Yours truly rarely watches movies made after WWII in our home, much less attends a new release in a theatre; but when we saw that the latest super heroes flick, The Avengers, starred Captain America with the “A” for-America badge still intact and that it had set an opening weekend record, we were like Moses upon first spotting the “burning bush” and had to “go see this great sight”.

We aren’t Moses and The Avengers was no burning bush, but we were not disappointed in the 3-D spectacle and especially its clarity on the matter of good vs. evil in the world.

We had expected  that Marvel, like Action Comics with their Superman no longer for “Truth, Justice and the American Way”,  had gone the political correctness route of moral and cultural relativism, lest any viewer between Hollywood, Cairo, Tehran and Beijing be offended.

But what we got, in our first trip to a public cinema since the release of Ben Stein’s “Expelled” in 2008, was a clear delineation between Good, consisting of a Captain America resurrected from having been frozen just before the end of WWII, with his good ole American values in tact, who, along with Thor, held together the flawed characters of The Avengers team consisting of Iron Man, Black Widow and The Hulk, versus Loki, Evil brother of Thor, who explicitly stood for totalitarianism as the government to “free men from freedom”.

And to top it all off, Good defeated Evil and it was a good thing, despite the collateral damage from battle.

We suspect that the recent popularity of super hero action thrillers is about more than merely capitalizing on a popular brand that young and old alike can enjoy. We further suspect that Americans crave moral clarity and are tired of the “why they hate us” response to September 11, 2001, along with the gnashing of teeth over too-broad definitions of what constitutes “torture” and refusals by the administration of President Barack Obama to even accurately identify our terrorist enemies as radical  Islamists.

Our enemies are not just “extremists” or “gunmen” and the terrorist attack at Fort Hood was not a mere “workplace incident”. Evil men and women are at war with the United States, have been since we built up the Arsenal of Democracy to win WWI, and always will be as long as we hold the values, power and will to defeat the enemies of Liberty in the world.

“They” hate that they can’t behave as have evil regimes since Eve bit the Apple and enslave their own people and conquered others for megalomaniacal goals. They know that since the Shining City appeared on the Hill that is Plymouth Rock, the number living in Liberty has increased exponentially.

We are glad to see that Marvels in Hollywood still see what a special place are these United States and that they saw fit to resurrect a captain from America to lead avengers of evil deeds. That is appropriate in a world in which the real heroes for good that are fighting the evil we face in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere; are captains and other soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines of various ranks in the armed forces of the United States.

God bless America and more super hero motion pictures unafraid of portraying the evils of totalitarianism.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Jury still out on Russian and other post-election “flexibilities” as Obama Media’s ABC aka All for oBama Corporation, chose to focus only on gay marriage, the “revival” of the auto industry and whether President Obama will continue the first family’s Mother’s Day tradition of leaving  the First Lady on Air Force One

First reaction of our Astute Democratic Party Political Observer in Georgia upon learning that President Barack Obama had evolved to favor the legalization of gay marriage:

“He just lost the election. He said it in public!”

More below on what else Democrats say privately but aren’t saying publicly and what loses elections for Democrats. But first, before President Barack Obama sat down for yesterday’s interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, he had not faced reporters, unaccompanied by a foreign leader, since November 13, 2011. Since last fall, news developments other than that a thirty-second state passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman, include:

• Obama and Democrats stopped winking over respect for the free exercise of religion by forcing Catholic and other religious charity employers, including hospitals and universities, to provide insurance coverage for morning after abortion pills;
• “Revived” General Motors falsely claimed it has paid back its government loan to taxpayers, conveniently omitting the fact that payments were made with other taxpayer money;
• The EPA issued a new regulation outlawing the opening of new coal plants;
• The President’s budget garnered zero votes in Congress, even from fellow Democrats;
• The President touted pond scum as a viable alternative energy source;
• Democratic Party primary voters in ten West Virginia counties prefer that an incarcerated convict face Republican Mitt Romney than the Democrat incumbent;
• President Obama refused to approve the Keystone Pipeline and the thousands of jobs it would produce;
• The labor force shrunk to its lowest level since 1981;
• President Obama touts the creation of 2 million new jobs, yet less Americans hold jobs today than did on Inauguration Day 2009;
• The Obama Administration sued the state of South Carolina to prevent it from requiring voters to produce photo IDs before casting a ballot;
• Visitors to the White House must still produce photo IDs to enter the executive mansion;
• Justice Department lawyers have argued cases in the Supreme Court against more than half of the states to prevent them from identifying criminal suspects that are in the United States illegally and to force Americans to enter into contracts with private insurance companies against their will;
• Muslim Brotherhood politicians from Egypt visited the White House without showing photo IDs;
• Russia threatened to bomb U.S. missile defense sites in Europe; and
• Our Commander in Chief secretly (he thought) promised Russia to be more flexible after the election if they would give him some space on missile defense before the election.

No questions, much less answers concerning the above, but we were assured that the President’s third position on marriage since he endorsed the same sex variety in 1996 is consistent with his Christian faith and that his refusal to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act is consistent with his present position favoring a federalist, state-by-state working out of the issue. Never mind that the Republican-passed DOMA, signed by then President Clinton, prevents federal courts or Congress from forcing one state to accept the definition of another state.

The slowing of Democrat winking, i.e. lying, actually began weeks ago when Citizen Bill Clinton, fresh from his late-hour lobbying of the 60 Democratic Party senators that were required to pass ObamaCare on the third try, began lobbying in North Carolina against the constitutional amendment that voters approved in a landslide the day before Obama’s LGBT evolution became complete.

But will Obama will be punished by the majority of Blacks that oppose gay marriage?

Ah yes, on the day after tea partiers  flexed their muscles in Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, West Virginia and elsewhere, the burning question in the Obama Media is if voters that look like Obama, Trayvon Martin and Obama’s imaginary son will turn out on Election Day 2012 so that we can all find out what he will is now, still silently, “flexible” about concerning a second term agenda.

If only we could get other Democratic Party factions to threaten to withhold campaign contributions, like the gay marriage lobby did earlier this week, maybe we could stop Democratic Party winking all together. But the fact is that voters white and black already had enough evidence before the most recent Tuesday elections to punish Obama and the Democrats based upon the results of their policies that produced the Great Recession and the Anemic Recovery.

The real story from Tuesday is its consistency with other election Tuesdays since America got a taste of super-majority Obama Democrats’ rule in the election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia; a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s senate seat and the tea partier-driven, historic GOP landslide that took control of the House of Representatives in 2010; and the passage of right to work laws and public employee union reforms in Indiana and Wisconsin, respectively.

Yes, President Obama will be punished by voters of all hues, much as was Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, based upon the James Cueball-’It’s the Economy, stupid!-Carville Rule. Obama’s new love for gay marriage more resembles the confession of a man on a political death row, than an honest evolution.

One would suspect that a large majority of Hope and Change voters in 2008 will have evolved to such an extent by Election Day 2012 that Citizen Obama will be free from Chief Executive duties in 2013 to write a third biography telling us all about flexibilities, evolutions and the component parts of composite girlfriends. He can make millions in the private sector and still trash Americans that don’t vote for him as bitter clingers to God, guns and antipathy to people not like them, i.e. white.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Samuel ‘Joe the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher favors Reaganite policies that work

Very few political races this year better encapsulate the stark choices Americans face on Election Day this fall than the contest between Republican newcomer Joe Wurzelbacher and his 28-year incumbent Democrat opponent Marcy Kaptur for Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A quick perusal of the campaign website of the Toledo native and Air Force vet, made famous after questioning President Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth” Democratic Party economic philosophy in 2008, reveals Joe the Plumber’s consistent support for supply side policies that have proven effective in the past in fostering the creation of wealth and jobs in the private sector. Joe understands that government doesn’t create any wealth and that policies promising too much Democrat “spreading” prevents the creation of wealth.

Given the stark contrast between the results of the Carter and Obama/Democrat Congressional super-majority years as opposed to the Reagan/Newt-Clinton years, one has to wonder if Democrats  not named Bill Clinton went Rip Van Winkle on us in 1983 and still haven’t awakened.

But a quick look at Democrat Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s website makes one wonder if her party simply prefers politics based upon favors for certain groups rather than policies that produce rising tides that lift all boats. Kaptur never touts any votes for policies that foster the creation of jobs in the private sector, other than for the joke we have all come to know, post-Solyndra, as “alternative energy”. That such a reference remains on her website reveals how out of touch with we the People one can become after 14+ terms in Washington, D.C.

Kaptur also sites her work on congressional subcommittees “to secure vital federal investments”.  You know the kind. The “investments” that require that wealth creators be taxed to support, i.e. bureaucrats that restrict or liberty and seek to control our lives.

Her recitations remind of old remembrances of how much the late Democrat Senator Robert Byrd “did for West Virginia”. Yes, he too could point to government buildings built in that state that government workers occupied for eight hours/day non non-weekends and non-federal holidays. But what about the rest of West Virginia? He voted against all of the successful policies of Reagan in the 1980s and the GOP House in the 1990s.

Kaptur has a perfect pro-Obama voting record. How has that worked out for Ohio. Not so well.

Will Ohioans make the connection, finally, between Democrats and their empty wallets? One hopes so, and if anyone can return sanity to House votes on behalf of Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District, it is the man whose new political career is defined by wealth creation for all in the Buckeye state, Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Of tariffs, quotas, Utopian free market consumerism, the nation state, and the “most efficient allocation of resources” including those that used to weave in the cotton mills of my hometown

Never thought much about tariffs, despite having matriculated my way to a B.A. in economics in a Southern hometown arguably ravaged by the lack of same for textiles. After all, my family worked for union railroad wages, their sons became lawyers and professors and the mere threat of a union raised the starting pay at the new BMW plant and even garnered “lint head” friends of mine another $1.50/hour due to the new “free market” competition. Then came the Reagan-Clinton boom years and even a recovery after 911.

No worries, right? Microsoft and Apple made constant communication and the Googling of minutia (that even Seinfeld wouldn’t plumb the depths of) possible on a minute-by-minute basis. And have you seen the low prices at Wal-Mart? Yes, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barney Frank and George W. Bush screwed up this Nirvana with a housing bubble, but other than that, the “fundamentals were sound”. Right?

Just return to those Reaganite conservative supply side principles. It will take time to balance the budget and pay down the debt, but all it will take is courageous leadership and patriotic austerity. Right?

Never thought much about trade policy as being part of the problem that lead to the Great Recession and the Anemic Obama “recovery”. After all, if liberal Hillary’s Bill and a conservative Newt birthed NAFTA and everybody in Washington, D.C. save labor unions and Pat Buchanan favor GATT and a U.S. domestic market as wide open to consumer goods in 2012 as Pearl Harbor was open to attacks from the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941, who am I to complain?

You did see those low prices at the Wal-Mart, right? Those free market low prices have been a Godsend greater than food stamps and non-work Obama welfare, especially for those of us non-government employees nor dependents on said government, no longer able to afford luxury Le Sueur peas since the end of prosperity after TARP and the “stimulus”.

But what has all this got to do with trade?

TV sabbatical leads to  a second “conservative epiphany” and rejection of free-trade Utopianism

We lost real property when the housing bubble burst. Our new living arrangements and financial condition made having a television in my bedroom unpractical. Over time we have come to prefer radio and internet to commercial television anyway and we can always join roommates in the parlor for Braves baseball, SEC football and the NFL, so that some six months ago we began a non-sports TV sabbatical. This led to some resort to C-Span archives for visual relief, which further led to a reviewing of Brian Lamb’s Booknotes interview with Pat Buchanan concerning his 1998 book, The Great Betrayal; and the  summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa econ major from the John C. Calhoun South finally got schooled on trade policy and had vague nagging doubts about the virtues of globalization answered.

What I learned:

• Liberty and prosperity are achieved via nation state competition and not via a “free” world market for consumers who happen to speak different languages.
• All of the Founding Fathers eventually rejected the notion of “free trade” and embraced the Hamiltonian-inspired “American System” of Henry Clay that induced patriotism among the investor class with tariffs that encouraged the building of the Arsenal of Democracy and the most powerful and prosperous nation in world history.
• John Adams and Thomas Jefferson entertained the notion of free trade until they had to remove rose-colored glasses upon assuming the Presidency. All of the great American leaders of the 19th Century favored tariffs as conservative common sense based upon history’ lessons, especially including their own colonial history with Britain. Even John C. Calhoun favored protectionism as the wisest national policy and only switched sides to support the South’s peculiar circumstance born of slavery. Lincoln? Rabid protectionist.
• In fact, during the Republican Party-dominated post-Civil War years through the 1920s, i.e. the decades when the United States of America surpassed Britain, Germany and the memory of ancient Rome to become the preeminent economic and military super-power the world has ever seen; the tariff was the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. Clearly the tariff didn’t prevent the prosperity that occurred and clearly it was not employed only to foster “infant” industries of a budding young nation.

There was nothing conservative about foreign trade policies that allowed the destruction of America’s industrial base and the middle class jobs that went with them.

So why did the U.S. move away from tariffs?

The first attempted move was inspired by President Grover Cleveland’s “embarrassment” over massive budget surpluses fueled by tariff revenue. Cleveland eventually managed to secure a reduction in tariffs with an emphasis on funding over protectionism; as well as an ill-fated income tax that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The change gained momentum via liberal progressives, their income tax constitutional amendment and a bigger federal government requiring more money than even draconian tariffs could produce.

Free trade ideologues permeated the Wilson Administration, including FDR, and then came the Smoot-Hawley tariff which got wrongfully blamed by many historians for either causing or extending the Great Depression. Wrongfully? Yes, because the stock market crash and first Federal Reserve tightening of the money supply occurred before Smoot-Hawley. The volume of trade as a percentage of the overall economy was too small to have admitted of a great impact, and our trading partners placed tariffs on our goods as well.

Then came WWII; the devastation of trading partners, allies and enemies alike; and the Cold War. These circumstance afforded the United States, as the lone super-power with a modern economy still standing, the “luxury” of magnanimous Marshall Plans and access to the U.S. consumer market as an inducement to eschew Soviet alliances. Japan and Germany recover, but U.S. trade policy remains mostly tariff averse. Slowly, the effects of free trade hand over large chunks of Detroit’s auto industry to the Mercedes-Toyota axis. Fruits of the Looms get woven nearer Asian mangoes than Georgia peaches. But no worries, the GDP numbers from the Reagan-Clinton boom are historic.

The TV sabbatical continues, and with it a massive increase in library-borrowed reading. It is amazing how much one can do when not zombied out over the latest droid ads. Eventually we discover via Charles Murray what happened to all those former cloth doffers, whose former plants are now yuppie studio apartments and who some arrogant lawyers assumed could just get a laptop and make a living competing with other laptops in Mumbai: The U.S. working class is and has beenComing Apart.

We come now to the end of part one of our anti-free trade apologetic. We expect to go into more detail periodically but suffice to say that any notions of free trade as conservative, are dashed. One of the main components of my 2000 conservative epiphany after 18 years an activist Democrat, is that conservatism forms policies based upon experience, not ideology.

The domestic U.S. market is not the global market. The “most efficient allocation of resources” must take into account the reality of the differences in the respective markets and what builds, not just low prices for goods and services, but also a prosperous citizenry. Why fear retaliation from nations whose current policies imposing tariffs on the U.S. are what retaliation would look like if the U.S. were not, at present, bent over and grabbing the ankles cheering on “free” trade”, i.e. treating Lockheed-killing foreign monopolies and foreign nations with the same unfettered right to sell widgets in Peoria as widget-makers in Peoria. Except that U.S. manufacturers are subject to anti-trust laws and Obama regulations.

Until next time, let me close with this: Foreign trade is not a game for the driving down of Jos. A. Bank shirts by a nickel a piece. This is real life. People’s lives matter. Their jobs matter. And they aren’t failures just because they aren’t willing to live in Chinese  caves and take the train to the factory.

And by the way, just to tie all this together. Hadn’t been to Wal-Mart much to buy clothes in more than a year or so until yesterday and I noticed that Hanes briefs cost about 25% more than they used to and generic brand peas cost what Le Sueur’s did in 2009.

How’s that “efficient allocation of resources” working out for you now?

Next time: We will address inevitable Red Herrings that attempt to exempt trade policy as the cause of any of our problems as the blame gets placed solely on labor unions, educational deficiencies and technology that kills manufacturing jobs.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Would a “general strike” on May Day to shut down Wall Street and Main streets, even if adjudges successful by Occupy Wall Street agitators themselves, achieve any goal worth achieving?

The nearly forgotten OWS movement of 2011,  famous mainly for class envy while making a mess of public parks, is back with calls for shutting down schools, banks, employment by corporations, and, generally “shutting down cities” for tomorrow’s  ”Occupy May Day” event.

Occupy Wall Street hopes to capture headlines once again next week with the May 1 “General Strike”, long advertised by the group as an event that will prove to the public and media that OWS is currently experiencing a resurgence. Whether workers, students or banking customers, OWS is calling on all Americans to stop offering their labor and money to corporations for one day and join their local Occupy chapter for a day of resistance.

The vague message of OWS reminds that the main differences between tea partiers and occupiers has been in the specificity of their goals as well as in the respective tactics used by each to achieve them.

Clearly, tea partiers are a group of previously non-politically active citizens desirous of reducing the size and scope of the federal government for the purposes of getting the national debt under control and increasing the liberty required to pursue happiness, especially via job creation in the private sector. Their main tactic has been to vote Republican after having spread their message via controlled events mainly aimed at Congress to change the law.

By contrast, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been rather vague in their “inequality” grievances and devoid of remedies with their main tactic heretofore having been open-ended protests that violate curfew laws, as they focus on class warfare demonization of the so-called “One Percent”.

Much of the angst of the movement (largely participated in by college-age youths) seems to be born of anxiety over the poor state of the economy, which concern is shared tea partiers. The OWS also shares the anger of tea partiers with TARP and other bailouts of banks and auto companies, but unlike tea partiers that have sought changes in bills signed into law President Barack Obama after having been passed by fellow Democrat super-majorities in 2009-2010, occupiers seem more concerned with class envy-driven tax hikes and schadenfreude, that solve no one’s economic problems.

Would any occupier’s life be more likely to successfully pursue happiness simply by virtue of the fact that the CEO of a bank has a higher marginal tax rate and/or is hated by much of the 99% thanks to sympathetic media reports? We think not.

Having their “comeback” on the day adopted by the International Communist Party during the heyday of the Evil Soviet Empire for the celebration of Socialism, certainly gives us no hope that the movement has matured since the publicdefecations of last year’s occupations. The homeless in Atlanta developed health problems due to the presence of occupiers in Woodruff Park for months, for example. That they wish to point for their inspiration to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riot that sought laws limiting the workday to eight hours offers even less comfort.

One good sign that municipal authorities have learned a valuable lesson from 2011: They are not waiving curfew laws this time.

Labor unions have, officially, mostly refused to participate in Occupy May Day, since calls for a “general strike” are outlawed by the Wagner and Taft-Hartley labor Acts and amendments.

The only actions that would make the economy improve would be less restrictions on work and job creation which require laws passed by Congress and not intimidation of private citizens that happen to be corporate CEOs, deemed members of the 1%, or their employees, who mostly reside within the 99%.

