A NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

The media and press are awash with scandal. Politicians are at it again...draining the last vestige of faith in the "political process" from the hearts and minds of the public. Like vampires they seduce us with the promises of wonderful things that they never mean to keep. They then leave us cold and numb in a cemetary of lies, bereft of any faith in our fellow man, consigned to walk the earth until we die, not trusting anything or anyone.

Bad leadership is the great existential crisis of our time. How are we to be led into the future if true and good leadership, which by its nature imbues trust, has ceased to exist? We are not by nature anarchists. We cannot as a society or a civilization survive in a state of ethical chaos. The inmates, as they say, cannot be allowed to run the asylum.

New York State is now grappling with so many problems great and small, that one feels like the possessed girl in "The Exorcist" with ones' head spinning around. The MTA is broke and must make service cuts so drastic that the very economic life of the city and its suburbs are endangered. The solutions put forward are higher job killing taxes which as a cure may be worse than the disease. The people in charge don't seem to understand what being in charge means.

A long term NYC Councilman from the Bronx who has literally spent his entire adult life on the public fisc is indicted on thirteen counts of larceny by the US Attorney from the Southern District. One of the allegations is that he took a bill for a Bagel sandwich and a Coke for $7.00 and changed it to $177.00 for reinbursement purposes. This of course only serves to give one the flavor of the remaining charges. These contain what has become an almost formulaic involvement of a not-for-profit organization, set up by the accused for noble purposes that have apparently not come to fruition but has managed to give fairly lucrative jobs to wife, family and mistress.

A key leader in the State Senate and his colleague, a US congressman from Queens are up to their necks in a project to create a "Racino" at Aqueduct Racetrack sponsored by the State Government. This award worth at least $300,000,000, was won by a consortium that also included a former Congressman who is a very powerful Minister/Developer/politician . The bidding process seems to have been in the opinion of one of the losers akin to trying to hit a moving target since the rules seemed to change as the process moved along. The one thing that didn't move however was that the Governor needed the support of all three of the gentlemen for reelection which he apparently got a scant three days after the award was announced. Since then stories have appeared alleging that the slot machine operator chosen by this consortium does not operate in Las Vegas but instead is confined to smaller Nevada venue where their Casinos apparently are unclean and second rate. Oh yes...the the State Senator and the sitting Congressman also have several not-for-profits, one of which was set up for giving aid to victims of "Katrina". They apparently collected over $31,000 but only distributed a little over $1300. no one knows where the rest of the money went.

The Mayor or those close to him distributed $1,200,000 to the Independence Party, on whose line he ran, for pollwatching and other assorted Election Day tasks via an entity created under law a month after the Election was over. The head of the party claims not to know anything about it. The New York County DA wants to know everything about it!

For the last five days the NY Times, has dangled a juicy tale of sex, drugs and presumably Rock n' Roll before the public. Allegedly it involves the Governor and the Governors' mansion and women not his wife. The story has yet to run, so this is the "Empire State" version of "death by a thousand cuts". In other words the rumor of the story has now become the story. The governor, no stranger to strange women by his own prior admission, has denied all. After the prior Governors' daillance with $4500 "ladies of the town", the voters are frantically seeking a "castrato" to run for the office if only to eliminate one barrier to putting full and devoted energy into the "peoples" business.

Another State Senator who was a former Police Officer, beat and cut up his girl friend so badly that she required surgery and a post assault order of protection from the courts. The attacker was tried and convicted and is awaiting appeal. The State Senate convened a Commission to decide what to do with this thug and eventually they recommended he be expelled. Yesterday they voted to do that even though by so doing, the Democrats would lose temporary control of the Senate. This is actually positive so why am I including it in my list of misery? Well the Senator was a Latino and other Latinos are outraged by this punishment even though the woman victim was a Latina. Apparently ethnicity and a deranged sense of victimhood trumps justice and moral principles. This is not just sad ...it is disgusting!

All of the above has hit us within the last week. The 15 inches of snow we got yesterday was in some way a repreive from God that has nothing to do with climate change. It stopped the miscreants from doing damage for a 24 hour span of time. This is a good thing. God apparently reads the papers also. The fact that sucessive "snowmageddons" has shut down Washington for most of a week is also good. It is costing us $100,000,000 a day but when the Government is functioning it costs us billions and sometime trillions. Hmm... perhaps a way out of the deficit...ya think?

