The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
Info about my book. All royalties go to a charity to help wounded veterans. Please forward and post where possible.
Book Signing—increase the value!
I was signing copies of Collapse for the doctor who ordered 50 to send to friends with a personal letter. (There’s a role model for you!) My ten-year-old granddaughter asked what I was doing, and I explained. “Oh,” she said, “That way when you die they’ll be worth something.” I’ll be happy to sign your copies, so they’ll be “worth something” and return them if you’ll have them sent to me. Write for the address. ~Bob.
Blog page views
In the past week, page views of my Old Jarhead blog surged to about 4,000, including 33 from the Ukraine
Important: Wisconsin GOP holds off Democrats in recall elections
“Crushing defeat for Democrats and organized labor.” Gotta love the sound of that. Congratulations to Wisconsin voters, who by a thin margin may have temporarily avoided joining disaster states like California and Illinois Wisconsin River Falls Oshkosh
Excerpt: The liberal political machine was in full throttle. Millions of dollars in campaign ads streamed on TV. An army of union workers descended on the state in a massive grassroots voter mobilization effort. But when the dust settled, the smoke cleared, and the votes were counted, the conservative majority that swept into Wisconsin Wisconsin
American Way
American Way
Republicans hold off Dems in recalls, win enough seats to keep majority in Senate
Excerpt: After tens of millions of dollars spent by outside interest groups, dozens of attack ads and exhaustive get-out-the-vote efforts, Democrats on Tuesday fell short of their goal of taking control of the state Senate and stopping the agenda of Gov. Scott Walker. Republicans won four of six recall races, meaning the party still holds a narrow 17-16 majority in the Senate — at least until next week, when Sens. Robert Wirch, D-Pleasant Prairie, and Jim Holperin, D-Conover face their own recall elections. A third Democrat, Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay
Must Read: Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Liberal-dogma-spawned-generation-brutalised-youths.html#ixzz1UcSwWKpK
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Liberal-dogma-spawned-generation-brutalised-youths.html#ixzz1UcSwWKpK
Interesting commentary from one of Britain U.S. city of Detroit England
With jails filled to capacity and violence escalating, pockets of London
Excerpt: Pockets of London went into lockdown Tuesday, with shops closing, a surge of 16,000 police officers taking to the streets and helicopters buzzing overhead as a stunned Britain London jails filled to capacity and violence escalating in Manchester , Birmingham and other parts Britain London may be going the way of Detroit Detroit London
Excerpt: The victims, understood to be two brothers and a friend, were hit by a speeding car in Birmingham Birmingham Middle East to restore order.” The Widow of Windsor must be spinning in her grave. She also said the youngsters seem to be coordinating via “social networking media.” Maybe Facebook isn’t such a good idea after all. Ron P.)
Excerpt: Riot police had been accused of adopting a hands-off approach when dealing with looters. But there was no chance of these officers, equipped with batons and shields, taking a softly-softly approach as they chased down and clobbered a group of suspected rioters. A police officer appears to kick one of the trio in the head and he is beaten five times with truncheons after the police chase him down. He is later seen getting to his feet.
The English Defence League Condemns Rioting and Unchecked Lawlessness in England
Excerpt: We know it’s not the rank and file police who are responsible because we know we have huge sympathy in their ranks. There is something very rotten being fed down from the top, however. It’s obvious that, perhaps because of a perceived “un-whiteness” of the current criminal looters, the police have not been ordered to crack heads. Maybe individual police officers are too fearful of being later blamed if they injure someone but the reality is the human rights of these violent criminal looters have been placed way above the right of decent people to walk the streets, to sleep soundly in their beds and to expect the police will protect their businesses and livelihoods. (There was a creepy guy bugging me when I was living in the North of England in 1998. One night I couldn't sleep and got up got up at 3 o'clock in the morning to make a cup of tea, and I heard the guy being arrested right outside the kitchen window I was standing next to. Later I learned he'd had an axe in his hand at that time, not to axe me, but to axe his way into a local shop. When he was not evicted from his flat, and persisted in bothering me after this incident, I rang the police. When the police officer came round, I told him I had a friend who'd offered to beat the guy up for me. The police officer pulled his chair closer to me and said, "That's what you have to do. That's what people have to do now. Don't tell anybody I told you this. Twenty years ago, we would've gone round there and given him a clout, but now you have to do it yourself. --Kate in LA.)
English Defence League Protect London
Excerpt: Jack England, EDL's south-east regional organiser, claimed that the people on the streets were "patriots" and not vigilantes. He said: "The police are unable to control the streets. Today, these are local people, not EDL, these are patriots who have come out to defend their area.
Is It Balanced…Or Even Fair?
Excerpt: Our President has been using the words “balance and fairness” frequently over the past few weeks or so while trying to explain our difficulty with the debt limit and the difference between him and the other side in facing that difficulty. According to the President, those people who earn more than $200,000 or a couple who earns more than $250,000 should contribute a little more in taxes. Businesses that are taking advantage of loop holes in the tax regulations should also pay more and those loop holes closed. One would think that these loop holes are illegal, but they are merely aspects in the law that allow companies to deduct certain expenses. Congress passed those laws. One could go so far as to say that deducting the interest and taxes on homes are also loop holes since only those who own homes can deduct them. Watch out, this administration is already talking about eliminating those deductions.
Least we forget
Barack Obama, on October 15, 2008: But there is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments. Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.
Mr. Cool turns cold
By a LIBERAL columnist--Richard Cohen, WaPo --DH. Excerpt: In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling President Franklin D. Roosevelt about her visits to the camps of migrant workers. She was especially poignant about the children and their lack of Christmas toys when the president tried to stop her. “Don’t tell me any more, Helen,” FDR told the woman who is probably best known for losing a dirty Senate race to Richard Nixon. She was stunned. Roosevelt was crying. Can anyone imagine Barack Obama doing anything similar? The answer — at least my answer — is no. And this is quite amazing when you think about it. FDR was a Hudson River squire — down to his cigarette holder and cape. Nonetheless, he could connect to the less fortunate. Obama, in contrast, was raised in the great American muddle, not rich and not poor. Yet when the stock market fell more than 500 points last week and the image that night was of the president whooping it up at his birthday party, the juxtaposition — just bad timing, of course — seemed appropriate. He does not seem to care. This quality of Obama’s, this inability to communicate what many of us think he must be feeling, has lately cost many trees their dear lives — reams of essays and op-ed pieces. One of the more interesting ones, by Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University
Great column: A Tottering Technocracy: Here and in Europe , the financial meltdown exposes the hollowness of our elites.
Excerpt: We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics. The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.
Dead SEALs? Great photo op!
Excerpt: President Barack Obama, in the process of saluting, participates in a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Dover , Del. , Aug. 9, 2011, for the dignified transfer of U.S. and Afghan personnel who died in Afghanistan
Allen West: Swing-District Firebrand: His reelection isn’t assured, but West has some factors in his favor.
Excerpt: Florida
Paralytic Western Society
Excerpt: It is fascinating to see how postmodern Western societies react to wide-scale rioting, looting, and thuggery aimed at innocents. In Britain, politicians contemplate the use of water cannons as if they were nuclear weapons; and here the mayor of Philadelphia calls on rappers to appeal to youth to help ease the flash-mobbing that has a clear racial component to it (is the attorney general’s Civil Rights Division investigating?). His appeal is perhaps understandable, but many of the themes of rap music — violence against the police, racial chauvinism, and nihilism—may well be some of the cultural catalysts behind the flash violence, though to suggest as much would be seen as more racist than the racist profiling used by the flash beaters. All these incidents are symptomatic of a general breakdown and loss of confidence in Western society. Such urban violence was of course a constant in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America, but now it is deeply embedded within modern sociology and no longer seen quite as criminality. We seem able to admit that massive federal and state entitlements have created a sense of dependency, a loss of self-respect and initiative, and a breakdown of the family, yet we still seem to fear that trimming the subsidies would lead to some sort of cold-turkey hyper-reaction. We assume that society is to blame for disaffected youth and therefore are hesitant to use commensurate force to quell the violence or even to make it clear that perpetrators are responsible for their own conduct. Yet at some point — when the violence reaches middle-class communities or, in serial fashion, downtown or suburban stores — we likewise assume that sufficient force will be used. Sociological exegesis will go out the window. Reality has a way of dispelling such cognitive luxuries.
