Propagandized Leftists Against the G20

One of the disturbing things about the kind of idiots that participate in this kind of violence and protest is that they have bought into a zero sum view of the world. Wealth is generated by free people creating things. The more people who are working hard and productively the more wealth there is. But the kind of condemnation these girls advance is the idea that profit is the problem. Airhead 101 since profit is just the return someone makes on their labor. Without profit there would be nothing left to build anything. A profitless economy is an economy that is operating at subsistence. But these girls and many others have been told that some people consuming what they create is the cause of the poverty of others who are sitting on their tails or being crippled in their productivity by warlords and tyrants. They are brainwashed by leftist professors apparently. I laughed out loud when Hannity said "You're living in lala land." I'm not a big Hannity fan, but he got that one just right.

Ten for Ten: A Real Program for America

CHECK OUT Laura Ingraham's site where she presents a pre-emptive plan to take back the Congress in 2010. If we don't then America as we knew her is toast. What are the ten plants in Laura's program?
1) Taxpayers' Bill of Rights (TABOR). Limit federal spending growth to the percentage in population growth plus the rate of inflation; provide taxpayers the option of filing a post-card sized return using a low, flat tax rate of 15%

2) End Tax-funded abortions. Stop federal payments to Planned Parenthood and prohibit any taxpayer-subsidized health insurance plan from covering abortion

3) Defend American Borders. Complete America's border-protection initiatives using remaining funds from the so-called stimulus bill

4) King Dollar. Preserve a strong dollar so that Americans' savings aren't wiped out by inflation and the U.S. dollar remains the world's reserve currency

5) Empower American Business. Immediately slash corporate tax rates to 15% and scrap the capital-gains tax altogether

6) Defend America. Strengthen America to defend our homeland and fully fund an operational, layered missile-defense system

7) Statism Exit Plan. De-fund czars; immediately cease bailout payments to failed companies; ban future bailouts

8) End Generational Theft. As few believe America's entitlement programs will be able to pay benefits to future generations, provide younger workers the choice of diverting payroll/Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts

9) Restore America's System of Justice. Introduce penalties for frivolous lawsuits, where those who launch unsuccessful lawsuits are liable for the defendants' legal bills

10) American Energy Independence. All-of-the-Above strategy that embraces alternatives, expands and accelerates exploration and production of oil and natural gas, and jumpstarts dramatic increases in nuclear power

Feeling Sorry For Yourself? — Give me a break!

As we go through life we often get too focused on our own journey and our own challenges and difficulties. Then along comes someone whose own journey is so much more difficult than ours that we realize how selfish our own concerns have been. CHECK OUT Nick Vujicic who was born without arms or legs. He doesn't know why, but he overcomes his adversity with great grace. He shares his own sense of blessing with others.

Phoney Baloney: Cooking the Data for Global Warming

In case you wondered why it was getting colder instead of warmer as the global warming nutniks think is should be you might want to CHECK THIS OUT. I always feel bad about this kind of thing. I'm a scientist and if there is one thing a scientist is not supposed to do it is fudge the data. My wife got me a tee shirt one time that had "When in doubt fudge the data." It was humorous I suppose, but I told her I'd never wear a tee shirt with something like that on it. Scientists stop being scientists and become advocates when they "cherry pick" their data to get the result they want or that someone else wants. That's also why I don't take too seriously the charges that "Such and such is no good because it was funded by the ..... fill in the blank ... (tobacco companies, oil companies, favorite group to beat with a wet noodle). The reason is that all good scientists believe that data is king.

Well maybe not quite ALL. Increasingly we see problems with fudged data, cooked data, whatever you want to call it. I tend to just call it "agenda driven science." Well now we know that the tree ring data on which the "hockey stick effect" was predicated was cherry picked. Shame on them. This rather cuts out the legs from one of the main arguments that has been advanced in favor of AGW. We'll see I suppose if anyone bothers to care. I'm afraid that science has become so politicized that no-one can be completely trusted. "Follow the money" has become the mantra of our time. Everyone is for sale. Integrity seems to be a word with a forgotten construction. Global warming continues to look to me like a sham and a fraud.