I have to laugh because if I don't I will scream. Where is the leadership that can help us thread our way out of this thicket of corruption and idiocy? It's not only my country, state and city at stake...it has become personal... it is my sanity at stake as well. I'm not looking for a savior...I'm just looking for integrity! Why does this appear so hard to find?

ERLANDSSON

OH CITY WHERE ART THOU?

(This is an old post)

"OH CITY, WHERE ART THOU?”

The chaos keeps coming like a tsunami poised to sweep away all vestiges of what is about to become, a lost civilization.

It is not enough that we are threatened by Washington with programs so stupid and taxes so confiscatory that some days all we want to do is stay in bed…take a mental health day from the maelstrom so to speak. It is not enough that we have to try and exist with a state government so dysfunctional that the entire country including Illinois, New Jersey, California and Louisiana take pride they are not us.

Now in the space of a single week two of the most irresponsible actions ever taken by bureaucrats and elected officials demonstrate we are closer to edge of the precipice then we were perhaps ever willing to believe. I speak of course about the second MTA “doomsday plan” in one year and the city Council’s decision to let 2200 jobs go down the toilet for purely ideological reasons.

First the MTA, who are the keepers of dual books and poster children for the lack of public accountability. It was only last spring that the long suffering public were threatened with draconian (a word used all too frequently with the MTA) service cuts or economy harmful fare hikes. Fares went up, the city was promised transit stability for a reasonable period of time and the suddenly after a disastrous and controversial wage arbitration, doomsday is once more upon us. This time public school children, elderly and disabled New Yorkers have been added to the array of victims along with the riders on 19 bus lines and 2 subway lines that will simply cease to exist. If that were not enough, weekend and/or overnight service on 45 other lines and deep service cuts to 16 other subway lines are scheduled as well. 4 express bus lines will also be impacted. 417, 243 public school students will lose their free full fare Metro Cards and 167, 912 other students will lose their half fare Metro Cards. This student subsidy program has been in place since 1948.

The city’s Access-A-Ride program provides 24 hour door to door service for around 65,000 disabled (half over the age of 75) New Yorkers a year and 26,500 rides a day. These trips mandated to a degree by Federal Law, average over $66 a trip with an annual budget of over $450,000 a year. For most of the riders they are an economic and psychological lifeline. Next year the 2010 MTA budget proposes to begin limiting the trips from home to the nearest accessible train and bus, which of course just got harder because of the cutbacks for those very services. Has anyone wondered how these New Yorkers will get to their final destination or for that matter back home again? Oh those pesky details!

What was the reaction of the Governor and the Mayor who was out of town in Green Copenhagen saving mankind from itself due to the fact we breathe? (Can you believe it? Politicians have finally perfected their art by actually coming up with a way to tax us for the use of air!) If you guessed tolls on bridges you win the big prize! Yes their solution is to make it even harder to travel in this city by putting the screws to drivers to make them pay for the rapacious wage demands of a workforce who have it so good they don’t even have to pay a co-pay for their medical coverage and the almost criminal ineptitude of management who can’t seem to ever get a budget to balance.

Hey Mayor …Hey Governor how about a wage freeze during the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? Why do public service union members not have to sacrifice when small businesses are failing and total unemployment is heading toward 17%? I for one, like former Assemblyman Steve Kaufman’s idea of declaring a city or region wide emergency and issuing emergency franchises to provide as much private sector service as possible to cover the cut backs. For the record I am a friend of Kaufman but I have never failed to disagree with him on a host of issues. On this one he has nailed it!

City residents cannot continue to live with the ongoing uncertainty that they may not be able to get to their job or school or Doctor, or supermarket because of no transportation or unaffordable transportation. With all the daily indignities New Yorkers have to put up with such as tickets, rude public workers, sky high prices and ever rising housing and energy costs (yeah Mayor Mike don’t give me windmills …give me Nuclear or gas from the Marcellus Shale), it is way past the time that the taxpayers demand a new way of providing affordable and reliable public transit services for this city. Kaufman points the way.

