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2007-06-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

New! Visit World Ahead's YouTube Channel for interviews, vlogs, and exclusive "vast right-wing conspiracy" video content.

Read the blogs and online editorials by World Ahead's authors:

Conservative Publisher by World Ahead president Eric M. Jackson, author of The PayPal Wars

Between the Lines by Joseph Farah, author Stop the Presses!

Commentary by Jerome Corsi, author of Minutemen and The Late, Great USA

Blogs for Bush by Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan, authors of Caucus of Corruption

Vanguard.org blog by Rod Martin, author of Thank You, President Bush

Yankees Fan blog by Thomas Kuiper, author of I've Always Been a Yankees Fan

Commentary by Joseph Klein, author of Global Deception

Official website for Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-TX), author of What's Right About America

Some of our favorite bloggers:

The GOP at 150

2006-06-18T06:55:00.000-07:00

To borrow from Tocqueville, Republicans are great when Republicans are good. It's not enough to win elections, or “have a seat at the table”. They must stand for something; and not just anything, but those core values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; of an overarching national identity; of equal opportunity for all; and of a God-given freedom and human dignity for every person which cannot be compromised or legislated away. These are conservatism, and these are the values which make us who we are.

When Republicans have abandoned these things, they've descended into utter irrelevancy. When they have stood strongly upon them, at home and abroad, they have won the greatest triumphs of our time.

Read the article

What We Now Know - June 16, 2006

2006-06-16T07:05:00.000-07:00

This Week: Rod D. Martin on "The GOP at 150"; plus: Frist calls a new Death Tax vote, Jack Wheeler on Democrat Hell Week, Marvin Olasky on Christian CEOs in China, and Jack Kemp's White Guilt.

Read the Newsletter

On "Inflation"

2006-06-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

A friend writes:

Sadly, a lot of consumer-oriented folks are loving this, as it is suppressing fuel prices to some extent, and a collapse would bring us back to $1.00-1.50 gasoline. Unfortunately, people wouldn't have jobs anymore, so the savings benefit from cheaper fuel would be a joke.

I'd like to see the economy cool (but not stop growing all together) without a recession. Blabbing to the news media every five minutes to show off a fed chairman's new-found stardom is hardly the way to do it. Ben is screwing up badly.

The economy does not need to "cool": that's a Keynesian myth. The Fed needs to quit fighting a phantom inflation which has nothing to do with the value or stability of the dollar. To say that rising gas prices are "inflationary" is just about as sensible as saying that dropping computer prices are deflationary: neither has anything to do with inflation or deflation at all. If both of those products were constants -- constant in demand, supply, quality, etc. -- than sure. And if both existed completely within a U.S. market context, then sure. But neither is true. Falling computer prices reflect advancing technology and increasing supply in a global market; rising gas prices reflect contracting actual supply after Katrina and contracting relative supply due to rapidly expanding global (chiefly Asian) demand.

What they don't reflect is inflation, which would mean that the increase in price is entirely the result of more dollars chasing the same (relative) amount of gas.

Prices move. Economies grow. This is exactly what can, should and does happen in any dynamic system; and trying to engineer a false "price stability" when the market price of a particular product should be rising or falling is the surest way to destroy all of the ecconomy's healthy sectors (which is just another way of saying "put families out of work and ruin people's lives").

Keynesian foolishness has always tried to freeze the economy in place, not just in this way but on a conceptual level as well (hence the warning given to FDR in 1944 that as soon as everyone had a small house and one family car, the economy would shut down, because everyone would have "everything anyone could want" and would therefore stop working). It believes there is no future, no growth, no possibility of tremendous breakthroughs (much less the seemingly constant tremendous breakthroughs we see today): it is best expressed in the "reduced expectations" and "limits to growth" language of the Carter stagflation era. So it tries to manage what it sees as a finite pie, by balancing inflation and unemployment against one another as the "inevitable" trade-off of monetary policy; and if that were it's only pernicious effect, the 1970s would have been a radically better time.

But what if you're economy is booming, growing rapidly in real terms, and starts requiring more workers than the domestic market can provide?

The liberal economic model can't account for this. So it starts trying to shut things down.

That's what Ben Bernanke is doing right now, that and trying to prove he's a big man who will be strong like his predecessor. And this is all a serious disappointment, because the whole idea of picking him was that he would be smarter than Greenspan, not a whole heck of a lot dumber.

I suspect the President is kicking himself, wishing he'd gone with Glenn Hubbard after all (see here: http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/everybreath/ )

But what he should have done was name Art Laffer. Reagan should have too.

Winners and Losers

2006-06-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

This was one of the more politically significant weeks in recent history. A recap of the winners and losers. Continue reading....

The Death Tax Vote: Good News, Bad News

2006-06-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

Thank you to everyone who fought for permanent repeal of the Death Tax. Though today's vote did not turn out as we hoped, we learned who our friends are, we outed some key enemies, and we saw clearly what a Democrat-led Senate would mean. There's more to this story than meets the eye. Continue reading....

Republicans at the Crossroads, Part Two: Next Weeks Chance For Redemption May Be Their Last

2006-06-02T00:22:00.000-07:00

Two key votes next week -- on permanent Death Tax repeal and the federal Marriage Protection Amendment give Republicans a chance at redemption. But though the GOP's record is far better than anyone remembers, a White House that can't communicate its way out of a paper bag surely can't lead, and a Senate which forgets who elected it and why should expect to be sent home.

This is just reality. And the witching hour has come.

Read the column here.

Oil Is Well: The Shortage Is a Myth, and Not a New One

2006-06-01T00:18:00.000-07:00

Liberals have been proclaiming the any-minute end of oil every few years since 1874. But in fact, the only thing obstructing plentiful supply and lower prices are those very liberals themselves.

Read the column here.

Joel Belz: Comparison Shopping

2006-05-31T00:25:00.000-07:00

From the price we're paying for gasoline compared to historical prices or other parts of the world, to the number of lives lost in Iraq compared to earlier wars or even training deaths, the American media have had a field day with the raw numbers, but have completely obscured the perspective necessary to draw any valid conclusions.

Read the editorial here.

Republicans at the Crossroads, Part One

2006-05-25T00:20:00.000-07:00

Republicans must quit hiding and start behaving like Republicans again. But that's not all they have to do. It's long past time Republicans began countering three deadly fallacies to which millions of Americans adhere. Until these lies are overcome, the conservative agenda will continue to face needless, powerful resistance, too often from within the Republican Party itself.

Read the column here.

We Need More Immigration, Not Less

2006-05-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

Larry Kudlow rightly pointed out on his show the other day that if, as is alledged, the Senate's bill were to allow in 100 million new immigrants over the next 20 years or so, that would do nothing more than replace the babies we've killed through abortion.

Staying even is important. We are weakened by every loss. Our unemployment is at its lowest rate in three and a half decades, showing clearly that we have more jobs than we can do (remember: Americans work harder and longer hours than any country on Earth). And our chief 21st Century rivals -- China and India -- have five and four times our population, respectively. China alone graduated 600,000 new engineers this year.

America needs more people, a point which would have been well understood by kings of an earlier age. All other things being equal, population is the measure of national strength, and we're entering an age when other things are getting all too equal indeed.

What we do NOT need is illegal immigration. America must control its borders, must determine who may and may not come in, must determine the terms of their coming. Americans have a right to expect that newcomers learn the language and join the culture. They will bring many good things with them, linguistically, culturally, and every other way. We welcome that heritage. But anyone who comes here seeking to be a "hyphenated American" or something even less than that should not be allowed on our shores.

These two concepts are not hard to reconcile, and they are a lot bigger than just Mexico. It's time Americans come to grips with both concepts, something which would be a lot easier if the Senate would come to grips with the need for real border security. Once that's done, we can get on with the hard but vital business of maintaining American values and American leadership in the century ahead.

This Is Julie

2006-05-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

The response to TheVanguard.Org's UN Gun Ban petition has been overwhelming, but yet plenty of anti-gunners ask why we care. Julie's story answers that question. Click here.

Oh, and don't forget to sign the petition.

Column: "Defending Our Greatest Human Right: President Bush vs. the UN Global Gun Grab"

2006-05-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush has been the most pro-gun President since George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But now, the Woodstock liberals, in concert with the world's terrorist states and dictatorships, mean to enact a UN treaty banning individual firearms ownership worldwide.

This is one of the biggest reasons we have a Republican Congress and White House. We better work like the dickens to keep it that way.

Read my column here.

AND sign our petition here.

Conservative Amnesia

2006-05-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

Like most conservatives, we're pretty upset with the Congressional leadership just now, or at least the Senate portion thereof. But make no mistake: conservatives are suffering just now from a strange selective amnesia. It's a malady they can ill afford. Click here.

Tancredo: Come Home, Mr. President

2006-05-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

While I am frequently of two minds about a lot of what Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has to say, in this article, "Come Home, Mr. President", he gets it just right. This is a prescription worth following; and moreover, if the President is serious about little things like his own political survival, he really better follow it. He gives up nothing by doing so; and in light of Mexico's new drug legalization, he would need to do these things no matter what.

A great read.

My Mexico Column Nails It (In Less Than 24 Hours)

2006-05-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

In today's column, "Reverse Amnesty: Mexico's Drug Legalization Cannot Go Unanswered", I assert that if anything will get Washington's attention regarding border security, Mexico's new drug law is it.

Well, no sooner do I speak it than this crosses the wire: "MAY SWEEPS: BUSH PRIMETIME SPEECH ON IMMIGRATION. SOURCES: BUSH PLANS NATIONAL GUARD ON BORDER..."

So what no President has been willing to do, well, ever, happens within one week of the Mexican Congress becoming Public Enemy Number One in the war on drugs; and before that new law goes into effect.

Mexico is a horribly dysfunctional, dystopian hell. It needn't be that way. But it always has been. And it can afford to prop up its horribly corrupt, vile elite decade after decade because it has the safety valve of America right on its border.

Well, immigration is wonderful, and I'm all for taking all the honest, hard-working Mexicans -- or anyone else of like character -- we can get. Our immigration quotas are ludicrously low, especially on science and technical people, and we're idiots for not taking in all the smart industrious people we can. They will not "take our jobs": they will create vast new wealth -- American wealth -- while taking strength from the lousy societies they left behind. It has been this way since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, and it will always be the same.

But illegal immigration -- actively aided and abetted by a corrupt kleptocracy shooing away its best people so the rest won't ask too many questions -- is just crazy. We have to control our borders or the word "nation" loses its meaning. We also have to be able to say who comes in and who doesn't: 9/11 taught us that. And so long as Mexico is broken (read, "horribly twisted and deformed"), we are all poorer and we are all faced with problems which just shouldn't ever be.

Now Mexico has gone off the deep end, forcing George Bush's hand. Let's see how he plays it. But as of today, it's looking a lot better indeed.

What Economic Boom? This One.

2006-05-07T09:10:00.000-07:00

On Monday, TheVanguard.Org put out an Action Alert asking people to immediately call their Senators and Congressmen and immediately sign our anti-tax petitions due to the likelihood that votes to extend the Bush tax cuts and repeal the AMT and Death Tax are imminent. In that post, we cited the positive effects of the cuts so far, which add up to our current "phenomenal economic boom".

We got a note from one or two clearly-benighted liberals in response to this, scoffing at the idea that the economy might not be in the toilet. A representative example went like this:

WHAT PHENOMENAL ECONOMIC BOOM? YOU GUYS ARE RETARDED, WHICH I GUESS THESE DAYS IS SYNONYMOUS WITH REPUBLICAN.

We helped these poor souls out with some proof, and I thought I ought to share it with you too. All of the following links are from the past several days, and just a tiny sample of what's available, randomly selected off Google more for my convenience and for time's sake than for anything else. You will note also that there's only one opinion column in the group (Larry Kudlow's, down at the bottom), the rest being straight news stories from the Mainstream Media. If you want more opinion (i.e., analysis so you can fully understand these numbers), I suggest you visit TheVanguard.Org and browse through our back newsletters, which more than tell the story.

In any case, without further ado, here's plenty of past-seven-days proof of our brilliant economic boom in what is surely the best economy which has ever existed in all of human history. Have fun confounding your liberal friends (and bucking up the conservatives too): as usual, the truth is all around us, if we're just willing to look.

May 4, 2006
U.S. Economy Firing on All Cylinders

May 4, 2006
US Tech Economy Continues Unheralded Boom

May 3, 2006
Fed's Stern Says US Economy on Solid Track - Report

May 3, 2006
U.S. Economy: Service Industries Expand Faster Than Expected

May 1, 2006
U.S. Economy: Manufacturing Unexpectedly Accelerates

April 28, 2006
Great Growth for U.S. Economy

April 28, 2006
Headwinds Can't Slow U.S. Economic Growth

Riding the Right Curve
by Larry Kudlow

May Day

2006-05-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

Everyone is thinking about immigration today, but long before Mexican illegals collectively lost their minds regarding public relations, socialists and Communists made May Day their high holy day. To wit, my column, here.

America: Choosing Life?

2006-04-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

My latest column, on the pro-life movement's amazing gains over the past five years and how to win final victory. Click here.

Also, pro-abort USA Today founder Al Neuharth makes a wonderful point -- and stretches far across the gulf dividing us all -- in a short piece here.

Reaganomics, 25 Years Later

2006-01-20T10:27:00.000-08:00

On the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the WSJ observes how much his pro-freedom, supply-side revolution has benefited the American economy:

"...94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years."

That's a track record that speaks for itself. (Or, to paraphrase Larry Kudlow, Keynesian-run France hasn't created that many jobs since Joan of Arc.)

Here is linke to the editorial.

Goodnight, de Gaulle

2005-11-11T10:19:00.000-08:00

Jonah Goldberg has penned an amusing (but I think generally accurate) take on what's happening in France. And it also contains the single best one-sentence description ever of why Western Europe's economy has been in the toilet for a couple of decades:

The French "social model" which pays wealthy, educated people not to work much — and prevents poor and desperate ones from working at all — simply has no solution for what to do with these surplus Frenchmen.

One can argue as to how much of a role that jihad is playing in the ongoing French riots, but I think that Jonah's conclusion that "France" as we now know it is ultimately doomed is right. French jokes aside, it will be sad to watch as their economy slides from stagnation into perpetual decline while at the same time a muscular, unassimiliated Muslim minority grows into a plurality and becomes the most powerful political force in the country. Goodnight, de Gaulle.

Hopefully the French state's disintegration over the next 30 to 50 years will at least be a wake up call for Germany and Italy (and possibly our own California!) to deregulate, lower their oppressive tax systems, and make their labor markets liquid enough to absorb their growing immigrant communities. If not, look for nationalism and nativism to rear their ugly heads on the continent again as demographics and economics bring Western Europe to a boiling point.

Click here to read Jonah's editorial

From the mouth of babes...and Katharine DeBrecht

2005-11-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

Ahh...From the mouths of babes. After spending four days quizzing my oldest son about Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, much to my chagrin, do I see my son plop himself in the back of my minivan in the middle of the carpool line to tell me “Mom, we studied the wrong chapter.”

“Wrong chapter?” I ask. In the middle of making chicken parmesan, changing diapers, and working on a spelling list with my first grader, not to mention a few interviews, I had spent a lot of time the night before discussing the difference between the Catskills and the Green Mountains with my nine-year-old. After a long day for my son, and an even longer day for me with a two-year-old with a major case of the sniffles and an utter demand for nothing on TV except “Diego” (Sorry, Son, call the cable company, because I have nothing to do with their programming), I decided to wait until he chose to discuss his test with me.

Later in the evening, after a few footballs nearly missed my pot of pasta, my son brings me the social studies test on “the wrong chapter.” He proceeds handing me the test with a “now, you know, we studied the wrong chapter.”

I glanced at the initial grade- 83. My son is a straight-A student. I ask him if he has learned his lesson to make sure he studies the right material. I also tell him, he has obviously been listening well in class to get the grade he got studying “the wrong chapter”. I go through the questions he missed. One question stood out: “What do people do if they don’t have any money to buy goods and services?” The correct answer: Barter. My son’s answer: “get a job.”

I couldn’t be more proud of him.

Russian novelist imagines Europe under Sharia

2005-10-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

Dr. Jack Wheeler -- one of the most well-connected and intelligent minds in the conservative movement -- writes on his website today of a novel that is causing waves in Russia. Elena Chudinova's new book, The Mosque of Notre Dame de Paris, is set in France in 2040 and tells of how a Muslim majority voted itself into power and established Sharia as the official law of the nation. Jack writes:

Chudinova takes the ongoing transformation of Europe into Eurabia – the Moslemification of Europe – seriously... The Moslem immigrant children who comprised 40-50% of the population under 20 in many French cities in 2005 have grown up, have voted themselves into power, established Islam as the state religion in France, imposed strict Sharia Islamic law upon all French people, and converted the cathedral of Notre Dame into a mosque. The only Christians who are left are forced to live in ghettos like Jews in pre-World War II Warsaw. The novel focuses upon an initially small Christian resistance movement that refuses to live according to Sharia laws and decides to fight back – violently.

It sounds like a fascinating read; let's hope it gets translated soon.

In the meantime, do yourself a favor and visit Jack's To The Point website. It charges a small subscription but it's worth it. It has some of the best commentary on the web, and Jack is always posting intel from his many sources that you won't find elsewhere. (For example, how India's spy agency is using the devastating earthquake in Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda.)

Left-Wing Whacko Kid's Book of the Week (part 2)

2005-10-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Liberals have been relentless in attacking Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed for exposing children to (shudder) politics. Alan Colmes called it "brainwashing," Ron Reagan said he wants to make a book that shows how "conservatives hate black people," and Andrew Sullivan says it reminds him of Mao Tse-Tung.

C'mon, guys. Your side of the aisle has been doing this for years. You've been peddling socialist fish and gay kings in our classrooms for years.

And then there's this little gem -- the story of how a "Truth Fairy" meets a little boy named George "to teach him lessons about How to not manipulate the Media, How to treat Veterans, How to be honest, How to be respectful with families who have lost soldiers in war, How to go to War only when necessary, How not to label people as Boogeymen, How not to invade countries, How to control greed, How to hold fair elections, and How to behave as a leader."

Limbaugh praises upcoming Clinton Library tour by Willey and Broaddrick

2005-10-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

Rush Limbaugh just read a World Ahead press release on his show. It announces the upcoming tour of the Clinton Library by Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Their Lives author Candice E. Jackson. In the words of El Rushbo:

"Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey will visit the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor later this month, on October 26th, to draw attention to the former President's treatment of women. They will be accompanied on the tour by attorney and author Candice E. Jackson. Broaddrick and Willey have both accused Clinton of assaulting them. Broaddrick claims that then-Governor Clinton raped her in Little Rock and Willey says that Clinton sexually assaulted her when she worked in the White House in 1993. And they're both going to tour the Library and Massage Parlor on October 26th. I hope this is true. It would be, well, it would be fun."

The complete announcement of Willey and Broaddrick's upcoming tour is available here.

More from the Help! Mom! Mailbag

2005-10-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

As Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! continues to energize some people while ticking others off severely, we of course continue to get lots of mail on the subject. Let's go to the mailbag and see what our more "progressive" brethren, or what the Brits call "The Great and the Good," have to say...

How can you call your website a family website, yet write books specifically for your own political agenda? Kids should decide for themselves what they believe in, they shouldn't have propaganda of any type (liberal or conservative) presented to them in a book like yours. Because they are not old enough to understand the issues, you are giving them your opinions with no concern for their integrity or feelings.

I think you will agree with me in acknowledging the horrible political division that now characterizes our country. Don't you hope that some day the "evil liberals" will be able to agree with you on things? Don't you hope that someday, somehow, every piece of legislation the Republicans pass doesn't upset your fellow countrymen, and vice versa? By planting your ideas in youth, you are taking away from their posibilities of breaking through the barriers now set between conservatives and liberals. This country's economy is not what it used to be for one simple reason: no one can agree on anything anymore.

You are a catalyst for the economic downfall of the United States, but of course you don't care, as long as your children report back what you've taught them, like the little automatons they now are, and make you feel loved and intelligent. At least adults can decide for themselves which side of the political spectrum they believe in, children don't have that luxury.

So I ask politely that if you continue to write, write articles for newspapers, or write adult literature, or write children's books that don't preach to them that which they cannot truly understand yet.

As long as there are books like yours, Republicans and Democrats will only be driven farther and farther apart. It saddens me that you are so immature as to write a book like this, especially while it is me, a 17 year old, pointing out that you are, in fact, being a little baby.
If you were a liberal, I'd still be sending you this message.

Thanks very much, I hope you seriously consider what I have to say.

Well, Greg...um, no, we don't think we'll seriously consider what you have to say. It's dumb. But on the other hand, it would make a great essay for an Ivy League school admissions packet, since your comments ooze with that endearing combination of naivete, ignorance and earnestness that admissions officers seem to really, really like. 17, huh? You need to rack up more Playstation hours, dude.

**

The Title should be Help! Kids there are Conservatives in the White House.
You are so off base. I work as an advocate for families and children with special health care needs. You need to do your research.

Actually, we have done our research...extensive amounts. And what we've discovered is that we have no idea what your point is, unless it's a sly way of letting us know that, under the current Republican regime, Very Important Persons such as Advocates for Families and Children with Special Health Care Needs just aren't being given the Respect and of course Money that they deserve.

Well, Beth, to paraphrase the immortal words of RINO Mike Bloomberg, "We can't do everything." He, of course, was speaking about why he was in support of building a new sports stadium in Manhattan to the tune of $400 million+ in tax breaks when the bilious NYC public school system was drowning in red ink. Bloomberg understands that when you build buildings it creates jobs and tax revenue, and of course when people use the buildings, that generates jobs and tax revenue-meaning that in the end, there's more tax money to spend on schools, and on Very Important People like you. That's logic simple enough for even a liberal to understand.

Quite frankly though, we just like the "We can't do everything" part.

**

Will you damn Republif*cks stop raping Democracy!!! Hillary Clinton isn't responsible for Katrina. Hillary Clinton isn't responsible for the slaughter of millions of Iraqis and thousands of our tropps. (sic) Hillary Clinton isn't responbile (sic) for 9/11. So go on and f*cking take the guns you NRA wingnuts so love and blast your right wing crap filled heads off.

Hmm. Yet another liberal with issues. Well, James, in the immortal words of General Honore, a guy who would kick your butt from one end of town to the other, "Don't get stuck on stupid"...

a) Nature created Katrina (Karl Rove was busy that day.)
b) Hillary voted FOR the US military's intervention in Iraq, and has, in fact, continued to support the war to this day. So if we want to get technical about it, she's very much responsible for what goes on there, good and bad.
c) A guy named Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. Ever hear of him?
d) something called the Second Amendment, a rumor of which may have circulated through your pointed little head at some time, acknowledges the right of Americans to keep and bear arms. Think you're smarter than the Founders, Jimmah boy? Think again.

**

On your new product - "Do You Have Liberals Under your Bed" - No , but we have fascists buried in our pasture. Have a nice day.

Whatever you say. From your apparent standpoint, wouldn't facists being buried in a pasture be a good thing? We're confused, but hey, muddled thinking is a hallmark of liberalism, so you clearly fit right in. Maybe you could help Greggie in the above post with his college admissions essay. The two of you together should be a slam-dunk for at least one Harvard admission, easy.

Left-Wing Whacko Kid's Book of the Week

2005-09-29T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yup, just your basic, good old fashioned pot primer for kids. The perfect book to read to little Timmy as you tuck him in with his teddy bear for the night and then head over to your neighbor's garage to smoke some weed and listen to the Grateful Dead.

Can you believe there are liberals like Andrew Sullivan attacking us for publishing a politically themed kid's book?

Evidently teaching kids about hard work and self-reliance is far worse than a book with the magical "tale of how a young girl learns about marijuana" so concerned parents have a "tool...to use in creating conversation that educates, rather than merely frightens, their young children about cannabis use."

And here we thought the image of Ted Kennedy under our bed was scary!

Interplanetary Kyoto?

2005-09-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

After his most recent Sierra Club rant, I can't wait to hear Al Gore try to pin responsibility for this news on President Bush:

And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of
frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have
shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a
climate change in progress.

Democratic Underground honors "Help Mom" author

2005-09-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

The brains trust over at Democratic Underground have honored Katharine DeBrecht, the author of Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed, with inclusion on their "Top 10 Conservative Idiots" list.

Those of us here at World Ahead are not sure if this really is a Top 10 list per se--since President Bush makes the list 3 times and one listing lumps Bill O'Reilly together with Condi Rice--but given the fuzzy math these liberals are being taught in public schools we thought it best just to politely accept the honor for our author.

View the Top 10 list here.

P.S. Who leaked our next book cover to these guys?

More 'Help! Mom!' Fun

2005-09-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

'Help! Mom! is coming out tomorrow (Sept. 20th) and the invective is flying! Let's check out today's mailbag...

Can't we find anything better to have our children read than forcing them to have the same ideals as ours? Shouldn't we want them to have the "freedom" to think "liberally" for themselves without mom and dad adding to the already mix of messages they are oversatuated with? C'mon. "Liberals under my bed?". Really...

In the first place Effrin - and if that's really your name, well, we can see where some of your issues stem from - no one is 'forcing' anyone to do anything. Children should indeed have the right to read things, or be read things from every perspective. Unfortunately, that perspective, at least when it comes to the books being made available by publishers, has been overwhelmingly liberal for the last 30 years or so...or have you not noticed that 'oversaturation?'As is usually the case with liberals, all viewpoints are welcome...as long as they kowtow to the party line. Well, we ain't 'towing' any more. Deal with it.

Someone has to be really f**ked in the head to write a book designed to brainwash children from day one into their parents political dogma.

There might be liberals under the bed...but there's probably alot more conservatives, in the closet.

Wow Dave, that's harsh. So harsh. That reference to 'conservatives in the closet'...well, we're quaking here, waiting for the thought police to come by and sort through our skeletons.

Ever hear of a 'red-diaper baby', Dave? Those were kids whose parents were confirmed Communists or socialists, who were imbued in those discredited, perverted dogmas from day one, forced to go to camp and school with other such unfortunates, and never given a chance to develop their own possibly more rational political beliefs. What's your throught on that? Or is the fact that the little darlings were recruited into fighting what we're sure you consider to be 'the good fight' from Day One justify what really is an ongoing form of child abuse? Way different from a book or two from a different viewpoint, wouldn't you say?

How many flavas of tic~tacs are the Skittles Breaux zzzzz II Bagz of new juice pops snd soda crakkatoas. Rove

We're printing this one in it's entirety just for you, Wieslaw (maybe you and Effrin should hook up.) We're assuming the 'Rove' you're referring to is Karl Rove, but since the rest makes zero sense - typical of so many liberal missives - we're just going to let the message stand on its own multi-hued merits.

Environmentalism's Role in the New Orleans Flood

2005-09-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

Liberals are dancing on New Orleans' grave with glee, chanting how this tragedy proves the need for the U.S. to ratify the anti-growth Kyoto agreement on global warming. In between their race-bating and calls for tax hikes, there have been plenty of liberals who have been quoted as saying that global warming caused this hurricane to lay waste to the Gulf. To wit:

"Global warming was responsible for this disaster," [Rev. Jesse] Jackson told reporters during a brief tour in which he held prayer sessions and paused often to have his photograph taken… Jackson cut short his tour as word filtered down from his staff that Oprah Winfrey had arrived and wanted to interview him.

Besides the dogma in Jackson's claim--when was the last time he spoke of the saving grace of Jesus Christ with such a lack of ambiguity?--the crassness of what he is doing in the media is transparent. (Yes, the part about Oprah is indeed in the original Metro News article.) But the willingness of left-wingers to take to the public airwaves to preach their environmentalist message while people drown is going to backfire.

It turns out that environmentalism played more than a small role in setting the stage for the tragedy in New Orleans, and it may ultimately be revealed to have had a direct role. John Berlau over at National Review Online has written a great piece exposing the role environmentalists have plaid in obstructing flood control nation-wide--and in Louisiana in particular.

So while the science of global warming is far from settled (except for the absurdity of claims that Bush's rejection of Kyoto caused Hurricane Katrina), let's take this opportunity to continue the conversation that liberals have so crassly started and attempt to understand just how damaging their extremist environmental beliefs have been.

Read John Berlau's op-ed

The Missed Story of Katrina

2005-09-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

After watching the events of the last couple days in New Orleans, my heart has gone out to the people of all of the Gulf States, especially New Orleans, where things have sunk to the lowest of lows; where even a helicopter rescuing children from a children’s hospital was shot at by thugs.

Although many politicians and pundits would like to play the blame game, I would like to point out a very important angle of this whole story. I am not minimizing the incredible effort by Americans for their amazing response to the needs of the people of New Orleans and elsewhere. Americans have huge hearts and it is apparent again today. I cannot, however, ignore the incredible contribution the US Military has made in this tragedy.

At a critical moment in this on-going tragedy, the only salvation the people of New Orleans had, and the only group to get the job done, was the United States Military. All you have to do is look at the turn-around in events since the National Guard appeared on this horrendous scene. More people are being rescued, food and water are becoming available to those who have had nothing in days, and the violence seems to be subsiding. The smiles on the faces of evacuees being loaded into military helicopters is just one picture of the many things that our military is doing to improve conditions in the area; something that couldn’t be done until the US Military arrived.

I wonder what Sen. Durbin and others on the left would have to say about the brave men and women who have voluntarily signed up (yes, some on college campuses) to serve their country. Are they still comparing them to Nazis? To members of the Gulag? I guarantee you, many refugees would prefer to have been housed in Club Gitmo rather than the Superdome. I am sure Cindy Sheehan’s group is disappointed that their message has been drowned out by Katrina.

As much as the left demonizes the military, the military has always responded with a sense of honor and duty to protect and rescue American citizens, regardless of political views, social standing, and, yes, race.

Watching things slowly turning around in New Orleans and elsewhere, I think we all need to stop and thank God for our military, who selflessly pack-up, leave their families and risk their lives to save and protect people whom they have never met or who even attempt to discredit them as Nazis or Gulags. No matter, they will be rescued and protected regardless.

To all of you who serve in the military around the world, I offer my heart-felt thanks for your voluntary service to our country. Most Americans do not label you as Nazis or members of the Gulag, etc.; we call you heroic fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, who give their lives to make the world a better place. For this, we offer you our thanks.

Do you 'Yahoo?' Al Qaeda Does

2005-09-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

Al Qaeda continually uses the internet to further its perfidious goals. Jeremy Reynalds, author of World Ahead's upcoming book 'WAR OF THE WEB,' investigates.

With only a handful of members, the recently formed Yahoo group Al Neda Cell doesn't look like it will be capable of causing much trouble. However, its very existence is still a reminder of the incendiary, anti-American Islamic material that circulates on the Internet–especially troubling as Yahoo is an American company and appears to freely allow this material.

For example, an file available at the Yahoo Al Neda Cell group site includes comprehensive instructions for making mines and booby traps.

Here's an extract -- "The operative can use mines and booby traps for selective assassination or to defend a residence, perimeter or retreat. Any of these devices can also be used in an ongoing guerilla campaign when fighting against numerically superior forces. Mines and booby traps also have great potential for causing general mayhem when employed in non-White areas."

The writer then talks about "Claymore Mines," which he describes as "anti-personnel, directional mines, which are used for perimeter defense, remote ambush and early warning when enemies trip them outside of a defensive perimeter."

The writer states, "To the resistance fighter, the claymore mine can be employed as a booby trap, a remotely detonated weapon of assassination or terror, or a defensive weapon to protect the operative's retreat. Claymores can be deployed wherever the enemy is likely to move, park their vehicles, store goods or pass through choke points. These weapons are really only useful against personnel and their directional firing makes the blast much more devastating in crowded areas than a radius fragmentation bomb of similar power."

Instructions are then provided for making improvised Claymore mines. "Start the assembly process by purchasing, or ‘liberating,' a length of heavy-duty 8" PVC waste pipe. Some plumbing shops will have scrap ends and pieces for sale at reduced prices…. But let's face it, ‘liberating' several full-length pipes from a construction site is really a lot more satisfying."

The writer then moves on to "Panji traps," calling it "A very simple trap. A small pit is dug, lengths of sharpened sticks are cut and inserted vertically into the bottom of the pit, a thin covering of dirt and leaves over the top."

A Panji Board, he says, is "a piece of board often with metal spikes, the ends filed to create sharp barbs. When the victim's foot is impaled on the trap it can't be immediately removed without causing intense pain and further damage. The tips can be smeared with poison or fecal matter to increase the risk of infection."

A description of a Venus Fly Trap follows. "This consists of a frame work with overlapping barbs placed in a pit. Some are made from a metal container that is sunk flush with the surface of the ground. It is covered with a grass or leaf camouflage. The barbs inflict injury especially when the victim attempts to withdraw his leg out of the trap."

Another file available on the same Yahoo group deals with how to make an improvised grenade launcher. Calling it a "very simple design," but still one that "works very nicely," the writer states, "The 40mm systems pumps projectiles out at low barrel pressures and spent casings for these weapons can be readily obtained at gun shows (at least in the US) or casings could, with the proper tools, be improvised. The US military designed the 40mm round to be easily reloaded by replacing the primer with a .38 blank. Civilian and law-enforcement application rounds, such as flare, tear gas and smoke are also available and can be modified to our use. These facts make the 40mm an ideal round to base an improvised grenade launcher upon. The design of these weapons is quite simple, not much more complicated than our improvised firearm designs." He then provides a list of the materials needed.

MESSAGES ON AL NEDA CELL

In addition to the material on the files, postings on the message board dole out a stream of anti-American pro-terror propaganda.

Here's a selection. A message posted on Sept. 1 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/al_neda_cell/message/20)
read in part like this, "There remains little to say about al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/message/53934) and the feared Jaish Ansar Al-Sunnah (www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/ansar-al-sunna.htm) as the groups battle it out daily on the ground in Iraq. Each and every day, both groups dole out a steady stream of offensives against US forces and their Iraqi collaborators with ever increasing precision.

"On Tuesday, both groups reported on multiple operations that took a heavy toll in equipment and lives. In The Name Of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. O Allah! Make our shots hit their intended targets and fasten our feet firmly to the ground. Praise be to Allah, peace and prayer be upon our prophet, his family, and his companions."

Another portion of the same message was titled, "Al-Qaida Liquidates Spy," and read "Our brothers from Al-Qua'Qua' Brigade belonging to Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers have on Monday Rajab 24, 1426, (Aug. 29 2005) assassinated one of the crusaders spies in the town of Al- Kalis at Diyala, by the grace of Allah."

Another gory extract from the same posting was called, "Al-Qaida's Omar Brigades Tallies Assassinations," and read in part, "The following assassination took place between 23 and 29 of August 2005. Our brothers from Khalid Bin Al-Waleed squad belonging to Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers have Assassinated two members of Badr Brigade, Rasul and Wahid Rafaqua, in the area of Baquba. Assassinated another member of Badr at the Industrial neighborhood. Assassinated a member of Badr at Al-Tahreer, Baquab, by the grace of Allah."

It wasn't only people who have been the target of insurgent wrath. The same message carried a narrative reading, "A squad from the lions of Tawheed have blasted a crusaders crude pipeline, in the neighborhood of Al-Dibs in the town of Kirkuk. The pipeline is benefiting the crusaders and apostates who love to be slaved by the Cross Worshipers, by the grace of Allah. They will never benefit as long there are men on the ground that knows what the crusaders are concerned with, the theft of the Muslim nation's wealth and fortune, but we will turn it into inferno before it reaches them."

Some more anti-American vitriol on the same posting read, "A squad from our mujahideen brothers belonging to Omar Ibn Al-Khatab company have on Monday August 29 2005 at 11:00 hrs blasted the fresh water pipe on the main road supplying the crusaders base at Al-Baghdadi South of Hadithah. When the crusaders approached the area, the Mujahideen brothers were waiting for them and pounded the area with 82 mm mortar rounds, destroying a Humvee with its crew all on board, by the grace of Allah."

The narrative continued, reading "A squad from the Mujahideen brothers were able today at 08:00 hrs to plant and detonate a bobby trapped vehicle targeting Apostates commandos' column. In the area of Al-Quala'a at Samarra. The explosion killed five apostates burning their vehicle by the grace of Allah. Allahu Akbar...Allahu Akbar... Glory is to Allah, His Prophet and Believers. Praise be to Allah, peace and prayer be upon our prophet, his family, and his companions."

The message was attributed to "Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers" and the Military Division of Jaish Ansar Al-Sunnah" and dated Aug. 30 2005.

Another message (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/al_neda_cell/message/21) was titled, "Al-Qaida Employs New Tactic Of Razing Houses."

It read, "In The Name Of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. O Allah! Make our shots hit their intended targets and fasten our feet firmly to the ground. Praise be to Allah, peace and prayer be upon our prophet, his family, and his companions ... Our brothers in the military division of Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers, have on Monday Rajab 24th 1426, (August 29th 2005) shelled the crusaders base of Al-Baker using ten mortar rounds, from two directions, by the grace of Allah. The military division of Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers have liquidated two spies, Saddam and Edward Al-Najafi and demolished their homes after removing the women and children. This method will be used with all conspirators and spies, by the grace of Allah."

Another portion of the same post read in part, "Our brothers in the military division of Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers have on Monday Rajab 24th 1426, (August 29th 2005) detonated an explosive device, targeting an apostate patrol at Al- Tarmiyah. The explosion destroyed a troop carrier killing six and injuring three apostates, by the grace of Allah. Allahu Akbar...Allahu Akbar... Glory is to Allah, His Prophet and Believers. Al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers

Another message (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/al_neda_cell/message/3) was titled, "American Bastards Play Football With Qur'an."

It started off with a prayer. "O Allah, curse these animals, take their vision and turn them into the apes and swine that they are, ameen."

The message continued. "A martyrdom fighter drove an explosives-packed car into a US checkpoint in the east of the city of Ramadi, Wednesday evening following an outrageous innocent earlier when US forces used the Quran as a football to provoke Mujahideen.

The blast killed more than nine US Marines and destroyed two Humvees that were parked at the checkpoint. After the attack, large numbers of US vehicles and helicopters very tightly encircling the entire area, backed up by Iraqi puppet army troops ... Less than an hour before, US forces had desecrated copies of the Qur'an in front of witnesses on the main street in the al-Qattanah area in northern Ramadi ... After about an hour of raids and searches yielded them no weapons or Resistance fighters, the Americans brought out a copy of the Qur'an and began kicking it around from one to another. US soldiers said they were trying to provoke Resistance fighters into coming out into the streets where they could be killed."

While some message board moderators claim that they are not responsible for the contents of the material posted, there's mistaking the intention of this group's leader. Al Neda Cell's front page (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/al_neda_cell) front page reads in part like this, "Remember your brothers and sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Chechnya! Our beloved children are dying everyday as a result of the genocide by the Great Satan and his allies. America has committed the most hideous crime against our beloved people. The American hands are stained with the blood of our innocent children.

"...Your Mujahideen brothers need your material and spiritual support. They are fighting the great Satan and his allies. They have nothing to fight with except their faith and body. They are fighting the enemy to liberate our beloved Ummah and land. They are fighting to remove the cancer from the heart of our great Ummah. We pray to Allah to grant the Mujahideen victory and destroy America, Israel and their allies."

This is not the first time that Yahoo has allowed its groups to be used by terrorists. In early 2004, one of Yahoo's then many on line radical Islamic groups was Global Islamic Media (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalislamicmedia), which at one point had about 6,000 members.

As Internet terror researcher Johnathan R. Galt commented in an e-mail written in early 2004, "Global Islamic Media (was) "regarded by the world's terrorism experts and the news media as the ‘official voice of al-Qaeda.' The next attacks (were) discussed daily on Yahoo (several months in advance). Global Islamic Media published in Dec. 8 2003 a more explicit threat, which hinted at the possibility of an attack against Spain outside of Iraq. After the attacks occur, they are celebrated at this group."

An e-mailed request for comment to Yahoo was not immediately answered.

World Ahead titles generate lots of ink

2005-09-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like publishing books from a conservative point of view to generate controversy...but hey! We like it that way. That's the point, in fact.

Here's a sample of the mail that came in this week.

About 'THANK YOU, PRESIDENT BUSH' -

"I am sure that the victims of Katrina are just dying to "Thank you Mr. President."

-- While they're at it, they should thank their weepy Democratic governor and inept Democratic mayor. Is their stellar performance under pressure the reason why people are pleading that Rudy Guiliani - a Republican - take charge? Just asking. At a time when people should be working together, the Democrats seem intent on assigning blame. There will be plenty to go around. Stop whining and start working.

"Thank you president Bush". This website is nothing more then absolute propaghanda. I hope god forgives you all for supporting this evil bastard we call our president. Everyday people are waking up to the lies of the republicans. Enjoy the power while you have it because America wont stand for it much longer, hold the election today and Bush would'nt have a chance in hell of winning, but don't worry, I'm sure your president will have he's chance in hell afterall."

--Uh, right. Good luck with the vision thing, dude - your dexterity with language is breathtaking, so much so that if the election had been held today, I'd have voted for you for President, Matty boy. Right after drinking a few six-packs and getting an in-home lobotomy.

About 'THEIR LIVES - THE WOMEN TARGETED BY THE CLINTON MACHINE' -

"Does your writer, Candace Jackson, know the only reference Google has under her name is a porn star? I thought it was quite fitting, really.
I surely don't condone the Clinton/Monica bit but I do object to "liberalism ...focuses on group rights rather than individual rights" when conservatives do the same thing. the abortion issue, for example. And re "liberalism ... permits political force to be used to accomplish all goals" - what does she think is gong on in Washiington now? And how about the "you're either with us or against us and not patriotic"? I particularly don't like the lying you seem to be condoning. For example, the children's book "Hey Mom, there's liberals under my bed" telling kids Kennedy will tax their lemonade stand (he couldn't even if he wanted to - it's the Congress) and that Sen.Clinton will outlaw sugary drinks. That's preposterous and outright lying - and to innocent little children. Shame........"

-- We entered several names into some of the web's more valuable porn name generators. Results included 'Annette Steel,' 'Donna Cummings,' and 'Rhonda Throb.' Jane, I'm sorry, but the name Candice Jackson never appeared. However, we do have a new name for you...Barbie Hump. We'll be sure to pass it along to Bill Clinton, just to save you the trouble.

About 'HELP! MOM! THERE ARE LIBERALS UNDER MY BED!'-

"You are spreading fear, hatred, and stupidity. I can't wait to get my hands on you."

-- This was signed 'Jesus Christ.' Probably an imposter, and clearly one who hasn't read the book which is coming out Sept. 20th. The real Jesus Christ is actually very positively represented in 'HELP! MOM!' But just for the sake of decorum, we won't run the imposter's assumed identity through the porn name generator.

"New ideas for you!

Help! Mom! There are Women Who Won't Bow Down to Men Under My Bed!

Help! Mom! There are People Who Question the Government Under My Bed!

Help! Mom! There are Citizens Who Think for Themselves Under My Bed!

Help! Mom! There are Citizens Who Understand Science Under My Bed!

Help! Mom! There are Christians Who are Opposed to War Under My Bed!

Help! Mom! There are People Who Think Owning an AK-47 is a Stupid and Danger Thing That Probably Means You are Having Erectile Difficulties Under My Bed!"

-- Buck - and it's almost embarrassing to admit that our favorite dog's nickname is 'Buck' - if you had actually read HELP! MOM! instead of speaking out of ignorance, you'd discover that all that brainpower you expended in an effort to come up with witless retorts was energy wasted. Go play with your Game Boy or watch 'The Daily Show' and calm down. Actually reading books and then commenting on them requires effort. Don't exert yourself.

Leave Lenin Where He Belongs -- the Dump!

2005-08-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

AFP reports today that Berlin officials are planning to haul a gigantic bust of V. I. Lenin out of a dump where it has been resting for 14 years and place it in a city museum.

Big mistake. From the sounds of things, the 3.5 ton statue was already being housed in the most appropriate setting imaginable (assuming the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port didn't have room).

While the reasons for the restoration may sound reasonable -- the statue is to be placed in an exhibit on East Germany's communist occupation -- it would be a more powerful historical statement to keep the head Bolshevik's head right where it is now, buried near the Mueggelsee Lake.

Lenin is one of history's greatest monsters. His band of power-hungry thugs derailed Russia's fledgling democratic movement and brought an end to what had been a flowering culture. He brutally murdered his opponents, siezed private property, and introduced economic centralization on a country that had been growing rapidly prior to World War I. And even though he was forced to back-track on some elements of the planned economy before his death, he was primarily responsible for turning Communism from a crack-pot theory to a movement that would engulf half the world and lead governments to slaughter over 100 million of their own people in the decades that followed.

It's hard to see how returning the image of this beast to public display has any benefit. There is no intrinsic artistic value to this slab (like all Soviet-mandated public "art") . And given the number of left-wingers throughout the administrative halls of Old Europe, it's more than likely that it will be placed in some sort of sympathetic museum display that white-washes the horrors of the Communist occupation.

On the other hand, choosing to leave Lenin buried in a public dump sends a compelling message, both about the character of the man as well as Communism's rightful place in the ash-heap of history.

(The complete AFP article is available at http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050801/od_afp/afplifestylegermany_050801204602).

Nuclear Fallout

2005-05-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

From Rod D. Martin:

It is very important to remember that the only reason there wasn't a vote implementing the "Nuclear Option" today is that Frist didn't have the votes to win; or more specifically, that he was short by two.

Let's put that another way: virtually the entire Republican Party was united in doing the right thing. To the degree there was a betrayal, it was not by "the Republicans". It was by John McCain.

I do specify McCain. Warner, Snowe, Collins and Chafee are to be expected. DeWine and Graham are good guys who ought to know better, and who will vote with Frist (giving him the margin of victory) if the Democrats abuse the deal.

