President Cliche ... Alan Caruba

President Cliche

By Alan Caruba

“Peace is more than just the absence of war.”

“So let there be no doubt…”

“We stand at a crossroads of history.”

“There is no excuse for inaction.”

Fewer people at home and around the world are paying any attention when Barack Obama speaks. He has become President Cliché. We were all told what a great speech-maker he was and now nobody wants to listen anymore.

Ironically, in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, September 21, he actually said some interesting things. Too bad none of the other leaders of nations care what he has to say. At home, his popularity and approval ratings in the polls continue to plummet to new depths and to set new records for the lack thereof.

In truth, this is not good for the world or the nation. The job of President is all about leadership coupled to effective policies that address problems. In fairness, Obama arrived in the Oval Office with some of the worst problems any president has faced in the modern era. Like his predecessor, on whom he blamed everything, he continued to throw money at the financial crisis, managing to run up the nation’s debt to a historic level. Obama's economic advisors dusted off the failed policies of the New Deal and tried again. They have not worked.

The problems not only did not go away, they got worse.

The Middle East has seen the “Arab spring” in which a number of dictators were overthrown and that seems hopeful except for the fact that radical Islam is the solution that many of those same nations are likely to embrace. It doesn’t help that the U.S. President has famously demonstrated a “tilt” toward Islam as it continues to foment conflict.

The United Nations speech was a long wish list, pasted together with a lot of platitudes about how the UN has played a role in warding off World War Three. That was largely avoided because the U.S. has a couple of warehouses full of nuclear weapons and had maintained the greatest military the world had ever seen. We’re still here. The Soviet Union isn’t. Most U.S. presidents since the end of World War Two wanted to see the world abandon nuclear weapons. It didn’t. The club just kept getting bigger with China, North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Now Iran wants them as well.

The Soviet leaders weren't crazy. The Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs are.

Obama cited the UN founding Charter that called on nations to “unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” In reality, it has always been the United States who did the heavy lifting. We fought the North Koreans and Chinese to protect South Korea. We sent arms to Israel when it was repeatedly attacked. We detoured into Vietnam and took a shellacking. After 9/11 we drove the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and we organized allies to remove Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Most recently, we got NATO to put an end to Gaddaffi’s reign of terror.

The problem Obama has discovered is that the United Nations is composed of many of the worst dictatorships and oppressive regimes on Earth. It is an utterly corrupt institution. It will not prevent World War Three if the U.S. leaves and a large number of Americans want us to leave.

“Peace is hard. Peace is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can split apart.” Aside from the yawning banality of this pronouncement, the President’s learning curve about the reality of life on planet Earth has been a tough one. Still, he did condemn Syria’s dictator who has been killing that nation’s people, but could not resist showing off his Islamic credentials by saying many of the victims occurred "during the holy time of Ramadan.”

Obama has discovered what presidents since the days of Harry Truman have discovered. That Palestine is not a nation and the Palestinians are a horrid group of people who refuse to live in peace with Israel. “The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” said the President. Guess what? The Israelis agree, but cannot get their Mamoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to actually agree that Israel has a right to exist. Or Hamas to stop lobbing rockets into southern Israel.

In case anyone was actually listening, Obama repeated what every prior President has said, “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring”. After spending the last two and a half years demonstrating his contempt for Israel, this comes as a real surprise and further proof that Obama will say anything to get reelected.

And then he ruined it all by saying, “To preserve our planet, we must not put off action that climate change demands. We have to tap the power of science to save those resources that are scarce. And together we must continue our work to build on the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun.”

The major fuels of the modern world are not scarce. We live above an ocean of oil. There is enough coal in America alone to keep the lights on here for centuries. Tapping the sun and wind has proved to be a huge waste of money for two of the least productive ways to provide energy. Copenhagen and Cancun, the site of two UN climate change conferences were total failures.

President Cliché closed out saying—again—“Peace is hard, but we know it is possible. So, together, let us be resolved to see that it is defined by our hopes and not our fears.”

Our fears are what sustain peace. It is why every nation is armed to the teeth.

Obama is a national embarrassment. And he wants four more years in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A World in Disarray ... Alan Caruba

A World in Disarray
By Alan Caruba

It almost makes one wistful for the Cold War when the world was neatly divided between the United States and its allies against what Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire”, the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.

Trying to bring about a League of Nations after World War One virtually killed President Woodrow Wilson who suffered a massive stroke, but liberals have always been entranced with the notion that an international organization would bring an end to war. Until, that is, World War Two.

As WWII was winding down, Franklin Delano Roosevelt set to creating the United Nations and, following his death, it came into being on June 26, 1945. The preamble to its charter says:

“We the people of the united nations determined

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,”

Yada, yada, yada!

The United Nations has devolved into a cesspool of evil and irrelevance. I cannot think of a single war, large or small, nor any genocides, it has managed to stop. There were a couple of military conflicts in which it was an active participant, mostly in the form of telling the United States to “go get’m!” and “don’t forget to wear our blue helmets.”

If there has been a force for freedom in the world, it has been the might and power of the United States of America.

Until now.

Now our President says, “No U.S. troops will be in Libya.” This administration is desperately looking for some other nation to take the lead on Libya.

Let me be clear. I have not been a fan of spending our treasure and blood for the people of the Middle East. I am not a fan of war, but I know that war is the only way that most international conflicts get settled for good or ill.

The last President, George W. Bush, put together a coalition and invaded Iraq because, well, because he really did not like Saddam Hussein who, incidentally, had been invading his neighbors since the 1980s. His father had previously done the same to drive him out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

If there ever was a coalition regarding Libya, it was made of sugar candy because Germany and France had serious second thoughts after a week. No fly zones, it seems, cost a lot of money to maintain and most Western nations are broke, including our own.

The Arab League that called for a no-fly zone over Libya ran away even sooner. Arabs, who have shown an unparalleled talent for killing one another, lack the stomach for anything that involves mounting a real war to stop one of their own from killing the unfortunate citizens of his satrapy.

As it is, alphabetically from Bahrain to Syria to Yemen, despots throughout the Middle East are busy right now putting down their own internal insurrections. In the late 1990s Osama bin Laden gained a lot of attention by calling for the downfall of all the monarchies and despots throughout the region and the implementation of sharia law in anticipation of a global caliphate. The Saudis exiled him as they thought this was a really bad idea despite being the protectors of Islam’s two holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

At the same time we are witnessing a remnant of the Cold War, NATO, that does not seem to be functioning all that well, nor the European Union that was formed to be an enconomic bloc and clearly not one with any kind of a military component or sense of mission.

What the world needs is decisive leadership, but instead it has the Hamlet of the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose initial tour of the Middle East has, in retrospect, turned out to be one that caused its despots to conclude he was a wuss, a naif, a moron.

Who’s in charge of Operation Free Libya? No one knows!

The result is a world in disarray because the one nation every other nation thought it could count upon, for better or worse, is led by the Vacationer-in-Chief, a man who thinks that merely “saying the right thing” is the same as “doing the right thing.”

The situation in Libya will not likely turn out well, nor the growing opposition in Syria. No one knows what the outcome in Egypt will be, but everyone is pleased the crowds in downtown Cairo have gone home.

Meanwhile, Hamas is gearing up to cause trouble in Israel, waging its usual Made-in-Palestine terrorism based on the Yassir Arafat Guide to Always Saying No.

It is my profound hope the Israelis will strike back very hard, but it is also my profound belief that the UN Security Council will hastily meet to pass another resolution against Israel taking any measures of self defense.

This is how really big wars break out because no one at this point wants to fight the small ones.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Will The US Senate Ratify the UN Small Arms Treaty?

Will The US Senate Ratify the UN Small Arms Treaty?
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

We haven’t heard much about gun control lately here in America, and I am beginning to believe that is by design. The Obama Administration is hoping for Senate ratification of the treaty, which would, almost certainly, gut the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.

The fact of the matter is this: The UN Small Arms Treaty amounts to global gun control.

In a letter from Congressman Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, posted at the website of the National Association for Gun Owners Rights (HERE) the congressman says the following:

“With willing one-world accomplices in Washington, D.C., gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.

In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just announced the Obama Administration would be working hand in glove with the U.N. to pass a new “Small Arms Treaty."

Disguised as legislation to help in the fight against “terrorism,” “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates,” the U.N.’s Small Arms Treaty is nothing more than a massive, GLOBAL gun control scheme.

If passed by the U.N. and ratified by the U.S. Senate, the U.N.’s Small Arms Treaty would almost certainly FORCE national governments to:

Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding citizens cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;

Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION.

