My Beauty Best Teacher

On the lighter side of things, apparently you and I are working hard right now to help re-elect President Barack Obama, donating millions through taxes to his campaign to help transport security vehicles, armored limousines, and communications gear into cities ahead of his various campaign appearances. President Obama has decided to fly around the nation giving speech after speech instead of working hard to rebuild our economy, right-size government, lower the deficit, bring efficiency to operations, root out waste and fraud, and working to strike the compromises and deals needed to reform our bankrupt entitlement programs- and you're gonna pay for it.

Via The Daily Caller, Obama campaign gets more Air Force aircraft:

The U.S. Air Force is pulling nine cargo aircraft from military operations to support President Barack Obama’s stepped-up visits to campaign events.

The five medium-capacity C-130s and four heavyweight C-17s will be used to ferry security vehicles, armored limousines and communications gear into cities ahead of Obama’s campaign appearances.

In the months before November, the president is expected to fly into multiple cities per week, and speak at multiple sites per day. On Mar. 8, for example, the president will fly to Richmond, and then drive over to a Rolls-Royce aircraft-parts factory. That evening, he’ll fly down to Houston, Texas.

His wife, Vice President Joe Biden and many of his cabinet secretaries are using the Air Force’s fleet of VIP aircraft to visit more states as the election season speeds up.

The nine cargo aircraft will begin operations in April, said Maj. Michelle Lai, communications officer for the Air Force’s 89th Airlift Wing. “They’ll stand down in November 2012,” she said...

...The cargo aircraft have been used to fly troops, weapons and supplies into U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Iraq and other sites in the Middle East during the decade-long operations in Afghanistan and Iraq...

...The squadrons will supplement the existing fleet of VIP passenger aircraft at Andrews. Those aircraft include two giant Boeing 747s — which are tagged Air Force One while they’re carrying the president — as well as five Boeing 757 wide-body passenger jets, and 11 Gulfstream executive jets.

Those passenger aircraft are already helping shuttling cabinet secretaries to their election-related events, many of which are in critical swing-states...

So, to sum up, rather than protecting our nation, or carrying food to poor starving children, or just sitting and not wasting expensive jet fuel, the President has ordered that military assets be used to supplement his already extensive fleet in ferrying people and supplies around the nation, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands.

It's kind of hard for liberals and progressives to argue that President Obama's actions as demonstrated here are anything other than wrong. On the other hand, I kind of feel like this borders on criminal- it's the utter misuse of government resources to support a person's political ambitions and fly friends and family around the nation in taxpayer paid luxury.

Here are ten consequences of a victory by President Barack Obama in November 2012 over Mitt Romney:

1. Obamacare will not be repealed. It is already being demonstrated to raise costs of healthcare and as its taxes and regulations sink deeper through the system, it will cause our healthcare system to increasingly be in a crisis, likely resulting in greater and greater government control to 'fix', until we have a massively inefficient and expensive and bad healthcare system.
2. The unprecedented levels of spending in Obama’s first four years will become the new floor, as America continues its experiment in reckless spending and adding up massive debt. The new normal of debt that Obama has established- $1 trillion a year of living beyond our means as a nation- will erode the value of our currency, lead to higher interest rates, lessen our national security, and eventually cause our nation to collapse. Four more years at our current levels might just about do it.
3. Job creators will face massive tax increases and more Americans will come off the tax rolls—resulting in fewer citizens with a stake in keeping taxes low and more with a stake in protecting benefits. The Bush tax cuts and other tax cuts may be allowed to expire while Obama and the Democrats who still support his failing policies will push for more taxes, fees, and fines to pay for the exploding cost of employing more and more government workers and providing ever more 'free' services and products to citizens.
4. Government dependency, already at record levels, will continue to grow. Based on the results of his first 4 years as President in which record numbers of people went on welfare, more people will go on food stamps and bridge cards and lifelong unemployment and other government programs. They will not gain job skills and any skills they have will be eroded by time, rendering them unemployable, unhappy, and dependent on elites above to provide them with what they need to live. They'll become slaves to the state, living in permanent poverty, and I don't think we can afford four more years of accepting this.
5. Four more years that we have already lost in dealing with the looming and inevitable entitlement crisis will become eight. The reforms needed for strong and healthy Social Security and Medicare programs  will need to be in place many years to avoid the collapse that is coming, and the delay of electing Obama on a myth of hope and change has already set our nation back a critical 4 years- another 4 years of Obama might change the conversation from 'implement reforms to keep these programs' to 'its a crisis and we're facing a collapse.'
6. Obama, unworried about the impact of gas and electricity prices on his reelection, will finally wage the regulatory war on fossil fuels the Left demands. As Obama stated in March, no President wanting to win re-election wants high gas prices- but a President not needing to win re-election because he is a lame duck for four years will not need to worry about high gas prices, and he is sure to wage a war to drive up the cost of gas. The cost of gasoline is a very regressive tax, which means when it goes up it hurts the poor more than the rich, and the effects of 4 more years of Obama will be a more unequal society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
7. He will unleash the Environmental Protection Agency to impose crushing new burdens on U.S. business. Already the EPA is an agency just barely under control, in every way it can waging its green communist war against freedom and liberty and property. Another 4 years of executive orders and ever expanding budgets will make this agency uncontrollable and its regulations and policies will be a corrupting influence on any potential economic growth.
8. President Obama will continue and heighten his administration’s assault on religious freedom, expanding it into other areas in his effort to wipe out the influence of Christians in our nation. Already liberals and progressives speak about removing the 'tax-exempt' status from Churches, closing down all religious schools, and increasing the wall of separation that already exists between church and state. Eventually, once organized religion- mainly Christianity, especially Catholicism-  is walled off and isolated, personalized and demonized, he can finally kill God and replace him with himself or one of his idols.
9. Another 4 more years of Obama will gut the Defense Department, with cuts so deep that America will no longer be a superpower. Already under Obama we have abandoned our long-held policy of fighting two wars; another 4 years of Obama may lead to our inability to fight one war successfully. While the military is cut, Obama as commander-in-chief focuses on making it more gay-friendly and more green, and another four more years of this may result in the US losing its ability to protect its citizens and interests around the globe.
10. Obama could have the opportunity to appoint more Supreme Court justices, and we have seen from President Obama's past two picks for the judicial branch that he does not even pretend to try to appoint moderates and independents, rather fighting hard to advance and appoint the most partisan and extreme judges in our system. If he is given another four more years by winning re-election in November, we could be looking at a majority of the court that agrees with current liberal Justices who argue that the US Constitution is inferior to the constitutions of other states and that we should use international law instead of US law when making decisions for our nation. This extreme and rogue and partisan Court of unaccountable and unelected lawyers will be a great threat to your life, liberty, and property.

You and your family and friends should be opposing President Barack Obama and working to remove him from power because of consequences above, which are all policy options that President Obama freely chooses to engage in. Most of these policies he pushed for when his party controlled all of Congress, and even today his party still controls the Senate. No one forced him to adopt the policies above, which will have the logical and reasonable consequences I detailed. Racism, partisanship, extremism, and dislike for the guy personally are not to be found in my analysis above. Rather my analysis is based on logic, history, reason, and results, from those principles we can see the consequences of President Barack Obama winning re-election in 2012, and knowing this, we should all oppose him and vote for his likely Republican opponent Mitt Romney.

UPDATE: Thank you for linking Right Wing News and Adrienne's Catholic Corner!

Bizarro World escapee Barack Obama (currently President of the United States) has called for an end to end $4 billion in subsidies for small companies that produce oil and gas for consumers, saying “You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people."

This latest effort to raise the costs of doing business on oil and gas companies is in response to the soaring price of gasoline in the United States, a development that will choke off the feeble recovery this nation has experienced under Obama's leadership.

Despite extensive research, it is still unclear exactly what Obama would cut that adds up to '$4 billion in subsidies', but based on past proposals Obama would likely cut out tax breaks that oil and gas companies receive for buying more efficient refining and industrial equipment, for creating and keeping manufacturing jobs in America, for costs related to repairing wells for safety, for encouraging more environmentally-friendly oil extraction, and for searching out and discovering new sources of oil.

Even though Obama pretends to support all of the stuff that the tax breaks go for, he doesn't like oil companies for some reason, and so he is going to make it more expensive for oil companies to do business in the hopes to lowering the costs of gasoline at the pump. If this makes no sense to you, you just have to think like Barack Obama and remember that up is down, good is bad, successful is wrong, laziness is a virtue, higher costs to produce somehow make a product cheaper, and demonizing others is okay if you're doing it but wrong for others to do.

President Obama though does not demand an end to all subsidies- only for an end for subsidies for companies that he personally does not like. Obama practices crony capitalism, whereby companies that give him political support in the form of campaign contributions get large subsidies, and companies who give money to his opponents (like the Koch brothers) are demonized and attacked. In the game of political power, President Obama intends to win so that he and his family and supporters and friends can benefit financially. Oil and gas companies oppose him because they want to provide cheap energy for poor people and manufacturing while making profits that are then distributed to shareholders and investors and they see Obama's policies as running counter to these ideas, and for their opposition Obama attacks them. So-called 'green companies' on the other hand cough up money to him and so receive substantially greater subsidies.

To wit, from John Hinderaker at Powerlineblog:

As the graph shows, in terms of per unit production, solar and wind companies receive considerably more subsidies than oil and gas, making support for these 'green' industries considerably more expensive, and thus wasting valuable resources like time and money that could have been spent curing cancer or building flying cars. It is not efficient or resource-usage friendly to support solar and wind energy, and yet Obama does, because executives and employees who run and work for these companies provide him with considerable campaign finances, which he then uses to maintain power for himself and redirect greater sums of money to his picked friends in those industries.

In this coming election, the left-wing that has seized control of your parent's Democratic Party is going to try to make this election about how Romney is successful, about how Santorum has good moral values, about how conservatives want people to pay their own way in the world, or about how some people make money providing cheap and efficient energy. They are going to make these things into bad things, and then make you feel bad if you write that they are actually good things, and they are going to pressure companies and individuals to say what the political power wants them to say. You are going to have to ignore all of this, and instead vote against tyranny- you need to vote Republican in the coming election and send Barack Obama back to Bizarro World where he belongs.

Here are my notes and thoughts as I watched President Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address:

• All of the conversation on the channels prior to the address centered on how this address is going to be used as a way to launch the President's re-election bid and as a taxpayer financed campaign speech. I've been watching these things for years and although past incumbents running for re-election have used this speech to speak about all their accomplishments, President Obama appears to be the most brazenly partisan in using this speech as a campaign speech.
• I found a list of past 'special guests' who have been invited by the President- Lenny Skutnik in 1982 (saved passanger from drowning plane), Sammy Sosa in 1999 (relief efforts in Dominican Republic and home run chase), Hamid Karzai in 2002 (Afghanistan President), Julie Aigner-Clark in 2007 (founder of Baby Einstein)... and now Warren Buffet's secretary in 2012 (prop to use to try to bring up point of taxing the rich more). Whereas once President's (both Republican and Democrats) celebrated people who had done things, President Obama celebrates someone who has called on other people to do more things (pay more money) and yet has no real accomplishments of her own (no offense- I'm sure she is a fine person).
• It was amazing and wonderful to see Congresswomen Giffords there- she has made such a great recovery and I wish her the best on her future.
• President Obama begins with his foreign policy accomplishments, which he can take credit for, although he should share this credit with George W. Bush, who put in place the foundations and background for many of these accomplishments (the pull-out in Iraq, the groundwork for catching Osama, drones and catching terrorists in the War on Terror, etc).
• Obama next suggests that private citizens should be more like the military and act as soldiers for the state. Citizens should stop fighting one another, stop disagreeing about the direction of the nation, stop pushing for their individual rights and liberties, stop trying to keep their property and the fruits of their labor, and instead citizens should serve the state, citizens should put aside their differences and just follow orders, and people should give up their wealth and property to the state so that it can redistribute it to those people who it favors. This all sounds vaguely familiar and has strong echo's of fascism in it, although I could sugar-coat it if you'd like.
• In 2008, the 'house of cards collapsed'- banks made loans they shouldn't have (which he pushed for a community activist), regulators didn't do their jobs (which they were not held accountable for), bonuses were paid to these banks and government agencies (to which they were never held accountable for)... he is on the wrong side of the ledger here- he was pushing for the collapse and after the collapse did not hold those people accountable.
• "State of the Union is getting stronger"- as if the mounting US debt is to be ignored and we're all just to pretend that trillions of dollars in my children's spending is not damaging the foundations of our nation and creating a time-bomb that will destroy America.
• President Obama says that he can't get anything done without control of every single aspect of our political system- he decries the 'obstructionism' of the GOP controlling one single house of Congress. No one- no one- should ever be elected President who says that he can't get anything done unless he has total power- that is bad for America and bad for democracy.
• "What is happening in Detroit can happen in other industries"- what happened in Detroit was that the auto companies were bailed out, costing taxpayers $80 billion in loans, debts forgiven, pensions guaranteed, and other loans. GM made $6 billion last year in profits- taxpayers should get that back, plus the next $74 billion in profits, and then we'll claim success in saving a company at no cost. Imagine if he were to bail every unprofitable business out at massive losses to taxpayers- what would that sort of economy look like?
• Proposes new tax on multi-national companies, to be redistributed to companies that 'hire here in America'- some sort of new loan to be administered by Obama officials based on conditions that he'd set. The increased taxes on MNC's will be sure to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on goods and services, causing inflation and hitting the poor especially hard. Why does Obama hate poor people so much?
• "We brought trade cases against China at over twice the rate as the previous administration"- but the Chinese just laughed at us because Obama bowed to the Chinese President and begged to borrow trillions more of their money so that he could blow it on his wasteful spending. It's nice that he's suing China though- I'm sure that's employing lots of lawyers.
• President Obama is mystified on why employers don't hire workers- perhaps if he would have had some sort of a job at some point in business or in the private sector or in some sort of productive economic enterprise he'd know that increasing regulations, fees, requirements, red tape, and the such encourage employers not to hire.
• Obama proposes starting a temp agency company... with taxpayer money. This government financed and supported company will compete with all of these Michigan companies.
• Obama is right- good teachers like me matter, and also he's right that teachers like me are attacked all the time- I'm bashed by liberals and progressives who call me all sorts of names. The President's other education policies are pretty- they are nice words that mean nothing since the federal government isn't supposed to be involved in education in any way other than making sure that there is equality in education for different races and sexes (Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965).
• It is almost as if the right answer to everything that Obama says is the opposite of what he says. He says that it is wrong for taxpayers to be giving illegal immigrants a paid education and then sending them home at the end- he suggests we should make these people here illegally citizens after investing all that money into them, while I kind of think that taxpayers shouldn't be investing money into people here illegally. Get a work or education visa or something to stay here or pay your own way.
• President Obama attacks inequality in pay between mean and women in work- that's right Obama, tear this straw man up! That straw man can't fight back- I suggest he go after those who want children to work in coal mines next!
• I followed this line... "need more bullet proof vests... computers chips... innovations... industries... energy..." what???
• President Obama claims that our nation needs an "all out all of the above strategy"- it's double-speak though, because in his next line he clarifies that this strategy means less oil, less natural gas, less coal, and less drilling. His 'all of the above' strategy is going to include additional fees, regulations, and rules on companies that he doesn't like. So, in summary, he is pitching a "some of the below strategy".
• On to exploding batteries discussion... Bryan (the guy Obama referenced) used to build luxury yachts, but when government policies that Obama supported (he wanted a higher tax on yachts) destroyed Bryan's company and industry, Obama was there to throw taxpayer dollars at him to get him restarted building taxpayer subsidized wind turbines, and now Obama is some sort of 'good guy.' He's the bad guy in the story, kiddies. Holland-based Energetx Composites LLC, you just got mentioned by Obama in his State of the Union address- that's the kiss of death.
• Proposed more small fees and regulations and burdens on businesses... I missed what sort of scheme it was supposed to pay for in order to be 'budget neutral'.
• I'm caught up now... "we need smart regulations"... "we need rules"... these rules and regulations "make the free market more free"- LOL. Did he just say "I've ordered thousands of federal agents to spend thousands of man-hours to search for useless regulations that waste taxpayer money"- I must have heard this wrong. He's moving on though to proposing new rules and regulations- I guess he was done with the part about getting rid of regulations and rules after he threw the joke out there. Listening to him talk, I feel like he's a joke of a President.
• Someone add up how much all these regulations, agencies, bureau's, rules, and investments are going to cost America... I'll have to look at the transcript, but I'm pretty sure all he does is to propose these things without any sense of cost. A man (or woman) could spend a hundred years undoing all the damage that this guy is doing to our Republic.
• "The recovery is still fragile"- but earlier he said the "State of the Union is getting stronger"- let's square this round issue, folks.
• Did you know that President Obama has cut the deficit $2 trillion? And not raised it $5 trillion like what really happened? BIZARRO WORLD!
• Let's not forget this people- President Obama hates people earning millions and wants to go after them and confiscate their income redistribute it to people making less. Those who are already wealthy can keep it, those who are on the bottom might like it, but there will be no more moving between classes in Obama's America. This guy wants to slap class systems on us and turn our nation into the rich- those who already made their wealth and who have connections with government- and the rest of us poor. "You can call this class warfare all you want" he says- it's class warfare. It's class warfare. It's class warfare. It's class warfare. It's class warfare...
• The partisan divide is getting worse every year he says... especially over the past 3 years. It must be George Bush's fault or something, right? Or maybe it's because you President Obama are the most bitterly partisan figure in the history of our nation and is tearing our nation into serfs and masters. President Obama attacks running a 'perpetual campaign'- but yet he is the worst offender in this, running continually for office in a way that no President in history has ever done, running campaign commercials a year in advance of the general election, and even trotting out his wife to make frequent partisan attacks.
• He just said-"With or without this Congress I will keep implementing laws and putting in place policies that I want, but if Congress went along with what I was already doing it would give me cover and get us all involved." This guy is a bully and a dictator. Maybe I heard him wrong though; I'll go back and re-read the transcript, maybe I got it wrong.
• The speech must be coming to an end- after spending a couple minutes in the beginning to address our military and veterans, we're now going to end with a couple minutes at the end about the military and veterans- I though think that the military shouldn't just be props in Obama's game of 'we're all in this together' meme; maybe he should talk about military programs in the body of his speech that he wants to cut or increase, about what he's been doing as commander-in-chief, etc. The military is not simply there to make Obama look good. "No one thought about politics on that day" Obama says- but yet the photo of Obama in the war room was staged. Nice words Obama, but in your mouth, they are just words, merely words.
• President Obama says that as long as we are all commoners, living like peasants on the land, serving our masters like serfs, than our nation will be strong. He said 'common' several times at the end- but private property, liberty, and protection of life wasn't mentioned.

UPDATE III: Thank you for linking to this article The Western Experience, The Bitter Americans, and others!

Every month teacher unions from around the nation gather together to pray at the alter of the Democratic Party, offering up the usual sacrifices (unions dues) and saying the usual prayers (another term for Obama). As part of this monthly ritual held in every public school district in the nation, union leaders faithfully repeat the claim that Republicans are anti-education and that President Obama is pro-education. Let's examine this claim in light of the a recent release from the House Education and the Workforce Committee Republicans:

Late last year, the U.S. Secretary of Education took unprecedented action and announced a plan that would allow the administration to unilaterally dictate federal education policy without Congressional input.

Secretary Arne Duncan’s plan to grant waivers for certain requirements under No Child Left Behind in exchange for states adopting the administration’s preferred education agenda has been called “the most sweeping use of executive authority to rewrite federal education law since Washington expanded its involvement in education in the 1960s” by the New York Times. In the Washington Post, George Will likened the plan to “coercive federalism”...

...Already, this conditional waivers plan has generated great uncertainty for state and local education officials. States that opt in to the plan will be forced to dedicate time and limited resources to implement a host of new federal regulations. However, the requirements could be easily changed by Congress, Secretary Duncan, or the next administration, potentially rendering a state’s investment in changing its education system meaningless...

...Making matters worse, the secretary's waiver plan – similar to his ill-fated Race to the Top program – pressures states to adopt common academic standards and tests in reading and math, creating de facto national standards and national tests. This one-size-fits-all approach usurps the power of local superintendents, school boards, and parents who know more about what kids need to learn than bureaucrats in Washington...

...House Education and the Workforce Committee Republicans are determined to fix current education law the right way – with smart legislative policies that will have a lasting impact. Toward that effort, Republicans recently released two pieces of draft legislation to overhaul No Child Left Behind. In addition to provisions that support state-developed accountability systems and a smaller federal footprint in education, the legislation includes four provisions that rein in the authority of the Secretary of Education and preserve state and local control...

...We cannot allow the Obama administration to implement a backdoor education agenda. It’s time to advance real change in our nation’s education system. The Student Success Act and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act provide states and school districts with a clear path forward that will help get more effective teachers in the classroom, enhance accountability, and raise the bar on student achievement.

Our Founding Fathers designed our legislative branch to implement and pass policies and to pass the laws which govern our nation- they clearly did not give the President the power to issue directives and orders establishing policies and laws, paid for out a giant slush fund (stimulus dollars, which were supposed to go for shovel ready projects that would put Americans back to work back in 2009). But this is what we have- a President who thinks he is smarter than the American public and their elected Representatives and Senators, and who thinks that he is supposed to be running our nation as a King, ordering his advisers and czars and secretaries to implement policies and rules and waiver plans without any Congressional authority to do so simply because HE believes it to be the right policies. Process and the means matter, and Obama is not going about implementing education policy the right way (with Congressional approval and direction).