McCain, though, did this purely because it puts him in the news as "a statesman", a "selfless public servant above politics". In other words, he's running for President, seeking to replace a real statesman and a true public servant.

McCain is the only person in the whole thing who needs or deserves punishment. Don't slam the party: it was the party that got sold out, along with you and me. Focus fire on the man who did it. And don't forget.

My column on this is available online here.

Habemus Papam Hard-Linus: NYT Attacks the New Pope

2005-04-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

Well, that was fast.

Within a couple of hours of Joseph Ratzinger being named the successor to John Paul II, The New York Times is already attacking the new Pontiff through its "news" coverage. The NYT homepage just posted two articles covering today's events, and both have their own special approach to criticizing the newly crowned Pope Benedict XVI:

Cardinals Choose a Close Aide to John Paul II to Lead Church
By IAN FISHER and LAURIE GOODSTEIN 2:25 PM ET
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served as John Paul II's hard-line defender of church doctrine, was elected on the second day of the conclave.

In St. Peter's Square, Optimism and Concern
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL 3:24 PM ET
As the new pontiff emerged on the balcony, many cheered wildly while others were openly and greatly distressed.

Notice how the summary for the lead article uses the word "hard-line" to describe Benedict's theology. Hard-line? What is that term supposed to mean? The man was a cardinal who has spent his entire adult life in the service of the Catholic church -- of course he's devout in following the tenets of his faith. Would the Times consider him a more "reasonable" adherent of the faith if he shared the convictions of a man like, say, Teddy Kennedy?

Unfortunately this biased summary on their homepage is just one small example of what evidently passes for journalism at the Times. Here's a very telling passage from the lead article:

He has been described as a conservative, intellectual clone of the late pontiff, and, as the dean of the College of Cardinals, he was widely respected for his uncompromising - if ultraconservative - principles and his ability to be critical.

As cardinal, he had shut the door on any discussion on several issues, including the ordination of women, celibacy of priests and homosexuality, defending his positions by invoking theological truth. In the name of orthodoxy, he is in favor of a smaller church, but one that is more ideologically pure.

Intellectual clone. Uncompromising. Ultraconservative. Shut[s] the door on any discussion. Ideologically pure... You don't have to read between the lines to get the sense that the Times writers and editors really don't like Ratzinger.

Of course, the editorial slant to this lead news article almost qualifies as restrained compared to the silly feature that follows it. The primary voice of concern that the Times quotes in that article is a "retired bank worker" who happened to be standing in St. Peter's Square when the new Pope was announced. Quoth the Times: "'I am very, very upset because I was hoping for a more open pope, one who was more open to the problems of the world,' said Paolo Tasselli."

Evidently "all the news that's fit to print" includes the deep thoughts of retired Italian bank workers named Paolo. Talk about thorough reporting! (Are you taking notes, Jayson Blair?)

Time will tell if Pope Benedict will measure up to his predecessor as a theologian and world leader, but being critcized so soundly by the Times "news" coverage on day one of his reign is at least one indication that this new Pope could turn out to be a worthy successor to John Paul II.

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and author of the award-winning book, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, which is on sale now.

The Intellectual Bankruptcy of MoveOn.org

2005-04-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

MoveOn.org is bent out of shape over the bankruptcy bill that just passed Congress and is assured of President Bush's signature. It's more than a little ironic that this far-left special interest group -- which was founded to defend Bill Clinton from impeachment over charges which included perjury -- is now lying to Americans about a pro-growth reform measure that will benefit consumers and businesses alike.

The Associated Press is reporting that MoveOn is preparing an advertising blitz to target lawmakers who voted for the bill, which passed the House today by a lopsided 302-126 margin:

Underscoring the political sensitivity of the issue, the liberal group MoveOn was beginning a campaign of radio ads this week against House lawmakers of both parties who support the bankruptcy legislation.

"With solid control of both houses of Congress and the White House, the Republican leadership thinks they're free to show their true colors -- taking from the middle class and giving to the wealthy and corporations,'' said Tom Matzzie, the Washington director of MoveOn's political action committee. ''But we're going to call the Republican agenda what it truly is: a war on the middle class.''

If you listen to what MoveOn is saying, you might conclude this new measure sounds like a throwback to the days of Dickens, where debtors were sent to prison and their suddenly orphaned children would have to live off of orphanage gruel. Such imagery couldn't be any further from the truth. The reality is that this measure will help cut down on fraud and in turn mean that consumers will face lower fees and greater availability of credit.

We live in an age where bankruptcy has almost become a financial planning tool. Approximately 1.6 million Americans filed for bankruptcy last year, which is double the number from a decade ago and an 8-fold increase from 27 years ago, the last time the nation's bankruptcy laws were passed. About 7 out of 10 people who filed went into Chapter 7, where all of their debts were wiped clean, as opposed to Chapter 13, where they repay a portion of their debts over 3-5 years. With the FBI estimating that 10% of all bankruptcy cases involve some form of fraud, and lenders taking annual losses estimated to be between $40-60 billion due to bankruptcy, something had to be done.

The compromise that President Bush and Congress reached is a good start. While allowing exemptions for debt due to health problems and other matters out of one's control, this soon-to-be-law simply applies a modest means test for eligibility to obtain the more lenient Chapter 7 status. Now bankruptcy filers who have an above-average income level and a court-verified ability to repay some of their debts will need to opt for Chapter 13, which means these upper income folks will likely have to repay a portion of the debts they chose to run up.

That's far from draconian, and it's certainly bad news for people like O.J. Simpson -- who used loopholes in the old code to avoid paying the civil damages awarded in the murder case of his ex-wife -- but it's good news for the rest of us. With the perverse incentive to pass the buck on your debt lessened, it means that lending money will become less risky for companies and that the rest of us won't be stuck paying someone else's bills.

This reform measure is good for business, good for consumers, and good for the economy. Unfortunately MoveOn.org, like the liberal movement it represents, is too mentally bankrupt to understand.

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and author of the award-winning book, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, which is on sale now.

Social Security: More is Better. Much Better.

2005-04-04T04:16:00.000-07:00

Despite an enormously publicized AARP effort to discredit Social Security reform -- aided and abetted every reactionary force the leftcan muster -- the good news is that George Bush is winning. The question is whether he'll take advantage of what he's won.

Friday's Opinion Dynamics/Fox News poll tells the story. Despite the thousand mainstream media stories you've seen to the contrary, 60 percent of Americans support private accounts. Those most likely to benefit -- Americans under 30 -- support them the most, by a whopping 76 percent; but the people AARP purports to represent -- 56 percent of all Americans over age 55 -- prefer them too.

Far from "dead on arrival", personal control over your own Social Security savings is a winner. Most Americans understand private accounts well: they've had IRAs and 401(k)s for a quarter century. They also know Social Security is going bankrupt: in another time, Bill Clinton, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi used to tell them so. And handing control back to each individual American -- which is to say, taking control out of the hands of the politicians -- is, to borrow a phrase, the ultimate lockbox.

The President's plan, both economically and politically, is a no-brainer.

Except that he doesn't yet have a plan.

In his State of the Union, the President offered a bold outline; but no formal proposal yet exists. This has complicated matters. People remain confused, not just the public but the donors who could fund the ads required to sell the plan. The President says everything's on the table, which is fine statesmanship but suboptimal politics: Hillary's similar strategy on universal health care allowed conservatives to pick apart a million hypotheticals before she ever produced a bill. And with most Americans agreed that Social Security really is in trouble and that private accounts are a good idea, focusing on the solvency crisis -- easily cast as decades away -- leads Beltway wonks down a dozen tax-hiking rabbit trails.

The President brought one of those on himself, albeit unintentionally. His stated goal is to set aside 4 points of workers' 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax for Personal Retirement Accounts. But it turns out that this number doesn't solve the solvency crisis. Democrats, along with some Republicans skeptical of free markets, have seized on this as an opening to remove private accounts from the plan, which, of course, completely defeats the purpose.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator John Sununu (R-NH) have a solution. With bigger private accounts -- 6.4 percent -- Americans don't just get more control over their retirement: the solvency crisis goes away too. In fact, the Ryan-Sununu plan puts Social Security in trillion-dollar surplus range by the time the current system would go broke. Benefits could go up significantly even for those few remaining in the government system (i.e., the poor whom liberals fret will "fall through the cracks") and the entire unfunded liability goes away.

This contravenes the conventional wisdom, including White House Budget Director Josh Bolten's own testimony about private accounts this February. But the problem was never with the private accounts: the problem was that a President known for Texas-sized plans hasn't yet dreamed quite expansively enough.

That may be changing. The Social Security Administration's chief actuary has backed Ryan and Sununu's numbers, and the White House itself has praised their plan. But they need to do more than just praise it. Every day the President goes without an official plan is a day that the Democrats get to demagogue the issue, attacking phantom "proposals" the President hasn't made. And while putting "everything" on the table is admirable, opening the door to discussions of payroll tax hikes, benefit cuts and increases in the retirement age as "solutions" muddies the waters and takes everyone's eyes off the ball.

President Bush has acted heroically in tackling the issue of personal accounts. He has sold Americans on the fact that there's a crisis: 71% agree. And the people themselves have resisted the left's anti-market -- anti-freedom -- arguments quite ably on their own.

Now the President needs to adopt Ryan-Sununu and announce it as his own. In so doing, he'll at least triple the average monthly retirement check Americans can look forward to. He'll head off the long-term market decline and recession we face early next decade when the Baby Boomers stop adding to and start withdrawing from their IRAs and 401(k)s. And he'll unleash an economic boom here at home just as Europe and Japan fall into their own severe pension crises, thus shoring up the American economy at that very moment which might otherwise be the beginning of a new global depression.

But in the short term, by embracing Ryan-Sununu, the President will give himself and his troops something solid to sell, something worth selling, something which could not be more different from the warmed-over statism of the left. It's time: for him, and for America.

An Income Tax in Sheep’s Clothing

2005-03-11T01:32:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest from Tara Ross, author of Enlightened Democracy. -- Moderator

The “conservative” Texas state legislature is on the verge of throwing away years of hard work. A new Texas state income tax—in disguise—looms on the horizon.

Two years ago, state Republican officials were faced with a $10 billion budget deficit. Despite intense and unrelenting pressure from special interest groups, Texas legislators successfully balanced the budget with reduced spending rather than increased taxes. They did something that politicians rarely do: They stood firm for small government principles. They refused to cave in to political pressure. They laid the foundation for a strong and healthy economy in the state of Texas.

Republican legislators that year were truly out of the ordinary.

Why, then, has Texas's previously resolute Republican legislature suddenly gone soft? What would cause such staunch legislators to railroad a brand-new and irresponsible tax through the legislature, quickly, before their constituents find out what hit them?

Perhaps a little background information would be helpful for my non-Texan readers.

One specific funding crisis is causing heartburn in the Lone Star State: Texas's school finance system is on the verge of collapse. For years, Texas schools have been funded by a controversial property tax system known as Robin Hood. The system requires wealthier school districts to contribute property tax funds to poorer school districts. Legislators spent the 2004 election cycle promising to get rid of Robin Hood and to reduce property taxes. The proposed one third reduction in school property taxes will cause a loss of about $5.4 billion in education funding statewide.

The $64,000 Question is obvious: How is education to be funded in the future, despite these lost property tax revenues?

Sadly, Republicans in the Texas legislature seem poised to answer the question as if they were big government liberals. They have proposed the creation of a brand-new 1.15 percent payroll tax (to be paid by employers), to cover a portion of the anticipated budget shortfall.

Republicans would make two critical mistakes if they enacted such a plan. First, they would replace a visible property tax with a hidden payroll tax. Moreover, their proposed payroll tax would be nothing but a reverse income tax on Texans--and state income taxes hurt everyone, not just a few wealthy employers.

Special dangers lurk in hidden taxes. Many taxpayers mistakenly believe that they are not sharing the burden of such taxes, and they are thus not diligent in ensuring that legislators keep these tax rates to a minimum. Legislators could likely increase payroll tax rates with no immediate ramifications at the ballot box. A small group of employers would protest, but most voters would never notice the tax hike. By contrast, when highly visible taxes, such as the sales tax, are too high, everyone notices. A hidden payroll tax, once instituted, would be virtually impossible to control or get rid of again. A straightforward state income tax (while a great evil to be avoided, in this author's opinion) would be preferable to the hidden reverse income tax that has been proposed by Republicans in Texas.

And make no mistake. This so-called payroll tax is nothing more than an income tax in sheep's clothing.

The proposed payroll tax is to be paid by employers, but the item to be taxed is the work performed by employees. And it is the employees who will most certainly bear the brunt of such a new tax when the state increases the cost of hiring new individuals.

Employees will bear the brunt of the tax when fewer jobs are available. They will bear the burden of the new tax when pay raises are less generous or don't come at all, and when employee benefits are reduced. Moreover, employees will suffer, along with their employers, when the health of the Texas economy is seriously undermined by its new tax on income.
And I have as yet to start in on Texas' constitutional prohibition against income taxes (unless such taxes are approved by a majority of voters). Doesn't this proposed "payroll" tax seem just a bit like an end-run around that constitutional protection?

Texas Governor Rick Perry is up for re-election next year. Rumors abound that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison may return to the state to challenge him in the Republican primary. If Governor Perry really wants to win this (likely) primary challenge, the last thing that he needs on his hands is a demotivated conservative base.

And Texas conservatives will most certainly be furious with a governor who approves and signs into law an income tax of any kind.

Tara Ross is a commentator for American Enterprise and the author of Enlightened Democracy. This article first appeared as a column at http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18423/article_detail.asp.

Rooting for the Bad Guys

2005-02-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest from Tara Ross, author of Enlightened Democracy. -- Moderator

Why do some liberals remain chronically pessimistic about the state of affairs in Iraq? At times, they almost seem to be rooting for the bad guys.

This week, history was made in the nation formerly ruled by the ruthless tyrant, Saddam Hussein. For the first time in decades, the Iraqi people were given the opportunity to cast their votes in a democratic election. Brave men and women across the nation were so overjoyed at their newfound freedom that they went to the polls in droves, even though they knew that they could be killed by terrorists as they cast their ballots.

They walked miles to polling stations. They spoke of their duty as Iraqis and of the elation that they felt after voting. They grinned from ear to ear as they talked to American media cameras. They danced in the streets.

The consequences of this free election will reverberate for years to come. What must others in the Middle East, particularly those who are not free, feel after hearing about this Iraqi election? The first domino has fallen. More will follow.

But in the face of this achievement, many liberals in America positively glowered.

Why do so many liberals find themselves unable to be happy when their fellow countrymen succeed? Can they only be happy when a Democratic administration achieves foreign policy successes?

Bush hatred has become a defining characteristic for many liberals--so much so that they appear to identify with it more surely and swiftly than they do their American citizenship. At times, some extremist liberals seem to be rooting against their fellow Americans and in favor of those who would kill us.

The rantings of the hard Left could be heard across the blogosphere on Sunday. One liberal message board, Democratic Underground, was ablaze with disdain and loathing for the election that so many Iraqis celebrated on January 30.

