who intend to vote in favor of the $80 to $100 million Golden Hill Health Care facility that will provide senior care to only one percent of Ulster County's seniors, many of whom are related to political officials and the county's wealthiest segment. The facility will cost each Ulster County taxpaying household more than $1,000, not counting interest on the loan, which could cost you another $1,000.  Yess wrote that she believes in limited government and lower taxes.  In her view support for the facility among GOP legislators is inconsistent with the GOP's principles.

               
Yess's resignation was accompanied by the usual political infighting.  But the principle ought to be of interest to anyone concerned with America's future.   Both Democrats and Republicans in Ulster County are committed to spending $100 million (not counting interest on the loan, which could amount to another $100 million) after twenty years of Ulster County's growth being one third of the national average.  New York is experiencing an exodus of young and hardworking taxpayers because of liberal taxation, and neither party senses a problem. 

              
The Golden Hill facility is an example of the age-old American phenomenon of special interest politics.  Both parties have pet causes. The Democrats have George Soros, the Trial Lawyers Association, the National Lawyers' Guild, and NYSUT, while the Republicans have Halliburton.  So it is at the county level.  Both parties have friends in the construction industry, in labor unions, and in the grant seeking business.

Both the Ulster County Law Enforcement Center--the county jail--and the Golden Hill facility benefit special interests.  Making matters worse is the absence of a serious press or media (other than The Lincoln Eagle) that employ journalists who are capable of analysis without ideology or being embedded in the special interests concerning which they are supposed to be reporting. 

Back in the day of the Second Bank of the United States, the precursor of today's Federal Reserve Bank, Whig politicians were on the Bank's payroll until Andrew Jackson, the equivalent of today's Ron Paul, abolished the bank and set the stage for the greatest economic expansion in world history.  After the Civil War, Standard Oil captured a number of state legislators, much as Bruce Ratner and The New York Times recently utilized New York State's Empire State Development Corporation to evict law-abiding property owners for Ratner's and The Times's benefit.

In the 19th century the nation's shared belief in limited government restrained lobbying.  Because Americans believed in limited government, corrupt city governments in places like New York and Minneapolis, and the corrupt federal government, could do limited damage. In those days the corruption in New York was due to the Democrats, but the corruption in the federal customs houses was due to Republicans.

The limits on corruption changed with Theodore Roosevelt's election in 1904.  TR, a Republican, strongly believed in expansion of government. Many of his ideas were copied during the 1930s and later.  TR was brighter than his more famous cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  By the 1930s both parties had adopted variants of the Progressivism that TR had adapted from Herbert Croly's Promise of American Life.  The GOP, inspired by President William Howard Taft, whom TR detested after Taft's first term, favored less regulation and opposed welfare; the Democrats, inspired by FDR, favored more regulation and a greater degree of help to the poor.  Both parties favored subsidies to the wealthy. On balance, the Democrats favored greater subsidies to both the very poor and the very rich than did Republicans, but it is difficult to generalize. Both parties changed from their Jacksonian origins to the Progressivism of Roosevelt, Taft and Woodrow Wilson.

Americans who still believe in the ideas that built America--limited government, hard work, innovation and individualism--have no representative in Ulster County, in New York State, or nationally.  The Republicans and Democrats are both Progressive.  That is, Yess is only half right about Republican principles.  The liberty Republicans, led by Ron Paul and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, are one remnant of the Jacksonian Democrats.  The rest of the GOP is comprised of Progressives and, perhaps more commonly, self-interested hacks.  There is a smaller remnant of Jacksonian Democrats within a Democratic Party which is dominated by left-wing Progressives and, just like the Republicans, self-interested hacks.

Until recently, Americans could afford to be complacent. Politicians are politicians, many have reasoned, and you can't fight city hall. But politics has become intrusive; government is ending the American way of life.  Unless the silent majority begins to take an interest, America as you once knew it will end.

The Constitution does not have a word to say about political parties, but most Americans feel that they need to vote for either Democrats or Republicans.  After all, a third party might be radical and do strange and unexpected, extremist things. For example a third party might:

-Start three wars at a time
-Quintuple the nation's money supply and hand the printed money to commercial banks and stock brokers
-Legalize unconstitutional searches and seizures
-Borrow nearly a trillion dollars and give it out to politically connected friends

-Replace the education system with an ideologically driven, politically correct indoctrination system that does not teach writing

-Propose a cap and trade law (and UN Agenda 21 under George H. Bush) that would force you to move out of your home
-Declare morality to be dead and then claim that on moral grounds they have the right to tell Americans what to eat.