Would that they would occupy Washington, D.C. and actually vote out those that enacted the laws that caused the economic crisis, Great Recession and most anemic “recovery” in U.S. history and vote out those Democrats that continue to refuse to reverse those policies in housing, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the non-Stimulus/Economic “recovery” Act, that wasn’t.

The 99% need  growth, not “fairness”.

Instead, we are supposed to take seriously a movement of screeds against the evils of capitalism that seems more like a desire to re-live Woodstock, which helped elect and re-elect Richard Nixon.

And more about that vague message from here in soon-to-be-occupied, Atlanta where one of the emphases is to be the supposed injustice of the execution in Georgia last year of African-American Troy Davis, after a fair trial and conviction based upon the testimony of numerous witnesses who were also Black.

One wonders if any occupiers have any concern for the victims of Troy Davis or Democrats in D.C.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Clintonian courage and the downside of being found out later to have failed to act on intel 

The pre-May Day, ‘Barack killed bin Laden’, Obama campaign ad appearance by former President Bill Clinton almost convinces me that Hillary will replace Biden on the 2012 Democratic Party ticket. Why else would the man who slayed Ross Perot twice and an al-Qaeda night watchman in Afghanistan state the following for the man that called him a racist during the 2008 South Carolina Democratic Primary?:

“He had to decide. And that’s what you hire a president to do. You hire the president to make the calls when no one else can do it,” Clinton said in the video, which sought to contrast Obama with his Republican foe Mitt Romney. “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there, and it hadn’t been bin Laden,” Clinton said in the one-and-a-half minute video. “Suppose they’d been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him. But he reasoned, I cannot in good conscience do nothing. He took the harder and more honorable path.”

Would that President Clinton had made similar and harder, ‘honorable path’ decisions on the fate of the man who declared war on America in 1998, but the ad featuring the husband of President Barack Obama’s  Secretary of State wasn’t content to merely praise Obama, as it also contained a four-year old quote from Mitt Romney as doubting the merits of searching for bin Laden:

“It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney was quoted as saying in a news report included on a CNN program when he was a Republican candidate four years ago.

It wasn’t Mitt Romney that voted twice to cut off funding for combat troops in the Afghan theatre when they were about the business of gathering the intel that eventually led to Obama’s only great moment of his presidency. No, it was then-Senator Obama (D-Il) and then-Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) that opposed swabbing the noses of high-level al-Qaedaofficials, including the mastermind of 911, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (pictured).

We now know that critical information on OBL’s location was learned from the persons whose noses were swabbed, and which persons, incredibly, continue to live despite having been water-boarded. What really takes courage is to stay the course with both feet planted firmly on the ground for a strong national defense over many years, so that events like the one Obama now credits as defining his manhood are even possible.

But this is, after all, the same Bill Clinton who served as the last-ditch ObamaCare lobbyist-in-Chief that convinced Jim Webb and the other 59 Democrat senators to ram a version of Hillary’s socialized medicine dream down Americans throat even after Scott Brown took Ted Kennedy’s seat, but I digress.

Most all Americans admire President Barack Obama’s decision to authorize the military action that killed Osama bin Laden after having the intel of the whereabouts of the man responsible the murder of 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001, for nine months. But let’s not pretend that the decision wasn’t a no-brainer.

Not to have take out OBL carried more political risk and would have taken more courage, of a sort, (The appeasing  kind that most Democrats have practiced most of the past 40 years.), than the one to send in the Seals, but here we have Clinton wanting Obama to be praised as courageous for doing what most Republicans support everyday, i.e. an aggressive defense of the United States that never considers Miranda warnings and OJ trials in NYC for OBLs.

Anyone paying the least bit of attention to the respective parties since 1972 knows that any Republican capable of being the GOP nominee will be more aggressive on defense matters than any Democrat since JFK. (Here, we don’t honor the kind of ‘hawkishness’ displayed by LBJ in the tapes that reveal his belief that the war he escalated in Vietnam could not be won.) Moreover, Mitt Romney has made clear his good judgment on such matters with his consistently hawkish stance toward an Iran that President Obama appeased while the Mullahs mowed down innocents yearning to breathe free in Iranian streets.

The suggestion that a President Mitt Romney would  not have taken the action President Obama took, given the same intelis about as believable as the one about not having had sex with “that woman, Monica Lewinsky”. What must take real courage is to pass oneself off in public as the arbiter of all things courageous, having never exhibited any, less than 10,000 feet over Kosovo.

We will say this for former President Clinton though. Unlike Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama’s husband, he and Mitt Romney have both endorsed the kind of aggressive interrogation techniques applied to KSM that led to the intel that led to bin Laden. Had Hillary and Barack had their way after 911, OBL would probably still be alive today, as would thousands of al-Qaeda operatives killed by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq and that kept America free from any terrorist attacks on U.S. soil until the Fort Hood workplace incident that occurred on President Obama’s watch.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

This conservative’s heart bleeds with Rush’s for the victims of the Democratic Party’s race-based policies.

I often ask blacks that I meet and get to know that still cling to the notion that most whites are racists; that most of Blacks problems are due to racist whites; and that they have a right to be liked by all white people…to join us. Join whites that walk out of the house everyday to a world that doesn’t like them very much either. Join us in the human race to try and build a good life of prosperity that is only possible if government shrinks from its control of our lives.

This former Democrat was won over to Rush while still a Democrat and still nearly ten years away from my eventual 2000 conservative epiphany due initially to his utter refutation of the notion that conservatives are racists. He epitomizes not only the perfect example of MLK’s content of character dream, but also the utterly Christian concept of how precious is each individual.

Couldn’t resist posting an example of the Wonder of Rush:

One of the many money quotes:

The race industry doesn’t. Here’s the thing. Paul, I can’t think of a single conservative that I know who would not be thrilled to see the day where skin color didn’t matter a whit. We conservatives, that’s not what we first see when we see people. We don’t see groups. We don’t see sex, race, gender, orientation, any of that. We see potential. We see Americans. We see human beings, and we want the best for ‘em. And the view of the people you’re asking me about, they don’t even conceive of the best. They don’t think these people are capable, not just minorities. Liberalism requires, as part of its belief, that nobody is capable of helping themselves. That’s why liberals are needed. That’s why big government’s needed.

(Extended excerpt)

CALLER: Well, it’s a history class.

RUSH: History class where you have to report on either art or justice?

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: Figures. Okay. Hit me with the questions.

CALLER: Okay. So the first one is, do you think that the mainstream media has an agenda and are using race and racism as a tool to accomplish goals, or are they just sort of being racist without realizing it?

RUSH: Okay, that’s a three part question. Is that the first question or is that three of the four questions?

CALLER: That’s the first question.

RUSH: Okay. Do I think the mainstream media has an agenda and are using race and racism as a tool to accomplish goals? Yes. I’ll explain here in just a second. Or are they just sort of racist without realizing it? That, too. They are what I call “reverse racists.” The first part of your question, the mainstream media does indeed have an agenda. The agenda is the advancement of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party. The purpose for this is to advance the whole concept of big government, which they wholeheartedly believe in as the best instrument for people’s affairs to be managed. The mainstream media is no different than your average Democrat. The mainstream media, individuals in it, are no different than your average liberal.

And as such, Paul, they do not have respect for average people. They look at normal people, the people who I think make the country work, look at ‘em with a little bit of contempt. They look at them and see incompetence, inability, and they think they need to be managed. They have to be helped ’cause they’re not capable of helping themselves, making the right decisions in life. They have to be taken care of because most people are not capable of taking care of themselves. That’s why Michelle Obama is deigned to tell everybody what to eat, because they’re not smart enough to figure out for themselves to eat the right things. And these are people who are obsessed with power over other people. They want to tell other people how to live, because they don’t think that people have the ability to make the right kinds of life decisions themselves or on their own.

Now, the way racism is a tool here is the mainstream media looks at minorities as especially inept, especially incompetent, because they are, not have been, are continually discriminated against. The mainstream media for the most part — there are exceptions to this, of course, person to person — but by and large have people who think that all minorities are at an automatic disadvantage simply because of the color of their skin not being white. They look at all these minorities as the same, monolithic. They don’t see individuals. They see groups of victims. And since they believe people in general are incompetent and incapable, they look at minorities as especially so because they’re so discriminated against.

That takes us back to why they like Democrats and Obama and big government, because it is there they have the power to implement the things they believe. And one of the things they love to do is to punish the people who are not minorities for the way they think they are treating minorities. And they relish the opportunity to use the power of the federal government to punish members of the majority — by definition, people who are not minorities — for all of the mistreatment, for the discrimination, pilfering of their money, this kind of thing.

The truth of the matter is, that while they believe their intentions are good, and they will tell you that they are doing all this because of compassion for these poor disadvantaged people, because of their big hearts and their love, what they are actually doing — and I mean this, Paul, and Paul’s teacher as you read this, I mean this from the bottom of my heart — they are destroying these people’s lives by denying them their dignity, their individuality, and their own humanity. They are making them not individuals, but members of groups. They are treating them as members of groups, and they are not permitting these people to be all they can be as individuals. If, in the eyes of a liberal, be it a media person or other, if you are a minority you don’t have a chance in this country because this country is racist and discriminatory. So you need advantages, you need help.

You are judged to be unable to help yourself. So we need affirmative action and other programs to help you out. See, all of this so-called compassion and big hardness is actually insulting and demeaning to the people they claim to be helping. They’re actually victimizing them and relegating them to lives of very little meaning because they end up serving as pawns for the media and for Democrats and liberals as a means to advance their agenda. If you can convince everybody that every person of color, every minority is poor and incompetent and blame the majority for that, blame the Republicans for it, blame conservatives for it, then you can use the power of big government to punish conservatives by giving the minorities advantages based on your own view that they’re helpless. That’s the answer to the first question. You have three more questions?

CALLER: Well, that sort of answered the second one more eloquently than I ever could have possibly imagined.

RUSH: Okay, well, you’re gonna have a hell of a report here. That probably would do it right there, getting you automatic F when your teacher reads it. You hang on. I gotta take a break. We’ll come back and do the other questions when we get back, okay?

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: Okay. Be right back. Don’t go away.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We are back to Paul, 18-years-old, writing a report and interviewing me for it. He’s from Los Angeles. Paul, are you recording this, by any chance?

CALLER: Well, in a way. My father is a Rush 24/7 member.

RUSH: You’ll have a transcript of this that way so you’ll be able to get it word-for-word. Cool, all right.

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: All right. What is the second question?

CALLER: Well, the second question you sort of answered when you answered the first, is what do you think the cause of this racism is?

RUSH: I’ll tell you what it is. The left in this country, and the media, view slavery as this country’s original sin, which, of course, you never get over, you never get over original sin. They don’t want us to get over original sin. The race industry doesn’t. Here’s the thing. Paul, I can’t think of a single conservative that I know who would not be thrilled to see the day where skin color didn’t matter a whit. We conservatives, that’s not what we first see when we see people. We don’t see groups. We don’t see sex, race, gender, orientation, any of that. We see potential. We see Americans. We see human beings, and we want the best for ‘em. And the view of the people you’re asking me about, they don’t even conceive of the best. They don’t think these people are capable, not just minorities. Liberalism requires, as part of its belief, that nobody is capable of helping themselves. That’s why liberals are needed. That’s why big government’s needed. But slavery’s our original sin, and it serves a daily purpose for the American left, for the Democrat Party, which is the media. Okay, what’s the next question?

CALLER: Okay. The third question is, what do you think the effect of this racism is, and is what the mainstream is doing creating a more racist America?

RUSH: Well, the effect is to keep the country divided, purposefully….

Read or listen to it all.

One reason Obama is going to lose is because he clings to the notion of America as a nation of venal whites that elected him President only to be treated like inferiors that need his ill treatment as reparations.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Gun-owning fathers in homes with good fences, make good neighbors

The shooting of an unarmed Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida has one again placed the issues of race, hate crimes and gun rights before the American public. Some Democrats have even dusted off their old gun control playbooks more than a decade after they shelved in the wake of electoral defeats attributed to their championing of the issue in the 1990s.

Previously in this space we have argued that the tape of Zimmerman’s neighborhood watch 911 call after spotting Martin “acting suspiciously in the rain” revealed no evidence of racial profiling and that the injection of race into the public discussion by Spike Lee-aided New Black Panther’s posting bounties, Attorney General Holder-praised Revs. Jackson and Sharpton alleging that Blacks are “under attack” in America, with even President Obama himself calling on Americans to search their souls over a shooting victim that looks like an imaginary son of his own would look like, was the height of irresponsibility.

The only “hate crime” we have been able to spot is the one regularly committed by Democrats and the media that assume white Americans must be presumed to be racists, thus requiring the government to afford them the extra-protection of “hate crimes’ legislation” and immunity from laws against vigilantism when a Black man is killed by non-Black men, including so-called “white” Hispanics.

But do hate crime laws really afford any extra protection from racist predators?

The question reminds of the vilification of then presidential candidate George W. Bush for opposing hate crime legislation while governor of the Lone Star State which would have allowed the murderer of James Byrd to have ten years tacked on to his sentence. All Governor Bush did was preside of the white racists murderer’s execution; but for the “civil rights” industry, justice for James Byrd mattered less than that governments maintain a public face riddled with white guilt.

No one ever asks if one of the reasons that the number of incidents of White-on-Black crime are puny as compared to the number of such Black-on-White incidents, is that blacks are constantly sent the message from media-favored Black leaders and Black Presidents with typical (racist) white grandmothers, that even whites that are not grandmothers are also, typically, racist.

It’s hard enough to convict killers with proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they intended to kill their victims, without also forcing juries into a whole other realm of mind and heart reading, especially when there exists no evidence that such examinations deter crime. One of the lessons this former criminal defense lawyer learned many years ago when a client of mine was jailed for contempt of court for rude behavior in the courtroom soon after being found not guilty, is to declare victory and leave the courtroom.

The victory, as best one can be achieved given the biting of the apple by Eve and her progeny, over racism was achieved in America many years ago thanks mainly to how a real reverend named Martin Luther King tapped into the moral consciences of white Americans raised on Judeo-Christian values. Who knows, maybe these Americans could one day even elect as president a man that doesn’t look like them. But if the civil rights industry were to declare victory, they would have to start doing real work.

Those same Judeo-Christian values also inform us concerning proportional punishments, deterrence and crime prevention. 

The “eye for an eye” legal proposition was “progressive” in the time of pagan virgin sacrifices and death sentences for crimes less than murder, rape or treason. Punish one for the intentional removal of the eye, not the condition of the heart of the eye remover. Let one man cleave to one woman and turn their born-wild issue into civilized human beings.

Finally, learn the lesson of Kennesaw, Georgia and apply it not only to the protection of the home, but also the sites of mass murder in public high schools like Columbine and college campuses like Virginia Tech, as March 25th marked the 21st anniversary of that city’s ordinance requiring heads of households (with certain exceptions) to keep at least one firearm in their homes.

The city’s population grew from around 5,000 in 1980 to 13,000 by 1996 (latest available estimate). Yet there have been only three murders: two with knives (1984 and 1987) and one with a firearm (1997). After the law went into effect in 1982, crime against persons plummeted 74 percent compared to 1981, and fell another 45 percent in 1983 compared to 1982.

And it has stayed impressively low. In addition to nearly non-existent homicide (murders have averaged a mere 0.19 per year), the annual number of armed robberies, residential burglaries, commercial burglaries, and rapes have averaged, respectively, 1.69, 31.63, 19.75, and 2.00 through 1998.

Finally, even if many Blacks won’t accept the fact that most Whites accept them as equals, they should still eschew special race-based laws that treat them like perpetual victims needing an Uncle Sam as daddy; and choose instead to embrace the U.S. Constitution whose 13th, 14th and 15th full-citizenship-granting “Civil War” Amendments were opposed by Democrats because, as Chief Justice Roger Taney said in Dred Scott, “[citizenship] would give [blacks] the full liberty to keep and carry arms wherever they want.”

Democrats were also the ones that passed race-based “Jim Crow” laws after the failures of Reconstruction to keep blacks unarmed and the Democratic Party has continued to this day, despite the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964, to betray the King “content of character’” legacy to favor laws based on race as if Jim Crow never died but just changed sides.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

The humbling of Nixon’s Hatchet Man in America’s Sodom and Gomorrah and the path to eternal life in the Kingdom of God

And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord…And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven.  And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?  And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? – Acts 9: 1-6 (KJV)

Though Daniel Ellsberg deserved to be  criminally charged for leaking national security secrets and though the leaking of his FBI file to the press by Charles Colson doesn’t rise to the level of the Apostle Paul’s (then Saul) participation in the stoning of Stephen, Chuck’s Road to Damascus also led to joyous concert performances behind bars. 

The mostly forgotten millions languishing in American prisons, America and the Body of Christ on Earth, each lost a precious member to cancer this past week when one of the “Watergate Seven” passed away at the age of 80. Colson’s life from his Boston birth in 1931 until his seven-month stint in 1974 at Alabama’s Maxwell Prison was dominated by law practice, Republican Party politics and CREEP (Committee to re-Elect the President) “Enemies List” services as White House Counsel for the only president of the United States to resign the office.

But what matters most about Chuck’s life is the one he led after being “Born Again” (also the name of his post-conversion memoir) thanks to in large part to C.S. Lewis’s classic Christian apologetic, “Mere Christianity” and Senator Harold Hughes, a former Republican, and governor turned Democrat, form Iowa.

Indicted on March 1, 1974 for covering up the Watergate burglary, Colson was given a copy of Mere Christianity by a friend. The book, famous for its systematic appeal to reason in making the case for the existence of God and the truth of Christian scripture, appealed to Chuck’s logical, lawyer’s mind and drove him to attend a regular prayer breakfast on Capitol Hill, where, Senator Hughes, a major critic of President Richard Nixon, embraced Colson and led him to commit himself to Christ:

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.   The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.  Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdomof God. – John 3:1-3 (KJV)

Many were sceptical of Colson’s post-arrest and pre-sentence conversion, but after pleading guilty and serving his time, Chuck established and ran the most prominent prison ministry in American history, Prison Fellowship, for the next 36 years before his death. He also wrote many books and took his message to radio airwaves.

Why we suffer, get old (if we’re lucky), and die

The above is one of the oldest, most asked, and most difficult questions to answer in human history, no matter one’s religion or lack thereof; but I think Charles Colson’s two lives and Christian conversion hint at the answer: Life is the process by which God makes us able to inherit eternal life.

God created man and placed him in a garden paradise with the choice of God as God with man subject to his laws or Man being his own God deciding good and evil. Eve, then Adam and then all of their progeny save one, succumbed to the temptation of the serpent:

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.  And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die, For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. – Genesis 3:2-4 (KJV)

Lots of dying has been the rule ever since, but in the fullness of time, God became flesh, dwelt among us, suffered and died on Calvary’s cross, and rose again on the third day. Chuck Colson believed and his new life began. He was transformed from a Hellish creature into a Heavenly creature that members of both political parties came to see.