A startling remark from "ShinerTX": "All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how 'freedom' has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the so-called 'voters' and barely mentioned the resistance movements at all. Where are the freedom fighters today?" (Gasp! Freedom fighters?)
A more typical comment came from "alarimer": "Whatever it is, it's bulls***. Totally bogus made-up numbers by this f***ing piece of s*** Bush administration. They need turnout to be high to claim victory." (Profanity, of course, is quite a vital component of any intellectual and scholarly discourse.)
A sarcastic remark from "Dark": "Yea, this is going to be a great representative government, With a third of the counrty [sic] not voting. A very volitaile [sic] third." (By this standard, American government is a sham as well. Oh wait. Ranting liberals already think that American government is a sham, don't they?)

Liberals in the Senate compounded the problem, offering generally dour assessments of the efforts in Iraq this week. "[N]o one in the United States," Kerry intoned, "should try to overhype this election." Senator Ted Kennedy renewed his calls for troop withdrawal, arguing that the Bush administration "must look beyond the election." Senator Carl Levin echoed the sourpuss attitude of these two men. "I'm afraid there were some areas where the turnout is extremely low, and that's the Sunni Triangle areas or parts thereof," Levin noted, "And that's the challenge that we now face."

Do Kerry, Kennedy, Levin, and other ranting liberal bloggers really have so little respect for the millions of Iraqi voters who risked life and limb to make it to a polling booth? How can they be so slow to understand and value the desire for freedom that drives all people, even those that happen to reside in the Middle East?

But, of course, these liberals really are not slow to understand. They are simply blinded by their hatred for all things Bush. Does anyone believe that these hard-left liberals would look upon the Iraq election with such negativity if it had occurred under a Clinton or Kerry administration? Highly doubtful.

Shouldn't Americans always root for America first and their political parties second?

To be fair, some conservatives made similar mistakes when President Clinton was in office. Such attitudes were wrong then, too.

Today, like it or not, success for Iraq equals success for America. The policy debate regarding whether or not American troops should or should not have gone into Iraq is over. The troops are there. The mission is already under way. All Americans--Republican and Democrat, conservatives and liberals--should root for American troops to succeed in restoring peace, stability, and freedom to Iraq. Rooting for failure is rooting for America's enemies.

Speaking on "The O'Reilly Factor" this week, Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh characterized the Iraqi Election Day as a good day for the Bush administration, but a bad day for Democrats. Precisely wrong.

January 30 was a good day for Americans.

Tara Ross is a commentator for American Enterprise and the author of Enlightened Democracy. This article first appeared as a column at http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18423/article_detail.asp.

Liberty makes inroads in Middle East

2005-02-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

It may be impossible to predict what will ultimately come of the current situation in Lebanon, where protestors angry over the recent murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hairi have defied their Syrian occupiers and forced the country's Quisling government to resign. But even if Beirut does not have the same happy ending that we recently saw in Kiev -- where a Kremlin-backed presidential candidate's attempt to steal an election was successfully resisted last year -- this kind of grassroots protest suggests that the winds of freedom are finally stirring in this long oppressed region of the world.

Despite all the protests from liberals in this country who rail against George W. Bush's so-called "neo-con" (i.e. Jewish?) strategy of bringing democracy into the Middle East to counter the spread of radical Islam, consider the examples of progress that have come about in just the past six months:

The first presidential election in Afghanistan's history.
The election of a moderate to the Palestinian Authority's presidency (after Arafat suspended elections when his term expired).
The first local elections in Saudi Arabia's history, which came on the heels of the ruling family's decision to have gov't agencies begin hiring women.
Free and fair voting with a good turnout in Iraq's parliamentary elections.
The surprise announcement that Egypt will reform its presidential elections (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4300039.stm).

The Middle East may not be mistaken for a Randian paradise anytime soon (although it is probably already on par with Massachusetts), and certainly any of the preceding initiatives could still fail, but taken together these signs are encouraging.

And even though daunting challenges remain -- preventing terror groups such as Hezbollah from derailing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and keeping the desperate mullahs of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons chief among them -- think how far the region has come far in just the past four years. If this trend continues, we may one day come to look back on 2004-2005 in the Middle East in a similar light as 1989 for Eastern Europe.

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and author of the award-winning book, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, which is on sale now.

Running on Empty: The Left's Idea Deficit

2005-02-03T17:36:00.000-08:00

These are lean times for the pro-centralization, anti-freedom crowd. Whether it's the Left's howling over Bush's state of the union promise to allow taxpayers to actually own the Social Security money collected in their name, or the blatant resentment over the successful elections in Iraq, liberals have been reduced to whiny nitpickers with no viable agenda to offer the American people. In fact, their paucity of ideas is so bad that they seem to have given up on offering anything even remotely resembling a coherent vision.

This idea deficit was painfully obvious to observers of the Kerry campaign. The man's entire platform could be boiled down to one long-winded slogan: "I won't say what I would do differently, but I would do it smarter and better than this president because I served in Vietnam."

When your standard bearer is reduced to vague promises of "doing job" and incessant references to his military service of nearly four decades before, it's safe to say that there are few intellectual winds in your sails.

Of course, the collapse of the liberal consensus didn't happen overnight. With the defeat of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of the welfare state, the political progress that the Left made during three-quarters of the 20th century ground to a halt. Since that time liberals have become increasingly anti-growth, anti-family, and anti-life, but they haven't been able to supplement this opposition by defining what they would actually do if given power. Education? We want better education but we oppose school choice. Social Security? We want to protect the program but we oppose partial privatization. National defense? We want to protect America but we oppose defense spending and the country's right to act on its own.

Contrast this to the surge of ideas and proposals that have come from the Right in recent decades. (E.g. Tax reform. School vouchers. Missile defense. Free trade areas. Medical savings accounts. Faith-based initiatives. Enterprise zones. 401(K)'s. Welfare reform. The Reagan doctrine. The Bush doctrine. Immigration overhaul. Tort reform. IRA's. Medical malpractice reform. Social Security privatization. Pollution control credits. The flat tax. The national sales tax.) Not all of these proposals have been written into law, nor do they even have universal support amongst the different fractions of the Right, but this list does show just how active the Right has been in recent decades at producing new proposals to advance their vision.

Where's the Left's plan? Where's its vision? The Left doesn't seem to have an identity these days except that it's opposed to whatever Bush supports.

Consider last night's Democratic response to Bush's speech. Senate Minority Leader Reid actually said the way to build a bridge to a 21st century economy was massive public works projects:

"After World War II, through the Marshall Plan, we rebuilt Europe and they went from poverty to an economic powerhouse. Today, we need to invest in our nation's future with a Marshall Plan for America, to build the infrastructure our economy needs to go and grow."

Talk about vision! Even casual observers of the political economy should immediately realize just how silly this is. Not only has this kind of Keynesian government spending been discredited in academia, real-world data show just how futile this approach is. Consider the performance of the Japanese economy over the past 10-15 years. The government spent billions on public works, producing thousands of miles of unneeded freeways, but their economy remains moribund. Meanwhile, the post-Reagan Revolution U.S. has posted strong economic growth for over two decades now, a growth fueled by lower taxes, reduced barriers to foreign trade, and the "creative destruction" of risk-taking entrepreneurs.

The American Left seems to have missed out on all of this -- it's as if time froze for them with the Vietnam War and all of the lessons of recent decades have escaped them. As a result, one of America's two major political parties seems stuck with a pacifist, economically backwards view of the world. It's no wonder that they're not offering new ideas, just shrill criticism of a center-right movement that has rightly come to dominate American political discourse.

"A Fire in the Minds of Men:" Reaction to the Inaugural Address

2005-01-20T11:40:00.000-08:00

My first impression is that this was a good speech. It benefited from a decent, even delivery but even more from its exceptional content.It was a very idealistic and uplifting speech for a 2nd term president whom common wisdom says typically lack vision or an agenda (although common wisdom is generally wrong when it comes to this man). And it was mercifully short on the laundry-list of domestic policy proposals that mark most addresses.

Bush also talked more about the lofty, abstract concept of liberty than I can remember most of his predecessors doing -- you can tell this is something in which he deeply believes. The speech effectively combined JFK's "bear any burden" sense of America's responsibility to provide global leadership with Reagan's optimism in the triumphal march of freedom.

While it is sweeping in its content, the address also had a few good sound bites. Here's the line that I think will prove the most memorable:

"By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well -- a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."

All in all, the address was a refreshing contrast to the minutiae that usually dominates political discourse.

P.S. The full text is available online: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,144976,00.html

______________________________

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and the former head of PayPal’s marketing department. His book,
The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth is on sale now.

The Significance of Bush's Second Inauguration

2005-01-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

As an unabashed fan of the free market and a contributor to Thank You, President Bush, it’s no surprise that I’m pleased to see George W. Bush being sworn in for a second term tomorrow. But beyond the positive policy implications of Bush’s November victory (e.g. simplified tax code, Social Security reform, strong national defense), there are a number of reasons why his triumph over John Kerry should be viewed as nothing less than an historic development.To wit:

· Bush is the first popular-vote-losing president to be re-elected. The others (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison) all failed in their re-election bids.
· His 51% of the popular vote is the first outright majority since his father in 1988.
· The 3% popular vote margin of victory may not sound like much upon first consideration, but from a historical perspective it’s a healthy win. Four elections since 1960 have been decided by smaller margins, and all five elections between 1876 and 1892 were by margins of 3% or less.*
· He significantly increased his party’s numbers in Congress, an almost unheard of accomplishment for an incumbent.

In terms of political alignment, Bush continued the Democratic Party’s two decade-long slide. The GOP has now won the presidency in 7 of the last 10 elections, and its 10 year dominance in Congress (something that couldn’t have even been imagined in the years following Watergate) was significantly strengthened. And with the GOP’s ongoing consolidation of Evangelical Christians and steady progress in the Latino community, it appears that this trend is poised to continue.

History tells us that the Democrats won’t remain a minority party forever, but with Bush’s recent triumph it’s hard to conclude that they will continue to face a rocky future over the next decade or so.

* Note: For an in-depth yet readable look at presidential elections past, readers are referred to Tara Ross’s Enlightened Democracy.

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and the former head of PayPal’s marketing department. His book,
The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, is on sale now.

Red vs. Blue: The Electoral College and Our Political Divide

2005-01-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

The latest from Tara Ross, author of Enlightened Democracy.

A nation is divided. Multiple elections feature similar divisions of red and blue on an electoral map. One region of the country leans Republican, while the other region reliably supports Democrats.

America, circa 2005? Perhaps, but the description also fits America in the 1880s.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, American presidential elections were intensely regional. Strong emotions and grievances separated North and South. Reuniting the country after the Civil War was no easy task. The regional divide could have persisted indefinitely were it not for at least one factor: The country's unique Presidential election process encouraged a quick healing of old grudges.

Then, as now, the Electoral College encourages voters and candidates to cooperate and compromise with those who are not like themselves. Indeed, Presidential candidates who cater to one region or special interest group are easily defeated by those candidates who succeed in building cross-regional national support. Grover Cleveland was one nineteenth-century President who was quickly forced to learn this lesson.

In 1888, Cleveland was defeated in his re-election attempt--despite a national popular vote victory--because his support was too heavily localized in the South. His opponent, Benjamin Harrison, received fewer total votes, but these votes were distributed across a wider spectrum of states. Cleveland learned his lesson. He rebuilt a national base of support during the next four years, and he went on to win a second term in 1892.

Other nineteenth-century political officials also had ample reason to understand the need for national coalition building: Neither political party could be assured of victory in any Presidential election unless it reached out to voters beyond its home base.

The natural allegiance of Democrats was to the South, but they could not carry a Presidential election without the votes of at least a few northern or western states. Similarly, Republicans could never safely rely upon their home base in the North and West. Technically, Republicans could win an electoral majority without obtaining the votes of any southern states; however, their margin of victory when relying upon northern and western voters, alone, was always dangerously narrow.

In many ways, the Electoral College encouraged voters and candidates in both political parties to reach across the seemingly stark northern/southern divide. The regional divisions caused by the Civil War and Reconstruction were healed, at least in part, because the Electoral College forced both parties to understand and appeal to those outside of their base constituencies.

Today, America faces a comparable situation. Two Presidential elections in a row have featured remarkably similar electoral maps. Democrats maintain strong bicoastal support, while Republicans maintain strong backing in the South and Midwest. A handful of states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, remain caught in the middle.

The Electoral College will help heal the divide between red and blue America in the twenty-first century, just as it did following Reconstruction. A direct election system, as promoted by The New York Times and other Electoral College critics, would serve primarily to exacerbate tensions.

Electoral College critics dispute this analysis, arguing that direct popular elections would heal frustration. A simple majority of individuals, they argue, should always be able to determine the outcome of Presidential elections. A system that allows the minority of individuals to outvote the majority is simply a recipe for resentment. The 2000 election is cited as a case in point.

This argument may sound appealing, but it is deeply flawed. The ramifications of eliminating the Electoral College would be greater than many anticipate. Ultimately, a direct election system would promote acrimony among the diverse states and voters in this nation.

The first noticeable consequence of a direct election system would be an increased number of Presidential candidates. Today, the winner of the popular vote within each state wins that state's entire allocation of electoral votes. Second, third, or fourth place candidates do not receive any electoral votes (except in Maine and Nebraska). Accordingly, the nation has a strong two-party system. Third-party candidates such as Ross Perot or Ralph Nader don't often receive many votes from individuals, because these votes are thought to be "wasted."

A direct election would reverse this situation. Suddenly, any vote cast for any candidate counts in the final national tally. A vote for a third-party candidate is no longer wasted. Rather, it is an attempt to force a run-off. Third party candidates would have greater incentives to jump into Presidential races, and they would receive more votes once they join the fray.

Over the years, candidates would proliferate. Multi-candidate races, with accompanying run-offs and recounts, would become the norm. Divisions would not--could not--be healed under such a system. To the contrary, the electorate would become deeply fractured.

The nation's Presidential election system cannot prevent regional divisions from occurring. The world is imperfect and contains many flawed human beings. Disagreements, problems, and splits will happen. The Electoral College, however, rewards those who pull together and seek to work with voters who are not like themselves. It encourages unity, just as direct elections promote discord.

Thanks at least in part to the country's unique Presidential election process, today's electorate will resolve its differences eventually, just as nineteenth century Americans were able to reunite despite the pain and suffering that accompanied the Civil War.

Tara Ross is a commentator for American Enterprise and the author of Enlightened Democracy. This article first appeared as a column at http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18385/article_detail.asp.

Death by Regulation

2005-01-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

Regulation is an important topic that's all too frequently ignored in public debate since it tends not to be as visible as taxes, budgets, and the Federal Funds Rate. Classic economics doesn't do a great job with it, either; most production functions describing economic growth will include inputs such as gov't spending and savings rates but essentially ignore the friction that regulation creates. This is an increasingly dangerous perspective to have inasmuch as regulation has grown into one of the Left's favored tools for controlling the economy, and this imposes a real cost on the private sector.

Given this, I was quite pleased when a media outfit that covers developments in the rapidly growing online auction industry recently interviewed me on the topic. Specifically, I was asked to discuss the regulatory future of PayPal, the online payment service that's the subject of my book, The PayPal Wars. (I've pasted the article below.) I used the opportunity to express concern over the likelihood that regulators will continue to view innovative firms like PayPal as a target, stifling their innovation and inadvertantly imposing a huge cost of compliance on their employees, shareholders, and customers.

P.S. It came as no surprise that agents working for Eliot Spitzer -- NY's Godfather General -- defended their aggressive regulatory thrusts with "protect the consumer" language. But I'll discuss Spitzer's tactics and twisted view of the economy at length some other day...

http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m01/i12/s04

PayPal Confident in Meeting Regulatory Challenges
By Julie Hauserman
AuctionBytes.com
January 12, 2005

With more than 56-million accounts, PayPal remains the leader in online payment systems. And, despite a five-day outage last fall and some loud customer complaints about PayPal arbitrarily freezing accounts and providing below-par customer service, competitors have not made significant gains on the eBay giant. What could slow PayPal's progress, however, are government regulations and lawsuits.

The company's phenomenal success has made it highly visible, and regulatory challenges could become a thorn in PayPal's side for years to come, especially with new laws, like the Patriot Act, which is designed to root out terrorists' transactions on the web, according to a PayPal expert.

"I do think ongoing legal and regulatory challenges are always going to hinder the company.
They are not going to sink the company, but they may prevent PayPal from doing new, innovative things that would benefit customers," said Eric Jackson, a former PayPal executive who wrote the book, The PayPal Wars. "It's very high profile, and it's got a big target on its back."

"There are two threats: new laws, and capricious regulators," said Jackson, who worked as a PayPal marketing executive for three and a half years. "Those are not going to go away."
But PayPal spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt says the company doesn't foresee problems.

"We don't actually see compliance with regulations as a challenge," Bettencourt said. "We have a large, dedicated team within the company that focuses on this."

Already, PayPal has scaled back some services that have drawn regulatory interest. The company no longer processes transactions having to do with online gambling, adult web sites, and buying prescriptions drugs from unauthorized sellers. PayPal went one step further, announcing it would enforce the ban by fining people up to $500 if they get caught trying to use PayPal for those purposes.

The company is regulated on a state-by-state basis. And some regulators have been more zealous than others. The state of Louisiana banned PayPal from operating there in 2002, but the issue was later resolved. New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer fined the company $150,000, saying the PayPal misrepresented terms and conditions to account holders in its user agreement.

Part of the regulatory interest stems from the fact that PayPal and other online transaction services are a new sort of animal: not banks and not credit card companies. In the early days after its inception in 1999, PayPal was moving toward becoming a bank, but the Internet startup decided that banking regulations were too cumbersome, Jackson said.

"We just wanted to be able to facilitate a quick payment," he said. "The question of how to classify PayPal lingered for some time."

The Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation in 2002 ruled on whether PayPal should be regulated as a bank, and concluded that it should not because it doesn't offer loans or take deposits.

"It's a sort of modern-era Western Union," Jackson said. "Really, all PayPal is doing is shifting money around on your behalf."

Customer complaints on the Web have been numerous, with several anti-PayPal websites cropping up to document problems with the company. Jackson says the customer complaints won't sink Paypal, because it is still the most convenient online payment system around. He said banks and credit-card companies deal with ongoing complaints, too. Complaints about problems with PayPal will come and go, he said, but regulatory hurdles remain the biggest challenge.

Bettencourt says the company is licensed in 32 states - the only states that require it so far. PayPal offers "pass-through" FDIC protection for user accounts, she said, because transferred money is parked in third-party banks that have FDIC protection.

"Even though we're not regulated as a bank," Bettencourt said, "we still adhere to most of the rules and regulations that govern banks."

PayPal adheres to a long list of regulations, she said, including the Bank Secrecy Act, Regulation E disclosures and consumer protections against unauthorized or incorrect fund transfers, federal and state laws against unfair or misleading practices and disclosures, SEC registration, disclosure and investment requirements for the PayPal Money Market Funds, credit card association rules and international money transfer laws.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer would not comment except to repeat what Spitzer said in a press release in March. "Protecting consumers' rights in online transactions is the best way to establish and maintain confidence in electronic commerce. As with any new industry, it is essential that consumers making e-payments receive full disclosure of their rights and liabilities."

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and the former head of PayPal’s marketing department. His book,
The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, is on sale now.

Good Tidings of Great Joy

2004-12-24T00:05:00.000-08:00

As Christmas approaches, media pundits still can't get over the results of the Newsweek poll about faith in America.

A vast majority of Americans not only call themselves Christians, but embrace what C.S. Lewis called "Mere Christianity": the key doctrines of the faith.

Now this is hardly news of the "stop-the-presses" kind. For years polls have shown over 90% of Americans both believe in God and that Christ really lived. Indeed, these beliefs have routinely been discounted as nominal, reflecting little either meaningful or deep.

But the Newsweek poll paints a very different picture.

82% of Americans believe that Jesus was and is both God and the Son of God, a very specific Trinitarian point. More significant still, 79% believe that Christ was born of a virgin, without a human father.

This is a very specific confession, one implying acceptance of virtually the full range of Christian orthodoxy, including God's existence, omnipotence and providential provision for salvation.

Indeed, 67% believe every detail of the Biblical account of Christmas, and 55% believe the truth of every word of the Bible. And belief in God's sovereign creation of the world is so widespread that 60% of Americans favor the teaching of creation science in addition to evolution in public schools, and fully 40% favor teaching creation instead of evolution.

The American people are and always have been an overwhelmingly Christian people, who take their faith more seriously than any other people in the developed world. That the picture of America we generally see seems very different is less the reality and more a reflection of the longtime cultural dominance of a small, radical minority.

It is, of course, no surprise that that extremist elite should be surprised by the Newsweek poll. There has rarely been a ruling class as out-of-touch with ordinary people since France's Bourbons.

What truly is surprising, though, is how at odds these polls are with the longtime perceptions of millions of American evangelicals. Indeed, for the better part of a century, most evangelicals have been painting an unrelentingly bleak portrait of religion and culture in America.

After the Scopes monkey trial in the 1920s, and after the liberal takeover of most of mainline Protestantism, literally millions of evangelicals pulled out of American political and cultural life. In so doing they produced a self-fulfilling prophecy. By pulling retreating from the culture en masse, and by inculcating their biases to their children, evangelicals rendered themselves irrelevant, and left America at the mercy of the coming storms of the Woodstock generation.

Yet even during the days of flower power and the "God-is-dead" movement, most Americans outside of Greenwich Village, Berkeley, Harvard and CBS continued to embrace traditional Christianity, even those who remained in liberal mainline denominations.

Now that doesn't mean the '60s cultural revolution didn't impact America and American Christians.

Of course it did. Profoundly.

Millions of baby boomers who believed Christianity's creeds threw off moral restraints practically overnight; many of them continue to do so, and have passed that on to their children. Indeed, for a time it seemed that America was teetering on the brink of moral collapse.

Yet that didn't happen.

Alone among the western democracies, America not only recovered from the 1960s, but began experiencing spiritual renewal in the years that followed, within that same boomer generation that had triggered moral revolution in the first place. And beginning in the 1980s, AWOL evangelicals -- still muttering about America's inevitable collapse -- began reporting for political and cultural duty for the first time in half a century.

And then, a funny thing happened on the way to America's demise: everything got better, across the board.

Abortion rates: dropping. Unwed pregnancies: lower. Violent crime: falling dramatically. Teen drug use: down each year for a decade straight. Teen chastity rates: at levels not seen since the early 1960s. Liberal church attendance: crashing. Conservative church attendance: soaring.

And who predicted and chronicled these signs of increasing moral and spiritual health in America?

Periodicals in Middle America? Evangelical leaders? Hal Lindsey?

No.

Two neoconservative publications in New York City, one run by Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest, the other by Norman Podhoretz, an ex-liberal Jew.

Writing in First Things, Neuhaus continually highlighted the goodness of America and its people, not with maudlin words, but with facts and figures.

And in Commentary Magazine, Podhoretz showcased many writers whose findings indicated the same trend.

They had more faith in America's heartland, it seemed, than those who were in it. And time has borne them out.

It's long past time for evangelicals to take the Newsweek poll to heart, as well as the signs that American culture is getting better, not worse. There is an entire nation out there which needs discipling, not hand-wringing, and especially not self-righteous superiority. Because no one can doubt that a certain amount of the writing-off of America is inspired by a “we're better than them” mentality in certain quarters of the church, and it is as unbecoming now as it was in the Pharisees of old.

For the sake of every American who wants this nation to remain what it's always been -- a bastion of freedom against the totalitarian impulse -- Christians must recognize the blessings God has bestowed, both human and material; and having realized our actual and potential strength, show our countrymen in humility and love a way that truly is better. That is our calling this Christmas, and beyond.

Rod D. Martin is Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC and editor of
Thank You, President Bush . This article first appeared as a column at
http://www.thevanguard.org.

Ukraine’s Money Lock-Down

2004-12-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

Americans may take their ability to load up on cash from an ATM and initiate wire transfers from banks for granted, but this simple economic right is a crucial underpinning of their liberty. The unfettered flow of money is the bane of despots and corrupt governments the world over. When money is allowed to exchange hands unimpeded, it decentralizes decision-making and empowers a society’s citizens by giving them a store of value and medium of exchange that they can employ for their own private use. This weakens the state’s central authority by affording individuals throughout the country direct control over their own destiny.

But if the free flow of money is a critical component of Western liberty, it should come as no surprise that earlier this week the Ukraine’s retrograde government took steps to curtail its citizens’ access to their savings. These newly imposed limits on bank account withdrawals and currency exchange—levied in the name of exchange rate stability—came as the populace began to rebel against the disputed results of their November 21 presidential election.

Going into the election, Viktor Yushchenko—a reformer who seeks to bring Ukraine into the West—held a comfortable lead, a lead which was later confirmed by exit polls. But his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, a yes-man to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, ended up garnering 870,000 more votes on election day. A Ukrainian comeback kid? Not likely. Regions in the Yanukovych-leaning eastern part of the country barred international poll watchers, and many precincts there notched voter turnout in excess of 100 percent. Although the United States and European Union have condemned this transparent act of electoral fraud, Ukraine’s out-going President Leonid Kuchma has dragged his feet while Czar Putin—looking to ensnare another satellite state into his orbit—rushed to hail Yanukovych as the winner.

In recent years the Ukraine has been following Belarus into Russia’s sphere of influence, a slide which Yushchenko pledged to halt. And his message appears to have resonated with a majority of the country; in spite of a hostile state-run media and a poisoning attempt this past summer, the plucky Yushchenko has defied the old guard’s attempts to cow him while they return the Ukraine to its Russo-dominated past.

But now that Ukrainians are protesting the stolen election in the streets of Kiev, the government has responded by clamping down on their finances. Earlier this week Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that Ukraine’s central bank initiated a lockdown on citizens’ financial freedom, capping bank account withdrawals at just 1,500 Hryvna (about $285 USD) per day while at the same time limiting currency exchanges to the equivalent of $1,000 USD. Private businesses were also hit with similarly restrictive withdrawal and exchange limits.

The claim that this move was necessary to prop up the Hryvna rings hollow. Why lock down citizens’ savings when their wealth is a pittance compared to the daily activity on the international currency markets? Open market intervention—like the Bank of Japan does to prevent the Yen from over-appreciating against the dollar—could be done without trampling upon the rights of citizens. The central bank is sitting on over $10.5 billion in hard currency reserves, so it could certainly do this if it desired.

Moreover, intervening with the currency at all ignores the fact that with fair elections and the installation of a pro-Western government, the Hryvna would not be facing selling pressure. Correct the underlying problem (a stolen election) and the exchange rate issue goes away. Instead the Ukraine’s central bank, with the blessing of President Kuchma, is interested in helping the government avoid the economic consequences of its own corruption by placing harsh limits on economic liberty.

At some point in the future a combination of the spread of global markets and advances in technology will make this kind of economic chicanery more difficult. No doubt there are entrepreneurs plotting ways to help capital elude the restrictions of heavy-handed regimes at this very moment. As I detail in my book, The PayPal Wars, the online payment service PayPal was created with this very goal in mind. PayPal’s founders envisioned their company empowering people from around the world with the ability to move money with the click of a mouse. Unfortunately an onslaught by regulators, lawyers, and lobbyists forced them to sell their company to the auction service eBay, prematurely ending their dreams of revolutionizing global currency markets.

But oppressive regimes should still beware—it’s only a matter of time until some similarly bold entrepreneurs will find a way to help citizens get their money out of despotic control. Until then, the West needs to pressure corrupt governments like the Ukraine not only to hold fair elections, but also to uphold the basic principles of economic liberty.

_______________________________

Eric M. Jackson is the president of World Ahead Publishing and the former head of PayPal’s marketing department. His book, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and Rest of Planet Earth, is on sale now.

Bush, Reagan and the Pivot of History

2004-10-25T00:04:00.001-07:00

Given a second term to complete his task, George W. Bush will give birth to a new and better era, one for which Reagan long hoped and of which he would be most proud. What’s more, this younger leader comes to the stage not one moment too soon, because like Reagan he stands at what might be termed the pivot of history.

Note: "Bush, Reagan and the Pivot of History" is the concluding chapter of Thank You, President Bush (Los Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, September 2004).

Aman and I dedicated this book – a call for the re-election of George W. Bush – to Ronald Reagan. This choice meant more than you might think, both about us and about our current President.

For our parts, Ronald Reagan was not merely a great president: he was the great president, the formative political figure of our generation and the hero who defined our time. We do not bestow the comparison – even on a president we admire and support – lightly. For us, it is virtually the highest praise we are able to give.

But it is President Bush who earned that praise, and whom, dedication aside, this book lauds. While many dedications are almost throw-away lines, we see ours as integral to the book, precisely because the symmetry is becoming so very strong; and because we are convinced that, given a second term to complete his task, George W. Bush will give birth to a new and better era, one for which Reagan long hoped and of which he would be most proud. What’s more, this younger leader comes to the stage not one moment too soon, because like Reagan – and for reasons which go far beyond 9/11 – he (and we with him) stand at what might be termed the pivot of history.

The Reagan Legacy

Though you would never know it from the protestations of adoration poured upon him at his death, it was fashionable once – yea, mandatory – among media, political and cultural leaders of the left to loudly proclaim Ronald Reagan a warmonger and a fool. Perhaps this is the best indicator of his Chuchillian stature; for like Reagan, Churchill was so maligned, and like Churchill, Reagan saved the world.

The left, of course, credited Gorbachev for this, which resembled nothing so much as crediting Hitler’s suicide for the end of World War II. Reagan’s victory – and the fact that we are not now speaking Russian or buried ala Khrushchev under a smoldering ruin – was produced of a vision shared by no president before him, and a fortitude possessed by few.

He refused to accept the left’s received wisdom of “moral equivalence” between the Communist East and the democratic West: he called Russia the “evil empire” it was, and revived the moral courage essential for victory. His opponents, lesser men from Michael Dukakis to Michael Foot, hurled their epithets: "dangerous,” “destabilizing,” “cowboy.” But Reagan understood the real danger was in a nuclear superpower bent on world conquest and in the throes of both economic and ethnic collapses its Western apologists refused to see.

He repaired a nuclear “deterrent” so badly eroded as to lack credibility and invite blackmail. Side by side with Margaret Thatcher, he stood down the left’s greatest-ever attempted appeasement – the nuclear freeze movement – and not only rearmed America but re-established its deterrent in Europe. The Soviets, playing off the terror of the times, threatened to walk out of stalled arms talks if he did so. In a move which stunned everyone, he wished them fond farewell. He would not be bullied; and when they realized it, they returned.

His certainty that people everywhere yearned for freedom and that free markets could always out-produce centrally-planned slavery drove his strategies where realpolitik could never go. He replaced both containment and détente with his “Reagan Doctrine,” proclaiming America would actively roll back its foe by helping freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain. From World War II until Reagan, not one square inch of ground had been recovered once lost to communism. Now all things changed, as Moscow was made to play defense, first in Grenada and Afghanistan, and ultimately from the Berlin Wall to the USSR itself.

Unwilling to play for less than total victory, he went for the Russian jugular. Realizing that over half of all Soviet hard currency came from the export of oil, he cut a deal with Saudi Arabia: weapons and other benefits previously unavailable, in exchange for an oil glut which would buoy the West and skewer the common foe. Combining this with an arms race, the keystone of which was the high-tech Strategic Defense Initiative, he pushed Moscow over a cliff his opponents said did not – could not – exist. Gorbachev, coming in much too late after a string of dead General Secretaries, was left first to “restructure,” then to dismantle his empire, and finally just to “wither away.”

This is Reagan’s greatest legacy, but it is hardly his only one. His supply-side faith in Arthur Laffer’s lower marginal tax rates ignited a twenty-year boom in an America used to every-three-year recessions and facing real economic decline: the Club of Rome’s famed “Limits to Growth” which, embraced by Carter and the commentariat, planned for the retreat of Western civilization to an almost pre-industrial level, were prompted not merely by sick ideology but by the fact that semi-socialist Keynesianism was burning out just like its more-evil Soviet cousin. His vision for tax-deferred retirement accounts transferred the “means of production” to the “proletariat” and destroyed the basis for class warfare: shareholders, a tiny fraction of the population in 1980, today are a large majority. The wealth his ideas created drove a technological boom unlike any the world had ever seen, and convinced billions previously susceptible to socialism that freedom really works.

It is there that Reagan’s greatness really lies. To a bleak Orwellian world, he restored hope; and the chance not only that there would be a next century, but that it would be a good one. Today, standing on the shoulders of this giant, his successor has a chance not merely to continue that legacy, but to fulfill and extend it; and if he succeeds in that task, he like Reagan will define our nation for decades beyond.

Reagan’s Heir

In the days surrounding Reagan’s funeral, some questioned the validity of any comparison between these two men. Yet the facts speak for themselves, and speak powerfully. A brief survey is in order.

The End of the Rainbow: Missile Defense

This Fourth of July weekend, twenty-one years after Reagan’s famous speech, America’s first missile interceptor was finally loaded into its Alaska silo. What Reagan once dreamed – indeed, devoted much of his presidency to – George W. Bush has made real.

This will come as a surprise to the seventy percent of Americans who through the years have consistently believed Reagan deployed a working system in the 1980s. It comes as an equal shock to those millions of us who knew better, and who watched as Democrats pulled every trick in the book to prevent missile defenses ever being deployed. But there he was, on a cold December’s day in 2001, George W. Bush, withdrawing us from the ABM Treaty by which Nixon had surrendered America’s technological lead to Brezhnev, prohibiting America from defending herself; and there he was again this July, fulfilling Reagan’s long ago promise.

He should be re-elected if only for this alone.

It’s hard now to remember just how we all felt then, living under the daily threat not of what a bin Laden might do to one city or two, but of what history’s most brutal dictatorship might do to us all. But it’s even harder to imagine the insane logic of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, which elevated that fear to the level of national strategy, the strategy in fact which most of America’s liberal elite preferred as the bulwark of America’s “defense” (the much smaller remainder of the left, which demanded unilateral disarmament, can only be understood as terrified beyond reason or as a fifth column; and in fact, they were a good bit of both). MAD, simply put, said that if the Russians launched against us, we’d launch against them. It was a Strangelovian balance of terror, by which both sides held hundreds of millions of innocents hostage. Yet for wanting to end this surreal, sick nightmare through purely defensive means, the left decried Reagan a madman, never quite seeing their own irony.

Their argument – which rested on the ideas that SDI would be “destabilizing” and that Russia’s vast number of warheads would overwhelm any possible defense – would have held a great deal more credibility if they’d quit making it after the Soviet Union fell. But in fact, though the Evil Empire is gone, the new Russia is (mostly) our friend, serious bilateral nuclear disarmament has been in full swing for fifteen years, and the current and growing threats are entirely of accidental launches or unstable dictators with but a handful of missiles – neither of which can be meaningfully deterred – the left has not, has never changed tunes. The Bill Clinton who once wrote that he “loathed the military,” the John Kerry who returned from Vietnam accusing the majority of America’s brave soldiers of war crimes, they and their allies did all they could to keep America undefended.

One can sympathize with the fearful, with those whose approach to the very real terror of nuclear attack was to hide their heads ostrich-like in the sand, raving about “the unthinkable.” Never mind that Stalin’s intentional terror famine in Ukraine was also unthinkable; Pol Pot’s murder of half Cambodia’s population between 1975 and 1978 was also unthinkable; Hitler’s “final solution” was also unthinkable. Some are constitutionally incapable of dealing with these issues, and likewise incapable of seeing that mass-murdering dictatorships are not an aberration but a constant of history. Though we disagree, we can understand how they feel, and be grateful for visionaries like Reagan, who could do their thinking for them and, in the process, remove the source of their fear.

But the willfully blind are another matter. It is not within the scope of this book to examine why Kerry or Clinton, Daschle or Kennedy wish passionately to leave America vulnerable to a North Korean missile; but it is within our scope to declare them unfit to lead. They are perfectly willing – and loudly demanding – that America gamble: that no one will launch a missile at her, that all attacks will be “like 9/11,” unconventional and unpredictable.

And maybe they’re right.

But in case they aren’t – and since it’s the job of our leaders to defend us to the best of their ability, not just bet on hunches and hopes – it seems quite self-evident that defending against the threat of the most dangerous weapons on Earth is indeed essential. And we finally have a president who has done it.

Letting Freedom Reign

Yet Reagan knew that merely defending America’s homeland was not enough: “Fortress America” was inadequate at mid-century, ludicrous by the 1980s. The world would not be safe, America could never be safe, so long as the USSR remained, actively propagating its “dictatorship of the proletariat” by every means at its disposal. And likewise, merely replacing Soviet rule with “friendly” dictatorships, while occasionally unavoidable, was to Reagan no solution: the real goal was freedom. And free men everywhere, he believed, would lay down arms, take up tools, and build a new, peaceful, prosperous world for themselves and their posterity given the chance.

In this measure too, Bush is Reagan’s heir. Having defined his Axis of Evil, he quickly sought to diplomatically surround North Korea, and physically surround Iran (with bases encircling from Afghanistan and Central Asia to Iraq and the Persian Gulf). He lanced the endlessly festering boil of Iraq and established a democratic government which – at this writing – enjoys a roughly eighty percent approval rating. If it takes, it will surely inspire a cascade effect of freedom throughout a region without a single democracy, save Israel.

Again, the first domino to fall is likely Iran. Dissatisfaction with the mullahs is at an all-time high, a situation which has already had a positive influence in Iraq, where, despite a more than sixty percent Shi’ite majority, a mere eight percent want the sort of theocracy their neighbors have come to loath. And most dangerous for the current regime, a majority of the Iranian population is younger than the revolution. Born after 1979, they know well the brutality of the extremely efficient ayatollahs, they know the Shah only as ancient history, and they know that many of their mothers had equal rights and studied in American universities. As the impossibly porous border with Iraq – and to a lesser degree Afghanistan – begins to spread fewer Iranian terrorists and more common Iraqis with a better, freer life, the lid will blow off Iran as though it were 1989 again.

Is Bush’s Iraq/Iran policy American self-interest? Is it unabashed idealism? As with Reagan, it’s both, reflected in Bush’s twin beliefs in taking the battle to the enemy (the Reagan Doctrine perfectly parallels the Bush Doctrine) and in freedom as both subversive force and ultimate cure. The left claims it is neither of these, but their claim rings increasingly hollow. As Victor Davis Hansen put it shortly after the handover of sovereignty, “The oil pipeline in Afghanistan that we allegedly went to war over doesn't exist. Brave Americans died to rout al Qaeda, end the fascist Taliban, and free Afghanistan for a good and legitimate man like a Hamid Karzai to oversee elections. It was politically unwise and idealistic – not smart and cynical – for Mr. Bush to gamble his presidency on getting rid of fascists in Iraq. There really was a tie between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein – just as Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton once believed and Mr. Putin and [Iraqi Prime Minister] Allawi now remind us. The United States really did plan to put Iraqi oil under Iraqi democratic supervision for the first time in the country's history. And it did.”

And when news of the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis reached President Bush’s ears, his smile told all, and his quickly dashed note to Condoleeza Rice – “Let freedom reign” – was heartfelt. It could not have been John Kerry. But it could have been Reagan.

Beyond Reagan’s Vision

Trying to list the ways in which Bush is fulfilling Reagan’s vision is the work of a book, not a chapter, and indeed that has been this anthology’s very point. Yet the high points still impress. Surely no one has so firmly stood for America’s sovereignty in ages: withdrawing us from the ABM Treaty, rejecting the International Criminal Court Treaty, and resisting Al Gore’s Kyoto Protocol fantasy, Bush has stood like a giant, not merely refusing to be tied down by the Lilliputians, but stomping as many of them as possible under his feet. Likewise, he’s been the most pro-gun president in memory, from his evisceration of UN efforts to impose a global gun ban to his reversal of the over-three-decades-old Justice Department position that the Second Amendment creates “no individual right” to gun ownership (and indeed, if it does not, it is utter nonsense).

He’s been thoroughly pro-life, in his judicial appointments, in his reinstitution of the Mexico City Policy, in his signing of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban and the Laci Peterson Law, and most importantly in his constant, active encouragement of a culture of life. The fact that lifelong abortion activist Patty Ireland’s own polls now show a pro-life majority among women – for the first time since Roe v. Wade – shows just how much impact he’s had. And of course much of this book has been devoted to his revival of Reaganomics, a devotion to supply-side theory which – despite a recession and market crash inherited from his predecessor and the economic effects of 9/11 to boot – has created what the Associated Press this week called “the best economy in twenty years.”

Will voters realize that fact before November? Maybe not; but one thing’s certain: they did in 1984.

Yet perhaps the most enduring, transformative act remains a dream: real Social Security reform. This was surely the most unsung, yet dramatic achievement of Ronald Reagan’s presidency aside from winning the Cold War: his championing of Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k)s, by which average Americans could save tax-free for their retirement, escape the slavery of the Social Security Ponzi scheme, and become real owners of the American Dream. Owners? Yes: when Reagan came to office, only 16% of American adults owned $5,000 or more of stock; by the turn of the century, that number had risen to an outright majority. On this flood of capital, markets soared, the economy boomed, small and large businesses alike exploded, homeownership soared, and Americans reached heights they’d never imagined. And perhaps most important of all, once again, the means of production had been transferred to the proletariat: America had become a bourgeoisie nation, and the fate of Marxian class warfare arguments had been sealed.

Building on this astonishing achievement – which the masses perceived but did not grasp – George W. Bush became the first major candidate to run on a platform calling for the individual ownership and direction of Social Security accounts. This went beyond touching the “third rail”: it was grasping the thing, ripping it from the crossties. And yet despite Al Gore’s increasingly hysterical attacks, the public didn’t punish Bush. Quite the contrary: even at the height of Enron and WorldCom and the bust, poll after poll showed majorities as high as seventy percent behind Bush’s plan. Eventually, Democrats may realize that a sizeable portion of that majority is not Republican.

Like every major Western nation, America faces a crippling pension crisis. It has not saved a single penny of it’s people’s Social Security “contributions”, because the “Trust Fund” is a myth. Social Security is pay-as-you-go: everything that comes in is spent today, on everything from thousand dollar hammers to crucifixes dipped in urine. Nothing is saved, no one has a real account. Any company that tried this would be busted, its executives sent to jail. But America faces a day – soon and very soon – on which bazillions of baby boomers will regret the children they aborted, as their too-few living progeny cannot sustain their monthly checks. Those then-middle aged children, of course, will never receive anything at all.

It need not be this way. Private accounts work, because freedom works: a government pension system is designed as badly and works as well as a government steel mill. And if the poverty of a Social Security system in which the death benefit won’t even buy a casket is not sufficiently clear, just look abroad. From Chile to Australia to Britain, our smarter neighbors have already pioneered this trail. We know exactly how to make private ownership work, and exactly what pitfalls must be avoided; and even more to the point, we know the power of the plan. After just a few years under the new system, Britain by itself had amassed a combined wealth in its private retirement accounts exceeding the total assets of all European government retirement systems combined.

Extending Reagan’s legacy in dramatic fashion, George W. Bush looks to give every American the benefit of this experience. Politics, of course, requires starting smaller than the situation truly demands. However, a truly private retirement system could easily eradicate most poverty in America: more than that, it could transform America from a middle class nation to a nation of the rich. Even cautious estimates indicate that private accounts would enable the average American to live on a retirement income at least equal to his working-years salary, even after adjusting for inflation. More importantly, both spouses would get all the money they’d saved, and both could pass on everything they don’t spend to their children, tax free. In this fashion – and through the similar Health Savings Account law just passed – nearly all Americans could accumulate true intergenerational wealth by the end of the century. It would be unlike anything in the history of the world.

The Pivot of History

It is in this manner – though not only this manner – that George W. Bush stands not merely as a good leader for his time, but truly at the pivot of history. Failure on the Social Security issue could doom America to a grim and dismal fate, as its internal economic crisis of escalating taxes and receding markets (as capital is withdrawn en masse from retirement accounts, much faster than can be replenished) comes to parallel Britain’s decline after World War I, with an accompanying transfer of global dominance to the booming growth engine that is China. Yet success could easily inaugurate a golden age like nothing ever seen in all of time. George W. Bush stands at this pivot. The choice is not entirely his, but the credit or blame (properly) will be.

He also stands at the most polarized period in American life since 1864. The old consensus politics which grew out of the New Deal are gone: the Republicans have finally become a party of the right, capable of balancing and meaningfully opposing a Democratic Party which moves further left by the day. This competition is at once frightening and exhilarating to liberals: they love the fight, they thrill at the opportunity to flex their considerable institutional muscles. And yet, they know they’re losing power. That Americans think of Social Security in the way they now do, that welfare reform has worked so dramatically, that more numerous media outlets provide conservatives a national voice, all these things terrify the left. It’s not just about Congress, or about any particular institution: it’s about the accumulated orthodoxy, built over a century, that says in a thousand ways every day to every American that liberalism is right. It is that which is slipping away. And that slippage is producing the polarization, on both sides.

Yet though the commentators speak of a 50-50 nation, it’s not so simple as that. The gurus forever forget that, under the best of circumstances, only half of eligible Americans vote, that any party which can mobilize a decent number of non-voters can radically alter the landscape without swaying a single current voter.

They forget this because they believe that, in reality, pretty much every group is maxed out. And that’s a pretty fair assessment. You’ll likely never see a greatly increased percentage of African Americans voting than voted in 2000. The same holds for women, union members, gun owners, gays, or any other group you’re likely to name. To the degree Hispanics are an exception, that is increasingly mitigated by the fact that Republicans are making significant gains within their ranks. This is the calculus, say the gurus: it’s still all about winning the middle.

The problem is, their calculus is wrong. There is one truly enormous group which votes far less than its numbers suggest. Though many of its current voters still vote Democrat, that number is declining, while almost every additional voter they produce votes Republican. And no one sees it coming.

That group is Evangelical Christians.

