Pennsylvania and Ohio will become rich states if they vote for Romney

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Voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio have a unique opportunity to make themselves energy producing giants this Tuesday, if they vote for the right candidate.

As geologists and energy experts probe what’s under the ground in these two states, it is becoming apparent they are sitting on huge reserves of natural gas. In addition to gas, they already have huge reserves of other forms of fossil fuels.

But in particular, the gas is near the surface and easy to obtain. If there is willing government cooperation from Washington DC, these states will be booming due to energy production. State treasuries would be overflowing with royalties from the billions in energy sold.

Thousands of jobs would be created on exploration, recovery, pipelines, transportation and infrastructure. Long-term employment would necessarily increase as companies look for qualified employees to help in recovering & marketing these resources.

North Dakota is a prime example of what a state can do when they pursue their energy resources. With a 3% unemployment rate, they are the lowest rate in the nation.

Under the last four years of the Obama administration, there has been a concerted effort to wage war on our energy sector. One of the key Obama EPA administrators was caught saying he wanted to crucify the energy industry. One of the biggest foes of Americas fossil fuel reserves, Bill McKibben, has the Presidents ear and was said to play a key role in his rejection of the Keystone Pipeline.

See McKibben Epstein ultimate energy debate November 5, at Duke University.

For the last 4 years, the Obama administration has been quietly crucifying andhamstringing our energy sector.

The stark, easy to see result of this policy, is to pull into the gas station and fill up your car for $100.00, when it only cost $50.00 four years ago.

Governor Romney has already promised he will encourage responsible recovery of our energy resources the first day he takes control of the reins of government.

We have already seen what 4 years of Obama policies have done to our energy sector. Energy plant shut downs-Coal mine bankruptcies-Huge tracts of federally controlled land barred from energy exploration-Billions in losses on taxpayer funded green energy schemes. The next 4 years will be all of the above, but on steroids, as he will not have to answer to the voters again.

The choice is clear for the voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. With Romney you have the opportunity to become energy rich and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. At the same time you can help our country become energy self sufficient.

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Ed is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Tuesday: Don’t Vote for Revenge, Vote for Love of Country

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Speaking in Springfield Ohio, Barack Obama mentioned Mitt Romney. As soon as he mentioned Romney’s name, the crowd began to boo. Obama told the crowd:

“No, no, no. Don’t boo, vote. Voting is the best revenge.”

Speaking in New Hampshire, Romney told supporters how Obama had said that voting would be their “best revenge” against Romney:

“Vote for revenge? Let me tell you what I’d like to tell you: Vote for love of country. It is time we lead America to a better place.”

This is but one snapshot highlighting the difference between Americans and “progressives”.

The choices Americans have on Tuesday November 6, 2012 fall into two distinct categories. The difference between these two philosophies is so clearly defined that it should be easy for Americans to decide where their sentiments lie.

The Declaration of Independence was a radical document because for millennia mankind had been ruled by monarchs, Caesars, Czars, or similar forms of dynastic oligarchies determined by bloodline.
The universally accepted school of thought was that Kings, Queens, Emperors or Caesars were anointed by God, or were even gods themselves. Only monarchs or nobilities appointed by monarchs owned anything. They “allowed” the “common people” to work the land as serfs, indentured servants or as slaves. But “common people” were never “allowed” to own property. All they produced belonged to the monarch and was the monarch’s for the taking.

America’s Founding Fathers disavowed this view of society.

They declared that all men are created equal, that in effect, all men are kings. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They declared that people could govern themselves without a monarch or an oligarchy ruling over them.

This was a radical departure from centuries old norms. They envisioned a system which allowed “common people” to own property without first obtaining permission from a “divine” ruler. Anyone could come to America, work hard, earn money, save it and buy property.

Those who rebelled against the Royal British Crown knew that if they failed in their endeavor, they would all hang. Yet, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” they pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor.

The Declaration of Independence was the mission statement for the United States Constitution.

Yes, the Constitution established an imperfect government, which among other flaws still allowed slavery. Yet at that point in history, the original 13 colonies could not have formed one nation capable of maintaining a semblance of unity had they not reached the 3/5ths compromise. But the Founding Fathers were wise when they wrote the Constitution. They ensured that the Constitution could be amended, so that in time slavery and other injustices could be altered through an orderly process which provided change that enjoyed overwhelming bi-partisan support.

The Marxist school of thought is in direct opposition to the uniquely American concept that everyone has the right to own private property. How would Americans react if, after years of struggle, they finally owned their own home, then government “informed” them that it did not belong to them, that it belonged to “all the people” and Americans had to let strangers live on their property whether they liked it or not?

If an all-powerful, big government oligarchy is allowed to seize private property in this manner, as in the concept of “social justice” or “economic justice”, America is dead.

The real philosophical divide in the United States lies between the intent of America’s Founding Fathers and the intent of “progressives”, who favor the Marxist view.

The American idea, the shot heard round the world, is that We the People can govern ourselves. By the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God we are entitled, by virtue of our humanity, to the maximum amount of Individual Liberties consistent with law and order, and to the Right of private ownership, not the least of which is the Right to own and decide for ourselves. These Liberties and Rights are to be equally protected by a constitutionally limited, representative government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

This is a distinctly exceptional American idea.

The “progressive” idea is that an all-powerful centrally planned government, with extreme hostility towards private ownership, forces redistribution of wealth in the name of social or economic “justice”. In order to ensure “fairness”, an oligarchy of self-imagined, self-appointed “intellectual elites” will control businesses, industries and people who are incapable of governing themselves. This was the position of a fringe minority who called themselves “progressives” until early twentieth century Americans saw for themselves exactly how bad “progressive” ideas were.

The “progressive” idea came to America from Britain’s Fabian Socialists, who advocate socialistic democracy, and from Germany’s Frankfurt School, who came to America after fleeing Adolph Hitler because they knew Hitler would kill them for being Communists.

These ideas are European, not American.

The settlers who founded America rejected European ideas in fleeing Europe searching for a better future. America has been a success and a beacon to freedom seeking people for over two centuries because the American idea is the better idea.

Among Americans unpolluted by “progressive” ideas, there is little debate that the United States of America is the most inventive, productive, prosperous and charitable nation in the history of the planet. There has yet to be put forth one rational, logical argument to support abandoning the highly successful American idea in favor of a European idea that is currently failing in Europe itself.