The second atrocity inflicted on the suffering public this week is the politically engineered destruction of more than 2200 jobs at the proposed redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. The City Council and the Bronx Borough President tag teamed to scuttle a $300 million economic development project that Mayors have been trying to get through since the Armory went vacant in 1993, costing the city $1 million a year just to maintain it.

The Bloomberg administration and the NYCEDC skillfully guided the project through all the environmental, land use and community sand traps and mine fields only to have an alleged “community alliance” called the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance or KARA enter the fray just prior to the selection of a developer to demand a “Community Benefit Agreement” (CBA) that demanded among other things that all retail jobs within the mall to be developed would pay a “living wage” of at least $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits. Related Cos. the selected developer promised Union prevailing wages with health and pension benefits for the building trades’ workers who would rebuild the armory into a shopping mall as well as union wages for all regular mall employees. The mall was to have a full scale 60,000 square foot supermarket, Movie Theater, community space, among other amenities. At Kara’s request there was even to be something called a “World Peace Atrium” which Related agreed to.

But Related could not nor should it have agreed to try and bring in a variety of businesses with mandated “living wages” as a prerequisite. The Bronx is the poorest county in the nation. Unemployment in the Bronx is at 13.4%. 10% of all “Bronxites” or 128,000 persons are on public assistance. 29% are on food stamps. Other projects such as the redevelopment around Yankee Stadium did not have to go forward under the kind of blackmail that this project was subjected to.

The Bronx Borough President disapproved the plan for specious parking and traffic reasons even though the state and city and the City Planning Commission examined these “issues” and approved them . The City Council allegedly directed by the Working Families Party acting in behest of retail workers decided ‘to hell” with their brothers and sisters in the Building and Construction Trades Council and got the City Council to defeat the plan 45 to 1 for the same spurious reasons the Borough President had conjured up. In short they simply let 2200 jobs disappear probably never to be seen again. Then in an orgy of pompous self congratulations they publicly celebrated this almost unbelievable act of self indulgent, stupid and arrogant incompetence by boisterously patting themselves on the back.

One is left wondering what in hell is the world view of elected officials who would take away jobs from people who desperately need them and then “crow” about it as if they did something good!

One can also only hope that these same elected officials will spend the rest of their terms in office explaining to construction workers, students needing jobs and people looking for their first job or for a much needed second job why those jobs are not there and why that is so damned good!

Where is the city of my youth? Where is the lusty, brawling metropolis of big dreams, big ideas and big achievements where you could live your life in the midst of giants who would turn their visions into reality and that reality into magic? New York was like no other place on earth then because the leadership in both the city and state was second to none and there was a shared consensus that capitalism was good and hard work was the only sure path to success.

Now we are becoming second rate because those shared values no longer have the same resonance that they did for former generations. There is a new game in town. It is played by the ideological children of Saul Alinsky and they mean to shove their nasty little beliefs down our throats despite all our protests and all our struggles. Somehow we have to summon the spirit and strength of yesterday to defeat today and preserve tomorrow for all of those yet to come. Oh New York…oh my city…where art thou?
ERLANDSSON

NEW YORK AGONISTES

New York is dying. The Democrats are currently the ones injecting the poison, but the Republicans have a lot to answer for also. I guess the fair thing to say would be that "politics" is the venom cursing through the veins of the once mighty "Empire State".

The quality of the politics today is so bad that words can't really capture the blend of stupidity, greed and malice that infect the nexus between those who are led and those who rule. Politics is bad today because the quality of our politicians has markedly deteriorated primarily due to political correctness and the fear of the average person to venture an opinion that could be contrued as racist, sexist or homophobic. It is still safe however to criticize Jews and Catholics... proving only that Freud, Doctor Spock and Saul Alinsky have had a bigger influence on present day politics than Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson or Reagan.

From 1990 to the present over 3,000,000 New Yorkers left the state and those who partially replaced them had incomes that were 13% lower. This helped to kill our revenue base but the faux leadership in Albany just kept raising taxes and proposing bond offerings believing that even as manufacturing fled to greener pastures, the urban economic engine of FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) would just keep on burning.

Small business or that part of the private sector that creates the most jobs, got treated like yesterdays fish wrapped in a newspaper because the "Progressives" both hate and don't understand capitalism. All they understood was anybody who made money had to "divy it up" with that amorphous crowd called the "poor". So in the end the middle class, who play by the rules and pay the "freight" for those who can't or won't... became the "poor".

