Judge’s Ruling Mirrors America’s Decadence and Decline

Judge’s Ruling Mirrors America’s Decadence and Decline
The Path to the Draft!
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

America’s moral decline has been obvious for decades to those Americans who actually make an attempt to maintain civility and morality not just in their religious lives, but in their “workaday” lives as well.

Now we get rulings from the courts, which demand that some of us accept those things our religion teaches us are abominations -- the worse kinds of sin.

Are we so stupid that we have to wonder why America is in such trouble?

Could America’s trouble stem from it’s forsaking the deity that had extended the arm of protection and guaranteed the prosperity and progress of a nation I am personally convinced was founded as the last hope for a deteriorating world?

America has deteriorated from a nation held up as a shining example of what a God-fearing nation ought to be to a nation so mired in decadence that we have become the sort of nation to which WE USED TO SEND MISSIONARIES!

Look, we murder our babies and refer to it as “The Right To Choose.” We accept homosexuality and refer to it as “Tolerance.”

Many of our mainline religious denominations have gone over to the enemy. “Under the same management since 33 AD” no longer applies. Having found that following the dictates of God and the Scriptures is uncomfortable and inconvenient they have forsaken their mission on this earth and become no more than social clubs espousing leftists political philosophy from their pulpits such as environmentalism, liberalism, political correctness, (which is rooted in Marxism), and moral relativism. It would seem the modern mainline denomination churches now stand for everything -- but the Christian faith.

I have heard it said that if God does not destroy America, then he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.

What leads me to reverse my collar and climb into the pulpit with this tome? Another judge legislating from the bench. A judge’s ruling that Americans MUST accept a life-style many of the Judeo-Christian faith believe -- and their faith teaches -- is one of the worse sins a human being can commit is, or, at least, OUGHT to be, an affront to every American who subscribes to the Christian faith. Unfortunately, subscribing to the Christian faith and living the Christian faith are two different things in today’s America.

Yes, I understand the judge’s ruling applied to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the US military. But do not be so naive that you kid yourself. This ruling will, most certainly, come to apply to all civilian endeavors as well.

This ruling will destroy our military just as it will bring dissension, discord, and eventually, dissolution to any civilian organization to which it is applied. For evidence, all one has to do is consider the mainline religious denominations which have accepted homosexual leaders and now permit the ordination of practicing homosexuals as pastors. They are crumbling from within while those religious denominations that insist upon remaining true to the scriptures are thriving and growing in vast numbers. After having tossed the scripture, upon which their churches were founded, out the window, they wallow in self-denial as they struggle just to have enough attendance at services to fill the choir, let alone the pews. They are, as the scriptures tell us: reaping what they have sown.

I left my denomination when it went over to the enemy. If I were an active member of the US military today, as soon as my current enlistment was up, I would leave the military, as well.

The US military is at war. They are fighting and dying every day. This is certainly NOT the time to force them to implement a new social policy on the fighting forces, which everyone (but the left) knows is going to cost the USA military additional lives on the battlefield.

The political left has never understood the sacrifice the people of our military make to insure the continued existence of the left’s unhappy lives. They have extreme difficulty understanding how anyone would willingly give their life for their country. They give lip service to terms such as “respect” and “honor” but I suspect they have never made the connection between those words and their application and practice, as they pertain to the US military.

If this judge’s ruling is allowed to stand, and I see no reason to suspect otherwise, as any appeal will be before the 9th Circuit Court, the most liberal court in the land, then we suggest the Commander-in-Chief order a 45 day period in which any US service member, not wishing to serve alongside homosexuals, be allowed to request and receive an honorable discharge and leave the services forthwith.

Of course, that will not happen.

If I were a recruiting officer today, I would request reassignment to some other duty. But recruiting won’t be a problem for long. The draft will have to be reinstituted in a few short years.

J. D. Longstreet

Echoes of 1930s Germany? ... Alan Caruba

Echoes of 1930s Germany?

By Alan Caruba

Time and again in these troubled and troubling times people make reference to Germany in the 1930s, the rise of the Third Reich, and to Hitler as they express their fears regarding the Obama administration. It is an interesting comparison if only because it reveals a sense that an authoritarian government is poised to impose its dictates. This is highly unlikely if only because the forthcoming midterm elections give every indication of overturning any such ambitions by the present administration. It is, for example, bleeding its top economic advisors, the former chief of staff to the President, the sudden resignation of the president’s national security advisor, and, most tellingly, virtually every Democrat running for office is running away from Obama’s legislative agenda.

Obama is hardly a Hitler and the Democrats are hardly Nazis. It's a bad comparison.

I think what is at the heart of the comparison is the way, in just under two years, Americans witnessed the government takeover of the healthcare sector, one sixth of the economy, the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler to the benefit of the United Auto Workers and the loss of their creditors and bondholders, and a so-called stimulus package that by most accounts has wasted billions.

The general anxiety is bolstered by the stagnation of the job market and a widespread belief that Obama, Pelosi and Reid, along with the Democrats in Congress, have taken the nation in the wrong direction. Those familiar with history see the kind of conditions that existed in Germany in the 1930s that were the background for the rise of the Hitler and the Nazi Party. Hitler, however, was not massively abandoned by his supporters as Obama as been.

It happens that I have been reading a book, “Berlin at War”, by historian Roger Moorhouse. What we tend to forget is that the National Socialist party, led by Hitler, was freely elected to power by Germans and, in general, had their support because of its early success energizing a moribund economy. Though we know in hindsight that Hitler was a monster, at the time he gave Germans a reason to take pride in their nation again and he proved adept at adding more territory to Germany without firing a shot. In the years leading up to the invasion of Poland in 1939, Berliners and other Germans were generally content with Hitler and the party.

It wasn’t until 1943 that Berliners began to feel the affects of the war in ways other than rationing and the conscription of their fathers, brothers, and sons. “After the first spate of bombings through late 1940 into the spring of 1941, there had followed a period of almost two years in which Royal Air Force raids on the capital became fewer and farther in between,” noted Moorhouse. “So, when the RAF reappeared in the skies over Berlin on the night of 1 March, it came as a shock.”

Americans were shocked to see Obamacare rammed through the House and Senate on a party line vote. It came after nearly a million Americans had shown up at the steps of the Capital building to protest against it. In effect, the Obama administration had declared war on Americans. It was not merely unresponsive to the majority, but contemptuous of it. What Obama forgot or never knew is that our government exists with the consent of the governed. What he forgot or never knew is that our presidents govern, not rule.

Something quintessentially American occurred. The same sense of unity and urgency that Americans felt after Pearl Harbor, that spurred the Greatest Generation to take on totalitarian threats in two theatres of combat, occurred in the rise of the Tea Party movement because many Americans perceived that their nation was literally under siege by an enemy and this time it was an internal one.

It took twelve years of Nazi rule and the reduction of Berlin to rubble for the usurpation of power to end on May 9, 1945. Compare that, then, with the Obama administration that began on January 20, 2009 followed by a swift loss of public support because of, not despite, its thuggish political effort to reshape the American model into a European socialist one.

Americans are just weeks away from “taking back” their nation from a man who hid or denied his real life from the voters to get elected on the basis of his oratorical skills and the stage managing of mass gatherings that were curiously reminiscent of Nazi rallies.

Obama had the good luck of having a lackluster opponent and a financial crisis that too conveniently broke just before the election in 2008. Even so, his margin of victory was slim.

It is not 1930s Germany. It is America in the first decade of a new century with new challenges. It is an America that has been through recessions and even a Great Depression, and which must learn again the fundamentals of the Founding Fathers; the need for a small, limited central government, the importance of sovereign, independent States, fiscal prudence, and citizens free to make their own choices regarding their lives.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.
© Alan Caruba, 2010

Environmental injustice en Español ... by Rev. Sam Rodriguez

Environmental Injustice en Español
Liberal Latino pressure groups’ campaign will drive up energy prices, kill jobs and hurt families
Rev. Sam Rodriguez

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Nineteen Latino activist groups recently asked Congress and President Obama to oppose any attempts to delay or scale back proposed Environmental Protection Agency air pollution and climate regulations.

The groups’ letter cites EPA claims that “rising temperatures caused by human activities” would lead to higher levels of ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in smog. This they assert, again citing EPA claims, would lead to health problems in cities with large Hispanic populations, because low-income and minority communities are often less able to pay costs associated with heat-related health threats.

Therefore, they argue, any legislation that affects the proposed Clean Air Act initiatives “will severely jeopardize” public health and productivity in our communities. These initiatives are needed to ensure “environmental justice” and avoid “disproportionate impacts” from climate change in minority communities, by emphasizing renewable energy, better weatherization and “green jobs.”

My organization, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, represents over 25,000 congregations and 16 million Hispanic Evangelical Christians. We were not consulted or asked to sign the letter. If we had been, we would have offered some very different insights and perspectives.

First, the legislative actions alluded to in the letter result from Congress’s failure to enact climate change, cap-and-trade and energy legislation. The House of Representatives did pass a complex, partisan, thousand-page monstrosity that no one read before legislators narrowly approved it. A similar bill died in the Senate, as the public began to rebel over its scope, growing scientific questions about “dangerous global warming,” and previous hurried votes on unread stimulus and healthcare bills whose hidden costs and regulatory landmines became apparent only after President Obama signed them into law.

EPA intends to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide – and thus major energy users, CO2 emission sources and huge sectors of the American economy – in the absence of congressional action, based on its assertion that this vital plant-fertilizing gas somehow “endangers human health and welfare.”

Many members of Congress, many states and numerous citizens are loath to give a single federal agency such vast powers. They insist that any such decision must be debated fully and openly, subjected to high standards of scientific evidence – and read carefully by lawmakers and voters, prior to any vote.

Second, many of the assertions made in the Latino activists’ letter and EPA documents are questionable, convoluted or based on a deplorable lack of understanding of energy, health and economic realities.

Yes, poor families, including many Hispanics, find it hard to pay for healthcare, including heat-related problems. However, driving up the cost of energy (and thus the cost of literally everything we eat, make, drive and do), impairing job creation and retention, and virtually ensuring brownouts and blackouts in the midst of heat waves and cold snaps, would undermine the very health, economic and environmental justice goals the Latino groups claim to champion.

Global warming could arguably increase summer temperatures and heat waves. However, heat-related health problems would become far worse if families cannot afford air conditioning, or wind-generation makes their electricity as unreliable as in many Third World countries. Those conditions would make even a 0.01 degree rise in average global temperature deadly.

Moreover, far more people die during the winter, especially when they cannot afford adequate heat. For millions of Hispanic and other minority families that live in our northern states, this would become a serious health threat, because the proposed EPA rules would dramatically increase heating costs. Worse, they would do so for little health or environmental benefit, because automobile, factory and power plant emissions have already been reduced way below 1970 levels – and most mercury emissions and microscopic soot now come from volcanoes, forest fires and overseas sources.

Although atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily, even scientists who worry about “dangerous” warming now acknowledge that there has been no warming since 1995. This undermines EPA’s claim that carbon emissions pose a health threat. And even if the United States eliminated nearly all its CO2 emissions, global levels would continue to rise, because China, India and other emerging economic powerhouses are using far more coal and oil energy.

Indeed, EPA itself admitted in a June 3, 2010 Federal Register notice that regulating emissions from US cars and trucks would reduce average global temperatures by an undetectable 0.002 degrees by 2100. The agency also admits that regulating factories, power plants, cement kilns, and large office and apartment buildings under its onerous global warming rules and permitting requirements would “slow construction nationwide for years” and cause “adverse impacts” on US economic development.

In other words, EPA’s new rules might result in jobs and “cash for caulkers,” perhaps with much of the funding channeled from taxpayers through the Latino groups that wrote the letter. But the rules would cost millions of factory, construction and other jobs – for little or no environmental benefit.

Official US unemployment remains mired at 9.6 percent. That’s the 14th consecutive month it’s been over 9.5% – the worst streak since the Great Depression. EPA’s rules would only make this worse.

One of the groups signing the letter claims Latino voters are willing to pay more to protect the environment. Are Hispanics really that eco-conscious? A 2009 Wilson Research Strategies poll found that 76% of black Americans are unwilling to pay more than $50 more per year for electricity, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A September 2010 Ipsos Public Affairs poll found that half of all Americans are unwilling to pay even $60 more per year in total energy costs.

