There is a small island just off the coast of Michigan's Upper Peninsula called "Mackinac Island". When automobiles were first brought there by ferryboat in the early 1900's, they spooked the horses so much that the island's fathers banned them, and they have remained thus banned ever since.

The place is now a tourist attraction, where tens of thousands go each summer to eat fudge, wear funny tourist hats, and see what life was like before there were cars. Either you walk to your hotel, ride a bike, or walk. Or, ride a horse.

Even servicing the tiny island, one thing there is, is horse poop. Tons of it, everywhere. The public works department does an outstanding job sweeping it up (-which requires battalions of men with big brooms), but it is ubiquitous, even though they thoroughly wash the streets each night. Road Apples get on your shoes, or pants if it is raining, or on your bicycle tires. This is a peek at the radical environmentalists vision for America.

People that populate Obama's EPA want to re-ruralize the United States, into a weird mixture of post-modern agrarian life. But, being thoroughly disconnected with life outside of hyper-urban America where they all (-to a person) actually live, have no waking thought of what that sort of life might actually look like. Sure, lets ban all of the chemicals, the petroleum products, the cheap, abundant electricity, the automobiles, the clean, efficient, miracle-producing hospitals. But what would it actually LOOK like?

It would look like Mackinac Island, with its legions of street sweepers swatting at disease-carrying flies, and vast mountains of horse-poop. The difference is, folks who tire of Mackinac Island get on the ferry boat and leave, with an ice-cream cone and a bag of fudge for the mainland. Sadly, though, in Obama's re-ruralized American Utopia, there is no ferryboat back to land. We're stuck here.

When your society aborts away two-thirds of the past two or three generations, when the culture puts no value on kinship and family, when the mainstream entertainments laugh at your long-established social norms and traditions, when your children are encouraged to remain adolescents well into adult-hood, and when your representatives in Government create a vast levithan of a welfare-state that is completely underwater fiscally, you have a situation that implores immigration policies that welcome the low-skilled and fecund.

This is the beginning of the Long Night in the western World, and folks like Gillian Duffy can see it from her vantage point on the ground, unlike the elites way up in their Ivory Towers, who can only see each other with their telescopes.

Wonderfully concise article. And we should be shocked that the home screed of Walter Duranty would carry the water for any wacked-out liberal cause why, exactly?

The father of a good friend of mine fought at the Bay of Pigs. He became one of the captured Cuban exile patriot freedom fighters, whose release was achieved by the $56 million dollar ransom paid by the United States to Castro just before Christmas in 1962.

This man I knew, my friends father, had a photograph that was taken of him (along with several others) standing in a line being reviewed by JFK at the Orange Bowl on December 29th, 1962. My friend's father (who, like so many of the others who fought so bravely against the Soviet-supplied Castroites, was very young, only 20 years old at the time) can be seen in the photograph, as I recall about second or third from the right. John Kennedy was shaking hands in the photo with another man, but my friends father was staring at his shoes, his right hand crumpled into a tight fist.

"It took every bit of discipline I had not to punch the son-of-a-bitch in the face when he shook my hand. And I'm not kidding", he said.

I was privileged to know this man. His name was Miguel. He has since passed away, at the very young age of 56. He carved out a good life here in America, and he seldom spoke of Cuba. "I'm an American now. As long as Castro exists, Cuba doesn't exist. It's a penal colony" he'd say.

The history of American treatment of Cuba, starting with the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt has been one of shame, ignominy, cowardice, greed and murder. It is what should be the most beautiful nation on the face of the earth. Instead, it is a hell-hole, and the news media-entertainment complex and the leftist academic culture continues to portray it as a something noble. It is not. It is a festering boil on the carbuncle of world socialism.

Someday soon, we will have a leadership with moral clarity in Washington, who says enough is enough, we are enforcing the Monroe Doctrine and are wiping out the withered vestiges of Castroism. And Havana will again be free.

God Bless the Heroes of the Bay of Pigs.

Maybe, but I never heard Ken Starr ask Mr. Clinton "Mr. President, did you get to Third Base with Miss Lewinski?"

Outstanding question. And, I must say, it's the most searing un-asked question I've heretofore heard regarding that sordid national episode.

I can think of no better example of a manufactured crisis than what does, or does not, happen to well water when we attempt to free naturally occurring terrestrial gas. Doesn't the federal government in general, and the Barack Obama in particular, have enough damned problems to take care of without bothering with this sort of crap?

To ask the question, of course, is to answer it, especially if you are an authoritarian Maoist statist radical leftist: No, they don't have enough to do. This collection of oligarchical monsters in Washington will not rest until they have utterly destroyed the mercantile underpinnings of this magnificent society. This includes completely benign sources of energy, such as natural gas.

Make no mistake: This radical administration despises the traditions of this society, and wants them destroyed-- root, branch and leaf. There is no better expression of the freedom our people enjoy than the free availability of fuels and energy: They provide EVERYTHING our modern society needs to remain, well, free and modern. It is essential for these disgusting, anti-freedom, anti-individual, anti-liberty thugs to limit the availability of all energy and fuel, thus limiting personal mobility and individual movement.

As a nation, we really need to wrap our minds around how alien, how foreign the Barack Obama cult is to our American institutions. And, rather like Alice through the looking glass, everything that to normal, liberty-loving Americans that might seem murderous, wantonly destructive, hurtful, petty, ugly and stupid, to Obama is loving, beautiful and adorable. This is especially true of seemingly pedestrian and prosaic things such as natural gas, grocery bags and lightbulbs-- things that are touchstones to a heretofore normal American life. They must be ripped out, and thrown on the Marxist fire of the bourgeoisie. It is truly nothing more complicated (or terrifying) than that.

I'll try a my pitching-wedge at this one...

Americans manifestly did NOT vote for the now-emerging Barack Obama's America.

They voted for the Barack Obama of the fall 2008 campaign, which was a moderate kind of happy-go-lucky slightly-left of center guy, quite possibly a centrist, but certainly no wild-eyed left-wing radical Stalinist who has emerged. They voted for a Barack Obama that was NEVER vetted, never scrutinized in the media, never asked a tough question, never examined in any biographically meaningful way. What were his grades in college? What is in his medical dossier? Who are his friends (I still have yet to be introduced to anyone who knew him before he emerged in Chicago)? What, exactly, did he mean by "everything is better if you, you know, spread the wealth around"?

Why didn't any major media outlet at least ask the very sensible question "can we see your birth certificate, because, after all, you are running for the most powerful position in the world, and it might give a better heft to your possible eventual presidency for such questions to be put to rest?" Why do they still refuse the even ask the question?

We were never even treated to an adult conversations about what he believed, other than he wasn't George Bush. Certainly the odious John McCain never pressed him into such a dialog. What about his extreme positions on abortion, reparations, and carbon remediation? What about folks like Reverend Wright, and Billy Ayers, and Father Flager? No, the Obama America voted for was a media creation, a phantom, and now they are stuck with hard-core reality.

But, have hope, Scott S: Jimmy Carter, too, laid waste to America. I remember the gas lines, the communist invasion of Afghanistan, the embarrassing cardigan sweaters, the ham-handed stupidity of Carter. I well remember Walter Cronkite intoning every night about "And that's the way it is, Friday, March 11, 1980--the 167th day of Captivity for our Hostages in Iran. This is Walter Cronkite, CBS New, Goodnight".. as if THAT'S the way it ALWAYS WOULD be.

Carter's Salt One was a stare-at-your shoes slap-down of the American Diplomatic core. The American President was being attacked by bunny rabbits. Every pundit in the land thought America was over, the Saudis were going to own us, the Russians were going to push us around all they wanted, we were running out of oil (set you thermostat at 58 during the night), the communists in Central America were on the move. We better get used to the lights dimming and then going out.

But, then a strong, optimistic, God-fearing Man entered the White House and said, the only thing we have to fear is the instrumentalities of a vast leviathan federal government. He refused to sign bad treaties, he refused to accept that high taxes were a permanent feature of American life, he refused to accept that the Soviet Union wasn't anything but a rotted hulk of an authoritarian evil and that America was the most magnificent place on God's green earth.

He was an honest, courageous, middle-American Man. It can, it will, happen again. And when it does, starting in January of 2013, America will again have sunrises that portend a new and invigorating Spring, rather than a dispirited, retrenching Fall. In fact, you could say, it will be Morning in America.

So, I put that chip-shot right in the hole.

Actually, Christ made quite a few allusions to being "left alone"... For example, imploring "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6)

But, this is getting out a bit in the weeds. You cannot make a salient argument that Christ came into the world to preach that the coercive iron fist of authoritarian government (Caesar? Herod? Robespierre? Obama?) can ever be used to advance the beneficent.

Government, by definition (even in elected limited Republics) GOVERNs, it cannot NURTURE. And because the only force available to Government IS coercion, Christ, I think, t would most assuredly stand against using the instrumentalities of coercion to advance even the most beneficent of intentions. Such things are battles of the heart, which is where the fundamental fault line lies between modern constructs of Left and Right are drawn.

No one ever born was more cognizant of our own "selfish interests" than Jesus Christ, but he was quite clear: There is only one path to overcome those interests, and it is arrived at through free will and love--not through force and coercion.

And, I might hasten to add, the federal levithan long ago dropped even the pretense of helping simply those who are the "least among us". It now has its tenterhooks into all economic strata. Just look at Cash For Clunkers, tax credits of Solar Panels, no-bid contracts to multi-national corporations, and on and on: Our tax and governing policy is an instrument of social construction, not simply a Christian "safety net", and it hasn't been for three or four generations.

Most of the inner urban areas of the Southern Tier of States in our nation are war zones, pitting one violent, brutal bunch of gang thugs against another. Los Angeles this year alone has suffered some 1,200 gang-related murders, most of them unreported and unsolved. Atlanta and Dallas are almost as bad. It is even drifting into places like Louisville and St. Louis. THIS incredible, race-based, violent low-level civil war has been bubbling unreported just below the surface of our national conscience, and it will bubble over at some point.

This violent, lawless state of affairs is the apex of Modern LIberal culture: Boys raised without fathers in homes without strong communal faith in the Judeo-Christian Lord, supported by a patrician leviathan federal welfare system, abetted by a rapacious plaintiff's bar, and egged on by a entertainment complex that gets a kick out of lawless, gang chic. THIS is the core constituency of Obama's America. It is anti-family, anti-faith, anti-children, anti-civil society. Why would we expect anything else from this pathetic Man-Child President?? --He is FROM this sick, warped, father-scorning culture.

Make no mistake: THIS will be the Gettysburg of this generation, and the "Health Care" bill is analogous to First Bull Run. For those of you who graduated from public schools in the last twenty years, look it up.