Wait, that's what the Democrats and the Republicans have been doing, most of all Barack H. Obama but also George H. and George W. Bush.  So Yess is wrong. We cannot expect the Republicans to think or act like Americans. The GOP is a big government Progressive Party just like the Democrats.  Do Americans want more government and economic death, or to rise to Yess's call for integrity within both parties or a third party? So far, the results are bleak.  Unlike their ancestors, today's America has declined so much that it is now a can’t-do nation.  

*Mitchell Langbert teaches at Brooklyn College. He blogs at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com

From Brooklyn to Kingston and Back: Welcome to The Lincoln Eagle

I ran into Bob Marnell at Steve Marnell's Woodstock Music Trade Show at the Holiday Inn in Kingston, NY.  Bob, an IBM employee who moved to South Carolina from Kingston, told me that he is hard at work creating the online version of his brother's, Mike Marnell's, Lincoln Eagle.  A beta site is up at: http://thelincolneagle.com/.

The story that the Marnell brothers chose to put up as the first article is the history of their ancestors' founding of The Brooklyn Eagle in the 1840s, its rise into becoming the largest newspaper in the world, its decline, and its closing in the 1950s.  A big part of the article is about the links between Brooklyn and Kingston. What a coincidence: I teach at Brooklyn College and am heading there tomorrow am!

Lei Isaacs writes in The Lincoln Eagle:

There are many links connecting Brooklyn and The Brooklyn Eagle to Kingston. Perhaps the most visible is an enormous, quirky house with a blue awning located at 58 St. James Street. Isaac Van Anden had a sister, who had two sons, William and Charles Hester, who eventually took the paper over from Isaac Van Anden, who died on August 4, 1875.

Around 1884, Charles Hester was one of the many tourists who have been drawn to the Kingston area over the decades by the combination of fresh air, access to transportation, and proximity to The City which, in 1884, was not New York City but Brooklyn. Brooklyn had become a city in 1834, and had annexed the surrounding five towns of New Amersfoort, Midwout, New Utrecht, Boswisk and Gravesend. Referring to itself as “The city of homes and churches,” Brooklyn contrasted itself to New York City, “the home of Crime Government.”

There had been several Hester families in what is now uptown Kingston for many decades, including several on Fair Street. In 1883 the Kingston City Directory listed the establishment of the domicile of Charles W. Hester at “58 St. James Street at the corner of Clinton. “ (The building that now stands between 58 St. James Street and the corner of Clinton was an outbuilding for the original grand house.) Marnell recalls that Charles Hester “Built the house for his wife and never worked another day in his life.” The building is still a quirky monument to the best in the excesses of Victorian architecture, embellished with dormers, balconies, lacework and the exquisite wrap-around porch, now enhanced with the modern blue awning.

According to available records, Charles W. Hester retired to 58 St. James Street in about 1896. It was a pivotal time for Brooklyn and for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1890 the cornerstone for the new Brooklyn Daily Eagle building was laid at the corner of Johnson and Washington Avenues across the street form Borough Hall. Until then, the paper had been published on Fulton Street.

The Brooklyn Eagle Then: Now, it's the Brooklyn Supreme Court.

The Eagle moved into its new building in 1892. In 1894, a popular vote was cast to consolidate Brooklyn with the City of New York. The Brooklyn Eagle passionately and vociferously opposed the annexation. In 1897, when Charles Hester was enjoying the view of St. James Street from one of his balconies, Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the United States. In spite of the warnings in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that annexation would cause real estate values to plummet and would have a disastrous effect on the quality of life, Brooklyn became a borough of New York City in early 1898. Neither Brooklyn nor its daily newspaper would ever be quite as grand again.

Sometime in 1903, Charles V. Hester died, having not lived to enjoy retirement to his mansion for even a decade. His widow, Mary F. Hester, and children Natalie and Arthur, continued to live in the mansion briefly, but they had moved out by 1906. Later, the splendid house became the home of Reverend Hillman, and for decades it has been a quiet apartment house, its exciting history largely unknown by its residents.

Agenda 21: If You Haven't Read It, then You Are Part of the Problem

UN Agenda 21 was signed by the Bush administration in the early 1990s. It is a plan to turn a large share of the earth's surface into parkland.  Few people believe that the US has associated itself with a treaty that would forcibly evacuate a large share of the nation's population. I have purchased a copy at:

https://unp.un.org/Browse.aspx?subject=29