Lamar Joins List

One public pronouncement, conveying one decision, is enough for me to never again vote for sham Republican US Senator Lamar Alexander. Alexander has always seemed uncomfortable around his conservative supporters; he sees himself above that madding fray, firmly in the camp of those elevated moderates and he has irrefutably demonstrated he does not back Tennessee values by announcing yesterday that he will vote for the confirmation of judicial activist, Hispanic supremacist, hard leftist Sonia "Soviet" Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I will support anyone to Alexander's right who tries to primary him and I will vote Libertarian, third party, or not at all, if Alexander secures the Republican nomination. He has always been a bit too enviro for my taste-a global warming "greenie weenie". Alexander has been a leader on the warpath against file sharing as he pretends to care about royalties for musicians but he never stood with the artists when they complained about receiving pennies on each CD sale as their labels made several dollars. I have always thought file sharing conceptually was like passing a paperback on after one has read it or using a public lending library, but Alexander feigned some interest in protecting musicians' royalty rights. In so many aspects, Alexander is just a shill for corporate interests, whether it is advancing industry agendas through legislation supposed to protect the environment but actually aimed at boosting General Electric and other giants who have found a profit angle in going green, or whether playing at being the champion for singers and songwriters when Lamar is basically out to advance the corporations behind music labels with any benefit derived by artists being purely incidental. Now, the die is cast, with his support for Sotomayor, Alexander has burned his bridges to conservative Tennessee.

Desperate Unthinking People

In the run up to the Presidential election, one of the networks had a couple on in Virginia, who were white rural denizens of a trailer. As I recall, both had at one time been gainfully employed, but at the time the story aired only one was and hours had been greatly cut back. The couple were portrayed as gun-owning NASCAR fans, the type of folks who would typically vote for McCain, but in their plight with open anger expressed for Bush's "failures", they were going to vote for "hope and change". I can hear the producers now filling a template: "Let's find some hicks, real trailer trash who look like Ku Kluxers to show the other rednecks Obama doesn't bite. The gun rack type, who don't know Bush isn't running. Yeah, right off of a Springer episode." The wayward couple was exploited by the New York press to show other poor, downtrodden whites that they needed to set aside their innate racism and vote for their savior. What a load of b.s. These same brand of people are being shown now, happy as clams in their new digs, that they were only able to purchase because Obama has given them $8000 in first time home buyer's tax credit. They are portrayed now in brand new cars that they were only able to drive off in because of Obama's generosity with $3500 to $4500 they received in "Cash for Clunkers." What are these poor people, whose future vote loyalty to Democrats has now been purchased not by Obama as he has no cash to give, but with our money confiscated from us by way of taxes, to do when six months from now they can not make their mortgage payment? When a year from now, they have their car repossessed as jobs continue to diminish as they must as Obama shoves the nation deeper into the pit of socialism-will they still blame Bush as Obama and his media are contriving for them or will they wake up that "hope and change" meant hype and suffering?

His Legion Marches

The unreasoned voice of reason/ The cold, calculating pretense of rationality/ Leading exuberant irrational masses in their hysteria for the One/ Yes we can/ His cult who do not give too much thought to playing the largest game of follow the Leader/ Who is never possessed of self-doubt/ And never loses Himself in self-reflection as He leads the chant-Yes we can... yes we can... yes we can/ Never lost in the paralysis of analysis/ Unthinking-they are in lockstep/ The unison of destruction of patrimony, of prosperity/ Of the millions who do not ponder much or often or read too many books/ The same types who under other circumstances burn scores of volumes-any tome that questions rigid patterns/ Uniformity, compliance, oh the sheep are marching to trample on our rights/ To the rhythm of yes we can...yes we can...yes we can

More Media Crumbs

The world is experiencing advocacy instead of analysis, distortion instead of reportage, a whitewash of the Islamist forces lined up against the West, the demonization of Israel in what is termed cutting edge media but what is actually a dinosaur being supplanted with readership on the web and more people in America tuning into conservative talk radio every day. Last night, I watched a Pierre Thomas report on ABC evening news. Thomas was interviewing the nation's first black Attorney General, ardent gun banner and recovering Clinton pardon broker, Eric Holder, when he asked about the black Harvard professor's case which has garnered so much recent notoriety. Thomas introduced that portion of the piece by subtly asking if Holder had been "racially profiled too", implying that it was a fait accompli that Harvard professor Gates had indeed been racially profiled and that the incident stemmed from the race prejudice of the white police. Thomas' use of the simple three letter word "too" damned Cambridge police officer Crowley. It is hard to imagine that the slight, which flies in the face of the evidence known of what actually happened-no profiling transpired on behalf of the police-was not deliberate. Then, on the 10 pm central BBC broadcast airing on PBS in Nashville, the reporter on the ground in Nigeria conveyed elaborate details about the recent and ongoing violence there, stating that police stations and churches had been attacked by a "radical sect" which she named and described, right down to two hundred men armed with AK-47s, but she assiduously managed to avoid mentioning that the culprits in the murder spree were Muslim, were Islamic extremists, were engaged in Jihad, or were in any other way associated with the faith of Mohammad. She intentionally left out the most glaring aspect of what the story should have been-namely that the attacks were prompted by the belief of the perpetrators in Islam-the motivation for the savagery had been to wage Jihad as an exercise of faith (or generously, the radicals perversion of what is religiously commanded). Later on the same BBC newscast, a correspondent reported from Kew Gardens in the UK on the world's oldest potted plant. She was reverently speaking in low tones as nine workers replanted the behemoth specimen-either because she is one of the worshippers in the new "green" religion, or more likely, that she was of the belief that the plant would be disturbed by anything louder than a whisper, as if she were dealing with babies in incubators or super sensitive zoo animals. In any event, to strain to hear a reporter only slightly more intelligent than the subject she was covering describing a plant in a rapturous hush, strained credulity and showed how far journalism is falling. Finally, America's dinosaur media is breathlessly helping the administration for which they work, no matter who actually signs their checks, to introduce the so-called "Cash for Clunkers" program, but I have heard from acquaintances who have been replacing vehicles that they were better served by a simpler old style trade or could receive a higher amount selling their used cars themselves rather than going through the rigmarole of paperwork and bureaucracy engendered by the new program. Though you will not hear it in the old line media dedicating itself to promoting Obama, the benefit to consumers of the CARS scheme, are anecdotally at least, negligible, if there is any advantage at all to participating. So like so much of what Obama and his minions have done so far, you are paying for it but will never derive any good from it. The networks do not invest any time investigating any of Obama's failures, but voters are figuring out for themselves, that what is being done for us by Obama, is actually being done to us.

No Golden Years

You worshipped FDR from afar/ As you bought a jalopy for your first car/ The New Deal President was your do no wrong guiding star/ Then came the war with you rearing to even the score/ You gladly played the ration game/ Because you believed everyone was treated the same/ The draft was fine as long as there were no shirkers or slackers or black marketeers living it up behind while you and Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones were manning the line/ And Rosies around the country remained sublime driving rivets and punching the clock for the first time/ Then you were wild about Harry/ And let Truman have his way/ Though you might not have liked his Korea stay/ You tried but cried when Stevenson lost his races/ But in spite of that, you thrived as Eisenhower put the nation through her paces/ You only chose to see one of JFK's two faces of Camelot and family man without the serial infidelity and stolen West Virginia and Chicago vote traces/ With LBJ you stood to do the nation's good/ Of punishing the South and making Wallace swallow the words the moment they left his mouth/ Nixon you despised even though he brought the peace you prized/ Ford was but a tall and clumsy toad in the middle of the road/ And up you elevated Carter until with much regret you realized you were smarter than a leader who would spend a billion on an energy plant and then delay it for a snail darter/ And then to see your whole country by Middle Eastern madmen taken hostage/ That caused a change in you and you became one of them-a Reagan Dem/ But that was not to last/ Your mule just runs too fast/ So there you cast again for Mondale/ Who would have taken us to hell/ And then you went Greek for Dukakis/ Bush One you could not bear/ So you were relieved to hear of Clinton of the Ozarks/ You knew he was sly with the little lie that would always fly/ But he was your Peck's bad boy-who cares if he kept an intern or two for a toy/ It was a water cooler story you could enjoy/ And if the fate of a few weirdos in Waco wasn't so nice it wasn't you who was paying the price/ You had heeded the sound advice "to live like a Republican, vote Democrat"/ Bush Two brought too much strife/ You couldn't bask in your life/ With at your throat, a Jihadi knife (like Damocles' sword for the masses)/ You couldn't have cared less that at lasses Crawford George did not make passes/ But you have unknowingly elected one who you thought would have protected, but instead is the sum of all your fears/ Bent on stealing your golden years/ You trusted him to wipe away your tears/ No you could not stand to see your government bloated/ And when your peer McCain lost, you gloated/ Your cheers for Obama were full-throated/ He would be the moderate sound manager, the super competent gatekeeper/ Only now are you waking up to the fact you elected your own grim reaper/ Rise to resist pathetic sleeper/ Do more than be a silent weeper/ Through years of effort to scrimp and save, you've tilled your soil/ And now should come calm, but you are starting to boil/ You've fought your lifetime to prosper after years of toil/ But the man you put in office is determined to help you shuffle off this mortal coil.