The knaves, varlets and bottom feeders who are elected today should for the most part live under bridges. Oh there are exceptions. A few brave souls, usually from another era when there was still a sense that being elected was an honor and a public trust, who still fight an almost impossible battle against the idealogues and the thieves. But they are tired and outnumbered and depressed from playing "Don Quixote" with no support from the voters.

And that is squarely where the problem now lies. Voters have to grow up. They have to do more than just get pissed off...they have to educate themselves as to how we arrived at this sorry state of affairs. They have to stop listening to the noxious and endless cascade of class warfare drivel that claims to explain and therefore justify everything elected officials do , and instead learn how the government they have let slip away... actually works.

Some one famous once said that "making laws was like making sausage...a truly nasty business". Today that statement is slanderous to sausage makers!

The one hope on the horizon for New York is that the "Tea Party" movement will reform one or even both of the major parties and in so doing present us with candidates who are dedicated, intelligent, have integrity and who don't see elective office as a lifetime opportunity to get rich off the peoples' dime. We have to stop electing people simply because they look like us, talk like us, invoke guilt in us or are able to con us with versions of reality that make "The Matrix" try to resemble upstate New York.

New Yorkers have a big political year ahead of us. We will be electing a Governor, an Attorney General, a Comptroller, the Assembly, the State Senate, Members of the U. S. House of Representatives and two U. S. Senators . In other words we can clean up this pile of steaming manure and actually reboot this state. It would be a cathartic moment for New York and for the nation. It is one minute to Midnight... decision time... and we have to decide as a community if we have the will and the fortitude to take our future into our own hands and cross the "Rubicon'.

Stay tuned for further posts on this topic.

ERLANDSSON

THE DELIVERANCE

It was shortly before ten in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, when the nation was delivered. It happened in the most unlikely of places...a state so blue that even after the concession was made, it still seemed implausible. It was if the ghosts of John, Abigail and Samuel Adams rose from their graves and led the people of the Commonwealth to their second insurrection, once again in the vanguard and once again saying to their countrymen and women that we will not be treated as mere "subjects". Rather we will act as free men and women who no longer will tolerate having their lives and their dreams treated like so much detritus by the ersatz "royalists" who attempt to subjugate us rather than represent us.

In Washington and other places where pundits gather over drinks and lattes to pontificate about the great events of our times, the impulse will be to ignor this latest and most dramatic act of defiance by the "rabble", just as George III did to his everlasting mortification. The people at the top however will just push us harder because they cannot and/or will not believe they are on the wrong side of history.

The White House has become a palace and not the "peoples house". The devotees who work there are, to a great degree, members of a cult ...not members of an administration. They do not toil for their countrymen, they toil for the a man who they believe transcends the bothersome barriers of the constitution and reigns instead of leads. Like virtuall every left wing regime in history, the centurions of the weak and downtrodden morph like lycanthropes into their true identity when given copious injections of power.

Today, less than 24 hours after the political tsunami of the Bay State, it is reported that intelligence gathering against China has been downgraded over the objections of the National Security Director and the Director of the CIA. These orders can only have come from the White House. Some one is in great haste to fulfill his agenda before the people fully retake their government. In the days ahead , there will be further comment on national security and other issues involving the Presidential Oath of Office and the Constitution but for today let all patriots place the date of January 19, 2010 in the chronicles of these United States. It is deliverance day.

ERLANDSSON

COMACTA COMMENTS BY FRANK VERNUCCIO

As you may recall, last week's COMACTA column in the Bronx Times Reporter reviewed President Obama's anti-NY defense policies. This week's column reviews the failures of Sheldon Silver, Senators Schmuer and Gillibrand, and Mayor Bloomberg's failure to protect NY from bad policies.

January may be drawing to a close and with it, many New Year’s resolutions, but COMACTA proposes a resolution for Mayor Bloomberg, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon: Remember what jobs you were elected to. Whatever one might think of the particular polices supported by these key elected officials, the fact is that they exhibit a strange forgetfulness about to whom they owe their loyalty and dedication to.

