Saturday, May 26, 2012

Political Digest for May 26, 2012

The Old Jarhead Blog: Bringing you news and information the MSM is too busy covering American Idol, celebrity affairs and sensational missing person cases to cover. Please forward to friends who need to be informed.

Posts/Digests may be limited over the next few days due to family commitments

Enjoy your long weekend, but please take time to recall the sacrifice for your freedoms that are the reason for the holiday. Do you honor our dead by the way you lead your life?

Memorial Day

The troubled world can offer no award
To you who sleep beneath the chiseled stone.
You died because we handed you the sword,
And we are free because you sleep alone.

The tides of history well may change the cause,
And time may blunt the sharpness of the debt,
For sacrifice, a nation under laws
Is gathered here today, lest we forget.

I composed this poem while marching in the Fitchburg, MA Memorial Day Parade in 1975, then used it in my speech at the upper common. (I’m not sure the crowd believed it was newly composed.)

CAF B-17 & B-25 over Saguaro Lake, Arizona
My uncle, Vern Becker, volunteered to fly as a tail gunner with the 487th Bomb Group on December 24, 2012. His B-17 was shot down and he died on December 26. Great pictures, ~Bob.

Worth Reading for Memorial Day: Tom Manion: Why They Serve—'If Not Me, Then Who?'
Excerpt: I served in the military for 30 years. But it was impossible to fully understand the sacrifices of our troops and their families until April 29, 2007, the day my son, First Lt. Travis Manion, was killed in Iraq. Travis was just 26 years old when an enemy sniper's bullet pierced his heart after he had just helped save two wounded comrades.

Heart of a Ranger. By Michael Yon
Excerpt: They say old Soldiers never die. In the case of Corporal Benjamin Kopp, this is turning out to be true in many ways. Ben was shot and killed during combat operations in Afghanistan. He was an organ donor, and his sacrifices continued. His heart was given to a family friend named Judy Meikle, who was 57 years old. 

My book, below, has been out for a year now. I wish I could say I’ve seen news in that year that makes me more hopeful. I have not. I feel like a member of a “forlorn hope” fighting a desperate rearguard action, because the alternative is far worse. For a free PDF of the book, e-mail me at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com.
~Bob

The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
All royalties go to a charity to help wounded veterans. E-Book available at Smash Words: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/59105
Please forward and post where possible.

Worth Reading: Ex-senator tells how he picked an untouchable, Patrick Fitzgerald, to be U.S. attorney in Chicago. By John Kass
Excerpt: Politicians were dancing and singing all along the
Chicago Way
on Wednesday, after U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald announced he would step down. "I can hear the champagne corks popping all the way over here, and I'm in Virginia," said banker and Illinois' former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (no relation), the Republican who sacrificed his political career by recommending Pat Fitzgerald. "Would I do it again? I'd do it in a second," he told me in a phone interview just after the news broke.

Worth Reading: Fitzgerald succession pick is a political hot potato: If Durbin doesn't choose wisely, he could hurt Obama's re-election campaign. By John Kass
Excerpt: Dick Durbin and Barack Obama have a political problem involving their choice of the next federal prosecutor in Chicago, now that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is leaving the office. And it won't go away before the November elections. There's been a stone in Sen. Durbin's shoe ever since Fitzgerald, a nonpartisan and iconic public servant in this most corrupt of political cities, announced he would step down at the end of June after a record of almost 11 years as federal hammer in Chicago.

Excerpt: Messina, a former top aide to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), also said that the issue of how much financial support the Obama operation would offer congressional campaigns did not come up. The meeting comes as a number of Democrats have criticized the Obama campaign’s hard-hitting attacks on Romney’s business background, which Republicans have cast as attacks on capitalism.

Obama Almost A No Show At Own Campaign Event?
Excerpt: An odd thing happened during an Obama campaign rally in California the other day –Barack Obama almost didn’t show up… (When I worked for an organization that lobbied in Harrisburg, PA, I had to attend a $200-per-perrson breakfast for a Democrat State Rep from Philly, who didn’t show. Sent a substitute. Scrambled eggs, greasy potatoes, bacon and sausage. Juice. Coffee. A good time was had by all. Usually the government affairs guy went, but when we got muscled for two tickets, I often did. ~Bob.)

How to Know You’re an Unpopular Incumbent. By Brandon Kiser
Excerpt: President Obama should be your guy in that scenario. But this case is different. Obama’s drooping popularity and peculiar ability to get the vote and support out among the opposition rather than his own side makes him a liability, not an asset. (I think it’s the other way around. Obama sees Barrett as a loser, doesn’t want the stench of being connected with him. In 1972, when I was running for the state senate, the folks running the GOP candidate for Congress’s campaign didn’t want my materials in their campaign office. I was just out of college, no money, little organization. They were hoping to win Democrat votes and thought I was going to get crushed. I won, he lost. They’d have been better with my “coattails,” such as they might have been. ~Bob.)

Marion Barry commits new gaffe while apologizing to Asians
Excerpt: “The Irish caught hell, the Jews caught hell, the Polacks caught hell,” Barry said, invoking a word that Polish people have viewed as disparaging. “We want Ward 8 to be the model of diversity.”

Fidel's niece: 'I would vote for Obama'
Excerpt: Fidel Castro’s niece on Wednesday hailed Barack Obama’s support for gay marriage and the loosening of US-Cuba travel restrictions, saying: “I would vote for President Obama.”

Unions angry with Dems over lack of help in Wisconsin recall
Excerpt: Top union officials are lashing out at Washington Democrats, claiming they haven't done enough to help them unseat Gov. Scott Walker (R) in Wisconsin's recall election. President Obama has been silent on the race since his campaign released a statement endorsing Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) immediately after his primary victory two weeks ago.

Report rips DOJ attorneys in botched Stevens' case
Excerpt: Two Department of Justice prosecutors have been suspended without pay and a Senate Democrat has scheduled a committee hearing following the release Thursday of a DOJ report that detailed the government’s misconduct in its botched case against former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). (Stevens lost his senate seat over the conviction, then his life in a plane crash, so it’s not clear what good this will do him now. Corrupt bastards. ~Bob.)

Romney campaign begins quiet push for African American voters
Excerpt: Mitt Romney’s campaign team has been quietly laying plans for an outreach effort to President Obama’s most loyal supporters — black voters — not just to chip away at the huge Democratic margins but also as a way to reassure independent swing voters that Romney can be inclusive and tolerant in his thinking and approach. That plan, still in its early ­stages, ran headlong into the harsh political realities on the ground in Philadelphia on Thursday, when Romney was treated to a hostile welcome on his first campaign swing through a poor black neighborhood this year.

Romney holds key advantages among financially struggling white voters
Excerpt: In an election year in which the economy ranks as Americans’ top concern, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney holds significant advantages over President Obama among white voters who are struggling financially and buffeted by job loss, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

If You Love Something, Set It Free: A Case for Defunding Public Broadcasting. By Trevor Burrus
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA697.pdf
Excerpt: In fact, public broadcasting suffers the main downside of public funding—political influence and control—yet enjoys little of the upside—a significant taxpayer contribution that would relieve it of the need to seek corporate underwriting and listener donations. But the limited taxpayer funding also shows that defunding can be relatively painless. Public broadcasting not only can survive on its own, it can thrive—and be free.

Worth Reading: Unconventional Energy Meets Conventional Politics: Which Will Win? By Steven Hayward
Excerpt: Nowadays everybody knows about shale gas (coal-bed methane is an easier variation of the same), and how it has revolutionized our energy outlook in the political equivalent of the blink of an eye. This is an important point: the shale gas revolution occurred mostly on private and state land, away from the greedy grasp of Washington and the attention of the major news media. If the political class had known this was going on, surely Washington would have done something to slow it up, tax it more, or stop it altogether. Witness how environmental groups, having touted natural gas as a "bridge fuel" when it was expensive and scarce, are pivoting to attack "fracking" now that natural gas is cheap and abundant, while the EPA scrambles to find some opening to regulate it.