Thin the Herd

The most disturbing feature, and there are many troubling aspects in the bill for universal health care (that will inevitably ration resources and hasten death-particularly of the old, infirm, chronically, or teminally afflicted) circulating in the US House of Representatives, is the so-called mandatory "end of life" counseling for senior citizens at least once every five years, more often for those seniors who are ill. I have heretofore in this forum called the counselors-a "ghoul squad" as they are assigned to tell seniors to forgo antibiotic if they have an infection as infections like Terri Schiavo's death by forced dehydration are a "peaceful" way to go. Antibiotics are four dollars for a full round dose at many pharmacies and free at Walmart-this is not about the cost incurred by government to treat infection per se but about ridding the Social Security and Medicare roles of people who paid into the system their whole lives just as they are starting to draw the benefits from their imaginary, accounting trick, nominal "lock boxes". The care they paid for, but never utilized throughout their lives, can then be shifted to Pedro and Paulina and there nine dependent children with perhaps one anchor baby popped on the US side of the Rio Grande when Obama declares his coming amnesty that will not be called amnesty but couched in terms of "normalizing undocumented workers and allowing family unification as a humanitarian measure" as the twelve million plus illegal aliens are allowed to bring in eighty or so million relatives to void the meaning of American citizenship and dilute Republican voting strength with grateful for life dole dwellers who will give credit to the party of the Democrat in chief who brought them here. That is why health care must pass first and fast so Democrats and their useful idiot Republican cover (can you say "McCain and Graham") can effectively grant broad amnesty to millions of foreigners who will make little or no effort to assimilate but who will tax the system in such an unprecedented way that the venerable but vulnerable seniors who saved the world from Hitlerism and Communism will just be too much of a burden to try to sustain, and in spite of their vast lifelong contribution, grandma and grandpa, who served in uniform and dutifully paid their taxes, will be made terminally redundant, while Oswaldo, who brought in resistant TB when he entered El Paso, will enjoy the antibiotic (that should have kept your flag waving AARP member grandparents alive- had the new national health scheme not denied them) in a cushy hospital bed he never paid for, never will pay for, but you purchased for him. When Oswaldo recovers, he can collect his checks from the new stimulus plan that Obama will pass to employ all the gravediggers to bury the last generation of Americans who knew freedom-who knows some of those robust, made healthy at grandma's expense undocumented workers may even dig the hole to bury her, and the circle is complete-you've given away citizenship, sovereignty, freedom, and life.

Here Comes Trouble

When he was sliding his iron fist into his velvet glove, Clausewitz characterized negotiation as war by other means. At the moment, the US is making war on Israel. Israel made her concessions and offered more with the Palestinians who would not take yes for an answer refusing 97% of the West Bank in exchange for peace when Bill Clinton was President. Palestinian leadership has been responsible for elevating terror to a high art (which paved the way for al Qaeda setting its sights higher) and has been marked by corruption and intransigence. Palestinian heritage is a dubious admixture, comprised largely of Arabs brought from other parts of the Ottoman Empire to serve as laborers in Ottoman Palestine in the last few centuries. Wandering Bedouin, Jews, Christians of various sects, a small band of Samaritans, who it could be argued, had the longest continuous presence, and Druse, were all on the land ruled by the Turks, but it must be stressed that most of today's Palestinian Muslims had far shorter ties to the land than the enduring claims of their neighbors. But now the Palestinians convey to the world that their durable (dubious) claim supersedes everyone else's. And where the Palestinian diaspora has flowed, misery has followed. Lebanon was peaceful and prosperous until the Palestinians initiated a bloody civil war. Before that, Palestinians had tried to rebel in Jordan and topple Hashemite King Hussein, and the bloodbath they initiated there, not some outrage in Israel, became the basis of Black September and the eponymous terror organization that slew the Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972. Palestinians who have never recognized Israel as a Jewish state, who have never eschewed violence, who refuse to abandon incitement, are about to be rewarded with much of Israel's land. The Palestinians in Kuwait turned on their generous Gulf benefactors when Saddam invaded. They were rightly then turned out. In Iraq, Palestinians were turned on Iraqis by Saddam Hussein and when he was deposed, his Palestinian henchmen were dispossessed by Iraqi neighbors who had come to fear them as they served as Bathist thugs under Saddam's protection. Where Palestinians have journeyed, they have taken simmering hostility and viciousness with them. When there is no exterior enemy they can focus their violent energies on, Palestinians fight among themselves as was evinced in Gaza with Hamas turning on the Palestinian Authority and Abbas' forces of order (at least as much order as Palestinians had ever enjoyed under internationally recognized leadership). So Israel is supposed to rely on US assurances that America will vouchsafe the Jewish state if she makes substantive territorial concessions to a people who shed blood everywhere Palestinians are or have been. The US made similar declarations of support to South Vietnam and I can no longer seem to find that polity on my world atlas. So should Israel bend to the pressure of her former best friend the US and return to pre-1967 suicide borders or should Israel point out that Palestinians already enjoy autonomy in Gaza from which Israel has received for her good faith, thousands of missiles, rockets, and mortars, terror sniping, bombs, a sneak attack involving murder and the unresolved abduction of Israeli military conscript Gilad Shalit? Israel should declare to the world Gaza is Palestine and until Palestinians cease attacks and incitement, Gaza is all the state Palestinians will have. They can have the Palestinian law of return there and crowd in like cord wood or sardines, they can call from the minarets there for death to the Jews, but they will not be doing so from East Jerusalem. Israel accepts the two state solution and so far as I am concerned, both states already exist in permanent borders.

Under the Gun

Last week, the US Senate managed to attain fifty-eight votes to attach an amendment to the defense appropriations bill to allow Federally-recognized state reciprocity in conceal and carry laws for handguns, enabling armed citizens to protect themselves across state lines. This amendment unlike the hate crimes law to give favored status to homosexuals which was successfully attached to the defense appropriations package, failed to win approval by two votes. So a pervert may claim he was threatened by a clergyman's admonition of morality and have him hauled into Federal court, but you can not carry your pistol on a cross-country trip with your family because a bunch of good-for-nothing liberals are afraid of law-abiding citizens being able to protect their families. To qualify for a conceal and carry permit in any state, the applicant must subject himself to a rigorous background check. In many states, the permit holder has been subjected to the same training and testing as some sworn officers. I have always stressed thought and rational action in this forum, but let me now say that the most helpless feeling in the world is to be shot at, with no means available to fire back. What South Dakota US Senator John Thune proposed, if adopted, would have ensured that carjackers in Florida could never again prey on drivers in rental cars or with out of state plates, as there would always be an element of doubt in criminals' minds as to whether the car they picked to hijack contained an armed, trained citizen ready and able to resist. By not allowing an amendment to the defense spending bill that would have made us all safer, the leftists who voted against this, showed they have contempt and fear of their own voters.

Over a Barrel

President Barack Hussein Obama has Israel by the short hairs in regard to the Iranian nuclear threat. With Iran showing her true face of brutality with the suppression of protesters after Ahmadinejad was assisted by the ruling Mullahs in stealing the elections, Obama is still convinced he can sit down and reason with the Iranian ruling fanatics. Israel, which has always been the seeker of peace since its modern rebirth in 1948 and often has been the sole seeker with all her Arab neighbors determined to drive the Jews into the sea, is being cast by the rest of the world as the obstacle to peace because of the so-called settlement enterprise. Even the US now casts Israel as the troublemaker, insisting the Jewish state must cease construction even in East Jerusalem. The President himself undercut Israel's just over 3000 year claim to her ancient capital, by suggesting the Jewish state's creation was a consequence of the world attempting to atone for the Holocaust rather than the perpetuation of continuous Jewish habitation on the land since Biblical times (interrupted only in Hebron's case by the notorious 1929 Arab massacre of the community's Jews; in East Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter was only lost in battle with Jordan in 1948 and held by the Hashemites until Jewish liberation in 1967). Yet Obama sees Israel as just so much more colonialism, like many Marxist professors, Obama apprehends the Jewish state as an imposed Western imperialism to assuage Shoah guilt. Obama, who professed Christianity during his Presidential bid, does not seem to have cracked open a Bible to discover what so many evangelicals hold dear, that the Jewish connection to the Holy Land is ancient, ordained by the Lord, and that those who bless Israel will be blessed. The most troubling aspect of Obama's policy for lovers of Zion is the artificial linkage between Israel ceasing all "settlement activity including natural growth" and the US administration's willingness to attempt to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. I believe America depite protestations to the contrary will countenance Iranian atomic weapons, will restrain Israel from her own defense, and will turn the screws to extort Israeli territorial concessions, promising help on the Iranian threat in exchange, but in the end, not only not using American might to thwart Iran, but actively stopping Israel from doing so. Obama is trying to force Israel into one existential threat before she is allowed to confront another. Unfortunately, Barack Obama is proving to be the kind of seductive pretender the Bible warns about, and he has turned his attention to making construction by Jews as the cause of continued hostility in the Middle East without consideration as to whether there is a Palestinian interlocutor who can deliver peace.

Lies, Hoaxes, Distortions

The history of race in this country has been a sordid one, and many well-meaning voters cast their lot with Obama to resolve centuries of racial polarization. Obama campaigned as our first "post-racial" candidate for the Presidency. Dissertations could and have been written about abduction in Africa, the Triangle Trade, involuntary servitude, Jim Crow, lynch law, enforced segregation, and Black studies programs and their permutations (Hispanic, Asian, and now even queer studies) have documented injustice and strife (but almost exclusively, that conducted by America, conspicuously avoiding any mention of the North African slave trade involving the capture of whites as has been pointed out by the sui generis Thomas Sowell, who happens to be black himself, with his scholarship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford). But many clung to the notion that our young President would act as a force to galvanize us as Americans-regardless of race. In the event, Obama is living down to his long association with Reverend Wright and separating us in matters of race. White liberals burdened with guilt for offenses they never committed thought a vote for Obama was a vote for racial reconciliation, a national kumbaya that would create a Utopia. These innocents at home whose relatives may have been in Italy or Russia, at the time whites held blacks as slaves in America were deceived by a smooth line and a hidden history-Obama's biography as he was introduced to America deliberately omitted Jeremiah Wright's simmering, anti-white hostility. Obama was sold to America as a racial neuter who would facilitate the great group hug to put all that animus and tragedy behind us. The Gates incident and the President's subsequent uninformed and inflammatory statement gave us insight into the character of Obama rarely seen, or more apropos, rarely allowed to walk out among the public with such precise stage management obscuring the real Barry-you saw it during the talk in Joe the plumber's neighborhood and you saw it in his knee jerk reference to racial profiling in the incident with a chip on the shoulder Harvard professor who should have been smart enough to remain composed whether the chip was based on Gates self-perception as an elite who should not have been subjected to police scrutiny or whether Gates really felt racially stigmatized by the conduct of the police (which would show a lack of reflection on the professor's part as he resides in one of the great liberal states in its most liberal bastion-a Bull Connor cop would never be hired in Cambridge and if one snuck through, he would be immediately removed from the force the moment his racial prejudice became apparent). Police are human, many have the utmost integrity-some do not. Is it possible that the policeman who made the arrest felt insulted by the professor's evident haughtiness and anger and baited him to go outside the house to make an arrest more plausible? Certainly it is, only the handful of people who were physically present know, but two adults acting like children should never have been blown into a racial cataclysm by the ill-chosen, intemperate words of our neophyte President who was acting more like a community organizer than the leader of the free world. When rumors were spread that the levy had been deliberately destroyed by the white power structure to rid the world of lower Ninth Ward blacks during Hurricane Katrina, I do not recall African American study professors rising en masse to denounce and debunk the monstrous lie. I have no recollection of these learned race professors rising to counter claims that the CIA brought in crack cocaine to destroy the black community or abjuring the notion that the government introduced AIDs to "kill off blacks". I recall no objections from the nascent black studies departments when it was claimed during the late sixties that blacks were being sent to Vietnam by McNamara to prevent them from resisting white oppression on America's streets. I did not see these cool-headed didacs rushing to stop violence in L.A. after Rodney King, in Crown Heights, at Freddy's Fashion Mart, or trot out to call Al Sharpton a race-baiter and liar in Tawana Brawley's grotesque hoax. In fact, these professors often make common cause with Sharpton. So is there a racial component in the Gates' affair that Obama rushed into-sure, many African Americans are deeply suspicious of white police officers. In this incident that merited no Presidential attention, both Gates and Obama drew on their tremendous reservoir of anger.

Csonka, Riggins, Emanuel

I, like most red-blooded American males, watch football. In the seventies, my appreciation for gridiron combat began. One of my favorite gladiators of that day was Larry Csonka who would dauntlessly proceed into the teeth of a line where there was no daylight to run to, and emerge on the other side bruised, battered, and bleeding but having generated a four yard gain in his cloud of dust. Another human battering ram who Woody Hayes would have admired was John Riggins. No Kansas Comet, the indefatigable Riggo would seek out contact and initiate a collision with a hapless defensive back, bowling him over and gaining the goal line. When there was no room to advance, these brutes through sheer force of will and power moved forward anyway. So what does this have to do with the national health care scheme and the celebrations of its delay and hopes for its defeat? Clearly the President and his balletic, bully boy henchman Rahm Emanuel would have liked to see more progress, but make no mistake, their determination to pass a universal coverage bill that includes a public option has not diminished in the least and it is my fear, that Republicans buoyed by a false sense of a secured victory will let down their guard and that the care rationing, life-shortening scheme will pass with Emanuel using every carrot and stick in the political canon to push it through. No, Rahm doesn't have the broad shoulders of a fullback or human bowling ball tailback, but his weight on top of John Galt's globe may just be enough to make Atlas shrug.

No Oil Addiction

I am giving an ABC program due to air tonight hosted by Cheshire Charlie Gibson some free promotion. The old line media networks and the moribund newspapers want to wean us off petroleum or, more to the point, punish us for its use. Whether terrorists could close a choke point to our access to Middle Eastern oil should not even be a concern. We have sufficient resources of our own in the US and certainly in North America that we should not be dependent in the first place on people who do not have our best interests at heart. When we have the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, why should we rely on Saudis who may want to kill us? In any event, it is more likely the Iranians would close the Strait of Hormuz than a terrorist manage to sink a supertanker in the Suez Canal. We have oil shale, more efficient drilling techniques to extract oil that was impossible to obtain before, new injection methods to gather remaining oil in wells that were thought to be played out, we have coastal reserves that are only off limits due to environmental pressure. We and Canada and Mexico have enough petroleum to meet our own needs. What we do not have is sufficient refinery capacity as green activists have blocked almost all refinery construction and modernization for a generation. Also EPA-mandated boutique fuel blends have exacerbated regional gasoline shortages and pushed up prices. There should be one national standard for fuel so the limited refinery capacity we do have, does not end up diluting our resources by having to produce more than a dozen custom blends. Switch grass, liquid propane, coal gasification as Germany developed during World War II to take advantage of coal reserves in the Ruhr and Saar when access to oil fields was cut off, all are great ways to stretch existing fuel reserves whether we have passed peak production or not. Nuclear energy, hydroelectric, solar and wind are fine. If someone develops a commercially viable substitute for petroleum, more power to them. But I love the sound of gasoline engines purring and motors whirring, it is the sound of progress and truly is the "engine of our prosperity" to be fostered and rewarded not taxed and punished as the Luddite Obamites believe.