Excerpt: The flash mobs in America or the Blackberry mobs in London have one thing in common. It isn't race, though they tend to predominantly be minorities. It's identity.
The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the 70's, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of. These are the children of the welfare state with little in common except a rejection of the commercial way of life. Neither the entitled white university brat or the posturing ghetto teenager has any interest in working. The businesses they smash are an alien thing to them. Small businessmen do not go about smashing stores. The people who do think of commodities as something they trick or intimidate others into giving to them. And that covers everyone from municipal unions to thugs driving around BMW's. Rand's looters take on a more literal meaning in Tottenham. Smashing store windows and grabbing what's inside is only the protest for more government handouts taken directly to the businesses who fund it without the bother of a government middle man.
Excerpt: When the Democratic Party nominated Al Gore for the Presidency in 2000, they made what seemed at the time – before the man unveiled himself as a “crazed sex poodle” – a respectable choice. Gore had been a prominent member of the Senate, and he had served for eight years as Vice-President of the United States. Nothing in his background, after he got a grip on himself in the wake of doing military service in Vietnam, suggested that he would go off the deep end – as he did after losing the Presidency. When, however, that same party nominated John Kerry in 2004, they really did take a flier. His one qualification for office was his performance of military service during the Vietnam War (when George W. Bush was in the reserves), and he had blotted his copybook after the war by playing a prominent role in a radical anti-war group (as the party elders knew perfectly well). He had, to be sure, served three terms in the Senate, but in those eighteen years he had never once even proposed a bill. He was an empty suit unqualified for executive office, and that was obvious. Nominating him for the nation’s highest office was a supremely irresponsible act. In 2008, the party doubled down on the same irresponsible strategy. This time they nominated Barack Obama. He had two qualifications for that honor. With the help of a teleprompter and a speech writer, he could deliver a speech with some panache, and, as Senator Joe Biden observed in a moment of rare candor, when he described the freshman Senator from Illinois to a reporter from The New York Observer, Barack Obama was “the first mainstream African-American [in American politics] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Postal governor resigns amid real estate scandal
Or, as they say in Democrat-run Chicago, business as usual. ~Bob. Excerpt: Former U.S. Postal Service Governor Alan Kessler pressured postal executives to scuttle a planned property purchase that would have cost a friend millions of dollars, according to a report from the Office of Inspector General. The IG also found that the Postal Service general counsel, Mary Anne Gibbons, failed to act as she should have to halt Kessler's actions and report them to the IG. The Postal Service announced Kessler's resignation July 6, three weeks after the IG completed a report on his involvement in the property deal. His last day on the Board of Governors was July 31. He was 19 months into his second term as a governor, which would otherwise have ended in 2015. "Through his involvement, Governor Kessler exerted pressure on Postal Service officials to consider settlement proposals from the property owner, instead of exercising their contractual option to purchase the property," the IG report said. Both Kessler and the person he allegedly helped, Douglas Band, are senior figures in the Democratic Party with close connections to former President Clinton, according to the IG report, which was obtained by Federal Times through a Freedom of Information Act request. Band, through his attorney, told investigators that Kessler has been "a friend for many years," according to the report.
From the left! ~Bob. Excerpt: Are we supposed to believe that over a dozen Obama campaign aides deliberately say the word “weird” will be used to describe Romney in the first prong of a two-pronged “slash and burn” attack, but that none of them knows that the Church of Latter Day Saints is currently running a campaign that “seeks to combat the ‘weird’ stigma that has been labeled on the church?” Or that none of them know about this poll on evangelicals? And why would using the world “weird” constitute a “slash and burn” campaign to “destroy Romney” if it wasn’t a reference to his religion? Saying the guy is a weirdo because he wears slim fit jeans may be elitist and condescending, but it is just does not constitute “slash and burn” in the era of Lee Atwater and Willie Horton. This is a challenging time for everyone. But you can’t sit back and let the principles you stand for be perverted by the people who pretend to represent them, or you become a mockery of all you believe in. If you can’t stand up for liberal principles when so-called liberals abandon them, you’ve got no moral high ground from which to criticize anyone else. In 2008 the Obama campaign was (rightly) accusing opponents of dog whistle and outsourced race-based attacks. To preach religious tolerance as Obama does, and then engage in this kind of appeal to religious bigotry, is both hypocritical and pernicious, not to mention self-defeating.
Republicans' latest weapon against President Obama: His own words
Excerpt: The past two months have taught us that the Republican presidential candidates are going to try to make the 2012 election a referendum on President Obama’s first term, and one of the most effective means of attack is starting to pop up both on television screens and websites — using the president’s words against him. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s (R) campaign has released a series of videos over the summer in that vein. One coincided with a visit to Allentown, Pa. — a town that lost a metal works plant, despite Obama’s touting it as a stimulus success story in 2009.
Obama and the quicksand summer
Excerpt: It’s not as bad as it looks for President Obama. It’s much, much worse. July and August are looking like a summer of quicksand for the president, and there is nobody left to throw him a rope. The more he kicks, the farther he sinks. It’s still way too early to pronounce Obama’s reelection hopes dead. But this is either the low point before the comeback or the beginning of the end. And really, it could go either way.
House ethics punts Waters’s ethics case to outside counsel
Getting the “black pass” on corruption. They’d rather let her get away with it than have black “leaders” charge them with racism, however bogus. ~Bob. Excerpt: The House ethics committee is poised to pay a half-million dollars by year’s end to resolve the mess that remains of its three-year probe of Rep. Maxine Waters. An outside counsel and private law firm will sort out how to handle the most substantive case on the committee’s plate this session, as the panel tackles more modest matters. Waters, a powerful California Democrat, and a former senior staffer on the committee have separately questioned the integrity of the panel’s investigation. Since last fall, The Washington Post and other news media have reported that partisan squabbling between staff and committee members derailed the Waters probe by the end of 2010 and threatened other ethics cases. The allegations, first made against her in early 2009, center on whether Waters used her public office to help bail out OneUnited, a bank in which her husband had a significant investment.
Worth Reading: Administrative Costs
Excerpt: I take a back seat to no one in complaining about the inordinate number of bureaucrats in health care. Where I part company with many of my colleagues is that I think there are too many bureaucrats in every field. Most health policy wonks have the opposite view. They are not bothered by bureaucracy in anywhere other than health care. For example, I almost never meet anyone who complains about high administrative costs in health care who makes the same complaint about education, where the problem is much more severe. In any event, there is no problem that cannot be made worse when legislators convene. And when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) it definitely made things worse than they otherwise would have been. A medical loss ratio (MLR) is the percent of health insurance premiums that is spent on medical care. The popular term for the remainder is “administrative costs.” The new law mandates a minimum MLR of 80% for individual and small group insurance. That means these plans must spend at least 80% of their premium income on “medical care.” Conversely, they can spend no more than 20% on “administration.” If they fall below the MLR minimum, they must give back the amount of the deficit to enrollees in the form of premium rebates. The minimum MLR is 85% for large groups. Here’s one immediate problem: no one knows how to define “administration.” Just as there is no line item in the federal budget called “waste fraud and abuse,” there is also no line item in any organization’s budget called “administrative costs.” Most of us think we vaguely know what it is. But pinning it down is sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.
Excerpt: Women today are entering adulthood with more education, more achievements, more property, and, arguably, more money and ambition than their male counterparts. This is a first in human history, and its implications for both sexes are far from simple. You can see the strongest evidence that boys and young men are falling behind in high school and college classrooms. Boys have lower GPAs and lower grades in almost every subject, including math, despite their higher standardized testing scores.[1] They are 58% of high school dropouts.[2] In the mid 1970s about 28% of men had college degrees. Since then, that number has barely budged. Meanwhile, the percentage of women with a college degree increased from 18.6 to 34.2%.[3] Women now earn 57% of college degrees; predictions have them at 60% in the near future. People often assume that this “boy problem” as it is sometimes called, is really a “low-income boy problem,” primarily affecting Blacks and Hispanics. It’s true that the human capital disparities between women and men are especially pronounced in these groups. But there are signs that higher income boys are also falling behind. By 2008, men were in the minority at Harvard;[4] that’s been the situation for years at Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia (though men continue to have an edge at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale.) At high-ranking historically male schools like Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Tufts, and Haverford, men are also less than half of the populations.