WATCH: Shocking video from Black Bloc march in San Francisco รข?" Glenn Beck
You can't harm a black rioter or thug any more. All of a sudden they all look like the son Obama never had. Some readers think bad behavior is racially induced. I wish you could come to Panama some time and see what REAL black people are like, not the monsters that have been deliberately created by a pandering government, media, education system and the bleeding hearts who sit idly by and watch this without a word of protest. There is no welfare in Panama and practically no anti-white sentiment at all. NO ONE feels entitled to government money, no one is interested in revolution. They just want to work hard and feed their OWN families, not hordes of other people's children. Bad behavior is due to conditioning (brain washing in the case of US blacks), not race. Our country has 2 groups of perpetrators in this system: Minorities who demand things that aren't theirs. The majority, too many of which who are stupid enough to think the minorities are entitled. --Don Hank. I have long maintained that race isn’t the problem. It’s culture. ~Bob.

Believe it. Obama's A Big Spender.
Excerpt: There are some things that are so apparent that they're not even worth mentioning. What goes up must come down. The earth is round. President Barack Obama is a big spender. But this week, some in the media and in the White House are denying one of these totally obvious truths. It shouldn't be a big surprise which one it is. On Tuesday, MarketWatch's Rex Nutting wrote that claims of Obama's big spending ways are overblown and that the "Obama spending binge never happened."

Jerry Brown's Robin Hood Tax Fantasy

Sudanese Muslim illegal aliens flooding Israel, crime rate soars
Excerpt: Israel cannot possibly accommodate the thousands of African refugees who are invading southern Tel Aviv. It is putting an unfair burden on their resources, while taking a toll on their own citizens, who are paying the price of rising crime rates. So, why don’t these Muslims flee to one of the other 57 Muslim countries? They have to pass through Egypt to get to Israel, but they don’t want to stay in Egypt because they fear getting killed there. Why isn’t the UN forcing the oil-rich Muslim Gulf States to take them in? Why is it Israel’s duty to welcome people who want to kill them?

Senators Demand Probe of Potential Cover-Up in Gulf Drilling Moratorium
Excerpt: Three senators have called for an investigation into a potential cover-up of documents that led to the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill. Sens. David Vitter (R-La.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) today wrote Kevin L. Perkins, chairman of the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, stressing that they believe the Interior Department’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall “failed to ensure an independent, impartial and complete investigation into the Administration’s offshore drilling moratorium and related activities.”

Justice Department delays swimming pool rule until after election
Excerpt: The Justice Department announced Thursday that it had again delayed implementation of a new regulation requiring existing public-access pools to be accessible to people with disabilities. Implementation of the new Americans with Disabilities Act rule, which was set to take effect Monday, has been delayed to Jan. 31, after the election. The rule was originally scheduled to take effect on March 15, 2012.

Manhattan public school adds mandatory Arabic class. By Melissa Quinn
Excerpt: A Manhattan public elementary school will begin requiring students to take a mandatory Arabic class for 45 minutes twice a week, putting it on the same level as science and music courses, the New York Post reports. PS 368 in Hamilton Heights will start the classes next semester, and all students from second to fifth grade will be enrolled. (Goodbye USA. Teach them Arabic and reading from right to left. They sure can’t teach them to read and write and think in English from left to right. Rotsa ruck. –Barb.)

Forget Bain — Obama’s public-equity record is the real scandal. By Marc A. Thiessen
Excerpt: Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats, President Obama has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama did not anticipate. After all, if Romney’s record in private equity is fair game, then so is Obama’s record in public equity — and that record is not pretty.

Kickass Saudi woman stands her ground against the Religious Police
Excerpt: “You are not the boss of me.” “I am not leaving (the mall) and what are you going to do about it?” yells the woman at the Police when they try to force her out of the mall for wearing nail polish. “Smile for the camera, boys, you are being broadcast on Twitter and Facebook as we speak.” If Islam is ever going to become part of the civilized world, it will be because of the women.

Should Black People Continue To Tolerate Black-On-Black Crime? By Walter Williams
Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94% figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13% of the nation's population, they account for more than 50% of homicide victims. (Too many so-called “Black Leaders” only care about murdered black folks if the killer was white, so they can use it to gain power through race baiting. ~Bob.)

Ann Althouse contemplates the Matter of Wisconsin
Excerpt: But then came the Tea Parties – which showed people what a real American populist movement looks like, and what it can do – and its success stung the Activist Left at the exact moment that Scott Walker came along and not unreasonably decided that if he was elected on a platform of doing certain things, he had best start doing them. This infuriated the Left, but not as much as the refusal of Walker and the WI GOP to go weak-kneed at the first sign of push-back. So… the recall movement was born! And… fizzled.

A smoke screen of self-delusion
Excerpt: Like a Seurat painting or a pixilated photograph coming into focus, there are now enough tiny dots of independent data to begin to form a preliminary picture of Barack Obama’s re-election effort — and the emerging image is bleak. Tuesday night, two more Democratic primaries brought bad news to the sitting Democratic president.

US cuts Pakistan aid over jailing of 'Bin Laden doctor'
Excerpt: A US Senate panel has cut $33m (£21m) in aid to Pakistan in response to the jailing of a Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA find Osama Bin Laden. The Senate Appropriations Committee has said it will cut US aid by $1m for each year of Shakil Afridi's sentence.

Scottish nationalists launch 'Yes' vote campaign
Excerpt: Scottish nationalists launched an official 'yes' campaign for independence on Friday ahead of a likely 2014 referendum on severing the more than 300-year-old union with England. Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond said the semi-autonomous region should run its own foreign, economic and defence policies, and promised that he would try to get one million Scots to sign a declaration of support. (We fight not for glory, nor for riches, nor for honour, but only and alone for Freedom, which no good man lays down but with his life. --Declaration of Arbroath, Scotland, 1320)

Flip a Coin
Excerpt: One source of good news for Democrats is that Obama draws a 51 percent approval rating on foreign policy; the bad news is that voters don’t seem likely to vote on foreign-policy matters this year. Conversely, the president got his worst approval rating on the economy: Just 43 percent approve of his handling of economic matters while 52 percent disapprove. Unfortunately for Democrats, the economy is the issue that does seem to be of paramount importance to voters. (If the poll being analyzed is truly random, this isn’t the end of the world or even the end of the battle. On the other hand, the article says the respondents were Democrat-heavy by 29% to 22% Republican. If that lopsidedness hasn’t been corrected for, this could actually be good news in disguise. Or, that could just be my wishful thinking. Either way, we need to work. Ron P.)

Obama’s Checklist
Excerpt: This strategy recalls President Clinton’s flotilla of micro-initiatives in 1996 but differs in that Clinton promoted consensus ideas (such as school uniforms) while Obama is highlighting issues that sharpen differences with Republicans. The fissures that Obama has created help explain why most polls show him equaling (or exceeding) his 2008 levels of support among the key groups he has targeted, such as Hispanics and upscale white women. And yet all of this maneuvering has left a potentially critical hole at the center of Obama’s reelection blueprint.

Holder refuses Fast and Furious interview request, accuses The Daily Caller of throwing ‘sticks and stones’
Excerpt: Attorney General Eric Holder has refused The Daily Caller’s request for a sit-down interview on Operation Fast and Furious, the latest stonewalling effort by the Department of Justice over the scandal. Because DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not answered TheDC’s questions about Fast and Furious for months, TheDC asked her if Holder would do an interview on the subject.