Before voting on Tuesday, November 6, 2012, decide which fate America deserves.

Then vote not for revenge, but for love of country.

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Michael Fell is a former MCA recording artist from the seminal punk rock era who toured America from coast to coast. Today, he’s a leading voice in the L.A. Tea Party movement, active since the February 2009 inception. Mr. Fell currently chairs the Westwood Tea Party, is a founding member of the L.A. Metro Tea Party Coalition, serves as the Vice Chairman of the Westside Republicans Club in L.A. CA, and is an elected Republican delegate to the L.A. 47th AD Central Committee. He’s been Campaign Manager for a primary winning Congressional candidate, as well as Santa Monica and L.A. City Council candidates. Mr. Fell is a contributing writer for https://conservativedailynews.com/, https://rightwingnews.com/, https://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/, https://beforeitsnews.com, https://www.redcounty.com/, https://www.uspatriotpac.com and, https://westsiderepublicans.com/. His opinions on today’s news events and political climate can be found on his blog: https://mjfellright.wordpress.com/

Mark Steyn: A Vote For Obama-Biden Is A Vote For National Collapse

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photo credit: nmhschoolIn political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era.

In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats (“John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs”) and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers.

He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket.

He announced that he’d instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America “we leave nobody behind.”

By doing all this, the president “shows” he “cares” — which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn’t care. So Brennan, the counterterrorism guy, and Blinken, the national security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.

Read more from this story HERE.

7 Questions That Will Determine the Outcome of the 2012 Election

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Photo credit: DonkeyHoteyThe debates are over, and although most of my fellow pundits were quick to tell us before they started that historically they don’t impact the eventual outcome, this time they certainly have.

This race hasn’t been the same since the first debate. Mitt Romney’s rout of a beleaguered and bored-looking Barack Obama dramatically altered the trajectory of the race from leaning strongly to the president to a toss-up/leaning Romney. The president bounced back somewhat in the second debate, and was much stronger in the final debate Monday night, but he’s still not been able to regain the momentum he lost in the first debate in Denver.

If Romney goes on to win this election that first presidential debate will go down as the biggest debate game changer in modern American political history.

So with the debates concluded, the campaign has now entered its final phase. The popular vote is trending Romney, but the Electoral College remains razor close and the president still has more routes to 270 than Romney does—although Romney’s path is much easier than it was at the beginning of October.

Heading down the stretch, the answers to these seven questions could determine the eventual outcome:

1) Will there be an October surprise? For example, the president clearly has a foreign policy edge over Romney, so could there be an unforeseen circumstance on the global stage that gives Obama one last chance to appear as a strong leader? Something like a rogue nation such as Iran doing something to insert itself into the election if it thinks it can handle an Obama second term more easily than a President Romney? Another potential October surprise could be the final two economic forecasts before the election, which will be on the rate of growth and unemployment. Will there be much more robust or negative numbers there when par for the course is expected? Or could it be something totally unforeseen, like George W. Bush’s revealed long-ago DUI on the eve of the 2000 election, which nearly cost him enough votes to give Al Gore the presidency?

2) Will the automobile industry bailout be the marriage amendment of 2012? In 2004, an instate fight for an amendment protecting marriage on the ballot in Ohio helped George W. Bush massively turn out the evangelical vote in that state, catapulting him to the win there and thus re-election. This time the Democrats are hoping an important but under-the-radar issue like the automobile industry bailout can do the same for Obama. The bailout wasn’t popular for Republicans, which is why Romney opposed it during the primaries, but it remains popular in Ohio. The Buckeye State is Obama’s firewall. With Ohio he stands a decent chance of denying Romney’s path to 270 Electoral College votes, and no Republican has ever won the White House without Ohio. On the other hand, if Romney wins Ohio it’s probably game, set, and match for the Obama Regime. This issue gives Obama his best chance of accomplishing that task, because he has no other record of economic achievement to run on.

3. Which base is more energized come Election Day? For much of this election cycle Democrats have been more energized than Republicans, who have been disappointed in the lack of leadership they’ve seen from many of the folks they just voted for in the Tea Party uprising of 2010. However, Romney’s rout in the first debate energized Republicans more than Democrats for the first time in 2012. Democrats have been trying to reignite that spark. Will Obama’s win in the final debate do it? Will something happen in the final two weeks that will do it? With so few undecided voters in this election, an energized base is even more vital. Obama is going to dominate traditional Democrat groups like blacks and Latinos, and Romney will dominate traditional Republican groups like evangelicals. Neither candidate has much cross-over appeal to the other’s base, which Obama was able to peel off some from John McCain in 2008. Without that cross-over appeal base turnout is even more important. Therefore, it won’t be the percentage each candidate gets of that group that matters as much as it will be the actual turnout of those groups.

4. What kind of coat-tails will each candidate have? For example, could a strong Romney win in Missouri ironically carry the embattled Todd Akin across the finish line there? Republican Linda McMahon has run a good campaign in Connecticut, but could she get swept up in Obama’s win in that state? Currently, Real Clear Politics is forecasting 10 U.S. Senate seats as toss-ups. Four of those are in states that Romney will likely win, two of them are in states Obama will likely win, and the rest are in true battleground states that could go either way. To get to 51 in the U.S. Senate, and thus repeal Obamacare, the Republicans need to win 8 of those 10 toss-up Senate seats. That is a tall order, and more than likely not possible without Akin’s seat in Missouri, which the party establishment still refuses to assist with.

5. No one else wants to say it, but since I’ve made a career out of saying stuff others don’t want to openly talk about I will. Between ACORN, the Secretary of State project, lack of Voter I.D. laws and lack of enforcement of voter fraud laws already on the books, and recent elections featuring districts and towns with more registered voters than the census says lives there, there is widespread anticipation from conservatives the Democrats are prepared to cheat if necessary. The progressive mantra seems to be “if you’re not cheating you’re not trying.” We know a multitude of attorneys were poised to invade Wisconsin for the Scott Walker recall, but he won “outside the margin of cheating” so it was a moot point. If we’re right to be paranoid about this, then Romney will need to win a state like Ohio by more than 2 points, or outside the margin of cheating. If it’s closer than that zany high jinks are sure to ensue.

