100 Days of Devastatingly Swift Success

 April 29, 2009  |  Vol. 4, No. 17

100 Days of Devastatingly Swift Success

by Newt Gingrich

Getting Congress to Give Him Things That Undermine Their Own Power
Two Historic Bureaucratic Power Grabs
In Foreign Policy, Weakness and Self-Delusion
All Other Obama "Accomplishments" Are Only a
Prelude to His $3.5 Trillion Budget
Will the Future Bring Change We Can Believe In?
Or a Change in What we Believe?

To mark President Obama's 100th day in office, I'm going to say something you might find unexpected, even shocking:
President Obama's first 100 days have been spectacularly successful.

President Obama is the strongest domestic Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson. His ability to get Democrats in Congress to give him things that undermine their own power is impressive. 

In just 100 days, President Obama has been devastatingly effective in moving forward swiftly the most radical, government-expanding agenda in American history.

Successfully Moving to a European Model of Government Control

At home, in everything from his economic policy to his energy policy to his just-announced science policy, President Obama has successfully moved the country from a traditional American model of entrepreneurship and private initiative to a European model of regulation and government control.

Abroad, he has succeeded in his apparent goal to be the un-George W. Bush; replacing aggressive, if sometimes flawed, American leadership with a humbled, weakened America on the world stage.

Judged by these standards, President Obama's first 100 days have been a remarkable success.

Getting Congress to Give Him Things That Undermine Their Own Power

The Obama record in the first 100 days includes three instances of spectacular political impunity:

• Under the guise of "economic stimulus" he was able to pass a $787 billion gift for his liberal special interest base. And he did it so quickly that no member of Congress was able to read it before they voted.
• After campaigning on a pledge to end earmarks, he signed an appropriations bill loaded with 8,000 earmarks - and paid no political penalty.
• President Obama has kept congressional Democrats marching with him in lockstep. House Democrats tow the party line an amazing 94 percent of the time and Senate Democrats vote Democratic 91 percent of the time.

Two Historic Bureaucratic Power Grabs

In these first 100 days, the Obama Administration has achieved two historic bureaucratic power grabs:

• President Obama has transformed the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) into giant engines of unsupervised spending. Together, they've spent the equivalent of the entire federal budget for 2007, without having to disclose where the money went.
• Just two weeks ago, the President presided over an unprecedented bureaucratic power grab when his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. This seemingly innocuous decision opens the door to wholesale regulation of American life by government. The threat is so great that politicians and activists are using the specter of an out-of-control EPA to force Congress to pass a $1 trillion to $2 trillion energy tax in the form of cap-and-trade legislation.

In Foreign Policy, Weakness and Self-Delusion

The Obama 100 days record also includes remarkable weakness and self-delusion overseas:

• In an attempt to overcome anti-Americanism abroad by agreeing with it, President Obama has gone on a global apology tour, labeling America as "arrogant, dismissive and derisive" in front of foreign audiences.
• President Obama has unleashed a domestic war over the meaning of guilt by caving in to the anti-American left and leaving the door open to prosecuting Bush Administration officials over the interrogation of terrorists who plotted to kill Americans.

All Other Obama "Accomplishments" Are Only a
Prelude to His $3.5 Trillion Budget

As I write this, Democrats in Congress are fashioning a deal to pass the budget's provisions on health care by preventing Republicans and moderate Democrats from having a voice in the debate.

Think about that. The Obama-Reid-Pelosi political machine is going to pass legislation that fundamentally affects every single American - as well as 17 percent of our economy - by cutting the elected representatives of half of all Americans out of the process.

If they succeed, the budget will be President Obama's most enduring - and devastating - accomplishment.

Will the Future Bring Change We Can Believe In?
Or a Change in What we Believe?

One thing is clear at this point in President Obama's presidency: His control of Washington Democrats has been so masterful, and his policies so successful, that he has officially claimed ownership of the American economy.

Going forward, it won't be possible to continue to place blame on former President Bush and the Republicans. If President Obama fails, it will be his failure and his alone.

As for us, the "success" of the first 100 days of the Obama presidency raises a threatening possibility.

As my daughter and columnist Jackie Cushman put it, if we're not careful, instead of change we can believe in, we're going to have change in what we believe.

It's something to ponder for the next 1,361 days.

Government cannot HELP our problem - Government IS our problem

 April 2009

- - Government cannot HELP our problem - Government IS our  problem

- - Nuclear Power is Green Power - get plugged in

- - Local Government is real government

- - Want Change? Try morality and truth.  Even honesty would be a good start.

- - TYRANNY: a government in which absolute power is vested in a single group or ruler.

- - We Shall Overcome

- - As St. Irenaeus said, "The glory of God is man fully alive."

- - We must love this country, and a smaller more efficient government.

- - The truth shall set you free...Turn off ABC news

- - ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR... etc. avoid the truth, especially about politics.

- - They called Bush was stupid... Uh, What's that, uh, term in, uh, Austrian?

- - Sanctuary Cities are Un-American

- - Socialism is un-American

- - Wasting Money is Stupid - Government wastes money - so Government is stupid!

- - The only thing that needs to be fixed are the President's friends in Congress!

- - Where is the "unprecedented openness" and "collaboration" with our OBAMANATION?

- - Democrats destroy people and dreams.

- - Equality for all, even the US Congress

- -  CO 2  is not pollution

- - Got Stupid?

- - Got Chains?

- - DONT TAX ME BRO!

- - If you can communicate well or even if you can't... You too can get elected.

- - A Well Regulated Militia = True Homeland Security... 2nd Amendment 101

- - Does irresponsible Government make you feel unbalanced?

- - Change should not be a bad thing!!!

- - Did you VOTE for this Obama-nation?

Unfortunately, the facts -- as always when you're talking about liberal theories -- tell a different story. A story in which all the major villains, it turns out, have one thing in common: government.

That's right. From the "Community Reinvestment Act" that pressured banks into affirmative-action lending, to those "government-sponsored enterprises" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- who bought up all the resulting subprime loans and repackaged them as "investment grade" securities -- the greasy thumb-prints of government were all over this fiasco from beginning to end.

But those, as I say, are facts. And facts have no place in the fantasy world of Democratic policy-makers. Nor does history -- true history, that is, as opposed to the public-school propaganda that teaches, for instance, that FDR's New Deal got us out of the Great Depression, when in reality it only deepened and prolonged it.

But the question remains: What can those of us in the fast-dwindling, Reality-Based Community do to survive financially as the Obamacrats prepare a "New New Deal" that threatens to outspend the original by about ten thousand to one?

Pilgrim Thanksgiving, Struggles, Dangers and Attacks, Then and Now - American Minute with Bill Federer

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1754/6613/files/Pilgrim_Thanksgiving_Struggles_and_Dangers.pdf?v=1732854029

Pilgrim Thanksgiving, Struggles, Dangers and Attacks, Then and Now - American Minute with Bill Federer

November 28, 2024 • Pilgrim Thanksgiving "God be Praised we had a Good Increase...Our Harvest being gotten in"-Pilgrim Edward Winslow

LISTEN (text to speech)

Download as PDF ...