The citizen “unrest” in America today may make the ratification by the US Senate of this “treaty” seem far more palatable and even desirous by those currently in power in the American government today. And that is why we bring this warning to you. We must keep a wary eye on the goings-on in the national legislature.

In July of 2009, we issued a warning concerning the unceasing work of “gungrabbers” in America. In that article we said the following: “So America edges ever closer to losing the citizen’s right to keep and bear arms, quite possibly even the right to carry a knife. There can be no doubt that a knife, in the time of our forefathers, was, indeed, a weapon. It would, no doubt, fall into the category of “arms.” There can also be no doubt as to why the forefathers felt it important to place this amendment (the second amendment) in the constitution as a part of the original 10 amendments that made up the Bill of Rights. They had just fought a war against a tyrant to gain their freedom - and they did it with a citizen’s army composed of men who owned their own weapons!

George Washington, the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States said the following: "A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."

Thomas Jefferson said the following: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

And finally, words from the most well known of the tyrants of the last century, Adolf Hitler: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.”

It is good, I think, to note that The Forefathers felt so highly of the right to keep and bear arms that it is the SECOND Amendment. The first being, of course, freedom of speech, religion, etc.

We must tread softly, yet boldly, as we attempt to protect our rights these days. America has two generations of citizens trained in socialism as products of the Public (Government) School System. Like “Pavlov’s Dog” they await only the ringing of the bell to respond in defense of the “greater good.” But, like the other dog, chasing it’s tail, they haven’t the reasoning ability to ask of themselves what they intend to do with the tail if, and when, they DO catch it?” (You may read the entire article (HERE).)

“The price of freedom is, indeed, eternal vigilance.” The Democratic Party has demonstrated over the past 4 years their utter contempt for the concerns and wishes of the American citizen. As they continue to hold the reins of power throughout this lame duck session of the Congress and will maintain control of the Senate after January first of 2011, we cannot drop our guard, or divert our attention for one moment. If there is a way, anyway, (as we have learned the hard way) the democrats will try to sneak ratification of the UN Small Arms Treaty through the Senate with no regard for the opposition of American gun owners nor for those who insist the US Constitution still reigns supreme in America -- and not the UN.

As long as the Obama Regime remains in power along with the liberal-socialists politicians that are, unfortunately, the Democratic Party these days, the constitutional rights of all Americans are in peril.

We conservatives must work harder than ever as we continue our endeavor to rid our nation’s leadership of those who support the United Nations and their goal of establishing a one world government, or global government, under THEIR control.

We must not allow the UN Small Arms Treaty to be rarified by the US Senate… period!

J. D. Longstreet

Renewed Effort Toward Global Governance At The UN?

Renewed Effort Toward Global Governance At The UN?
One-World Government Aborning?
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

“Outlining priorities for the 65th session at a news conference last week, Mr. Deiss (Thomas Deiss, the UN General Assembly President) called for efforts to “reinstate” the UN and its 192-member General Assembly to the centre of global governance.” (SOURCE)

The paragraph above is from an article titled: “Countries welcome new Assembly President’s focus on global governance,” which can be found HERE. The article is dated the 21^st of September 2010. It also states: “Several countries have expressed support for the initiative of the General Assembly President to make global governance a central theme of the current session of the United Nations body.

Prime Minister Klaus Tschütscher of Liechtenstein, as well as Sheikh Khalid ibn Ahmad Al Khalifa, the Foreign Minister of Bahrain; Xavier Espot Miró, the Foreign Minister of Andorra; and Amr Moussa, the Secretary-General of the Arab League concurred with Joseph Deiss on prioritizing such an important topic.”

The article quotes Mr. Deiss as having said: “The challenges which we face today have acquired a global dimension and require global solutions. Our actions must have broad legitimacy and be the result of inclusive processes. We have to improve the mechanisms for information, consultation and cooperation between the United Nations and other actors and tools of global governance ... ."

It surely appears that warnings concerning the determination of the UN to formulate a one-world government were prescient, indeed.

It is fairly easy to understand why an organization, any organization, would want to rule the world … RAW, UNADULTERATED, POWER … but, it absolutely escapes me as to how they plan to actually GOVERN all the peoples of the earth for a single instant, let alone forever.

The expression “herding cats” comes immediately to mind when I think of the impossibility of a single ruling body governing the “earth people.”