Break the Nation

Barack Hussein Obama heralded the cost savings of the elimination of the F-22 as an example of his sound management that will enable him to fund universal care during his speech last night. The reduction of spending on seven stealth airplanes is quite modest when measured against the budget as a whole. In fact, if Obama eliminated defense expenditure all together, he could not come near making up for the massive existing government obligations of servicing the national debt, paying for existing entitlement programs, and funding the envisioned national care scheme. "Yes we can" save quite a bit by ridding ourselves of defense research and development, procurement, dispensing with the army, navy, air force, and marines, but that would still not close the gap engendered by the mammoth deficit, and Obama's throwing what is becoming progressively worth less fiat currency into stimulus, at bailouts, and on a national health scheme. We would not have a military and soon would have no nation.

Pick Your Villain

Barack Hussein Obama continued his effort to demonize capitalism last night with calumny launched at banks, insurance companies, and pediatricians. In Obama world, only government, N.G.O. activists like ACORN, and labor unions can do right with righteous motives. Banks are thieves in the night without regard to what government regulation forced them to do to avoid charges of "redlining". Insurance companies become care rationing bloodsuckers-they could never want to preserve their customers' lives and welfare to keep premium payments coming in-no insurers must be impugned. And doctors, well, doctors have no interest in patient health, they are too busy violating the Hippocratic oath by performing unnecessary organ removal on defenseless children for mercenary gain to concern themselves with sustaining life. All this while Obama wants to create a "ghoul squad" to counsel elderly on end of life decisions at least once every five years and infirm elders more often to let them know that they have outlived their usefulness and are a burden on society, their children, and their grandchildren (and the so-called non-partisan AARP arm of the Democratic party is advocating for Obama care which will ration care and kill off seniors, against the interests of its own membership). To the left, investors termed speculators, SUV owners, and even Walmart are culprits; let it be no surprise that such an opponent of the free market as Obama expands the target list. So demonize the private sector, elevate government to a panacea for all ills which it can never be and taxpayers can not come close to paying for, and you have Obama's Utopia where jobs disappear, small business is pounded out of existence, and America is left as a pale shadow of what the Founding Fathers intended and what we were for more than two centuries.

Worthless Republicans Cave

Lindsey Graham, who is one of the Senators representing conservative South Carolina, announced today he is joining at least four other Senate GOP colleagues in voting to confirm "Soviet" Sotomayor. This is a craven act twisted to appear courageous. Placating Hispanic interest groups such as la Raza which calls for the return of the Southwest to Mexico, is seen as a brown supremacist organization, and to which Ms. Sotomayor allegedly belonged, is a betrayal of all fair-minded American regardless of origin as Hispanics who are in the mainstream see brown separatist groups as a leftist fringe and a danger to full assimilation and integration into American life. Only a small minority of activists belong to such groups as la Raza or the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund Sotomayor served on and counseled, and in fact, served at times, as Vice President of the so-called civil rights group which was often a platform for anti-US agitation with many members favoring Puerto Rico's independence rather than remaining a US territory or seeking statehood. If Sotomayor's racist statements and membership in groups that advocate extreme positions do not disqualify her in the eyes of these moderate Republicans, is there anyone who Obama would put forward for nomination who these compromisers would oppose? These were Senators who were part of the gang of fourteen compromise with Democrats to preserve filibuster while advancing Republican judicial nominees under the last President Bush rather than using the "nuclear option" that would have given Bush his way. A lot of good that did, as Republicans now can not even muster the numbers to sustain a successful filibuster because of weak as water politicians like Graham and Specter who actually has subsequently switched parties. Now, Republicans who could at least vote against her or abstain from voting, are endorsing Sonia Sotomayor even though her associations and statements cast her far outside the political mainstream. Even though her confirmation is inevitable due to Democrat super-majority numbers, duty demands that Republicans stand against a jurist who will drag the court to the left and be both partisan and activist for years to come. If Republicans continue to roll over for or be rolled by Democrats, America must create a viable down the line conservative party.

Play for Pay

Bribery-I read on the ABC crawl that the US is considering paying Afghan farmers not to grow "heroin". I am not a fan of government subsidies of any kind, whether a car company bailout
(which fails and ultimately results in nationalization anyway), to price support subsidies to American farmers to keep certain commodity prices stable, to paying American farmers for crop substitution or to keep fields fallow (these interventions disrupt the forces that balance the market and subsidies are only necessary when a foreign competitor is subsidizing their industry and/or agriculture, creating an uneven playing field-which certainly happens and must be addressed through domestic subsidy, seeking redress through the World Trade Organization, and/or imposition of tariffs). I certainly have principled objections to buying off foreign criminals in a time where our troops and those of our allies in Afghanistan are sustaining their highest casualties ever due to our aggressive actions particularly in the Helmand province offensive by US marines and British and indigenous forces, combined with the most restrictive rules of engagement these forces have ever faced (they must hold fire if Afghan civilians are downrange including extreme restrictions on fire/air support). Pay Afghans not to produce the opium poppy while they have and are providing material support and rooting for the Taliban? And this at a time when American budgets are stretched thin and US states totter on bankruptcy. Every American is about to face higher taxes, levies, and fees at some or all levels of government including unprecedented rate increases for energy as producers pass their burden on under "cap and trade". I have a better idea in the opium poppy growing, terrorist backing regions. We won't destroy their crops with our sixty thousand US forces actively engaged in combat (unlike Colombia where we only have had the presence of a handful of advisers) if they voluntarily give up growing the poison of Western streets. Otherwise our forces and NATO allies will use chemical defoliant and flamethrowers to destroy the poppies and the farms and houses of those who would attempt to continue to aid terror and international organized crime by continuing to produce them. I don't care if that would make it hard for illiterate Afghan farmers (who love and would gladly lay down their lives for Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden in many instances, who despise foreigners in almost all instances, and who cheered the "achievement" of the September 11, 2001 mass murder when they were told of the "triumph" their crops had paid for and harboring of bin Laden had achieved); it is plenty hard on the ten percent of Americans who are unemployed in the Obama prosperity, none of whom grow opium poppies, none of whom ever would, and most of whom would never resort to selling drugs even to feed their beleaguered US families. Pay me-I promise I won't grow any heroin and kill these insular, terror supporting, misogynist Afghans whose product produces nothing but the misery of addiction and early death on our streets.

Over the Coals

Barack Hussein Obama was interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS as part of the President's effort to pass universal health coverage. Just imagine the potential for graft if a public option on medical care passes and the government ultimately ends up controlling the health care sector, one-fifth of the US economy. And what the government already controls, it does so well-a Social Security system with empty "lock boxes", public schools that fail at education but succeed at indoctrination, a nightmare of Byzantine, labyrinthine regulation (only becoming worse) to strangle small business. Yet, Obama care will somehow be different with "efficiencies", "best practices" and elimination of waste. This is balderdash! We have a President who is determined to overturn the free market. During the Lehrer broadcast, Obama described his belief that the banks had "no remorse" for causing the country a near depression by taking undue risk on derivatives. Obama made no mention of government's failings including the government sponsored entities FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC that enabled subprime loans to exist and started the slide, nor did he bring up laws forcing banks to issue subprime loans (to many of Obama's own voters who sought loans they neither had the capacity or in some cases, the desire to pay back) or face charges of "redlining", or Federal regulators being asleep at the switch and allowing the decline to start and then to snowball without intervening or raising the alarm. No the failure was not government's in Obama's eyes, but capitalism itself. Yes, Obama's quarrel is with competition-based free enterprise-the President loves government, larger more encroaching bureaucracy and hates the private sector, not withstanding his laughable assertion that he has enough on his plate fighting two wars and conducting the usual duties of a President to try and take over health care. Obama seeks to monopolize as much power in the hands of government as possible before more Americans wake up to freedoms lost and start to squawk. With the demand for a health scheme before the August recess of Congress, Obama continues to speed through as much as possible before the public can mobilize politically to resist. Citizens wake up, your freedoms are fleeting.

Pulling the Strings

Theories abound that some dark force majeure is the guiding hand behind the Obama administration. Some speculate the puppet master pulling Obama's strings may be George Soros. Others claim Soros may be one of several "wise" men who make the decisions along with the wizard of Omaha Warren Buffet. Soros is a valid candidate as to who has Obama's ear. Obama no longer seems to seek Buffet's counsel after using the super-capitalist to present a veneer of moderation in order to manipulate some in the public to vote for him in the primaries, caucuses, and general election. This patina fooled the gullible as Republican Obama supporters, Christopher Buckley, Peggy Noonan and their ilk fooled themselves into thinking Obama was something other than an arch-leftist that his radical voting record in the US Senate (and the Illinois legislature before that) indicated. Obama may not be under the direction or control of anyone, but it is manifestly clear that Obama is controlling the socialist agenda in Congress. Harry Reid is carrying the water in the Senate where Obama has managed to pull off three (now two, since Arlen Specter showed his turncoat colors) Republicans-the Maine delegation of Snowe and Collins, to advance his agenda and give cover to Democrats. In the House, the true radical Nancy Pelosi has shepherded Obama's leftist program through, meeting a little resistance from first term Democrats who are less securely entrenched in incumbency than their more senior colleagues who have years of patronage pork doled out and favors rendered to ensure voter loyalty. Make no mistake though, the odds strongly favor enough Democrat support being generated to pass "cap and trade" in the Senate and the national health scheme in both houses of Congress. Rahm Emanuel will twist enough arms and enough legal bribes will be disbursed through campaign contributions and more importantly, money appropriated and projects started in districts where Representatives and Senators swing toward and vote for Obama care and energy measures rather than listening to angry constituents and shying away from Obama. In Germany, the German merchant class, the burgher and the bourgeois, thought Hitler would be confined in his actions by the centrist, steady, experienced hand of World War I hero and President Paul Hindenburg who may have been a restraining influence on Adolf had he not done the Nazi Party the great favor of dying, opening the door to the leader (fuhrer) state. Maybe no one is pulling our Leader's string but he will certainly strangle the life and liberty out of the country if enough voters don't raise enough of a stink to stop him.

Guilty Your Horror

With the confluence of the looming passage of a hate crime bill that will stifle preaching Biblical or Koranic morality and the appointment to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, we are about to enter an Orwellian nightmare of thought control by government. In this Aldous Huxley Brave New America, an Associate Justice of the highest court who repeatedly made wise Hispanic woman making better decisions than a wise white male, we have a judge who would not even grant a hearing to white and incidentally an Hispanic firefighter in the Ricci case but dismissed their claims summarily in favor of black firefighters. We face a jurist who has in her speech and in her rulings from the bench shown total disregard for equality in the eyes of the law. She will be confirmed and may even receive the backing of worthless Republican Senators more concerned about the possibility of alienating Hispanic voters than doing the right thing and trying to bar a domineering racist from the Court of last resort. The Democrats had no compunction about offending Hispanics when their Senators did not allow the more collegial, more qualified Republican court candidate, Miguel Estrada from even receiving a vote during the last Bush administration. Combine the imposition of activist jurists with the hate crime bill added to the defense appropriation package to grant homosexuals (gay, lesbian, and transgendered as they like to call themselves) special status and the US is opening the door to censorship of Old and New Testament and Koranic morality that casts sin as sin and sanctifies marriage of man and woman-not man to man, woman to woman, or for that matter, man to sheep, as the only consecrated norm. Well, if a reverend, imam, or rabbi instructs their charges in the "old time" religion and a homosexual is stricken with fear, that preacher may find himself in the dock. Some judge like "Soviet" Sotomayor would be happy to correct the thinking of such a spreader of hate and might assign him to the existing tool of diversity training to wash his mind of the principles of living that have advanced the family as the basic unit of society throughout the course of civilization to this point. Beware Communist style reeducation camps may be coming as the political correctness that dominates the college campus and prevails in the dinosaur media may well be drawing near nationwide with the force of law imposed by activist judges who already consider male gender and white skin as two strikes against you. In their eyes, I have already damned myself with my assertion of traditional morality in these pages.

Pulled Out Rug

Walter Cronkite is receiving "fare the wells" across the old line media but what must be remembered is that his "stalemate at best" statement paved the way for US defeat in Vietnam. Cronkite made the sacrifice of sixty thousand Americans in Southeast Asia meaningless, advanced the Communist cause, and precipitated the fall of dominoes that included South Vietnam, Laos, and facilitated the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. All this with one "the war can not be won" statement in the wake of the Tet Offensive in which the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong attacked during a ceasefire that was traditional during the lunar New Year celebrations and which according to their own commanding general Vo Nguyen Giap had been a resounding defeat for his forces with the regular army throttled and turned back and the guerrilla bands crushed. So what was a moment of triumph by our forces was transformed into a defeat and propaganda coup for the other side. The Johnson administration should have had Westmoreland (the David Petraeus of his day), McNamara, or even the President himself publicly question how many campaigns Cronkite had waged, what battles he had won, or which war college he had attended. The damage wrought by Cronkite's uninformed speculation cost millions of lives. The slog to victory would have been hard, but just like the Malay Insurrection, the war could have been won and thousands of Americans would not have had their lives taken for nothing, millions of Asians would not have been murdered, and Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam would not have become Red enslavement and murder regimes. Cronkite, amidst the glowing eulogies, must be remembered as one of the breed of journalists who undercut his own country.

President Obama's Gift

Numerous commentators have rapt ecstatic about our young President. Michael Beschloss imagined Obama's epic IQ in an interview with Don Imus that has become notorious. Our leader has undeniable mass appeal (but so did Hitler), some would say charm and grace, and an almost unparalleled ability to read a speech seamlessly from a teleprompter or script. His innate gifts notwithstanding, Obama has received a gift from an al Qaeda affiliate organization today with the double hotel bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia, a town in which the young Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama) resided. Indonesia was of course the scene of terror attacks during the Bush administration, most notably the Bali outrage, but make no mistake, this is an answer to Obama's vigorous outreach to the Muslim world. The irredentist factions of the religion of Obama's youth believe he is an apostate Muslim heretic who must be resisted to the death. They despise Obama with his olive branch of squeezing Israel every bit as much as they hated Bush, perhaps even more as they see Obama as someone who abandoned their formerly shared faith. This was every bit as much an attack on America, directed at two hotels with deep American connotations as on Indonesia, and targeted perhaps at Jakarta, because as a boy, our President made his home there. The attacks needed neither a vast support network, nor enjoyed broad popular support, but with so many committed Jihadist worldwide, who learned bomb making skills in Afghanistan or Pakistan, from those who learned in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or even from the Internet, the security services recognize that it does not take more than a small cadre to do great damage. In this latest horror, the suicide bombers may have been convinced they were delivering a present to Obama himself with their detonation.