If only reality were so kind. Studies by the Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, Congressional Budget Office and others found that the House-passed climate bill would add $1,500 to $3,000 to the average family’s annual energy bill! It would raise electricity rates 90-130% and gasoline prices 60-140% after adjusting for inflation. EPA rules would have similar impacts.

We should not be surprised. Over in Britain, where they have already imposed a host of “green energy” and “climate protection” laws, energy prices are already soaring, 5.5 million households have been driven into “fuel poverty” – and 25,000 more elderly people died during the winter than during the summer.

The fact is, when energy and regulatory compliance costs increase, building construction slows, businesses stop hiring or lay people off, the cost of everything we do soars higher, the vaunted Hispanic entrepreneurial spirit is stifled, and poor people’s hopes of achieving the American Dream are thwarted. This is not “environmental justice.” This is perverse, unnecessary and unacceptable.

Speaking of polls, a brand new Pew Hispanic Center survey found that Latinos are far less enthusiastic about heading to the polls this November than in 2008. That makes the timing and thrust of this activist letter smell like an effort to energize these reluctant voters and buttress White House and EPA agendas on energy, climate change and a new “green economy.”

Weatherproofing homes and improving energy efficiency are generally good things. But if cash for caulkers is the quid for the quo of activist groups promoting government agendas that drive up energy costs and kill jobs, we have a serious problem. For then politicized groups and their leaders profit at the expense of those they claim to represent. That is environmental injustice en Español. And it is wrong.

Rev. Sam Rodriguez
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Rev. Sam Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and co-chair of the Affordable Power Alliance, a humanitarian coalition of civil rights, minority, small business, senior citizen and faith-based organizations that champion access to affordable energy: http://www.affordablepoweralliance.org/

Rebuild and Restore

Rebuild and Restore
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

We Americans must ask ourselves a very important question as we make our decision concerning whom we will choose to govern us in the coming years.

Looking back to the years before we mistakenly allowed control of our government to be placed in the hands of the liberal-socialist democrats, in 2006, and comparing the years before that unhappy event to present day, it is immeasurably important for us to consider this question: Are we more free today than we were then? I submit – the correct answer is a resounding NO! In fact, we are far less free, and becoming even more enslaved to the state, every day we allow the socialists to remain in control of what used to be the freest nation, with the freest people, on earth.

If we allow the liberal-socialists to maintain control of the United States there is no doubt America will become a full0fledged socialist nation only one small, baby-step from becoming a communist nation.

It is extremely important that Americans understand that America is in enormous danger. We are under attack -- from within -- by those domestic enemies from which we military veterans took an oath to defend against.

In my opinion, every single US military veteran should vote against every liberal-socialist on the ballot on November 2nd. As I said above, we took an oath to protect the constitution and this country and, there was, as I recall, no expiration date on that oath.

Today, America has a Congress and a President not worthy of their constituents and the US military has a Commander-in-Chief not worthy of his troops. What we DO have, in our nation’s government, is a MESS … a DANGEROUS mess! The liberal-socialist’s redistribution of the nation’s wealth has made no one richer. It has resulted, as Winston Churchill predicted, in a predicament in which we all suffer more equitably. And THAT is the very best that can be said of it.

An honest, objective, consideration of America’s position today will inevitably lead one to the conclusion that our very own government has brought America to the edge of the precipice.

Look, dear reader, when the President of the United States surrounds himself with advisors who are Socialists, Marxists, Communists, Statists, Collectivists, Unionists, and Progressives, and the lends his ear to religious advisors who, themselves, seem confused about who really is GOD – Karl Marx, or Jesus Christ, then it is far past time to worry. It is time for action!

Americans have always been a “singular” people. We fuss and fight among ourselves, much as a large family does. And, like a large family when a threat to the security of that family is perceived we come together to neutralize that threat.

Americans were, admittedly, slow in recognizing the threat Obama and the liberal-socialist Congress were, and are, to their/our country. No one likes to admit they have made a mistake, let alone a mistake of the magnitude of the mistake Americans made in handing control of their government over to a socialist/marxist government. Just as it requires a strong person to admit a mistake, it takes a big, strong, country to do the same thing.

