Moscow and Michigan

The horrific Moscow subway bombings are a wake up call to some who may have forgotten the authentic threat of jihad with worldwide tentacles that have spilled innocent blood in Bali, in China, in Thailand, in the Philippines, Madrid, London, New York, on the Indian subcontinent, and across the African continent into the Middle East. I am quite a bit less worried about supposed "armed Christian militias" as were allegedly plotting in Michigan (and Ohio and Indiana). In the late 1960s, radicals in the United States claimed agent provocateurs, law enforcement members or confidential informants often in the employ of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had prompted them to plan, attempt, or commit criminal acts. Maybe, those detained in the militia roundup may have been truly dangerous would be or even soon to be terrorists, or perhaps, they were merely caught in a web spun by the FBI. They may be fantasists with more guns than many citizens own, but unless those weapons were altered to fire in full automatic mode illegally or owned without the owner going through the requisite background check and paying the BATF Class III (three) tax, if the guns are full automatic, there is no offense in owning legally-obtained firearms. Were the suspects making bombs (which would be against the law)? Let the government produce the evidence. There are some people who manufacture explosives as a bizarre hobby but who have no intention of doing anything but setting them off in the woods and not directing them against any person, including law enforcement. Maybe, the Michiganders in custody are dangerous, but we must not be distracted from the real threat of those acting for the cause of world jihad that has spilled much real blood the world over.

Our Impetuous Lad

We are living the high life- spending Federal dollars like there is no tomorrow. But, eventually, and probably sooner than later, the bill will come due. President Barack Hussein Obama is perfectly content to keep on spending. Obama betrays a lack of understanding of basic economics that seems almost unfathomable. Does Obama simply believe that the US Treasury can simply print more money to pay for all this and that this will not utterly devalue US currency? Most eighth graders would comprehend this. Past Republican Presidents have been accused by liberals of practising voodoo economics. Our current leader is taking us down the path of Zimbabwe economics, and it is not sustainable and not good.

Send Them Packing

This November, we will have a rare opportunity- and I hope it is not our last- to restore fiscal sanity and reverence for liberty to Washington. As D.C. spends us into oblivion and directs us as politicians and bureaucrats become our masters, voters have the ability to stop the national death spiral and remove one-party rule that has shown itself to be extra-Constitutional by its very nature, of late in the health care regime rammed through against popular opposition. In districts where it seems Democrats will prevail no matter what because of strong minority or liberal presence, perhaps closet conservatives should run in Dem primaries to muddy the water and perhaps even trip up incumbents who felt sure to be re-elected, facing no or only token opposition. After all, those supporting "Light-brain" Harry Reid suggested fielding a Tea Party candidate to take votes away from Reid's Republican opponent in Nevada's general election for US Senator.  After all, two can play that shameless game. Even in my own US House District election, with fake fiscal conservative Jim Cooper seeking re-election, expect a tough slough. Nashville, where not Blue Dog, but lap-dog Cooper is running is still largely supportive of Obama's rubber stamp as Copper continues to draw backing from  three levels of government workers  in this state's capital city with local, Federal, and state union roster folks all still behind Cooper, along with the substantial university community here that tacks Left, and the large black population that mostly still believes Obama and his minions can do no wrong. There is strong sentiment against Cooper but with his vast personal wealth, family name recognition with a father who was a well-loved Tennessee Governor, strong backing from labor and even corporate interests, and the inherent power of incumbency, it is no sure thing that Cooper will not gain another term. Perhaps, the GOP will not win here but must win elsewhere and by wide margins because in any close race, expect ACORN-type machinations and Al Franken tricks to keep Democrat incumbents in their seats which will only usher in the New Amerika where real Americans will not want to go.

Are They Marxists?

Nothing could be more American than an independence-minded cowboy riding the range in the Big Sky country of Montana- right? So who would have ever thought that the first overt admission of the Democrats' Marxist bent would have come from none other than Montana's own US Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, who conceded the passage of the health care legislation occurred to help overcome "mal-distribution of income in America". This startling revelation is not an act of socialism, which would merely portend government ownership or effective control of the means of production, but a blaring declaration of redistributionist intentions in the path followed by Communists the world over as they gain power. Senator Baucus heralded this as a plan for "income shift", but the scheme rewards the dole dweller at the expense of the productive and saps the ability of private sector employers to create jobs. Thank you for your frankness and honesty Senator Baucus, perhaps more fellow Democrats will embrace your refreshing candor.