6. Obama clearly won the third and final debate, albeit not in the same dominant fashion that Romney won the first one. The third debate also had the fewest viewers, and many polls showed folks’ minds weren’t changed by the debate either way. After the debate, I talked to Republicans I know around the country whose job it is to get Republicans elected. Two schools of thought emerged:

Optimism—The race is trending Romney’s direction, therefore he was wise to play it safe and say nothing that risked changing the subject from a referendum on Obama, which it has been since the first debate. Foreign policy debates always favor the incumbent, so all the challenger has to do is come across as a credible commander-in-chief. All the polls show that Romney did that.

Pessimism—Romney is playing prevent defense with the game still in doubt, and he may have peaked too soon in the polls. Remember in the primaries when a candidate surged as the “flavor of the month” only to be dropped by the voters later? The same thing could happen to Romney if he keeps playing it safe and let’s Obama off the hook on issues like Libya.

We won’t know which one of these schools of thought is correct until a winner is declared on November 6th.

7. Will any of the three wildcards play spoiler in the election?

Wildcard #1—Battleground states Nevada and Iowa each have strong libertarian/Ron Paul factions that aren’t enamored with Romney. Could Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson siphon enough votes from Romney to alter the outcome there?

Wildcard #2—The battleground state of Virginia features a rare third party candidate that has actually won multiple major elections there. Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode has been elected as a U.S. Congressman in Virginia as a Democrat, Republican, and an Independent. Goode received more than 157,000 votes in his last Congressional campaign in 2008. Obama won the state by 6 points four years ago, which was about 236,000 votes. Thus, you can see how much of an impact Goode can have on a razor close race there.

Wildcard #3—More than 30 states began early voting before the first presidential debate. How many of those voters were independents that couldn’t be swayed by that debate because they had already voted? We won’t know until Election Day.

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You can friend “Steve Deace” on Facebook and follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow. To learn more about his nationally-syndicated radio show, go to www.stevedeace.com.

Mayberry No More: The US is “Coming Apart”

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Photo Credit: Javier Rojas/Zuma PressAs we anticipate Mitt Romney’s (hopefully delicious) victory next Tuesday, we shouldn’t be fooled to think that all will be right in America if he wins. His victory, which is in no way assured, would only give us a bit of breathing room to buckle down for the long haul, because a Romney victory will only make the left mad (well, madder than they are already. Remember, they have been berserk since Bush “stole” the 2000 election).

Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, writes in “Coming Apart” that today’s leaders lack bravery and perspective. While many readers can hang on to the memories of the Greatest Generation and of Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff”, what exemplifies America to a large extent is 56,000 square foot houses such as Aaron Spelling’s 123 room villa. I would have been happy to have raised my family with four bedrooms. Ok, five, to be honest.

“Unseemly” is how Murray puts this decadence, which in large part describes contemporary American government, with “Washington [being] in a new gilded age of influence peddling that dwarfs anything that has come before.”

Can the U.S. recover from this unseemliness? In Marvin Olasky’s book review, he points out the courage and perseverance of one man, William Wilberforce, who led England to abolish slavery in the early 1800’s. Olasky reminds us too that the American Revolution was fueled in part by the patriot’s aversion to the decadence of London.

Murray, like all of us, hopes for “a civic Great Awakening among the new upper class” where the wealthy can lead a more balanced and rewarding life as they focus more on society and less on their Maseratis.

With Mayberry RFD (and Leave it to Beaver) long gone, America has reached a point of “Coming Apart”. But we are not finished by any stretch of the imagination, as we shall see next Tuesday.

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Bill Peck is a software developer, Christian, conservative, West Point grad ’81, and part-time blogger. He is also a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a masters degree in administrative science, with a concentration in Information Technology. He helped Joe Miller become the Republican nominee for Senate in Alaska in 2010, fell in love with the Alaska people and the grandeur of the 49th state, and is now Joe Miller’s spokesman.

Why America May Reelect Obama

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1) Cheap Borrowed Money: On an intellectual level, most Americans may be able to comprehend that the country is in deep financial trouble, but they’re not feeling the squeeze. Part of that is because Western Europe is having its own financial troubles and it’s driving cheap borrowed money here, but it’s also because the Fed is playing sleazy financial games to cover up our weakness. Interest rates are being kept artificially low and in 2011, the Fed bought 61% of our debt. So, we have a 16 trillion dollar debt we can’t pay for, we’re running a trillion dollar plus deficit a year, people from both parties say it’s “unsustainable,” and yet the public isn’t being forced to make any hard choices at all. Essentially, the only thing of significance we’ve agreed to cut in the last four years is the military budget and both Obama and Romney agree those cuts will never happen. It’s hard to convince the public that there’s an impending crisis when Republicans are calling for tax cuts, Democrats are calling for more spending and everything seems to be humming along just like it always has.

2) A Style Over Substance Mentality: One of the great ironies of modern American life is that as the number of news sources Americans have access to have proliferated, news organizations have become more and more enamored with covering gaffes and clever put-downs to draw an audience in an increasingly competitive market as opposed to hard news. As a result, increasingly, Americans seem to be less willing or perhaps even less able to comprehend the crucial issues that confront the country. Barack Obama, to his everlasting shame, has taken full advantage of this trend. In 2008, his campaign was about “Change,” “Hope,” “Unity,” and in 2012 it has been “Big Bird,” “Binders,” and Bayonets.” If we become so shallow as a people that elections are primarily decided by trivia instead of the issues that will really determine the fate of our nation, then ultimately we’re doomed to fail.

3) A Left-wing Takeover of Colleges, the Media, and Hollywood: The Left has completed its “long march through the institutions” and now it owns Hollywood, colleges, and the mainstream media. People tend to notice Hollywood stars spouting off, but Hollywood is really effective because it habitually treats far left-wing beliefs as the cultural norm while Christian and conservative beliefs are almost always portrayed as backwards and mean-spirited. In our colleges, Communists, terrorists, and far left-wingers indoctrinate naïve students with a poisonous miasma of liberal beliefs. Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media, from The New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc., etc., etc. act as press flacks for the Democratic Party. Whatever story the Democrats want out there, they push it. Stories that are bad for the Left are either completely ignored or treated as insignificant. When conservative state legislators help fund public colleges that teach kids to hate them and conservatives watch TV shows, movies, and cable news networks that smear their beliefs over a morning paper that mocks God and looks down its nose at people with traditional values, it’s no surprise the Left has a huge advantage. Vladimir Lenin once said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” and today, conservatives are funding the very people who are hanging our country by the neck until it dies.

4) Racial Polarization: Democrats start every election with 90% of the black vote and roughly 65% of the Hispanic vote as a given. Some of this is based on issues. Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than other Americans to be poor and impoverished Americans are more likely to find the Democrats’ offers of free goodies to be appealing. However, much of it is cultural and the fruit of the liberal strategy of falsely calling Republicans racist. In fact, that’s pretty much the ONLY thing Barack Obama has had to offer to black Americans. They’ve gone backwards economically, illegal aliens have taken jobs that would have gone to black Americans, and Obama has fought against God’s definition of marriage and school choice, both of which are popular with African-Americans. It’s not much better for Latinos. Helping illegal aliens to stay here doesn’t help American Hispanics; to the contrary, it hurts all low income workers and costs the middle class money. The only people who really benefit are corrupt business owners who get below market labor and liberal politicians who eventually want to turn illegals into votes. Yet, as long as the Republicans refuse to do serious outreach and liberals can keep locking up huge percentages of the vote just by crying racism, they’ll keep getting a much larger share of the black and Hispanic vote than they deserve based on their performance in office.

5) Entitlement Culture: Because America has done so well for so long, we’ve started to embrace a “participation trophy” mentality.

Read more from this story HERE.

Media Bias on Steroids: Compare Treatment of Cindy Sheehan to Fallen SEAL’s Father

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[If fallen Benghazi SEAL’s father Charles Woods] had been Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, his publicly confronting the president would be considered a patriotic act.

As it was when she became the media’s — and Democratic Party’s — darling for her public rants against then-President George W. Bush.

“Cindy Sheehan is single-handedly bringing the Iraq debate to Mr. Bush’s doorstep,” hailed NBC back in 2005.

She was a sad, unstable, clearly tortured woman, but she was a handy cudgel and the media exploited her shamelessly.

Charles Woods, on the other hand, has been all but ignored. Consider:

•On “Meet the Press,” GOP panelist Carly Fiorina brought up Benghazi, only to be cut off by moderator David Gregory, who promised to “get to that a little later.” He never did.

•Newt Gingrich raised Benghazi on “This Week.” Moderator George Stephanopoulos changed the subject.

•On CNN’s “State of the Union” (with presidential debate “moderator” Candy Crowley), two GOP officials tried to raise Benghazi — but Crowley sloughed the issue off.

Read more from this story HERE.

On Eve of Nov. 5 Fossil Fuels Debate, Penn State Global Warming Prof Outed for Falsely Claiming to be Nobel Recipient

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Just days before the McKibben vs Epstein environmental debate, November 5, at Duke University, a bombshell rocked the environmental community. Read more: “Michael Mann Retracts False Nobel Prize Claims in Humiliating Climbdown.”

The Nobel Prize committee declared Penn State’s Professor, Michael Mann, has falsely claimed to be a recipient of the Nobel Prize; He never received an award from them. Both he and Penn State have been claiming for years his Nobel status to boost his scientific prestige and credibility.

To Mann, the litigious creator of the climate “Hockey Stick” graph, this is an extreme blow to any scientific credibility he may have had. The “hockey stick graph” was used by Al Gore and others to convince us we were on the verge of climate catastrophe, One critic stated: “Michael Mann is another black mark against anyone involved in “climate science.”

Penn State, still reeling from a sex scandal that threatened its accreditation, suffers another huge blow to its reputation. But the taint of Penn States scandal will now waft over the environmental movement, which has used Manns science to further its war against fossil fuels. This latest scandal throws into question the validity of the science behind the “climate change” movement.

There is a huge, well funded, well coordinated movement throughout the United States, set on the goal of completely killing our use of fossil energy. One of the main public spokesman and virulent foes of fossil energy is Bill McKibben. McKibben recently stated fossil fuel is public enemy #1 and has vowed to destroy our fossil based energy industry, source of 85% of our power.

But the fossil energy industry is not without its defenders and Alex Epstein has stepped up to the plate to defend it. He has challenged Bill McKibben to a one on one debate at Duke University November 5, where they can slug it out in the intellectual arena of ideas.

Epstein is president of the Center for Industrial Progress, a think tank that proactively champions the use of fossil energy, using real science to bolster its pro energy argument and history as a guidepost to the beneficial use of fossil fuels for mankind…Epstein is a formidable spokesman to stand toe to toe with one of the lefts most high profile foes of fossil energy.

McKibben is recognized as one of the key people influencing President Obamas decision to delay the building of the Keystone Pipeline. When he publicly states he wants to make the use of fossil fuels illegal, it is a reflection of an overall strategy to fundamentally transform our society.

In a Bill McKibben world, our energy would be supplied mainly by windmills and solar. Historically and at present technological levels, these forms of energy could not put a dent in the energy needs of our advanced society. This means civilization would have to become more primitive and a large segment of our population would revert to manual labor focused on farming.

Alex Epstein totally disagrees with this vision and had a message for McKibben and the rest of those who are out to destroy the use of fossil fuel. “The idea that fossil fuels are destroying the planet, is contrary to all evidence. All of the evidence we have is that by producing abundant affordable energy, fossil fuels have made our climate 50 times safer over the past 80 years.” ” And just on a common sense level you’d much rather be alive today, whatever happens in the climate or the weather, than you would a hundred years ago….The last time we had Bill McKibbens desired C02 emissions.”

The fossil fuel industry is highly adaptive and at the cutting edge of new technological breakthroughs that make it more efficient and cleaner. The 3 fields of energy that produce power serving billions of people; nuclear, fossil and hydro electric, are incredibly advanced, making them the progressive energy of the present and future. Windmills (technology from hundeds of years ago) and solar cannot even begin to serve the energy needs of the world and replace fossil based (carbon) energy.

The militancy of the war on fossil energy, brings a huge price tag with it. Already there are job losses in coal which is under a huge assault. Gasoline is double the price it was 4 years ago and utility rates will skyrocket as rate payers are forced to pay the subsidies given to “green energy,” which McKibben and his allies want to force on society.

