WILL THE USA GO THE WAY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

The decline of the Roman Empire was a gradual transformation that cannot be dated precisely. Some stepping stones in the path toward the loss of the Western part of the Empire, the weakening of its Eastern part, and the progressive estrangement between the two halves, are nevertheless worth remarking:

The first war with the Visigoths (376 - 382), culminating in the Battle of Adrianople (August 9, 378), in which a large Roman army was defeated by the Visigoths, and emperor Valens was killed. The Visigoths, fleeing a migration of the Huns, had been allowed to settle within the borders of the Empire by Valens, but were mistreated by the local Roman administrators, and rebelled

The second war with the Visigoths, led by king Alaric, in which they raided Greece, and then invaded Italy, culminating in the sack of Rome (410). The Visigoths eventually left Italy, and founded the Visigothic Kingdom in southern Gaul and Hispania.
The rise of the Hunnic Empire under Attila and Bleda (434-453), who raided the Balkans, Gaul, and Italy, threatening both Constantinople and Rome.
The second sack of Rome, by the Vandals (455). effectively ended the Empire that had built the system of aqueducts, the Apian Way, the Forum and the Coliseum.

But there was an internal decay within the Roman populace that contributed to it's fall
The decadence, amorality and the general degradation of the populace resulted in a weak army( Roman Legions) that once conquered the whole of the known world.
A.H Jones wrote: ".the decay of trade and industry was not a cause of Rome’s fall. There was a decline in agriculture and land was withdrawn from cultivation, in some cases on a very large scale, sometimes as a direct result of barbarian invasions. However, the chief cause of the agricultural decline was high taxation on the marginal land, driving it out of cultivation. Jones is surely right in saying that taxation was spurred by the huge military budget and was thus ‘indirectly’ the result of the barbarian invasion."
The argument is made that Rome's loss of her provinces in the fifth century was not an "inevitable effect of any of those features which have been rightly or wrongly described as causes or consequences of her general 'decline.'" The central fact that Rome could not dispense with the help of barbarians for her wars (gentium barbararum auxilio indigemus) may be held to be the cause of her calamities, but it was a weakness which continued to be far short of fatal but for the sequence of contingencies pointed out above. WEAKNESS!!

Roman decadence was the gradual decline in the ancient Roman republican values of family, virtus, and dignitas that ultimately led to the decay of Rome. According to Edward Gibbon, the root of the decadence may have lain within the political system. Sound familiar with what is going on in the halls of Congress and the Supreme court today?

There is no doubt in my mind that Stalin was correct when he said we will not have to conquer you. We will do it from within. I paraphrase his words, but the meaning is still there.
A look at the major Ivy league university faculties will show you that most so called tenured scholars are at the very least leftist socialists and at the extreme, Communists. These are the people who are teaching the next generation of leaders in a Godless, Statist mind set!

The TV is filled with advertisements that just a few years would be considered pornographic. Most of them are adds to increase sexual pleasure for couples, and there is an add that touts a vibrator for women! While the morality of this country is being degraded the value of human life is no longer important thanks to the Supreme Court. There is even a push to force Catholic and other doctors who have a conscience, to make them perform abortions even if their conscience says an abortion is a sin. Not only the doctor is being attacked, but Catholic hospitals may be forced to allow abortions in their Obstetrics departments!

Will the advent of Obama's National Health Plan open the doors to rationing of services and eventually the withholding of treatment to save the lives of older patients? If you increase the number of people who are eligible and able to access the limited number of medical doctors and hospitals were presently have. It is axiomatic that there will have to be rationing of services and preferences for treatment based upon the secular attitude of a persons "worth to society".This has ominous consequences that the Left who are pushing the "government Option" do not want you to think about, nor will the answer questions that are asked as the Town Hall meetings have shown!

And if that does not destroy or individual and States rights they have the Cap and Trade bill that will deliver the knock out blow to our way of life if they can hood wink enough Congressmen and Senators to pass this heinous bill!

These are questions that need to be answered, but getting a straight answer from Obama and his minions is "like pulling teeth"!

WHEN WILL THE PRESIDENT DEFEND THE USA?

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —Ronald Reagan

When Barack Obama was a candidate for president, the main plank of his foreign policy, other than withdrawing from Iraq, was agreeing to "talk to our enemies," notably Iran and Syria. The intellectual rationale for this policy, as far as one can make out, is that because George W. Bush wouldn't commit the office of the presidency itself to direct negotiations with the leaders of these regimes, and because everything George W. Bush did was wrong, reversing that policy would bear fruit.

Obama went to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a "missionary" with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.

No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle."Don't blame me, as I was only a child when it happened"!

None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world.a nation built on the fruits of greed, and racism, have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him. And after sitting in a pew of Reverend Wrights hate filled church for 20 years may explain this horrendous betrayal of America.

The hopeful way to view the Obama administration's openings to Chávez, the Castros, Iran and the others would be: This had better work. Because if it doesn't, a lot of people who've spent years working in opposition to these regimes -- in hiding or in prison in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, Burma, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan -- are going to get hammered. North Korea's opposition is invisible.

President Obama has painted in indelible ink images of America that cannot be taken back. These images will remain in both the minds of those who received the apologies, and in the minds of the American public of those who vote. The enduring power of the negative images Obama painted to satisfy one more campaign promise will endure, and come back to haunt Obama in 2010 and if he keeps it up will sweep him out of the OVAL OFFICE in 2012! Source:Wall Street Journal

OBAMA TAKES "TURN THE OTHER CHEEK" TO THE EXTREME!

First he traveled to Great Britain and then the major powers of the EU, Germany, France and the Muslim Country of Turkey with the message of apology and buckets full of taxpayers dollars for appeasement.
Then he went to the meeting with Ortega, Chavez and Castro last week, and said "don't blame me because it all happened when I was child".Not a word in defense of the Country he swore to defend and protect in his swearing in as President.
He shook hands with Chavez as though he was an old friend and listened for 90 minutes to a tirade from the Tyrant Ortega who blamed all the worlds ills on the USA, without uttering a single word of protest.

The picture of the president of the United States smiling broadly as he met President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela schockd me. Our president is considered a nice guy. Chavez is anything but.


US President Barack Obama,shook hands warmly with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, Friday.

The State Department maintains that Chávez has attacked democratic traditions and has put Venezuelan democracy on life support with unchecked concentration of power, political persecution, and intimidation. Foreign Affairs magazine says that Chávez is a power-hungry dictator with autocratic and megalomaniacal tendencies whose authoritarian vision and policies are a serious threat to his people. In testimony before the US Senate, the South American project director for the Center for Strategic International Studies said that Chavez's government engages in "arresting opposition leaders, torturing some members of the opposition (according to human rights organizations) and encouraging, if not directing, its squads of Bolivarian Circles to beat up members of Congress and intimidate voters-all with impunity."

In spite of a presidential term limit of six years, Chávez has suggested that he would like to remain in power for 25 years. Hmmm. An autocratic dictator who abuses human rights and undermines democracy being warmly embraced by the American president. There's something wrong with that picture.

Then there was the incident of President Barack Obama seeming to bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 summit in London. The president's people denied it was a bow, but it certainly was a sign of great deference from the American president to the dictator of a country who just six weeks ago sentenced a 75-year-old woman to 40 lashes for having been secluded with her nephew after he delivered bread to her home. This is the same Abdullah whom, when asked why Saudi Arabia prohibits the public practice of religions other than Islam, said, "It is absurd to impose on an individual or a society rights that are alien to its beliefs or principles." Source: The Values Network

Obama is also pursuing a renewed relationship with Cuba, a country which engages in systemic human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions. Censorship is so extensive that Cubans face five-year prison sentences for connecting to the Internet illegally. And not only is emigration illegal, but even discussing it carries a six-month prison sentence.

WATCHING ALL THIS, I was wondering what the new American standards are. How oppressive must a leader be before we determine that he has not merited a hug by the democratic standard-bearer of the free world, the president of the United States? Yes, I get it. We have to speak to our enemies, and America has to push "reset" on its relationship with many of these countries. We should try and change them through charm. But who said the president himself, rather than a lower-level diplomat, must do so? That is what the State Department is for!

And if Obama feels that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez, must it be with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show girl scouts selling cookies? It must surely be disheartening for those who suffer oppression in countries like Venezuela, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to see the American president backslapping their oppressors when these victims have always looked up to the United States as their champions.

In Turkey, Obama boldly declared that "the United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam." But the person who was at war with Islam, Saddam Hussein, the man who killed nearly one million Muslims, was removed by a country which has already paid with the lives of 4,500 of its servicemen and women. The same is true of the Taliban, another group whom the Obama administration is considering talking to, who beat Muslim women in the streets of Afghanistan. Yet the president seems reluctant to publicly identify these real enemies of Islam.

I am increasingly troubled by his seeming inability to call out rogue dictators. He seems to want everyone to like him except the Conservatives in America, of whom he says we would be better off if we didn't listen to them!

While he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised, "As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide." But in a press conference in Ankara with President Abdullah Gul, he refused to use the word "genocide" when challenged by a reporter on the issue. Yet, it was Obama's early foreign policy adviser Samantha Power of Harvard who wrote "A Problem from Hell", the definitive book on the American non-intervention in repeated 20th-century genocides, beginning with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks which killed 1.5 million between the years of 1915 and 1923. Source: Jerurslem Post

WHILE THE FBI INVESTIGATES VETERANS OF WAR OBAMA SIGNS UP MORE GOVT. EMPLOYEES

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —Ronald Reagan

As documented by Michele Marie Moore in the book Oklahoma City: Day One, the legislation provided a general charter for the FBI and other agencies, including the military, to investigate political groups and causes at will. In addition, the legislation authorized secret trials, the use of illegally obtained evidence, allowed the military to engage in law enforcement activities (in violation of Posse Comitatus), relaxed rules for wiretaps, and allowed the president to determine who is a terrorist. “The bill was specifically designed to give the President of the United States the ability to name whomever he wished as a political enemy for the purpose of that person’s removal, and the appropriate media label would be ‘terrorist’. One could also foresee, as a result of this bill, great strides in the effort to completely disarm the American people,” Source:Congressional Record

While setting the Defense Department and the FBI's sights on returning veterans for possible Terrorist activity, Obama is quietly filling his own "army" of civil reervants by legislative fiat.
Seventy-five years to the day after President Roosevelt signed the Civilian Conservation Corps into law, the House of Representatives sent President Obama a sweeping expansion of national service that will engage millions of Americans in meeting national needs and solving local problems through volunteer service.Of Course he signed the Bill into law, as it would put more people on the Government payroll and thus result in more voters for the Democrats and him!

The House voted 275-149 to accept the Senate amendments to H.R. 1388, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The Senate passed the bill in a 79-19 vote and renamed the legislation after Senator Kennedy, a longtime champion of national service. The House action then sent the bill to President Obama, who has signed the measure.

The legislation would reauthorize and expand national service programs administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency created in 1993. The Corporation engages four million Americans in result-driven service each year,(note the words "each year") including 75,000 AmeriCorps members, 492,000 Senior Corps volunteers, 1.1 million Learn and Serve America students, and 2.2 million additional community volunteers mobilized and managed through the agency’s programs. All people who are dependent upon the Federal government for their livelihood.

Under the legislation, the Corporation would increase and enhance opportunities for Americans of all ages to serve by setting AmeriCorps on a path to increase from 75,000 to 250,000 positions each year, establishing a Summer of Service program, expanding eligibility for Senior Corps programs, and creating Silver Scholarships and Encore Fellowships for older Americans. It will strengthen America’s civic infrastructure through the creation of grant programs to invest in social innovation, support volunteer mobilization, and build nonprofit capacity. The new law is also designed to strengthen the management, cost-effectiveness and accountability of programs by increasing flexibility, consolidating funding streams, and introducing more competition. It also includes ACORN as one of the organizations that "volunteers"(who are paid) help financially to further their education.


The legislation would reauthorize and expand national service programs administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency created in 1993. The Corporation engages four million Americans in result-driven service each year, including 75,000 AmeriCorps members, 492,000 Senior Corps volunteers, 1.1 million Learn and Serve America students, and 2.2 million additional community volunteers mobilized and managed through the agency’s programs. Thus growing the Federal government even more as Obama crows about his cut in the Federal Budget of 100 million dollars! Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself; 4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel; Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane; 7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system; 1/10,000th of the government's operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.Source: New media Journal

An administration that chooses not to call those who cut off heads of captured Americans like Richard Pearl, TERRORISTS! They have the alert alarm for returning veterans who join or might join Militia groups.
While the FBI stood by and let the Acorns led radicals destroy private property of those who received bonus money from AIG, and did nothing to stop the pirates holding the captain of an American flagged vessel. It took three navy snipers of a SEAL team to resolve the issue! These people are thanks to Secretary Napolitano's leaking a redone memo alerting all law enforcement agencies to consider returning veterans as potential terrorists. Obama was quietly growing the number of people he could legally put on the government payroll. All of whom will be beholden to the "Messiah" for the rest of their lives. Unless they wake up and realize that this President is a Statist who loves adulation and power.

OBAMA even has on the agenda, for action very soon, the creation of a Federal Police Force comparable to the size of our present military! Where have we heard of such a force before. Perhaps those of you old enough, as I am, will remember the special forces troops that Hitler formed called the "SS". A force that struck fear in the hearts of any one who dared to dissent from Hitlers plans, or failed to pledge allegiance to him!!

YOU CANNOT GIVE WHAT YOU DO NOT HAVE!

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —Ronald Reagan.

You cannot say President Obama has the best interests of the United States in his heart. He is all about appeasement and "cow towing" to the most dastardly dictators like Chavez and the Castro brothers.
And We thought Jimmy Carter was bad! Obama has been a world traveler. Traveling all over the World apologizing and offering taxpayers money to every country he has visited while his sycophants in the White House and the Congress are putting the finishing touches to his "statist" change for America. His apparent lack of respect for the values of human life, liberty, personal property rights and free speech will all be part of the change he is planning for us.

How can a man who sat in the church pews of Reverend Wright, and associated with radical weathermen like Ayers and Dorn possibly hold dear to his heart what the average American takes for granted. Our Liberty and freedom from tyrannical rule? This president is at the very least a socialist statist who believes that the government can do a better job of running our lives and business than we presently are doing under the free enterprise system.

It should be apparent that Obama is an advocate of World government, as he curries the favor of world leaders at the disparagement of the USA. He apparently is not proud of anything previous Presidents have done, especially George Bush, as he blames every failure and slight on the past president. Never once considering that the Congress of the United States was complicit in all actions done by Bush including the invasion of Iraq!

Obama bowed to the Muslim King, and found time to visit a Mosque in Turkey, but when he returned to the USA and gave a speech at Georgetown University, his "caporegimes" had the University cover up the name of Jesus on the wall behind where he was speaking.

This man who swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, should have reminded the Germans and the French that if it were not for the tens of thousands of young men who gave their lives during WWII. The Germans would be speaking Russian and the French would be speaking German! Yet he apologized to both for America's arrogance, and did not find time to visit the Hallowed Ground in Normandy, France where thousands of serviceman are buried who died to make them free!

A patriotic president would not have sat idle while the tyrant Ortega trash mouthed America. A more patriotic man would have walked out in the middle of the 50 minute tirade, or at least spoke up to object. But then Obama seems comfortable in the company of people who hate America!He even married a woman who said she was never proud of the USA until the Democrats nominated her husband!

But then I guess I should not be surprised. A man cannot give homage to a country that he believes is corrupt, unfair, and racist.
He seems to be filled with class hatred and disgust for the free enterprise system, so I must conclude that he cannot show pride where there is none!