Extol Our Virtues

It started with one remark by his wife, now our First Lady, that for the first time in her adult life, Michelle Obama was "proud" of America but only with her husband's rise toward the Presidency. Now, it has continued with her husband persistently apologizing for everything to everybody abroad for the United States, as if our very existence has darkened the globe. Quite to the contrary, the US has been the beacon of liberty, the sanctuary, and indeed the liberator to the oppressed the world over. Why do you think so many have risked all to come here? Why did Obama's own father travel here from Kenya? Our society has exemplified our exceptionalism by enshrining liberty that made us the Land of Opportunity as you could enter our land with a dream, use freedom to risk to succeed or fail, but in this land, you could pull yourself back up by the bootstraps and start again. The synergy of political and economic freedom meant that, more than anywhere else, you had the chance to pave your own street with gold. But the regretful socialist running things now does not believe this, Obama has been taught and agrees that we were a nation built on the sweat of slaves, stolen from the Red Man, and basted in the blood of all those we dispossessed in our rise to the tyrannical colossus that bestrode the earth. That is what the Noam Chomskys of the world think and preach and that is the mentality that now resides in the Oval Office and insists that we are so filled with original national sin and so inherently unjust and flawed that we must be remade. That is what Obama's change is all about.

Poison the Well

Democrats have attempted to frame the terms of debate by corrupting the very language. To hear the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, talk about health care with what this plan will do for "workers" is a repulsive bridge to Marx ("workers of the world unite") and an affront to the vast majority of full-time workers who already had health insurance before this debacle which will only end up being a rights-limiting, net expense for them when all provisions of the law take effect. The manipulation of language to pit groups against each other is now stock and trade in the dirty Democrat playbook. The colored language is part of triangulation strategy that has sadly worked successfully since Bill Clinton used it at Dick Morris's behest in capturing the Presidency. But Nancy Pelosi is the consummate schemer in attempting to pull the rug out from the American Dream. Does Pelosi believe that "workers" are drone bees content and only qualified to stay in a persistent underclass, without the desire, aspiration, and formerly, before Democratic tax increases made it much harder to rise, the ability to lift themselves up the social strata? Never has a country existed like the American nation, never having a rigid caste or class system, where so many impoverished immigrants may soar to ownership in a single generation with their children often entering the professional classes. And let us immediately disabuse the idea that the rich do not work. Often the wealthy are successful because they work harder, work longer hours, work smarter, and delay gratification, so that they may accumulate productive assets. With the exception of inherited wealth, which is how the last several generations of Democrat Kennedys survived, and which is often squandered by idiot heirs, almost everyone who enjoys success in the United States has worked for it.

Jihad Against Us

I have never particularly worried that an al Qaeda member would turn up on my front lawn, gleaming scimitar in hand, and despite today's audio release of a threat against Americans being issued supposedly by Osama bin Laden himself, I still do not. But I am beginning for the first time in my life, to greatly fear the hand of my own government. Two statements by major Democrat figures, not backbenchers, but senior members of the US House of Representatives have only reinforced my worries. First Representative John Dingell in an interview with WJR's Paul W. Smith let the truth slip out that it would take a while for the government to initiate the mechanisms in the new health care regime that would enable the government to "control the people". Was this moment of clarity not a signal that we need to banish our new-found masters from office as soon as is possible? The second statement came from Barney Frank of Massachusetts and revealed his determination to "wipe out the shareholders" in large companies. So the Democrats at senior levels are openly admitting that they are both anti-freedom "control the people" and anti-capitalism "wipe out shareholders", and this ought to scare the hell out of liberty lovers and individual investors alike. Ad to this the seeming determination of Democrats to criminalize criticism by terming dissent as threat as they are doing in the wake of the health care debate, and we are well on our way to Russia.