These Trying Times

Never has there been greater potential for human prosperity, longevity, and liberty than has been brought forth by technology for the dissemination of ideas than today. Yet, in the country that consecrated freedom, a force has emerged that seeks to rob us of our blood-earned blessing and make us dependent from the cradle to the grave. Every policy position is borne on the wings of a "crisis", from the chimera of global warming to the supposed health care debacle which must be addressed posthaste. There is no time for cool-headed deliberation or debate about the immediate need for reform-we must act now and worry about the details and consequences later. Exaggerate the necessity, use your media flacks to advance the effort, deceive the public about the cost, both monetary and in freedom lost and chalk up another victory for Dear Leader. We have a new breed of "leap before they look" Democrats controlling both House and Senate-more eager to please the ruler than anxious about re-election, figuring with McCain-Feingold and ACORN that their incumbency is so well protected that they need not worry about challengers and absolutely cavalier about the damage they are doing to the country. I never imagined we as a nation were susceptible to a cult of personality dictator, but with a putty media and a rubber stamp Congress willing to broach no dissent-we find ourselves with an autocrat. We are allowing Obama to end the experiment in liberty that gave flesh to the ideas of Locke. We are giving away choice, grasping dependency, and leaving our children less free.

The Imperial Presidency

I watched Barack Obama being interviewed by Tim Johnson on Nightline. I was struck by Obama's arrogance when he spoke of "deploying our resources" as prior to his ascension, I thought America was a capitalistic society where people were free to select their career path, strive for professional education, and practice what they were qualified for, not what a command economy laid out for them. My bad-we are on a central planning life path with a great community pot of resources, not what we earn for our families but what Obama deigns to allow us. Obama questions the "profit motive" of insurers who do not want to alienate or kill off their policy holders who after all pay premiums. But are we allowed to question Obama's motives? Obama spoke of committees of medical "gatekeepers" being established which will keep you from receiving specialized care at the time of your greatest need-the government will marshal its resources on the front end and focus on prevention. God forbid you have a complicated, expensive, chronic, or extensive illness or condition under Obama's rationing scheme. His condescension was apparent with his red pill/ blue pill cost argument as though we are wasting resources for the sheer joy of it now in medical care or as patients. People who have to foot the bill have always sought the most efficient treatment without this haughty idiot's admonition. This emperor showed his true colors as a sham commander when he tried earlier in his administration to make wounded veterans bear the cost of their treatment. Bush was lambasted for saying he was the "decider" in his real effort to be a wartime commander-in-chief after the worst attack ever on our nation, now we have this usurper who palpably possesses a king complex trying to take over the most vital and personal aspects of our lives. We can not afford to let him.

No Smoking Troops

The Obama administration's Pentagon is launching a study about a complete ban on smoking among members of the US military. No more iconic images like those seen in World War II and even in our current Iraq campaign of rough-hewn American warriors puffing away as they cut our enemies down. No now, these troops who face daily danger can not be allowed the freedom that Obama himself exercises to smoke away. Yes our stage managed hypocrite of a President still battles his smoking demon, but you will not see this in the complicit mainstream press. Just as the media willingly helped conceal FDR's polio-induced disability and JFK's systematic and widely known infidelity, today's White House reporter corps suppresses unflattering facts about Obama such as his tobacco addiction or his inability to throw last night's MLB All-Star game first pitch over the plate. In and of themselves, Obama's lack of physical prowess or his occasional discreet lighting up, may not provoke much consternation but taken with the media's failure to scrutinize his associations with Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, and long membership in the church of Jeremiah Wright with anti-white and anti-American pronouncements, this amounts to a pattern of media malpractice where the old-line press have reduced themselves to Obama's willing partisans-henchmen advancing the statist, socialist cause.

The Amazing Fetus

I was reading the crawl on ABC news this morning when I saw that scientists have confirmed that the human fetus starts forming memories in the womb. Juxtapose this news item with the "Soviet" Sotomayor testimony that the "right to abortion is settled law". If a fetus is merely a mass of tissue more analagous to a tumor than a vulnerable, nascent human, already sentient almost from the moment of conception, then like a tumor, there is no problem with removing it. No need for ethical dilemmas if a woman is ridding herself of a little carbuncle as the Supreme Court nominee believes, but as technology has evolved and medical care has improved, what was not able to survive out of the womb when the Roe decision was rendered, is now able to survive if given the opportunity and grow into productive adulthood. In the early 1970s, a premature baby delivered at thirty weeks faced a grave prognosis of almost certain death. Now, thanks to biomedical advances, babies delivered at twenty-four weeks can survive. Even as premie treatments have progressed, the "settled law" is based on the premise that infanticide is not being committed because the standard of care in 1973 did not routinely produce survival until the latter part of the third trimester. With a care rationing regime on the way with Obama's national health plan, not just the preborn should worry but the disabled, particularly those who are most dependent on society for aid and protection (lest we forget Terri Schiavo), who may well be deemed too costly to be maintained under our new medical scheme. If a viable unborn child may be fatally ripped from the womb, then why not pull the plug or starve and dehydrate an adult who is no longer productive and is unable to speak for or defend himself. Murder by way of euthanasia advocate Peter Singer has been an open proponent of this and his views have been embraced by leftists. So in the Big Brother, ultimate invasive government control state that is going to be formed if it is not stopped, abortion on demand for those who neither practiced safer sex, nor troubled themselves with any moral consideration, will be the sacred right while those most in need of our assistance because of disease or debilitating injury will just be too much of a burden for the State to maintain.

Will to Lose

The only way the West can be defeated in the war on terror is if they lack the resolve to win. Barack Obama's CIA director Leon Panetta manages to undercut his intelligence agency to rescue Nancy Pelosi's flagging reputation with allegations that the clandestine agency had secret plans to kill or capture al Qaeda members-seeming to confirm Pelosi's dangerous claims of an organization that instead of serving the national interest and following the law-"lied all the time" to Congress. Threaten prosecution for CIA interrogators, question the agency's credibility, and drop their mission to kill our most implacable enemies. Sounds like a formula for victory to me. Engage the remaining two bad actors (North Korea and Iran) from Bush's Axis of Evil (a characterization for which Bush was sometimes mocked) as both nation's procure weapons of mass destruction apace, pursue ever increasing range in the means to deliver them, and in the case of North Korea, become the world's most overt and willing proliferator. In Iran, use the opportunity of their rigged election to praise Obama's Cairo speech as turning the tide of history-then do nothing besides a few Voice of America Persian language service broadcasts chronicling the suppression in the streets-VOA content most Iranians never heard as the mad Mullahs and Ahmadinejad had some success in jamming and blocking incoming broadcasts. This pronounced failure to support a ground-up democracy movement against a wildly unpopular religious fanatic of a leader and his street thug and cleric backers who had in Ahmadinjad's previous campaign promised to uplift the poor but in office had done nothing to ease their plight-even raising gasoline prices and doing nothing to address other deficiencies because so much national resources had been diverted into Iran's nuclear program.  Reward terror and bolster Arab intransigence by falsely elevating Israel's settlement enterprise into the main source of tension  and conflict in the Middle East, all the while ignoring both violent action and genocidal foment against Jews by Hamas, Hizballah, Saudi and Egyptian Wahhabs, Syria, and Iran as the Obama administration is doing. Making Israel the culprit and focus of Western pressure does not further the objective of peace but guarantees continued bloodshed.  In Afghanistan, produce the most restrictive rules of engagement ever imposed on US forces as they are introduced to their highest level of combat with the entry into Helmand. This is a recipe for unnecessary casualties and our ally Great Britain is similarly exposed, sustaining her own bloodletting with fifteen deaths so far this month due largely to a dearth of proper equipment (according to BBC-particularly helicopters). So, from a lack of preparedness by Britain which economized on Boeing Chinooks and is now paying with troopers' lives, to America, which has substituted the need to talk for the need to win and civilization may yet see defeat snatched from the jaws of triumph with darkness, nihilism, and world jihad winning with patience and perseverance.

Hellbent on Destruction

It is not enough for American leftists to corrupt their own households, villages, or even states, they are striking out at the entire nation. Massachusetts insists her perversion of the sanctified institution of marriage be given the full faith and credit it is due, and that its homosexual unions be recognized in the other forty-nine states as well. California, which has bankrupted itself, wants its enviro-friendly building codes incorporated in the cap and trade disaster with requirements for Energy Star appliances in new homes or existing ones where ownership is transferred, and this onerous, costly provision, which inhibits already devastated home sales, is indeed in the bill passed by the House. And there is haste in these measures and the rest of Obama's initiatives, he must pass and sign cap and trade and the national health care regime quickly as Americans are already beginning to wake to the Obama failures in bailouts and stimulus which have manifestly not revived the economy. Obama's rhetoric and that of his minions will keep the pot simmering and try to convey the air of crisis to get his initiatives passed in a hurry, without due deliberation by Congress and being pushed through without public scrutiny. Rahm Emanuel's "never let a crisis go to waste" has been put to good effect by an administration which takes all credit-if you still have your job, it is not your inherent ability, your work ethic, or your employer's needs, you're still working because of grand master Obama and his brilliant team. If you are out of work, well that is the fault of the Bush hangover. So wreck both the economy and the social order before the public demands that media, politicians, and jurists do their jobs and soon we will have the country that Stalin, not Washington, imagined.

The Common Thread

The remarkable similarity between Jimmy Carter and Barack Hussein Obama has been pointed out before, but I think it is more easily defined in the statement that both believe that the US is just too big for her britches. We have enjoyed too much prosperity, too much opportunity, too much power. We have simply been too American. Just as South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings declared in his ringing bass-baritone that "there's just too much consuming going on" around here, our apologetic President is administering our dose of punishment for enjoying so much for so long. In Jimmy Carter, America had a real Puritan who was willing to share our suffering with us. He would have bravely put on his little sweater and braved absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, cracking into a pile of dust if he could just spare one poor beleaguered soul from suffering anywhere in the world. Carter earnestly thought his mission was to alleviate all suffering everywhere and as long as anyone was left behind, we all had the duty to share the pain. Obama does not pretend to bear this particular burden. He, his wife and daughters, and their close confidants are milking the position of the Presidency for everything it's worth. Let Carter and the other poor suckers wallow in austerity, the Obamas have moved on up on false pretenses-the man knows he was ill-prepared and is ill-equipped for the office and is going to work the position, to use the office with all the tricks of a community organizer to his own advantage just as he would have instructed his followers in his ACORN days in Chicago to use the system for every possible benefit available. While the jobless struggle to make ends meet, the Obamas enjoy lavish accommodations and banquets in Paris and Russia. Michelle sports a purse more expensive than many peoples' monthly mortgage payment. I will not forget the grief Nancy Reagan took for purchasing new White House china. No matter if Republicans use their own funds or private contributions, they must be held to account with ridiculous comparisons about how many homeless could have been fed, if the money was otherwise directed. While Carter saw the need to share the misery as he cut his own country down to size, Obama harbors no such delusions-he will ride high while we pound sand if and until the voting public figures him out.

Fritz Henderson Fantasist

From the unsafe at any speed Chevrolet Corvair on which Ralph Nader made much of his reputation as a consumer advocate, to the notorious Brian Bosworth article where he claimed that while he was working at a GM plant in Oklahoma, UAW assemblers would mischievously scatter a few loose bolts in the door so the subsequently produced vehicles would always have an unexplained rattle, General Motors has a well-earned reputation. From unscrupulous dealers such as my hometown's thankfully vanquished Bill Heard, to my own experience with my 1995 Chevrolet Blazer, which surged into traffic at a busy intersection when I released the brake but before I stepped on the gas-nearly causing me a t-bone collision, to my grandfather's 1968 Cadillac that sits immobile in my garage after running well for about a month in 1969 and having so many problems that it was simply left idle since the early 70s, GM has produced piece of crap after piece of crap and some very dangerous ones along the way. The reborn GM has all the baggage of shoddy workmanship to go with screwing their own dealers, some of which screwed their customers, terminated their own salaried workers (executives, designers, engineers, and management who do not enjoy union protection), stripped the rights of customers who were in litigation after being injured by GM products who had their recourse taken away by the bankruptcy, dunned suppliers, and even left states in the lurch, such as my own Tennessee, which hosted the state of the art Chevy Traverse plant which had formerly been Saturn and had given General Motors enormous subsidies-some in the form of education grants, road building around and for the benefit of the plant, tax abatement just to bring and keep the plant, only to be stabbed in the back by GM, who is relocating manufacture to Wisconsin, a closed shop, rather than right to work state Tennessee, to placate the UAW. As long as Barack Obama is President, living in the back pocket of organized labor, I will never consider purchasing a GM or for that matter, Chrysler product (the worst vehicle my family ever had to endure was a 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue). Companies that sell inferior products to unwary and vulnerable consumers, sometimes using essentially fraudulent financing schemes, such as telling car buyers to deliberately overstate their incomes to qualify for loans-both a lie and criminal offense, who always seem to be able to boost a price between the time it is negotiated and sealed with a handshake but before it is put down on paper, whose trained technicians seem to find mechanical difficulties you never knew you had that make your vehicle dangerous to operate if not immediately addressed, but can never seem to hear the hiss and rattle that brought you into the Goodwrench repair shop in the first place, which have kowtowed to their unions while telling their consumer to take a leap-deserve to be consigned to the ash heap or in this case the "green" enviro-friendly junkyard of history. Ask me what these behemoth government-union partnerships can do to earn back my business with their new fuel-efficient CAFE standard mandated models and I will tell you-"nothing, not now, never. I will never buy anything from a socialist enterprise."

Running of Fools

Inevitably, if you combine a large crowd of people, with enraged bulls, and alcohol, someone will be hurt, and today at the running of the bulls at the Festival of San Fermin, someone died. Hemingway romanticized this notably foolhardy enterprise a few generations back and since then, international literati have joined the local idiots in trying to show their bravado from a bottle. But then, extreme sports offer little appeal for me. I just am not thrilled by the idea of having a tipsy Ed Ames impersonator throw tomahawks at me or of finding Sicilians to insult gratuitously. I gave up membership in the dart catchers league and I think I'll wait until I turn one hundred to join the first President Bush in jumping out of airplanes. As for me, dressing as a ninja and sprinting on a moonless midnight across an eight-lane super highway is all the excitement I ever need.

Take Their Water

A certain breed of politicians permeates the Democratic party today. They are the type that feel that the people they represent are so inept that for their own good, these wise politicians need to make all the decisions. This new breed of Democrat puts the nanny in nanny state. They were talking about how we peons are being exploited by the bad, old bottled water pushers. Why, do we realize there's water in them there bottles? Not magic, not super pure glacial melt meant to make you live to one hundred and twenty. Not runoff from Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth-just in some cases, plain unembellished municipal tap water. There is a sound reason to drink bottled water-portability. In areas where no water fountains are nearby, you look like less of an idiot with your little plastic bottle than with your army surplus o.d. canteen, your old lunch box thermos, or your camel back hydration pack. Yes, I would love to walk through the mall with my old boy scout canteen or maybe my old fabric covered Western trail canteen while wearing a Resistol or Stetson. These do-gooder dictators are out to limit choice, to take your choice away when it comes to everything but abortion on demand. There you have a choice, but in every other aspect of your life (except euthanasia, they push that too), this scourge wants to tell you where to live, how to live, how much you may pollute, what doctor you may see, what treatment you are permitted to receive, what light bulb you can use, what low flow toilet you must use, what car you drive, now right down to the water you drink. They are your benevolent masters and you're just too dumb to appreciate them.

North Korea Strikes

The warped, recalcitrant, self-indulgent leader of North Korea, who feasts on fatty tuna and Beluga caviar while his people starve, has had his midget minions playing little games with US and South Korean government computers. His hackers, using some of his nation's handful of modern computers, have made a little mischief at our expense, but this cancer on the face of the globe does more than parlor tricks. North Korea has attacked and murdered American guards in the Truce Village of the DMZ with axes. They seized the USS Pueblo in 1968 and still hold the vessel to this day. They have blown a commercial airliner out of the skies. They never returned some POWs after armistice. They kidnapped Japanese citizens from their home islands to use in bizarre espionage training. They have printed counterfeit American currency and Treasury instruments. They are holding two American journalists hostage, and Barack Hussein Obama is terrified of pipsqueak, starving North Korea. Obama's worldview, which eschews force (and in my belief, had we not already been involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would not under Obama engage anywhere abroad as even now he is trying to return us from a war on terror back to a Clinton era law enforcement problem), is wholly unequipped to deal with the dying North Korean madman, who may well want to bring the walls of the temple down with him. Rational considerations such as survival have no bearing in the mind of missile-lobbing sadists. A leader like Teddy Roosevelt, no matter what you think of his progressive policies at home, would not have long countenanced an anti-American fanatic menace so small it was not holding a knife at our throats but at our toes. It may be time for Obama to squash another annoying bug-but he won't.