There are 60 million Evangelicals in America, yet only 15 million of them vote. There are a number of reasons for this, most of which are theological in nature and not within the scope of this book. Yet every day that a baby is aborted, every time a Roy Moore gets attacked in the press, every place a homosexual “marriage” is performed, more Evangelicals find the resolve to enter the process and stand up for their values. And the polarization we see today is heaping mountains of fuel on the fire.

It is always positive when Americans participate in their government. Our system depends upon a vigorous debate in the marketplace of ideas: the effective self-exclusion of such a large group from its proper place in American life for much of the last century impoverished us all. In theory, at least, everyone should embrace the rise of Evangelical voting and applaud it as much overdue.

But it won’t just be ideology that prevents the left from enjoying this unfolding civics lesson.

Christians are coming into the process because they are outraged. There’s no question where their outrage is directed. Merely reaching the fifty percent voting strength one might expect of them would up-end the current political calculus: as they flood into Republican ranks, they will swamp the liberal and non-ideological hacks who run much of the party (this process has been accelerating over the past decade), and eventually they will dramatically add to Republican voting strength (not to mention activist strength) at general elections. And as everyone gains a powerful ownership stake in upward mobility through Health Savings Accounts and the proposed Personal Retirement Accounts, the number of Americans seeking distinctly free market solutions – and rejecting statism – is sure to increase as well. A 50-50 nation could easily turn 60-40 over the next generation.

For all these reasons, George W. Bush stands in a historically unique position: given another term, he can lay the foundation for a new American Century of such universal wealth and power as none have ever imagined; and at the same time, as a genuine Christian and a true supply-sider, he can dramatically propel those trends which would give his party an insuperable majority with which to see that project through. He has come to that point through faithfulness to Reagan’s vision. Given just one more election victory, we will all learn whether he fulfills the promise he’s shown, of reaching beyond that vision to one so much grander as to eclipse all which has gone before. But whether he does or whether he doesn’t, we have seen that he can be trusted to try. His opponent, by contrast, will do everything possible to undo even that which we now have.

Conclusion

To borrow from de Tocqueville, George W. Bush has become a great man because he is first a good one. Even when he’s erred, that goodness has shown through: he has consistently, obviously tried to do the right thing.

We believe in him. We appreciate him. We certainly support him. And perhaps most rare of all in politics, we thank him. He has earned our gratitude, as well as that of every friend of liberty throughout the world.

Rod D. Martin is Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Special Counsel to PayPal.com Founder Peter Thiel, he is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy, a Vice President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), and co-editor of Thank You, President Bush the definitive handbook to the second term.

Republican Convention Day 1 and 2

2004-08-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

August 30: Day One in New York
7 am:
I came in on the red-eye this morning, landing at 6:30 am. I stand in the taxi line at JFK, blinking blearily at the guy who grabs my bag and tosses it into his car- I could swear that that was Dennis Kucinich. Couldn't be, could it?

10 am:
I lived in this city for 3 years, in the mid-1990s, and every time I come back he place has changed a little bit. I used to work steps away from Ground Zero, at the World Financial Center, so I figured that I'd take a quick tour of the area. Kucinich (?) drops me off right near Ground Zero. The energy and excitement of the financial district that I remember so well has all but disappeared. The grave, solemn site has now given way to lots of construction activity and occasionally the majestic towers of light that stretch into the sky - I had seen the site before, and I already understood how the lack of the huge, twin towers has changed the skyline.

This time, what struck me most was the sheer enormity of the reconstructionarea. It's a 9 square block area, and it took a good half hour to circumlocute. It's completely leveled now, and I had a chilly feeling as I surveyed the palpable emptiness, a gaping hole punched into a piece of valuable cloth, stretched over an unmarked graveyard.

2 pm:
The event begins! A lot of the book's contributors showed up - Grover Norquist, Stephen Moore, Art Laffer, Phyllis Schlafly and Star Parker. All this brain power in one room! We got great press coverage, from the LA TIMES, the NY TIMES, and even my favorite TV show: THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART.

Not to choose favorites, but Star absolutely rocked the house. She was definitely the most passionate, direct and "no holds barred" speaker we had. She wrote a terrific piece on welfare reform, and she has such a great story of personal transformation as well that she was an absolute hit.

6 pm: Dinner in Times Square, at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co., with my co-editor Rod Martin, his wife, and John Mark Huckabee, the son of the Arkansas governor.

August 31: Day Two
9 am:
So, I've talked to many of the delegates here, and so far they seem to be happy with how things are going. All agree that we had a couple of very strong speeches last night. John McCain gave a spirited defense of President Bush's reasons for invading Iraq and effecting regime change. As usual, he eschewed attack politics and refrained from even mentioning John Kerry (though the highlight of his speech was a not-so-veiled reference to Michael Moore. Moore was actually in the press boxes in the back of the room, and as McCain tagged him as a "disingenuous filmmaker," many in the audience turned to laugh merrily.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has faded into the background, and his predecessor - Rudy Giuliani - was met with a thunderous applause that eclipsed all others. Giuliani (characteristically) went right after Kerry, calling him a flip-flopper and ill-equipped to be commander-in-chief.

Noon:
Lunch with the Iowa delegation, which was kind enough to invite me to one of their affairs at the Sheraton Hotel. Like most Republicans in this town, they are feeling pretty cheery.
I know that this has been a close race up until now, and I still think the election will be a squeaker, but I am reminded that in 1996 and 1984, the races were pretty close heading into the convention of the party of the sitting president. In each case, the president ran away with the election by shining at the convention.

I feel like President Bush has a pretty good story to tell here:
* National security - clearly, this is a Republican strength, and in this city there's a strong feeling that Bush will knock this issue out of the park come Thursday's speech.
* The economy - the US has had the fastest GDP growth over the last four years of any G7 nation. The unemployment rate is 5.5 percent, which is almost exactly where it was when Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996 - and at that time, the press was calling it the "strongest economy we've had in three decades." Bush has the lowest misery index (inflation plus unemployment) of any president since LBJ. So Bush's record on the economy is actually very good - which is amazing, considering the shocks it has undergone: a popping of the stock market bubble, the terrorist attacks, and the corporate accounting scandals that sunk Enron, Worldcom, Nextel, and others

10 pm: Off to the Garden, to catch some of the speeches. So here I stand, after an absence of about a year, in the midst of my old digs once more - in the midst of a bustle and turmoil , to which lunchtime in the Tower of Babel was foolishness.

I don't have a pass to get in, so I just stand outside to soak up the atmosphere. From morning till night, these streets have been crowded to suffocation with citizens, and police officers, and fire companies. The air is filled with music, and I wonder where such multitudes of people could have come from.

Aman Verjee is Director for Strategic Planning of a Silicon Valley Company and is the Editor of Thank You, President Bush, which is on sale now.

Republican National Convention Tuesday Night Speakers

2004-08-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

September 1: "Garden Party"
The speeches:

Last night, the speeches went from the sublime to the ridiculous. Governor Arnold Schwarzengger was simply electrifying, hitting all the right themes about what a great country this was, and how immigrants are welcome into this country and the GOP with open arms. He seemed strong, principled, optimistic - he was the anti-Kerry. No wonder he scored big.

Unfortunately, the planning committee tapped the Bush twins to follow this act. Experienced public speakers would have had a hard time following Schwartzenegger and suffice it to say their inexperience showedTheir routine felt more appropriate to MTV than a political convention. However, Laura Bush was next.

Laura Bush followed her daughters, and I thought she was really good: probably the best speech from a First Lady I've heard in a long time. The Garden was still filled with the excitement that Arnold generated, and quite simply, they all loved her speech. Unlike Hillary and Teresa Heinz, Laura basically talked about us, the American people, how her husband's policies affect us - and women in particular. I suspect that we'll see a lift in the polls tomorrow, as both of the major speakers scored.

Aman Verjee is Director for Strategic Planning of a Silicon Valley Company and is the Editor of Thank You, President Bush, which is on sale now.

What a Tangled (WMD) Web They Weave

2004-08-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

Did George W. Bush lie about WMDs? Not according to senior Democrats; and though many of them have about-faced post-Michael Moore, their collective testimony bears close examination.

Here's President Bill Clinton, February 17, 1998: “If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.”

On February 18, 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright added this: "[W]hat happens [in Iraq] matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."

That same day, Sandy Berger intoned: "[Saddam] will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983." By the fall of 1998, Congress could be heard weighing in on the matter.

In a letter to Clinton dated October 9, Democratic senators, including Tom Daschle, Carl Levin, and John Kerry, urged him, after consulting with Congress, to take all actions necessary in response to "the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi said, on December 16, "Saddam...has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspections process."

Three years later, after 9/11, Democrats were singing the same song. In a letter to President Bush, dated December 5, 2001, Senator Bob Graham, joining other senators, wrote the following: "Saddam has reinvigorated his weapons programs.

Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue...and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies."

A year later, on September 23, 2002, none other than Al Gore -- who now calls Bush a “liar” -- somberly warned, based on his knowledge from the Clinton years, that an undeterred Saddam had WMDs and wanted more: "We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country...Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."

In that same speech, delivered to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, Gore reminded his hearers that "we [have had] a goal of regime change in Iraq....for a number of years."

On October 10, Hillary Clinton echoed her fellow Democrats about Saddam's chemical and biological stocks, his missile delivery capability, and his relentless pursuit of nukes.

Interestingly enough she also added, "[Saddam] has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda...."And then there's John Kerry, the accuser-in-chief.

On October 9, 2002, Kerry said, "I will be voting to give the President...the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam...because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."

Three months later, on January 23, 2003, as war approached, Kerry said, "Without question, we need to disarm Saddam...He is a brutal, murderous dictator...He presents a....grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation...And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction....So the threat of Saddam...with weapons of mass destruction is real..."

On January 31, in the Los Angeles Times, Ronald Brownstein quoted Kerry as saying, "If you don't believe Saddam Hussein is a threat with nuclear weapons, then you shouldn't vote for me."

Yet today, Kerry -- along with virtually all Democrats everywhere -- pretends just the opposite: it was, supposedly, all a big lie, personally concocted by George W. Bush.They're not concerned with the evidence. They don't ask where al Qaeda terrorists got the twenty tons of nerve gas confiscated from them in Amman, Jordan this April, just before they unleashed another Nagasaki.

They don't want to pursue Israeli reports of large WMD stocks smuggled into Syria, or even UN reports of whole Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles turning up in Holland.

Even the Iraq Survey Group's report -- providing irrefutable proof of Saddam's capability to produce large quantities of chemical weapons at a moment's notice -- is swept under the rug.Yet, as Bill Clinton put it to Larry King in July 2003 (after the war) “it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there [was]…a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for [in Iraq].”

The threat was real. The threat is still real. President Bush has eliminated Saddam Hussein, his murderous regime, and his ability to produce new weapons at the drop of a hat. But hundreds of tons of WMD materials remain unaccounted for.

We can either find them now in the Middle East or we can find them someday in New York. What we cannot, must not do is play politics with the issue. Even Bill Clinton will not.

So why does John Kerry, and why does the entire Michael Moore wing of his party?

This is the sort of irresponsibility that could cost millions of lives. It is certainly not worthy of elevation to the Presidency.

Rod D. Martin is Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC and editor of Thank You, President Bush . This article first appeared as a column at http://www.thevanguard.org.

Defending the Bush Deficits

2004-07-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

Since President Bush took office in 2000, the economy has gone through at least three major shocks that were not of his making – a major terrorist attack that damped consumer confidence; the depression in business spending that followed the bursting of the stock market bubble; and a series of accounting scandals that afflicted some of the largest and most visible corporations in the United States.

Yet, the U.S. economy has outperformed that of every other G7 country since 2001. Today, the unemployment rate is at 5.6 percent, almost exactly where it was in 1996 when Bill Clinton was re-elected, proclaiming in his State of the Union speech that the “economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades.” In the last three quarters, since the 2003 tax cuts were enacted, the U.S. economy has been growing at a 5.4 percent annualized pace, which is the fastest clip we’ve experienced since 1984.

This remarkable record on the economy owes much to the pro-growth policies of the Bush administration. By reducing the tax code’s inherent penalties on work, savings, investment and entrepreneurship, they have kept us out of a prolonged recession. Yet, critics of President Bush’s fiscal policies have argued that today’s record federal deficit, which will reach $445 billion in 2004, will cause long term economic growth to flounder by pushing interest rates higher.

Like Chicken Little, who caviled because she mistook a tumbling acorn for a crashing sky, President Bush’s critics are unjustified when they foretell of an impending economic doom. Alarmists who worry about the historical heights to which deficits have climbed need to step back and review the historical data for context. At the end of 2001, the federal debt of the United States that was held by the public stood at 33 percent of U.S. GDP, which was the lowest it had been in 18 years. At the end of 2003, federal debt stood at 36 percent of GDP, and it is currently projected by the Congressional Budget Office to reach 40 percent of GDP by 2005 before beginning to decline again.

By historical and international standards, these levels of debt are very modest. For instance, the debt burdens of Germany and France are over 60 percent of GDP; in Japan, debt is almost 150 percent of GDP. In the United States, we have had 24 years since 1939 when the federal debt was below 36 percent of GDP. In 41 years, the debt has been higher. The President’s critics might suggest that economic growth should have been better in the low debt years than in the high debt years – in fact, real GDP growth averaged 4.44 percent in the high debt years and just 3.14 percent in the low debt years.

To some extent, this divergence in growth rates was a result of the war years, when debt piled up quickly and economic growth was relatively robust. But the story is the same over a more restricted time horizon. Indeed, we can look at only the years since 1963, which is when the debt fell to present-day levels for the first time since WWII. Since then, public debt fell to a low of 24 percent in 1974, rose to a high of 50 percent in 1993 and fell back to 33 percent in 2001. Economic growth was higher in the relatively high debt years during this period, averaging 3.47 percent versus 2.59 percent. Unemployment was also lower in the high debt years averaging 5.65 percent as opposed to 6.43 percent in the low debt years. And consumer price inflation was almost three times higher in the low debt years than in the high debt years — 7.6 percent to 3.0 percent.

Looking back at American history, it is apparent that economic prosperity can continue even if the federal government maintains a debt burden that is much higher than it is today as a percentage of GDP.

Moreover, large budget deficits have never been a cause of – or even correlated with – the high interest rates or slow economic growth that deficit hawks predict. For instance, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations practiced fiscal restraint, keeping taxes high (the top rate was over 90 percent) and paying down the federal debt. The result: four recessions between 1948 and 1961. Contrary to the expectations set by the President’s critics, real interest rates actually rose slightly during this period of fiscal restraint; the real, inflation-adjusted 10-year government bond yield edged up from 170 bp in 1953 (when the 10-year was first issued) to 280 bp in 1961.

In the 1960s, the federal government ran modest deficits while cutting taxes. In the 1980s, the federal government ran much larger deficits, while cutting taxes sharply and increasing spending. In both periods, economic growth was robust. In the 1960s, interest rates fell slightly; throughout the 1980s, they dropped dramatically, which is exactly the opposite of what the deficit Chicken Littles would predict.

The lesson is clear: economic prosperity can continue even if the federal government never balances its budget. The greater threats to prosperity are high levels of taxation, and regulatory barriers to growth. President Bush deserves our gratitude for having steered the right fiscal course to keep the economy on track.

Aman Verjee is Director for Strategic Planning of a Silicon Valley Company and is the Editor of Thank You, President Bush, which is on sale now.