Arrogance in Power

In this column, two seemingly unrelated issues are intertwined, so please bear with me as I explain how the two items are related and more than just tangentially. First, we have the argument concerning the soaring cost of gun violence, with extreme expense incurred on the front end in emergency services, trauma care, and investigation- whether or not the victim survives. Then, should the wounded person survive the injuries, we are told that society often has to pay for the continuing burden of extensive rehabilitation, including physical and occupational therapy and perhaps psychological counseling to assist the victim in resuming a normal life, if said injured party is not so badly debilitated that he or she requires even more costly lifetime care. So, according to the gun control advocates, death, injury, a former productive person being turned into an invalid, are all the consequences of our being able to access firearms with which we may hunt, sport and target shoot, and indeed, in a situation where lives are imperiled, protect ourselves, our loved ones, and other innocent people, but ah, there is the rub, liberals including emergency room physicians (such as Vanderbilt's Emergency Department Chairman Corey Slovis who has spoken in local media denouncing easy access to guns because the enormous cost caused by their use) have long been trotted out by the dinosaur press to demonstrate the price we pay for our gun rights while no attempt at balance is presented by the propagandists for the gun banners with no Second Amendment supporters allowed on to counter with either the "more guns, less crime" argument so brilliantly advanced by John R. Lott or the "price of freedom" argument that would be sufficient in a sane society. Now, those Leftists in power are prepared to use any ploy to advance their agenda. They intend to replace the real economy with a false one involving carbon trading credits with "cap and trade" where they will takeover another significant portion of control of our independence and destiny just on the heels of co-opting over fifteen percent of the economy with their just completed "Obama does not care" medical sector coup. An administration eager to create a fictitious economy based on the whole cloth rationale of man-caused global warming to overturn the actual economy that thrives most when there is cheap and abundant energy and is willing to restrict the use of energy by businesses and individuals, thereby imposing greater costs on us, taxes hidden by businesses having to pass on their new-found regulatory and operational costs to consumers, and further restricting our rights, would not hesitate to use other subterfuge to steal more of our formerly enshrined freedoms. I believe the cabal ruling over us now will most likely try to use the new health care regime to impose restrictions on our gun rights, using the excuse of the spiking price of firearms violence, to say that under universal care, our love of guns is simply a privilege that the United States can not afford to maintain. Just as the radicals in charge will use cap and trade under phony anthropogenic global warming to inhibit our liberty, they will similarly lie to take our guns. In come restrictions motivated by budget restraint (society can simply no longer afford that quaint old Second Amendment), and out go our rights.

Now the Repercussions

The die is cast, the deed is done, and for the moment, Obama won. He is happily proclaiming what he has done for the American people, but the majority of Americans know what Obama has done to us. But there is a cost associated with every action. The price the Democrats will pay will be the loss of their majority in the US House of Representatives as well as the loss of marquee Democrats in the US Senate including the Democrat leader, Nevada's Harry Reid. They will not hold these seats in spite of the endemic machinations of the successor groups to the discredited ACORN who will simply rename themselves before conducting the same dodgy tactics that have formerly helped Democrats win (steal) previous elections. The Democrats shot themselves in the foot with the health care vote which is not good right before the sprint of November's elections.

Mourning for America

Many a Democrat politician celebrated last night, perhaps some by sparking up a Cuban, as America gave away her patrimony and her exceptionalism to become yet another socialist enterprise. In a nation already stretched too thin by orgiastic spending, what is a few trillion more dollars anyway? And to force the productive of the nation to further subsidize the shiftless, the irresponsible, and the soon to be formerly criminal aliens who are about to be made legal and subject to this new entitlement from a system that they never paid into- to force the 250 million already insured to bear the burden of the dole dweller and the underclasses? What is in it for them who already were taxed to death before last night's debacle? Of course, this was passed in the dark of night, when robbers like the Democrat leadership are on the prowl. And some Democrats had the gall to say that universal care is our Christian duty, once again confusing Christ with Robin Hood. Where are the doctors going to come from to treat the newly insured thirty million, particularly with provider compensation cut and workload of patients to care for increased under this new mandate? Intentionally or not, Democrats deliver death with this scheme that must include rationing. But before we start to suffer "death by politician", we can start to reverse or at least contain the damage caused by this monstrosity by sending the culprits away in the November elections. The last transformative president before Obama was Ronald Reagan who with his "morning in America" proved one man possessed of a great idea can renew us. Is their a leader on the near horizon who carries the American ideal in his heart and in his head? All is not lost- we are a resilient people and we are waking in righteous fury. Even some who supported Obama can feel freedom slipping away, their liberty being stolen, and with this realization, there may be hope for change in a new Congress after the election.

The Last Stand

Today could mark the last stand for medical autonomy without the giant encroaching hand of government dominating our lives, and the end of our exceptionalism as a nation, free enterprise, and human liberty (as we have been the bastion of freedom, its storehouse, repository, and defender across the globe- people are not fleeing to Cuba to enjoy her free medical care- so much for the significance of universal access to health care as a hallmark of human rights). Today we see if the Obama posse will be joined by 216 anti-Constitutional Judases in the effort to upend the Founding Fathers and replace them with the tenets of Marx. Our boy wonder promised change and today will be transformative with the door widely open to forcing us to pay for others' abortions, the removal of choice when it comes to every other health care decision, a broad expansion of the scope, size, and power of the Internal Revenue Service to enforce the new regime, and the loss of ability of families to control the decisions at the end of life. God save our nation.

Crack of Doom

Stop it now. Kill the monster of hell care before it escapes its lair. The un-American bill is being ushered in by a cadre of radicals who fall somewhere between Fabian socialists and outright Marxists. They are still relying on the widely discredited concepts of John Maynard Keynes to end the era of American exceptionalism. So on a day that the US continues her sell out of the best ally she has in the Middle East and the only nation that shares our Western values Israel and on the day the dinosaur media attempts to conflate largely harmless flash mobs with "text rage" because of the alleged actions of a fifteen year old unstable sadist in Florida, we have our radical President Obama trying to live up to his promise to "remake" the country. Do not permit him and his Leftist minions in Congress to end our two plus centuries of freedom and prosperity- the greatest experiment in human liberty that the world has ever known.

Fudge the Number

Questions abound about the supposedly non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's scoring of the hell care plan. It seems amazing that it came in nicely under the magic one trillion dollar mark at just over 940 billion dollars over ten years as its projected cost. Many analysts project that it could easily be three times that as so many previous Federal programs have had costs metastasize and the CBO could only score the bill based on a double counting of costs previously projected to be incurred by Medicare that are now termed cost-saving as they are shunted into this new plan. The cuts will likely never occur due to righteous outrage among seniors and even if they do, the money will be spent on the new plan anyway, so there is no real reduction, merely a redirection of Federal spending. Either way the dollars are yanked from taxpayers or borrowed (from abroad or leveraged from the US Treasury borrowing from itself in a corruption known as monetization). The CBO's projected deficit reduction is therefore a bad joke, a fraud or hoax perpetrated against the unwary taxpayer, citizen, and voter. I am highly skeptical of the assumptions, accuracy, and even the independence of the Congressional Budget Office as it is being used as a tool of the Left to foist hell care on the public. Of course, the CBO can only work with the numbers and assumptions with which it is provided and look at the great integrity and wonderful honesty of the political echelon led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as they push this tack.

Public Option's Path

Joe Biden let the cat out of the bag in his interview with Jake Tapper that aired on today's ABC Good Morning America. The loose-lipped Vice President Biden who could be called the soul of indiscretion had the truth slip out- the health reform plan will allow the government to "control" the insurance companies, not regulate, the Federal government and the various regulators in the fifty states already do that, but control. And that is the definition of socialism- when management is taken away from private business and turned over to government. Command economies, central planners, and their army of bureaucrats never made anything any better anywhere. But will this revelation by Biden- the truth coming out that free enterprise in health insurance will be choked out by the strong hand of government thwart the bill? And under this constraint private insurers cease to operate and there remains only one option- the public option. I doubt Biden's statement will even register with the House Democrats who intend to vote for it no matter what as they are power-mad robots in the grasp of their one master Obama and the evil cabal behind him.

Up in Smoke

I will relate two stories from the Nashville area in today's post. The first concerns the arrest in Mississippi of Dr. Bruce Levy, Nashville, Tennessee's coroner, who also performs autopsies on a contract basis for the state of Tennessee and state of Mississippi. Dr. Levy allegedly received marijuana in a Magnolia state hotel room. It is sad to see someone on whom law enforcement has relied, a person with evident professional accomplishment, and on whose word people have been imprisoned, squander it all and bring into doubt much of what he said when he testified on the stand. The other report runs into the realm of the bizarre and tragic. In one of the communities that surround Nashville- Gallatin, a bank was robbed yesterday, with one of the armed perpetrators dressed as a leprechaun. A car chase ensued between the robbers and police with shots being exchanged before the gunmen fled on foot. What could have been a humorous story ended in horror as the police were forced to kill the robbers as they tried to affect their escape through a field. There are no earth-shaking political revelations in this post, just meanderings about how one poor decision can tarnish or even end one's life.

Down Our Throats

Barack Hussein Obama may well have his wish fulfilled and be able to direct one-sixth of the US economy by co-opting control of America's health care. Obama and his White House flacks had consistently called for an up or down vote on the scheme, but now it seems they will be more than happy to merely deem the bill to have passed the US House of Representatives, using the chicanery of a parliamentary maneuver that has rarely been used and never used on an issue of such consequence. The socialists may well win the day to initiate their program, but while they may win the battle to impose their will on a resistant electorate, they have not won the war. The battle will be joined in November when the colossus of the angry American voter rises to throw the bums out.

Talked to Death

It started in Madrid as a snowflake, became a snowball in Oslo, and has become an avalanche with the ascension of Obama. It is the effort to dismantle Israel piece by piece, erode her legitimacy, and replace her with one state- a Palestinian Arab one. No this was not an Arab or Muslim attempt, that started in 1948, the moment the state came into being. This assault is one by Israel's erstwhile allies and now is being led by Israel's former most reliable friend, the United States. One would expect the Jewish states mortal enemies to wage war by other means. They have and this continues, with Israel making vast territorial concessions to Egypt for what has turned out to be a cold peace filled with Egyptian incitement, with Israel allowing Palestinians back from Tunisia under the auspices of Madrid and Oslo to be repaid with rockets, to earnestly try to return to the path of talks with no peace for the sake of Obama to be rewarded with the current train wreck and to have Obama's dressing down of Israel used by Israel's adversaries to trigger the third intifada which may be starting even now, not stifled or prevented by US peace moves, but actively facilitated and fomented because of American interference. America has poured the fuel for the intifada fire, and until the Arab world relinquishes or is forced to drop its desire to drive Jews from the Middle East, there can never be peace and the Arab interlocutors with whom Israel has reached accord are only using the peace process tactically to weaken Israel to speed her destruction. The Arabs now see that Obama will deliver them a Palestinian state without the terrorists who embody Israel's negotiating partner having to moderate in the least and feel Muslims will achieve what they have attempted since Israel's inception, a one-state solution with an Arab-Muslim state supplanting Israel.

Mired in Waste

The United States is boiling in a cauldron of superfluous spending. From more than five million dollars spent by the State Department on super-expensive Swedish crystal stemware to the countless millions wasted by the Treasury on mailings telling that the Census would be arriving in one week, and an advertising campaign on television promoting said census that started with an ad aired at the most costly possible time- during the Super Bowl, are just three examples, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our government squandering our tax dollars. Today, it was announced that for the first time since the Reagan-era fixes, Social Security would be paying out more than it was taking in from withholding tax revenue. As a nation, we are already leveraged past the point of breaking and for several years have been monetizing our own national debt. We can not afford to indulge frivolities like fancy wine glasses. Let the multi-millionaire or billionaire Obama-supporters who essentially buy their appointments as ambassadors with political contributions buy their own brandy snifters. We can not pay for all this and Obama care too.

Cogitate and Agitate

"He won't take my calls," she said. No that is not a jilted lover, but many an American taxpayer and citizen trying to call their Representative in the US House to try to express displeasure at politicians ignoring voter will (at their peril) on the widely unpopular proposed health care reform. Democrat pols are assiduously avoiding their constituents in public places- they are hiding, and ignoring the phone flood, e-mails, and letters made or sent in opposition to Obama care. Since our Representatives are not listening, it may be time to co-opt some of the tactics of the left. Use their Leftist-style street theater to drive our point home. If you attack our families' medical decision-making autonomy, drown us in new taxes to pay for your hell care scheme, and crush our nation under unrecoverable national debt, we will boycott any enterprise with which you are associated, picket your businesses, even your homes. If you scheme and plot to destroy US, there is an associated cost that we will force you to bear. Ultimately, you may win your vote, but the people you are conspiring to destroy will usher you out of office and drive you to the place you scheme to take us first.

Courting a Disaster

Why would a nation decide to do herself great injury? The nations of Western Europe have followed the path of benevolent socialism and look at where it has led them- into the abyss of dislocation and chaos. The trap America is diving into with national health care has been adopted, tried, adapted, and perfected (to the detriment of freedom and prosperity) by the European states with the most brilliant minds of the Left leading the way, often under the banner of moral obligation. Under the aegis of the universal care, left-leaning governments across the continent mucked things up, ushering in the return of the right. The conservatives, adults who took over after idealists had expanded benefits beyond the ability of taxpayers to afford, could not simply scrap the programs, which were now a moral imperative, a necessity, and an entitlement, but came in on the promise that the new stewards could better manage the spiraling costs of the programs. Once initiated, the virus of national care could not be contained by any party and the Right could not simply kill the scheme as even the widely-supported Thatcher government with some success in re-privatizing some of Britain's socialist bungles, could not have withstood the general strikes (such as Greece now faces), had Maggie tried to take away folks' medicine. Once the blunder of national care is entered, it is impossible to reverse the fiasco. So Europe's Right attempts better management of that which can not be managed. But the street in every country rejects belt-tightening, the imposition of fiscal discipline, and the kind of austerity that would restore the balance of "spreadsheet sanity". Once a nation has slipped into the noose of universal health care, they seemingly must endure the costs forever. There is no way to avoid the skyrocketing price in Euros and in intrusiveness of bureaucrats into lives. Leftists create schemes that metastasize. America has a last chance now to avoid the snare that captured Europe. The majority of US citizens know that the government will spend money that as a nation we do not have on a plan that we neither want nor need. Why embark on a doomed voyage? Stave off disaster now instead of inviting further economic collapse and the un-American abridgement of our sacred liberty.

Against Our Will

The United States was established under the premise that governance would be conducted with the consent of the governed. For more than two hundred years, this concept served the Republic well. We now have a cabal in power that essentially seeks fiat rule and plans to impose its will on the citizenry. Obama's hell care is just the start (but what a start). Next comes the dreaded illegal alien amnesty pushed through by Obama with the help of Republican in name only Lindsey Graham and includes a mark of the beast type national biometric identification card which may be used as Communist Party membership was in the old USSR to deny political dissenters employment where those who oppose the new tyrannical American regime may have to watch their families starve when because of a political vendetta, they can not find work and are deemed ineligible for aid because something is amiss with the card that will follow them with the real potential to bar all doors. I hope this is a paranoid rambling, but I am sure many Russian refuseniks could not believe that the beloved Mother country was sending them to Siberia either.

Death Before Dishonor

Today's commentary was engendered by last night's promotion of the US Navy SEAL program by NBC nightly news. The report on the super-elite of the navy chronicled their tough training and the desire of President Obama to produce more special operations forces necessitating new measures to ad numbers to the selective force. One method of boosting membership that is being employed is using non-military coaches for a three month physical training regimen in Illinois before the SEAL selection begins. I find this confounding- with military budgets already in the hundreds of billions of dollars, why would the Navy have to look outside its ranks to find physical trainers? In World War II, every member of service received P. T. without the need to hire specialists from the outside to help them sweat. And that begs a more fundamental question- does simply raising the numbers not automatically detract from a unit's selective nature. To raise grades in a classroom setting, simply turning Cs and Bs to As does not make the students who generated them any smarter. It simply lowers the value of the A. I will also mention Eisenhower's esoteric objection to special forces: that a general would rather have super-motivated, athletic patriots in the ranks of conventional units, strengthening them than mission-specific elites off on their own, consuming resources and perhaps acting as cowboys, freebooters, or as surrogates for external spy agencies (read as the Central Intelligence Agency). Ike felt that beyond the need for paratroopers that he used and endorsed that diverting great soldiers into special forces sapped the cohesion of the mission as a whole. JFK, on the other hand, was a great proponent of special warfare units with his fascination with counter-insurgency. In today's chaotic world with the threat of extra-national terrorism and the need for soldier trainers who can function abroad screaming out for soldier linguists, I come down on JFK's side on this mark. I wholeheartedly support the Green Berets, who serve this task of helping Iraqi and Afghan forces stand up and I commend all who would attempt the rigors of US Army Ranger training, Air Force forward observer or para-rescue school, Marine Force Recon duty, or Navy UDT (underwater demolition team) or SEAL training ordeals, but I have to ask why with the supposed admiration NBC displayed for the SEALs why that network has not bothered to present extensive coverage of the SEALs who are being court-martialed for alleged punching a known al-Qaeda terrorist when they captured him in Iraq? I am also certain that those scholar warriors seeking to join the SEALs must now ponder a little harder with brother SEALs in the dock for serving bravely and doing their duty and an anti-military agenda spilling from the arch-leftist in the White House.

Reason to Profile

An American woman in Pennsylvania has been accused of joining Islamist terrorists and has been termed "Jihad Jane". As it happens, she is reported to have been a US-born citizen with blond hair. ABC's Good Morning America had former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke on to use this case as a rationale for why we can not successfully profile terrorists. This contention is absurd on its face, the woman is clearly an anomaly, as Clarke himself even conceded with his terming her a "misfit". The United States has spent billions of dollars, particularly through the Transportation Safety Administration, subjecting millions of innocent travelers to intrusive, expensive, time-consuming searches that Israel which takes security plenty seriously would never subject visitors to, but instead, uses a different set of metrics that include behavioral observation but also utilizes profiling to secure her airliners. The September 11 perpetrators were easily identifiable had anyone been looking, the London mass transit bombers largely fit the profile, and I would lay odds that the next attack will come from Muslim males, under the age of forty of South Asian, Middle Eastern, or African appearance. It is a shame that political correctness forces the removal of common sense from the battle against crime and the war on terrorism.

The Last Stand

The looming passage of Obama care is the denouement of America's exceptionalism. The threatened legislation goes to the fundamental view of government. Is the bureaucracy there as a benevolent hand up or is the malevolent potential of overreach innate? Our Founding Fathers and the framers of the US Constitution knew that government needed curbs to prevent tyranny and that is why the Constitution enshrined individual rights and placed strictures on the government itself rather than the other way around. In the America envisaged by our founders, we were free to live, make our own choices, and bear the price of our own mistakes. We could indulge in a sugary beverage or enjoy our tobacco at our peril if that is what we decided to do. If Obama care passes, the nanny state awaits.

