For decades Americans have listened to any number of political catfights over defense policy and defense spending. It always seems that the political party in power wants to spend zillions of dollars for some new weapons system being built or proposed by a defense contractor with the proper political connections, while the minority party favors some other system, being built or proposed by a different contractor with the proper political connections. Making the defense of our nation a political hot potato generally leaves the military between a rock and a hard place of course, often being handed weapons they can’t use/don’t want, and at the same time not getting the weapons they want/need.
All three major presidential hopefuls often cite their vast foreign policy “experience”. Yet that experience seems to be based on visiting this or that country for a short period of time, varying from a few days to several months. (The exception being Sen. McCain’s five year long stint in a North Vietnamese prison, which I hardly think qualifies him as an expert on present day Vietnam.) To the best of my knowledge neither Senators Obama or Clinton have ever served in the military, nor do they have any real experience with military affairs other than sitting on congressional committees. Yet both senators, by reason of visiting Iraq for a day or so, seem to think they are military experts. By their standards (thanks to quite a few years in the USAF and the Idaho National Guard), I suppose I could qualify as a military affairs expert as well, so… I’ll toss my nickels worth out for all to see. Picking on Sen. Obama only because he’s said the most in recent weeks about what he intends to do if elected, I’ll question many of his military ideas. Here are some of his proposals:
“.....I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems...” Unproven? Humm… “Star Wars” (SDI) has proven itself quite effective in numerous tests, and in the recent shoot-down of an errant American spy satellite. The original objection to the Reagan era missile interceptors was that they could not shoot down all the Russian ICBMs aimed at the United States. Quite so, they couldn’t, because, for one thing the technology was still rather immature, and for another there were a lot of Russian missiles pointed at us. Still, even 10% of 1,500 missiles is a lot of megatons that could otherwise have killed American women and children. Today’s missile interceptors have proven they do work, and quite well apparently. Nor do they have to defend us from thousands of incoming warheads any longer, but rather they must stop only a few missiles from one or another unfriendly nation, or possibly only a single rocket from al-Queda. I would give them a high probability of success under those conditions, considering that the satellite shoot-down was a “direct kill”, where the interceptor physically hit the satellite, the hardest to accomplish shot of all.
Sen. Obama went on to say “....I will not weaponize space...”. This is an idea that suffers from mixed reviews. I can’t say that anybody really wants an arms race in space, but still, space based weapons are the easiest, and probably the cheapest, means of destroying incoming warheads, from anywhere, not just from the mid-east. We might also keep in mind the Chinese satellite kill of not long back. China is in a space race with us, whether we want to admit it or not, and the PRC does very little that doesn’t have extensive military applications. With all this, yes, I do think we need space based defenses.
Then we have “....I will slow development of future combat systems...”. Considering the very long developmental time of modern weapons systems, if things got any slower, they’d be in reverse! Why is it that our primary fighter aircraft are nearing thirty years old? Why are we still using fifty year old B-52 bombers, and expecting to keep them in service for yet another twenty years!? If today’s Democratic candidates had their way, the US Army would probably still be armed with Civil War era muskets, and sent out to do battle against tanks and machine guns!
On a “pie in the sky” note, “....I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons...”. An admirable goal certainly, but quite impossible I’m afraid. Once that first nuclear device was detonated at Alamogordo in 1945, the genie was out of the bottle, and we’ll never get it back in despite all the wistful thinking. Once we demonstrated that such a weapon was possible, Stalinist Russia bent on every effort to duplicate that weapon, which they did in surprisingly short time, with the rest of the “nuclear club” quickly followed suite. The basic knowledge needed to construct nuclear weapons is common knowledge all over the world today, with only the lack of certain fissile materials keeping every nation from having their own nuclear arsenal. Following that, “....I will seek a global ban on the development of fissile material...”. Good luck young feller… the prospect of cheap nuclear power is far to important for many third world nations to expect them to just bury the idea. I expect we could find a way to harness all the hot air being generated in Washington DC every day, to provide for this country’s electrical needs, but that’s not going to help the rest of the world. If oil production has peaked as so many experts presently claim, nuclear power will become a dire necessity for every country that hopes to have much more than a medieval existence.
He further said “....and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert...”, followed by “....and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals...”. Unless I missed something really important over the last few years, I think President Bush (the elder) ordered a nuclear stand-down at the end of the cold war, which ended the “hair trigger” response days in both Russia and the United States. I do know that the US Air Force ended their nuclear airborne alert, and I understand it would take an hour or so to prepare an American ICBM for flight nowadays. That hour is hardly “hair trigger”! As to the deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal, I believe that’s already been done as well? I know that a large number of US nuclear weapons have been removed from service in recent years, and not replaced. Even the currently available weapons are far fewer in number than they were eighteen years ago. In fact, the Russians have done exactly the same thing, with our assistance!
So I’ll ask you Sen. Obama, are you just playing to the anti-nuclear crowd, or do you actually intend to disarm these United States? Remember that there really are quite a lot of unpleasant people in this world who would like nothing better than to destroy our nation, and enslave any of us who happen to be left alive. The only thing that stands between them and their goal are the US armed forces, and the ability to deliver massive amounts of death and destruction on those who would attack us. Nobody in their right mind wants a nuclear war, but after all, the threat of one helped to keep the Soviet Union on it’s better behavior throughout the cold war. Today we face an increasingly hostile China, along with minor players such as North Korea and Iran.
Sorry Sen. Obama, but there is no acceptable substitute for victory, and victory is impossible when all we have is little more than a bouquet of flowers to defend ourselves with.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Agenda 21
Agenda 21?… Huh?…wuzzat? I’d vaguely heard of this United Nations sponsored program before, but I really didn’t know just what it referred to, and due to other concerns didn’t take the time to look into it. Actually I thought it was just another of those wild “end of the world” tales culled from the archives of the National Enquirer. Pity, as Agenda 21 actually exists, has been an official UN policy for the past sixteen years, and has apparently been accepted by 178 sovereign nations including the United States of America. It’s something that everyone in this country should be fully aware of, considering that it severely affects not only your life, but that of your kids, grandkids, and the yet unborn generations.
Agenda 21 (the “21” indicates “21st Century”) is a United Nations sponsored, world encompassing plan to ensure the ecological sustainability of the Earth by controlling all aspects of human activity that impacts the balance of nature. Or so goes the theory. Essentially it calls for developing over a period of about 30 years the much feared “one world government”, and implies a planet wide socialist culture. Virtually all decisions regarding your life are to be made for you rather than by you, by a remote and yet un-named, worldwide central government. An enormous planning and zoning commission will decide what industry is to be allowed, where it will be located, and just how it may function, along with the same decisions of where homes, schools, farms, and stores will be located. Government appointed medical experts will decide what foods you may eat, and in what quantity (but only to protect your health from unwise personal judgment of course). A population control committee will decide how many children you are allowed (probably only if you meet certain government approved genetic standards, although that’s yet unstated), while education committees will decide how those children are to be raised. The kids are to be cared for by a centrally planned public school system that provides a state friendly planned education, and I suspect will also provide their health care without your input. I imagine that such a system is considered best, so that the problems of raising your children won’t interfere with the performance of your government assigned job, and besides, if you’re not “in the loop” the kids can be better taught to be perfectly obedient citizens of this brave new world order.
There will be no crime in this upcoming socialist Utopia of course, as nobody will have any money or personal possessions worth stealing. It would be a peaceful world where no one can start a war, because no one (except the guardians of the government) are allowed to possess a weapon with which to threaten the security of the state. Greed and poverty are eliminated, as everyone works for the state, at their state appointed job, and everyone is provided for by the state, according to their needs (no exceptions allowed). Everything is centrally organized and peaceful, where we may all feel secure in knowing that tomorrow will be a carbon copy of today, as will the day after that… and the day after that. We will be ruled by the intelligentsia, who we all should know are far smarter and better qualified to rule than us ignorant unwashed commoners. I would like to know what they intend to do with those citizens who break the rules, either deliberately or by accident? Hum… Kind of makes you wonder what might be planned for the “unproductive” among us, such as retarded children, physically disabled individuals, and even senior citizens doesn’t it?
Agenda 21 was announced at the “United Nations' Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June of 1992. Essentially it’s a policy called Sustainable Development (or in some circles “zero growth”) where population, production, and consumption are to be held at some environmentally friendly predetermined level. The program is now said to be part of the official policy of the United States government, and is being quietly imposed on every state in the Union. To me, using the term “Sustainable Development” is of course an immediate warning that the hard core environmentalists are at it again. Actually that’s unfair to the rational environmentalists; this sounds more like something from the kooks at Earth First or PETA! What’s planned in Agenda 21 is a program in which every decision involving our lives is determined by a government program, not by the individual most concerned. They will determine all business decisions; all property usage; the medical care you receive; what your education will consist of; planet wide economics; labor policies; your career decisions; where and how you are housed; a world wide farm policy; energy allocations; and anything else that affects every aspect of our lives. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with sustaining natures balance. The guiding principle of Agenda 21 apparently is that any individual rights are a gift of the “benign” government, wherein government giveth and government can darn well taketh away. You receive only what the government appointed bureaucrats think you deserve.
Many of us will remember the song “Little Boxes” that was quite popular during the 1960’s. Basically it describes a totally conformist world where the streets are lined with hundreds or even thousands of identical houses, and about the only choice you have is what color to paint the living room walls. With global sustainability the rule, you won’t even have to make the choice between a two or three bedroom house, as you don’t have a choice. Your housing is assigned to you, as determined by the government. Besides, you’d probably only need a two bedroom at best, as much like China today, in the name of population control you’re only allowed one child (and China enforces that law with rather draconian measures). We’ve seen the TV advertisements for weekly or monthly food deliveries (pretty much on the line of TV dinners I understand) being advertised as a weight loss aid, but in actuality is this nothing more than quietly introducing the concept of food rationing? Housed alike, fed alike, and clothed alike, what is else is planned for us? Well, how about implantable ID chips, which just might aid the government in controlling our daily movements? Sub-dermal chips are now being seriously considered for all American newborns, in a way quite similar to the mandatory Social Security numbers now assigned at birth. I suppose we wouldn’t have to worry about cars either, as we’ll probably find our assigned living quarters located within walking distance of our assigned work station. “We live in little boxes, all in a row”.
Principle #1 of the “Rio Declaration on environment and development” states (and I quote from the Rio document as copied from a UN website), “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” For one thing, I’ll argue with the “entitled” part. You get what you earn; nobody is automatically entitled to anything except possibly death and taxes (unless you’re a member of the elite ruling class and stand to inherit the worlds wealth). The “harmony with nature” part sounds much like the stance taken by a hard core environmentalist I once had a conversation with. His idea was that we should all live a primitive, hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle, with the excess population being “mercifully” eliminated. I guess in the evenings we could sit around in the safety of our little box and sing “Kumbaya”, thereby making it the anthem of our sustainable new world.
Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, defines sustainability as “a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. The term, in its environmental usage, refers to the potential longevity of vital human ecological support systems, such as the planet's climatic system, systems of agriculture, industry, forestry, and fisheries, and human communities in general and the various systems on which they depend in balance with the impacts of our unsustainable or sustainable design.” I imagine we could get Al Gore to explain global warming and the planet’s climatic system to us, but how about the rest of it? Every time people try to “adjust” the natural balance of nature (no matter how we think to improve it), we wind up with another localized ecological disaster! Looking at the results of the changes our government has mandated in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries over the last few years, this whole thing is beginning to look like an enormous planet wide anti-human conspiracy, orchestrated by a bunch of starry eyed environmental idealists! Unfortunately, the rest of us aren’t being given any choice in the matter. We get to be the worker bees in an experimental planet sized hive!
I can always hope that I’m being unnecessarily an alarmist, or perhaps reading something into all this that simply isn’t there, but from all appearances we are on just this track. If you try to find an answer for all the seemingly screw-ball things that our government has been foisting on us lately, you get some vague doubletalk that makes absolutely no sense at all, and certainly doesn’t answer your question. We’re slowly being disarmed under the guise of “protecting the public” via gun control. “Real ID” allows the government a means to control our every movement. Credit cards, direct deposit and computers allow the government to track and control our personal finances. Taxes, particularly those odious hidden taxes, rob us of the fruits of our labor and “redistributes” our wealth all over the world. Globalization sends our jobs overseas, and doesn’t seem to be attracting any jobs here. A lack of immigration control invites a flood of undocumented cheap labor to grab whatever jobs are left. When a bazillion dollar bank goes broke due to their own fiscal foolishness, the government quickly takes our money and bails them out of the jam… but seemingly can do nothing if a citizen looses his home because of that bank. The courts read anything they want into the laws, while bureaucrats make law, and congress just spends our hard earned money. The bright ideas of government educational experts are dumbing down our children. Political correctness, backed by law, has robbed us of our freedom of speech. Assorted government required licensing and permits control nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Environmentalists, backed by the government, control our national wildlands, not “we the people” who own those lands. And we can seemingly do nothing to halt this continuous government supported erosion of our freedoms.
There’s also the fact that the various “true believers” in socialism have, for a very long time, been trying to force their brand of governance on the entire world. They nearly succeeded with communism and the Soviet Union, but they failed to take into account the real world of economics and the variables of human nature, so the whole assemblage self destructed. Despite its good points (and there are a few), the fact remains that socialism just doesn’t work over any period of time for any but a few insect species. Yet socialists continually insist that they have all the answers to the problems of humanity, if only we would allow them to take over, and of course “share the wealth” equally among all the peoples of the world. Their theory of economics failed to prove their point, so now they’re going to use the bug-a-boo of over population, and toss in global warming as seasoning! Such persistence can be admired I guess, but I do wish they’d pick a better subject.
So Mr. Congressman; is or is not “Agenda 21” a United Nations sponsored program, and has or has not the US government become a signatory to this program? Both parts of this question can be answered with a simple yes or no rather than political sidestepping and fast talking. Do you actually intend to allow our government to turn the nation, and all its citizens, over to UN control, without our unanimous agreement? What gives you the right to try something like that? And just how do you plan to explain this horrific plan to your bosses, the American voters?
Something this all-encompassing could not be accomplished overnight of course, but it could be introduced in numerous small steps taken over a long period of time. Might this be at least part of the reason we have seen so many highly restrictive laws and regulations passed by the federal government over the last decade or so? As I understand the Agenda 21 timeline, the final steps are planned to be taken somewhere in the years 2040 – 2050. I guess that allows plenty of time for us “old timers” who remember the freedom Americans enjoyed in the past to die off, thus making it much easier for the new world order to take over.
There are currently around six billion humans on the planet, and through overpopulation we are slowly but surely wreaking havoc with the environment. That is a given. Runaway population already threatens to turn the Earth into an all encompassing mega city. Our resources are not inexhaustible, we’ve nearly reached the limits of our energy resources, many parts of the world have already run out of potable water, and atmospheric pollution is a major problem in far to many areas. Our food supply is already endangered by the rapid expansion of towns and cities. If humanity is to survive on Earth, then resource rationing is likely to become a necessity along with some form of population control, if that is, our shortsighted leaders fail to recognize the alternatives. As I see things, we have essentially three choices open to us. We could become the socialistic hive dwelling creatures of Agenda 21. Second; we could use our ingenuity and technology to expand our species into the vastness of space and utilize the seemingly endless resources found there to sustain our planet, or thirdly; somewhat like the dinosaur, we can face the inevitable extinction of the human race.
For the moment however, I have seen our centrally planned future… and I ain’t gonna like it…
Agenda 21 (the “21” indicates “21st Century”) is a United Nations sponsored, world encompassing plan to ensure the ecological sustainability of the Earth by controlling all aspects of human activity that impacts the balance of nature. Or so goes the theory. Essentially it calls for developing over a period of about 30 years the much feared “one world government”, and implies a planet wide socialist culture. Virtually all decisions regarding your life are to be made for you rather than by you, by a remote and yet un-named, worldwide central government. An enormous planning and zoning commission will decide what industry is to be allowed, where it will be located, and just how it may function, along with the same decisions of where homes, schools, farms, and stores will be located. Government appointed medical experts will decide what foods you may eat, and in what quantity (but only to protect your health from unwise personal judgment of course). A population control committee will decide how many children you are allowed (probably only if you meet certain government approved genetic standards, although that’s yet unstated), while education committees will decide how those children are to be raised. The kids are to be cared for by a centrally planned public school system that provides a state friendly planned education, and I suspect will also provide their health care without your input. I imagine that such a system is considered best, so that the problems of raising your children won’t interfere with the performance of your government assigned job, and besides, if you’re not “in the loop” the kids can be better taught to be perfectly obedient citizens of this brave new world order.
There will be no crime in this upcoming socialist Utopia of course, as nobody will have any money or personal possessions worth stealing. It would be a peaceful world where no one can start a war, because no one (except the guardians of the government) are allowed to possess a weapon with which to threaten the security of the state. Greed and poverty are eliminated, as everyone works for the state, at their state appointed job, and everyone is provided for by the state, according to their needs (no exceptions allowed). Everything is centrally organized and peaceful, where we may all feel secure in knowing that tomorrow will be a carbon copy of today, as will the day after that… and the day after that. We will be ruled by the intelligentsia, who we all should know are far smarter and better qualified to rule than us ignorant unwashed commoners. I would like to know what they intend to do with those citizens who break the rules, either deliberately or by accident? Hum… Kind of makes you wonder what might be planned for the “unproductive” among us, such as retarded children, physically disabled individuals, and even senior citizens doesn’t it?
Agenda 21 was announced at the “United Nations' Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June of 1992. Essentially it’s a policy called Sustainable Development (or in some circles “zero growth”) where population, production, and consumption are to be held at some environmentally friendly predetermined level. The program is now said to be part of the official policy of the United States government, and is being quietly imposed on every state in the Union. To me, using the term “Sustainable Development” is of course an immediate warning that the hard core environmentalists are at it again. Actually that’s unfair to the rational environmentalists; this sounds more like something from the kooks at Earth First or PETA! What’s planned in Agenda 21 is a program in which every decision involving our lives is determined by a government program, not by the individual most concerned. They will determine all business decisions; all property usage; the medical care you receive; what your education will consist of; planet wide economics; labor policies; your career decisions; where and how you are housed; a world wide farm policy; energy allocations; and anything else that affects every aspect of our lives. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with sustaining natures balance. The guiding principle of Agenda 21 apparently is that any individual rights are a gift of the “benign” government, wherein government giveth and government can darn well taketh away. You receive only what the government appointed bureaucrats think you deserve.
Many of us will remember the song “Little Boxes” that was quite popular during the 1960’s. Basically it describes a totally conformist world where the streets are lined with hundreds or even thousands of identical houses, and about the only choice you have is what color to paint the living room walls. With global sustainability the rule, you won’t even have to make the choice between a two or three bedroom house, as you don’t have a choice. Your housing is assigned to you, as determined by the government. Besides, you’d probably only need a two bedroom at best, as much like China today, in the name of population control you’re only allowed one child (and China enforces that law with rather draconian measures). We’ve seen the TV advertisements for weekly or monthly food deliveries (pretty much on the line of TV dinners I understand) being advertised as a weight loss aid, but in actuality is this nothing more than quietly introducing the concept of food rationing? Housed alike, fed alike, and clothed alike, what is else is planned for us? Well, how about implantable ID chips, which just might aid the government in controlling our daily movements? Sub-dermal chips are now being seriously considered for all American newborns, in a way quite similar to the mandatory Social Security numbers now assigned at birth. I suppose we wouldn’t have to worry about cars either, as we’ll probably find our assigned living quarters located within walking distance of our assigned work station. “We live in little boxes, all in a row”.
Principle #1 of the “Rio Declaration on environment and development” states (and I quote from the Rio document as copied from a UN website), “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” For one thing, I’ll argue with the “entitled” part. You get what you earn; nobody is automatically entitled to anything except possibly death and taxes (unless you’re a member of the elite ruling class and stand to inherit the worlds wealth). The “harmony with nature” part sounds much like the stance taken by a hard core environmentalist I once had a conversation with. His idea was that we should all live a primitive, hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle, with the excess population being “mercifully” eliminated. I guess in the evenings we could sit around in the safety of our little box and sing “Kumbaya”, thereby making it the anthem of our sustainable new world.
Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, defines sustainability as “a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. The term, in its environmental usage, refers to the potential longevity of vital human ecological support systems, such as the planet's climatic system, systems of agriculture, industry, forestry, and fisheries, and human communities in general and the various systems on which they depend in balance with the impacts of our unsustainable or sustainable design.” I imagine we could get Al Gore to explain global warming and the planet’s climatic system to us, but how about the rest of it? Every time people try to “adjust” the natural balance of nature (no matter how we think to improve it), we wind up with another localized ecological disaster! Looking at the results of the changes our government has mandated in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries over the last few years, this whole thing is beginning to look like an enormous planet wide anti-human conspiracy, orchestrated by a bunch of starry eyed environmental idealists! Unfortunately, the rest of us aren’t being given any choice in the matter. We get to be the worker bees in an experimental planet sized hive!
I can always hope that I’m being unnecessarily an alarmist, or perhaps reading something into all this that simply isn’t there, but from all appearances we are on just this track. If you try to find an answer for all the seemingly screw-ball things that our government has been foisting on us lately, you get some vague doubletalk that makes absolutely no sense at all, and certainly doesn’t answer your question. We’re slowly being disarmed under the guise of “protecting the public” via gun control. “Real ID” allows the government a means to control our every movement. Credit cards, direct deposit and computers allow the government to track and control our personal finances. Taxes, particularly those odious hidden taxes, rob us of the fruits of our labor and “redistributes” our wealth all over the world. Globalization sends our jobs overseas, and doesn’t seem to be attracting any jobs here. A lack of immigration control invites a flood of undocumented cheap labor to grab whatever jobs are left. When a bazillion dollar bank goes broke due to their own fiscal foolishness, the government quickly takes our money and bails them out of the jam… but seemingly can do nothing if a citizen looses his home because of that bank. The courts read anything they want into the laws, while bureaucrats make law, and congress just spends our hard earned money. The bright ideas of government educational experts are dumbing down our children. Political correctness, backed by law, has robbed us of our freedom of speech. Assorted government required licensing and permits control nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Environmentalists, backed by the government, control our national wildlands, not “we the people” who own those lands. And we can seemingly do nothing to halt this continuous government supported erosion of our freedoms.
There’s also the fact that the various “true believers” in socialism have, for a very long time, been trying to force their brand of governance on the entire world. They nearly succeeded with communism and the Soviet Union, but they failed to take into account the real world of economics and the variables of human nature, so the whole assemblage self destructed. Despite its good points (and there are a few), the fact remains that socialism just doesn’t work over any period of time for any but a few insect species. Yet socialists continually insist that they have all the answers to the problems of humanity, if only we would allow them to take over, and of course “share the wealth” equally among all the peoples of the world. Their theory of economics failed to prove their point, so now they’re going to use the bug-a-boo of over population, and toss in global warming as seasoning! Such persistence can be admired I guess, but I do wish they’d pick a better subject.
So Mr. Congressman; is or is not “Agenda 21” a United Nations sponsored program, and has or has not the US government become a signatory to this program? Both parts of this question can be answered with a simple yes or no rather than political sidestepping and fast talking. Do you actually intend to allow our government to turn the nation, and all its citizens, over to UN control, without our unanimous agreement? What gives you the right to try something like that? And just how do you plan to explain this horrific plan to your bosses, the American voters?
Something this all-encompassing could not be accomplished overnight of course, but it could be introduced in numerous small steps taken over a long period of time. Might this be at least part of the reason we have seen so many highly restrictive laws and regulations passed by the federal government over the last decade or so? As I understand the Agenda 21 timeline, the final steps are planned to be taken somewhere in the years 2040 – 2050. I guess that allows plenty of time for us “old timers” who remember the freedom Americans enjoyed in the past to die off, thus making it much easier for the new world order to take over.
There are currently around six billion humans on the planet, and through overpopulation we are slowly but surely wreaking havoc with the environment. That is a given. Runaway population already threatens to turn the Earth into an all encompassing mega city. Our resources are not inexhaustible, we’ve nearly reached the limits of our energy resources, many parts of the world have already run out of potable water, and atmospheric pollution is a major problem in far to many areas. Our food supply is already endangered by the rapid expansion of towns and cities. If humanity is to survive on Earth, then resource rationing is likely to become a necessity along with some form of population control, if that is, our shortsighted leaders fail to recognize the alternatives. As I see things, we have essentially three choices open to us. We could become the socialistic hive dwelling creatures of Agenda 21. Second; we could use our ingenuity and technology to expand our species into the vastness of space and utilize the seemingly endless resources found there to sustain our planet, or thirdly; somewhat like the dinosaur, we can face the inevitable extinction of the human race.
For the moment however, I have seen our centrally planned future… and I ain’t gonna like it…
Monday, April 7, 2008
Worth it?
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. – Thomas Jefferson
The remains of two U.S. contractors kidnapped in Iraq have been found. With these deaths, and the four US servicemen killed by a roadside bomb just a week after the fifth anniversary of the Iraqi War, we are now mourning 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq. Of those 4,000 military personnel killed in the war, 3,263 have died in combat, and 737 in various incidents such as traffic accidents and suicides. