Posts Tagged ‘Russia’

How the party fell behind

These days, Republican political professionals seem to feel rather like Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1983 when he toured farms in Canada two years before he would become premier of the Soviet Union. Stunned by how productive a certain agribusiness was, Gorbachev asked how many farmhands had brought in the crop. “None,” came the answer; the farm was entirely mechanized.

From this one conversation, Gorbachev instantly understood the depths of the Soviet crisis and the desperate need for a new approach. For Republicans, the November 2012 election proved their technical inferiority in exactly the same way — it all came home to them in one day, Nov. 6, as President Obama’s campaign demonstrated a degree of technological superiority above the GOP’s efforts as shocking in its way as the mechanized agribusiness was to the hidebound ways of Soviet agriculture.

Read more by John Podhoretz at NY Post

Thirty years ago, the USSR was better known as the “Evil Empire.” Fast forward to today, when its successor Russia, is apparently the “Tax Free Empire“, and less socialist than France, at least to infamous millionaire expatriate Gérard Depardieu, who as reported previously has paid €145 million in taxes over 45 years, and who demonstratively decided to give up his French passport in the wake of France’s socialist 75% millionaire tax (subsequently ruled unconstitutional), and as of today, has just been granted Russian citizenship.

Read more at ZeroHedge.com

We are being played; it’s time we learned the game.

Conservatives have their Constitution. Progressives have their Narrative. The current battle for America is between these two concepts, and each side uses different rules to fight it.

One set of rules is consistent with an unchanging objective: limited government and individual freedoms. The other side’s rules are as fickle as their goals, which are never fully disclosed beyond the equivocal references to fairness and hyphenated forms of justice. They will have to remain vague and deny their true allegiances until a time when American voters will no longer squirm at the word “socialism.”

And yet spotting them isn’t that hard. As a bird is known by his feathers, socialists are known by their Game.

First tried and mastered in the USSR, the Game has since been popularized around the world, assuming various forms, names, and colors — from red to brown to green. It is now taking hold in the United States under the blue web banners of Obama’s campaign infomercials.

Read more by Oleg Atbashian at American Thinker

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What’s not to like?

Read more by Yuri N. Maltsev at mises.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAxKAzpGmVA

Monday night’s meeting of the Milwaukee South branch with Dr. Yuri Maltsev was impressively entertaining to say the least. Dr. Maltsev gave a wonderful talk and left many thankful for having attended. For those of you who were not able to make the meeting, here is Dr. Maltsev at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference in Naples, Florida where he presented the same talk. Enjoy!

In Liberty,

Michael S. Murphy
Chair, RPMC-South Branch

An Evening with Dr. Yuri Maltsev
6:45pm

The “K” Ranch
4840 S. Whitnall Ave.
Cudahy, WI. 53110

General Contribution to this event is only $10.

An Austrian school economist and economic historian, Dr. Yuri Maltsev is a Professor of Economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. and is a Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Dr. Maltsev graduated from Moscow State University with a Master of Arts in History and Social Sciences. He received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Labor Economics from the Institute for Labor Research in Moscow in 1980. Dr. Maltsev was a member of a team of Soviet economists that worked on President Gorbachev’s reforms package of perestroika at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In addition to appearing on PBS Newshour, CNN, C-Span, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Market, and NPR… Dr. Maltsev appeared with Tom Woods on the Glenn Beck Program in June 2010, where he explained his struggles in avoiding being punished by the Russian Government for reading and secretly teaching free market capitalism by citing the works of Austrian school economists, such as F.A. Hayek and his book, The Road to Serfdom.

Being critical of the Soviet Union’s attempts to preserve Socialism and Statist Policies, Dr. Maltsev will bring real life experiences to share and better inform the audience on the perils of Socialism as America heads further towards the left-leaning agenda with the policies of Barack Obama.

This is one event you cannot afford to miss!!!

This event is open to both members of the RPMC and the general public. This information is just too good just to keep it to ourselves, so please bring your friends and family.

If you wish to co-sponsor this event, please contact RPMC-South Branch Chair, Michael S. Murphy, prior to the event occurring, at murphyms@wi.rr.com, or call at (414) 364-8762.

Gold Sponsor VIP: $50
Silver Sponsor VIP: $30
Platinum Sponsor VIP: $20

All contributions and donations will go to the 4th Congressional District Republican Party of WI, James McFarland, Treasurer

The Europeans — and the American intellectuals who yearn to be European — have long believed that America was doomed. It goes way back. There was already a significant literature on the inferiority of Americans during the colonial period, replete with scientific proof: those who lived in North America were held to be shorter, weaker, and stupider than those who stayed put under the old regimes. In the view of the transatlantic intellectual elite, we never really had a chance.

Even though the American Revolution is the only durable success among the Big 3 — ours, the French, and the Russian — the intellectual elites on both sides of the Atlantic rarely admit that America is the only truly revolutionary country in the world, and they routinely reserve the term for Russians, Cubans, Iranians, and even Chinese. No matter that they are all failures, and that the only good news from those unfortunate countries is the result of the occasional leader — the great bridge player Deng Xiaoping, for example — who emulates American revolutionary principles.

Read more by Michael Ledeen at PJ Media

–SNIP– Too many people think that freedom, opportunity and a variety of choices are ever-present features of life in the U.S. — that fundamental transformation of America will not affect accustomed standards.

When we lived in the U.S.S.R., locked away from the world, kept from traveling abroad and surrounded by government-controlled sources of information, we couldn’t imagine what kind of life people had on the outside. Simple things, like tomatoes in stores in winter, seemed improbable.

–SNIP– It’s stunning for an immigrant from a socialist country to hear in the speeches of Democratic Party leaders platitudes taught in socialist countries. Even more stunning is how they resonate with people born in the free world.

Read more by SVETLANA KUNIN at Investors.com

In Europe, especially in Germany, hoisting a swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag is a crime. For decades after World War II, people have hunted down and sought punishment for Nazi murderers, who were responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people.

Here’s my question: Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned, but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind’s history.

Read more by Walter Williams at Investors.com

That basic truth cannot be repeated often enough. That figure comes from left-wing historians in France. If you thought totalitarianism would fade away after the Cold War, think again. North Korea keeps concentration camps for 200,000 people, according to recent satellite photos. The moral difference among Hitler, Stalin, and the Kims is zilch, zero, nada. There are no moral distinctions among willful mass murderers.

Liberals never seem to get that elementary point.

As Paul Johnson points out in his crucial book, Intellectuals, prominent Western professors and media heroes consciously enabled mass murder all over the Nazi-Marxist world. They still do. That is knowing, criminal collusion in murder on an unimaginable scale.

Big-name philosophers in England and France supported both Hitler and Stalin — a sort of serial mass murder-enabling racket. Paul Johnson’s book is an essential read.

But liberals everywhere are in denial about the new totalitarianism, which is exactly like the old totalitarianism.

Read more by James Lewis at The American Thinker

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book authored by several European academics and edited by Stéphane Courtois, which describes a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines. The book was originally published in 1997 in France under the title Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression by Éditions Robert Laffont. In the United States it is published by Harvard University Press.

From Wikipedia

Happy May Day!

Ronald Reagan, together with Margaret Thatcher, stood up to Moscow, and brought the Soviet Empire to its knees. In contrast, Barack Obama has gone on his knees to grovel before the Russians. The exchange between President Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul was a display of supplication before a major strategic adversary on an issue of great importance for US national security – missile defence. The private conservation was picked up on microphone, and relayed by ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper:

Read more by Nile Gardiner at blogs.telegraph.co.uk

Most of Europe’s clocks fell back by an hour last night (10/29), but not Russia, which will stay on “summer time” forevermore. Or until it changes its mind again.

By Cory Doctorow, on Sunday, Oct 30, at BoingBoing.net

–SNIP– In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama went on a mission to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN). The newly-minted U.S. senator was invited to be part of a Russian fact-finding tour that inspected a nuclear weapons site in Perm, Siberia. The base Lugar and Obama visited was where mobile launch missiles were being destroyed under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (CTR), which also went by the name of the Nunn-Lugar program.

What happened next — after the inspections were over — was at the time reported by several foreign news sources but was never reported in the USA by the CMM. The Russians detained Obama and Lugar for three hours at the airport, demanding to examine both Obama’s and Lugar’s passports and search their plane. Some sources reported that the Russians accused Barack Obama of being a spy.

But wait — there’s more!

According to an Italian source, the Russians did not accuse Obama of being an American spy; they accused him of being a spy for the British! The report went on to say that the incident ended up involving the White House, the U.S. State Department, and military officials, along with their counterparts in Moscow.

Strangely enough, an official report from Lugar’s office about the trip never mentioned the incident. Neither did Barack Obama in 2008 when he was desperate to exhibit some foreign policy chops.

One other oddity: in the fall of 2008, Obama admitted on his Fightthesmears.com site that he had held dual citizenship with both the United States and Great Britain (the site explained that this was due to Barack Obama, Sr. being a foreign national) until 1982. Did the Russians know something about Obama’s citizenship in 2005 that ordinary Americans don’t know in 2011?

Another story no one has seen fit to ask about: Obama’s Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure.

Read more by Mondo Frazier at American Thinker

Possessing the biggest-yet space telescope, just launched into orbit, and the only manned spaceship that can take cosmonauts to the ISS, Russia’s role in world space programs is irreplaceable, the country’s space chief Vladimir Popovkin told RT.

rt.com, 7/18/2011

–SNIP– RT:With America’s shuttle program coming to an end, Russia’s set to become the only country capable of sending people into space. How long will that monopoly last?

VP: The United States is planning to create a new space launch program for manned ships and build a new manned spaceship with the help of investment from the private sector by 2016. Let’s wait and see how things go. I think that today Russia’s role is irreplaceable because at the moment the world has only one manned spaceship, the Soyuz, which is capable of taking cosmonauts to orbit, including the International Space Station (ISS).

Read more at https://rt.com/news/popovkin-space-industry-soyuz/

We’ve come to this just 42 years after Apollo??

Steyn on America, 6/15/2011

Why can’t America win wars? It’s been two-thirds of a century since we saw (as President Obama vividly put it) “Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” And, if that’s not quite how you remember it, forget the formal guest list, forget the long-form surrender certificate, and try to think of “winning” in a more basic sense.

The United States is currently fighting, to one degree or another, three wars. Iraq — the quagmire, the “bad” war, the invasion that launched a thousand Western anti-war demonstrations and official inquiries and anti-Bush plays and movies — is going least badly. For now. And making allowances for the fact that the principal geostrategic legacy of our genteel protectorate is that an avowed American enemy, Iran, was able vastly to increase its influence over the country on our dime.

Read more at http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4132/26/