But first we must ask ourselves how, exactly, will global governance be established? It will surely be through one of two avenues. Think about it. A one-world government must be achieved either by consent -- or by conquest.

It is inconceivable that the people of the United States would willingly give up their freedom and liberty, forsake their constitution and their bill of rights, and swear fealty to the United Nations, or any other would-be global ruling body … at least for a few more generations, anyway.

Americans, of a necessity, will have to be conditioned to accept less and less freedom, as the years go by, before there can be any thing approaching a reasonable expectation that they will accept what can only be described as “global slavery” overseen by a single globe encompassing authority.

Look, a one-world government would immediately bring us global poverty, and global war(s). That is the bottom line. Earth would overnight become a single battleground as the forces of that ruling authority attempt to impose its will on every single person on the planet. All wars would be “world wars” as they would affect every person on the globe.

Only one form of global governance has any chance of success – at all. That is totalitarianism -- a one-world dictatorship – period. As we said above global governance is all about power – absolute power.

The current American government is trying, as best it can, to condition Americans and drive them toward acceptance of global governance at some level, to some degree, with the goal of having America willingly submit itself to a single global authority. Unfortunately, the current American presidential administration is, for all intents and purposes, just a puppet government whose strings are being pulled by international financiers and moneymen.

Nobody has been able to convince me, yet, that the 2008 financial crash was not orchestrated to elect the Obama Administration in order to pave the way for the totalitarian one-world government those powerful world financiers covet.

Sounds like another conspiracy theory, doesn’t it? Well, as the television program says: “Not all conspiracies are theories.”

I am convinced the idea was to bring America to her knees to make her malleable to their wishes. For a global government to have any chance, at all, the puppeteers need America in the vanguard of the creators of that government. But most of all they need the American people to willingly submit to it.

But, they ran into a problem, a big problem. The problem they mistakenly thought they could avoid turned out to be -- the American people themselves!

Almost immediately, Americans began fighting back. Can you say: “TEA PARTY?”

The weak-spined American government will be shown the back of the American people’s hands in about four weeks at the polls.

Much of the world does not understand that here, in America, the government serves at the pleasure of the people. The power of the American government is granted by the “consent of the governed.” We, the governed, are about to rescind the privilege to wield that power for a great number of those in our government in about a month. Its what we do to a rogue government.

While the Obama Regime is busy back-slapping each other, and applauding each other, and reveling in the deepest depths of denial we have seen since “Baghdad Bob,” their world is about to crumble about them. And the global governance crowd? Well, their plans will be set back, at least for a while. But they will be back. Count on it. And we will confuse their plans again. “Sic Semper Tyrannis!”

J. D. Longstreet

"Deniers" Meet and the Media Ignores Them...Again

"Deniers" Meet and the Media Ignores Them...Again

By Alan Caruba

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“Denial” is not a river in Africa, nor is it a proper term for the legion of climatologists, meteorologists, geologists, and others like myself who have devoted decades to debunking the utter rubbish called “global warming.” So toxic has the term become, the charlatans pushing the fraud have long since abandoned it and begun to refer to “climate change” instead.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and I daresay that its climate has been changing since it first cooled, oceans formed, and one-celled forms of life began to develop into complex creatures like dinosaurs, Al Gore and politicians continuing to lie about global warming.

The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change concluded Tuesday in Chicago. Sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank, it brought together eminent (and legitimate!) scientists and other distinguished folk for panels and speeches addressing the arcane mysteries of climate.

Among the dignitaries addressing the thousand or more people who attended was former astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, PhD, a one-term Senator who discussed why the U.S. Constitution makes no provision whatever for the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency. For three days men who know their science in ways that would fill entire libraries held forth.

A Google search for any mainstream media coverage of the event turned up little evidence of it, nor is it likely that were I to list the names of the speakers, you would have ever heard of them. These foremost “deniers” have received short shrift in a media that has been determined to convince Americans that the Earth is burning up due to an infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The conference was of great significance this year because the Kerry-Lieberman Cap-and-Tax bill has been introduced in the Senate for the purpose of putting limits on carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., the use of all energy; a bill without a scintilla of scientific justification, nor merit. It will, however, create the buying and selling of utterly bogus “carbon credits” to enrich utilities and those involved in the exchanges based on the global warming fraud.

It will also kill the U.S. economy.

I attended the first three conferences and, although I have been a member of the National Association of Science Writers since shortly after the last ice age ended, I confess that when some of the scientists began to get deep into the issues of climate anomalies, minutia of paleoclimatology and comparable matters, my eyes would glaze over and I would feel a strong urge to take a nap.

It occurs to me that this has long been a part of the problem for most people who either dropped out of school, slept through science class, or who preferred to ignore all the silliness of global warming being blamed for…for…for everything. The problem is that global warming or climate change is being used to manipulate the world’s population into accepting global governance that involves the loss of their nation’s sovereignty in favor of international organizations like the United Nations. A draft international treaty making the rounds would be the end of democracy.

Not surprisingly, the whole global warming scam began somewhere in the bowels of the UN, emerged with the Kyoto Climate Change Protocols, and is the basis for the waste of billions on “clean” or “alternative” energy in the form of wind and solar energy. It is a full scale attack of the very basis for modern life, the use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Those of us living in advanced societies tend to forget that vast portions of the globe have no electricity whatever. How would you like to cook your dinner over dried animal dung?

The conference and the fact that the mainstream media has once again chosen to ignore it is a shining example of why the MSM is losing readers and viewers who have correctly concluded it can no longer be trusted. Global warming? Here’s an excerpt from the latest edition of IceAgeNow.com:

UK - Coldest winter in a lifetime - Freezing in May - 12 May 10

Record Cold in Paris - 11 May 10

Snow in "sunny" Spain - Coldest May since records began - 6 May 10

Snow In Southern France - 5 May 10 Again?

Yet another Alberta snowstorm! - 5 May 10

The biggest news emerging from the conference is that, in addition to the fact that the Earth is ten years into another perfectly natural cooling cycle, it is also verging on another ice age. We are all literally at the end of an interglacial period of approximately 11,500 years.

Bundle up!

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© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

My "Interview" with Al Gore ... by Alan Caruba

My "Interview" with Al Gore

By Alan Caruba

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The mainstream media have been trying to find Al Gore in order to interview him about the revelations that the research data supporting “global warming” was cooked—pardon the pun.

Here is my exclusive "interview" with him. You will find the source of his quotes at the end of this Q & A.

Q: Is it true that you lost your bid to become president because of the media?

A: I don’t want to leave the impression that the media’s unwillingness to focus on the global environment was the only reason why the issue failed to ignite serious debate during the campaign.

Q: A lot of people thought you have made too much about an environmental crisis. What do you say to them?

A: For me, the environmental crisis is the critical case in point: now, every time I pause to consider whether I have gone too far out on a limb, I look at the new facts that continue to pour in from around the world and conclude that I have not gone nearly far enough.

Q: Do you still maintain that human beings are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels, driving automobiles, and such?

A: One doesn’t have to travel around the world to witness humankind’s assault on the earth. Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Humankind is now changing the climate of the entire globe to a degree far greater—and faster—than anything that has occurred in human history.

Q: So, despite the fact that it’s been revealed that scientists in England, America and elsewhere; those affiliated with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were falsifying their data, do you still believe in global warming?

A: The theory of global warming will not be disproved, and the skeptics are vastly outnumbered by former skeptics who now accept the overwhelming weight of accumulated evidence.

Q: So you’re still convinced, eh?

A: Siberia is one of the regions of the world that seems to be warming most rapidly.Q: It’s that bad, eh? What role does capitalism play in all this?

A: The partial blindness of our current economic system is the single most powerful force behind what seem to be irrational decisions about the global environment. Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system.

Q: That sounds serious, Al. What can we do?

A: The United Nations might consider the idea of establishing a Stewardship Council to deal with matters relating to the global environment.

Q: But, Al, aren’t the Kyoto Protocols based on the data provided by the United Nations Environmental Program and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? If the IPCC has been using phony scientific data all these years, maybe it isn’t a good idea to turn the environment of the Earth over to the UN. Well, let me finish up by asking how you feel about automobiles?

A: We now know that their cumulative impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront.

Q: Really? What do you propose we do about automobiles?

A: It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.

Q: So capitalism is bad. Automobiles are bad. And human civilization is bad. No disrespect Al, but you sound loonier than a spotted owl.

All the quotes attributed to Al Gore were taken directly from his book, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit”, published in 1992. The Earth is in a new, natural cooling cycle that began in 1998.

So far, Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his documentary, has not been available for interviews.

Alan Caruba

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