The Three Fingers Pointing Back At Atheists When Atheists Point A Finger At Christians About Evil And Judgment

You’ve probably heard that expression, “When you point a finger at me, three fingers are pointing back at you.”  Let’s work with that today.

I recently wrote an article with the deliberately provocative title, “Atheist Country Japan Smashed By Tsunami.”

It generated quite a few cross postings to atheist blogs and forums.

One recent example attacked Christians as being “happy” that Japan was stricken by disaster, and, in linking to my blog, said:

Of course, maybe it’s because of all teh gay [sic] in Japan, or because the Japanese are all atheists. Or maybe it’s because they worship demons.

…

What a nasty, horrible God is the one in which they believe. What nasty, horrible sentiments they have expressed in the wake of so much suffering by their fellow human beings. What a nasty, cynical thing they do to promote their own religion by using this tragedy and other recent catastrophic events to “win converts” for Jesus.

Naming them charlatans and hypocrites does not do justice to the utter lack of compassion that resides in their hearts.

And the blogger cites my blog as an example of a fundamentalist who argues that God struck Japan “because the Japanese are all atheists.”

Well, first thing, did I actually even say that?  I quote myself from that article:

But is Japan’s unbelief the reason why Japan just got hit with an awful tsunami?

My answer is, “How on earth should I know?”

I cite passages of Scripture that clearly indicate that a disaster does not necessarily mean that God is judging someone, such as Luke 13:1-5.  I could have just as easily also cited passages such as John 9:1-3 about Jesus’ distinction between suffering and sin.  I could have cited 2 Peter 3:9, describing God’s patience with sinners rather than His haste to judge.  These passages aren’t at all out of tune with what I was saying.  And I actually DO single out by name for criticism men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who have immediately pronounced the wrath of God following some disaster.

I begin my article saying, “That headline is a deliberate provoker.  But please let me explain why I used that headline before you erupt one way or another.”  Then I proceed to state two undisputed facts: that Japan is atheist, and that Japan got hit by a disaster.  I urge someone to actually read the article and reflect on the possibilities.  But Boomantribune is an example of most of the atheists who cross-posted or commented to my article by NOT being someone who wanted to read or reflect; he or she is someone who refused to look beneath atheist ideology and immediately began demonizing the other side to “win converts” for his religion of atheism.  [And let’s get this straight: atheism IS a religion.  “Religion” does not need to depend upon belief in God, or Buddhism would not qualify as a religion.  The courts have ruled that atheism is a religion, and it is a simple fact that atheism has every component that any religious system has].

You can’t have a valid argument with someone like Boomantribune, I have learned.  They are either too ignorant, or too dishonest, or both to accurately represent the other side’s position or arguments.  They create straw men and then demolish claims that Christians like me aren’t even making.

Boomantribune viciously attacks me as harboring the “nasty, horrible sentiments they have expressed in the wake of so much suffering by their fellow human beings.”  But I end my article on Japan by saying:

You need that gift of divine grace.  I need that gift of divine grace.  And the people of Japan desperately need it today.

I pray for those who are in Japan.  I pray for their deliverance from both the tsunami and from their unbelief.  And I will join with many other Christians who will send relief to the Japanese people, with prayers that they will look not at me, but at the Jesus who changed my heart and my life, and inspired me to give to others.

It is also a simple fact that religious people are FAR more giving than atheists:

In the US, anyway, they don’t. Here’s just one study, done in 2003: The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions…Note that neither political ideology nor income is responsible for much of the charitable differences between secular and religious people. For example, religious liberals are 19 points more likely than secular liberals to give to charity, while religious conservatives are 28 points more likely than secular conservatives to do so…The average annual giving among the religious is $2,210, whereas it is $642 among the secular. Similarly, religious people volunteer an average of 12 times per year, while secular people volunteer an average of 5.8 times.

And this is “secular” people who aren’t particularly religious.  A lot of people rarely ever go to church, but still believe in God (basically 90% of Americans belive in God).  Since the evidence is rather straightforward that the more religious one is, the more giving one is, it is justified to conclude that atheists who are less religious than the merely “secular” are even LESS giving.

And, guess what?  My church has already taken its first of several offerings for Japan, and I have already given – and plan to give again.

I would also point out a couple of historical facts:

Christians actually began the first hospitals.

More hospitals have been founded by Christians than by followers of every other religion – including atheism – combined.

That said:

Atheist doctors are more than twice as likely to pull the plug on someone than a doctor who believes in God.

So just who is being “horrible” here?

Here’s another example of an atheist attack on me that backfired, followed by the dishonest atheist “cutting and running” from his own attack:

For what it’s worth, I have never withdrawn a single post:

Also, unlike too many blogs – particularly leftwing blogs, in my experience – I don’t delete anything. When the Daily Kos hatefully attacked Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol and claimed that Bristol Palin had been impregnated by her own father with a baby, and that Sarah Palin faked being pregnant – only to have that hateful and vile lie blown away by Bristol giving birth to a child of her own – they scrubbed it like nothing had happened.

I’m not that despicable. Every single article I have ever written remains on my blog. And with all due respect, I think that gives me more credibility, not less: I don’t hit and run and then scrub the evidence of my lies.

If I post something that turns out to be wrong, I don’t destroy the evidence; I stand up and take responsibility for my words.  I apologize and correct the record.  As I did in the case above.

That, by the way, is the first finger, the finger of moral dishonesty pointing back at these atheists. 

That’s not the way the other side plays.  History is replete with atheist regimes (e.g. ANY of the officially state atheist communist regimes) destroying the record and any debate; history is replete with atheist-warped “science” making one claim after another that turned out to be entirely false.  As examples, consider Java Man, Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Peking Man and the various other hoaxes that the “scientific community rushed to embrace in their rush to falsify theism.  In some cases “scientists” created an entire community – or even an entire race of people – around totally bogus evidence in “It takes a village” style.  There was the bogus notion of “uniformitarianism” by which the “scientific community” ridiculed creationists for decades until it was proven wrong by Eugene Shoemaker who documented that the theory of “catastrophism” that they had advanced for millennia had been correct all along.  And then all of a sudden the same evolutionary theory that had depended upon uniformitarianism suddenly morphed into a theory that depended upon catastrophism. It morphed so that it was equally true with both polar opposites.

Then there’s this:

Ann Coulter pointed it out with the false claim that evolution was “falsifiable” versus any religious claim which was not. Darwin said, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” And Ann Coulter brilliantly changed a couple of words to demonstrate what a load of crap that was: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by God, my God theory would absolutely break down.”

In any words, evolution is no more “scientifically falsifiable” than even the most ardent young earth creationist claim. Their standard is impossible to prove. I mean, you show me that God “could not possibly have” created the earth.

The whole way they sold evolution was a lie.

There is NEVER an admission of guilt or an acknowledgment of error by these people.  They simply suppress or destroy the evidence, or “morph” their argument, or anything but acknowledge that just maybe they should be open-minded and question their presuppositions.

There is the extremely rare admission:

For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. -Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers

But those are extremely rare, indeed.  The rest of the atheist-assuming “scientific community” is all about saying, “Move on, folks.  Nothing to see here.  Why don’t you look at our new sleight-of-hand display over in this corner instead?”

Phillip Johnson, in a very good article, points out how the “bait-and-switch” works:

Supporting the paradigm may even require what in other contexts would be called deception. As Niles Eldredge candidly admitted, “We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing it does not.”[ 1] Eldredge explained that this pattern of misrepresentation occurred because of “the certainty so characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940s, the utter assurance not only that natural selection operates in nature, but that we know precisely how it works.” This certainty produced a degree of dogmatism that Eldredge says resulted in the relegation to the “lunatic fringe” of paleontologists who reported that “they saw something out of kilter between contemporary evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil record on the other.”[ 2] Under the circumstances, prudent paleontologists understandably swallowed their doubts and supported the ruling ideology. To abandon the paradigm would be to abandon the scientific community; to ignore the paradigm and just gather the facts would be to earn the demeaning label of “stamp collector.”

[…]

Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a strategy to prevent this problem from arising: it labels naturalism as science and theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the latter as mere belief. The distinction is of critical importance, because only knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone; belief is valid only for the believer, and should never be passed off as knowledge. The student who thinks that 2 and 2 make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing a minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of education is to cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge. Students in the public schools are thus to be taught at an early age that “evolution is a fact,” and as time goes by they will gradually learn that evolution means naturalism.

In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated. This is because naturalistic evolution is by definition in the category of scientific knowledge. What contradicts knowledge is implicitly false, or imaginary. That is why it is possible for scientific naturalists in good faith to claim on the one hand that their science says nothing about God, and on the other to claim that they have said everything that can be said about God. In naturalistic philosophy both propositions are at bottom the same. All that needs to be said about God is that there is nothing to be said of God, because on that subject we can have no knowledge.

I stand behind a tradition that has stood like an anvil while being pounded by one generation of unbelievers after another.  That tradition remains constant because it is founded upon the unchanging Word of God.  My adversaries constantly change and morph their positions, all the while just as constantly claiming that their latest current iteration is correct.

That is the second finger of intellectual dishonesty which so thoroughly characterizes atheism and anything atheism seems to contaminate with its assumptions.

Lastly, there is the finger of ethical dishonesty that is the ocean that the “walking fish” of atheism swims in.  [Btw, when I see that fish riding a bicycle I’ll buy their “walking fish” concept].

Basically, for all the “moral outrage” of atheists who want to denounce Christians for their God’s “evil judgments,” atheism itself has absolutely no moral foundation to do so whatsoever.  And the bottom line is that they are people who attack the five-thousand year tradition of Scripture with their feet firmly planted in midair.

William Lane Craig provides a devastating existential ethical refutation of atheism in an article I posted entitled, “The Absurdity of Life without God.”

To put it simply, William Lane Craig demolishes any shred of a claim that atheism can offer any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value, or any ultimate purpose whatsoever.  And so atheism denounces Christianity and religion from the foundation of an entirely empty and profoundly worthless worldview.  Everyone should read this incredibly powerful article.  I guarantee you will learn something, whatever your perspective on religion.

The thing I would say is that atheists denounce God and Christians from some moral sort of moral posture.  Which comes from what, exactly?  Darwinism, or more precisely, social Darwinism?  The survival of the fittest?  A foundation that comes from the “secure” footing of a random, meaningless, purposeless, valueless and entirely accidental existence?

As atheists tee off on God and at Christians for being “nasty” and “horrible,” what is their foundation from which to judge?

First of all, what precisely would make one a “nasty” or “horrible” atheist? 

Joseph Stalin was an atheist:

“God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just… I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.”

Mao Tse Tung was an atheist:

“Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?”  [Mao Tse Tung, Little Red Book, “Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle chapter 21”].

Hitler was an atheist:

Hitler described to them that “after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions. I feel as refreshed now as a foal on a meadow” (Ernst Helmreich, “The German Churches Under Hitler,” p. 285).

Joseph Goebbels, a top member of Hitler’s inner circle, noted in his personal diary, dated 8 April 1941 that “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.”  Now, one may easily lie to others, but why lie to your own private diary?

Goebbels also notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.”

Hitler also said, “Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.” [Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books; 3rd edition October 1, 2000, p. 343].

Albert Speer, another Nazi in Hitler’s intimate inner circle, stated that Hitler said, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion… Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

Konrad Heiden quoted Hitler as stating, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself.” [Heiden, Konrad A History of National Socialism, A.A. Knopf, 1935, p. 100].

Now, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao were terrible, despicable, evil people.  But what made them ” bad atheists,” precisely?

When Mao infamously expressed this attitude –

“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.” [Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998].

– or when Joseph Stalin was similarly quoted as having said:

“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

– were these men who were responsible for some 100 million deaths of their own people during peacetime expressing anything that violated some principle of Darwinian evolution, or the morality that derives from the ethic of survival of the fittest?

Mao put his disregard for human life and the lives of his own people to terrible work:

LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.

And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”

CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”

Did that somehow disqualify him from being an atheist?  How?  Based on what foundation?

Let me simply point out that the most evil human beings in human history and the most murderous and oppressive political regimes in human history have the strange tendency to be atheist.  It would seem to me that these atheists should frankly do a lot less talking smack and a lot more shutting the hell up.  But two verses from Scripture illustrate why they don’t: 1) The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1) and 2) “A fool does not delight in understanding, But only in revealing his own mind” (Proverbs 18:2).

Let’s talk about “evil” for a few moments.  I have already begun addressing the “third finger” that points back at atheists when they denounce Christians or God.  But the idea of “evil” makes that “finger” the middle one.

Christians talk about evil.  A lot of people do.  Even atheists routinely do.  But what is their foundation for evil?  What is “evil”?  Most give answers such as, “Murder or rape is evil.”  But those would at best only qualify as examples of evil – not a definition that would allow us to make moral judgments.  Christians have an actual answer.  They point out that “evil” is a perversion from the way things ought to be.  But what “oughtness” is there in a random, purposeless, meaningless and valueless universe that was spat out by nothing more than pure chance?

Let’s just say at this point that the atheists are right in what is in reality a straw man attack of God?  So what?  I ask “so what?” because even if what they were saying were somehow true, by what standard would either God or Christians be “nasty” or “horrible”?  What is the objective, transcendent standard that stands above me, that stands above every Christian on the planet, that stands above the entire human race across time and space and holds it accountable, such that if Christians or even God do X or say Y, or believe Z they are “nasty” or “horrible”?

It turns out that they don’t have one.  And in fact, their very worldview goes so far as to literally deny the very possibility of one.  At best – and I would argue at worst – we are trapped in a world in which might makes right, and the most powerful dictator gets to make the rules.  Because there is nothing above man that judges man and says, “This is the way, walk in it.”  There is only other men – and men disagree with one another’s standards – leaving us with pure moral relativism. 

And if moral relativism is true, then the atheists STILL lose.  It would be a tie, given that atheists have no more claim to being “good” than any other human being or group of human beings, no matter how despicable and murderous they might be.  But they would lose because there are a lot fewer atheists (137 million) than there are, say, Christians (2.3 billion).  And it only remains for Christians to disregard their superior moral and ethical system just long enough to rise up and annihilate all the smart-mouthed atheists, and then say afterward, “Boy, we sure feel guilty for having done THAT.  Let’s pray for forgiveness!”  And the only possible defense atheists would have would be to abandon their “survival of the fittest” mentality and embrace superior Christian morality and cry out, “Thou shalt not kill!”

Even if Christians don’t wipe out the atheists physically, most would readily agree that the Christian worldview is still far stronger than the atheist one.  Dinesh D’Souza makes a great argument to illustrate this on pages 15-16 of What’s So Great About Christianity that shows why religion is clearly the best team.  He says to imagine two communities – one filled with your bitter, cynical atheists who believe that morality just happened to evolve and could have evolved very differently; and one filled with Bible-believing Christians who embrace that life and their lives have a purpose in the plan of a righteous God who put His moral standards in our hearts. And he basically asks, “Which community is going to survive and thrive?”

As a Christian, I don’t have all the answers (although I can certainly answer the question immediately above).  I am a human being and my mind cannot contain the infinite plan of an infinitely complex and holy God.  But I have placed my trust in a God who made the world and who has a plan for His creation which He is bringing to fruition.  And that worldview doesn’t just give me explanatory powers that atheism by its very nature entirely lacks, but it gives me a strength that I never had before.  Even when evil and disaster and suffering befall me beyond my ability to comprehend, I can say with Job – the master of suffering:

“But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last.  And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God!  I will see him for myself. Yes, I will see him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought!”  Job 19:25-27 (NLT).

Obama Tries To Fit Japan Crisis, Two Wars And Shocking Oil Prices In Between Golfing And NCAA Brackets

Obama is at a -22 approval, according to a just-breaking story:

Obama Approval Index: -22 Strongly Approve 20% Strongly Disapprove 42% Total Approval 43%

Here’s Obama’s trend for the past 8 days:

-10
-15
-16
-16
-15
-18
-20
-22

Does he deserve even that much credit?

Japan suffered a quake that has been upgraded to a 9.0 on the scale.  It is the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded in human history.  That quake resulted in a tsunami that did terrible damage.  And as a result of all that damage Japan is watching in horror as one nuclear power plant after another melts down.

Yet “no drama” Obama just doesn’t seem to care.  He didn’t even bother to mention Japan or it’s earthquake or its tsunami or its nuclear meltdown in his address the day after the disaster.  And just to demonstrate that he truly truly, truly didn’t give a damn, he played 18 holes of golf.

See the photos of Obama’s golf outing from Sadhill.

Then there’s the unfortunate fact that this disaster has coincided with the far more important NCAA basketball tournament.  A president has to choose his priorities, and clearly the basketball brackets won out.  It takes a lot of research and study to go out there and pick the winning teams.  And President Obama is clearly prepared to put in the time to make sure his picks are good ones.

Oh, yes, there’s one another thing that is keeping Obama busy: Democrat fundraisers at luxury hotels.  Obama had his second this week and his fourth such event this month.

American servicemen are facing radiation exposure.  Obama is facing ESPN sports reporters.  And which situation is more toxic?

Earlier, Obama’s excuse for failing to talk about Libya even as the protestors were being killed from far above by Gaddafi’s jets was becasue he had a “scheduling conflict.”  Now you know what his “conflicts” were.

It’s not just Japan or Libya, of course.  It’s not just the fact that radiation leaks have made over a hundred thousand people prisoners in their own homes.  It’s not the fact that Japan’s market has lost more than 16% of its value in just two days.  And it’s not just the terrible impact that a devasted Japan (which is the 2nd largest purchaser of U.S. debt) will have on America.  It’s not just the shocking increases in the price of oil and gasoline.  It’s not the collapse of one government after another across the Arab world.  It’s not that Bahrain is declaring a state of emergency after the protests and rioting has overtaken that kingdom.  It’s not that Obama made it American policy that Gaddafi fall, and then did nothing to make that happen as Gaddafi’s forces begin to rout the unsupported rebels who are screaming for George Bush and for a no-fly zone.

It’s the fact that the world is burning, and we have a pathetic weakling appeasing president who cannot lead because he was never more than a community agitator.

From Bad To Worse: Japan Was On Path To Debt Default BEFORE Earthquake, Tsunami And Meltdown. America Next.

Meltdown.  That’s a good word for Japan these days.

And I’m not talking about the nuclear reactors, either.  I’m talking about what had been one of the most powerful economic engines on the planet.

Look at the facts in late 2010 BEFORE the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor.  They didn’t look pretty then; they’ve become nightmarish since:

Japan Will Default as Economy Unravels, Bass Says
October 13, 2010, 4:19 PM EDT
By Nikolaj Gammeltoft and Susanne Walker
 
Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — Japan will be forced to default on its debt, Greece’s economy is “done” and Iceland is worse off than Greece, said J. Kyle Bass, the head of Dallas-based Hayman Advisors LP who made $500 million in 2007 on the U.S. subprime collapse.

Nations around the world will be unable to repay their debt and financial austerity in a country such as Ireland is “too late,” Bass said today at the Value Investing Congress in New York.

Japan’s economy may unravel in the next two to three years, and its interest payments will exceed revenue, he said. “Japan can’t fund itself internally,” Bass said.

The country’s year-over-year gross domestic product was 2.4 percent as of June 30. It has the world’s largest public debt, approaching 200 percent of its GDP amid a 5.1 percent jobless rate. Consumer price fell by one percent in September and has been negative each month since May 2009, as deflation has taken hold.

Pricing on Japanese interest-rate swaps is the best he’s ever seen, Bass said. Investors could make 50 to 100 times their capital betting on them, he said, calling them a lottery ticket on Japan’s economy.

Japanese bonds have returned 3.3 percent this year, according to Merrill Lynch Indexes, compared with a return of 0.872 percent in 2009.

Crisis

Bank Of Japan’s Governor Masaaki Shirakawa refused to expand monthly purchases of government bonds this year even as deflation persisted. The bank on Oct. 5 instead created a 5 trillion yen ($60 billion) fund to buy bonds and other assets, and pledged to keep its benchmark interest rate at “virtually zero” until the end of deflation is in sight. Deflation has been entrenched in the economy since 1998. The GDP deflator, a gauge of prices across the economy, has fallen 14 percent since 1997, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

A financial crisis in 1997-98 precipitated by bad loans on Japanese lenders’ balance sheets stemming from burst land and stock-price bubbles of the early 1990s set off Japan’s deflation. Property prices have slumped for 17 of the past 19 years, and stocks remain 76 percent off of their 1989 peak, according to the Nikkei 225 Stock Average.

Japan’s currency traded at 81.79 per dollar, compared with 81.72. It touched 81.39 on Oct. 11, the strongest level since April 1995.

Bass began buying securities with shorter durations last year as he predicted central bank and government actions globally to rescue the financial system will result in “outright currency debasement.”

He began buying shorter-term debt and precious metals then, anticipating hyperinflation will lead to higher interest rates. Bass also said in May that Europe’s debt crisis will not be solved by the $1 trillion loan package the International Monetary Fund and the European Union agreed on earlier that month.

–Editors: Nick Baker, Dave Liedtka

And that was all BEFORE Japan went from the frying pan into the nuclear fire.

What’s being said now?

Quake shattered Japan poses global debt worry
GARETH COSTA, The West Australian
March 15, 2011, 6:11 am

Concerns have emerged in global credit markets over how heavily-indebted Japan will be able to pay for its biggest economic reconstruction effort since World War II.

The Bank of Japan’s promise yesterday of a ¥15 trillion ($182 billion) cash injection into its banking system managed to soothe global equities, but not debt markets as Japanese government credit default swap rates used to insure against debt default soared 13 points to 92.

Although not yet at critical levels, analysts said yesterday’s sharp spike in the CDS rates highlighted debt market concerns about Japan’s funding pressures within a cash-strapped global economy.

“When you have a market the size of Japan down this much, it’s going to affect everybody,” Stephen Halmarick, head of investment markets research at Colonial First State Global Asset Management, said.

“A tragedy of this proportion is going to take up a lot of economic resources.

“It’s going to have quite a negative impact on growth.”

Credit markets were already concerned that Japanese government debt had ballooned to $US12.2 trillion, or 200 per cent of GDP.

Insurance experts estimate the repair bill carried by foreign reinsurers will be capped at $US34 billion, with the rest borne by Japanese insurers, the Government and uninsured homeowners.

Japan has so far managed to function under its debt because it has predominantly been funded by domestic investors and because it runs a steady trade surplus.

However, analysts caution that short-term liquidity constraints could prompt strong yen repatriation flows out of foreign markets as occurred after the Kobe earthquake.

Early estimates suggest the cost of the Sendai earthquake will easily exceed the $US100 billion Kobe earthquake in 1995.

Japan’s increased funding pressures are also occurring in a global economy far more cash-constrained than in 1995, and unless export earnings begin flowing soon, escalating funding costs could push the country’s financing costs over the tipping point.

Japan has been one of the biggest buyers of US Treasury debt and in January pledged to also buy up to one-fifth of bonds from the European Financial Stability Fund that was created to bail out Greece and Ireland, all of which will become secondary to Japanese funding needs for the next few months.

The country is also one of the world’s biggest holders of gold bullion.

Any decision to cash in on bullion’s record price and offload much of its sovereign holding would likely depress the gold price.

Japan’s Nikkei equities index slumped 6.2 per cent, its worse daily performance in two years.

[…]

What impact will it have on the global markets if the 3rd largest economy in the world defaults?  What effect will it have on the ability of the world’s largest debtor – that’s YOU, America – to continue to get credit as WE begin to look more and more like a default-likely credit risk???

Japan was the second largest purchaser of American debt, and was so far ahead of #3 (Japan buys 3 1/4 times more of our debt than Britain), that it’s not even funny.  The U.S. needs a sucker, I mean an investor, to continue to artificially prop-up our insane lifestyle.  Who’s going to do that now?

What you’re going to see is either the Fed dramatically hasten the rate at which it devalues the dollar, which in turn will hasten the inevitable result of America becoming a banana republic, or a giant spike in interest rates as other U.S. debt buyers demand more reward for their risks.

A third alternative is that Japan could begin to sell off its US debt to raise money to rebuild.  While that seems like the obvious course, it turns out in this crazy world it isn’t; were Japan to sell it’s U.S. debt, the result would surely kill the U.S. dollar, but it would also dramatically strengthen the yen and hurt Japan’s export market just when they need it most.

My point is it’s a lose-lose.  And the U.S. loses right along with Japan.

Yet “no drama” Obama didn’t care.  He didn’t even bother to mention Japan or it’s earthquake or its tsunami or its nuclear meltdown in his address the day after the disaster.  And just to demonstrate that he truly truly, truly didn’t give a damn, he played 18 holes of golf.

See the photos of Obama’s golf outing from Sadhill.

Then there’s the unfortunate fact that this disaster has coincided with the far more important NCAA basketball tournament.  A president has to choose his priorities, and clearly the basketball won out.

Note #1: this is hardly new behavior from the man who promised “hope and change.”

Note #2: the mainstream media excoriated Bush for golfing a tiny fraction as often as Obama.  One example is the liberal Washington Post headline from August 5, 2002, “Before Golf, Bush Decries Latest Deaths in Mideast.”  I wonder what the Post’s headline would be about Obama if they had even a shred of fairness in their coverage?

We’re in trouble.  And our leader is a fool.  And we have a media that is hell-bent (literally) on ignoring or explaining away this fool’s actions and responses.

One of the things I came to believe as I realized that Obama would actually quite possibly get elected president was that our economy was dead meat.  I entirely got out of the U.S. stock market entirely and won’t return until Obama and the Democrats are out of power.  The reason is that I believed – and STILL believe – that when our economy collapses, it will happen very suddenly, like a house of cards falling down.  And it might not start in America; rather, an event in another country will set off a spiral that will envelope us and expose us for what we truly are.

And just where truly are we?

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Our actual debt is not the fourteen trillion dollars that would be scary enough; it is $200 TRILLION.

That isn’t some rightwing thinktank saying that; it’s the IMF.

Japan had a literal meltdown.  It is about to have a financial meltdown.

And America will not be far behind.

As you look at the current fiscal situation, with Democrats not just fighting to keep the status quo of reckless and morally and mentally insane spending that will necessarily bankrupt America – and with Democrats literally sitting back waiting to demonize Republicans as “mean-spirited” the moment they try to do what is absolutely necessary to get our skyrocketing spending under control – realize that the United States is necessarily going to explode and collapse just like those reactors in Japan.

Democrats murdered America.  It was Democrats who were responsible for nearly ALL of those $200 trillion in debt that will destroy us (it is a simple fact that the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that constitute virtually all of our actual debt were all Democrat programs).  And it is Democrats who will literally fight to America’s death to prevent the nation from doing what is necessary to fix our situation before it is too late.

Social Security is now paying out more than it takes in.  Workers under forty are rightly quite confident that the system will collapse before they get a chance to collect.  Republicans want to fix the system before it collapses in order to save it.  But Democrats lie about the Republicans efforts (which would kick in slowly and not affect current retirees at all).  And Democrats race us faster, ever faster toward the collapse and nightmare that surely awaits America.

We’re a dead nation walking.  We just don’t realize it yet.

That’s the hope and change you voted for, America.  I hope you enjoy your starving in the soon-coming banana republic your false-messiah president created for you.

Obama Wishes He Was President Of China (And So Do I)

I remember once attending a lecture from the great analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga.  He told a couple of good jokes.  One of them was a chance encounter with a mathematician at a university who worked with a fellow professor who was a solipsist.  For the record, solipsism is basically the belief that only your own mind exists, and that basically everyone and everything else around you is a figment of your imagination.  Plantinga was fascinated with this, and asked the mathematician what it was like working with someone who literally believed you didn’t exist.  And the mathematician said, “It’s okay, I suppose.  We tend to take pretty good care of him, because if anything were to ever happen to him, that would be it for the rest of us.”

Philosophers love jokes like that.

Barack Obama is so incredibly narcissistic that you begin to wonder if he’s like that mathematician, and thinks that only he exists, or that only he matters.

Everything revolves around this guy’s pathologically and malingnantly narcissistic ego.  Case in point:

President of China?
Obama’s lament.
9:01 AM, Mar 11, 2011 • By WILLIAM KRISTOL

“Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.’”

  “Obama Seeks a Course of Pragmatism in the Middle East,” The New York Times, March 11, 2011.

Mr. Obama is right.

If you’re president of China, people around the world who are fighting for freedom don’t really expect you to help. If you’re president of China, you don’t have to put up with annoying off-year congressional elections, and then negotiate your budget with a bunch of gun-and-religion-clinging congressmen and senators. If you’re president of China, you can fund your national public radio to your heart’s content. And if you’re president of China, when you host a conference on bullying in schools, people take you seriously.

Unfortunately for him and us, Barack Obama is president of the United States. That job brings with it certain special responsibilities. It’s a tough job—maybe tougher than being president of China. But Barack Obama ran for president of the United States. Maybe he should start behaving as one.

It is just so appropriate that Obama would say something so monumentally stupid and so pathologically self-absorbed on the day when our allies in Japan suffer a massive catastrophic tsunami in which 88,000 people are missing and their nuclear reactors could literally melt down and spew unprecedented disaster. 

The people of Japan just survived a massive 8.9 earthquake.  Then they managed to live through a gigantic wall of water from a tsunami.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, they then found out that they would be trapped in the wreckage of their homes – unable to either leave or be rescued – because of radiation leaks resulting from a nuclear meltdown.  And what do these people say?  “Poor Barry Obama-san!  We are very fortunate indeed that we do not have the difficulties of his life!  We have no food, no clothes, no place to sleep and we are sick from radiation; but at least we are not being scrutinized!”

I mean, who cares about everybody else; it’s clearly all about Barry Hussein and the hard time he’s having in the job he told so many lies to get.  Wah!

It’s rather obvious that we should all have a serious pity party for this loser.  Only he matters, after all.

I’ve got a few suggestions beyond Kristol’s for Barry H.  First of all, he could quit.  I for one wouldn’t complain, especially if Obama took his fellow incompetent Joe Biden with him and allowed John Boehner to cry at his swearing-in ceremony.  Because as much as that man might cry, at least he doesn’t whine.

The second thing I have to point out is that here we’ve got Obama publicly wishing he were the tyrant totalitarian dictator of a communist country.  I think the fact that he’s plagued with a democratic republic – which he despises – is finally getting to him.  Why can’t he run over his dissenters with tanks like the Chinese leaders can, he apparently wonders.  Because, you know, Barry, the reason they don’t scrutinize  the Chinese dictator’s words in Tahrir Square is the same reason they didn’t scrutinize the Chinese dictator’s words following the events in another square – Tiananmen Square and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, to be precise.

And I know that you would crave nothing more – you Marxist-fascist tin-plated tyrant – than to be able to “punish your enemies” the way the Chinese presidents do it.

Another thing I would point out is that maybe the reason people aren’t scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words as much as they are yours is because Hu Jintao tells the truth more than you do.  Maybe if you told the damn truth just once people would stop finding out that, sure enough, you lied to us again.

I mean, Barry Hussein’s lies go up to like 1,600 by now.  This is a guy who is somehow even lying if he tells you he’s lying.

And we’re not supposed to “scrutinize” him?  I mean, seriously?

One of Obama’s lies was about “unparalleled transparency.”  Remember that one?  Now the same guy who talked about being the most transparent president in the history of the world is whining about being scrutinized, as if this lying little weasel can’t stand it that someone would have actually taken one of his galling and unmitigated lies seriously.  And the end result is – fittingly – stories like this one.

“When I promised you unparalleled transparency, what I meant was how dare you examine what I’m constantly trying to do behind your backs!”

Another thing I would point out is that maybe they don’t scrutinize Hu Jintao so much because, unlike you, Barry Hussein, Hu Jintao is not an absolute hypocrite of rarefied proportions.

Oh, and for the record, neither is John Boehner – especially when compared to Tsarina Pelosi.

Lastly, it would be nice if Obama were the president of China.  That way he could destroy China, which – according to Obama’s own intelligence chief is basically our worst enemy which is out to destroy us – and we wouldn’t have a complete moral moron completely imploding the most powerful nation in the history of the world in only four miserable years.

So get your skinny butt out of the White House and go pout to China.  Go away mad, but please just go away.  Sadly, the Chinese people are far too smart to make the same O.B.A.M.A. (as in, “One Big Ass Mistake, America”) as the American people stupidly made by giving you a job.

Atheist Country Japan Smashed By Tsunami

That headline is a deliberate provoker.  But please let me explain why I used that headline before you erupt one way or another.

First of all, Japan is in fact one of the most atheistic countries in the world:

And Japan certainly got hit with a monsterous tsunami:

As I write this, I hear that there are 88,000 people missing in Japan.

So there is little question that the title for this article is factually completely accurate.

But is Japan’s unbelief the reason why Japan just got hit with an awful tsunami?

My answer is, “How on earth should I know?”

God doesn’t explain to me why He does a lot of things.  I think He figures I’m too dumb to understand His infinite mind and the infinite complexity of His plan for an incredibly complex world filled with going on 7 billion souls.  And He’s probably right.

I am familiar with Christian “leaders” (I put that in quotes because neither of these men are on my list of Christian leaders) such as Jerry Falwall or Pat Robertson have essentially stated that acts of human destruction such as 9/11 or acts of natural destruction such as Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans were acts of divine judgment for homosexuality.

And they might have been such judgment for such sin, I suppose.  But I doubt if God told Falwell or Robertson any more than He told me.  For one thing, if these men were acting as God’s prophets, God would have told them BEFORE the disasters happened in order to forewarn the people to repent.  That’s the rather clear prophetic pattern of Scripture.  That’s kind of what makes it “prophetic.”

Me?  I don’t pray for God’s destructive violence to destroy my ideological or religious enemies.  Let me explain why.

In a word, I don’t want God to ruthlessly punish others for their sins for fear that God will ruthlessly punish me for mine.  You see, it turns out that I’m not perfect either.

That’s part of a detailed solution to the so-called “problem of evil.”  When the human race fell into sin (as recorded in Genesis), it affected the entire created order (see Romans 8:22).  Evil has become part of the human condition.  And there are literally billions of degrees of evil in the world.  And – unless He destroys the whole world (as He has done and as He will one day do again) – just where is God supposed to draw the line?

What we tend to want is for God to judge everyone who is at least slightly more evil than we are.  But why should that be God’s standard?  But maybe God should obliterate you and all of your family and friends, too.  It’s His universe, after all; not yours.  You don’t get to make the rules in God’s universe.

There’s an interesting passage from Jesus in Luke 13:1-5:

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

There is no question: God sovereingly rules over the universe.  And we know that God judges the nations and individual people for sin (see Romans 3).  But only rarely – as recorded even in Scripture (e.g. Psalm 73, why do the wicked prosper?) – do we know the details.

We also know that God is patient.  We know from the Old Testament that God will literally wait hundreds of years before He brings judgment.  And we know from the New Testament (2 Peter 3:9) that God is patient, not wanting any to perish.

We also know that God often holds His sons and daughters by faith to a much higher account (Hebrews 12:5-11).  Just as a good Christian father may not concern himself with other people’s children, but his own had better tow the line.

We will never know this side of eternity why many terrible things happen.  Or why God judged this nation or that individual and spared another.

But we certainly can look upon a great diaster and pause in our own lives to take a look at ourselves and at our own nation, and tremble.  Because what happened to “them” can easily overtake “us” – whoever “they” are or “we” are.  And we all of us need to be ready to meet our Maker.

If we all lived as though death were a postential heartbeat away, I do believe we would live in a much better world.

I look at the many major earthquakes and the disasters they are causing as a sign that we are truly in the last days.  Jesus told us in Matthew 24:7 that ethnic groups (the word is “ethnos”) would rise against ethnic groups, and that there would be famines and earthquakes erupting all over.  And in verse 8 He spoke of them as birth pangs, meaning that as the end came, they would get more and more severe. 