The Eidetic Narcissist — How to Digitize Yourself As If Anyone Cared

Gordon Bell is the guy featured on this HOME PAGE and he's engaged in a slightly weird project, but fascinating as well. It's called the MyLifeBits Project and it seeks to capture everything you see and do and store it on digital media. SEE HERE That seems like the ultimate project for a Narcissist but I suppose it has practical uses as well. I just picked up a tiny 4Gig Flash Drive that was very tiny, about the size of a postage stamp the other day at Staples and it's fascinating to contemplate the potential of all this compact memory to store images, videos, sound recordings, pdf files and the like on everything you do. My students, the millenial generation, are so steeped in technology that they look like Martians crossing the campus with their cell phone antennas sticking out of their ears. They take literally hundreds and in some cases thousands of digital photographs and post them to their FaceBook accounts for all the world to see. Being linked-in, connected is a new form of belonging that those of us older folks can hardly imagine as a real need, but the students say it is very important to them. They text each other throughout the day and often have their cellphones up to their ears on the way out of class. I don't know what any of it means, but it seems like a very narcissistic impulse to be so needful of attention. We all seek to be loved and to love but an old fogie like me can't see this as anything but over the top. For more about Gordon Bell check out the EXTENDED BIO

You Can't Spend Money You Don't Have Forever

When is the crunch coming? Yeah, the big crunch, that's the sound of the economy collapsing like the World Trade Center. SEE HERE It's not as if it's something invisible, a catastrophe in the night, sudden and unforeseen. This is a catastrophe that is entirely predictable and certain to occur if we continue doing what we've been doing, which is spending money we don't have for things we don't need. But we don't seem to get the message. The fix is in, the mantra is spun up, and we're green and multicultural, we're diverse and promiscuous, and we're irresponsible and in debt up to our ears. None of this goes to good places. It's all going to the same place before too long — The Big Crunch.

It's hard to know exactly when the thing comes crashing down. It depends on a lot of factors. If the rest of the world continues to let us get away with borrowing our prosperity from them, sort of a perpetual IOU, then it can happen later rather than sooner. If they wake up to the fact that they'll never see their capital again, then the free ride will dry up and it will happen sooner. We already have China and Japan getting antsy.

The G20, the group of 20 countries that constitute 85% of the world's economy, SEE HERE and HERE may not continue to recommend the use of the U.S. dollar as the global exchange currency. The flight has already begun. SEE HERE and banana republic status will likely follow and we may be lucky to avoid hyper-inflation. The solution is simple if painful — stop deficit spending and live within our means. Good advice, but we've not taken it and the run up to disaster is well advanced. One question I have is that given that it is entirely predictable, why have we gone down this path? The irresponsibility on the part of our leaders is hard to exaggerate. This is not a party issue since both sides have played the borrow and spend game. The party has been going on so long they must think it can never end. A big shock is coming.

Alternative Media: Saving the Republic From the Phony Media

What is with the fact that the so-called "mainstream" media are now managing the news so as to ignore stories that don't fit into their ultra-liberal koolaid drinking mindset? It's scary that significant and important breaking news from the alternative media is simply being ignored by the mainstream. Freedom of the Press is a freedom intended to make sure that the press is not shackled by connections with government and can be a fair witness. Instead we see a media that seems to be almost literally groveling before the liberal left president who is largely president because they refused to report his incredibly tainted associates and his total lack of significant experience. Since when is being a "community organizer" — read hooligan and thug master there, a qualification for the presidency when your public record at the time you announce is about 100 days as a U.S. junior senator and a few years as a state senator voting "present" most of the time? We deserve better than this from the media.

In Case You Wondered: Arctic Ice Is Not Being Melted by Atmospheric CO2

SEE HERE The problem with the chicken littles is that they are mantra thinkers. They just repeat the mantra. "CO2 ... See Oh Two ... CO2 ..." most of them have never looked at any data and if they did they wouldn't know what to make of it. But science is not about consensus and it is not about who is the most convincing rhetorically, words just don't matter. It is all about the data. Check out the logic and the data and you'll find that CO2 is a very unlikely candidate for the job the climate alarmists expect it to perform. It has been much higher in the past without huge temperatures and it is not even, by a long shot, the most important green house gas. So when we decide to add "global warming" to the things to be worried about, check out the sun. At least the sun has the advantage of being where all our warming comes from.

Reflection on War

Patrick Buchanan's column today focuses on the impact of military decisions. SEE HERE The column set the theme for my own personal reflection on a life at war. I was a fetus at Pearl Harbor. My dad was on U.S.S. Detroit when the Japanese carrier aircraft arrived bombing and strafing and torpedoing the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl on December 7, 1941. My mom was evacuated to the mainland along with all the other dependents in anticipation of a possible Japanese follow up attack on the islands.

I was born some seven months later on June 4, 1942 the day of the battle of Midway. My early life was determined by my dad's duty stations. The Korean war followed the end of WWII and the years of the cold war contained many events that had their own tensions. The Berlin blockade, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and our betrayal of the Hungarian freedom fighters. One of the young people who escaped from Hungary ended up being a high school classmate of mine. The Cuban revolution which put a communist dictatorship in play 90 miles off our coast. I remember the day the Cuban flags joined with American flags dotted Constitution Ave. in D.C. I was a high school student and caught the street car every day. We heralded Fidel Castro as a liberator only to see him killing his enemies and showing his true colors.

I remember the Bay of Pigs invasion, the planning for which had begun because of Castro's decision. I remember the Soviet missiles in Cuba which John Kennedy got removed. I remember the beginnings of the Viet Nam war, a war to protect a Democracy from the invasion of the Northern Communists. I remember the beginnings of the Green Berets because I was in the Army when it began. I remember the betrayal of the president of Viet Nam by the United States and our complicity in his assassination. I still wonder if that might have had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination which came so soon afterwards. I remember the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which was an excuse to increase our commitment. I remember the betrayal of our forces by the government and the student activists inspired by Communist clandestine activities in the United States. I remember the phony peace talks and the betrayal of the Vietnamese people by the congress of the United States.

I remember the betrayal of the Shah of Iran by the Jimmy Carter administration. I remember the consequences as the revolutionary jihadist Islamic radicals in Iran exported their ideology in the form of terrorist attacks at the Olympics, throughout the Middle East, even against cruise ships and airlines, and our marines, and our naval ships, and then a failed bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. I remember that we didn't connect the dots.

I remember the day when a fellow professor said to me, "A plane flew into the World Trade Center." I said something, "That shouldn't have happened." I was thinking that it must have been some idiot flying a light plane. Hours of watching the news coverage followed as the events played out at the World Trade Center on that fateful September day in 2001.

I remember the intervening years and the efforts to increase our security and the military's efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also remember thebetrayals and the traitors. The traitors are those who send our young men and women into combat situations that the leaders have no intention of winning. I am tired of war. I am more tired of traitors in our midst. My life is a tissue of wars, wars fought to help people which were undermined by evil men with smiling faces, men like Frank Church and Jimmy Carter who smile as they betray others. I am tired of war. The sacrifices of our young men and women deserves to be honored by victory. So finally I am tired of politicians who are men of no particular conviction and no particular honor and whose only interests are their own particular power. They smile, they lie, and all my friends in all the years go down to Sheol betrayed. We need to return integrity to government and to the schools.

Propaganda In the Collectivized Schools

This video is supposed to come from a New Jersey elementary school: "Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments."

If You Want It Bad — Collectivize It!

The debate about health care continues without ever looking at the fundamentals. The history of this sort of thing is of the government or some other large bureaucracy stepping in to cure some minor problem which has been exaggerated into a mandate.

Then they issue rules and regulations and centralize things with an aim towards solving the problem which most of the time wasn't much of a problem at all, just an excuse to intervene. The resulting centralization, increase in rules, and oversight causes a growth in cost. This is taken to mean that there is profiteering because after all it used to be less costly. Never you mind that you've added a bunch of regulators, regulation costs for compliance, and review, and the staff additions to do those things. Usually you've also made everything more rigid and inflexible, but the cry of "profiteering" seems to stick with no evidence and no understanding that what has happened was exactly what should have been expected to happen.

So what is the proffered solution? — why stronger collectivization of course, more regulation, more government intervention. The cycle then begins again and the situation gets still worse. Then with everyone rather fed up the thing begins to deteriorate. What worked at one time works no longer. "Things have changed" we are told. In the case of health care we get rationing, we get delays, we get death counseling, all in the name of improving things.

The solution however is not to centralize, but to decentralize and free market. The United States did not get to be the richest and most productive country in the world because of collectivization. It was the action of the free market, free men and women motivated by their own interests to make things better, cheaper, more available, in greater variety and appeal. Until we understand that collectivization is the disease and not the cure we are doomed to see deterioration in health care, in government, in everything that is collectivized. You'd think people would learn but the schools were one of the first things that were collectivized and so people actually learn less now than every before. It's a downward spiral, all the way down to dissolution.

Watch Afghanistan: A Test of Resolve and Commitment

SEE HERE "General McChrystal to Obama: More Troops Or I Quit!"— That's the headline on the story. So far my personal impression of Obama continues to be "showboat" or as a former Navy Chief friend of mine would style it, "All feathers and no chicken!" You never can tell of course. Obama is a neophyte with essentially no real experience to qualify him for the White House, so he is in a dicey position, 'put up or shut up' as my dad used to say sometimes. It's his opportunity to show he has some moxie and can grow into the position. So far he looks more like a tool of his handlers than a real leader, a pretty face and a smooth fast talking con man. But that might still turn out to be an illusion. He is a chameleon so he might be anything at all from day to day. How he handles Afghanistan will tell us if he is a president. I sort of expect him to blow it, but that's just me.

Honduran Coup? Maybe one's brewing now!

Is a real Honduran coup in the offing? SEE HERE It seems unlikely to me but anything is possible. U.S. intrusion into the affairs of others has not been all that rare. It just changes political caste when the folks in power shift from conservative to liberal. The question would be: "What is our involvement?" and "Why are we involved?"

Zelaya seems to be in the country fomenting some sort of trouble. SEE HERE Since I don't get the sense that he is a particularly courageous man nor does he have a cause other than his own engrandisement, this kind of posturing tends to imply that he has allies that he expects to intervene in his name. We'll see how that works out. Picture is of Zelaya and his buddy Chavez. That speaks volumes about his plans for Honduras. They got rid of him just in time.

Al Jazeera Does Some Things Right

This paeon of praise for Al Jazeera summarizes it as "The Arab TV channel is visually stunning, exudes hustle, and covers the globe like no one else. Just beware of its insidious despotism." That being said, it's incisive style and breadth puts to shame the coverage our insipid news media provide. As the article states SEE HERE

One of the multitude of problems I have with Fox News is that even its most analytically brilliant commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, seem to be scoring points and talking to their own ideological kind rather than engaging in dialogue with others.

Food for thought on Tuesday morning: How can we get more comprehensive coverage and at the same time expose the underlying biases of the coverage so they can be fully appreciated too? There was a time when that question was answered by saying it was the role of good journalism to do just that. But we are far past that time and now everything has to be viewed with a very very big grain of quite bitter salt.

A Congress that can't write its own bills is a Congress we don't need at all

If you wonder why the stimulus package doesn't seem to be working it might just be because it was written by left wing radicals who used it to feather their own nests rather than do a credible job of countering adverse effects on the economy. SEE HERE

It seems appropriate to ask just what Congressmen think their jobs are? If they are not there to write bills, or read bills then why are we paying them the big bucks? What they seem to be doing could be done a lot cheaper by chimpanzees. Frankly it's disgraceful. What's even more disgraceful is that very few voices are complaining about it. Apparently these useless drones have reached the point of believing they have an entitlement to their positions. The time may have come to dissuade them of this illusion. Let's consider replacing all of congress at the first opportunity.

Racism? or Patriotism?

The Reverand Wayne Perryman lays it out, the Democrat history of racism which former president Jimmy Carter had the audacity to accuse the Tea Party Patriots of. Perhaps before slandering others the Democrats should apologize for their long support for racism. What hypocrites!

Internet Regulation... On What Grounds? By What Authority?

Now the government wants to move in on the Internet SEE HERE The FCC has an arguable case for regulating the airwaves which are a public trust, but by what stretch of their fevered imagination do they think they have the right to regulate the Internet. The internet is composed of a zillion private servers connected by a large and complex set of private landlines and is not in the public domain at all. So tell me again why the government has the right to regulate it at all. Freedom of speech is about "freedom" first and freedom of the press isn't restricted to print media. So the government should keep its filthy hands off the freest media yet developed by man. They have no legitimate right to do anything to it. I'm personally fed up with the government asserting its rights to any damn thing it wants as if it's our master and has to take care of us.

Brainwashing a Nation: Anything Familiar?

Just as an aside, what is going on with Obama and Honduras? This little country is entirely within it's rights to throw out a president who violated its constitution. SEE HERE So perhaps we can ask the same question that one of the commenters on this article made — What's going on when we treat our friends badly and our enemies as if they are our friends?

Leno Knows: Everyone Knows about ACORN except Obama! Right!

To see how much Obama knows or claims not to know check out Michele Malkin's coverage. SEE HERE

You didn't think you were getting your money's worth did you?

Anyone in business that saw this graph would say, "What are we spending all this money on? Whatever it is, it isn't working." Then they would try something else. I think tougher schools that are more demanding and didn't pretend that every student was exceptional would probably work better. School choice and enhanced homeschooling as an option would bother be better than the government indoctrination centers.

If there are no illegals then no illegals will be covered: Really!

I get it! Why don't we just make health care free. Doesn't that mean there will then be an infinite supply of it? Right now due to laws on the book no emergency room can turn away someone untreated ... Gee who pays for that? Of course — you do in higher health care costs. Is that OK? I don't know. But what is not OK is government pretending it has a mandate to provide health care. Which line in the constitution provides for that? Health care is a personal good not a common good or something covered by the "general welfare" in the preamble, which by the way doesn't establish any powers whatsoever for the government. What we need is smaller government that lets us take care of ourselves. We can do it a lot better than they can.

A Story of Survival through Personal Responsibility

"It's not my fault, George did it!"

A test of character is how much responsibility you take for your actions. The "blame game" is finding scapegoats so that you can escape responsibility. Sure, sometimes things are not your fault. In fact sometimes things are no-one's fault. As one Navy chief used to have written on his door, along with many other colorful saying, was "Shit happens." The rest were even more vulgar so I'll spare you. But all embodied wisdom of a down to earth sort.

Our current president seems to be an accomplished player of the "blame game." Bad things only happen because he was not on the scene to save the day. Sort of reminds me of the mighty mouse theme song, "Mighty mouse is on the way. Mighty mouse will save the day ..." Obama still is playing the "Bush did it to us" card SEE HERE and it is getting quite old.

From a financial point of view Bush didn't do it, the Democrats did and over a rather long period of time. Every time a Republican administration tried to put the breaks on the Democrats would yell "foul" and spend more. Clinton takes credit for a surplus but one should remember that budgets are allocated by congress and Clinton had a Republican congress ... Wow... do you think that had something to do with the surplus? I do!

I'm not sure when the president will grow up. So far everything bad is someone else's fault. Any time anything good happens he tries to take the credit for. Check out the history of the pirates that the Seal team took out for a particularly ridiculous example. He appears to live in a very narrow and distorted world in which fingers must be pointed at stupid police, George W. Bush, and right wing media. I'll start feeling a lot better when the president starts taking more responsibility for his actions and those of his administration.

Apparently the Media Can't Count

"... a spokesman for the National Park Service, Dan Bana, is quoted as saying "It is a record.... We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever." ..." That's a bit more than tens of thousands.
SEE HERE AND HERE AND HERE TOO


Awesome turnout. Awesome event!

A Sober Assessment ...

I'm probably as guilty as the next conservative of seeing Obama as a proto-dictator. Mostly I've seen him as a front-man for some group that is using him as a smooth talking facade for their own intentions running in the background, generally I expect for money and power, although one can't rule out the more sinister themes of tyranny down the road. The American Thinker SEE HERE ran an insightful piece today by J. R. Dunn which points out, and I think quite rightly, that Obama just doesn't fit the dictator mold established by such stalwarts as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini and the like. He's just not up to the comparisons on the whole. This of course doesn't address the issue of whether he's just a facade, a stand in for a coterie of powerful folks that are off stage pulling his strings. But Obama isn't up to the tyrant job based on his profile so far. That's the case that the American Thinker piece makes and I think it is cogent.

Stossel on Health Care

This is an oldie but goodie. The point is that health care rationing is a certain byproduct of government health care. The real problem though is it will dry up and destroy the rest of the health care system, so that means you won't have any alternatives. Competition always works better than government if for no other reason than alternatives trump monopolies. Single providers have no incentive to do a particularly good job, and when it's health care you're talking about it means you're hung out to dry. Don't kid yourself. Government doesn't really do anything very well and if it is important you'd be much better off with the free market.

Who Are His Handlers?

The question that has been bothering me ever since I heard that Barack Obama was going to run for the presidency is "Who is running him?" SEE HERE Why would I think something like that? Well the short answer is another question: When is the last time that a junior senator with almost no experience of any kind worth talking about ran for president? Not in my lifetime. This guy had done essentially nothing. He'd written two books about himself. I'm curious who wrote them and who bought them. It's not like he'd had some big achievement or other to support even one book. Go figure? Then he'd had a uninspired stint as an Illinois state senator where he avoided voting on anything controversial and as a result voted "present" a lot of times. What was that about?

I thought then and I think now that this guy is an empty suit. He talks well on script. He's great at repeating talking points. He's been a rabble rouser (ur community organizer) and is expert on Saul Alinsky radicalism. None of that sounds like presidential timber to me. David Horowitz turns out to think much the same as I do I gather. SEE THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE ARTICLE

Here's an excerpt:

With unseemly haste Obama has nearly bankrupted the federal government, amassing more debt in eight months than all his predecessors combined. He has appeased America’s enemies abroad and attacked America’s intelligence services at home. He has rushed forward with programs that require sweeping changes in the American economy and is now steamrolling a massive new health-care program that will give the government unprecedented control of its citizens.
Horowitz thinks billionaire George Soros may be the man behind the throne. He's certainly involved. The key to discovery is to connect the dots and find the threads that make what seems obscure emerge more clearly. What does seem obvious is that something sinister is going on. The conjunction of these crises focused on ramming destructive and intrusive programs with catastrophic side effects down our throats cannot be accidental. When a spider weaves a web, the sheer intricacy of the pattern may at first be disguised. But as the web grows the pattern becomes all too evident and the hapless are soon enough trapped snared and struggling to be fed upon at the leisure of the weavers.

Take Back America in 2010!

A friend sent me this video today. It's a little old (August 16th) but since Saturday was the Washington Tea Party I thought it had a certain "punch line" appropriateness. I sure don't want any of this socialist agenda we're getting from the left. The U.S. will not survive this kind of power centralization. The founders knew very well that what they didn't want was a strong central government. We've been undermining their great experiment for a hundred years. It's time to stop.

Tea Party Anyone!

Tyranny Rising!

This is a picture my son's friend drew in 2007. I guess the signs of the times have been pointing this way for a long time, long enough so that even a very young man like my son is aware of it and sees it in some perspective. I was struck today by the fact that the picture that Michelle Malkin had on her Tea Party 9/12 March post was taken from one of those on-line net cameras that monitor traffic in DC. See the last post for that picture. You can link to the camera in real time. If you can get that picture in real time, then what can the folks with real clout get in real time?

But surveillance is the least of our problems. The real problem is more and more centralized nanny state government which Mark Levin calls "soft tyranny" — this is all the measures that are taken for your own good. Fasten your seat belts, it's the law. Wear a helmet when you ride your motorcycle. Your car is required to have all sorts of things now a "black box" and every intersection has a traffic camera which in the long run is perfectly capable of getting your licence number. The Feds can read your bank records, monitor your cell phone calls (actually they made it illegal to listen on those frequencies which is like outlawing ears on people or charging for breathing the air) but it's technically pretty trivial to capture the signals. Sniffing the internet for packets is easy and unless your traffic is encrypted you don't know how many characters are reading your mail. These are just a few obvious examples of how little privacy we have these days. Now the government is creating crises and profligate spending which will further devalue the currency and centralizing health care (17% of the economy) and threatening to pass a horrendous cap and trade bill which is just a huge huge tax on energy consumption and all in the name of saving you from yourself.

Well pardon me if I don't think government is the answer to very many problems. I've worked for the government. I've seen how government works from the inside in a part that actually does work, the defense department. I've also been a bystander watching the rest of the government which works hardly at all. No thanks. On any given day the free market does far more for less than any level of government manages to achieve. If we let what is going on continue we will be enslaved and the last great hope for humanity, the United States, a beacon of freedom and prosperity for all the world will go into the dustbin of history as another collectivized and failed social experiment. I don't want that to happen to my children and my children's children. Say no. Say it loud. Say it often. Say it at the ballot box and failing that say it in the trenches of the resistance. But say no to Tyranny Rising!

Tea Party Crowd Estimated at 2 Million

One of the biggest crowds I've ever seen in Washington and I've been to many a pro-life march estimated at over 500,000 so the 2 million estimate seems plausible to me. Apparently Obama got out of town for the event. How convenient! What a fraud.

Never Forget!

The perpetrators of this cowardly attack on innocent Americans are still at large. They need to be hunted down. Stand Strong, Stand Tall, and Never Forget!

Newt Gingrich on the Health Care Situation

Dontcha Just Love It: Honor Among Thieves

I'm always vastly amused by the bickering that goes on in Washington D.C. among our enlightened rulers (ur pubic servants or is that public? hmmm...) in any case SEE HERE It would be funny if it were not so darn serious. Somehow we hard working Americans have managed to put the three stooges candidates all into government to run the show. It's a wonder there are so many of them, but I suppose the explanation is as easy as the quote from Ecclesiastes 1:15 in the Vulgate shows
15 Perversi difficile corriguntur, et stultorum infinitus est numerus. "... the number of fools is infinite." That is one of my favorite bible quotes since it explains almost everything, especially in politics.

Transforming Our Society One Marxist At A Time

So why does the Van Jones appointment and resignation matter. SEE HERE I suppose the short answer is because they did know what he stood for. It wasn't a mistake. That should scare the hell out of you. One of this guys great "creative" ideas was using the green initiative to transform our society.

"The green economy will start off as a small subset" of a "complete revolution" away from "gray capitalism" and toward "redistribution of all the wealth," Jones said during a 2008 interview on leftist Uprising Radio in Los Angeles. "And we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society."

This wasn't a surprise, this was a strategy which was discovered and rejected by the people. What it reveals is the thrust of the this administration and there is video out there of Barack Obama saying he will transform our society. This is what he means.

The Gurgling Sound Is The Economy Going Down the Drain

The Basic Forms of Government

This is an "Oldie but Goodie" which everyone should see and remember if we are to preserve the freedom that we have enjoyed for so long. A Representative Republic and NOT a Democracy.

An Attorney on the Health Care Bill

Someone sent me this link this morning. It goes back a few weeks but it is an interesting take by attorney Michael Mconnelly who finished reading the whole health care bill, all one thousand and eighteen pages which is a commendable feat. SEE HERE I started and bogged down pretty quickly. The language is convolved and confusing, almost as if it were written to mystify. Mconnelly's conclusion is sobering:

...I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The interesting thing is how many people are in denial. At the Goodlatte Townhall meeting I attended yesterday I talked to some people who didn't seem to care what the bill actually said, or that it would put in place a Byzantine array of Federal agencies all of which would take their pound of flesh (How can this possibly save money? — it can't and they can't possibly not know it. So they are lying.) and impose their rules and regulations over the good judgment of the patients and their doctors.
The arguments you hear are all inspired by misinformation about the way our economy works. I heard "profit" denigrated a hundred times by people who don't understand what profit is or how a free market economy works. It's actually quite scary how misinformed people are. Profits are what makes possible new technology, now innovations, new buildings and machines and it is profit that gives people the leisure to think of new ideas. Without profits you have no medical system at all because you are still eking out a living from a cave and trying to find food with a club. You didn't have time to discover fire or the wheel or accomplish much of anything but a subsistence existence. But that doesn't keep people from buying into the idea that profit is about greed. They are people with a diminished understanding who would sacrifice their freedom because of their brainwashed ignorance.

Don't You Get Tired of Being Lied To?

The Chart of the Day is worth a look SEE HERE What it shows is that "...the current job market has suffered losses that are more than six times as much as average (20 months after the beginning of a recession). In fact, if this were an average recession/job loss cycle, the number of jobs would have begun to increase five months ago."
But that can't be true, the president said the stimulus was working. "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore Toto." You didn't believe the president did you? Hunker down, things are likely going to get worse before they get better.

Town Hall Meetings and the Constitution

The Framers wanted the House of Representatives to be just that, a representative body, not a group of near permanent political professionals that except for a brief time in their early years had never held a real job in their lives. So where does this group of mandarins get their wonderful expertise to dictate to the rest of us? Apparently since they have no expertise themselves then it must come either from their advisers or from hubris. Their advisers are themselves professional bureaucrats who circulate around capitol hill floating from one office to another, not even necessarily sharing the political philosophy of the elected officials that they serve yet given a good deal of trust to influence policy. I doubt this is what the framers had in mind.

This morning I attended my congressman's Town Hall meeting. Unlike many it was a civilized affair despite the obvious presence of printed signs and an organized group of pro-government health care advocates. Perhaps being in a clear minority discouraged them from being more disorderly, or perhaps it is just the nature of the Shenandoah Valley people to act respectfully. It didn't hurt that Congressman Goodlatte was respectful to all and heard out even the longest winded and least coherent questioner. One of the things that makes me respect Bob Goodlatte a lot is that ability to empathize with those he does not agree with. He heard everyone out and carefully distinguished things he agreed with from things he didn't and he didn't shut down the dialogue. I think that takes a special kind of temperament. I'm far too combative to do it very well even though I try. I want to jump on the fallacies, question the data and hurry to a judgment that would be better drawn if all was taken more slowly and carefully.

Goodlatte was clear in seeing health care as a real need and supporting diversity in its delivery so that people can have choices. The model he prefers is the one which government workers get, a selection from a large range of private insurance plans. This lets people get what they need as determined by them. A single payer, one plan fits all, government approach will not only be incredibly inefficient, it will deny people the plans that they have that fit their needs. The some 10 million who currently don't have health care insurance coverage and can't get it, would wag the dog and the result would cost more and lead inexorably to poorer health care for all. I hope Goodlatte succeeds, but I think he knows it is an uphill fight.

The Constitution? — Bob supported a bill that would require bills to include an explanation of how they are allowed by the Constitution. That's not much, but maybe it's a start. Currently the entire health care debate is about arguably unconstitutional powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. SEE HERE for an interesting article on the constitution. The tenth amendment reserved powers not explicitly delegated to the Federal government to the several states. We've long since betrayed that amendment and it will be at our peril if it continues. That came up at the meeting, but was not explored enough. We need to stop the Federal power grab before our liberty is swallowed up.

Reform Health Care by Tort Reform and Free Market

What a Concept! Use the system that has always worked for the benefit of all Americans not the government who frankly screw up pretty much everything they touch. This lady gets it and gives it to them. Hurray for her! I'm a fan, run her with Palin.

LOL: Cult of Personality! Check it Out

Iconography is the theme and the Republicans could learn a thing or two about branding from the Obama campaign. It is true though that there are some disturbing features of that campaign, especially that they continue to use the personal brand after winning the election. A cult of personality is always dangerous in a free society. We need no new Caesars, still less any new Lenins. The style of governance that the Democrats are supporting leaves open the question of what are they supposing is the end game of this administration? I am not ready for empire, still less for Caesar. The whole thing has the rank oder of Tyranny Rising!

Death Panels ... Oh No ... NOT Death Panels

Yes, death panels ... SEE HERE We're on the same fast track if we go with Government run health care. What makes any of you believe that the government give's a fig about you?

Government Really Knows How to Run Things: NOT

What goes around comes around! When you do what you've always done you get what you always got. Below is the text that came with the picture:

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Dear President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature. It is now official: You are all morons.
The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775 - you have had 234 years to get it right; it is broke.
Social Security was established in 1935 - you have had 74 years to get it right; it is broke.
Fannie Mae was established in 1938 - you have had 71 years to get it right; it is broke..
War on Poverty started in 1964 - you have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor"; it hasn't worked.
Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965 - you've had 44 years to get it right; they're broke
Freddie Mac was established in 1970 - you have had 39 years to get it right; it is broke
Trillions of dollars in the massive political payoff called the TARP bill of 2009 shows NO sign of working.

And finally to set a new record:

"Cash for Clunkers" was established in 2009 and went broke in 2009!

So with a perfect 100% failure rate and a record that proves that "services" you shove down our throats are failing faster and faster, you want Americans to believe you can be trusted with a government-run health care system? 15% of our economy? Are you crazy?
Truly, the inmates are running the asylum! (And what does this say about voters who put such morons in office....hmmm? Maybe we need to let others in on this brilliant record before 2010 and just vote against incumbents.)
So once again... it's official, you are ALL morons, I don't care what your political leanings are.

Hubris In Spades

Priceless Indeed! I gotta wonder why no-one in the media thinks this is outrageous. Had Bush done any of this they would have been baying after him for his blood. Obama gets a pass. Go Figure?

The Government Can ... And Then We're Done For

Texas Knows!

A friend of mine sent me this aerial photo from Texas. I guess Texans get it!

The Tipping Point - Are we there yet?

You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.—Adrian Rogers, (1931-2005)
These prescient words should be reflected upon. When my children were little and we would go on an automobile trip, long before the trip was done little voices would come from the back seat,"Are we there yet?" and "How much longer?" We are on this road that Adrian Rogers mapped so long ago. We need to get off or we will find Tyranny Rising!