New York City is a complex metropolis, with numerous municipal challenges. A distressed public education system, aging and inadequate public transportation, decaying roads and bridges, insufficient affordable housing, high unemployment, excess taxation, and numerous other issues all combine to make the governing of this locale a difficult and certainly full-time task. Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg appears to spend more time on issues that, whatever their merit, have very little to do with the powers, duties and responsibilities he accepted when he took the oath of office. For example, while the MTA was proposing drastic service cuts, including the elimination of student passes and the complete withdrawal of bus service to whole portions of our city, the mayor was in Europe discussing global warming. International environmental issues may be important, but the last time COMACTA reviewed the NY City Charter, foreign policy was not listed among the Mayor’s tasks. Similarly, as vast numbers of New Yorkers continue to join the unemployment lines, the Mayor seems obsessed not with their fate, but with the average intake of salt and sugar New Yorkers consume. That issue is the responsibility of the Surgeon General, not the mayor of one city. If the mayor is bored with the arduous task of governing New York, he should consider another position.
The American Constitution is a masterpiece of governing logic, the greatest governmental blueprint ever devised. One of its most important features is its structure of federalism, allowing the individual states to elect officials to both govern the nation and protect the interests of their home states. During the ongoing health care bill debates, one wonders where Senators Schumer and Gillibrand have been. Other states, most notably Nebraska, have been provided with extraordinary incentives to support the health care measure. New York has received next to nothing in the way of special incentives. To the contrary, this state, with a greater number of more inclusive private insurance policies, stands to lose greatly by the special tax on so-called "cadillac" health plans. Despite all this, and many more anti-NY features, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand have been among the most ardent supporters of the health care bill. Why do they seem so disinterested in protecting their fellow New Yorkers?
Speaker Silver, arguably the most powerful elected official in the state, and the longest-serving of the so-called "gang of three" that make most of the governing decisions in New York State, has a long history of questionable decisions that has led many critics to levy conflict-of-interest charges against him. Examples of inappropriate deals in which Mr. Silver has fought against the interests of his own city and district are both lengthy in number and outrageous in their blatant nature. For example, NYC ‘s desperate search for revenue would not be so critical if the Speaker had not bargained away NYC’s commuter tax in return for a potential partisan political windfall. This year, he has bargained away desperately needed charter school provisions in return for political support from the powerful UFT.
While there is always room for debate on which policies are correct, the requirement that elected officials represent the interest of their constituents is absolute. Mayor Bloomber, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, and Speaker Sheldon Silver need to reassess to whom they owe their allegiance.

SAVE THIS DATE

APRIL 17, 2010

MARCH AND RALLY FOR
LIBERTY, FREEDOM
AND THE RESTORATION OF OUR CONSTITUTION

A NATION REBORN

When free men and women are ignored and abandoned by their government and their rights are threatened and even taken from them by those who purport to represent them, it is incumbent on all who treasure liberty and freedom and who abhor and reject tyranny and oppression to defy that government and make every effort to bring it back into harmony with its citizens by all appropriate and necessary means.

We are now living in such anxious and precarious times. We are ignored by those who claim to speak and act on our behalf and for our benefit despite our objections to those actions and the laws behind them. By the very decision to pay no heed to our wishes, we are reduced to the status of children by a political paternalism completely alien to our history, our rights and our traditions.

Our government has used its power to tax us beyond human endurance. It has amassed a collective debt so huge that it will rob our posterity of their birthrights. It will forcibly subjugate us to a state of denigrating dependency upon government with regard to virtually every vital aspect of our daily lives. Our state verges on bankruptcy as special interests refuse to compromise and make a shared sacrifice so that the commonwealth can survive and recover. While an empire state collapses, its political leaders look the other way, increase the budget and raise taxes on a shrinking population.

Our freedom of speech is suppressed by a culture of political correctness that threatens to destroy not only our values but also acts to distort and falsify our history. Political correctness is corrosive to the national psyche and corruptive to the national soul. When allied with apologists for militant Jihadism, it represents an existential threat to world civilization. If it is allowed to plague us without any resistance, our descendents will never know what the country conceived and promised to all Americans for all time by the founders was or is supposed to be.