Strong Arm Tactics

While reeking of appeasement abroad, the Obama administration is cutting a wide swath here in the US with Obama firing the head of a car company en route to nationalizing two of the former Big Three to vest control of them with the unions who broke them while essentially robbing the common shareholder who beyond a mostly meaningless proxy vote had no say in how companies were run. The government regulators across industry and finance did less than nothing to protect the small individual investor who the last President Bush and Secretary of Treasury Paulson so falsely maligned as "speculators". There were and are certainly speculators, but so many hurt in the Bush recession which is becoming the Obama depression, were buy and hold investors, not looking for quick profits by way of a trade but specifically seeking out blue chip shares to derive an income from dividends. They were given a false sense of security by company assurances, words they falsely believed had meaning such as fiduciary responsibility that was supposed to keep those running the companies on the straight and narrow, and the government regulation regime that continued to instill confidence in investors that their interests were being protected by government when there should have been none. The government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with laws against supposed discriminatory lending known as "redlining" actually started the "sub prime" avalanche that collapsed the economy. The government created the mess, caused an artificial sense of security that investors' interests were being looked after, and now is rewarding labor which destroyed management in what used to be the largest industrial companies. American hospitals have now been essentially extorted to provide $155 billion for the coming national health care scheme. They were told to contribute now to funding uninsured care and look like team players and good guys or have your government reimbursement for care provided cut much more deeply and the accompanying bad p.r. of being called out as working against the interests of taxpayers and your own patients. This is Daley Chicago Machine style legal blackmail. The government threatens banks to take TARP money whether they need it or not, then uses the rationale that they took said money to exert control over them, from making them buy failing brokerages against the fiduciary interests of their common shareholders (who were after all the presumptive owners) as was the case in Bank of America being forced to acquire Merrill. The banks, many of which were cajoled into taking the government's money, now find themselves subject to the new "compensation czar". Some banks have not been permitted to pay the government back and may not be allowed out from under the new regulatory regime that they never needed to place themselves under in the first place as they had relatively strong balance sheets but were forced by the government to take over weak or failing institutions and given TARP funds with strangling strings attached for their trouble which they were told was necessary by said government regulators to preserve the US financial system. So from our largest corporations to the government telling you what vehicle you may drive and which light bulb you must use, we have a sweeping loss of freedom, not to mention, little anti-Constitutional measures like the test case roll out of door to door gun searches with one hundred extra Federal agents gathered from all over the country in Houston, Texas, as has been widely reported. So project weakness abroad, appease enemies, threaten friends, stand against freedom seekers in Honduras with a nascent dictator, blow kisses to Iran, give platitudes about "restraint" to China, quaking at North Korea, all the while bullying, to extract concessions from capital (management) while throwing unprecedented sops to labor which had outlived its usefulness as a movement and was on its way to dying a natural death were it not primarily for government workers, including teachers. Give in to foreign enemies, unnecessarily pressure friends abroad to make them adversaries, rise above media scrutiny-after all the media except for a few bastions like talk radio, some elements at Fox, and a few conservative bloggers here and there on the Internet are with the team, just as car makers, banks, and hospitals have just been cajoled to be. In America, it's risky and expensive to be seen to be against Obama.

Herald the Triumph

All hail Barack Obama-bringer of peace. The Obama administration and its US mainstream media lackeys are crowing about the greatest achievement in the history of arms control. I have always been skeptical that any country that you need a formalized treaty with to further peace is a nation apt to break the treaty anyway. "Trust little, and verify much" should be the watchwords of the day as Russia seems to have held on to an evil legacy that quashes dissent and even finds journalists critical of the Russian administration murdered. The CIS has devolved into Czarist anti-democratic tendencies. She has also of late invaded, stirred up trouble, or otherwise attacked weak, tiny neighbors who have tried to move closer to the West. Each country will retain sufficient weaponry to destroy the earth several times over, the Russians are not dependable, and if Obama stays in office long enough he may fully disarm unilaterally which seems to be his heart's desire. The world remains a dangerous place, diplomacy is useless without force to back it up-China explodes in ethnic violence with our State Department urging restraint on both sides as I predicted in an earlier column today and our greatly naive, great leader signs meaningless agreements with realpolitik tough guys who are laughing at him and the country dumb enough to put him in office.

Natives Are Restless

A careful balance has to be struck by the United States in dealing with resistance groups and totalitarian regimes in the case when the resistors are in the camp of al Qaeda and the dictatorships happen to hold much of our debt. The Muslim region of Red China has undeniably been subjected to great oppression-but then so has Tibet, the Falun Gong, and any other freedom seeker in the world's largest Communist slave state. Not that bolstering or even giving tacit endorsement to tyranny can ever be American policy, but neither can we ever again have a situation where we destabilized Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, allowing the success of the Mujaheddin who would include Osama bin Laden and come to spawn Taliban takeover and failed state status creating a void in lawful governance that ultimately led to the September 11, 2001 attacks. So as the worst violence since Tiananmen grips Xianjiang with restive Muslims, not of Chinese but Turkish ancestry bringing an uprising to the streets, the US must tread carefully with a measured response by the administration and State Department, calling for calm and "an end to use of force by both sides" as is so often heard in relation to Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians in the inappropriately termed "cycle of violence". The Uighurs (Turkic minority but a majority in the area of the fighting) have legitimate grievance as do all Chinese who are not elites with privilege such as Politburo members, but the answer is not the murder of ethnic Chinese who mostly are just as deprived of human rights as the Muslim or Tibetan minorities. America has already angered Chinese authorities by sending Uighur terrorists caught by US forces training for Jihad in Afghanistan to a beach resort upon their release from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility rather than extraditing them to China to face justice (almost certain execution) as the Reds demanded. With China, along now incidentally, with Russia and India, demanding that a new currency replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and with ethnic Chinese who might themselves yearn for more freedom, righteously outraged at seeing their brethren butchered by Uighurs and though not especially supportive of the Communists, absolutely opposed to the lapse in law and order that permits ethnic cleansing, who will gladly rise to protect other ethnic Chinese-this is the time for the utmost discretion in US diplomacy to permit China to handle her internal affairs with just enough emphasis that there is scrutiny, that the world is watching and while it recognizes China must restore order, it will not countenance a bloodbath silently.

Oren's Dire Warning

The Jerusalem Post reported that new Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, sending an unmistakable signal in a public American forum, has stated that if Iran realizes her nuclear aims, she could destroy Israel in a matter of "seconds". Then a report emerges that Saudi Arabia, which is not only the home of Mecca, but the leader of the Sunni world, might not object to Israeli overflights to remove a Shia menace rising with atomic weapons in the hands of the Mullahs. Finally Joe Biden, on a visit to the Middle East, basically condones Israel squelching Ahmadinejad-encouraging the Jewish state to stand up for itself. Of course, Oren might be posturing to initiate movement by the US or the world aimed at curtailing the Iranian nuclear program, or he could be explaining that a casus belli already exists, presaging future Israeli military action. The Saudis may have tacitly or overtly approved Israel's potential act to rid a regional threat if the report on the Saudis is not in error. Arabs have been at odds with Persia for millennia. Joe Biden is given to frequent bouts of verbal diarrhea so this could be mere slip of lip, or the Vice President could be enunciating administration policy that while America will not act to stop Iran, if Israel does, she has US blessings. In any event, Iran has revealed her true face and the world, while it may not be ready to confront, may be ready to hold the coat for any nation or entity that will effect regime change in Tehran.