Furthermore, by his actions President Obama does not demonstrate that he is any sort of 'friend of education', deserving of one-sided and considerable support by the National Education Association and its various state chapters. Pressuring states to adopt common core standards is the same sort of 'national standards' that the unions opposed so loudly during Bush's administration- the emphasis on national tests is the same sort of 'national testing' that brought howls from unions and magazine articles in education magazines- and the push for merit pay should be met with a storm of opposition by the education labor unions. On these issues and many others, the labor unions have decided to compromise their positions and policy stances so that Barack Obama can remain as President, and by doing so continue to destroy the property tax base and income taxes on which education depends for its funding.

The truth of the matter is that today, perhaps it is the Republican Party which offers the best path forward for public education in America. A rising tide floats all boats, and Republican policies which encourage economic growth- less regulation, more protection of private property, less fees, less red tape and bureaucratic interference, etc- will likely lead to increased tax revenues that will in turn lead to increased funding and money for education. Further, policies designed in the legislative branch and laws passed by our Congress will have more broad consensus and input from more parties and thus be better designed and implemented that dictates issued by an overbearing and close-minded Executive Branch.

Today on the Ed Schultz show Ed was interviewing some expert, and the two liberal Democrats agreed with one another that the problem with our current political system was not the fact that our national government is exceeding its limited powers and spending too much money, but rather the problem with our current political system is that our national government is not efficiently and effectively systematically looting the wealth from productive members of our society and giving that wealth to those who are politically favored.

Is this what modern day liberalism is? Is this what the modern day Democratic Party has become? Is this the goal of President Obama and the new-Democrats in Congress? Is this what their policies and laws and orders are attempting to achieve?

Oh, I know that Schultz and the expert (I didn't catch his name) don't 'represent' the Democratic Party any more than Rush or Sean do the Republican Party. But even still, it is a sign of what I am fighting against and what I am pushing back against, and it is distressing to hear that these people support what President Obama and the Pelosi-led Democrats in Congress are trying to do- they are pushing for the United States government to put in place laws and policies that more efficiently and effectively loot the wealth from those people who have earned it in order to transfer that wealth to those people whom it favors.

That's tyranny and corruption and despotism, boys and girls, plain and simple, and I mean to fight it, just like my forefathers did before me. Although the Republican Party is not perfect- far from it- it is the only party in our system that serves as a means of blocking the attempts by Democrats and liberals of turning me into a slave of the state- voting Republican in the upcoming elections is the only real way today of making it so that my labor and time and effort and energies are my own and serve my purposes and that the fruits of my labor and the product of my time and effort and the wealth that my energies produce are not taken from me to be given to someone else.

Let's dress up this pig here and put some lipstick on it- the election of 2012 is a going to be a key one, an election that will determine the future of our nation, and it is not simply enough for President Obama and the Democrats to lose- no, the Democrats must suffer historic losses such that they learn that the purpose of the United States government is not to systematically loot the wealth of others in order to give it to those who did not earn it, but rather the purpose of the United States government is to protect my life, liberty, and property so that I may achieve the fullest of my God-given abilities.

This two party system has run its course, and the modern day Democratic Party must be destroyed, to be replaced by a Tea Party dominated conservative party that will battle for offices and power with a moderate Republican Party. No longer can our nation tolerate people on the radio who advocate for higher taxes so that older people can live comfortably on wealth they did not earn; no longer can our nation tolerate politicians who advocate for more land regulations and environmental policies so that property ownership becomes more costly; no longer can our nation support people who want corporations and businesses to pay so that they can collect money in the form of unemployment insurance and welfare even when they did not pay for these things; and no longer can the debate be about how tyrannical and despotic the government should be but rather why we should allow people who dodge taxes to create our very tax policies.

Liberals and the party that they have seized control of might believe and argue that the United States government should systematically loot those who have property and transfer it to others- but I don't, and I ask you to support me in 2012 by rejecting Democrats up and down the ballot by voting Republican.

This year I'm getting off to kind of a slow start- for example, just yesterday I got my new Franklin planner pages and figured out what is going on for this month and this year. This post is another example- my obligatory 'best of' post. 2011 was a good year for my blog- readership is way up and lots of radio and newspaper interviews were set up- and there were a lot of great posts from which to choose from, so I basically just went with the numbers. Some of you are new regular readers and might have missed these, and my usual readers will also enjoy reading some of these posts again. So here you go, the Best Posts of A Conservative Teacher 2011:

How I Helped Mary Beth Hicks Write her Book 'Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid'

Many of you know that I have been interviewed by newspapers (Detroit News) and by major radio shows (Larry Eldar Show) and some of you have even tuned in to hear me occasionally co-host a radio program (Total Education Hour), but it may surprise you all to know that I have also been a part of a major best-selling book- Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom by Mary Beth Hicks...

The rest of the post is about how I helped out Mary Beth Hicks- although again, I did very little other than nudge her in a direction. You really all should pick up her book- it's great.

Yulia Tymoshenko, former PM of Ukraine, is Now in Prison for Political Differences

For some reason, my blog has been getting very popular in Ukraine recently- after the US, the second largest source of readers of my blog is coming from Ukraine over the past month, and all-time, Ukraine is the 5th biggest nation of readers of my blog. Why Ukraine? Perhaps it stems from a post I wrote in January 15, 2010 supporting Yulia Tymoshenko for President of Ukraine...

The rest of the post is about Mrs. Tymoshenko, who is a pro-democracy former businesswomen who rejected the communist approach of keeping the masses poor while the elites proposer, so the elites manipulated the voting processes and the masses to defeat her, and then they turned around and imprisoned her and likely will kill her while she is in prison.

Evaluating the Leadership of Obama and Romney Using Howard Putnam's Principles of Leadership

...Yesterday I heard some more about leadership from Howard Putnam at the Get Motivated Business Seminar that was held in Auburn Hills (see my post Get Motivated Business Seminar Review: Powell, Giuliani, Cosby, Putnam, Walsh, and More! for my full review). Mr. Putnam rose through the ranks at Southwest Airlines to become CEO of the company, where he led it to great profitability and success. According to Putnam, there are several principles of leadership. Let's look at each one, and then evaluate whether Obama, Romney, or I follow these rules on how to be an effective leader:...

The rest of the post looks at Obama and Romney and evaluates their leadership in light of the principles that Putnam laid out.

America will Realign Towards the Tea Party in 2012; Write it Down in Stone

...In my post NYT's Douthat is Wrong: Realigning Elections Exist and One is Coming I countered an argument that was advanced by the New York Times Ross Douthat where he claimed that Harvard Professor V.O. Key's theory on realigning elections was wrong. Douthat thought that 2008 was supposed to the be realigning election, and now that we can all see that it was not, he has become disillusioned with the theory that Key advanced in his iconic essay “A Theory of Critical Elections” and now thinks that elections that change America's direction are no longer possible. But he is wrong. In my post Why 2008 Was Not a Historic or Realigning Election (written in 2009) I addressed Key's theory of realigning elections and looked back on the election of 2008 and looked forward to 2012....