Every day, more and more Americans are standing up and saying: “WHOA! We really messed-up!” Now Americans are ready to right that mistake and return our country to its rightful status as a constitutional republic. We are determined to stop its slide into naked, unadulterated, socialism.

On November 2nd, we have our first opportunity to correct the course of America’s ship of state. But, please, make no mistake about it: purging the Congress of its many liberal-socialists is just the starting point. Correcting and then repairing the damage they have done to the republic will take many years. The work of restoring the republic will, of necessity, have to be done while fending off multiple counter-attacks by those same liberal-socialists who remain determined that America be transformed into a socialist dung heap.

For those of you new to my scribblings, understand this: I do not count myself among those who profess to believe the US Constitution is a living, breathing document. I do not count myself among those who proclaim that America is in a continual state of “becoming.”

NO!

I believe the constitution is what it is, period. I believe the nation’s founders -- including those who actually wrote the constitution -- said then what they meant, and meant what they said then. It was then, and is now, a document for all seasons.

America became, at its founding, a constitutional, representative, republic. It is not “becoming” anything other than that. In my opinion, attempting to change America to anything the founders of this nation did not intend is grossly un-American.

There can be no doubt that America has been badly and deeply damaged over the past four years. Some of that damage will last for generations to come.

Yes, it IS a sad thing to realize that the damage was self-inflicted. But that realization is the first step toward rebuilding and restoring a nation like none other on this earth.

It is time to turn the lights back on in “The Shining City on a Hill.”

J. D. Longstreet

Southern Politics

Originally Published April 27th, 2007

The Southern Democrat/Republican

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

There is a time-honored tradition in the South of registering to vote as a Democrat but actually voting for the Republican presidential candidate.

It makes no sense any longer to do that.

Back when the Democrat party controlled the South, prior to the Civil War, and again immediately after the so-called Reconstruction, the South was solid democrat. Why, even the Klan, and the Night Riders, were created by democrats.

Southerners are big on family, family tradition, and personal, as well as family honor. And to the Southerner it just seemed dishonorable to forsake the political party of your fathers.

Then came the 1960’s when the Democrat Party adopted much of the Socialist Party’s platform. Southerners, never the bumbling idiots other regions of the county made them out to be, quickly realized that Socialism and Communism were, for the most part, one and the same. There was a mass migration of Southern Democrats away from the Democrat Party.

Unfortunately, the Socialist/Democrats control academia in America and when the Southerner sent his son, or daughter, away to college, they almost always came home as new socialist democrats. Not knowing the history of politics in the country, and certainly not taught a balanced history of politics in college, these young people came home as freshly minted socialists. It caused great concern for their families because Southerners know that Socialism and Christianity cannot co-exist. Some Southern families were driven apart never to re-unite. Others simply accepted their child’s new found religion, socialism, and prayed regularly for their awakening before the fires of hell claimed their souls.

So… those young socialists are now the baby boomers with children of their own and, in some cases, grandchildren. They go to church every Sunday and worship and pray and… somehow… they do not see the marked irony in what they are doing. They are members of, and regularly attend, churches, which teach that Abortion is wrong, that Homosexuality is wrong, and… that it is the churches place to care for the poor and needy and not the government’s… and they continue to align themselves with the political party which supports these hellish ideas.

To make the problem ten times worse, many of the nation’s mainline churches have been hi-jacked by the same socialist who indoctrinated the baby boomer generation during their college years. Thus, all the trouble and turmoil in the Mainline Denominations today over the same issues supported by the Democrat Party.

So, what we have, at least here in the Southland, is a dichotomy of the Southern family into two opposed divisions. And it has been this way since the democrats became the Socialist/Democrats in the 1960’s.

By and large, though, Southerners vote conservative. Every election since the Nixon Administration that has meant voting for the Republican candidate, or some third party candidate, who hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

It was/is a difficult thing for a Southerner to cast a Republican ballot because the Republican Party is the party which imposed the so-called Reconstruction Era on our forefathers, which did far more damage to the South than the Civil War. But, when one considers that a large portion of Southerners see the Democrat Party as “The Party of Satan”, the Republicans don’t look so bad!
J. D. Longstreet