There are certainly famines and fears of famines galore.  That is one of the key realities behind the massive unrest in the Middle East (see also here).

It is a fact that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was at most one major earthquake a year.  Now there are “big ones” erupting all over creation.  There was another huge and deadly earthquake just last month in New Zealand.  And we’re even seeing a rash of earthquake activity in the midwest(see also here).

Jesus also spoke of great catastrophic signs in the waves (e.g. tsunamis) in Luke.  And in Luke 21:8 Jesus said, “Now when you see these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Bottom line: we ought to be looking around, and we ought to be straightening up and flying right.  And if you are a perfect, sinless human being, good for you; but if you have ever sinned so much as once in your life, if you have ever once violated even your own conscience and standard, let alone a perfect, holy God’s, you had better fall at the feet of the one Savior for the human race (John 14:6) and embrace the Lamb of God (John 1:29-34).

Let me provide my own parable to explain a powerful biblical reality.  It’s called the ants on the elephant’s back:

Two ants of different species happen to bump into each other as they crawl across the back of a huge bull elephant.  The larger ant says to the smaller one, “I can’t help by notice I’m larger than you.  That means that I’m closer to being the same size as the elephant we’re crawling on than you.”  Well, in a way, that larger ant is right; but his comparison is nevertheless utterly ridiculous.  Why?  Because the elephant is so enormous compared to the size of either ant – let alone the amount of difference between the ants’ sizes – that a comparison is meaningless.  And that’s the way it is with human righteousness and God’s righteousness.  Billy Graham is considerably more righteous than, say, a Skid Row bum.  But the difference in their personal degress of righteousness is as nothing compared to the awesome holiness and perfection of God.  And you might think you’re better than someone else.  You might even be right.  But you are comparing yourself to the wrong subject.

When we stand before God, we will answer to how we compared to the righteousness of God.  “Be holy, as I am holy” (Leviticus 20:26, 1 Peter 1:13-16), God told us.  And just as we bear His perfect image (Genesis 1:26-27), we bear the responsibility to living up to His perfect character.

Only Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life (Hebrws 4:14-15).  Even the Quran affirms this (Quran 40:55; 48:1-2).  Jesus, fully God, God the Son, assumed a human nature and lived a perfect life on earth.  And He died for our sins so that we could have His perfection by faith.  He became our substitute.  That’s what “Lamb of God” means.

You need that gift of divine grace.  I need that gift of divine grace.  And the people of Japan desperately need it today.

I pray for those who are in Japan.  I pray for their deliverance from both the tsunami and from their unbelief.  And I will join with many other Christians who will send relief to the Japanese people, with prayers that they will look not at me, but at the Jesus who changed my heart and my life, and inspired me to give to others.

Update: I have since written an article entitled, “The Three Fingers Pointing Back At Atheists When Atheists Point A Finger At Christians About Evil And Judgment.”

Entire Failed Obama Agenda Summed Up In One Brilliant Cartoon

Here it is, from the pen of Michael Ramirez at Investor’s Business Daily:

That about covers everything Obama’s trying to do.  Let’s ruin America with one ruinous policy after another.  And the fact that everything he’s doing has already been tried before and completely failed before shouldn’t have anything to do with anything.

Obama Stimulus Is Reason Why Our Unemployment So Much Higher Than Others

The Obama stimulus was one of the greatest political disasters in American history.  It’s not enough to say it did nothing; it did WORSE than nothing.  And it is going to be like an anvil weighing down our economy for years and years to come as we struggle to pay back what will ultimately be $3.27 TRILLION.

Updated April 28, 2010
Why Our Unemployment Rate Is So Much Higher Than Others
By John Lott
FOXNews.com

Compared to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, Americans have real reasons to be dissatisfied with President Obama’s policies.

As President Obama travels today to Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, he will try to convince voters that his economic policies are creating jobs. But a year after Obama claimed that the stimulus had started creating jobs, it is not just the general public that believes that the stimulus was a waste of money, so do the experts. This week a new survey from the National Association for Business Economics found that 73 percent of business economists believe that the stimulus “has had no impact on employment.”

Many will point out that the unemployment rate has soared well above what the Obama administration predicted would occur if the stimulus were enacted. On Feb. 28, 2009, Eleven days after the stimulus bill signed into law, the White House predicted that the national unemployment rate would average 8.1 percent in 2009 and then decline to an average of 7.9 percent in 2010. Clearly things got much worse than the administration predicted. While the unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in February, 2009, by the end of last year it had risen to 10 percent. It still remains very high at 9.7 percent.

As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. Why not compare the changes in unemployment rates in other countries to the unemployment rate in the U.S. Figure 1 shows (click here) the percentage change in the U.S.’s unemployment rate since January 2009 when Obama became president compared to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. While several of the countries experienced similar increases during the beginning of 2009, by October of last year the United States had clearly “won” the race to have the largest percentage increase in unemployment of any of these countries.

Looking at the unemployment changes in terms of just the level of unemployment produces a similar picture (click here). The U.S. and many of these other countries had fairly similar unemployment rates in January last year, but by March the U.S.’s unemployment rate had increased.

Take Canada, whose economy is closely tied to ours and who is our largest trading partner. The Canadian stimulus package was nowhere as extensive as ours. Their stimulus spending of $22.7 billion last year and $17.2 billion, this year, amounts to about 7.5 percent of their federal spending for their 2009 and 2010 budgets — about a third of the per-capita stimulus spending in the United States.

Has Canadian unemployment climbed higher than ours because of their relative inaction? Hardly. Figure 3 shows (click here) the percentage change in unemployment rates in the U.S. and Canada since January 2009 when Barack Obama became president. While the percent increase in unemployment was the same for the first couple of months, Canada’s unemployment rate had peaked by August last year and fallen since then. By contrast, the U.S. rate only really began to decline the beginning of this year.

But it is not just Canada where the unemployment rate is faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pointedly refused to spend more money to “stimulate” the German economy. Yet, Figure 4 (click here) shows that Germany never really saw the unemployment experienced by other countries.

Japan clearly had an initial percentage increase in unemployment that was at least as bad as what we saw in the United States, though the country started from a much lower unemployment rate to begin with. Its stimulus as a percentage of GDP was also relatively large — about half as large as ours. Yet, Japan’s unemployment rate peaked in July 2009 and began to decline after that (see Figure 5 here).

The unemployment data shows that compared to these major countries, Americans have real reasons to be dissatisfied with Obama’s policies. It is also understandable why the vast majority of economists feel that Obama’s stimulus policies have spent a lot of money but produced no benefit. These same economists now expect the U.S. job market to improve, but that improvement won’t be due in any part thanks to Obama’s policies. It will just be due to the normal end of the recession.

As Obama travels the country today telling us what he is doing for us, Americans might do well to remember not just the huge bill that he has left our children and grandchildren, but how poorly he has done compared to other countries.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of “More Guns, Less Crime” (University of Chicago Press, 2010), the book’s third edition will be published in May.

According to a New York Times/CBS poll, a whopping 94% of the American people agree with Bayh. Only 6% of Americans believe Obama’s massive porkulus has created jobs a full year after going into effect.

Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all.  That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus.  It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.

And 48% of Americans polled don’t think porkulus will EVER create jobs.

And now we find out that the people were right.

We have to hold Democrats responsible for this travesty.  We have to vote them out, before they destroy the country more than they already have.