Colson came to see that we can’t save ourselves. Yes, we can be the Lord our life on Earth and inherit the death we sow. But there is an alternative, even for Nixonian crooks and the incarcerated, that was made possible for us by Christ having become one of us, much like the famous Paul Harvey story about the birds imperiled by an approaching storm.

The farmer wanted to save the birds feeding near his barn, many of whom would surely be killed when an approaching thunder storm reached his property. But try as he would, he could not get the birds to go into the barn. And then he thought, if only I could become a bird, I could lead them to safety.

God led Chuck Colson to safety and, thanks to his witness and good work, many more in prison and out, are safer today.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots,  and all  Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Conservative Republican policies work best for the poor, middle class and Liberty-based happiness pursuits for all

An exchange with a close friend, self-described as a “bleeding heart” who is “sure” President Barack Obama will be re-elected, inspired the eponymous section of this column discussed further below, but first let’s address concerns of conservatives who delivered the historic 2010 GOP mid-term election landslide that may be disillusioned by the emergence of Mitt Romney as the likely nominee of the Republican Party after the failures of Cain, Bachmann and Perry to continue the tea partier takeover.

This column never uses the term “tea party” for a reason. There is none. Which is why that non-existent “party” has no nominee.

Rather, the tea partier “movement”, whose rumblings were first heard before “compassionate conservatism” completed eight years of Big Bush Government spending, held its first party at the invitation of CNBC’s Rick Santelli to toss mortgages into Lake Michigan and coalesced in opposition to near trillion dollar non-stimuli and Obamacare; is one of the four major conservative movement surges of the past 50+ years to influence the GOP.

The first was led by William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater in the late 1950s and early ’60s; the second by anti-tax Proposition 13 proponents in California in the late ’70s and President Ronald Reagan’s two terms in the ’80s; and the third by Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America in the ’90s. A main component of each of these conservative surges was revulsion at the excesses of an ever larger federal government infringing upon Liberty and private property-fueled happiness pursuits via higher taxes and ever more burdensome regulation of economic activity.

The tea partier iteration is no exception and some recent musings of the, now presumptive, nominee of the GOP should reassure conservatives that their pleas for a candidate that will will fight back against Obama leftism and actually reduce the size of government and the debt, have been heard.

Since Mitt Romney’s early April visit with Paul Ryan around the time of the Wisconsin primary he has:

Eschewed arguments against Obama’s re-election based upon  a lack of experience and competence in favor of a more conservative policy-based critique that includes movements to the right on taxes, regulation and national security;

Been overheard suggesting that he would eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development and make the Department of Education puny; and

Called out the press as the “Obama Media“, thus assuring voters that he is not afraid to call out the Left despite their purchases of ink by the barrel.

Gone are the days when GOP primary and caucus voters were invited to choose Mitt because he has business experience. Now the former governor of Massachusetts cites the failed policies of Obama and offers conservative policies as the remedy rather than merely a biography. Romney has also deftly seized upon Obama’s open mike admission to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would be a more flexible appeaser in foreign policy after the election and suggesting that such an attitude would also translate in domestic policy to a more dictatorial executive branch encroaching upon the powers of We the People’s representatives in the legislative branch.

Moreover, even the polls the Obama Media regularly use to try and shape public opinion have moved Mitt’s way, which makes the recent musings of my close friend on the inevitability of an Obama second term even more perplexing.

Bleeding hearts, the moral case against Buffett Rule tax hikes and increased welfare class envy spending  ”fairness”; and Obama’s “inevitable” second term?

Maybe I’m too harsh in my broad and harsh criticisms of the national Democratic Party and Barack Obama? Maybe I’m too sanguine concerning the Republican Party’s obvious superiority as compared to the Democrats? But I doubt it.

I ask these questions because my good friend, who is an economic conservative businessman that will vote for the GOP nominee, regularly refuses to join in my periodic bashings of Obama and his party on issues; and immediately changes the subject to the supposed impossibility of a Romney Presidency. Of course, no one, including my good friend “knows” who will garner more electoral votes this November and be inaugurated next January; but what inspired this missive was this past week’s recent additions to his divergence away from the obvious and stark differences between the parties’ respective policies of the past 30 years and today as my friend volunteered that he was, after all, a “bleeding heart” as a result of his stronger Christian commitment over the past decade.

Your humble Southern Baptist correspondent was floored as thoroughly as if he he were Dracula exposed to the Cross!

After all, my Summer of 2001 “conservative epiphany” after 20 years of liberal activism as a South Carolina Democratic Party official was inspired by my own bleeding heart Christianity as I saw the poor and middle class actually become less poor when Reaganite conservative economic policies were employed by Reagan himself and a Newt-tamed Bill Clinton.

Don’t bleeding hearts want the ranks of the poor to shrink? Or are they narcissists driven to stanch the bleeding of their own guilt-riddled hearts with class-envy-driven tax and regulatory punishments of the rich?

Shouldn’t we judge politicians by the results of their policies and not our amusement with their clever rhetoric and whether we “like” them as persons? Obviously, and on that score can there be any more stark comparisons than the contrasts between the failed Carter/super Dem-majority policies of the late 70s and Obama’s super Dem majority policies of the past three years as compared to the 25-year Reagan Recovery from the mid-80s thru 2007? I think not.

And what has Campaign 2012 made clear if not that Obama will impose more of the Big Government, shrinking economy same and that the GOP nominee will unleash job creators?

Yes, the Republican Party of the past decade did not meet expectations of conservatives or the average American on the size of government, the debt and standard of living measurements, but does that mean we double and triple down with a party whose main criticisms of Reagan and the Bushes was that they didn’t spend more of other people’s money. Again, I think not.

Since Eve bit the apple, life has been about choices among the imperfect. The Party of Lincoln is not the party of the one that put Eve in the garden, but its a hell of a lot less east of Eden than the party that would consider my good friend a “bitter clinger”.

The only chance America has to right the ship of state is via a conservative tea partier takeover of the Grand Old Party. It is the height of “See no evil, hear no evil monkey” irresponsibility to do as Reagan described in another context and succumb to “…the temptation of pride — the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault.”

Both sides are not equally at fault, which a glance at Obama’s $5T debt amassed in 3.5 years, as compared to the respective debts of Bush’s eight years, attests; and only one party seeks a reversal of our disastrous road to Greece.

So friends, both personal and tea partier, the next time someone close by commences to bash Obama and the democrats, please join in and work towards making Romney’s election inevitable.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

All lovers of liberty should loathe the evil of brutal repressive dictators, not just ethnic relatives of the oppressed

I never laughed at jokes  with the late Kim Jung Il’s hair as the punch line nor Saturday Night Live skits featuring mumbling caricatures of late Libyan and Iraqi strongmen. They eat bark off trees for sustenance in North Korea and life in Libya was worse than in Orwell’s 1984. Saddam Hussein killed over 300,000 political opponents including tens of thousands in AbuGhraib wood-chippers and via poison WMD gas in Kurdistan, when he wasn’t waging wars that resulted in the deaths of millions, yet Hollywood obsessed over BushLied when a non-Clinton president relied upon CIA and other WMD intel to attack Iraq.

I didn’t watch a gushing Barbara Walter’s famous sit down interview with Muammar Gaddafi and wasn’t amused with Hollywood’s BushHitler screeds and films depicting the assassination of the U.S. president that deposed the Taliban, chased Saddam into a rat hole and Osama bin Laden out of Tora Bora, thus ushering in a post-911 decade, free of more 911s.

Needless to say no amens were heard from DeVine quarters when the manager of the Miami Marlins baseball club expressed love for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. We have loathed the longest reigning Communist suppressor of human freedom since before Robert Redford broke bread with the tyrant and the Congressional Black (Democratic Party) Caucus visited him in Havana while refusing invitations from his jailed dissidents.

Ozzie Guillen has always been a colorful character and a real man’s man that many of us Major League Baseball fans have enjoyed during his playing days and present managerial phase of his career. The pressure from the South Florida Cuban community, his present team and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig led Guillen to apologize before his five game suspension for the comments was imposed. Ozzie now says he meant to express “admiration” for Castro’s ability to survive for the past 50+ years, given all those that understandably want him dead, and not “love” for the man. We do wish JFK’s CIA had been as successful as Bush in Iraq and Obama in Pakistan.

We appreciate Ozzie’s need to atone and will welcome him back to battles with Braves and Phillies in the National League East after his suspension, but as one that admired President Ronald Reagan for properly calling out the Soviet Empire as evil, it was good to see someone finally pay a price for treating Fidel like polite company. Too bad Bud Selig didn’t suspend himself for sitting next to Castro when the Orioles visited Havana several years ago. I guess the offense taken by the “Cuban community” in Baltimore didn’t register on Bud’s conscience meter.

One doesn’t have to be black to find slavery abhorrent, be a woman to understand that abortion kills babies nor be Polish to admire Lech Walesa and recognize the evil of Communist gulags.

We don’t know how much influence Hollywood’s politics have on voters, but we can sure see the de-sensitivity their feigned loathing of America has on the culture. Bravo to Miami for reminding us that there is good and evil in the world, and that the latter deserves neither love nor admiration.

P.S. The best way to make trains run on time is not Mussolini-like totalitarianism. Railroad watches earned their reputation for accuracy and trains for timeliness in the era of free market competition, even with labor unions!

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

A properly blindfolded Lady Justice wouldn’t know if a corpus delicti looks like President Barack Obama’s imaginary son and wouldn’t weigh empathy in the scales of justice.

Unless one accepts the default assumption of “Civil Rights” industrialists, including the Attorney General-dubbed “anti-race cowards”  law firm of Obama, Holder, Sharpton, Jackson, Lee & Nzinga, that White America (including so-called “white Hispanics”) circa. A.D. 2012 is a monolithic Jim Crow or that George Zimmerman’s heart, mind and soul is uniquely readable; there is no reason to suspect that the shooting of Trayvon Martin had anything to do with racism.

Rather than accept “Reverend” Jesse Jackson’s conclusion that “Blacks are under attack” in America and proceed to heed Cheif Magistrate Obama’s admonsihon to “search our souls”, why not first listen to the 911 tape, which reveals the following:

Zimmerman:

We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy. It’s Retreat View Circle. The best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle.

This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about. [00:25]

911 dispatcher:

OK, is he White, Black, or Hispanic?

Zimmerman:

He looks black.

911 dispatcher:

Did you see what he was wearing?

Zimmerman:

Yeah, a dark hoodie like a gray hoodie. He wore jeans or sweat pants and white tennis shoes. He’s here now … he’s just staring. [00:42]

Apparently the 6’2″ teen wasn’t singing in the rain and, like Gene Kelly, apparently wasn’t up to no good either; but most folks reserve leisurely strolls for non-stormy weather. All things being equal, including skin pigmentation, walks in the rain sans umbrellas can be seen as “suspicious” on some level.

We can’t read the hearts of John Does, Trayvons or Zimmermans, but what we do know is that the race of the unarmed man was only brought up by the 911 dispatcher, not the armed neighborhood watch volunteer who ended up injured about his face and head, but alive, after his confrontation that he claims ended with an exercise in the right of self defense.

Hopefully a jury will decide the matter, rather than New Black Panther Party vigilante bounties or Spike Lee tweets aiding and abetting same; all of which race-obsessed felonies continue to go un-acted upon by either Holder’s Justice Department or legal authorities in the Sunshine State.

Before President Barack Obama nominated his two Supreme Court nominees that now sit on the nation’s highest court, he said the main quality he looked for in a judge was “empathy” for the “weak” against the strong. We got a glimpse of what empathy means to the president when he immediately accused Cambridge, Massachusetts police of “acting stupidly” when they investigated a reported break-in at the home of a Black, i.e. “weak” Harvard Professor friend of his. That sad affair ended with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden eating crow at a White House “beer summit”.

The sad spectacle of AG Holder congratulating “Reverend” Sharpton while Black racist vigilante voter intimidators roam free in Sanford, Florida reveals that President Obama still favors a Lady Justice that peeks from under the blindfold to see if the Party of the First Part or the Party of the Second Part is the one that deserves her “empathy”.

Justice be damned.

This is what happens when you elect a man that sat at the feet of “Reverend Jeremiah Wright for 20 years.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

But oh by the way, he killed Osama bin Laden

Hearing President Barack Obama caught on an open mike ensuring his Russian counterpart, in a conversation meant to be in strictest confidence, that Tsar Putin could count on “flexibility” after the election on many issues, “particularly missile defense”, reminded us of debates past concerning the assimilation of immigrants and enhanced expectations of patriotism for “natural born” citizens.

Those reminders tempered our recent expressions of shock at President Obama’s alienation from America as founded and as an exceptional nation in history; and that while the present occupant of the White House appears to be exponentially more alien than any of his predecessors, he is, after all one of those “BushLied Era” Democrats happy to do for free, what many of our enemies would gladly pay us to do, much like many others of his party dating back to the Church Commission gutting of the CIA and the betrayal of the Hmong and South Vietnamese to slaughter. It was also Democrats that:

• reduced the U.S. military to a shell of its former self after Watergate, thus tempting Soviet expansionism around the globe;
• abandoned the Shah to the tender mercies of a “religious man” named the Ayatollah Khomeini; and
• in the person of Senator Ted Kennedy, secretly wrote Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev that he and other Democrats supported the Nuclear Freeze movement in Europe in direct opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s policy.

While senators, both the present Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of State voted against funding the troops in the war on terror that they have left in theater essentially as props for their own political purposes. So why be shocked when the Muslim Brotherhood progenitors of al Qaeda are visiting in the White House while missile attacks against Israel are planned and carried out from Egypt’s Sinai.

But after all, Osama bin Laden is dead.

Who needs Camp David Treaties? Who needs to preserve a victory for a Third Way in the Iraq? Who needs a secure Israel?

Obama killed Osama! Didn’t you hear?

More than ten days have passed since the irrefutable revelation that the man Americans entrusted with the sacred duty of protecting our lives from any and all enemies, foreign and domestic, had betrayed that trust with the nation most capable of threatening the most American lives. Its as if a re-elected Barack Obama wants to reverse the outcome of the Cold War by giving away the very bargaining chip that Gorbachev identified after the collapse of the USSR as being the catalyst for same, i.e. strategic missile defense, with a reduction of our nuclear forces reduced to 1951 levels and the US Navy to pre-WWI levels, to boot, in return for…nothing!

Given that Alaska regularly elects Republicans to Congress and Obama’s aversion to fossil fuels unless they are being used transport he and Michelle via air, land and sea, we wouldn’t be surprised if Obama’s flexibility extends to returning Sarah Palin’s home state to Vladimir.

Yet, there is no outcry for impeachment. No demand for his resignation. No charges of treason.

But can a Citizen of the World really have enemies that can be adhered to?

No one wanted to believe, while purging themselves of decades of “white guilt” and seeing Patriot John McCain withhold fire, that they were voting for a radical that could possibly agree with Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist hatred of America and Terrorist Bill Ayers general purpose liberal hatred of the USA. Hear no evil, speak no evil, vote for the black guy and feel good about yourself.

But before Obama was black, he was reared a modern liberal Democrat and taught radicalism in his native state of Hawaii, childhood homes in Indonesia and Kansas, the Ivy League and Trinity United Church by family and friends. His brain was washed by natural born Americans, rather than by Manchurian candidate prep schools chosen by Angela Lansbury.*

Yes, the dreams from his father were of Kenyan hatred of Britain and the West, but those who related the dreams were as natural born as 10th generation descendants of the Mayflower.

The danger of natural born liberal Democrats

The constitutional requirement that presidents of the United States be “natural born” was an attempt by the Framers to try and ensure a level of singular loyalty to the new nation that had often escaped the old nations of Europe often ruled by trans-national, inter-marrying despots. But given that America’s greatest assimilation problem appears to be not the huddled masses fleeing foreign lands that yearn to breathe free, but rather liberals in academia, the press and the Democratic Party that worship multi-culturalism; aren’t there lots of foreign born Americans who could be better trusted to defend the nation than Barack Hussein Obama?

President Obama was asked by Bob Woodward in his recent book, what problem keeps him up at night? Obama stated that it was whether our first responders are adequately prepared for a WMD attack on domestic soil, and not actually preventing such an attack. This same mentality has been seen in 911 anniversaries that seem to obsess over Americans as victims rather than any celebration of the armed forces that have prevented more 911s by destroying our enemies.

Meanwhile, when not promising flexibility or bowing to foreign leaders, he goes about bankrupting the coal industry, violating court orders ruling Gulf  oil drilling moratoriums null and void and begging Mexico for electricity during especially cold winters in Texas.

But not to worry. Bin Laden was buried at sea.

Editors Note: Obama’s betrayal is a very serious matter and he must not be re-elected for flexible foreign policies that sell America out, but it is just that seriousness and the lack of outrage by the same American public that reveres Bill Clinton despite “free trade” sellouts of advanced American military technology to North Korea and China; that inspires our comic relief below. We have to laugh to hold back the tears for our country.

* Suggested roles for the new release:

Moose, Squirrel, and The Manchurian Candidate imitate life in the Obama Era:

Michelle Obama – Angela Lansbury (pictured above)

Laurence Harvey – Rahm Emanuel (pictured above)

Bullwinkle the Moose – Frank Sinatra (pictured below)

Rocky the Squirrel – Janet Leigh (pictured below)

All remaining characters pictured below:

Vladimir Putin – Mr. Big

George Soros – Fearless Leader

Dmitry Medvedev – Boris Badenov

Barack Obama – Natasha Fatale

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

A mixed race Trayvon Martin is killed by a mixed race, and so far uncharged, George Zimmerman, and We the People are admonished to search our souls since the deceased looks like President Obama’s imaginary son.

Souls are searched.

Souls in Florida impanel a grand jury to determine if sufficient evidence exists to bring charges against a broken nosed-Zimmerman for the homicide and a U.S. Justice Department investigation is commenced to determine if Martin’s civil rights were violated.

Problem solved? Not according to the souls of New Black Panthers, certain non-Pastoral “Reverends”, and the director of “Do the Right Thing”.

New Black Panthers (only recently granted the right to wield billy clubs outside polling places on Election Days when Eric Holder, President Barack Obama’s attorney general, dropped voter intimidation charges against them)  post kidnapping bounties for Zimmerman, aided and abetted by inaccurate Spike Lee tweets that force an unrelated elderly couple to flee their home, as Revs. (without portfolio) Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton claim “blacks are under attack” and call for an escalation of civil disobedience, respectively; and the nation’s Chief Magistrate says…nothing.

Clearly, President Obama considers all souls to have been sufficiently searched and subsequent actions by so-called civil rights advocates to be appropriate. Could this be because neither George Zimmerman nor that elderly couple forced to flee from an angry mob look like any of Barack’s imaginary friends or relatives? Or is it because he is too busy making promises to appease Russia after the election and demonizing oil companies before the election?

Camel-Not vs. Camelot

Would that the present occupant of the Oval Office: had been steeped in Holy Scripture by a “reverend” other than Jeremiah Wright; didn’t refer to the nation’s #1 racist by the honorific “Minister”, when referring Louis Farrakhan; and considered racial discrimination against non-blacks to also be a moral issue.

We used to have a president, nominated by the Democratic Party no less, who appealed to the better angels of our nature to end and prevent riot in the streets and vigilante justice, respectively. The State of Alabama was aflame after Attorney General Robert Kennedy had directed federal troops to enforce 14th Amendment school integration against Governor George Wallace’s wishes, when President John F. Kennedy gave what may have been his finest and most important address to the nation when he said:

It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and…We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

How hard would it be for President Barack Obama on April 1, 2012 to utter the words that President Kennedy uttered on June 11, 1963?  Yet, instead of moral leadership from the Oval Office: police are determined at have acted stupidly before Beer Summit investigations (Professor’s skin color similar to Obama’s?); Americans are hectored as race cowards; and souls are searched based upon how many drops of “slave blood” have coursed through the veins of homicide victims and perpetrators.

And you thought Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy? Barack Obama presides over Camel-NOT!

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

The biggest story of the day  that no one is covering occurred in the closing few minutes of today’s Rush Limbaugh program.

El Rushbo says Romney has a Polkian-conservative core:

RUSH:  Folks, I must be honest with you.  I hear this all the time from people about Romney, and I know him and I’ve talked to him.  He came here and he sat down and he told me what his plan was, and it sounded like anything you and I would say. He even said to me, “If I accomplish everything I want to do, I may only be a one-term president.”  I said, “What do you mean?”  “Because I am gonna so fix this. It’s gonna be dramatic. We’ve gotta reverse this. We gotta stop this. Our children’s future is at stake here, and I’m gonna stop the direction that we’re headed, and if they throw me out after four years, fine and dandy.”  And from right here in this studio he left to go to a huge fundraiser here in Palm Beach.  First traffic jam I have ever been in since I lived here trying to get home. (interruption) No, I don’t go to fundraisers. Of course I wasn’t invited. I don’t go to those things.

But anyway, what she just said, no core, I can’t tell you how many people I hear this from.  And it surprises me a little.  There’s gotta be some core there.  There has to be some core.  But there is a tremendous amount of, what is it, suspicion, distrust.  And I know why.  Back in 2006, (imitating Romney) “Oh, no, I’m not really conservative. Yeah, I had to vote for Paul Tsongas, a Democrat, there weren’t any Republicans on the ballot.”  Then there’s Romneycare and all that.  I think the note I read from my friend really sums it up.  The Tea Party did all the heavy lifting.  The Tea Party actually presented this opportunity.  I think some of the anger at Romney is actually anger at the Republican establishment itself.  Maybe I’ll develop that, talk further about that next week.

President James K. Polk (D-TN) made America’s  sea-to-shining-sea destiny, manifest. Remember 54’40″ or Fight, the Alamo and that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C. native promised one term, delivered on his promises and chose not to run.

Mitt Romney can be trusted to do us right. I have always seen the character that will do what he says he will do. It seems Rush has glimpsed a man we can trust as well.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

The fate of the republic is not in the hands of one Supreme Court justice

From listening to the media commentary during the extraordinary past three days of oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court, one would think that Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy decreed that ObamaCare would be the law of the land unless he gets talked out of it this week.

It is asked, how did we “get to the point” where one man can decide if the relationship between the federal government and its citizens will be fundamentally changed? Let me answer that question:

Too many Americans voted for Democrats.

It was a Democratic Party president, Democratic Party majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof super-Democratic Party majority in the United States Senate that, in 2009, jammed through bankruptcy threatening mandated policy coverages on private insurance companies and Medicaid mandates on the states as well as the unprecedented mandate that most every adult U.S. citizen buy a private health  insurance policy.

President Ronald Reagan’s second choice (after the 1987 “borking” of Robert Bork by the late Senator Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats), Anthony Kennedy played no role in enacting ObamaCare, and no matter how the nation’s highest court rules this week, We the People will still have the power in our hands to restore self government for the preservation of life, liberty and happiness pursuits.

If the court upholds the whole law or parts of it, We the People will still hold the fate of the nation in our hands. We can deny President Barack Obama a second term, maintain the Republican Party majority in the House and elect a Senate populated with a majority of members from the Grand Old Party of Lincoln.

And if the court strikes down the whole law that is oxymoronically entitled “The Affordable Care Act”  (If the Dems are proud of Obama’s signature legislative achievement, why don’t they welcome the “ObamaCare” moniker? I love Reaganomics, after all, but I digress), the voters should also elect Republicans to control the White House and both houses of Congress because there is much more work to be done to right the American ship of state.

Yes, the temporary Democrat majority swept into office in 2008 used all sorts of legislative maneuvers amid polls showing Americans loathed Obama’s vision of government controlled “take the painkiller and go home” health care. They failed the first two times they tried after the President’s Inauguration and we thought the final stake had been driven thru the heart of the blood-sucking law that Dem-o-bats have desired for nearly a hundred years when the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts filled the seat of the late Teddy “The Swimmer” Kennedy with Republican Scott Brown who based his campaign explicitly on voting against ObamaCare.

But Senator Brown never got the chance and before the third and final Senate vote, former President Bill Clinton paid a visit to the so-called “Blue Dog”  Democratic Party senators on Capitol Hill. He told them that despite the problems with the bill, they should support their president. After all, this law has been the dream of liberals for decades, including his Hillary’s, and that they could fix the problems with it later.

After the 42nd President’s pep talk, all 60 Democrats in the Senate voted in lock step for ObamaCare, thus preventing a filibuster and handing the 44th president his great “victory”. But Democrats never got a chance to “fix” ObamaCare as 2010 election tea partiers produced the largest GOP landslide since the 1940s, demanding the most radical of fixes.

The fate of the nation is always in the hands of voters in every election. We the People get to be heard from again this November no matter what Justice Kennedy and four other like-minded lawyers do this summer when they render their decision.

The best way to chart a better fate for the United States is to vote Republicans into office in Washington, D.C.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

The Whippersnapper snapped when he accepted the Democratic Party media fiction while The Legend’s campaign is as much against the media as it is for the GOP presidential nomination

Thankfully, former Speaker Newt Gingrich is every bit a social conservative as the former senator from Pennsylvania, and so would have that historical advantage that, along with the “It’s the economy, stupid” rule, regularly results in the election of Republican presidents and congressional majorities.

So how did the young whippersnapper who previously won our Super Tuesday endorsement by avoiding anti-Bain venture capitalism-pile-ons while also contrasting his unblemished record against individual health care mandates as opposed to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts RomneyCare  and 2009 advocacy for the individual mandates in ObamaCare? Unprompted, he essentially took the economy off the table for the fall election against President Barack Obama based upon seasonally adjusted employment fictions from the administration:

“You hear now the media starting to say, oh well, looks like the economy is getting better,” Santorum told supporters in Missouri Saturday night after winning the Kansas caucuses. “You know, the economy may be getting better and Republicans may lose their edge on that issue. Well, if that was the only issue in this race, that may or may not be the case, we don’t know.”

You heard that right. The man that pointed out the danger of a Romney candidacy that takes ObamaCare off the table against the Democrats, volunteers to take the economy off the table based upon the bogus hurrahs for a fictional economy built at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that changed decades of procedures last year by rejecting state employment statistics in favor of the federal government’s own best estimates. One wonders what the senator would say if the MSM reported that Americans are happy with ObamaCare.

When asked about Young Rick’s concessions yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) yesterday recited economic reality:

Well, no, I don’t think he’s right at all. This is an anemic recovery as a pretty long recession, 37 months in a row over 8 percent unemployment for the people in the United States, the longest streak since the Great Depression. Last month in February, $229 billion monthly deficit, the highest deficit in the history of the nation. When you look at the stimulus package two years ago, they projected unemployment at 6.5 percent. Obamacare said that everybody’s premiums would be lowered by $2,500; they’ve gone up by $2,200. And we’re producing less oil on publicly held lands than any time in the nation.

So the economy is not — is anemic at best, and the policies of the president are going to make it impossible for this country to recover. Big things haven’t happened very well on his watch.

Doesn’t the man so well-informed about the evil details of O’RomneyCares understand that:

1. the raw numbers of Americans working last month are nearly two million less than those working when the Democrat president was elected in November of 2008;
2. the 227,000 number of “new jobs” allegedly “created” last month is a fiction based upon seasonal adjustments;
3. the U-3 unemployment rate of 8.3% produced by bureaucrats in D.C. sans data from states was flatly contradicted earlier last week even by liberal Gallup (9.1%) and the week before by the Congressional Budget Office (10%);
4. 8.3%, in any event is unacceptably high after three-plus years of between 8-11% as Obama has presided over second the longest such period of high unemployment in American history; and
5. the Gross Domestic Product over the last year has been  barely above a pulse at an average of less than 1%.

Yet, somehow because ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and even Fox News Channel report government propaganda as fact, Republicans could somehow lose “the edge” on the economy this fall? Well yes, if we concede issues for incoherent reasons, we would lose the edge, not because the voters buy it (polls show that majorities reject the rosy scenarios and Obama’s performance on the economy); but rather because too many voters would again see a cowardly Republican against a courageous Democrat and stay home.

Therefore, despite Newt’s personal and non-personal baggage (Cave-ins to Bill Clinton while betraying promises to republican colleagues, Couching Pelosi on the  science fiction of man-made global warming, Bain attacks etc), we are satisfied with his mea culpas and are confident that he won’t shift campaign strategy based upon what John King insists is a booming recovery, when the numbers rely upon writing off 1.2 million people that failed to file their 5th application for work at the corner McDonald’s for four consecutive weeks.

We just hope that a Gingrich nominee would also not have to fight with some timid conservative websites that also seem to want to make Green Rooms at CNN more palatable by also faking a smile about fictitious improving economies.