Iran's Super State

Yesterday's election in Iraq is being hailed in the dinosaur media as a triumph of the Obama administration's wise policy on withdraw of troops in that troubled, sectarian-violence filled nation. Iraq already had been transformed from rule by the Sunni minority as Saddam Hussein ran the nation under the auspices of the Ba'ath Party which had a few token representatives from other religious communities but clearly excluded and oppressed the Shia majority and trampled over the minority Kurdish population to rule of the Shia after elections held under occupation. The Shia governing forces attempted to systematically exclude Sunni candidates from standing in the election just passed because of alleged ties to the Ba'ath Party in their pasts but the attempt was rebuffed by Iraqi courts. I doubt though there will be anything like proportional representation with Sunnis feeling rightly that they have been deprived of their voice and their rights. This taking against Sunni interests furthers the interests of one nation in particular, the Shia super state of Iran who have now escaped the borders of the former Persia to co-opt their Arab neighbor Iraq- lest we not forget that the Mehdi Army was Iran's proxy as was Hizbullah in Iraq. Iran has now effectively grabbed Lebanon through Hizbullah proxies. Iran's tentacles reach into Gaza under Hamas and into the West Bank. Even parts of South America are infected by agents of Iran. A Shia victory in Iraq elections is nothing America should welcome but fear as it signals the spread of domination by Iran and makes regional war and an extended US troop presence far more likely.

Litany of Lies

My constant fear since Barack Hussein Obama took office has been that he will use any means to acquire and advance self-perpetuating power. One of the surest means to do so would be to foist government into the relationship between a patient and his doctor, which ultimately could lead to a nameless, faceless bureaucrat, perhaps one with a political bias and malign intentions, controlling both the patient and the care provider. Of course, those pushing the Obama care agenda deny any such premise, but every dictator who has ever gained power has claimed only the best of intentions. As for the care regime itself, it is falsely premised using manipulated numbers where six years of care are financed by ten years of revenue collection (read as taxes). Cost savings are premised on cuts to Medicare which with the inevitable hue and cry of senior citizens when any such reductions start, will never be carried forward to completion. The only way such a massive takeover of a sixth of the US economy can work economically is if draconian care rationing (read as death panels) begins. Obama and his Democrats of course also deny that any care rationing will take place although Obama himself said he would deny an elderly grandmother a pacemaker and force her to take "the pain pill" option. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Obama's Chief of Staff, and one of the closest advisers to Obama on his health care agenda, is one of the foremost advocates of care rationing in the nation, favoring denying care to the aged and infirm as a cost saving measure. Of course, Obama would not admit to being a proponent of such a death-hastening scheme. So the Obama care scheme is falsely premised, being falsely sold to the public with over optimistic projections of public benefits, deliberate understatement of the program's costs, and a cover up of the way the scheme will limit care choices, diminish freedom, and shorten lives.

Media Strikes Again

There is a deliberate attempt to stifle normal political discourse by Obama's media foot soldiers, bolstered by the slime at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and originated in the notorious Department of Homeland Security report that characterized those with principled opposition to where Obama wants to take us as a cabal of dangerous right-wing extremists who needed great government scrutiny as they attempt to conflate the tea party movement and other legitimate resistance to Obamaism with its unchecked intrusiveness of government and unprecedented levels of spending with acts of violence perpetrated by unstable leftists. Continuing this trend of broad brushing the right with acts of madness was today's ABC Good Morning America where Bill Weir interviewed a former FBI agent and conveyed the sense that violence is just a step away in any legitimate dissent against Obama. This is an insult to those who demur from the Obama line in general and rightists in particular. I find it amazing that so little dinosaur media time and attention has been devoted to the motivation for the Fort Hood and Arkansas recruiting post attacks both committed by Muslims while so much focus has been devoted to the IRS Texas kamikaze, the Holocaust Museum attack, and the recent Pentagon assault. While acts of jihad in America are minimized and mischaracterized deliberately to separate them from their religious context, the three attacks carried out by white males and their bizarre action (as leftists) is being used to tar all those who would dare just say no to Obama.

Down with Privacy

The Obama administration is awfully concerned with cyber-security, so concerned in fact that they intend to use the National Security Agency and a program benignly known as Einstein to examine all Internet traffic including the contents of every e-mail, but have no fear- the government assures us that they will use anonymizers to protect the privacy of the citizenry. There has not been to this point a great hue and cry amongst privacy advocates as there was constantly when the last George Bush was President. There is a simple yet compelling reason that the privacy activists are not up in arms, most are merely poseurs, leftists who were using privacy as a brickbat to bludgeon Bush. Now that their fellow traveler occupies the Oval Office, these rights champions could not care a wit less that Obama who does not share Bush's values about the significance of individual rights but rather is concentrating on the collective and of course enhancing and permanently entrenching his own power and that of his cadres. Dread naught, folks in the heartland, Obama has got your back (and your wallet and soon control of your medical destiny). Enjoy.