Obama's Land of the LOST. By Michelle Malkin
Excerpt: The persistent transnationalists who drafted LOST favor creation of a massive United Nations bureaucracy that would draw ocean boundaries, impose environmental regulations and restrict business on the high seas. They've tinkered with the document obsessively since the late '60s, enlisted Presidents Clinton and Bush, and recruited soon-to-depart GOP Sen. Dick Lugar to their crusade. Ignore the mushy save-the-planet rhetoric.

Quote
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of. –Henry Fielding

Excerpt: Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to believe liberals believe in liberalism anymore. With the obvious global meltdown of Keynesian economics, how could anyone remotely intelligent support the continued deficit spending that is driving the Western World into bankruptcy? And yet a large proportion of our population still backs Barack Obama for a second term. (Liberals don’t care about actual results. As long as their intentions are good, the results for real people, no matter how horrific, are of no interest to them. ~Bob.)

Top Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guards Dropping Like Flies
Excerpt: At least ten top members of the Iran's Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (Pasdaran) group have died under suspicious circumstances in recent months, the Defense Online website reported Thursday. Those killed include generals and other top-ranked officials, and many of them have died in “apparently violent circumstances,” the report said.

ATF Requests Records Of Gun Owners
Excerpt: Apparently Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) agents have been visiting gun shops in Alaska and asking for firearms sales records. This has caused many to wonder if the agency is building a database of gun owners in the state.

I-Team Report: Police Line
Excerpt: As NATO protesters clashed with Chicago riot officers on live TV Sunday, another story played out behind the scenes. When demonstrators started throwing bottles and planks of wood at police who were lining Cermak and Michigan, it wasn't a surprise, based on our review of sometimes dramatic communications between special dispatchers in a command center a few miles away and field commanders on the scene.

Israeli companies win UN bids to reconstruct Gaza, angering Palestinians: Palestinian Contractors Union forbids members to collaborate with Israelis
Excerpt: A number of Israeli companies have recently won UN tenders for reconstruction projects in the Gaza Strip, enraging Palestinian contractors who claim they were outbid by the country that destroyed their infrastructure.

Barber throws Obama under the bus
Excerpt: The candidates in last night’s CD8 debate were each given three playing cards. The cards designated the three challenges each candidate was allotted to make in response to statements made by their opponents. Democrat Ron Barber held his cards close to his chest throughout the debate. So close, in fact, when asked by Jesse Kelly which presidential candidate he would vote for, Barber refused to answer.

"The Reason is Religion, Mom"
Army Pvt. Naser Jason Abdo faced his mother during a visit in a Texas jail last July.
Abdo had been arrested for plotting an attack on a restaurant in Killeen popular with soldiers from nearby Fort Hood. He would set off a bomb inside the restaurant, then shoot and kill as many survivors as possible as they scrambled out to safety. His mother asked the obvious question. Why? Jurors convicted Abdo's Thursday of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder after hearing and seeing the answer on video. "The reason is religion, Mom."

Excerpt: House Republican leaders on Friday unveiled a legislative calendar for the summer, revealing plans to hammer President Obama and Democrats on the economy, energy, taxes and other divisive issues in the months leading up to November’s elections. The schedule includes a July vote to extend the Bush-era tax rates for all Americans.

Man wanted in 1985 L.A. slaying evaded arrest by altering name
Excerpt: A San Jose man who'd been on the run for 27 years has been arrested and booked on suspicion of killing his sister’s lover in South Los Angeles in 1985, authorities said. Abel Avila-Perez, 53, was able to escape detection by making minor changes to his name after the crime, authorities said. (Anybody want to bet that he is not here illegally?? –DH).

Filings raise more questions on Warren’s ethnic claims
Excerpt: But for at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves. In addition, both Harvard’s guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet. 9she and Harvard both lied to get minority-victim benefits, but entitlement voters won’t care as long as she promises continued benefits for them. ~Bob.)

Elizabeth Warren Is Losing the Media
Excerpt: What has mainly been a New Media story up till now, especially in the realm of being curious enough to vet someone who could become a United States Senator (what a concept!), has finally burst to life in old media. Thanks mainly to yesterday's media moment created by a tenacious reporter who could no longer ignore the issue and an ever-mounting pile of facts accumulated by Breirtbart News' Michael Patrick Leahy -- two high-profile left-wing news outlets have just turned on "Fauxahontas" U.S. Senate Candidate, Elizabeth Warren:

Boston Globe Makes the Bell Connection
Excerpt: Elizabeth Warren's tenured appointment at Harvard Law School during a time when she claimed to be a Native American "woman of color" was directly connected to protests for "faculty diversity" led in the 1980s and early 1990s by the late Critical Race Theory professor Derrick Bell, according to the Boston Globe today. Breitbart News reported in March that Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, had joined protestors, urging students in April 1990 to "open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell." 

A User's Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama
Excerpt: Barry was quite the accomplished marijuana enthusiast back in high school and college. Excerpts from David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

Iran’s Efforts to Deepen Ties in Lebanon Meet Resistance
Excerpt: As the Assad regime in Syria teeters on the edge of a cliff, Iran is trying to strengthen its economic and political ties to Lebanon. While the Iranians do have their supporters among Lebanon’s poor Shia communities and in Hezbollah, many other Lebanese view the Iranians with deep suspicion.

Iran not to retreat from 20 percent uranium enrichment: Khatami
Excerpt: Iran will not retreat from 20 percent uranium enrichment, Tehran’s interim Friday Prayer Leader Hojjatoleslam Sayed Ahmad Khatami said here Friday.

Meet Soros-Funded Domestic Terrorist Brett Kimberlin Whose ‘Job’ Is Terrorizing Bloggers Into Silence
Excerpt: How immutable are our First Amendment rights? Would they remain so even under the most dire conditions? There are about half a dozen bloggers who, at this very moment in time, are finding out just that, after having been subject to: death threats, blackmail, extortion, numerous frivolous lawsuits, cyber-attacks of email and social networking accounts and become the target of smear campaigns that have led to their firing until ultimately discovering that others who came before them, have turned up dead.

30 North Korean Officials Involved In Talks With The South Have Died In 'Traffic Accidents'
Excerpt: Thirty officials of the North Korean regime who were involved in talks with South Korea have been executed or died in "staged traffic accidents," according to a human rights report. In its annual study, Amnesty International claimed that in addition to the 30 who died in purges last year, a further 200 were rounded up in January this year by the State Security Agency as Pyongyang carried out the transfer of power from Kim Jong-il, …

Supreme Court: Having legal-resident parents doesn't prevent deportation of adult children
Excerpt: The Supreme Court decided unanimously today that the immigration status of parents can't help their adult-aged, illegal-alien children convicted of a crime. In the case Holder v. Martinez, the Court overturned a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled that Carlos Martinez Gutierrez, who had been ordered deported, couldn't use his father's status as a lawful permanent resident to stay in the country.

Israel revives military option after Obama rejects its nuclear demands of Iran
excerpt: A fateful decision is reached on Iran. Israel has withdrawn its pledge to US President Barack Obama not to strike Iran’s nuclear sites before the November presidential election after he rejected its minimal demands for nuclear negotiations with Iran. This is reported exclusively by DEBKAfile’s Washington sources.

7 WRONG Ways to Decide Your Life’s Career
Excerpt: It’s that time of year again when a new crop of ambitious young folk will be graduating from high school and heading off into their glorious futures by selecting the exact wrong career for themselves. We all want nothing more than to have that perfect career that makes us feel like life is the equivalent of skipping through a summer field, with flowers in bloom all around and the golden sunshine on your face (this is a fictional world where there are no bugs in that summer field). Most of us instead end up with a career like that miserable camping trip where it rained the whole time, you were freezing and tired and hungry non-stop, and, oh yes, there were lots and lots of nasty, crawling, dirty bugs. (There’s actually some good advice in this article. There’s also enough humor to keep a young person’s attention. Many people, perhaps most people, have no clear idea what they want to do for a living. Because of his birthday falling on Income Tax day, 15 April, I constantly teased Bob Hall throughout his time in the Marines that he would become either an accountant or a politician. You can see how that turned out; Bob must not have wanted to be an accountant. Ron P. That’s because accountants are supposed to make the numbers come out the same way every time—boring! ~Bob.)

Ready, Fire, Aim. By Matthew Continetti
Excerpt: We are rapidly approaching the moment at which Washington reevaluates the Obama campaign’s reputation for competence and expertise. Every week, one or several of Obama’s surrogates trip over their own words; every day, Jim Messina and David Plouffe and David Axelrod must scratch their heads in wonder at the mess they are creating.

Media Spiking and Manufacturing News Stories to Get Obama Re-Elected is a Sign of Liberal Desperation
Excerpt: Stories that are harmful to the president’s re-election efforts are spiked, news that puts the president in a good light are turned into front-page headlines, and when they can’t find either, the media manufactures news out of thin air. This is good news! It shows that liberalism can’t stand on the truth. Ten former presidential advisers are warning that if present economic policies continue, the next crisis could dwarf what we saw in 2008.

Obama Breaks the First Rule of Lying Believably
Excerpt: The GOP has been “bamboozling” Americans and running up “wild debts,” the president told an audience in Denver this week. If you’re going to be a liar in a political campaign and get away with it, there are some ground rules that must be followed.

About European decline
The worst case and best known is Greece, and that train wreck just keeps on crashing. Greece got on the Euro, and slowly but steadily progressed further into socialist practices and abuses than anyone else in Europe. (Although some of what they were into is also what Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc, got into, and they have their own major problems.) We're talking retirements at 50, total security and generous paychecks and benefits for all government employees and all major unions. In a nation where cheating on taxes is the major national hobby, and there was very little enforcement of tax penalties even though everyone knows the cheating is widespread and intensive. Basically, the Greek governments have been spending a lot more than they took in for 15+ years, and the debt finally became impossible to conceal and impossible to deal with. This is why the Germans, who are the hardworking and frugal people of Europe, are really ticked, since it's their loans that have keep Greece going, and they are very tired of it. (They don't have any of the radical benefits of the Greeks, and they have to pay their taxes.) Greek society has grown so accustomed to living on other people's money that they think it's their right, and they just threw out the politicians who were just talking about austerity, to put in a party that says absolute NO to austerity. How that's going to work out will be interesting. If they don't shape up, they'll have to go off the euro and back to the drachma, and then they'll find out what austerity is like because they won't be able to buy much of anything in world markets with the drachma. This is another example of people doing incredibly stupid things, but somehow getting away with it for a very long time. However, as I always say, sooner or sometimes very later, reality comes up behind you with a baseball bat and WHAM, you're in the hospital with a cracked noggin. What is hard to predict is just what is going to happen in Greece in the next year or two. Personally, I think it extremely likely that there will be some sort of disaster/collapse, and things will get very, very messy for a while. After which the scale of living for most Greeks will be taking a sharp downturn. Time will tell. Maybe the other nations in deep trouble will learn something and do better in avoiding their own disasters. And here is an article about Greek universities that will help understanding of a lot of what goes on there. It appears in the British Times Higher Education Supplement, which is generally left-leaning, reflecting the world view of most academics. It tells you what is wrong with Greece, as seen from a particular sector where the Left is dominant. --Del

1 comment:

  1. With all due respect to my old professor, Ann Althouse, the question in Wisconsin is quite simple: Does the govt (and govt employees) work for the people, or do the people work for the govt? Are we a free people or servants?

    ReplyDelete