On NOVEMBER 21, 1620, according to the "New Style" Gregorian Calendar, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact and began their Plymouth Colony.Of the 102 Pilgrims, only 47 survived till Spring.
At one point, only a half dozen were healthy enough to care for the rest.
In the Spring of 1621, the Indian Squanto came among them, and showed them how to catch fish, plant corn, trap beaver, and was their interpreter with the other Indian tribes.
Governor William Bradford described Squanto as "a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation."Bradford added:
"The settlers ... began to plant their corn, in which service Squanto stood them in good stead, showing them how to plant it and cultivate it.
He also told them that unless they got fish to manure this exhausted old soil, it would come to nothing ...
In the middle of April plenty of fish would come up the brook ... and he taught them how to catch it."Pilgrim Edward Winslow recorded in Mourt's Relation that in the Fall of 1621:
"God be praised we had a good increase ...
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.
They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.... At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted,
and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others.
And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time, with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."
Bradford described the same event:
"And besides waterfowl, there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc.
Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion."The idea of a Fall day of thanksgiving may have come to the Pilgrims after they moved to Leiden, Holland, in 1609.
Dutch citizens there annually gave thanks to God for William of Orange, in 1574, ending the bloody Spanish Furies, where Spain's "Iron Duke" of Alba had butchered tens of thousands.Dutch historian Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Ph.D. Leiden, 1976, in his article "1621: A Historian Looks Anew at Thanksgiving," documented that a friend of Pilgrim elder William Brewster, whose name was Jan Orlers, wrote of the City of Leiden's Thanksgiving to God for Spain being driven out of the Netherlands:
"Every year throughout the city a General Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving ... held and celebrated on the Third of October, to thank and praise God Almighty that he so mercifully had saved the city from her enemies."
Also in Leiden was a community of persecuted Jews who had been exiled from Spain.
Beginning in 1575, at the University of Leiden, students were taught Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac by a rabbi, just as Pilgrim elder William Brewster taught students English.
Pilgrims would have observed Jews celebrating the annual Thanksgiving Feast of Tabernacles or "Sukkot" in September–October.
Pilgrims identified with Jews, who fled from Pharaoh across the Red Sea in search of their Promised Land, as the Pilgrims fled from the King of England across the sea in search of their Promised Land.
The Israelites had self-government, called the Hebrew Republic, for four hundred years before they asked for a king. This example of self-government inspired the Puritan Reformers and the Pilgrim separatists.
Protestant scholars who studied the Hebrew Republic were called Christian Hebraists.When Harvard and Yale were founded in New England, Hebrew was taught.Historian Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs explained how Pilgrims thanked God:"Our knowledge of the 1621 Thanksgiving comes from Winslow and Bradford.
Winslow's choice of words, understood by his contemporaries, implies to us that the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for their preservation and for the plenty that gave hope for the future.
Winslow specifically tells us that the colonists sat down with their native neighbors and enjoyed several days of peaceful rejoicing together. It is a history with potent symbolism, and it needs neither apology nor distortion ..."Bangs added:
"When Winslow described the Pilgrims' intention, 'after a more special manner to rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors,' he was alluding to John 4: 36 and to Psalm 33.
The first is, 'And he that reapeth, receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal, that both he that soweth, and he that reapeth, might rejoice together.'"On November 9, 1621, thirty-seven new Pilgrims arrived from England on the ship Fortune.
The joy of greeting this second group of Pilgrims was quickly dampened when it was discovered they brought with them no food or supplies.This resulted in the second winter having a "starving time," where at one point, each person was rationed just five kernels of corn a day.Attempting to repay the "merchant adventurers" who financed their trip, the Pilgrims filled the Fortune with 500 pounds of furs, but tragically the ship was captured by French pirates, leaving the Pilgrims in greater debt.In 1622, the friendly Indian Chief Massasoit became ill.
Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow visited and doctored him.
He thankfully regained health, which contributed to a peace which lasted over 50 years.
Edward Winslow was especially grateful, because the Indian tradition was, that if a person doctored a chief and the chief died, that person died too.Two years after the Pilgrim landing, there was a drought in 1623. Edward Winslow recorded in Alexander Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims, Boston, 1841:
"Drought and the like considerations moved not only every good man privately to enter into examination with his own estate between God and his conscience, and so to humiliation before Him, but also to humble ourselves together before the Lord by Fasting and Prayer."Their attitude was:

• when things were bad they would have days of prayer;

• when things were real bad they would have days of fasting; and

• when things turned around they would have days of thanksgiving.