Epstein says: “The last thing true scientifically is, we need to destroy our energy supply. That is the least scientific statement a human could make and is the most suicidal statement a human could make.” “Bill McKibben and his movement are free to make us an offer in the free market of ideas…. let them convince us. But they don’t have the right to force us, or give us an order.”

I asked Epstein what he hopes to accomplish in this debate: “I want people to have an appreciation and gratitude for the fact that everything they love in their lives depends on abundant, affordable energy. Their ability to get that in the future and the ability of billions of others to get it in the future, depends on the freedom to use fossil fuels, as well as other practical sources of energy. But this ability is really under attack by Bill McKibben and others who think going forward we should not use fossil fuels.”

This debate is a rare opportunity for the public to witness the clash of powerful ideas that are being used to re-shape our civilization. With professor Manns loss of stature in the scientific community, the climate change movement has a lot to answer for and we will expect answers November 5.

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Ed Farnan’s articles are also carried in:

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The Media vs. America

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At a recent conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media, Democratic pollster and pundit Pat Caddell said that the media is “the enemy of America.” He wasn’t kidding. While conceding the media’s longstanding liberal bias, Caddell said that media outlets “crossed some lines” recently. He specifically accused them of suppressing critical national security information following the deadly September 11 attack this year in Benghazi, Libya, merely to protect President Obama from embarrassment:

The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and decide that they will now become active participants, that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse—and this is the danger of the last two weeks—what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people [emphasis added].

The Benghazi episode is only the latest example of media malpractice. There are countless examples stretching back years. Bill Clinton’s end-run around presidential appointee background checks allowed the Communist Chinese widespread access to critical classified military technology, a story the media largely ignored to our great peril (see Bill Gertz’s book Betrayal). Even media preoccupation with Clinton’s sexual scandals sought to downplay them and ridicule his enemies. Suppressed stories from the 2008 elections could fill books, and they have.

This is an entrenched, systemic problem, and it exists whenever and wherever the Left sees an opportunity to influence the public. For instance, the debate moderator for this year’s vice presidential debate was ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. How many Americans know she had a special guest at her 1991 wedding to current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski; namely, longtime Genachowski friend and Harvard classmate, Barack Obama? ABC News did not feel the need to mention this before the story broke at DailyCaller.com. Afterwards, ABC defended its choice by noting that Genachowski and Raddatz have been divorced since 1997.

So what’s the problem? It didn’t concern the Commission on Presidential Debates, which chooses debate moderators. Raddatz, after all, is no different from the other moderators, all pulled from the Left media and reliable Democratic defenders: CNN’s Candy Crowley, CBS’s Bob Scheiffer, and of course Jim Lehrer of PBS, a network that receives millions a year in federal subsidies.

Crowley’s behavior while moderating the second presidential debate was arguably even more egregious than Raddatz’s. During the Oct. 16 debate, Crowley interrupted GOP candidate Mitt Romney 28 times. She interrupted Obama only 9 times, and four of those were necessitated by Obama’s refusal to respect time limits.

The most brazen interruption came near the debate’s end. GOP candidate Mitt Romney said “it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” President Obama interjected, saying “Get the transcript.” Amazingly, Crowley assumed the role of fact-checker in addition to moderator, and told Romney he was wrong. The problem is he wasn’t.

At the White House on Sept. 12, Obama said an anti-Islam video had provoked the attack. Obama said what happened in Benghazi was “a terrible act” and promised that “justice will be done.” He didn’t say the events in Benghazi were instigated by terrorists. He restated longstanding U.S. policy, saying “no acts of terror would shake the resolve of this great nation.” Over the following two weeks, the Obama administration continued to resist calling the events in Benghazi a terrorist attack.

After the debate, Crowley acknowledged on CNN that Romney had been right all along but blamed him for not speaking with sufficient precision. Romney “was right in the main, but I just think he picked the wrong word,” said Crowley.

The Commission on Presidential Debates apparently didn’t have a problem with Candy Crowley either. But then the Commission has problems of its own. A run down of the Commissioners reveals a stacked deck of Obama supporters and longtime Democrat insiders including Antonia Hernandez, former president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF, an illegal alien advocacy group); Howard Buffett, son of billionaire Obama supporter Warren Buffett; former Citigroup chief and Obama pal, Richard Parsons; early Obama supporter and former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Newton Minow; Ted Kennedy Senate replacement appointee Paul Kirk; and others. The Commission co-chair is Mike McCurry, President Clinton’s former press secretary.

Republicans are pathetically represented by two ancient, former Republican senators, Alan Simpson and John Danforth. Simpson earlier this year called himself a Republican in Name Only, and Danforth trashed his party when interviewed in May by the left-wing website ThinkProgress.org. The Republican co-chairman, Frank Farenkopf, once headed the Republican National Committee but now is a casino lobbyist who endorsed his pal Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2010. Fairness and balance, Democrat-style.

Meanwhile Commission Director Janet Brown, another RINO Washington insider, worked on Danforth’s Senate staff in an earlier day. Brown has directed the Commission for its entire 25-year history. She makes a cool $249,000 annual salary for arranging a few presidential debates every four years. Nice work if you can get it, but guess what? You can’t.

But back to Julius. Obama appointed Genachowski to head the FCC in 2009 after he had worked on the presidential campaign. Genachowski brought us the policy of “net neutrality,” which promises unprecedented and unwanted federal government intrusion into the internet. His imposition of this new rule, like many promulgated by this administration, has been challenged for violating both the will of Congress and the courts (see “Pew and the Gang Ride Again,” Foundation Watch, April 2011).

Significantly, Genachowski visited the White House 81 times between January 2009 and November 2010, while net neutrality was under consideration. The FCC’s Democratic commissioners adopted new net neutrality rules in December 2010 over the objections of their Republican counterparts, who noted that a federal court had earlier declared the FCC had no authority to issue such edicts.

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) questioned the FCC’s independence, considering the huge number of White House visits, which Issa said equaled the combined visits of the Secretaries of Energy, Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security, and State within the same timeframe. Might Genachowski have recently arranged some pre-debate “coaching” of his ex-wife before the debate? It would not be difficult to believe. She certainly allowed Vice President Biden to rudely interrupt and talk over Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan throughout the debate, and frequently stopped Ryan from finishing his thoughts.

In that debate and the first and second presidential debates, all the moderators allowed the Democrat on stage to have several more minutes to talk than the Republicans.