Our freedom of religion is assaulted by those who in the name of preventing the establishment of a state religion have effectively established a secular state non-religion.
This tyranny of a virulent minority aided by a cynical government has made our public life devoid of tolerance and contemptuous of faith. Most importantly it has violated the rights of every person who privately practices religion but is forbidden under penalty of law to do so in the public square.

Our right to bear arms, which is an ancient and critical necessity for any free people, is increasingly denied by civil authorities who first seek to disarm us so that their control over us can be made more expedient and more complete.

Our right to assemble and petition our leaders is hindered and thwarted by rules and regulations designed to keep us from expressing a collective opposition to the misrule of government at all levels. These legal barricades exist not for the benefit of the people or for the perpetuation of public safety and public order. Rather they exist for the perpetuation of the power and privilege of elected and appointed officials who have ceased to be the servants of the people and who instead believe the people have become the servants of them.

Our educational system, which was once the envy of the world, has now descended into mediocrity. Propaganda is substituted for fact and ideology far too often trumps objective debate. From the primary level through the universities, our children are subjected to indoctrination formulated by zealots pushing radical causes and disturbing beliefs. Children in the early grades are “taught” about sexuality against the wishes of their parents and contrary to the religious beliefs that only their parents have the right to impart. We are treated to the spectacle of grade school students singing hymns to the President that are disturbingly reminiscent to totalitarian regimes of the past and present. Children graduate with diplomas they cannot read and unions and the politicians who are subservient to them block reform as generation after generation undergoes educational genocide. The pursuit of excellence is ignored amidst the clamor for “self esteem” teaching each generation how to become a victim instead of how to become educated, well rounded and self reliant. All of the above is done in the name of “tolerance” and “progress” and “fairness”. All of it leads to a bleak future of dependency.

The very nature of our governance has historically been a limited federal system of government designed to protect individuals and not groups. It has been dedicated to Jefferson’s eloquent proposition “that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This is now under attack as a problem both internationally and domestically because it doesn’t guarantee equality of outcomes, merely equality of opportunity...

Those who strive to erase our history and expunge our constitution by fundamentally altering it are as dangerous than those who 147 years ago sought to make “one nation, indivisible” divisible and separate for reasons that were as abhorrent and contradictory to our national purpose then as they would be today. Those who seek to divide and separate us by hyphenating our status as Americans and then demand restitution in the name of victim hood and a false justice seek to destroy the American dream and end the American story.

Along with the founders, the other great contributors to the success of this story have been those immigrants who came here and still come here by the millions to escape oppression, seek religious freedom and obtain equal opportunity to be free and prosperous. They asked and still ask only to be allowed to succeed by the sweat of their labor and the creativity of their intellect. All we ask of them in return is to come here legally, assimilate into the great American melting pot, learn our common language, show fidelity to our laws, history and traditions and be loyal only to this flag and this country. We are a nation of immigrants and we can no more turn our backs on “those yearning to breathe free” then we could refuse to help the victims of war, famine, pestilence and natural disasters. We as one people, under one flag have fought more wars in faraway places not for conquest but for the freedom of human beings whom we did not know than any nation in history.

At the great moments in our history…moments that were often achieved by sacrifice that Abraham Lincoln described as “the last full measure of devotion”, Americans have rallied not just to our flag, our country, our constitution and our history. They have also rallied to the dream of America that Dr. King envisioned and spoke of with perfect clarity and absolute truth. As we gather in groups across the nation to demand our rights and to stop the erosion of our freedoms let us do so in the name of that dream so that the “elites’ who mock us and the intolerant who seek to silence us understand that we will never let them make us subservient to an omnivorous and omniscient state. They should understand without any ambiguity that the state that seeks total control over our lives will not succeed because we will fight them to the death.

Today we live in a nation of bailouts that achieve dubious results, stimulus bills that cannot demonstrate job creation and energy schemes that do not unleash the vast potential resources that would make us both prosperous and safe. We have economically disastrous health care plans forced upon us that intrude in life and death decisions made between Doctor and patient and which must ration health care in order to succeed. We have a foreign policy seemingly built upon the premise that America is the problem and thus we must atone for all past mythical sins. To expiate those sins we must apologize for our generosity and cease to be vigilant, resolute and strong. Our allies are either ignored or ordered to do things inimical to their national interests and even dangerous to their survival. Our enemies are courted and fawned over. We look weak to friend and foe alike because we are rapidly becoming weak and our weakness will create a void that will be filled by those who seek the total destruction of western civilization and America in particular.