We also hope that those anti-social conservatives don’t pull their support when the media reminds of Newt’s very strong, you might say religious right-strength, social conservative views as expressed in his 2009 book, “Rediscovering God in America”; positions against judicial supremacy mainly on religious freedom issues; railings against the ABC TV show, “Christian Bitches”; and boldly and accurately describing then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama’s opposition to the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act” as support for legalized infanticide.

Prior to Santorum’s weekend remarks conceding economic issues to the failed Democratic incumbent, we thought we had cast our Stone Mountain of Georgia precinct primary vote for the best candidate to evict the American economy wrecking machine, also married to Michelle, from the  White House. Our trust was betrayed.

Hopefully, our present advocacy for Gingrich that we hope is heeded by Alabamians and Mississippians voting in Tuesday’s next installment of Newt’s I-85 Primary, won’t be betrayed before the sun sets on March Madness after the Kentucky Wildcats finally deliver a national championship to Coach Calipari.

But if Newt transgresses, he will be called on it by the DeVine Law Gamecock by rooster crowings before April Fool’s Day. Would tea partiers expect anything less? No, and while I think either of the top three could and would defeat Obama, we are interested in the issues and a mandate to fix what ails us. We will continue to hold our fellow conservative Republicans accountable.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Any of these Republicans would deny Obama re-election

The view from this South Carolina gamecock’s Stone Mountain of Georgia roost sees Newt Gingrich winning from whence he made conservative Republican history, second only to Ronaldus Maxus. DeVine Law dictated this Southern Baptist’s vote for the young Catholic, while my long-time, part-time, lifetime-Democrat girlfriend will be casting an anti-religious bigotry vote for the savior of the Salt Lake City Olympics (who by the way, served as CEO of Bain Capital and has not presided over the worst economy in U.S. history since the 1930s) in her first vote in a Republican primary (Can I hear an amen?) .

Cockstradamus thinks all of the above are far superior to John McCain and that any of the above can and would defeat President Barack Obama. Why? The current occupant of the White House was hired to fix the economy and lower the oceans. The oceans are lower (no one cares) but the economy is not fixed (people care) and obviously won’t be fixed by Election Day given Natural Law. But even if said law were to be suspended, would a majority of We the People re-elect a man based on a few months of prosperity but who chose recession for 3+ years? No.

We know that the In-the-tank-for-Democrats-Media will tell Big Lies about any one the GOP nominates, but we also know that over time, even The Whippersnapper wouldn’t serve as an effective vehicle for making the choice about access to The Pill instead of the reality of the economy, Stupid! Moreover, over time, Santorum would win a battle over contraception as well, since he favors the legal status quo, while Obama favors making others pay for the sexual activity of others.

We wish that the former senator from the Keystone State were as agile as The Legend in responding to the media, but over time, he gets the full message across and lacks the weight of the baggage the former Speaker carries. But Newt carries much less baggage than Barack and would bring the most promise of not only repeal of the Obamanations enacted over the past three years but also major conservative change from the liberal policies of the past 79 years.

The former governor of the Bay State does have better “experience” than President Obama, but the reason he would be an obviously better choice is not because Mitt Romney is more “competent” than Obama. The inexperienced senator from Illinois has been just competent enough to enact nearly all of the liberal big government, liberty-killing agenda that Democratic Presidents from Wilson to Clinton failed to do. The presidency, unlike business executive positions, has power conferred by the U.S. Constitution and is not dependent on private market business skills.

But, the policies Romney favors are far superior to Obama’s and any other Democrat. His election would trigger a massive recovery of the U.S. economy as money on the sidelines fearful of Obama confiscation comes off the sidelines; and if we can get Mitt to make more specific promises, his past history of keeping them gives us great hope for him and us if he is inaugurated next January.

The only factor that could deny any of our candidates the presidency is the composition of the electorate, which factor would not be significantly affected by which particular one of the acceptable three we nominate. If America has reached the tipping point warned of by Benjamin Franklin and Alexis deTouqueville in which the takers now outnumber the producers, there is no nominee we could choose in good conscience that could fool a majority into taking their lips off the government tit.

I am disturbed by all the votes being cast in our primaries and caucuses for The One Whose Name Shall Not Be Uttered. This is a sign of cultural decay and, admittedly youth, in general; and the yutes that are products of an inferior education system and culture. Of course, an even worse sign are all the youth that voted for Barack Obama, but I digress.

We can’t fool the takers into voting for us and we shouldn’t try. Hence, my fearless vote for The Whippersnapper. I would be almost as happy with Newt choosing the next vice-president, less happy with Mitt, but happy is the operative word, when one contemplates the removal of World Citizen One from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

Red meat that both Romney and the base can eat on the way to the crucial selection of who will wield federal executive power 

Would you re-visit a barber, in a town with other barbers available, that you had initially hired for a trim around the edges but who instead shaved your head, merely because your pate was technically “improving” due to ongoing natural growth three weeks later? I didn’t think so, and you know, Rome began “improving” immediately after the last flame turned to embers and Nero fiddled his final chord.

Despite the near flawless application of James Carville’s, It’s-the-economy, stupid-Rule to every presidential election outcome since at least 1976, even many bona fide conservatives in the NY-DC Media are buying into the inevitability of the re-election of an incumbent chief executive who is supposedly “liked” by most Americans and presiding over an acceptably improving economy.

Don’t believe a word of it. They don’t manufacture mirrors that make America’s three-year old haircut look good, much less $4/gallon+ gasoline while at home for a summer stay-cation.

Too many Americans crave a return to the  entrepreneurship they enjoyed for two decades before the 2008 housing bubble-induced collapse, whose silent cell phones still ring louder than misleading U-3 unemployment rates driven downward more my men applying for disability than by private sector hires (if everyone in the “labor force” delayed filing their third application at the nearest Wal-Mart for four consecutive weeks, Barack could boast of a 0% unemployment rate); to be fooled by relative “improvements” unworthy of the description.

Yet, only three days removed from Leap Day and more than eight months before Election Day, George Will thinks Cadillac, contraception and moon colony gaffes will weigh more heavily on the minds of at least 270 electoral collegians worth of voters than thin wallets. Did he miss the seemingly consequential-at-the-time Playboy heart lust, Tuscumbia states rights speech and “I didn’t inhale” gaffes that were outweighed by empty wallet space? How about Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers and bitter clingers?

Admittedly, President Barack Obama has kept his promises to fundamentally change America, bankrupt coal companies and lower the oceans (seriously, the Earth has cooled down since Inauguration Day 2009), but do a majority of Americans really “like” skyrocketing energy prices, Chevy Volts and Michelle’s pre-K school lunch gauntlet? Not likely.

Yes, enough Americans haven’t given up and still adapt to prevailing conditions with what Liberty remains in their hands despite the usurpation of much of our Rule of Law-protected property rights by “the ObamaCare Secretary shall decide” and EPA Rules, so that the economy hasn’t disappeared. But will Americans re-hire a man merely because a scab begins to form on the sore during his periodic retreats to 18 holes? Again, not likely.

Improving? Yes, much like changes in hospital patient evaluations from critical to serious. Moreover, would voters wish to risk a return to three years of debt ceiling-busting and currency-threatening, un-stimulating reforms in exchange for a one year focus on jobs? Did I say not likely? Yes.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that the wizards of smart are right and that a more realistic goal for the Republican Party would be to “focus” on winning control of the Senate and retaining control of the House, exactly how would that increase the likelihood of making its reduced goals more attainable? Would campaign promises that GOP congressmen would protect voters from an Obama they don’t fear more than a Rick, Mitt or Newt, really be persuasive? In a word, no.

March came in like a lion in years past foretelling the second terms of Carter and Bush41, only to yield to recession-inspired Reagan and Clinton first terms secured in November.

So, what accounts for all the gloom and doom from so many in the conservative chattering class even before March inevitably goes out like a lamb? Is it ignorance or could it be more about the desires of a cautious conservative minority cadre for months of easier camaraderie with their liberal majority panel show comrades?

Its always safer to predict a president’s re-election, all other factors being equal, but what compels so many to predict, despite the risks of self-fulfilling prophecies, if not misplaced pride?

The latter deadly sin, much as America’s economy in three years, hasn’t improved much either, since Eve bit the apple.

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

We lost one of the Brightest stars in the conservative firmament when we lost Breitbart today

Its been at least six months since I read Andrew’s conservative conversion biography, but his untimely death in today’s wee hours at the age of 43 reminded me of how much I identified with him. Yes, he was raised in Hollywood and educated in academic cathedrals of the left. I was raised and educated in the Deep South’s Baptist churches and Methodist colleges.

I had much less of an excuse for my conservative epiphany to have been so late in my life and I thank God that Andrew had the courage to embrace the values and the truth at a much younger age. For to be a conservative is to blow the whistle on so many on the left, many of whom have been friends and family. It takes courage in this culture.

He showed the conservative movement the way by entering the field of news reporter in the most professional sense of the word. How much easier it has been for a gamecock lawyer to right op-eds to atone for his cowardice of so many years.

What struck me so deeply about Breitbart’s journey was how his moral sense of righteous indignation would not let him wink at obviously false liberal lines about class, race and the economy. His journey reminded me of a sermon my brother once preached about how the people of God should often be and express righteous indignation  and confront the winkers and the glazed over eyes of liberal templates.

If We the People are ever to save this country, it will be because enough of us followed Andrew’s example by getting down in the weeds in academia, the press and Hollywood. It is in the culture that the battle must first be won.

God rest his soul and I pray that more and more people will read his Righteous Indignation biography along with the other two classics of the genre that have so effected this gamecock and many others, formerly of the left, i.e. Witness by Whittaker Chambers and Radical Son by David Horowitz.

God bless his soul and prayers for the family he left behind. Andrew personifies my Old Hickory signature line:

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Mike DeVine

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern Conservative, Unified Patriots,  and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.