The George Soros-funded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW; 2010 revenues, $2.6 million) also sent a letter to Genachowski last May, demanding that he pull Fox News’ FCC license because of the controversy embroiling Fox’s parent NewsCorp in Great Britain. Genachowski said he takes such complaints “seriously.” (https://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/226513-fcc-takes-very-seriously-calls-to-pull-foxs-broadcast-licenses).

Soros has pulled out all the stops to influence American news media. While pushing officials to move against Fox publicly through CREW, Soros was also instrumental behind the scenes in getting Glenn Beck removed from Fox. His subtle methods may have included direct threats to Fox employees. But Soros and his leftist allies have sought to influence news more directly. Soros money funds a number of influential nonprofit media enterprises, including the notorious left-wing attack group Media Matters, ProPublica, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s ThinkProgress blog.

Think Progress
The radical website ThinkProgress is a project of the Center for American Progress’s Action Fund (CAP AF). Its objective is to “advance progressive ideas and message through traditional news media along with on-line reporting….” The Fund also works with “citizens” and executive and legislative branch policymakers to “impact the national debate and transform progressive ideas into policy.…”

It bills itself as “non-partisan,” but the Center for American Progress is the brainchild of former Clinton and Obama advisor John Podesta. It is a far-left organization whose board includes former Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.); Aryeh Neier, president emeritus of Soros’s Open Society Institute; and Progressive Insurance magnate Peter Lewis. (The recently deceased subprime mortgage magnate, Marion Sandler, served on the board at the time of her death.) Former members include self-described communist Van Jones and Obama’s “Global Warming Czar” Carol Browner, who also served for eight years as Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency director.

As a staffer for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Podesta helped Leahy develop the tactic of smearing and filibustering Republican judicial nominees, a practice previously unknown in Washington, according to DiscoverTheNetworks.org. He is also the author of what has come to be known as “Project Podesta”:

Project Podesta enabled the President to bypass Congress through the use of executive orders, presidential decision directives, White-House-sponsored lawsuits, vacancy appointments to high federal office, selective regulatory actions against targeted corporations, and a host of other extra-constitutional tactics. In short, Podesta showed the Clintons that they could gain by force what they might fail to achieve through legislation.

As then-Clinton White House aide Paul Begala told the New York Times in 1998, “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kind of cool.”

ThinkProgress editors and writers compose a who’s who of left-wing journalism. Editor Judd Legum is the former research director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Deputy editor Igor Volsky is a former Russian national who co-wrote presidential candidate “Screamin’ Howard” Dean’s socialized medicine proposal. Other writers have been culled from staff of Keith Olbermann, Al-Jazeera—the English language voice of the Muslim Brotherhood— the Sierra Club, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and other notable examples of the unhinged Left.

They call ThinkProgress a “blog,” and it has won awards for blogging. But that is kind of like calling North Korea’s Olympic Teams “privately funded amateurs.” Similarly, ThinkProgress is a well-endowed, professional organization with highly paid “bloggers.” Its Action Fund took in a cool $9.4 million in 2010. Despite its nonprofit status, the Fund netted $1.5 million after paying all its expenses for two years running. For each of the past four years at least, the Fund has seen its assets rise by 16 percent.

Think Progress’s Joseph Romm edits their “Climate Progress” blog (thinkprogress.org/climate). According to CAP AF’s 2010 tax return, Romm earned a salary of $136,241. Other “bloggers” are similarly compensated. CAP president Podesta, takes $55,000 a year from this subsidiary, in addition to the $274,000 a year he earns from CAP. Those two revenue streams alone put him near the dividing line for the demonized 1%. Like most fans of income redistribution, Podesta assigns himself a generous portion of the wealth the redistributionists always seem eager to spread around when it is someone else’s money.

For most real bloggers, on the other hand, maintaining a blog is the work of an individual or sometimes an ad hoc collection of volunteers. The only revenues generated are from the occasional ad and the generosity of readers. It is a labor of love and dedication, not a business. Few attempt to obtain nonprofit status and make no phony pretense at being “nonpartisan.”

Conservative bloggers receive little, if anything for their efforts, aside from being vilified by the cash-rich crybabies of the Left as “far-right extremists,” “stooges of big oil,” or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s favorite: “Hate Groups.” These are all defamatory smears, which conservatives rarely have the resources, time, or inclination to challenge in court.

CAP AF reveals little of their funding sources, but according to the 990 tax returns of their parent organization, Center for American Progress, most of CAP AF’s revenues ($5.4 million in 2010) come directly from CAP. CAP in turn receives big money from the usual suspects.

Board member Marion Sandler, who died this June, had paid a lot for her seat on the CAP board. According to Foundation Search, the Sandler Foundation gave CAP a whopping $24 million between 2005 and 2011. George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Foundation to Promote Open Society contributed $5.5 million for that period. The various Rockefeller funds provided $4.6 million. Ford added another $2.5 million. Tides kicked in a mere $1.2 million. Obama’s old Joyce Foundation offered $863,000.

A lot of investment houses “invest” in CAP too. The charitable funds of Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, and Goldman Sachs sent a combined total of $4 million during this period. These monies came from “donor-advised funds,” in which individual investors indicate where they want their money donated. Sometimes fund advisors assist with these decisions, sometimes the choice comes from the individual donor; so either the donors are ignorant of CAP’s radical designs and leftist advisors have cleverly “advised” them to steer money into left-wing organizations, or the donors know what they’re doing, and a lot of leftists are actually 1 percenters. No big surprise there. Still, it’s amazing that investment company dollars find their way into the coffers of those who wish to end the free enterprise system.

ThinkProgress like the rest of the left-wing commentariat shows incredible blindness to facts when it comes to defending its narrative. As I write, the Middle East is in an uproar, the president is doubling down on Big Bird. Yet ThinkProgress devotes its front page to Solyndra; not to dig into this multi-million-dollar corruption scandal, but to declare Solyndra and the Obama administration innocent simply because no one could get them to admit they are guilty!
(https://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/10/987251/exclusive-special-interest-groups-spent-nearly-11-million-on-solyndra-attack-ads-since-april/)

Meanwhile, Solyndra is just the tip of the crony-capitalist scandal iceberg. One of the latest revelations finds that the administration’s infamous TracFone Wireless cell phone giveaway program directly benefits the president’s political supporters. TracFone president Frederick Pollak has given more than $365,000 to Obama and the Democrats since 2007. His wife is a bundler for the Obama reelection campaign, having raised over $1.5 million for him since 2007; $632,000 in this cycle so far. TracFone receives a subsidy for participating in the program.

