The New Clarion

The blogger named Zombie has a shocking expose, first reported on FrontPage Magazine, about the totalitarian views of John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar.  Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar.

This is required reading for anyone concerned about American freedom.

Jay Cost questions President Obama’s priorities. He thinks the President should focus on improving the economy.

The 2008 election is a typical American response to economic woes. The country has been voting for out-parties during economic slowdowns since 1840, when it tossed Martin van Buren out on his duff. The United States votes for prosperity. It always has. It always will.

But Obama never promised us prosperity. In fact, he said several times that Americans would be called on to sacrifice under his presidency. His wife said that Barack will require Americans to work. Sacrifice means one gives up for others. This is not prosperity, but self-deprivation.

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A couple of people on the Harry Binswanger List linked to an article about the Bolivarian Brain Drain.  It details the exodus of the best and the brightest under way in Venezuela and those Latin American nations that are modelling themselves on Hugo Chavez’ ”21st century socialism.”   To rational and freedom loving people, such a brain drain would be looked upon as an awful event.  But to a dictator, or would-be dictator, it is an unalloyed blessing.  Chavez isn’t after happiness, or progress, or a higher standard of living.  He is only after power, and the fewer brains in the country, the easier it is to maintain his power.  So there is a definite up-side to brain drains—for dictators.

But there is a fly in the ointment.  It used to be that such a talent emigration would head directly for America, the land of freedom and opportunity.  That land exists no more.  Where can freedom loving people go now?  They are left to shuffle about from one semi-free state to another, looking desperately for the last, fading beacon lights of freedom in a darkening world.

 Objectivism can relight the world.  The question is when.

ARCTV has posted John Ridpath’s speech on Patrick Henry in honor of Independence Day. I recommend it highly. The speech is entertaining and, more important, it reminds us that the American Revolutionaries stood on the principle of individual liberty. There were timid souls back then, moderates, as there always are. It took a a man of integrity and oratorical genius to steel their resolve. Henry persuaded people that there could be no compromise, that war was the only proper course of action.

I could write a paean to America today. I could discuss the exceptional nature of the United States in a world fraught with tyranny and force or lament the unheeded wisdom of the Founding Fathers in this trying time. Those are the things that politicians around the country will be doing today, co-opting the occasion in the verbal equivalent of a flag lapel pin.

But I won’t. To me, the Fourth of July is like Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Day: a day when everyone celebrates something they should be doing year-round but aren’t. Reserving your energies and efforts to honor your values for a single day every year is actually a moral travesty. America is the greatest nation on earth and has been since its inception 233 years ago.

We here at The New Clarion love America. And we show that love (almost) daily when we chronicle and expose the distance we as a nation have strayed from where we ought to be. It is right and just to be patriotic for the United States and there’s no reason to limit it to just one day a year.

The week began with Mark Sanford ruining his political career by taking a secret trip to Argentina to see his soulmate. Then he kept talking about it as if the media were his therapist. Such is our egalitarian New Leftist culture: dignity is fast becoming a lost virtue as people psychologize themselves in public. Dignity is acceptable only when connected with the multiculturalist tribe one is born into or needing a handout; otherwise it’s stuffiness.

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Chrysler has filed for bankruptcy.

The only good thing about the prospect of automakers going into bankruptcy was that it was a chance for the government to un-do the damage it did by coercing them to meet the unsustainable terms of the auto unions. They could have removed the debts to the unions and called it a day.

Instead, they pretty much did the opposite, which neatly sums up what this administration is all about. Everyone but the unions was left holding the ball, and the government took over with their fascist “car czars.”

As you can see, with Chrylser it is going down in exactly the same way. (more…)

Robert Tracinski sees a theme in Obama’s reaction to events in Iran and Honduras: anti-Americanism.

From the views he learned at his mother’s knee, to those he imbibed at Reverend Wright’s church, to those he heard from his friend and political mentor Billy Ayers, Obama has spent his whole life steeped in the slander that America’s assertion of its interests in the world has created an evil empire that must be dismantled. And now that he is in office, he is setting about to dismantle it.

I’ve been worried that Obama will be another Jimmy Carter—but he is worse. He is the first actively anti-American president in our nation’s history.

An anti-American as Commander-in-Chief; it’s a breathtaking paradox worthy of Victor Hugo’s fiction. The man tasked with protecting America’s interests believes that doing so is wrong.

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Professor Rahe looks at Obama’s Tyrannical Ambition. He takes the long view, putting Obama in perspective of America’s political history. His information on Woodrow Wilson is fascinating.

Back in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson successfully ran for the presidency, he told his compatriots, “We are in the presence of a new organization of society.” Our time marks “a new social stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stagesetting for the drama of life,” and “the old political formulas do not fit the present problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.” What Thomas Jefferson once taught is now, he insisted, quite out of date. It is “what we used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple.” Above all else, he hoped to persuade his compatriots to get “beyond the Declaration of Independence.” That document “did not mention the questions of our day,” he told them. “It is of no consequence to us. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action”–once of use, outdated now.

Rahe makes the interesting observation that Wilson substitutes Hegel for the ideas of Montesquieu that inform the Declaration of Independence. Given the philosophical corruption of the progressives, it’s remarkable that America is still semi-free a century later.

Kos and Bill Press, living in Liberal Land, will be angry at Harry Reid if he does not pass everything the left wants now that Al Franken’s election has given him 60 Democrat senators. They don’t understand that politicians are terrified of taking the blame if things go wrong. If the Dems can’t bring along Republicans for cover, then they get all the blame.

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