The American sheeple are at it again I see, blindly mouthing all the catchphrases and buzzwords tossed at us by the various political campaigns. Currently the magic word is still “change”, as in “It’s time to kick the other guy out and elect my crook… err… candidate for (fill in the blank) elected office”. So we can continue with "business as usual" of course.
Almost two years ago consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high, gasoline sold for around $2.20 a gallon, and the national unemployment rate was in the 4.5% ballpark. Since those fondly remembered days we’ve suffered through a mid-term election that saw Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi take over the leadership of congress. Their loudly promised withdrawal from Iraq hasn’t happened, improved border security hasn’t happened, and government expenditures still aren’t under control. The Obama – Clinton mudslinging contest has reached epic proportions unseen in recent decades, the news media constantly displays the political posturing of every incumbent and office seeker in the country, along with all the gory details of every major or minor scandal to come along. Oh yeah, the Hollywierd celebrities still seem to think they’re the nations foremost experts on just about every conceivable subject and they never tire of telling us all about it.
The candidates keep calling for “change”, but I’m not real sure just what sort of change they have in mind, and I expect I probably won’t much like it either. It seems that the war in Iraq has calmed down somewhat since the “surge”, which indicates to me that it’s working despite all the loud claims that the war is/was lost. So now the political hopefuls have changed their line of attack to our financial woes, attempting to make us believe that vague and undefined forces like "the economy," "inflation", or "politics" have prevented them from doing what they took a solemn oath to do.
Since we voted in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we've seen a lot of changes, although they weren’t necessarily the changes we were promised. So far, consumer confidence in our financial system has dropped into the basement, and now it seems we have a recession staring us in the face. The cost of gasoline has risen to well over $3 a gallon, and I can just envision OPEC ministers gleefully rubbing their hands together as they plan further inroads on the American consumer’s finances. Unemployment has seen a roughly 10% increase, now it’s at about 5% of our national workforce. Keep in mind that that increase is after all those “jobs Americans don’t want” have been filled by a horde of illegal aliens, and it doesn’t count the how many other unemployed folks who have completely given up looking for work (and likely given up hope as well). American households have suffered a $2.3 trillion loss in stock and mutual fund equity, while their home equity has fallen by around $1.2 trillion dollars, and something like 1% of all American homes are currently in foreclosure.
The republicans blame the democrats, the democrats blame the republicans, the media weeps and wails, and yet nothing seems to get done to solve our quite severe national problems. Well, remember that one hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices - out of the 300 million of us in this country, are directly responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, stood up and criticized President Bush for creating deficits, apparently forgetting that the United States Constitution, the supreme law of the land, gives responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. “We the People” don't have the Constitutional authority to pass appropriations bills, nor does the Senate or the president. But the members of the House of Representatives certainly do. The president can propose a budget, he can wheel and deal all he wants to get it passed, but he can’t force Congress to pass it. Ms. Pelosi and the House membership can approve or disapprove any budget they want. If the president doesn’t like what they pass, that’s tough.
If both the Democrats and the Republicans are against budget deficits, why do we still have budget deficits? If our politicians are against inflation and high taxes, why do we still have inflation and high taxes? If they don’t like our runaway trade deficits, why do we still have those deficits? If they don’t like American jobs going overseas, why do we still have NAFTA? If energy independence is so vital to the country’s security and well being, why aren’t we doing anything about it? If affordable health care is so important to Americans, why isn’t congress doing something about runaway medical costs?
Politicians seem to be the only people who can create major national problems, and then constantly get themselves reelected by campaigning against them. When you understand that among our entire population these people alone exercise the power of the federal government, then it would appear that the existing situation is what they want to exist. If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it that way. If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red. If the US Army is in Iraq, it's because they want them in Iraq. The basis of the problem is not with the federal bureaucracy, whom Congress can hire and fire at will. The problem is not with lobbyists or special interests whose “advice” they can reject. Nor is it with government agencies to whom they give the authority to regulate our activities, and from whom they can just as quickly remove that authority. I can't think of any domestic problem, from our rickety tax code to budget deficits, from the war in Iraq to our collapsing economy, that is not the direct responsibility of our congressional representatives in the nation’s capitol. Those people alone are responsible for causing, or failing to correct, the problems that plague our nation. I’d think they should be held fully accountable by the voters every two years. It seems strange to me that a nation of 300 million supposedly intelligent citizens cannot replace 535 politicians (and one President) who stand guilty of malfeasance, as demonstrated by the sorry situation we presently find ourselves in.
Today we stand before the world, bloodied and bruised. Not defeated by a foreign power, not beaten by insane religious zealots, not laid low by homegrown extremists. Instead we’re being destroyed from within, by our own congressional leadership. We voted for a change in 2006, and we certainly got one. Now, with another presidential election rapidly approaching, I’m wondering just how much more “change” our once great nation can stand?
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Asteroids?
The recent near impact of an asteroid with Mars, our northwest meteor flap, the highly visible lunar eclipse, and now the spy satellite shoot-down have certainly focused our attention on space in the last few weeks. As a predominately agricultural area, the majority of us are far more concerned with the timber, beef, and grain markets than we are with spaceflight, but still, space is a rather interesting area of scientific endeavor. It also generates a lot of curiosity in the public mind, and often a lot of national pride in most Americans. Like everything else however, the interest can’t last long in the minds of a fickle American public.
In recent years scientific research has been adopted by the “Chicken Little” set as their source of gloom and doom “the sky is falling” catastrophic threats to the world. These of course range from global warming to the threatened Bird Flu pandemic, from a giant asteroid impact to massive overpopulation. While the sky is not falling, and the world is not necessarily coming to an end anytime soon, all these threats do have some probability of happening. Generally a pretty low probability, but like everything else, I’d never say it can’t happen. The predicted Mars/asteroid impact didn’t occur, but Mars did have a pretty good chance of getting smacked by a flying rock. Sort of an interplanetary fender bender that had a lot of space scientists all excited. Based on the known orbital parameters available late in January, asteroid 2007 WD5 had a high probability of hitting the northern hemisphere of Mars, sometime in the evening of January 30th, 2008, with the best guesstimates at about a 4% chance of impact. WD5 is only about 160 feet across, which puts it a long way from being the “Planet Killer” so beloved of the science fiction movie writers. From a purely scientific viewpoint however, most of us with an interest in space happenings rather did hope it would hit. What a fireworks display!!
Assuming that the gentle reader has a working knowledge of meteors, comets, and asteroids, I’ll explain that 2007 WD5 is what’s known as an “NEO”, a Near Earth Object. An NEO is an inner system body (usually an extinct comet core or an asteroid) whose orbit periodically crosses that of Earth, and that often brings them fairly close to our little blue planet. WD5 was first discovered on November 20, 2007, after the object had already passed within 5 million miles of Earth on November 1. Astronomers calculated its course and noticed that it would be passing quite near Mars as well. NEO’s routinely pass close to Earth several times every year, and occasionally we get hit by them. Arizona’s half mile wide “Meteor Crater” is the aftermath of one such impact a few thousand years ago, and interestingly enough that rock just happened to be about the same size as WD5. The Arizona strike produced an explosion equivalent to about 2.5 megatons of TNT, or about 150 times the size of the A-bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The inpact occurred during the Pleistocene epoch when the area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands and inhabited mostly by woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and camelids. I can just imagine the wildlife stampede when that thing hit!
A comparable incident occurred in 1908, when something exploded above the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees in a 25-mile radius from the center of the blast. Scientists are pretty sure it was a comet or asteroid, considerably smaller than WD5 that was torn apart by its own shock wave as it plowed through the atmosphere. (UFO enthusiasts have long believed it was a flying saucer that somehow made it across light years of interstellar space, only to blow up above Russia.) The scientific explanation would account for the aerial explosion, and also the fact that no crater has been found. However, an Italian science team has recently measured seismic waves reflecting off a high-density spot in the bottom of a suspiciously crater-shaped Lake Cheko which lies quite close to the event's ground zero. It could be a piece of the original object and finding it could help investigators understand exactly what happened in 1908. If they find burned-out flying-saucer remains however…
Created by a much bigger object, the Chicxulub Crater underneath the Yucatan Peninsula is believed by many scientists to have brought about the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The crater is over 110 miles in diameter, making the feature one of the largest confirmed impact structures in the world. That particular asteroid or comet was at least 6 miles in diameter. Recent evidence suggests that the impactor was a piece of a much larger asteroid which broke up in a space collision more than 160 million years ago. Ahh… where’d the other pieces go?
While the potential Mars impact was interesting, it would be quite another story if 2007 WD5 were heading toward Earth. "Something of this size could take out a fairly large metropolitan area," said Donald Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who manages the agency's (severely under funded) Near-Earth Objects program. It was this congressionally mandated search for potentially threatening asteroids and comets that turned up 2007 WD5 as a target in the first place. Originally identified as a possible risk to Earth, later analysis showed that the asteroid just might collide with Mars. While WD5 flew right on past Earth and Mars, that may not be good news for Earth, which will sometime again find itself in the asteroid's path. It would seem that even if they miss us this time, they keep coming back for another try.
Unlike the 1908 event, in the future we should have some warning of a possible strike, as well as (hopefully) the tools to divert the threat. We do have the technology to deflect something like this today, but before we send the Space Cadets out to blow it up with an A-bomb, we might remember that blowing one up Hollywood style will do little more than send a whole lot of slightly smaller fragments our way (somewhat like exchanging a rifle bullet for a shotgun blast). However, all we really need to do is slow it down a bit, which we could readily do with a nuclear rocket engine, if we start several years before it’s due to hit us. What we don’t have at present (thanks to congressional budget cuts and NASA’s constant dithering) is the means to reach an NEO with anything big enough to help.
For the moment however, we don’t even have any plans to save the Earth from a major NEO impact, nor any idea of what hardware we’d need. And unsurprisingly there are tens of thousands of them out there, ranging in size from little bitty things that we’ll never notice, to a lot of flying mountains several miles across. While the odds of an impact on any particular day are pretty slim, the question isn’t “if” one will hit us, it’s “when” will it hit us. We really do need to develop a means of defense, even if it's not a real high priority item. Meanwhile, congress keeps passing out earmarks while they can't find the money needed to keep NASA viable, and NASA seems to be asleep at the switch as well.
In recent years scientific research has been adopted by the “Chicken Little” set as their source of gloom and doom “the sky is falling” catastrophic threats to the world. These of course range from global warming to the threatened Bird Flu pandemic, from a giant asteroid impact to massive overpopulation. While the sky is not falling, and the world is not necessarily coming to an end anytime soon, all these threats do have some probability of happening. Generally a pretty low probability, but like everything else, I’d never say it can’t happen. The predicted Mars/asteroid impact didn’t occur, but Mars did have a pretty good chance of getting smacked by a flying rock. Sort of an interplanetary fender bender that had a lot of space scientists all excited. Based on the known orbital parameters available late in January, asteroid 2007 WD5 had a high probability of hitting the northern hemisphere of Mars, sometime in the evening of January 30th, 2008, with the best guesstimates at about a 4% chance of impact. WD5 is only about 160 feet across, which puts it a long way from being the “Planet Killer” so beloved of the science fiction movie writers. From a purely scientific viewpoint however, most of us with an interest in space happenings rather did hope it would hit. What a fireworks display!!
Assuming that the gentle reader has a working knowledge of meteors, comets, and asteroids, I’ll explain that 2007 WD5 is what’s known as an “NEO”, a Near Earth Object. An NEO is an inner system body (usually an extinct comet core or an asteroid) whose orbit periodically crosses that of Earth, and that often brings them fairly close to our little blue planet. WD5 was first discovered on November 20, 2007, after the object had already passed within 5 million miles of Earth on November 1. Astronomers calculated its course and noticed that it would be passing quite near Mars as well. NEO’s routinely pass close to Earth several times every year, and occasionally we get hit by them. Arizona’s half mile wide “Meteor Crater” is the aftermath of one such impact a few thousand years ago, and interestingly enough that rock just happened to be about the same size as WD5. The Arizona strike produced an explosion equivalent to about 2.5 megatons of TNT, or about 150 times the size of the A-bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The inpact occurred during the Pleistocene epoch when the area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands and inhabited mostly by woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and camelids. I can just imagine the wildlife stampede when that thing hit!
A comparable incident occurred in 1908, when something exploded above the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees in a 25-mile radius from the center of the blast. Scientists are pretty sure it was a comet or asteroid, considerably smaller than WD5 that was torn apart by its own shock wave as it plowed through the atmosphere. (UFO enthusiasts have long believed it was a flying saucer that somehow made it across light years of interstellar space, only to blow up above Russia.) The scientific explanation would account for the aerial explosion, and also the fact that no crater has been found. However, an Italian science team has recently measured seismic waves reflecting off a high-density spot in the bottom of a suspiciously crater-shaped Lake Cheko which lies quite close to the event's ground zero. It could be a piece of the original object and finding it could help investigators understand exactly what happened in 1908. If they find burned-out flying-saucer remains however…
Created by a much bigger object, the Chicxulub Crater underneath the Yucatan Peninsula is believed by many scientists to have brought about the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The crater is over 110 miles in diameter, making the feature one of the largest confirmed impact structures in the world. That particular asteroid or comet was at least 6 miles in diameter. Recent evidence suggests that the impactor was a piece of a much larger asteroid which broke up in a space collision more than 160 million years ago. Ahh… where’d the other pieces go?
While the potential Mars impact was interesting, it would be quite another story if 2007 WD5 were heading toward Earth. "Something of this size could take out a fairly large metropolitan area," said Donald Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who manages the agency's (severely under funded) Near-Earth Objects program. It was this congressionally mandated search for potentially threatening asteroids and comets that turned up 2007 WD5 as a target in the first place. Originally identified as a possible risk to Earth, later analysis showed that the asteroid just might collide with Mars. While WD5 flew right on past Earth and Mars, that may not be good news for Earth, which will sometime again find itself in the asteroid's path. It would seem that even if they miss us this time, they keep coming back for another try.
Unlike the 1908 event, in the future we should have some warning of a possible strike, as well as (hopefully) the tools to divert the threat. We do have the technology to deflect something like this today, but before we send the Space Cadets out to blow it up with an A-bomb, we might remember that blowing one up Hollywood style will do little more than send a whole lot of slightly smaller fragments our way (somewhat like exchanging a rifle bullet for a shotgun blast). However, all we really need to do is slow it down a bit, which we could readily do with a nuclear rocket engine, if we start several years before it’s due to hit us. What we don’t have at present (thanks to congressional budget cuts and NASA’s constant dithering) is the means to reach an NEO with anything big enough to help.
For the moment however, we don’t even have any plans to save the Earth from a major NEO impact, nor any idea of what hardware we’d need. And unsurprisingly there are tens of thousands of them out there, ranging in size from little bitty things that we’ll never notice, to a lot of flying mountains several miles across. While the odds of an impact on any particular day are pretty slim, the question isn’t “if” one will hit us, it’s “when” will it hit us. We really do need to develop a means of defense, even if it's not a real high priority item. Meanwhile, congress keeps passing out earmarks while they can't find the money needed to keep NASA viable, and NASA seems to be asleep at the switch as well.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
CIA
Despite well over a decade of military observers, investigations, “fact finding” missions, and intensive intelligence gathering, the American military and intelligence communities found themselves repeatedly explaining to four consecutive US presidents that a guerilla war against the Viet Minh (Viet Cong) in Indochina was not something the US could win, with both the military and CIA vehemently opposing the US entry into the Indochina war. Irregardless, with the Tonkin Gulf incident as LBJ’s excuse, we soon got the US Marines landing on the beaches near Da Nang, massive troop build-ups, and a full scale shooting war in South Vietnam. Apparently, because the White House better understands the conduct of field operations than do military commanders on the scene, the military soon found themselves “micro-managed” by Washington to the extent that then President Johnson often bragged the Air Force couldn’t bomb an outhouse without his express permission. At the same time, the CIA was directed to conduct an “in the black” covert war in the jungles of Laos, a mission that the agency was totally unprepared to handle. The Pentagon, and Langley, put their best efforts into following orders, but even so the effort was somewhat akin to bailing out New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina with a leaky teacup.
Towards the end of the war, the previously hawkish US Congress began looking for scapegoats to take the rap for the perceived US failure. As it was (and apparently still is) totally inconceivable that our political leadership could possibly make any errors in judgment, political expediency told them that the fault must obviously lie within the US Armed Forces and our intelligence agencies. With that political decision, congress began a multi-year effort to emasculate the US military and CIA, an effort that the far left continues to this day. The military survived those efforts, just barely, and thanks to President Ronald Reagan, managed to revive themselves sufficiently for George Bush the elder to successfully conduct the Desert Storm war. The CIA, starved of funds and under severe oversight by congressional amateurs who haven’t the vaguest idea of what intelligence gathering is all about, wasn’t quite as fortunate. The media had predicted that after the near wrecking of the CIA, it would take decades to rebuild our foreign intelligence capabilities. That time has passed, and the job still hasn't been done.
Following the congressional hatchet job at Langley, President Jimmy Carter's administration, in its incessant playing to the radical left, cut even deeper. The Carter efforts had gotten rid of nearly all the US “humint” (Human Intelligence) assets worldwide that would have been able to properly keep track of the goings on in the clandestine world, resulting in the only intelligence resource available to the United States being satellite photos, along with whatever was forwarded by our friends and allies throughout the world. With 9-11 and the War on Terror, we trusted the intelligence data passed on to us by the British, French, Germans, and several other nations, a necessity required by the need to fill the artificial void created at CIA. As it’s also politically unthinkable that the intelligence agencies of these allied countries could have misled us, George W. Bush believed the information we received concerning Iraq was credible, so apparently did Colin Powell and the US Congress. After the invasion, and after no Iraqi WMD’s had been found, we heard the wails from European capitols that “we didn’t say the information we passed along was reliable or credible”. Apparently they didn’t say it was unreliable either, until well after the war had started. And if they thought it was unreliable, why did they join us in attacking Saddam’s Iraq? And yet once again Congress, and the media, laid the blame squarely on the CIA.
I rather think that this questionable intelligence data was considered reliable at the time by all parties involved. After all, we know that Saddam did have chemical weapons. He used them against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. We know that he used those weapons against his own restive population on several occasions. We know that he had those weapons at the time of Desert Storm, because we found many of them lying around Iraqi ammunition dumps after the cease fire. What we didn’t know, and apparently still don’t, is just how extensive Saddam’s WMD programs actually were.
FBI special agent George Piro, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic, questioned Saddam after he was captured near Tikrit in December 2003. Prio told CBS's "60 Minutes" program that Saddam expected only a limited aerial attack by the United States and thought he could remain in control. "He told me he initially miscalculated ... President Bush's intentions," said Piro. "He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 ... a four-day aerial attack." "He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack," Piro added. The Associated Press spoke to an aide of Saddam's in August 2003, who also said that Saddam did not expect a U.S. invasion and deliberately kept everyone guessing about his weapons program, although he already had gotten rid of it. Saddam publicly denied having these weapons before the U.S. invasion, but prevented UN inspectors working in-country to prove or disprove his claims. Piro said that Saddam wanted to keep up the illusion, partly because he thought it would deter a possible Iranian invasion. Instead, his “faking” brought about a US led invasion and the fall of B’aathist Iraq. Piro added that Saddam had the intent of restarting the Iraqi weapons program, and did have the scientists and engineers for future chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development. Despite the UN’s inability to find anything, given the geography of Iraq it would not be difficult to believe that Saddam did have a quite large stockpile of WMD’s hidden in the desert. I’m reminded of the difficulties we’ve had in finding Saddam’s hidden ammunition dumps, and a chemical artillery shell isn’t very large. Humm… What other nasty little surprises might be stashed away in Iraq’s deserts?
With the gift of 20/20 hindsight, the American political left in this election year continually decries the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing war, accusing President Bush and the Republican party of being militaristic, along with a wide assortment of other failings. Yet what else was the president to do? He is after all, sworn to defend the United States to the best of his ability. Arab terrorists had already used civil airliners as missiles, causing extensive death and destruction in this country. He was well aware that Saddam was the sworn enemy of the United States, and had previously demonstrated both possession of, and a willingness to utilize, WMD’s. Saddam’s continued deliberate faking of having these weapons fooled nearly every intelligence agency in the world apparently. With that, how hard would it have been to believe that Saddam might happily hand a few chemical weapons over to al-Qaeda, for use in terrorist attacks against the United States?
If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, at first sight most of us would probably think it’s a duck.
Towards the end of the war, the previously hawkish US Congress began looking for scapegoats to take the rap for the perceived US failure. As it was (and apparently still is) totally inconceivable that our political leadership could possibly make any errors in judgment, political expediency told them that the fault must obviously lie within the US Armed Forces and our intelligence agencies. With that political decision, congress began a multi-year effort to emasculate the US military and CIA, an effort that the far left continues to this day. The military survived those efforts, just barely, and thanks to President Ronald Reagan, managed to revive themselves sufficiently for George Bush the elder to successfully conduct the Desert Storm war. The CIA, starved of funds and under severe oversight by congressional amateurs who haven’t the vaguest idea of what intelligence gathering is all about, wasn’t quite as fortunate. The media had predicted that after the near wrecking of the CIA, it would take decades to rebuild our foreign intelligence capabilities. That time has passed, and the job still hasn't been done.
Following the congressional hatchet job at Langley, President Jimmy Carter's administration, in its incessant playing to the radical left, cut even deeper. The Carter efforts had gotten rid of nearly all the US “humint” (Human Intelligence) assets worldwide that would have been able to properly keep track of the goings on in the clandestine world, resulting in the only intelligence resource available to the United States being satellite photos, along with whatever was forwarded by our friends and allies throughout the world. With 9-11 and the War on Terror, we trusted the intelligence data passed on to us by the British, French, Germans, and several other nations, a necessity required by the need to fill the artificial void created at CIA. As it’s also politically unthinkable that the intelligence agencies of these allied countries could have misled us, George W. Bush believed the information we received concerning Iraq was credible, so apparently did Colin Powell and the US Congress. After the invasion, and after no Iraqi WMD’s had been found, we heard the wails from European capitols that “we didn’t say the information we passed along was reliable or credible”. Apparently they didn’t say it was unreliable either, until well after the war had started. And if they thought it was unreliable, why did they join us in attacking Saddam’s Iraq? And yet once again Congress, and the media, laid the blame squarely on the CIA.
I rather think that this questionable intelligence data was considered reliable at the time by all parties involved. After all, we know that Saddam did have chemical weapons. He used them against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. We know that he used those weapons against his own restive population on several occasions. We know that he had those weapons at the time of Desert Storm, because we found many of them lying around Iraqi ammunition dumps after the cease fire. What we didn’t know, and apparently still don’t, is just how extensive Saddam’s WMD programs actually were.
FBI special agent George Piro, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic, questioned Saddam after he was captured near Tikrit in December 2003. Prio told CBS's "60 Minutes" program that Saddam expected only a limited aerial attack by the United States and thought he could remain in control. "He told me he initially miscalculated ... President Bush's intentions," said Piro. "He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 ... a four-day aerial attack." "He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack," Piro added. The Associated Press spoke to an aide of Saddam's in August 2003, who also said that Saddam did not expect a U.S. invasion and deliberately kept everyone guessing about his weapons program, although he already had gotten rid of it. Saddam publicly denied having these weapons before the U.S. invasion, but prevented UN inspectors working in-country to prove or disprove his claims. Piro said that Saddam wanted to keep up the illusion, partly because he thought it would deter a possible Iranian invasion. Instead, his “faking” brought about a US led invasion and the fall of B’aathist Iraq. Piro added that Saddam had the intent of restarting the Iraqi weapons program, and did have the scientists and engineers for future chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development. Despite the UN’s inability to find anything, given the geography of Iraq it would not be difficult to believe that Saddam did have a quite large stockpile of WMD’s hidden in the desert. I’m reminded of the difficulties we’ve had in finding Saddam’s hidden ammunition dumps, and a chemical artillery shell isn’t very large. Humm… What other nasty little surprises might be stashed away in Iraq’s deserts?
With the gift of 20/20 hindsight, the American political left in this election year continually decries the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing war, accusing President Bush and the Republican party of being militaristic, along with a wide assortment of other failings. Yet what else was the president to do? He is after all, sworn to defend the United States to the best of his ability. Arab terrorists had already used civil airliners as missiles, causing extensive death and destruction in this country. He was well aware that Saddam was the sworn enemy of the United States, and had previously demonstrated both possession of, and a willingness to utilize, WMD’s. Saddam’s continued deliberate faking of having these weapons fooled nearly every intelligence agency in the world apparently. With that, how hard would it have been to believe that Saddam might happily hand a few chemical weapons over to al-Qaeda, for use in terrorist attacks against the United States?
If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, at first sight most of us would probably think it’s a duck.
Lincoln Day
Last week I talked about the Idaho County Democratic Caucus, so with fairness in mind (I believe in picking on everyone equally) I’ll talk about the Republican “Lincoln Day” assembly held in Ferdinand on Saturday. Essentially this event was put on by the Idaho County and Lewis County Republicans to allow various GOP office holders and hopeful candidates to meet the public, and jump up on a stump to do a bit of speechmaking. Sen. Mike Crappo was there, as were Rep. Bill Sali and Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, along with about a hundred other folks.
Problem number one for the day just had to involve my navigational skills. I mean, how can you possibly get lost in Ferdinand!? But never fear gentle reader, I managed. I had in mind that the assembly was to be held at the Ferdinand Community Center (a big building with a lot of cars parked out front), which I didn’t remember seeing before, so I drove right on by the Gym (a big building with a lot of cars parked out front), looking for a “Community Center” sign. Please don’t ask me where my mind was, I think I left it at home…
Most of the office holders present were on pretty tight schedules, so they were scrambling around shaking as many hands as possible and then moving on. That doesn’t allow a poor reporter much time to ask the dozen or so questions he has in mind. I think I spoke with Sen. Crappo for probably thirty seconds before he disappeared into the crowd, and I never did get near him again. Rep. Sali wasn’t in quite such a hurry, so I did speak to him for a moment. I’d never met him before, but he seems like a pretty nice guy who definitely will take the time to talk with his constituents.
One of my current hot button subjects is the latest “Gun Grab” deal, whereby many military veterans are denied the right to possess a firearm. It is of course quite sensible from a bleeding hearted liberal public safety point of view, in that veterans with possible PTSD aren’t allowed to possess guns with which they might commit mass murder. Unfortunately, under this law, nearly anyone from a doctor, to the cop on the beat, to a casual acquaintance can simply say “He’s nuts” for as little as having an occasional nightmare, and true or not, the vet is up the proverbial watercourse, without the proverbial means of propulsion. The burden of proving otherwise is laid on the vet, and getting this “nuts” label removed is going to be very difficult. I asked Rep. Sali just how this thing got passed, and he explained that the law was slipped in as a rider on another measure, and apparently no one knew it was coming. (I’d think that congressmen would at least read the entire Bill coming up for a vote, before they passed them.) The next question was obviously “Are we going to get rid of this?” to which he quickly answered “Yes”. He says there is a movement afoot to repeal this particularly odious measure that specifically targets military veterans, but he didn’t want to get into any of the particulars. I for one certainly hope it gets repealed, and soon! There have been a lot of unfounded claims in the eastern mass media of late, of how so many returning “mentally disturbed” Iraqi War veterans are indiscriminately killing people or committing suicide. From some of the news reports you’d think all Iraq vets were automatically incipient mass murderers. In reality the chance of being killed by a mentally disturbed vet is much lower than that of being killed by a member of the general public, particularly in New York and Washington DC, and the so called suicide rate is actually some sort of a “violent death” rate that counts all causes, including any returnee who just happens to be the victim of a traffic accident!
Many of the candidates present were running for Larry Craig’s soon to be vacated Senate seat. The speeches from these hopefuls covered pretty much the standard GOP fare, cutting back on the federal “tax and spend” feeding frenzy (which unfortunately nobody can seem to get a handle on), protecting individual rights, enforcing immigration laws, guarding our borders, and of course the perennial fight against big government. I didn’t hear much said about the “abortion on demand” question, or of biological research, but the undercurrent was there of course. For the most part I fully agree with the ideas our GOP senatorial hopefuls are trying to get across, and I hope one of them does get elected to Larry’s senate seat. But I also rather worry about the chances of their really accomplishing anything in the near future. They all have good ideas I’d say, but we also know how much clout a freshman senator has.
Nothing much was said about the presidential race unless you spoke with some individual or other, unfortunate, as I consider that to be extremely important in this election. Of the Republican candidates (McCain, Huckabee, Romney, and Paul), I can’t really accept any of them. I’ll probably agree with Paul’s ideas more than the others, but even if he does manage to get elected president I really can’t see congress cooperating with him at all. He wants to cut the federal budget, yet the congressional budget battles remind me of a whole mess of hogs pushing and shoving at the feeding trough. Does anyone really think they’re going to cheerfully eliminate their chances to spend our hard earned tax money!? He wants to severely reduce the size of the federal government, but will congress agree to toss patronage in the wastebasket? I’d like to see him go through with repealing the Patriot Act, eliminating the Department of Homeland Security, and outlawing domestic spying. Generally our Idaho senatorial hopefuls seem to be on the same wavelength even if most of the presidential hopefuls aren’t. Yet these are all programs strongly supported by Republicans across the country, and I rather doubt congress is going to smile benignly on any attempt to eliminate them.
There were several people around that I know, anywhere from “sorta-kinda” to fairly well, so there was a lot of “Hey, how ‘ya doing?” going on. I ran into one particular friend as well, Brad Mittendorf, who’s running for Lewis County Sheriff. We go back quite a ways, and the last time I saw him we were both still wearing Army uniforms. As I can’t vote in Lewis County we didn’t discuss politics much, but rather caught up on the past few years a bit, and like old soldiers do, promised to meet again one of these days, something I really need to do.
Problem number one for the day just had to involve my navigational skills. I mean, how can you possibly get lost in Ferdinand!? But never fear gentle reader, I managed. I had in mind that the assembly was to be held at the Ferdinand Community Center (a big building with a lot of cars parked out front), which I didn’t remember seeing before, so I drove right on by the Gym (a big building with a lot of cars parked out front), looking for a “Community Center” sign. Please don’t ask me where my mind was, I think I left it at home…
Most of the office holders present were on pretty tight schedules, so they were scrambling around shaking as many hands as possible and then moving on. That doesn’t allow a poor reporter much time to ask the dozen or so questions he has in mind. I think I spoke with Sen. Crappo for probably thirty seconds before he disappeared into the crowd, and I never did get near him again. Rep. Sali wasn’t in quite such a hurry, so I did speak to him for a moment. I’d never met him before, but he seems like a pretty nice guy who definitely will take the time to talk with his constituents.
One of my current hot button subjects is the latest “Gun Grab” deal, whereby many military veterans are denied the right to possess a firearm. It is of course quite sensible from a bleeding hearted liberal public safety point of view, in that veterans with possible PTSD aren’t allowed to possess guns with which they might commit mass murder. Unfortunately, under this law, nearly anyone from a doctor, to the cop on the beat, to a casual acquaintance can simply say “He’s nuts” for as little as having an occasional nightmare, and true or not, the vet is up the proverbial watercourse, without the proverbial means of propulsion. The burden of proving otherwise is laid on the vet, and getting this “nuts” label removed is going to be very difficult. I asked Rep. Sali just how this thing got passed, and he explained that the law was slipped in as a rider on another measure, and apparently no one knew it was coming. (I’d think that congressmen would at least read the entire Bill coming up for a vote, before they passed them.) The next question was obviously “Are we going to get rid of this?” to which he quickly answered “Yes”. He says there is a movement afoot to repeal this particularly odious measure that specifically targets military veterans, but he didn’t want to get into any of the particulars. I for one certainly hope it gets repealed, and soon! There have been a lot of unfounded claims in the eastern mass media of late, of how so many returning “mentally disturbed” Iraqi War veterans are indiscriminately killing people or committing suicide. From some of the news reports you’d think all Iraq vets were automatically incipient mass murderers. In reality the chance of being killed by a mentally disturbed vet is much lower than that of being killed by a member of the general public, particularly in New York and Washington DC, and the so called suicide rate is actually some sort of a “violent death” rate that counts all causes, including any returnee who just happens to be the victim of a traffic accident!
Many of the candidates present were running for Larry Craig’s soon to be vacated Senate seat. The speeches from these hopefuls covered pretty much the standard GOP fare, cutting back on the federal “tax and spend” feeding frenzy (which unfortunately nobody can seem to get a handle on), protecting individual rights, enforcing immigration laws, guarding our borders, and of course the perennial fight against big government. I didn’t hear much said about the “abortion on demand” question, or of biological research, but the undercurrent was there of course. For the most part I fully agree with the ideas our GOP senatorial hopefuls are trying to get across, and I hope one of them does get elected to Larry’s senate seat. But I also rather worry about the chances of their really accomplishing anything in the near future. They all have good ideas I’d say, but we also know how much clout a freshman senator has.
Nothing much was said about the presidential race unless you spoke with some individual or other, unfortunate, as I consider that to be extremely important in this election. Of the Republican candidates (McCain, Huckabee, Romney, and Paul), I can’t really accept any of them. I’ll probably agree with Paul’s ideas more than the others, but even if he does manage to get elected president I really can’t see congress cooperating with him at all. He wants to cut the federal budget, yet the congressional budget battles remind me of a whole mess of hogs pushing and shoving at the feeding trough. Does anyone really think they’re going to cheerfully eliminate their chances to spend our hard earned tax money!? He wants to severely reduce the size of the federal government, but will congress agree to toss patronage in the wastebasket? I’d like to see him go through with repealing the Patriot Act, eliminating the Department of Homeland Security, and outlawing domestic spying. Generally our Idaho senatorial hopefuls seem to be on the same wavelength even if most of the presidential hopefuls aren’t. Yet these are all programs strongly supported by Republicans across the country, and I rather doubt congress is going to smile benignly on any attempt to eliminate them.
There were several people around that I know, anywhere from “sorta-kinda” to fairly well, so there was a lot of “Hey, how ‘ya doing?” going on. I ran into one particular friend as well, Brad Mittendorf, who’s running for Lewis County Sheriff. We go back quite a ways, and the last time I saw him we were both still wearing Army uniforms. As I can’t vote in Lewis County we didn’t discuss politics much, but rather caught up on the past few years a bit, and like old soldiers do, promised to meet again one of these days, something I really need to do.
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