This is classic Chicago style corruption: you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours. Where is CAP AF on this scandal? Nowhere to be found. Even though the FCC’s Genachowski admitted earlier this year that waste and fraud was occurring in the giveaway program because some people were obtaining multiple “free” phones.

Similarly, the Soros-funded CREW can’t seem to find anything wrong with the Obama White House, despite its stated mission to “ensure government officials—regardless of party affiliation—act with honesty and integrity and merit the public trust.” CREW spares no expense, however, in attacking Republicans. CREW has issued a call to “End Secret Spending by Tax-Exempt Groups.” That might be a good idea if CREW included groups like CREW, which doesn’t disclose its donors. But they have other things in mind.

The CREW website features a project titled “Dark Money” focusing on those few corporations that provide funding for non-leftist causes. One of its entries breathlessly describes how, for example, AETNA Life Insurance Company has contributed more than $3.3 million to the American Action Network (AAN) and nearly $4.5 million to the Chamber of Commerce.
(https://www.citizensforethics.org/blog/entry/melanie-sloan-end-secret-spending-by-tax-exempt-groups)

AAN, which CREW describes as a “shadowy 501(c)(4) organization,” describes itself as an “…‘action tank’ that will create, encourage and promote center-right policies based on the principles of freedom, limited government, American exceptionalism, and strong national security.” Now that is scary!

AAN is run by former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), a moderate Republican who even earned good marks from some unions and liberal groups (https://votesmart.org/candidate/evaluations/20239#.UHhx2sXA9CM). Coleman, you will recall, lost his 2008 re-election bid to comedian Al Franken after a dubious recount vote presided over by the Soros-supported, ACORN-connected Secretary of State Mark Richie. No wonder the Left is so upset. Don’t expect we’ll be hearing much about that election from CREW though. (https://washingtonexaminer.com/york-when-1099-felons-vote-in-race-won-by-312-ballots/article/2504163#.UHiXja5iTHo)

CREW participated with ProPublica in a New York public radio program discussing “Dark Money and Big Data”. (https://www.citizensforethics.org/blog/entry/revealing-dark-money-and-big-data) But CREW receives quite a bit of “dark money” itself. In 2010, CREW received $415,000 from Soros foundations. This represented 16 percent of CREW’s 2010 revenues. In 2008, Soros donated $300,000. PBL Fund, a philanthropy of Progressive Insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, donated $396,354 to CREW in 2008. The Gill Foundation, “Advocates for LGBT Equality,” has provided a total of $426,000 since 2006. The Tides Center and Tides Foundation have together contributed $300,000 since 2002. CREW’s expenses were $2.8 million in 2010 against revenues of $2.6 million.

ProPublica
Interestingly, ProPublica also runs a “Dark Money” project, and focuses on, you guessed it, those bad Republicans, and how they are spending money to win elections. Its website mentions the usual suspects: the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Americans for Prosperity, Crossroads GPS, the American Future Fund, and others. Included is only one obscure Democrat group promoting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-nonprofits-spend-millions-on-elections-and-call-it-public-welfare)

Most of ProPublica’s “investigations” serve to promote the Left’s narrative but do not necessarily shed light on anything. For example, its research on the foreclosure crisis focuses on the role of banks, and largely ignores the fundamental cause: a decades-long leftist effort to force banks to provide home mortgages to uncreditworthy customers. Another example: the “Detention Dilemma” category focuses on the plight of Guantanamo Bay terrorists and their alleged torture at the hands of their American captors.

ProPublica’s 2011 revenues were $10.1 million. In the past two years it has received $14.5 million from the Sandler Foundation. It also receives funds from George Soros’s Foundation for an Open Society, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford, MacArthur, and donor-advised fund donations from Schwab and Goldman Sachs. (For more on ProPublica and its backing by subprime mortgage bankers Herb and Marion Sandler, see the May 2009 Foundation Watch.)

Media Matters
Perhaps the most notorious of Soros’s media propaganda vehicles is Media Matters for America. They do not so much write stories as rebuttals. And they rove the Internet, waiting to pounce on anyone willing to criticize Democrats. Furthermore, this is not performed in a dispassionate, circumspect manner, but with a snarky, childish “gotcha!” tone. Recent entries include:

* Rush Limbaugh joins the attack on moderator Martha Raddatz. (Will we be next?)
* What Wisconsin journalists want you to know about Paul Ryan.
* Fox Seizes On Out-Of-Context Quote To Defend Jobs Numbers Conspiracy. (So it’s a conspiracy now?)
* Tucker Carlson, Still Confused About Media Bias

And so forth. The attack on vote fraud expert John Fund is a good example of Media Matters’ style. At David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in November 2009, Fund erroneously cited Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) as co-sponsoring a plan to enact nationwide universal voter registration, along with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). (https://www.examiner.com/article/what-the-dems-know-that-we-don-t-universal-voter-registration).

“Universal voter registration” would automatically register names on public databases to vote. In addition to its unconstitutional aspect, universal voter registration would create a nightmare of verification and duplication problems, leading to unprecedented voter fraud. Given their campaign to resist voter integrity efforts and their valiant defense of ACORN, we know that leftists don’t object to vote fraud.

But John Fund committed a cardinal sin. According to Media Matters, he lied, because he said that Barney Frank was the bill’s co-sponsor, when in fact it was Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). An article by this writer and others followed suit, so we promoted the lie! Actually, Fund issued an apology, I issued a correction, and that was that. Simple mistake. Anyone could make it. But to the fever swamp at Media Matters, it was a conservative conspiracy to match the CIA plot to kill John F. Kennedy.

Media Matters also receives funding from the usual suspects. George Soros’s Foundation to Promote an Open Society donated $675,000 in 2010 alone. The Sandler Fund provided $400,000 over two years. The Tides Foundation has provided $3.5 million since 2003, most coming between 2008 and 2010. Tides is a donor-advised fund and its many donors do not want to be publicly identified as supporting Media Matters.

