SEA ISLE, N.J. — I should be worrying about how the politicians are killing the nation financially, but that's on the back burner today because the 25th annual Red, White and Blueberry Festival is right up the road and they're estimating that 10,000 of us will show up and eat a million blueberries.

That works out to just 100 blueberries each -- a piece of cake. Or a nice stack of blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup and a side of blueberry sausages.

The party is in Hammonton, N.J., the "Blueberry Capital of the World." What lobsters are to Maine, what wings are to Buffalo, that's what blueberries are to Hammonton, home to sandy soil and dozens of blueberry farms.
 

The John Birch Society Live on KWEL 1070 AM
Bill Cherry, JBS Development Officer, is a weekly guest on The Morning Show- Craig Anderson Local & Live

APPLETON, WIS. – July 26, 2011 – The John Birch Society Development Officer, Bill Cherry, is a weekly guest on The Morning Show- Craig Anderson Local & Live on KWEL 1070 AM on Thursdays from 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. (Central Standard Time).

When Chalmers Johnson, a retired Asian scholar and former Naval officer during the Korean War, visited Japan in the mid-1990s, he was surprised to discover 38 U.S. bases on Okinawa alone, half a century after U.S. forces captured the island in the last great battle of World War II. If Johnson, past president and founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute at the University of San Francisco and author of numerous scholarly books on Asian affairs, had been unaware of the enormity of America’s military involvement in far-off lands, it is hardly surprising that the public at large has been even less aware. The American people, he would later observe in The Sorrows of Empire, “do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire.”

Most reasonably informed Americans know our country has long had a large number of overseas bases, but we seldom think about how extensive that network is or what it costs — in lives, in dollars, and in the simmering resentment of people living in the shadow of a foreign military power.
 

The one unmistakable conclusion that can be drawn from Monday's dueling press statements on the debt limit battle is that President Barack Obama is losing the argument for endless deficit spending. But a second conclusion is equally important. House Speaker John Boehner, whom Obama accused of trying to sell out the fiscally responsible Tea Party faction of his Republican party, is losing as well.

President Obama bemoaned in his July 25 address to the nation that "a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a different approach — a cuts-only approach." That was a clear reference to the Tea Party movement. And because the U.S. Constitution allows the House to stop any legislation, Obama's only remaining strategy is to appeal to the American people. "So I’m asking you all to make your voice heard. If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your member of Congress know.  If you believe we can solve this problem through compromise, send that message."

The big news, as far as the media are concerned, is the political game of debt-ceiling chicken that is being played by Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But, however much the media are focused on what is happening inside the Beltway, there is a whole country outside the Beltway — and the time is long overdue to start thinking about what is best for the rest of the country, not just for right now but for the long haul.

However the current debt-ceiling crisis turns out, the current economic turmoil in financial markets around the world should cause some serious thoughts about the long run, and about the whole idea of a national debt-ceiling.

Some people may have been shocked when the credit-rating firm Moody's recently suggested that the debt-ceiling law be repealed, in order to avoid fiscal crises which can throw world financial markets into turmoil that can injure countries around the world.

In the battle of environmentalists against business that began years ago in the United States, one of its latest victims is Birmingham, Alabama, coal mine owner Ronnie Bryant.

During a recent public hearing in Birmingham — called to consider whether to place a coal mine near a river that serves as a source of drinking water for parts of the Birmingham metro area — Bryant heard accusations by an overflowing crowd that businesses in the area were polluting the drinking water and causing cancer.

Though both state environmental officials and mine operators asserted that the mine would not pose a threat to the drinking water, environmentalists contended that it would.

Although the reviews on the new Captain America movie have been good, according to us afficiandoes of the Golden and Silver ages of comic books, it would be very strange, but very welcome, if Hollywood took the next logical step and made a second Captain America film which showed his fight against Communism. It was easy, during the Second World War, to create gruesome and nasty stereotypes of Nazi and Japanese military and political leaders. The nastiness of Hitler and the gruesomeness of the Rape of Nanking were all too real.

But comics, of course, avoided all reference to the nastiness and gruesomeness of our “ally,” Uncle Joe [Stalin] or the unbelievable brutality of the Soviets towards everyone: Germans, of course; allies like Rumanians and Hungarians; but also victims of Nazi aggression like Poles and Czechs; and finally to the Soviet subjects and the Red Army itself. Captain America could fight Baron Zemo and Red Skull and other fictional fiends, but the Holodomor of the Ukrainian people or the tens of millions consigned to slow death in the Gulag were invisible in the Golden Age of comics.

In an effort to draw national attention to the federal government's intrusion into the everyday lives of its citizens, Oklahoman Kaye Beach has elected to take on the system. She refused to renew her driver’s license in protest of not only forced biometric enrollment — having her information shared with corporations and government agencies — but also the influence of international organizations on U.S. policies and laws. Her actions have initiated a full-fledged legal battle.

According to the Constitutional Alliance, an organization supporting Beach’s case, she was recently cited for driving with an expired license in Norman, Oklahoma, reportedly because she felt that being forced to renew her driver’s license with biometric information was a violation of her constitutional rights.

Item: “The White House is negotiating new vehicle mileage and emissions standards with carmakers, labour unions and environmental groups, proposing rules that would sharply cut petrol bills for US drivers and put domestic manufacturers on a par with those in Europe and Asia,” reported London’s Financial Times for July 4.

Item: The New York Times for July 4 said, “Depending of the stringency of the standard, the deal could also reduce global warming emissions by millions of tons a year and cut oil imports by billions of barrels over the life of the program, cornerstones of President Obama’s energy policy.”

Correction: The government may be promising us a Rose Garden, but what it actually will deliver is a patch of painful thorns.

According to President Barack Obama, Franklin D. Roosevelt, long regarded as a free-spending President, was actually “fiscally conservative.” What’s more, said Obama, Roosevelt’s “austerity” hampered the economic recovery being wrought by the New Deal, leading to a downturn in 1937 — a warning to leaders who think now is the time to begin slashing federal spending.

Obama offered this analysis of FDR’s alleged fiscal conservatism during the course of a July 22 town hall meeting at the University of Maryland, reports CNSNews.com. Said the President: “FDR comes in, he tries all these things with the New Deal; but FDR, contrary to myth, was pretty fiscally conservative.”