Charles Dickens opened his great masterpiece “ A Tale of Two Cities” by proclaiming that …”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..“. As Dickens recognized then so should we recognize now that all ages have their great moments of peril and confusion when only moral clarity and common sense can be a true guide to overcoming danger and evil. In this modern time of moral and cultural relativism we have seen moral clarity and common sense turned on its head. When a nation or its people cannot differentiate between good and bad, how are they expected to recognize the difference between good and evil? Ultimately this abandonment of values and judgment accompanied by its “footservant” political correctness has evolved into the greatest enemy we face today. A government who worships at the shrine of relativism is a government who cannot protect your rights, wealth and safety because in their world view you either do not deserve them or it doesn’t want to offend those who wish to take them from you.


All throughout this nation, citizens are now awakening from a long slumber to discover that the country they knew and loved is in danger of ceasing to exist. They are asking each other and their government how did this happen and what must be done to restore the natural relationship between free men and women and their democratic institutions. The asking of the central questions of this present crisis is what brings Americans from all walks of life together in protest. The answer to these central questions is what will wisely and expeditiously guide the direction of our mutual struggle until we are once again in control of our government, our nation and our lives. What is undeniable however is that as free men and women we must act now before it is too late. Edmund Burke the great English parliamentarian said “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good [persons] do nothing”. This is common sense indeed!
We as a people stand at the precipice of history. If we continue down this path of ever rapacious. government, unsustainable debt, weakness in foreign affairs and political correctness, our country will cease to exist as we have known it. Most Americans do not want to travel down this road. Why is it then that we have allowed a small dysfunctional minority to undermine our freedoms and our prosperity in the false name of equality?

The world we have lived in since September 11, 2001 is both lethal and chaotic. Unrelenting vigilance is the only path to relative safety. Overwhelming strength and dogged determination are the best weapons we can bring to bear against enemies at home and abroad who fervently believe that their culture of nihilism and death is the answer to modernity and western democracy. Others have put it more succinctly…if you want peace, then prepare for war! Moral and intellectual clarity devoid of self defeating and self loathing ideology must become the pragmatic road map through the political minefield that both our political leaders and our political enemies have built to trap us.

We have become yet another American generation with a rendezvous with destiny. What we do in the here and now is critical. We are at a crossroads and time is running out. Most importantly we must act to save those who will inherit this country after we are merely dust and faded photographs. In the words of Thomas Paine “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my children may have peace”.