This post is one of my more educated posts- I pull from political science and pundits and election data to project 2012 as a re-aligning election that will be dominated by the Tea Party (in Congress).

USA Today Is Wrong- 58.5% of Americans Have Jobs, not 45.4% as Reported

...But I have some issues with this data. According to my own analysis of the information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing the employment-population ratio from 1988 to 2011 (seasonally adjusted), the number of people employed in our nation is holding steady at a new-normal post-Obama post-recovery number of 58.5%...

This post has been updated from time to time- and in spite of the supposed 'recoveries', the number of employed in our nation has actually gone down. Go to the post and you can link to the numbers yourself and see just what the 'new normal' of employed is under Obama and the Democrats.

Increase the Number of Representatives in the House? An Argument in Favor.

...In my post 1930's Are Root of All That is Wrong I wrote that "At one time, I thought the 1930's were at the root of all that is wrong about America, and compiled a list of all of the laws and taxes and liberal decisions passed during that time." That post contained a list of all of those bad laws that came out of that time of fascism and communism and war and depression and collapsing social values. But one law that I left off that list was the Reapportionment Act of 1929, which established a permanent method for apportioning a now constant 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives according to each census, essentially capping the number of Representatives at 435...

This post goes on to argue in favor of increasing the number of Representatives in the US House. Yeah, if I were in charge we'd move past the cartoonish arguments that Republicans and Democrats are currently having in the political world and really start getting to the root of bringing our nation back towards conservative principles. Check out this post and get educated.

The Story of a Bear named 'Bearack Obama' and How Liberal Policies Are Affecting His Brother Bears Too

...According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are even reports of a black bear that has recently taken to sitting every day at the picnic table, apparently waiting to be fed. He also has refused to dig out his own winter den, forcing government employees to do so. Although the bear once was self-sufficient, he now begs for a handout every day from our generous government, who provides him with food and a home because those rich fat cats who make a profit deserve to suffer or something or other. Because the bear was once a healthy and prosperous bear but now is just a lazy welfare case of a bear, the local residents have taken to calling him Bearack Obama...

This post is amusing, but it was based on a true story.

Abolish the Department of Education- What Does the Data Suggest?

...the massive spending in education at the federal level was largely a waste of money and did nothing to improve our test scores.... this group would argue that all of the spending done at the federal level is having little to no effect on test scores for students because the money is being gobbled up by bureaucrats in Washington who are far removed from the real educating of students at the local level. They would suggest spending less amounts on education at the federal level and seeing what might happen- perhaps test scores would remain flat as they have done for over 30 years, but if this happens than our nation could save that $77 billion dollars/year and use it in other areas where it might be needed or not use it at all and have our government run a balanced budget....

This post considers two arguments in favor of the Department of Education- you'll have to read the full post to find out what the data suggests regarding this federal agency.

The official Unemployment Rate number dropped to 8.5%. But sadly, this number increasingly does not reflect the reality of the economic situation in the United States.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also measures the number of people in the US who are employed- it's called the Labor Force Participation Rate. Since 1980, on average only 65.8% of the number of people available to work have in fact been producing goods and services. There were more people being productive, tax-paying citizens in the past (we were above this average from 1988 until 2008), but since 2008, something changed, and we have been hopelessly pulling down the average. There was a brief rise in the number of people employed in 2009, but since then things have mysteriously gotten worse and the expected recovery has not materialized. Today, only 64% of people are employed. See the graph of these numbers here.

Another number that I found useful was generated by Tyler Durden on the blog Zero Hedge. Dunden figured out that since 1980, the average number of people who are employed in the American work force is only about 65.8%. When this number is applied to the participation rate of the workforce, you get a better number of the 'implied' labor force that is available in the United States. Out of this population, the unemployment rate is 11.4%, which is essentially what it has been since early 2009. Go ahead and bounce over to this website and look at the data there, because it is very interesting.

With this additional information, let me venture a couple personal thoughts. First, the unemployment has to recover at some point and the US has to emerge (however slowly) from this recession- it is not surprising then that the unemployment rate is coming down- it is surprising instead that it has taken so long and is recovering so slowly. Second, the unemployment rate generated by the government increasingly does not reflect the reality of the situation- much like the economic numbers generated by the Soviets, these numbers are more political propaganda numbers and thus are increasingly more symbols than useful numbers. Third, the number of people employed and being productive tax-paying citizens is not increasing, in spite of the fact that my children and grandchildren have given away their future (in massive amounts of debt) and that the foundations of our economic system have been stripped (the bankrupting of Social Security and Medicare and pension programs)- this means that all of those policies were bad policies that at great cost did not achieve desired results and those who designed and wrote and passed those policies should lose their jobs.

I'm happy that the unemployment number has gone down, but I'd be more happy if more people had jobs, could pay their bills, and could pay their taxes, and all of this was done without artificial stimulation or inflation by government policies.

Via Doug Ross.

The coming year will give voters a real choice of visions- divide up the wealth in our nation differently or grow the amount of wealth in our nation.

Before we visit the best posts of 2011, let's all take a moment to reflect back on some of my best posts from last year, 2010, and see how the analysis, predictions, and theories that I advanced in those posts have held up over the past year.

Obama: Didn't Waive the Jones Act, Made Gulf Spill Worse:
Occasionally I break a major story, like this one, which I was on well in advance of the MSM. Here was the story that I broke in 2010:

In reply to the emails from snarky liberals who ask 'just what do I expect Obama to do about the Gulf oil spill', the reply is 'get the hell out of the way'...Let loose the power of free markets and civil society and restrict government to limited and defined roles, and the world will be a better place. In this particular case, just 'what can Obama do'? Here is one of dozens of examples that are specific and have few drawbacks but Obama isn't doing- Obama can temporarily waive the Jones Act....

In retrospect, it is clear that Obama did have a reverse-Midas touch with the Gulf Oil spill- every move he made or didn't make during this disaster was the wrong one. From not temporarily waiving the Jones Act (which effectively forbid foreign nations from assisting the US by banning ships flagged, crewed, constructed, or owned by other nations from transporting cargo from one US port to another US port) to overstating the extent of the disaster (his talking about it caused a larger drop in tourism to the entire Gulf region than the actual disaster did), we can see in the Gulf oil spill just how aimless and unhelpful President Obama is when America faces an immediate crisis, and this post was yet more support to that argument.

Obama Nicknames
Every President has a nickname- Reagan was the Gipper, Bush was W, Clinton was Slick Willy, Thomas Jefferson was Long Tom, Chester Arthur was the Walrus, Calvin Coolidge was Cool Cal- so in this post I decided to pull together some of the top Obama nicknames that I have seen or heard. It's a good and solid list, and I've added to it over the past year (2011). My personal nickname for Obama: Waffles the Clown.

Oppose Race to the Top: Reasons Why Conservatives Should Oppose RTTT
This post was one of my 'thinking posts', where I was asked a question that I should have considered before but hadn't, and I went home and really thought through my views and beliefs and arrived at an answer. My instinct was always to oppose Race to the Top, which was President Obama's major education initiative, but I wanted to make sure that I was opposing it for the right reasons- not because the NEA was against it or because Obama came up with it, but because it violated conservative principles. Read the whole post, but here is a bit of it...

Recently, Michigan Senate Majority leader Mike Bishop asked me for my opinion on the President's Race to the Top program. I told him that I didn't support it, and he looked at me in a way that said "I thought you were a conservative" and "I thought you wanted to help education." At the time, I struggled to explain why I didn't like the program- I didn't really know all the details to it, but suspected that I was indeed correct in opposing it from what little I knew. He thought I was just a tool of the teachers unions, who also oppose RTTT, but I knew that for some reason I didn't like this initiative by Obama, and it wasn't just paranoid anti-Obama sentiment.... Today, via theblogprof, via Right Wing News, I came across the an article called "Ten Rules for Anti-Government Republican Radicals in D.C. ." As an anti-government conservative radical, the kind that our founding fathers were, the kind of people that built our nation and made our country a great success, I find these rules to be useful in helping me begin to articulate why I oppose Race to the Top....

Since I put together this post, I've gone on the radio multiple times in a variety of shows to talk about a true conservative approach to education, one that emphasizes decentralization of power, local control, less federal spending, regular and measured policies, structural changes, the humanity of the system, the lessening of federal laws, and the passage of good solid legislation. A good conservative believes 'first, do no harm' and 'less is more' and that the purpose of the state is to protect life, liberty, and property, and Race to the Top is not legislation that a conservative should support, even though it attacked the NEA and labor unions and put in place small good changes to the system. Read my whole post and you'll see yet another reason why thinking individuals should be opposing Obama in 2012.

Obama's New NASA Policy- Yet More Broken Promises and Lies
American Exceptionalism is being killed by Obama, in ways big and small. Once America was a great nation that put men on the moon- an exceptional nation capable of spaceflight and exploring new worlds. Now...:

Out of all of the broken promises of President Obama, this one is probably not the biggest to a lot of people. Out of all of the phony and lying rhetoric about hope and change, this latest policy announcement that kills hope and changes things for the worst is probably not the most backstabbing that he has uttered. But that does not mean that Obama's plans to destroy NASA's budget and redirect its mission away from exploration is not big or important to me....

Obama's attack on NASA didn't stop in 2010 as he continued to oppose its vision of boldly exploring new worlds and demonstrating America's amazing exceptionalism. I revisited this theme several times in 2011, notably in my posts Nuclear Power and Manned Space Flight: Victims of Democrat's Progress Backwards? and Obama Killed My Child's Dream of Being an Astronaut.  Obama and the Democrats will not be happy until America is an average nation that has fallen back into the pack of tyranny and debt that is the history of the world, and their policies towards NASA are an example of this.

Recommended Read: Codevilla's 'America's Ruling Class'
This post was an attempt to get people to read one of the most important essay's of 2010- Codevilla's essay America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution that was published in the American Spectator.

...it lays out quite clearly the two classes that are evolving in our nation- what Codevilla calls the 'ruling class' and the 'country class.' Codevilla echo's what I tell my students every year- it is getting increasingly important to understand how the ruling class in our society works and how they use government to maintain their ruling status, because our society is increasingly about what the government does and less so about what you do...

Revisiting this essay today, you can clearly see the increasingly divide in America between those people who are benefiting from government connections and those who are not, increased by the policies pushed by the modern-day Democratic party and to a lesser although still significant extent the Republican Party. Solyndra is a great example of this- a company that found favor in the ruling class was able to secure loans and help while other companies not favored by the ruling class had money taken from them in the form of taxes and regulations and fees and permits. The massive expansion in food stamps or the massive expansion of taxpayer subsidized healthcare are also great examples of how the ruling class is increasingly looting all of us in order to give gifts and trinkets to the country class as our nation descends into tyranny.

A couple weeks ago I read an interesting article in the Telegraph- in it, longtime journalist Janet Daley suggests that the best thing that the British government can do to improve the economy and make people more wealthy and happy and free is to work really hard and be very productive in DOING LESS. The truth of the matter is that politicians have to have real guts and strength to simply say 'no, I will not spend taxpayer money trying to control people and the market,' but that may be exactly the kind of strength and guts we need today- politicians who promise to do more of less. From her article A daring idea to fix the economy: try doing less:

...the myth of government activism – the idea that intervention by the state is the answer to every economic and social problem – had been definitively routed. Apparently not: Mr Osborne and, we must assume, his boss still seem to believe that any unacceptable national situation must require direct action from them.

Or maybe they don’t believe that at all. Perhaps they just lack the political courage to admit that, in our present crisis, the best thing that the Government can do is to get out of the business of running (or subsidising, or initiating, or incentivising) things altogether – not just in the interests of saving money, but because the effects of such interference are counter-productive. What the economy is suffering from is not an insufficiency of overweening, fussy, bureaucratic initiatives that inevitably unleash an avalanche of unintended consequences, but a lack of cash in the hands of people who might spend it in ways that would actually create wealth and stimulate (in the proper sense of the word) economic growth.

If ever there was a time for radical proposals by a governing party, this is it. Rather than the imitative, mealy-mouthed shuffling of dollops of money from one departmental scheme to another, in what will inevitably look like panic in the face of rising youth unemployment and disappointing growth figures, what we need is a display of real insight and nerve...

...There is an urgent need now to rethink the whole relationship between government and populace while there is still the possibility of discussion. In Britain, Europe and America, the questions are remarkably similar. Can a free-market economy support an infinitely growing state? We will have to choose, quite soon, between liberty and the “security” of a society in which government controls the levers of economic life. Washington politicians are getting a terrible drubbing for failing to resolve their implacable differences over the size of the state (to the extent that they are unable to agree a federal budget). The US national debate may seem rough and ready to European ears – but at least they are engaging in the real argument.

She is right- the argument has been joined, and today via memeorandum I read in the Wall Street Journal an article that echo's the very ideas of Ms. Daley. From former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's article Capitalism and the Right to Rise:

...Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise....

....We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

What Governor Bush is talking about is the same kind of thing that I personally observed during my time as a policy adviser in the state's capital. I remember distinctly one time when a young Republican 'conservative' staffer came in to work one day, upset that the car that she had recently bought turned out to have been a bad purchase. She set about writing a law that would force the state to regulate and control all sellers of automobiles in the state and then tried to convince legislators to sponsor this piece of legislation- she wanted the state to immediately do something, to step in and spend lots of money and time and effort controlling thousands of people's individual decisions just to protect several people from their own stupidity. She proposal was met with great hostility towards me, and I countered her proposal by suggesting that rather than the state doing something about used car dealers, it instead loosen regulations and fees and taxes on all car dealers, making the market more free, so that more fools like her could be separated from their money, as the hand of God in its infinite wisdom is wont to do. I wasn't joking though.

The real courage and intelligent thing to do to create a more vibrant, free market by cutting back government regulations and fees and enabling people to be people, in all their glorious faults and warts, because only by doing so can we also unleash the amazing potential for great and good things that humans contain in them. The safe, stately downward path of state control is not the path for me and is not the path that successful, free, and prosperous people- no, we choose the jagged and uneven and unpredictable path that is the path of less government regulation, taxes, fees, and supervision- that is the only true path for better protection and encouragement of life, liberty, and property.

Here is what Richard A. Epstein, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor of Law at New York University Law School, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, had to say regarding the major speech that President Barack Obama (one-term Democrat) gave at Osawatomie, Kansas:

The painful ignorance that is revealed in these remarks augurs ill for the long-term recovery of America. With the president firmly determined to set himself against the tides of progress, innovation will be harder to come by. The levels of unemployment will continue to be high as the president works overtime to impose additional restrictions on the labor markets and more taxes at the top of the income distribution—both backhanded ways to reward innovation and growth.

The problem, therefore, with the president’s speech is not that it is demagogic in tone. The problem is that it is intellectually incoherent. As a matter of high principle, the president announces his fealty to markets. As a matter of practical politics, he denigrates and undermines them at every step. It is a frightening prospect to have a president who lives in a time warp that lets him believe that the failed policies of 1935 can lead this nation back from the brink. His chosen constituency, the middle class, should tremble at the prospect that his agenda might well set the course for the United States for the next four years.

In Professor Epstein's analysis of President Obama's speech, he echo's some of the comments that I have been making on liberal blogs like Balloon Juice and others- that in spite of his rhetoric and because of his economic incoherence and illiteracy, workers, school teachers, union employees, blue collar employees, the middle class, supporters of Occupy Wall Street, and related groups are going to suffer the most from President Obama's policies.

As Epstein wrote in his article Populist-in-Chief:

It is a good thing when plants can achieve the same output with less labor. Do we really want an America in which thousands of people work in dangerous occupations to turn molten lava into steel bars? Far better it is that fewer workers are doing those jobs. The jobs lost in that industry will be in part replaced by newer jobs created in the firms that build the equipment that make it possible to run steel mills at a lower cost and far lower risk of personal injury. The former workers can seek jobs in newer industries that will only expand by competing for labor.

And what about those ATM machines? Does the president really want people to have to queue up in banks to make deposits or withdraw cash in order to make a boom market for human tellers? Perhaps we should return to the days before automation, when phone calls were all connected by human operators. And why blast the Internet, which has created far more useful jobs than it has ever destroyed?

You see, if President Obama had his way, we would return to the Great Depression, when people were dependent on government for goods and services because government was in the business of destroying productive business around the world. If President Obama had his way, he would increase taxes and regulations on businesses while giving out subsidies and tax breaks to favored businesses, favoring those who hire lobbyists and special interest groups who redirect wealth over those who create wealth and make products or sell goods and services. If President Barack Obama had his way- a Congress of Democrats that went along with his ideas and ideals- America would be dragged back to the early 1900's, when we had a low standards of living and shorter life spans, and Obama would happily fill up dangerous and inefficient steal mills with 'workers', he would sign praises to the joy of labor while factory workers worked for low wages (compared to today) in dangerous industries, and the working class would have few goods (like cheap cars coming in from the Far East, cheap electronics built in backward nations around the world, and labor-saving devices everywhere built everywhere) just so that he could burnish his protectionist credentials.

When government gets in the business of redirecting wealth and picking and choosing the winners and losers in society, the only people who win and get wealthy are government officials- this lesson has been demonstrated over and over around the world many times over. And yet, that is exactly what Barack Obama and his Democratic Party are proposing to do- increase the power of the government to control wealth, liberty, and property in our society, and that somehow through this 'workers' and the '99%' will get more wealthy and happier. The logic is not explained, the mechanisms by which wealth is created are not explained- rather, the logic is the same logic that is found in every despotic tyranny throughout history- people have earned things that others want, and the government will get those things by playing one side off the other. Obama's magic act of wealth creation is the same sort of tyranny that the world has seen many times over- and has fallen for many times over as well.

Our nation has not only learned nothing from the Great Depression, we have learned the wrong lessons as well (see my post Lessons from Economic Recessions- Introduction and Great Depression), and are going about repeating the same mistakes that turned a recession in 1930 into a Great Depression that lasted to the 1950's (and included in it the collapse of the world into a deadly World War!). We must not allow this guy to enact those same policies- I don't care who does what with the GOP, and it doesn't matter who they are, anyone is an upgrade over this incoherent ideologue whose mind is so filled with mush and mindless platitudes and liberal bumper slogans that he is now unable to effectively design any policies that have a slightly positive effect on anyone.

President Obama, any Democrat who supports him, and any Republican who agrees with his policies needs to join Herbert Hoover on the unemployment line (or better yet, get a job somewhere in the private economy building or making or doing something useful!).

One of the cornerstones of modern-day conservatism is the belief that America's energy resources can and should be responsibly exploited. This means that the United States should allow private companies to drill for oil, mine coal, build nuclear power plants, tap into natural gas reserves, get shale oil, and utilize whatever other energy resources that these companies wish to use, provided that they respect the property rights of others.

Oh, I know what liberals and left-wingers will say- the horror of pollution! But the faults of energy development do not lie with the companies themselves, but rather with the government for not establishing clear and defined property rights- for example, rather than having the government act as police to safeguard public water, the water rights should be more clearly defined and if companies destroy or harm the property (the water) of others, they should be forced to pay in a court, much as if they destroyed other private property. The faults with 'pollution' then lie not in the companies for breaking ever expanding government rules and regulations over ever expanding public lands, but for the government for not putting in place limited and clear rules regarding private property rights and then divesting itself of public lands by selling these lands off to private entities that can then do a better job of protecting. Like most problems in our society, the solution is less government, not more.

With the main liberal concern out of the way, our nation would be free to exploit and use its vast resources- enough oil for 30 years, enough natural gas for 575 years, enough coal for 500 years, etc. With oil, gas, and coal be utilized to its fullest extent, our nation will have cheap and plentiful energy, enabling it to develop some of the most amazingly energy intensive industries there are- 'renewable resources'. The horse needs to go before the cart here- we  need to have cheap and plentiful energy in order to build the energy intensive operations and industries like building solar panels, developing batteries, building geothermal plants, etc. A wealthy, productive society thriving on cheap energy can afford to become environmentally friendly, as opposed to a cheap, declining society that the liberals and Democrats appear to be pushing us towards with their anti-energy policies.

In a free market, one in which the government is not subsidizing any of the industries (and this includes cutting subsidies for oil and gas and coal), the most efficient energy resources will be developed in an environment that encourages private property ownership and protection. American can be great again, if it moves away from the liberal model of public ownership of lands and public protection of the environment with restrictive regulations and rules and taxes on energy production combined with subsidies for 'favored' industries and campaign donors. It can be great again if it moves towards a more conservative model of private ownership of lands and private protection through impartial courts of the environment, with few restrictions and regulations and subsidies on energy production, encouraging the most efficient producers and users of energy in a free market.

Via Powerlineblog's post AMERICA’S VAST ENERGY RESOURCES I read this quote from the Institute for Energy Research. IER describes the problem (and the opportunity) bluntly:

Access to affordable, abundant energy is, fundamentally, a means of freedom. But for those seeking to create a crisis that provides an opportunity to direct the way we live, work and act, affordable, reliable, abundant, domestic energy is a threat. In a very real sense, the more energy we have, the less power they will have. Energy abundance ends the justification for central energy decision-making.

As it turns out, many of the problems of energy scarcity and rising costs in the United States have been caused by the government itself. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a report that outlined many of the policy and regulatory constraints that impact domestic energy production. While the report focused on natural gas specifically, many of the laws and procedures also represent roadblocks to any form of safe and responsible energy production. The list of energy barriers included the following policies, all of which can limit access to U.S. resources, increase delays related to exploration and production, and/or increase costs of development:

(John from Powerlineblog)The list of statutes and other legal impediments that follows is three pages long. Only liberal politicians stand between the American people and development of our vast energy resources.

