In a style reminiscent of the Third Reich, Obama celebrated his first 100 days in office. The media sycophants tripped over each other with accolades. The Leader graced his people with speeches and smiles. The government presses kept busy minting more money to better bind the people to Him. The alphabet networks called him the greatest president ever, the savior of the common people, just a regular guy who can eat hamburgers with the rest of us. Wow!

In the midst of all the hoopla, we received via email, without attribution, a pictorial ranking on a different scale. It is worth sharing. Below is a ranking of the world’s greatest disasters. Here too, Obama is a winner. Just click on a thumbnail to enlarge the image and read the details.

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New York Times (NYT) 5 Year Stock Chart - High: $47.00 Low: $3.44

President Obama, Ben Bernanke and Warn Buffett declared “war on the economy.” The economy is losing. It is simply not possible for the Fed to borrow trillions of dollars, driving interest rates up, simultaneously printing trillions to push rates back down to the .25% target, without diluting the cash savings of individuals and inflating the prices of everything else. Yet, in the trenches, life goes on. The troops follow old routines as if nothing has changed.

Investors are sitting on cash as a defensive strategy, just like they have always done, unaware that the forces unleashed by Obama’s “war on the economy” are bound to reduce the value of cash on hand. As the newly minted money trickles down from the political classes, through their Wall Street buddies, to main street, there will be twice as many pieces of paper chasing the same assets. Shouldn’t we all be buying assets now, before the wave of Bernanke dollars washes ashore? Read more >

Jonah Goldberg is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and contributing editor to National Review. His new book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, is a must read scholarly work that explains much about today’s left.

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities-where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler’s Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
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Sure, anybody can control temperatures inside, but what about outside? Outside is much bigger than inside and many people spend at least part of their day there. Temperature change outside can inconvenience millions of people. Women, minorities, and the poor are hit particularly hard. Politicians have been ignoring the phenomena, pretending that it does not exist, even though temperature change is settled science. Pretty much all scientists agree that temperature change is real. There is a consensus, except for Joe Sacrilege, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Rio Linda University. Crazy Joe, as his friends call him, is a temperature change denier.

Since each degree of global temperature change inflicts a measurable amount of suffering, we have decided to organize the Foundation Against Temperature Change Outside (FATCO). The goal of the Foundation will be to increase the level of awareness of temperature change and take concrete steps to reduce temperature change by one degree every ten years. FATCO will establish a temperature change misery index, modeled after the Jimmy Carter misery index. The index will show people at a glance the degree of suffering they will experience if they step outside. Some FATCO insiders have suggested that the index should be called “thermometer”. Perhaps, we’ll see.
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