AMERICA SLOUCHING TOWARDS JONESTOWN
As America commences its sleepwalk through history in the era that is ironically striving to become known as the Pax Obamus, it is critical for any and all of us who have no desire to follow a very strange man with very strange ideas over the cliff, to be as defiant as our forefathers were at Lexington and Concord. We must individually and collectively do all that is humanly possible to stop this act of mass national suicide before there is no one left who can even leave behind a true and objective chronicle of how American drank the “kool-aid’. Posterity demands at least this much of us.
This country has come to a fork in the road and there are no maps in existence to guide us to a final destination or even a vision of a final destination. We are like the ancient mariners left with cartography that simply says “Beyond this point there be dragons”.
America like the “Jonestown” of the seventies has turned its back upon itself and retreated into the wholesale devotion of a cult of personality that demands only that one suspend rational thought and simply follow the lofty dictates of the messianic leader. As with all such cults no deviation is tolerated by the acolytes who have been appointed to key positions to actualize the will of the leader.
Something is very wrong with Barack Obama. It is more than his preternatural abilities to be Svengali to most of the mainstream press and media. It is more than the still unfathomable decision of a majority of our fellow citizens, to bestow almost unlimited power to a man with almost no public record and a very disturbing private one.
What does this say about us as a people? What does this say about us as a culture? Have we begun the descent that history tells us every great civilization inevitably goes through? Or are we simply being tested by a divine providence who is distressed that the “shining city on a hill” envisioned by the founders and the framers has become corrupted and now like the Augean Stables, needs to be cleansed.
The President of the United States who has sworn an oath to protect and defend this country wants instead to fundamentally change this country. He wants the American Public to abandon the basic principals that act as the bedrock of the nation and instead adopt something so foreign and alien to our history and our psyche that it may as well be something from another dimension. He wants to perform this metamorphosis without debate or discussion and he wants to complete it before the nation hardly even knows it has begun. In effect he wants to enact a “Putsch”.
This “Putsch” will affect every aspect of our society. It will cause our energy costs to skyrocket based on a dubious theory of climate change that is debunked by thousands of scientists even as it is embraced by thousands who celebrate emotion over science. It will ration health care so that the healthy will have checkups free of charge but the sick will face a death sentence if the “system” decrees that the operation, or the drug or the therapy is not warranted or cost effective due to age or income. It will abandon traditional allies an instead adopt policies of reconciliation with regimes run by the fanatical and the insane and in so doing, it will become the enabler of evil. It will lower the standard of living for almost every citizen of the country in the name of finally achieving the goal of equal outcomes for all instead of equal opportunity for all. It will create group rights that will supplant individual rights. It will dismantle our military and our defense capability to the point that we will be vulnerable to those who hate us. This will be done in the name of “fairness” to those nations we “oppressed” throughout history regardless of whether or not we brought peace, prosperity, food, medicine or freedom to them.
Under this President we will turn our backs upon ourselves and everything that is unique to us being “Americans” will become something to be shunned and be ashamed of.
We stand today on the edge of the precipice with POTUS playing the role of the Pied Piper and telling us in his unique beguiling way to jump over the cliff for that is where a better future lies.
If the nation decides to travel this wretched road to “Obamanetics”, many casualties will strew the wayside. Gone will be the “separation of powers” and with it the “division of powers”. Using a media ignorant of history and spilling over with slavish devotion to celebrity for celebrity’s sake, the work of Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Jay and Hamilton will be consigned to a musty corner of a dark and dusty mausoleum. This president has made it abundantly clear that “Democracy” is not one of his priorities. He feels that what we all need and want, whether we know it or not, is security and predictability. None of these objectives, he argues opaquely, is possible with democracy. Democracy is too unpredictable…too volatile…too hard to manage. It is the secular argument against Democracy that mirrors the religious one exhorted by political Islam.
So the nation deceived by the fourth estate it once trusted and fearful of an economic tsunami caused in large part by the direct interference of the partisans of the party of Obama with the free market and capitalism, stands stunned and numb as to what to do as the bottom falls out beneath their feet. They are fed all manner of lies and distracted by meaningless media circuses as brave people in a land run by men from Hell itself, are butchered in the streets, The President of the United States says little …he does not want to interfere…he does not want to become the issue…he wants to preserve his precious dialogue with leaders so bereft of humanity that only the application of brute force can get their attention.
But the American Messiah is oblivious. He revels in his powers of persuasion. Has he not seduced an entire country with platitudes and generalities always careful to mention that this job or that will be long and difficult so that the details are always hidden away? Has he not toured foreign capitols and been received like the greatest star of the age? Dictators who bared their fangs at his predecessor now dazzle the camera with huge toothy grins for him. He gives speeches with a backdrop of smiling faces, carefully orchestrated so that the viewer will associate their giddy applause at strategic moments with instant vindication of what ever has just come out of his mouth.
For the students of history however there is something wrong with these otherwise magic moments. The stagecraft associated with his performances is all too reminiscent of people, places and times decidedly dangerous and decidedly deceptive. It is Bayreuth bathed in torchlights or Pyongyang suffocating in darkness or Jonestown with bodies contorted in rigor mortis as the jungle begins to claim them as its own, that begins to be conjured up in the darkest recesses of the mind. We are being had one begins to think. We are being had by a very great hustler at the pinnacle of his powers.
So we stand on the cusp of history. What we do depends entirely on us and depends on whether or not this generation has any of the vision of Washington and Lincoln left in their political DNA. The choices before us all demand sacrifice and hard work. One path however leads to a better and stronger nation reborn under the Constitution as it has been by every generation, to meet the great challenges of the time and overcome them. The other leads to a new country which will run from these challenges and thereby lose the essence of whom we are and who we have been and who we can be in the future. One is the road to freedom and the other is the road to Jonestown.
ERLANDSSON