A a recent article that Charles Moore wrote, I think he put his finger on exactly what is going on today- the success and advance of the twin threats of fear and doubt. Moore, who is a British journalist and former editor of The Daily Telegraph, in an article about Margaret Thatcher, wrote that after the long boom and success of capitalism and free market economics that "the worm of doubt entered the system":

You borrowed all the money needed for the price of a house. This made you, in your mind, though not in full fact, an owner. Because the value of the house was rising, it also made you, again in your mind, richer. The bank, which actually owned the house, found clever ways of mixing and selling on the loans it had granted so that it, too, felt richer. Governments, happy at rising revenues, thought it was their business to make sure that when the symptoms of high risk began to present themselves, they were suppressed.... (then) the roof fell in... (and now) when people now hear words like globalization or capitalism... they feel slightly sick.

Free market economics and capitalism did not lead our nation to failure- rather, during its wild success at making millions around the world more prosperous over the past centuries, communism and socialism and fascism latched on to it, sucking from its prosperity to feed its sick aims like parasites, and over time, many smart people began to become confused and unable to see the parasites from the concepts that they latched on.

Where free markets and capitalism created wealth and encouraged personal responsibility, governments and elites put in place rules and regulations which weakened the foundations of the system, subsidized risky behavior such as sub-prime mortgages and leveraging investments, and gave out handouts to favored industries and distorted the market by doing so. When banks, businesses, and corporations operated in a free market of capitalism, they could succeed or fail based on their own efforts and innovation; but in the new markets, which were no longer capitalistic or free, government subsidies and spending and lobbying and regulation and rules determined whether or not a business, corporation, or bank was successful or failed. And although this was no longer capitalism or free markets, but rather markets once free now twisted to the aims of elites and socialists and communists and fascists, many smart people became critical of the markets or capitalism because of the failures of the government bureaucrats who were twisting and corrupting the system.

And then the parasites of leftism began to weaken and kill the free market and capitalism, and the people cried out 'capitalism and free markets are failing us'- when it wasn't the free markets and capitalism that failed, but rather the people who failed the system.

They were led to this failure by fear and doubt- they did not believe in the hand of the God and the freedom of individuals and life, liberty, and the protection of private property.

The people (or The People, as leftists call them) feared that although they were becoming prosperous and their lives were rapidly improving, they were somehow falling behind others who were advancing more rapidly. Rather than looking at why they were successful in the free market capitalism- because of their hard work, innovation, and yes, luck- they instead demanded government policies to hold back others and help out themselves, corrupting the very system that had brought them so far. They doubted that if people were free and made free decisions, they would make 'the right decisions'- that is, the decisions that they would make if they controlled the other people and had power over them (their definition of 'right decisions').

Rather than just letting go and trusting that the unseen hand of God, trusting to the thousands and millions of individual decisions, and working to ensure that private property rights are strengthened and respected, they doubted that this giant experiment of capitalism and a free market would work, and feared that they would somehow fall behind others in material wealth if they didn't vote for and support people who promised to corrupt the system and abuse the system and circumvent the system. Many people trusted and believed in the power of men to control other men and redistribute property to other men, and in so doing rejected free markets and capitalism.

Fear and doubt came to the people's mind every time there was a recession, or even during periods when great wealth was created but wasn't immediately distributed evenly. The people reacted to the Great Depression by doubting that the free market would correct (as it had done in the 1920's and dozens of times before in the 1800's) and feared that he return to prosperity wouldn't come fast enough- and so they worked to destroy the system, corrupt the system, and make the market less free- and the results were a slight recession during into a decade long destruction of wealth.

And today, government policies and regulations and taxes and laws which corrupted the free market and corroded private property rights have let the worm of doubt creep once more into the people's minds, and in their fear that maybe they won't get to loot the dying Republic of its wealth they vote for Democrats who promise to manage the downfall and distribute the ever-decreasing wealth in the system to their supporters and voters and friends.

To return to success and advance again as a nation in wealth and happiness, we must reject doubt of the free market system and capitalism and trust the people- we need to trust and believe again that the thousands of decisions of free people will create more wealth and make more people happy, and reject those who suggest that having a smaller number of elites make those decisions for us is better. We need to let go of our fear that if we don't control the market and the system that you'll lose out, and instead work hard, innovate, save your money, and invest wisely.

UPDATE 12/7/11: President Obama delivered a major speech today on the economy, in which he expressed his doubt that the capitalist system could continue to provide wealth and prosperity for many and work to make society more equal, and from this place of fear he instead wants to trust himself and his fellow men to run a better system that will somehow do a better job of creating wealth and distributing it than having free people make free decisions.

Via memeorandum, in his Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas, we read the following fear and doubt from US President Barack Obama, one-term Democrat. These are selections from the speech- (you can read the whole thing yourself here if you want):

My grandparents served during World War II. He was a soldier in Patton’s Army; she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. And together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and over fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried -- no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out.

And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known. It was here in America that the most productive workers, the most innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth. And you know what? Every American shared in that pride and in that success -- from those in the executive suites to those in middle management to those on the factory floor.

In this passage, Obama communicates to us that his parents believed in capitalism and free markets and personal responsibility and liberty and protection of property. And furthermore, Obama knows that this system worked. But yet, he has this nagging doubt and fear...

But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments -- wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t -- and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.

He doesn't BELIEVE in capitalism. He has no faith in people, freedom, liberty, and rights. It's clear he doesn't have any hope that people will make the 'right decisions' (the decisions he would make) and he wants to therefore control other people. He continues:

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. (Applause.) He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest. And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices. And today, they still must. He fought to make sure businesses couldn’t profit by exploiting children or selling food or medicine that wasn’t safe. And today, they still can’t.

We simply cannot return to this brand of “you’re on your own” economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country.

And it is around here that we get to the heart of the matter- in the last quarter of his speech, after ripping on capitalism and freedom for 3/4's of the speech, that we finally here what he wants to do...

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy? Well, it starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages, who’s best at busting unions, who’s best at letting companies pollute as much as they want.

We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission -- a national mission. (Applause.) Government and businesses, parents and citizens. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission -- a national mission. (Applause.) Government and businesses, parents and citizens. They should be rebuilding our roads and our bridges, laying down faster railroads and broadband, modernizing our schools. Of course, those productive investments cost money. They’re not free. And so we’ve also paid for these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices.

So, in summary, here is Obama's alternative to free markets and capitalism- give him more power. Give him the power and authority to tell employers what to pay their employees, give him the power and authority to combine big government with big business and big labor (ie, fascism), give him and his cronies the power to give money to favored constituent groups to fund pet projects of vanity (palaces, statues, etc), and the power to demand that all of these decisions are paid for by someone else who does not want to pay for it- to use the power of guns to the head to make people give up cash to Obama and his people to feed their wrong ideas about the power of men to control others for their benefit.

Obama is wrong. He needs to be defeated- not just politically, but his ideas and beliefs need to be rejected by all good people and good citizens and patriots and he and his policies need to be forever rejected in decent society. We must instead look to capitalism and freedom and liberty and property protection to our future, and not look backward to the sort of tyranny that Obama is proposing.