The Dirty Secret About Our Unemployment Rate

First of all, did Obama’s stimulus create jobs and help the economy?  I put it this way the other day, while writing an article about how ObamaCare amounts to a profoundly dishonest and secretive scheme to hijack one-sixth of the economy:

It’s rather like the stimulus.  Obama fearmongered the economy to get his $3.27 trillion stimulus-porkulus through Congress.  Obama falsely promised that unemployment wouldn’t go above 8% if it passed.  The legislation was raced through so quickly that no one could have even possibly read it.  Obama has said it was a success, citing the never-before-in-history-seen category of “created or saved jobs.”  But even then, he had to resort to a series of galling lies to sell his giant failed stimulus.  Not only were jobs created out of thin air (Obama claimed that a single lawnmower created 50 jobs through his website!!!) to fraudulently make a failed stimulus appear successful, but phantom congressional districts and even zip codes that don’t exist began to collect huge sums of stimulus money.  Meanwhile, the thoroughly dishonest Obama administration transformed their stimulus into a gigantic Democrat slush fund, with double the money going to Democrat districts and with no regard to unemployment.

The answer is readily obvious.  No, the stimulus didn’t help the economy.  As a solid plurality of Americans now rightly believe, the stimulus HURT the economy.

And they are right.  What we find out when we look at the economies of countries that either had or did not have stimulus packages is that the countries with huge stimulus packages (like the U.S.) had much more unemployment than the countries that didn’t:

As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. But if Summers and Biden are right in their assessment of the stimulus measures, one would think that the U.S. economy should be recovering better the many other countries, countries not wise enough to follow Obama’s lead of an extraordinary $787 billion increase in government spending.  It is also particularly timely to evaluate the spending since Christina Romer, the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Congress today that the stimulus had already had most of its impact on the economy. […]

But it is not just Canada where the unemployed are faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel nodding in agreement at his side, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “the problem is not about spending more.” Later that month, the president of the European Union, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, castigated the Obama administration’s deficit spending and bank bailouts as “a road to hell.” The Washington Post wrote that there was a “fundamental divide that persists between the United States and many European countries over the best way to respond to the global financial crisis.”

The unemployment rate in the European Union was higher than in the United States to begin with even before the Obama administration’s spending. By January, the EU unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent — almost a whole percentage point higher than ours.  So what has happened since the big U.S. stimulus spending spree was passed? We more than caught up with the EU’s high unemployment rate.  By August, the last month data is available for the EU, the U.S.’s unemployment rate slightly exceeded the EU’s — 9.7 versus 9.6 percent.

Germany has particularly been out front resisting the call for more public spending.  Yet, from January through September, the German unemployment rate only rose slightly, from 7.9 to 8.2 percent.

Data on unemployment rates from 27 countries from Japan and South Korea to Brazil and other South American countries to Europe shows that from January to August display the same consistent pattern.  Even in the EU it isn’t just a few countries that are driving the relatively small increase they have experienced.  The U.S. had a larger increase in unemployment than 22 countries — that is, 81 percent of the countries had a smaller increase in unemployment this year than the United States. Unemployment in some major countries such as Brazil and Russia has actually fallen since January (see Table here).  Other countries, from France to Mexico to Australia to Switzerland, have seen unemployment increase by only about half the amount of the U.S. rate. Indeed, the average increase in unemployment for the 27 countries is slightly less than half the US increase.

The article should be read in its entirety to see just how powerful the evidence is that the stimulus failed.

In other words, to the extent that there has been any improvement in the economy, it has been in spite of – and VERY CLEARLY NOT because of – the stimulus.

And one of the most frightening things we have in the wake of the failed Obama stimulus is shockingly high unemployment levels.  The Obama White House said that if Obama’s stimulus wasn’t passed unemployment would rise to 9% (it was 7.6% when Obama took office; and the Obama White house said it would remain under 8% if the stimulus was passed).  But it didn’t, did it?

Thus we come to Obama’s dirty little secret of unemployment:

Unemployment: The Dirty Little Secret Everyone’s Ignoring

By John Lott – FOXNews.com

The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning.

The unemployment rate might be stuck at 10 percent, but the more detailed numbers in the Department of Labor’s Household survey data paint a more dire picture. The number of people with a job fell by 589,000 in December. Even worse, the number of people not in the labor force grew by an astounding 843,000 during just the last month. The Household survey data is what is used to measure the unemployment rate.

To get an idea of the size of this increase in the number of people not in the labor force, since February, when the stimulus package was passed, I repeat, the number of people not in the labor force has grown by 3.2 million. But the number for December represents 26 percent of the entire increase over that period of time. The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning. Of course, they have had good reasons to be discouraged. Similarly since February, the total number of people employed has fallen by 4 million.

In September, Larry Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, claimed: “We have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery. Most importantly, we have seen a substantial change in the trend of job loss.” Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, made a similar statement today. While conceding that the December numbers were a “slight setback,” she argued: “In a broad sense the trend toward moderating job loss is continuing, consistent with the gradual labor market stabilization we have been seeing over the last several months.”

The growth in the U.S. unemployment rate has continued to outpace the rest of the world. Since February, the average unemployment rate for the European Union has grown by 1.2 percentage points. By contrast, the US unemployment rate has grown by 1.9 percentage points — a 58 percent greater increase. Nor does the rate look particularly strong compared to what economists were predicting at the beginning of the year. Back in mid-January, business economists and forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected the December unemployment rate to be at 8.6 percent.

Unemployment should start to improve, but the numbers indicate that the improvement in unemployment that economists and forecasters were predicting has occurred much more slowly than was expected at the beginning of 2009. By moving huge amounts of money from one industry to another, the stimulus as well as all the regulatory changes have caused a lot of churning in the labor market — movement of people from one job to another than has caused temporary unemployment. Unfortunately, the huge number of people who have withdrawn from the labor force represent a big hangover that will make reducing unemployment a slow process.

The “unexpected” (the lamestream media always naively expects good news when Democrats are in charge) and disappointing December job numbers released yesterday have more economists worrying about a double-dip recession.  We lost jobs even during the Christmas temp hiring frenzy, which will force the federal reserve to keep interest rates artificially low, which will have a negative impact on our economy down the road.

Obama could care less about the millions of workers who have despaired of finding a job to the point where they don’t even bother to look for work any more, because those people fall off out of the measurement categories.  If you consider them, unemployment is now at 17.3%.

Let me introduce you to an economist who – unlike so many others – was correct in her prediction of the economic meltdown: Meredith Whitney.

Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC. […]

“We underestimate how much the whole economy is dependent on the mortgage industry, and that has to change,” Whitney said. “This is what happens when you delay the inevitable. We’re buying time here, but we’re not restructuring the economy.”

Not only has Obama failed to improve the mortgage industry, but what he has done has actually made the system WORSE, even according to the left.  I mean, even the New York Times has said Obama’s solutions are adding to the housing woes.  The first paragraph of their article said:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

To serve as an ironic reminder of Obama’s message of “hope and change,” here’s a recent Business Insider article entitled, “How Obama’s Mortgage Modifications Are Making Things Worse By Giving Desperate Homeowners A False Sense Of Hope.”

Well, Obama promised hope.  If you were dumb enough to believe his promises had any reality, then doom on you.

And it isn’t any better for residential mortgages:

(June 9) – Commercial real estate mortgage defaults are at a 15-year high and will more than double by the end of 2010, according to a new report from research firm Real Estate Econometrics (REE).

And again:

NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) – U.S. commercial mortgage-backed bond defaults may more than double this year as the economic recession hurts office building, retail store and multifamily housing assets, Fitch Ratings said on Wednesday.

It was the mortgage industry – imploded by Democrats – that caused the economic implosion of 2008.  And our failure-in-chief hasn’t done a damned thing to make that industry better.  All he’s given, characteristic of his entire presidency, is false hope.

And now we’re looking at a double dip for the housing and mortgage industries, as well.

One day, years from now, an honest Obama administration official (if there is one) will be saying something similar to FDR’s Treasury Secretary:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, six years after FDR rolled out his failed New Deal, unemployment was still at 20.7%.

We are now only 3.4 percentage points away from Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau’s moment of clarity.

Moral Coward Obama Refuses To Support Decision To A-Bomb Japan

The decision to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – as much as the Japanese might disagree – is one of the great no-brainers of history.

Here’s a couple of quick reasons why:

TOKYO – Japanese Second World War leader Hideki Tojo wanted to keep fighting even after U.S. atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accusing surrender proponents of being “frightened,” a newly released diary reveals.  Excerpts from the approximately 20 pages written by Tojo in the final days of the war and held by the National Archives of Japan were published for the first time in several newspapers Tuesday.

“The notes show Tojo kept his died-in-the-wool militarist mentality until the very end,” said Kazufumi Takayama, the archives curator, who confirmed the accuracy of the published excerpts. “They are extremely valuable.”

Tojo, executed in 1948 after being convicted of war crimes by the Allies, was prime minister during much of the war. The notes buttress other evidence that Tojo was fiercely opposed to surrender despite the hopelessness of Japan’s war effort.

An invasion of Japan would have consumed the lives of as many as 4 million American causalities.

Japan refused to surrender even after the first bomb was dropped, thereby welcoming the second.

Students of World War II history also know that Japan was only a couple of weeks away from launching their own nuclear attack against the United States by means of German uranium sent via U-boat.

Of course, when I say the decision was a “no-brainer,” I exclude moral cowards, who will always find a way to dither, to question, to hide, to demagogue.  What is obvious to anyone else becomes an endless quagmire of indecision to such as these.

The Pentagon was fed up with Obama’s dithering moral cowardice regarding Afghanistan 2 full months ago, for what it’s worth.

Obama Declines To Defend U.S. Bombing Of Hiroshima, Nagasaki

Defending the decision of the United States to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII is not a comfortable thing to do when you’re in Japan.  But if you’re President of the United States, you must do it. Diplomatically, yes.  With sympathy for the civilian victims, yes.  But you must do it.

But when it came time today for Barack Obama to fulfill that fundamental duty, he failed. The very first reporter [from Fuji TV] called on at the joint press conference with PBO and Japanese PM Hatoyama in Tokyo today put the question to Pres. Obama in blunt and explicit terms:

JAPANESE REPORTER: What is your understanding of the historical meaning of the A-bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Do you think it was the right decision?

Obama took a deep breath, paused . . . and punted.

PBO gave a halting response that utterly failed to answer the question.  The closest he came was to observe that Japan “has a unique perspective on the issue of nuclear weapons as a consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m sure it helps to motivate the Prime Minister’s deep interest in this issue.”

The reporter tried again: “do you believe the US dropping of nuclear weapons on –“

Obama cut him off, choosing to answer an unrelated question on the situation in North Korea.

President Reagan – who famously shared his vision regarding the Cold War as “We win, they lose” – was very different indeed from a dithering and morally weak President who recently said:

OBAMA: I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

And, of course, Obama is doing everything he can to ensure that the United States doesn’t have to bear the burden of a “victory” in Afghanistan, or suffer the indignity of a “victory” against an Iran that is determined to develop nuclear weapons of their own on Obama’s watch.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Iran rejected nuclear deal, Obama postponing announcement

Iran has completely rejected a UN-brokered nuclear deal, but US President Barack Obama has postponed the official announcement on Teheran’s refusal due to internal political reasons, Israel Radio quoted a senior western official as saying Saturday.

The deal would see most of the Islamic Republic’s uranium shipped to Russia and France for further processing.

The official reportedly told journalists in Paris that Iran has also refused to resume nuclear talks with the six world powers.

What we desperately need is a president who actually has the courage and common sense to prefer victory over chaos, and to recognize obvious historical facts supporting the use of American force with clarity, rather than with postmodern, blame-America-first political correctness.

Why Do We Have Islamic Terrorism AND What Should We Do About It?

This ostensibly comes from a respected German psychiatrist named Dr. Emanuel Tanay:

A German’s View on Islam

A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. ‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he said, ‘but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.’

We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and ! to become suicide bombers.

The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ‘silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans,Japanese,Chinese,Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world wide, read this and think about it, and send it on – before it’s too late.

Emanuel Tanay, M.D.
2980 Provincial St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Liberals want us to think that terrorism began because George W. Bush took the oath of office. It’s not true. Islamic terrorism has been an exponentially-building phenomena that began over 60 years ago in Egypt. Their numbers, their attacks, and their influence have been growing stronger and stronger, regardless of what political party the president of the United States happened to belong to.

We can remember the Tehran hostage crisis in 1979. We can remember the truck bomb attack that killed 243 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1982. We can remember the numerous attacks that took place during the Clinton years (e.g. the first World Trade Center bombing, the U.S.S. Cole bombing, the simultaneous bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, etc.).

Liberals also want us to think that militarily responding to the 9/11 terror attack has only increased the numbers of terrorists. While this is probably technically true, it is equally true that America’s declaring war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in WWII also increased the number of German and Japanese conscriptions, or that the anti-slavery American North’s fighting against the pro-slavery South resulted in more Confederate conscriptions. Should we have therefore not fought in those wars?

Israel has been the subject of more terrorism than anyone, and they have learned through years of experience that they are safest when they fight back with massive force.

Another myth that many (thankfully not all) liberals want us to think is that Israel is the reason for or the cause of terrorism. This article by Dr. Tanay mentions some of the numerous conflicts that have been and are going on in the Islamic world today that have nothing to do with Israel.

FrontPage Magazine in its October 8, 2007 edition pointed out that:

“some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.”

There is a murderous spirit of violence that has seized Islam, and ignoring it will avail no better than ignoring a deadly cancer.

I vividly remember staring at my television screen in anger and horror as tens of thousands of Palestinians danced in the streets upon learning about the 9/11 attack. I remember the name of Osama bin Laden became the most popular name in Pakistan, Turkey, and several other Islamic states until the name was banned by the governments.

The United States, like Israel, will continue to be the subject of attacks (“the Great Satan”) whether we fight or whether we bear our throats to the enemy. 9/11 was not merely a “crime”; it was an act of war by a global enemy numbering in the tens of thousands who have declared war upon us. And it was an attack of “total war” against an unarmed civilian population.

Should the U.S. go to war against terrorists?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks – said after his capture that the American response was so massive and so deadly that he doubted if al Qaeda would ever attack America on its home soil again. It was only after the United States attacked Iraq that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program. And the “surge” strategy of sending thousands of troops against terrorist insurgents resulted in overwhelming victory in a war that liberals declared had been “lost.”

Robert Heinlein said it this way:

“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor; and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”