The Pritzker Family Foundation donated $400,000 between 2007 and 2009. Hotel and finance magnate Penny Pritzker is an Obama insider and was finance director for his 2008 campaign. The Picower Foundation provided $100,000 in 2008, shortly before the fund was discovered to have received most of its endowment from the Bernard Madoff scheme. The Picower family has since returned to authories a record $7.2 billion for its role in the scandal. As with CAP AF, the investment firms of Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Vanguard passed along a combined $763,000 to Media Matters between 2005 and 2010, even though it’s hard to imagine investment firms existing for long if Media Matters’ policy agenda were completely implemented.

So is there no accountability? What about the supposedly “nonpartisan” Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio?

In the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney said to moderator Jim Lehrer, “I’m sorry, Jim, I’m gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I like PBS, I love Big Bird—I actually like you too—but I am not going to keep spending money on things [we have] to borrow money from China to pay for.” The comment set off a firestorm. The social media site Twitter recorded 135,000 “tweets” [comments] per minute. (https://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/presidential-debates-10-million-tweets_b29439)
But Romney’s point was not about Big Bird and Sesame Street, which only received about 5 percent of its 2010 funding from federal subsidies and prospered through millions of dollars in product sales and private donations. Romney’s point was about PBS and its parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which partially funds independent PBS stations all over the country.

CPB’s annual appropriation from Congress runs about $0.5 billion annually. It won’t put much of a chink in our $16 trillion national debt, but the government is saturated with these small, unnecessary, and often redundant programs. They add up.

In addition, despite its supposedly “nonpartisan” charter, public television is, if possible, even further to the left than broadcast TV and the newspapers. Brandon Darby is a case in point. Darby was a movement leftist who had an epiphany when he realized that the Left serves no one but itself, and creates more problems than it solves for the people it claims to help. Darby saw this firsthand during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when he spent extensive time in New Orleans’ ninth ward assisting in recovery efforts. Leftists thwarted his efforts at every turn, and even threatened him, because he wasn’t doing things their way.

Still perceived as an insider, Darby continued to obtain information from other radicals regarding their various machinations. At one point he learned that radical leftists planned to firebomb the 2008 Minneapolis Republican National Convention, and he decided to penetrate the group as an FBI informant. Thanks to his brave efforts, potential murder was averted, and the Left’s other efforts to disrupt the convention were stymied.
For his trouble, Darby was the subject of slanderous attacks in the press, led by an article in the New York Times that accused him of provoking the bombings. Darby sued and the Times had to issue a retraction.

The New York Times has fallen far from covering only the “news that’s fit to print,” if it was ever actually there to begin with. Today the Times fits right in with the anarchist Occupy movement. One of its reporters covering Occupy was discovered actually participating in the planning and execution of Occupy protests and was arrested in New York along with other Occupy activists. (https://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2011/10/23/New-Video-Reveals–New-York-Times-Reporter-Natasha-Lennard-Is–OccupyWallStreet-Activist–Supporter)

Public radio ran a story on Darby called “Turncoat.” For the Left it was actually a relatively balanced piece, including many segments of an interview with Brandon. But in the end, the piece could not resist blaming him for the conviction of the two would-be bombers. The narrator explained that Darby could have used the wisdom gained by years of activism to convince the others to renounce violence. (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/381/turncoat?act=2)

Finally, PBS produced a Point Of View film titled “Better This World,” which received an Emmy nomination and other awards. PBS describes the film:

Better This World follows the radicalization of these boyhood friends from Midland, Texas, under the tutelage of revolutionary activist Brandon Darby. The results: eight homemade bombs, multiple domestic terrorism charges and a high-stakes entrapment defense hinging on the actions of a controversial FBI informant. Better This World goes to the heart of the war on terror and its impact on civil liberties and political dissent in post-9/11 America.

This film once again reiterates the false narrative first reported by the New York Times. (https://www.pbs.org/pov/blog/povdocs/2012/09/emmy-2012-watch-best-documentary-nominee-better-this-world/).

America is facing a crisis of misinformation from an unscrupulous minority bent on replacing our republican form of government with its largely self-serving socialist vision. We are funding much of this with our own tax dollars. That funding should dry up. If the Left wants to participate in the marketplace of ideas, it can do so on its own dime.

Pundits characterize the mass media as “in the tank” for Obama, or Clinton, or whoever is the anointed left-wing public figure of the day. But the media is not “in the tank” for anyone. Leftists strategize endlessly on how to capture and manipulate public opinion, whether it be in media, or public institutions or on college campuses. They are proactive and relentless. The media don’t follow anyone. To the contrary, today’s mass media executives are key leaders in the far left movement. Everything they do is calculated on the prospects for capturing hearts and minds. They are not opposed to deception, and we should not be entirely surprised at the lengths to which they will go.

But as John Adams wisely said, “Facts are stubborn things.” The truth has the annoying habit of sticking with us when we hear it, because it usually rings true. As long as we have the capability to bring truth to the public, our Republic stands a chance. If the Left continues to successfully overwhelm us with propaganda and lies, and continues using the organs of government to misinform and silence us, the fight will be over and we will lose.

_________________________________________________________________

James Simpson is an economist, businessman, and freelance writer. His writings have been published in Accuracy in Media, American Thinker, Big Government, Washington Times, WorldNetDaily, FrontPage Magazine, and elsewhere.

Thomas Sowell: Benghazi Just One of Many Obama Deceptions

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It was a little much when President Barack Obama said he was “offended” by the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi, Libya. What has this man not deceived the public about?

Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in office? This was followed by the first trillion-dollar deficit ever, under any president of the United States — followed by trillion-dollar deficits in every year of the Obama administration.

Remember his pledge to have a “transparent” government that would post its legislative proposals on the Internet several days before Congress was to vote on them, so that everybody would know what was happening? This was followed by an Obamacare bill so huge and passed so fast that even members of Congress did not have time to read it.

Remember his claims that previous administrations had arrogantly interfered in the internal affairs of other nations — and then his demands that Israel stop building settlements and give away land outside its 1967 borders, as a precondition to peace talks with the Palestinians, on whom there were no preconditions?

As for what happened in Libya, the Obama administration says there is an “investigation” under way. An “ongoing investigation” sounds so much better than “stonewalling” to get past Election Day. But you can bet the rent money that this “investigation” will not be completed before Election Day. And whatever the investigation says after the election will be irrelevant.

Read more from this story HERE.