After the Pilgrims prayed and fasted, Governor Bradford wrote:
"Afterwards the Lord sent them such seasonable showers, with interchange of fair warm weather as, through His blessing, caused a fruitful and liberal harvest, to their no small comfort and rejoicing.
For which mercy, in time convenient, they also set apart a day of thanksgiving. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine now God gave them plenty - for which they blessed God.
And the effect of their particular planting was well seen, for all had - pretty well - so as any general want or famine had not been amongst them since to this day."Decades later, a thanksgiving proclamation was issued by the Governing Council of Charlestown, Massachusetts, June 20, 1676:
"The Council has thought meet to appoint ... day of solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God ...
that the Lord may behold us as a people offering praise and thereby glorifying Him;
the Council doth commend it to the respective ministers, elders and people of this jurisdiction; solemnly and seriously to keep the same beseeching that being persuaded by the mercies of God we may all, even this whole people offer up our bodies and souls as a living and acceptable Service unto God by Jesus Christ."Ben Franklin wrote of the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving (The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, editors Mark & Jo Ann Skousen, Regnery, 2006, p. 331):
"There is a tradition that in the planting of New England, the first settlers met with many difficulties and hardships, as is generally the case when a civilized people attempt to establish themselves in a wilderness country.
Being so piously disposed, they sought relief from heaven by laying their wants and distresses before the Lord in frequent set days of fasting and prayer.
Constant meditation and discourse on these subjects kept their minds gloomy and discontented, and like the children of Israel there were many disposed to return to the Egypt which persecution had induced them to abandon ..."Franklin continued:
"At length, when it was proposed in the Assembly to proclaim another fast, a farmer of plain sense rose and remark'd that the inconveniences they suffered,
and concerning which they had so often wearied heaven with their complaints, were not so great as they might have expected, and were diminishing every day as the colony strengthened; that the earth began to reward their labour and furnish liberally for their subsistence;
that their seas and rivers were full of fish, the air sweet, the climate healthy, and above all, they were in the full enjoyment of liberty, civil and religious.... He therefore thought that reflecting and conversing on these subjects would be more comfortable and lead more to them being contented with their situation;
and that it would be more becoming the gratitude they owed to the divine being, if instead of a fast they should proclaim a thanksgiving.
His advice was taken, and from that day to this, they have in every year observed circumstances of public felicity sufficient to furnish employment for a Thanksgiving Day, which is therefore constantly ordered and religiously observed."During the Cold War, socialists and communists began an effort to weaken America from the inside by infiltrating the media, entertainment, the pulpit, courts, political parties and the educational system.On January 10, 1963, Rep. Albert S. Herlong, Jr., of Florida, read into the Congressional Record, (Vol 109, 88th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, pp. A34–A35), the 45 tactics communists were using, including:
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under communist attack ...
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV ...
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.”
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc ...
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use "united force" to solve economic, political or social problems.Socialist infiltration tactics utilized an "unlearning" process called "deconstruction," as in Howard Zinn's A Peoples' History of the United States, and in The New York Times' 1619 Project.Deconstruction is a cultural gene-replacement therapy, where the old identity is removed and replaced with a new identity:
1) the younger generation of students are separated from the country's past by the negative portrayal of the country's founders.
Students not only reject the founders, but through guilt-by-association, reject the rights and freedoms that the founders established.This was explained by the Communist Party Education Workers Congress in 1918:
"We must create out of the younger generation a generation of communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good communists ... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them."
2) Students are then moved into a neutral point of view where they are open-minded to other belief systems.
3) Finally, students are indoctrinated into accepting the socialism, communist, alternative sexual agendas, and non-Western beliefs which do not believe in individual rights but rather "group rights."Karl Marx is attributed with the statement:
"Take away the heritage of a people and they are easily conquered."
Frederick Engels wrote in Capital, Volume II, 1885:
"It was Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history ...
All historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are ... struggles of social classes ...
Collisions ... between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position ... This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science."Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci, who founded the Italian Communist Party, explained how Judeo-Christian civilization could not be defeated on the battlefield, but it could be made to slowly rot from within through what was termed "the long march through the institutions."
 
Gramsci was famous for his Prison Notebooks, 1929-1935, translated into English by Joseph Buttigieg, father of the politician Pete Buttigieg.
 
Gramsci wrote in an article "Audacia e Fede” printed in the newspaper Avanti!, May 1916: "Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity."
 
James W. Wardner rephrased Gramsci's views in his book Unholy Alliances, 1996:
"In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
 Commenting on Marx's socialist deconstruction, U.S. Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall stated, as recorded in 20 Centuries of Great Preaching (Vol. 12, Waco: Word, 1971 p. 11-19:
"There was a time in these United States when youth was inspired by heroes ... Along with the ponderous Family Bible on the Victorian table and the hymn books on the old-fashioned square piano, there looked down from the walls the likenesses of our national heroes ...
Those were the days of great beliefs - belief in the authority of the Scriptures, belief that prayer was really answered, belief in marriage and the family as permanent institutions, belief in the integrity and worth of America’s great men ...Marshall lamented:
"Then there dawned the day when the pictures of Washington and Lincoln did not fit in with our concept of modern décor ... The old Family Bible looked embarrassingly out of place ... So the pictures and the Bible were often relegated to the Attic of Forgotten Things ...
Along with our higher education came a debunking contest. This debunking became a sort of national sport ... It was smarter to revile than to revere ... more fashionable to depreciate than to appreciate.
In our classrooms at all levels of education, no longer did we laud great men - those who had struggled and achieved. Instead, we merely ...ferreted out their faults ... They were merely ... products of their environments ..."
 Senate Chaplain Marshall concluded:
"But we failed to realize that when we were denying the existence of great men, we were also denying the desirability of great men.
So now, many of our children have grown up without the guiding star ... holding in their hands only a bunch of ... question marks, with no keys with which to open the doors of knowledge and life ...
Thus, our debunking is ... a sign of decaying foundations of character to the individual and in the national life."
Franklin Roosevelt stated in his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, October 31, 1939:
"More than three centuries ago at the season of the gathering in of the harvest, the Pilgrims humbly paused in their work and gave thanks to God for the preservation of their community and for the abundant yield of the soil."President John F. Kennedy proclaimed a National Thanksgiving Day, on October 28, 1961: