A brief review of international matters.

First, Mrs. Clinton. Apparently, she does have influence with her foreign allies. The government of socialist thug Hugo Chavez has implemented “the Hillary Tax.” Starting this week in Venezuela, foreign oil companies will have to pay between 50 and 60 percent higher taxes on earnings — which should pretty much wipe out profits. This is exactly what Senator Clinton promised to do to our oil companies, but Hugo got to the finish line first!

Next, as part of his outreach program to convince Jewish voters that he can be trusted on the Middle East, Senator Obama criticized former President Carter for meeting with Hamas. Senator Obama, Jimmy Carter is doing what you said you would do: talk with our terrorist enemies! He is you! And you are him! (And you “are the ones we’ve been waiting for”?)

Incidentally, Hamas leadership says Carter’s visit has boosted their legitimacy. Another terrorist group aided and abetted by American Democrats and liberals.

Finally, despite offering apologies, kissing up, and prostrating on hands and knees, CNN’s still in the China doghouse. China remain upset over remarks by CNN commentator Jack Cafferty, who called Chinese products “junk” and disparaged China leadership as “goons” and “thugs.”

An editorial in The People’s Daily, the communist paper, accused Cafferty of inciting “verbal violence,” and called CNN’s work “information terrorism.”

CNN: The Information Terrorists! Why, the Chinese got it right! Give them credit!

There’s a new Zogby poll out that says:

“Americans are feeling slightly more optimistic this month as they come to grips with a struggling economy and an uncertain future, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. The Reuters/Zogby Index, which measures the mood of the country, rose sharply to 95.5, up from 87.7 in March, as all 10 measures of public opinion used in the Index climbed.”

Now, how can this be?

“Concerns about personal finances, job security and the direction of the country eased at least slightly, and positive ratings climbed for President George W. Bush, the US Congress and economic and foreign policy. Pollster John Zogby,” in analyzing his own poll, “said the improved marks were mostly a sign of tempered expectations as the public settles in for a rocky ride on the economy.”

Okay, fine and dandy. How does that make any sense? How does the public mood go up when they lower their expectations? I don’t know.

“More Americans feel safe from foreign threats and more are proud of the United States, and the number of Americans confident their children will have a better life jumped from 61 percent to 65 percent.”

That makes no sense whatsoever. It makes no sense with what is happening in the country today. Unless a conservative population were the ones polled, this makes no sense with what we’re being told is the truth about the mental state of the American people.

I, frankly, hope this is accurate.

But Reuters came out with this story:

“A majority of small and medium-sized businesses say the US economy is in worse shape than five years ago and nearly half expect a recession in the next year, according to a survey released on Wednesday.”

Now, that’s more like it from the media! That’s more like it, the doom and gloom that you’ve all come to be know for, that’s the way to keep up the tradition of destroying people’s attitudes.

Liberalism is the greatest enemy this country faces, because too much of this country is ignorant.

It’s the most expensive commodity we have, ignorance.

If there were half the education in this country that there used to be, liberalism would have died long ago. It would still be around but it wouldn’t be anywhere near a majority because people wouldn’t in any way, shape, manner, or form trust it or believe it, because there’s no evidence anywhere in the history of the world that it works.

It does not deliver on its promises. So why focus on Obama? Because these people are telling us for us, they’re telling us themselves exactly who they are and what they’re going to do.

The liberals have redefined patriotism, hate your country, hate the military, seek America’s defeat. Hate American corporations. Hate all of these things that have made this country, that’s patriotism, standing up to our evil, guilty country.

If you are proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you. You are stupid or you are ignorant. You are bitter and you cling to your religion or you cling to your guns, and the fact that you love your country means that you’ve been hoodwinked and that you’re a NASCAR fan, and that you’re stupid. Because you don’t have the enlightenment to see exactly all of the evils posed to the peoples of the world by the United States of America.

Well, I think it’s the greatest enemy that we face, the most serious challenge that we face, and people say, “How can it be bigger than Islamofascism?” Because they don’t find anything wrong with Islamofascism. The liberals think Islamofascists are Islamofascists because we’ve made them that way, because of our support for Israel or because of our unfair treatment of various countries, or because of our wealth, because of our prosperity. They think it’s justified that we’re hated on this basis. They think it’s justified that our reputation’s in the tank, in their view, and what do they want to do to fix this reputation?

They want to cut the US down in size; they want to let people take shots at us. We deserve it.

You think I’m making it up? How many liberals have been quoted, among them Jeremiah Wright, who said America’s chickens are coming home to roost, we deserve to get hit on 9/11; we deserve those two jets to fly into our buildings; we deserve the Pentagon to get hit; we deserve more.

Our illustrious State Department after 9/11 convenes a serious forum on why do they hate us. Who cares why they hate us? Nothing justifies the murder of 3,000 innocent people. We have liberals saying, “Oh, yeah? How many innocent people have we killed? We deserve this.” So if the liberals triumph, and they triumph in such a way that they have four or eight years unabated to mess this country up, and if liberals do not find a great threat in Islamofascism, then where are we?

So, all of this, all the rest of this is academic. Liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces. Because liberalism today is so damn close to socialism, and in some of these statements that some of these Obama supporters are making, and in fact some of the statements he’s making, it approaches Marxism. It’s just stunning. And yet how many people do you think know what’s wrong with Marxism?

We need to do an education on who Marx is, because if there has been any education in our high schools and junior highs on Karl Marx it’s all been laudatory. It just means we share everything. Marxism means we share. We have too much, and we’re raping the planet, and we’re stealing other resources that are rightfully the ownership of other peoples around the world and we’re keeping them poor and so forth.

The only thing keeping people poor in this world is the unequal distribution of capitalism.

Socialism, liberalism, communism, whatever you want to call it, everywhere it’s been tried, it has failed.

Look at the former Eastern bloc nations that have escaped since the Soviet Union went south. Almost all of them have the flat tax. Almost all are using a flat tax, from anywhere from 15% to 22% and their economies are booming. The evidence of the failure of the Soviet Union, of Cuba, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, it’s just out there for everybody to see. And yet, people don’t see it.

We’re the greatest country in the history of humanity, and we are a force for good. We are the solution to the world’s problems. We are not the problem.

And yet, we have to fight this battle. We have to somehow get into arguments about the greatness of this country, with other Americans. And so this is why I’m focusing on Obama, and this is why I’m focusing on Clinton, and this is why I’m trying to get as many people as possible to recognize who these people are, by virtue of their own words. What bigger indictment can there be than Obama and Clinton and all the rest of these Democrats admit they have contempt for regular people?

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness concept — the Democrats and Liberals are not for life, they’re not for liberty, they’re not for the pursuit of happiness. How can they be for life when they’re sponsoring and have sponsored and promoted and have promoted abortion as a political objective over the years.

Liberty, what liberty? You give these people half the chance and we won’t have any. It’s happening very slowly and it’s happening under a false premise and a false guise, and that is we need to give up some of our liberty as punishment for destroying the planet.

So we gotta get rid of lightbulbs in 2012, gotta put in a bunch of worthless, dangerous lightbulbs. This is not America. This is not the America I know.

We have a situation coming up, Harry Reid and his party are trying to pass a piece of legislation in the Senate. He thinks he’s got 60 votes for it. I think it’s called Lieberman-Warner. What this does — in fact, parts of this are going to happen in 2009 regardless. Do you realize, that the US, because of a Supreme Court decision, the US Fish and Wildlife Service will be able, after 2009, to proclaim that a Wal-Mart store or any other kind of factory in Tennessee cannot be built because its carbon footprint might impact anything on the endangered species list or the melting of Arctic ice, which is not happening. So if the Fish and Wildlife Service, a bureaucracy, nobody on there elected by the people, and a circuit judge and Supreme Court have given the Fish and Wildlife Service and the EPA this power to declare that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and none of these people are elected, and they have no accountability.

Starting in 2009, the Fish and Wildlife Service wants to say that an apartment building in Chicago is going to have a carbon footprint too big that would impact species on the protected species list or endangered list or cause Arctic ice to melt, it can’t be built without some formula where the people that want to build a Wal-Mart or the people that want to build the apartment complex have to go somewhere and buy up somebody else’s permission to pollute.

We are propagandizing young kids. We are propagandizing them in school, and we are not teaching them anything. We’ve have a dropout rate that is embarrassing. We’ve got an illiteracy rate that is embarrassing. Liberalism has destroyed the black family. It’s destroyed the incentive of way too many Americans. It has dispirited their effort and their ability to realize how good they can be.

Liberalism survives today by blaming this country for virtually everything, making sure as many Americans as possible don’t like their country, don’t respect their country, hate the traditions and institutions that have made this country great.

We have two liberal Democrats running for the Democrat presidential nomination, who, if elected, will continue this tide almost unstoppably, because they’re going to have to increase majorities in the House and the Senate if they win the presidency. It’s going to be four years of trouble, four years of a huge mess, and it’s gonna take a long time to reverse this. Reverse it; it’s gonna take a long time to stop it.

I know it sounds maybe a little simplistic to just blame a single word, “liberalism.” But it’s true.

They have destroyed everything they’ve tried to fix, from poverty, to racism, to economic injustice, to social injustice. Everything they have tried has failed, and they don’t permit their results to be examined. No, no, no, we have to imagine their intentions, their honorable intentions. They believe the world can be perfected. We don’t. Any time they think that the people who don’t think the world can be perfected are standing in their way, and we are evil, because we disagree with them.

For a party that claims tolerance, their actions are contradictory and have always been that way. Just another big liberal lie.

This is Harry Reid on the Senate floor April 14,2008.

REID: Mr. President, someone wanting to visit the Capitol today, there’s no place for them…to gather. They gather… It used to be out on the East Front. Now they gather on the West Front — and the people who work joke about, “You can always tell when it’s summertime because you can smell the visitors.” What they mean by that, Mr. President, is they stand out there in the high humidity — heat, sweating. There’s really… There’s no place for them to go. The bathrooms in this facility are almost nonexistent. There’s one on this side, one on the other side, both very small.

So… (laughing) Harry Reid says you can smell these small town people when the show up to visit the Capitol, because they stink, because they sweat. Nice…