Worth Reading with comment below: How Stupid is Obama?
Excerpt: We've long been aware that the One is not quite the superior intellect he was sold as. Obama, we were told, was the rare possessor of a mind with the profundity of a Socrates, the breadth of a Goethe, and the penetration of a Newton. An intellect unrivaled on the current American political scene, and possibly without equal in this country's politics since the beginning. Events have certainly demolished that little trope. Within weeks of the inauguration, sometime between "I won" and the Air Force One trip to New York for a single night's outing with Michelle, it became clear that the American Solomon was no better than average. And in the immortal words of Harvey Pekar, "Average is dumb." (I had said before that, while many think Obama is cleverly implementing Saul Alinsky's scheme for amassing power, he has in fact made major gaffes that hurt him more than anyone else. (See the linked article) For example, it is obvious that he would really like to at least temporarily "create jobs" just before the election and has another plan to do so by using the same old Keynesian tricks that have failed so ignominiously in the past. He's like the addicted gambler who is about out of money but wants in on the just one more poker game. He just KNOWS he will win this one...A smart man who wants to see more jobs created at least before the elections would use a tried and true method like cutting taxes, spending, anti-business regs and the sovereign debt. I had concluded, mostly on this basis, that Obama is just plain dumb and had said so. I didn't get much response on that. I don't know if readers disagreed, thought admitting the truth would make them appear racist, or if they just were too busy at the time. I have previously debated against the theory of African inferiority with blogger Lawrence Auster, using the collective intellect of the mostly-black Panamanian nation as an example. I have seen more than enough evidence that the predominantly black Panamanians are smarter on the whole than other Westerners -- and it is non-racial. It's circumstances. For example, their banks remain solid as the rock of Gibraltar, simply because they have clung to the forgotten common-sense notion that borrowers must be made to prove they can pay their debts. And, while insisting that industries remain as clean as feasibly possible, the government does not forbid ALL of certain kinds of economic activity (such as mining) on the basis of environmental concerns. Lawrence allowed his blog readers to debate me, knowing they were of a mind with him, and they took the tack that Panamanians were not mostly black and therefore my argument was not valid. Obviously none of them had ever been here. (Whenever I see a white person in the mall, I note it in my mental diary). Their claim was that mestizos and people of mixed race could not be deemed black. What he forgot was that in the US, the official standard for deeming someone an Afro-American is the one-drop theory. By their theory, Obama is not black, for example, and neither are a large percentage of the group considered as "Afro-Americans" according to US government demographics. By this American theory, what are called mestizos here in Panama are in fact some of the blacks Lawrence was referring to, even though Latins have traditionally categorized them separately. When Lawrence spoke of blacks in his article on race and intelligence, he did not sort out those with mixed ancestry -- which in fact, constitute a vast percentage of "Afro-Americans." You can't use one definition for one side of an argument and another for the other side. Yet that is what his team was doing. Friends, I am proud of my fellow Americans. We have watched this bozo destroy our economy and apply Black Liberation theology in ways that enable black criminals to get away with crime. Yet, the average American has been too smart to fall into the trap of racism into which many Europeans are falling. Instead, for example, very many conservatives are looking to black candidates such as Allen West to counter Obama. That means that America can, with a little luck and God's grace, pull out of their moral and economic crisis. In fact, if enough Europeans reject racism and choose a Biblical Christian policy that puts love ahead of all else and firmly rejects fascism and racism, they can overcome the destructive effects of the Ruling Class on their nations and restore nationhood without falling back into the failed racist-fascist pattern. Finally, let me go one step further than the author of the article below and say that Democrats who overlook intelligent blacks in favor of below-average candidates are suggesting that the Left is racist, believing these dimwits are the most intelligent candidates available among blacks.--Don Hank
62% Understand That Spending Cuts Really Means Slowing Pace of Spending
Excerpt: Congress and presidents have been playing the “spending cuts” game for years, but most voters know what they’re really talking about. Sixty-two percent (62%) of Likely U.S. Voters understand that when Congress mentions future spending cuts, they’re really saying the growth in government spending will be less than planned. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 19% think it means spending next year will be lower than this year’s. Twenty percent (20%) aren’t sure which is right.
Border agent arrested for stealing woman's purse, using credit cards
Excerpt: A Border Patrol agent has been arrested for stealing a woman's purse and using her credit cards at a Douglas Walmart last week. Teofilo Rodarte, 32, faces charges of burglary, forgery, theft and illegal use of a credit card. Douglas police Sgt. Jose Duarte said in a news release that a woman reported her purse was stolen from her vehicle at a Douglas gas station during the early morning hours of August 4.
A heartbreaking wartime sacrifice and later, a father's quest
Great story of courage. ~Bob. Excerpt: She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. "The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive." He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this." A cold wind cut at the skin that December morning, so Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one. He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.
American Tinderbox
Excerpt: For some time now, residents of some US cities have noted occasional incidents of seemingly random, racially motivated violence in which young Black males are involved. The hot weather and bad economy seem to be combining to generate a small but possibly significant uptick this year. The national media are doing their best to avoid looking too closely at this disturbing phenomenon, and perhaps for good reason. What the United States doesn’t need is a media firestorm that triggers copycat violence. … The same thing is true at a local level. As more successful families have moved out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, the ability of the national and local “Black Establishment” to intervene in moments of tension is dropping. Many inner city kids today grow up feeling abandoned by Black leaders as well as by whites. Should flash mobs or other disturbing phenomena catch on more widely (and the combination of social media and idle youth can lead to very rapid shifts in behavior), it is not clear that either local or national leaders could do much to calm things down.
The Next President
A whole lot of valid reasoning in this column. Ron P. Excerpt: I don’t have a candidate yet, but I do have some traditional requirements. Most of the time, we elect either state governors or generals who have won wars. There are good and obvious reasons: We want leaders who have executive experience making difficult decisions, whether on the political or military battlefield, leaders who know how to manage a large and complex enterprise, leaders who have dealt with internal and external criticism, and who have kept together sometimes-fractious teams of advisers, colleagues and subordinates. That’s the overall requirement for me. Second: I don’t want someone from business who has no experience in politics or the military; the worlds are too different, and we don’t have time for the next president to learn the basic rules. Third: I don’t want a legislator whose career has been almost exclusively in politics. (…) Like justice, policy delayed is often policy denied. Ask the Syrian and Iranian people about that. Faster, please.
Worth Reading: Weapons of Mob Destruction
Excerpt: The racial element of these attacks is becoming impossible to ignore. In Philadelphia, black Mayor Michael A. Nutter, much to his credit, stepped into the breach. After telling black youths, “You have damaged your own race,” he announced an increase in police patrols in some neighborhoods, called on citizens to monitor the streets, and moved up a weekend curfew on minors to 9 p.m. Parents will also be subjected to increasing fines each time one of their children gets caught violating the curfew. “Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer,” said Nutter. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.” Nutter also challenged parents to take responsibility for their children, with specific admonition aimed at men. “If you’re just hanging out out there, maybe you’re sending them a check or bringing some cash by. That’s not being a father. You’re just a human ATM … And if you’re not providing the guidance and you’re not sending any money, you’re just a sperm donor,” he said. On Monday, he spelled out his intentions to maintain order using gang references. “Let me just share this with you. We’ve got the biggest, baddest gang in town — a committed group of citizens and a committed government — and we’re working together and we’re not going to have this nonsense anymore,” he warned. … Like their counterparts in the United States, the mobs are all too easily organizable courtesy of modern technology. Texting, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and instant messaging, allow for an unprecedented level of timing, coordination and flexibility of flash mob organization, all of which put law enforcement officials at a distinct disadvantage. ”What is making this unique today is the social media aspect,” said Everett Gillison, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for public safety. “They can communicate and congregate at a moment’s notice. That can overwhelm any municipality.”
A History Dangerous to Repeat
Excerpt: Unfortunately, democracies have a bad habit of shortsighted reductions in defense spending in order to finance other priorities, leaving them vulnerable to aggressors. In 4th-Century B.C. Athens, a fund called the theorikon distributed public monies to citizens so that they could attend religious and theatrical festivals. A law directed that budget surpluses go into this fund rather than into the stratiotikon, the military fund. Indeed, other legislation made any attempt to direct surpluses into the military fund a capital crime. This prioritizing of income redistribution over defense took place at the same time that the autocrat Philip II of Macedon was aggressively moving against the free Greek states, which he would defeat at the battle of Chaeronea in 338, destroying their political freedom. The historian Theopompus linked that defeat to such entitlement spending, castigating the Athenians for becoming “less courageous and more lax” because of the state-distributed dole and funding of festivals, upon which “the Athenian people thoroughly squandered their resources.” Corrupted by these state-funded entitlements, Theopompus observes, “the entire citizenry spent more on public festivals and sacrifices than on the management of war.”
Excerpt: So this year’s fiscal-policy code word is “balanced approach.” This means nothing more or less than higher taxes on high earners, business income, and capital gains. Congressman Eric Cantor remarked at one point in the debt-ceiling debate that the Democrats (including Obama) were totally stuck on the idea of raising taxes. But Cantor stressed that they never presented an economic rationale for higher taxes. It was all about class warfare, pure and simple. Class warfare is like catnip to progressives. The problem with class warfare is that it doesn’t give us growth and jobs. At least a few of the Democrats recognize that growth is a mandatory part of a fiscal-reform strategy (higher taxes and spending/entitlement cuts are the other two). Remember the Bush tax-cut debate last year? Then, Democrats readily admitted the numbers: the Bush tax cuts on high earners were worth an estimated $700 billion in revenues over ten years, while the same cuts on everyone else were worth about $2.8 trillion. You can raise taxes on high earners, but you don’t solve any economic problem that way. There just aren’t enough rich people to buy candy and bubble gum for everyone else.
Ignorance, Stupidity or Connivance?
Excerpt: Let's look at what happened when Obama's predecessor George H.W. Bush signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 and broke his "read my lips" vow not to agree to new taxes. When Congress imposed a 10 percent luxury tax on yachts, private airplanes and expensive automobiles, Sen. Ted Kennedy and then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share of taxes. What actually happened is laid out in a Heartland Institute blog post by Edmund Contoski titled "Economically illiterate Obama, re: Corporate Jets" (7/12/2011). Within eight months after the change in the law took effect, Viking Yachts, the largest U.S. yacht manufacturer, laid off 1,140 of its 1,400 employees and closed one of its two manufacturing plants. Before it was all over, Viking Yachts was down to 68 employees. In the first year, one-third of U.S. yacht-building companies stopped production, and according to a report by the congressional Joint Economic Committee, the industry lost 7,600 jobs. When it was over, 25,000 workers had lost their jobs building yachts, and 75,000 more jobs were lost in companies that supplied yacht parts and material. Ocean Yachts trimmed its workforce from 350 to 50. Egg Harbor Yachts went from 200 employees to five and later filed for bankruptcy. The U.S., which had been a net exporter of yachts, became a net importer as U.S. companies closed. Jobs shifted to companies in Europe and the Bahamas. The U.S. Treasury collected zero revenue from the sales driven overseas. (One of the great things about reading a column by a Williams or a Sowell is that their facts are always plainly stated and easy to check. Some of us can remember when this happened. Ron P.)
California's High-Speed Rail Draws $179 Million in Federal Aid as Cost Soars
Excerpt: The Obama administration announced this week it's giving California $179 million to fill in portions of a high-speed rail that will travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but the project is increasingly being portrayed as a local transportation boondoggle, with the cost for building the first section billions more than originally estimated. Arnold Schwarzenegger, while governor, said the total $43 billion cost was too prohibitive to create the 220-mile per hour system, but his successor, Gov. Jerry Brown, has accepted federal cash, in what will now be divided between three areas.
Accused Ft. Hood Gunman Is Still Getting Paycheck From the Government
Your tax dollars at work. ~Bob. Excerpt: Accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan continues to draw a military paycheck from the government, the base commander said Wednesday. Major Nidal Hasan, accused of the 2009 mass shooting rampage at Fort Hood that left 13 dead, has retained his military rank and continues to get paychecks from the government, the base commander said Wednesday. Lieutenant General Donald Campbell, Jr., the commander of Fort Hood, said Hasan’s confinement and medical expenses are also being paid for by the military, KXXV-TV reported. He receives weekly medical treatment and is occasionally transported to meet with his defense team. Hasan was shot during the attack and is reportedly paralyzed from the waist down.
Officers who responded to 2009 Fort Hood shootings, hailed as heroes, losing their jobs
Money to pay him, but not them. Give me access to Hasan with a 9mm in my hand and in five seconds I could save the government enough money to save their jobs. ~Bob. Excerpt: The two Fort Hood police officers celebrated as heroes for responding first to the 2009 shooting massacre at this Army post were told recently they would lose their jobs as part of broader military budget cuts. Kimberly Munley and Mark Todd, who is credited with taking down suspected shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, have both left Fort Hood in advance of the termination of their jobs. Fort Hood officials said other civilian police officers on the post who were hired on a year-to-year basis will likewise not see their employment renewed. "We all hold Fort Hood in our hearts and never thought we would be facing cutbacks," said Munley, who has taken an unpaid leave of absence.
No shame for religious killings in Indonesian town
I repeat, most of the victims of Allahmurder are Muslims. ~Bob. Excerpt: When Dani bin Misra was released from prison last week after serving just three months for smashing in the skull of a member of a Muslim sect, this conservative Indonesian town let out a triumphant cry. "He's a hero!" Rasna bin Wildan said of the teenage killer. The ferociousness of the attack, captured on video and circulated widely on the Internet, guaranteed no one from the Ahmadiyah group would dare set foot in Cikeusik again, the 38-year-old farmer said as others nodded in agreement. Their reaction is part of a wider wave of intolerance against religious minorities that is challenging Indonesia's image as a beacon of how Islam and liberalism can coexist.
Did Gov Walker Stage Wisconsin Fair Race Attack?
Excerpt: My contention, based on that and other examples that could fill a book, is that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was, in some way, behind that so-called Black Youth Attack and worked to benefit from it. It just didn't happen. (So...Gov Walker is smart enough to fool a large group of African American youth to commit hate crimes. Either that, or all those that participated are stupid. And worse, if they aren't already voting, someday they will. –MasterGuns. Bet he believes Bush staged 9/11, Palin is responsible for random violence, and a tax on the rich would balance the budget. ~Bob.)
Critics Question U.S. Aid to China Amid Debt Woes
“Everyone needs to chip in.” –Obama. To help China? ~Bob. Excerpt: With America still drowning in debt, critics in and outside of Congress say it’s time to reassess U.S. foreign aid -- especially to China. "We started looking at the contracts and it was rather amazing that the No. 1 recipient of these taxpayer dollars were Chinese-state owned corporations," said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, referring to $320 million dollars worth of U.S. government contracts let to China. "I think we can take a good hard look where we're giving foreign aid." The U.S. provided $47 million in "development aid" to China in 2010, even though the nation is already a military and economic giant and the world's only other true superpower.
Aerial Drone Cracks WiFi, Taps Cell Phones: Report
Excerpt: A rather obscure aviation contraption is making headlines this week by cracking secure wireless Internet (WiFi) and a cell phone networks (GSM), and along with it, a host of personal information and sensitive data. The Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform (otherwise known as the WASP) is an unmanned vehicle converted to run on batteries instead of gasoline. It has a 6-foot wingspan, a 6-foot length and weighs in at 14 pounds. WASP stores global positioning system (GPS) information that allows it to fly a predetermined course without the assistance of an operator, only requiring human intervention for taking off and landing.
Withholder in Chief by Maureen Dowd in N Y TIMES
Excerpt: Even the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair is not enough to sweeten the mood. Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world. “We are choosing hope over fear,” Senator Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 here the night he won the Iowa caucuses. But fear has garroted hope, as America reels from the latest humiliating blows on the economy and in Afghanistan. The politician who came across as a redeemer in 2008 is now in need of redemption himself. Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt. Many of his Democratic supporters here, who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One, are disillusioned.
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