There Really Were Good Old Days

There Really Were Good Old Days

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

An old friend and I were conversing recently and reminiscing about the world we grew up in as opposed to the world we actually live in today. It is something “old-timers” like us have been doing since the dawn of time.

We were comparing the price of gasoline where he lives as opposed to the price for the same gasoline here, where I live, on the edge of a coastal resort area.

We live in neighboring states, but here in NC we have one of the highest state gasoline taxes in the United States.  Add to that the proximity of that resort area and I, unfortunately, fall into one of those pricing zones set up for the tourist trade. As a result, the price for gasoline is consistently higher where I live than where he lives… substantially higher.  

Of course, we began comparing the price of gasoline today to what we paid for it as teen-agers.  There is no comparison.  Regular gasoline was 13 cents a gallon and high test was 15 cents per gallon.  Really expensive gas was 17 cents a gallon for regular and 19 cents a gallon for high test – and that was before gas wars.  Then it was not unheard of to pay 11 and 12 cents for a gallon of regular gasoline. 

When you went out to purchase a car, you didn’t buy a car that got the best gas mileage – you bought a car you actually wanted!  They had lots of steel and lots of chrome.  Cars of that age had character unlike these generic models that are so similar you can’t tell who made the cussed thing without getting a good look at the trademark on the hood or trunk lid. 

We both remembered the early gas pumps.  They had five-gallon glass containers on top.  There were manually operated.  They had no electric pumps inside them.  YOU pumped five gallons of gas from the underground tanks up into that glass container atop the pump with a pump handle.  Then you placed the nozzle of the hose into your gas tank and gravity transported the gas from the glass container to the tank of your car.  You could only pump five gallons at a time. If you wanted more, that meant you had to repeat the process. 

It was quite an experience when it was raining or sleeting – or worse. A dollar’s worth of gasoline would last you all week!

A teenager on a date could have a ball on five dollars -- and still have money in his pocket when he got home.

A hamburger was 15 cents and a coke was a five to seven cents, depending upon whether we were in North Carolina or South Carolina.  Since we lived right on the border we were then, and remain today, as much at home in one state as the other.

NOBODY, in their wildest dreams, ever thought gasoline would sell for three to four dollars, and more, per gallon.  NOBODY.  It was inconceivable … period.  This was America and such things just did not happen.

But it did happen -- all because we were not paying attention.  We trusted our government to do what was right for America… not what was politically correct.  Suddenly there was something called the Environmental Protection Agency, and something else called the Department of Energy -- and by that time -- we were well and truly had! We were then, and we are now, sitting on a sea of oil.  Yet, our government will not allow us to knock holes in the dirt and suck it out.

We have oil containing rock and oil containing sand and we have vast deposits of oil just off our coasts -- in our own territorial waters.  It’s just sitting there while we pay through the nose for oil we have to purchase from countries that hate us even after we debase ourselves just for the privilege of buying their oil. 

What kind of government does that to its people?  Answer:  The kind of government we have in Washington, DC.

See, back in the good ole days, we made a terrible mistake.  We trusted our government.  Now that we KNOW better -- it is too late.

Or is it?

If, as some are suggesting, we are about to have a global financial collapse, we’ll get a “do over.”  It won’t be pretty and it is going to hurt like the dickens, but if there is a bright side to an economic apocalypse, it may be that we will get a chance to clean our government of the socialists, Marxists, progressives, and left-wing liberals that spent us into this mess. 

Some say the Good Ole Days were not all that good.  Having lived in both I can tell you the Good Ole Days beat the heck out of the mess we live in today!

J. D. Longstreet

The Deconstruction Of America

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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Politics is rotten … period. 

The form of government the American people chose at their founding was unique.  It still is.  Many have sprung up around the globe in imitation of the American constitutional “representative” republic.  None have yet hit the mark -- though they have come close.

Ours is an imperfect form of government. It is a government “of,” “by,” and “for” the people. The key word, of course, is “people.”  And therein lies the problem.

The American government was flawed from its beginning.  It is a result of the human touch.  It could not and cannot be helped.  But it has worked miraculously well, for over two centuries.

From time to time, America has touched on destruction, even self-destruction. But, so far, we have managed to pull back, at the last moment, and survive to become a colossus astride the world.