The Killing Time

Barack Hussein Obama's health care pitch, if it passes as proposed in its present form, will force Americans with objections of conscience and religious opposition to elective abortion on demand to subsidize the lethal procedure involuntarily to the tune of one dollar a month in each individual health plan under the rubric of reproductive health. This poison pill is in the bill that has passed the US Senate and President Obama is trying to force it down the throats of objectors of conscience in the US Congress from his own party's small pro-life wing, eleven US Representatives who still have regard for life's sanctity led by Bart Stupak. The coming debate over pushing the bill through by means of reconciliation may be the last chance America ever has of killing socialized medicine as President Obama himself is determined to force his care scheme on the majority of US citizens who do not want to live under government-controlled health care. If passage is foisted on an unwilling public, it will signal the end of representative democracy and the start of the collapse of our Republic.

Batting Down Britain

The United Kingdom has been and is America's greatest ally of consequence since the First World War. Gordon Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair took much domestic criticism including from within the ranks of their own Labour Party because of Britain's steadfast stand with America in both Afghanistan and Iraq. To reward Britain for their loyalty, the Obama administration sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US version of foreign minister to Argentina to undermine the United Kingdom's long-standing and legitimate claim to the Falkland Islands. Talk about American gratitude and trying to cut Gordon Brown's throat just at the time of a coming UK general election- US conduct  is just not cricket.

Rectitude and Propriety

Mark Foley was one of four hundred and thirty five. The US Congressman from Florida was not particularly known as a king maker or bill shaper when his moral lassitude had him chased from the House of Representatives. But what he was no doubt was a handy target for the dinosaur media and the Democrats that they should be made notorious as flacks for- Foley was a minor representative from a major state who could be used as a wedge in a triangulation strategy to peel off some conservative voters who otherwise would have stood with the GOP. And Foley's Capitol offense- he had exchanged racy text with some young but beyond the age of consent male pages. Disturbing yes, perhaps even disgusting to some but certainly no threat to the Republic. And some of the first and harshest critics of Foley's failings, including many calls for his resignation came from Foley's own party, Foley was immediately disowned by the GOP once the scandal became publicly known. Let us contrast this with the conduct of Democrats when dealing with the ongoing scandal that is influential New York Congressman Charles Rangel. The Ways and Means Committee Chairman has long and well-documented tax problems even though the body he chairs is responsible for writing US Federal tax laws. Finally caught in a fix that he can not escape, Rangel falls on his sword (temporarily giving up his leadership post but unlike Foley who was chased from Congress by his GOP colleagues, Rangel will not be ousted but remain in his seat, protected by the Democrat establishment) as Democrats and their propagandists in the old line press try to bury the Rangel affair before the aroma wafts into the rest of the already stinking party.

The National Ashtray

President Barack Hussein Obama had his physical conducted by a Navy doctor, and it was revealed that the leader of the free world continues smoking and has been urged to "moderate" his alcohol consumption. It may not be heartening to know that the fellow who intends to take over your health care can not take care of his own. I could continue by quoting someone much wiser about the "ash heap of history", but I will content myself with the sure and certain knowledge that President Obama will continue to enjoy his vices (and full and free medical care for himself and his family) at our expense while raising sin taxes on drinking and smoking so much that they will become vices that only the rich can afford. In any event, the President has a costly hypocritical streak that a more virtuous political opponent who does not want to take over a sixth of the economy (health care), while continuing health-compromising personal habits, could easily exploit.

The New Intifada

A third Intifada may be brewing as Israel already under the microscope for her defensive actions in Gaza and facing international opprobrium for including two of Judaism's holiest sites on her National Heritage List, faced renewed violence, particularly in Hebron and the Old City of Jerusalem. The two religious sites in question were Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs. Palestinian and Israeli Arab violence was going to escalate regardless of the decisions or actions of the Jewish state as these Muslim elements are serving as willing proxies of Iran as that nation seeks the destruction of the Zionist entity. Israel should have been held blameless and not subjected to the kangaroo court Goldstone Report complete with the real possibilities of referral to the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity that simply never happened, any Israeli action to quell Islamist violence will surely be met with quick condemnation and the threat of international sanctions as the appeasers running too many nations answer their leftist and anti-Semitic street. Israel is already deemed guilty of premeditated murder in Dubai without the least consideration in most of the world press that the alleged victim was a wanton murderer who was probably in Dubai to expedite the purchase of more deadly weapons to be turned against innocent people. If the Mossad did rid the world of a Hamas terror leader, the action was every bit as justified as US drone missile strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. Finally, the world marks Anti-Israeli Apartheid week starting today as a cabal of Muslims, leftists, and useful idiots push for sanctions, divestment, and boycotts of the front line state for democracy in the war against Islamist expansionist terror. Israel is legitimate as ordained by God even as her Palestinian, Arab, and pan-Islamic enemies deny any historic connection between the Jews and the state and join old-line Marxists, secularists, and much of academe to do their part to dismantle the Jewish state.