There have been costs.  There will be more.

Some say America is hard on the world.  Maybe.  But America is hardest on itself.  The internal war between Americans to determine what we will become still rages. For, you see, America is never static.  America is always “becoming.” 

The continuous swirling vortex that is America wounds and wounds deeply.  Our leaders come and go.  They ascend to the pinnacle of power with grandiose ideas only to be swept to the kneeling benches below by the American people, fickle, as they are, who choose not to accept those ideas or that leader’s choice for the direction of travel he intends to take America. We have seen it time and time again.

America’s current leader, Barack Obama, is experiencing the backhand of the people of America. His policies, his directions, his political philosophies have been rejected by “the people.”  He is in a desperate fight to salvage something for posterity.

Obama’s mistake was to drag America, kicking and screaming, in a direction it did not want to go. As a result he will earn an asterisk by his name in the history books as America’s first black President -- and very little else.

America finds itself at another crossroads.  We have one chance to take the right direction.  The cost of choosing wrongly is the destruction of our great nation.

The process of choosing a leader for the future of America is well underway.  It is a spectacle seen nowhere on earth save for America.  We push forward a number of men and women we think we would like to see lead America  -- then we begin the process of striping the flesh off their bones.  There is no mercy.

Candidates who survive the process are not necessarily good leaders just very good at perseverance and dodging those proverbial slings and arrows. 

America is rich in citizens who would be leaders about whom future generations would sing songs.  But they will not step from the safety of the sidelines and join the fray.  But then, who can blame them. Of course, that means America tends to be led by the second best, or the least best, or the lesser of two evils, all soaked in mediocrity.   It is a rare occurrence, indeed, when America actually gets a better President than it voted for.

The fact is – there is no outstanding leader among the candidates for President from either side of America’s political spectrum in this election cycle.  At the very moment America is in desperate need of a lion at the helm -- we have only mice from which to choose.

America can do better than this.  The nation deserves better than this.  But THIS is where we are. 

From today’s perspective, the American future is bleak with decay as far as the eye can see.  Why? --  Because we are no longer a single people.  We have become far too diverse a population.  Until we decide, again, who we are and coalesce around that certain, singular, American character, we will remain, for all intents and purposes, ungovernable. 

Diversity and inclusion have murdered the singular American character and culture.  We are adrift, unclaimed, and un-claimable.  Electing another mouse to lead us will do nothing more than seal our destiny as just another consignment to the dustbin of history.

J. D. Longstreet

Life in a Box ... by Paul Driessen

Life in a box
Is there an exit strategy for this energy, environment, and economic predicament?
By: Paul Driessen
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“Life in a box is better than no life at all,” playwright Tom Stoppard famously opined, through the personage of Rosencrantz. (Or was it Guildenstern?)
That’s lucky for us, because our energy, environmental and economic policies have certainly put us in a box – and there is no easy way out.

Congress passed a $787-billion “stimulus” bill, and a $3-billion cash-for-clunkers program that trashed perfectly good cars, and the energy and raw materials that created them. It’s halfway toward imposing nationalized healthcare that could cost taxpayers another $2.5 trillion over its first decade.

Unemployment now stands at 10.2% officially, or 22% if you include people who have given up on finding a job. At this point, 25 states have borrowed $23 billion from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund, to meet their obligations to work-deprived workers.

Meanwhile, over in Copenhagen, the G-77 poor nations snubbed Europe’s offer of $10 billion over three years, for climate change reparation, mitigation and adaptation. “The world’s scientists and policy makers say this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced,” G-77 chairman Lumumba Di-Aiping noted. Something closer to $1 trillion every few years would be more appropriate, he suggested.

That’s in addition to regular foreign aid – and on top of the $50 trillion in life support for corrupt dictators that the developed world has already provided to still-impoverished nations since 1950.
In response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dutifully pledged that the United States will importune taxpayers, private donors and other countries to raise $100 billion annually through 2020, to help poor nations cope with the “ravages” of global warming – or our current “CO2-driven” global cooling. She claims the money will be provided only if China and other major developing countries agree to binding emission targets that can be verified internationally (a condition that they have steadfastly rejected).

But of course, neither Di-Aiping nor Clinton wants to remind anyone of a few elephantine realities. This “greatest risk humanity has ever faced” is based on fraudulent claims, data, models, analyses and peer reviews. The proposed 83% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 would send the United States back to levels last seen in 1908 – or 1868 when population, energy use and technology changes are considered.

The cap-tax-and-trade laws and Copenhagen treaty represent the greatest transfer of wealth, power and control in the history of mankind. Perhaps worst, the energy taxes and restrictions amount to economic suicide by PDCs – previously developed countries.

That collective seppuku would benefit some in emerging economies but bring little or no environmental gain or climate stabilization. The surging economies will emit far more pollutants and CO2 than the US, Europe and Canada can eliminate, even if they send emissions to zero; and carbon dioxide is a minor player in climate change, compared to the sun and a host of other natural forces.

Where will the United States find the trillions of dollars to pay for all this? “We’re out of cash,” President Obama has pointed out. So he and Congress have announced the usual progressive “solutions.”

They raised the national debt ceiling to $14 trillion – a 39% increase since Democrats took charge in 2007. (The debt is now 60% of the nation’s GDP.) They plan to raise taxes, print more increasingly devalued currency, and unleash the Internal Revenue Service on businesses and families. And of course implement cap-tax-and-trade – to take $300 billion a year from energy consumers, and transfer it to government bureaucrats and companies with good lobbyists.

They adamantly refuse to raise revenue by doing what built America: tapping the energy and mineral resources that America still has in abundance: a century’s worth of oil, natural gas and shale oil in Alaska, the Western states and Outer Continental Shelf (OCS); two centuries’ of coal on public and private lands; and vast stores of uranium, metals and rare earth minerals. Oil shale deposits alone contain 1 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, nearly equal to the world’s total known conventional oil reserves, the Institute for Energy Research calculates.

These resources could generate trillions of dollars in bonuses, rents, royalties and taxes, and create or save millions of high-paying jobs. They could provide the billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass, plastic films and rare earths that will be needed to cover millions of acres with wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal facilities and transmission lines, for the new “eco-friendly” economy.

But many of our best energy and mineral prospects are locked up in over 500,000,000 acres of wilderness, park, refuge, recreation, scenic, endangered species habitat, and ecological study areas and “protective buffer zones.” Offshore, the vast majority of our OCS energy is likewise off limits.

Developing these resources is ideologically anathema to Democrats and greens, who concoct new anti-development rationales and restrictions every week.

Instead of developing these bounties and reaping the energy and economic benefits, we spend trillions importing replacements: oil, natural gas, uranium, metals and even wind turbines. A new 240-turbine wind farm in western Texas has reportedly created 2,800 jobs – but 2,400 of them are in China, where the turbines are manufactured! The 400 new green-collar American jobs include truck drivers to haul the gargantuan parts from the West Coast to West Texas, an installation and landscaping crew, and a small army of bureaucrats, lawyers and accountants.
This is the green, sustainable economy of the future? America’s oil and natural gas industries alone support more than 9 million American jobs and contribute well over $1 trillion annually to the US economy, PricewaterhouseCoopers has calculated. Coal likewise generates vast job and economic benefits. At 400 temporary jobs per wind farm, renewable energy has a long way to go.
How long the US economy and family can survive such “sustainability” is a question our illustrious law and policy makers had better start addressing.

“Quite frankly, from our point of view,” Polish Finance Minister Jan Rostowski recently said, “it’s totally unacceptable that the poor countries of Europe should help the rich countries of Europe help the poor countries in the rest of the world.” Those Eastern European countries lived under Nazi and Soviet regimes for five decades. They have no desire to live under a UN climate dictatorship.

Copenhagen and the circling of alarmist wagons over the climate change email and computer code scandal has made one thing absolutely clear, to anyone with open eyes and minds. The caterwauling over warming has nothing to do with science or saving Planet Earth.
It has everything to do with global governance, UN control of energy, economies and lives, and of course money – for research, renewable energy, bureaucracies, and international welfare.
Rosencrantz was satisfied with life in a box. “You’d have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, ‘Well. At least I’m not dead.’”

Have we now become Rosencrantz? Or does the spirit of Patrick Henry still reside within? “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Hopefully, the 1776 redux will come at the ballot box. But if the eco-tyranny continues, Earth’s climate may really heat up.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which sponsors the All Pain No Gain education campaign and petition against job-killing global warming policies, and the ClimateDepot website for the latest news and views on climate change. He is also a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.

Why Conservatives "Suck" At Government!

Why Conservatives “Suck” At Government!

By: J. D. Longstreet

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Shocking title, eh?

Well, it needn’t be. Heck, if you are a conservative, don’t be ashamed of it! Be PROUD of it! It means you are normal! We conservatives are awful when it comes to governing.

The longer I live, and the longer I have dealings with liberals, I have come to suspect they are mentally disabled in some way. It is the truth. Conservatives, on the other hand are fairly easy to figure out. We come into this world hard-wired toward conservatism.

OK, let me see if I can stir this piece back to conservatives and why we are so terrible at governing. The underlying, single most important fact about conservatives is that they loathe government. We DO understand there must be boundaries and government provides that, but when government reaches beyond providing a service, which offers security for the country, most conservatives, including this scribe, recoil.

Ronald Reagan summed it up for conservatives: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." (Ronald Reagan -- First inaugural address, January 1981) He was right on the money.

We conservatives can abide government when it is small and kept that way, but the very nature of government, itself, is to grow and become bloated and end up smothering to death the very society it was set up to oversee. The most efficient form of government on the planet, at smothering its adherents, is… socialism. You know, the type of government we now have in the United States! You may have thought all those parties on January 20th were for Obama’s inaugural. They were not. Those parties were, in fact, a wake for democracy in America.

It is abhorrent to conservatives that a government should be run by a cadre of people who have trained all their lives to administer power over their fellowman. That is how we view the corp of trained bureaucrats running all those government agencies and even those in the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches of the government. Liberals may choose to view them as public-minded civil servants. Conservatives do not. We see them as tyrants and would-be dictators. The very idea that they are in government to serve their fellow man is foreign to conservatism. If one wishes to serve his fellowman, there are many other ways to do it than through administration of some government agency that wields control over those it supposedly serves. No, do not expect conservatives to toss laurel branches at government toadies!

I suppose one must say that government is a necessary evil. In that case…. Conservatives demand that it be kept small. Currently, the US government is growing like a marshmallow in a microwave oven! I know you are going to say it grew under George Bush, a Republican! Yes, but we are not writing of Republicans here. I am writing of conservatives here. George Bush was a lot of things but he was/is not a conservative.

Liberal government types do not speak to you, they lecture you, they “talk down to you.” They come across as stiff necked, and rigid, and convinced of their superiority of intellect, over yours, and they, and they alone, are your salvation. As an example, I give you the President of the United States, the messiah, Mr. Obama.

There is something in the conservative animal that resents the living daylights out of that approach to anything, including politics. It is one of the underlying reasons Northeastern candidates do so poorly in the bastion of conservatism, the South. In the South you are free to suggest most anything you want. But, the instant you begin “telling” or ‘commanding” or “demanding”... we bristle, and we get our backs up. We do not like being ”talked down to.” We find it offensive… extremely offensive.

Conservatives have such disdain for government that if and when we stand for election, it is most likely out of sheer consternation with the then current liberal office holder. If, and when, we win that office, we have a very steep learning curve because we are not prepared to accept superiority over our fellow citizens and we have not trained for a job in government as so many, many, of our liberal friends have while studying in their liberal colleges and universities. Plus, a true conservative is never REALLY happy in a government job. He feels, well, somehow dirty.

I’m not offering any of this as an excuse for conservative failure at politics. I’m offering it as one (conservative) man’s opinion as to why conservatives really do so badly at governing. If it makes you uncomfortable, I ask only that you think about it for a bit. You may come to agree with me… you may not. I would ask that you consider how conservatives, when in opposition in the Congress, seem much more effective with more “fire in the belly” as they oppose the would-be legislation introduced by liberals in both the Senate and the House. While that does not make my case, in my mind, it sure does lend validity to my argument.

J. D. Longstreet

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Conservative+Liberal+Government+US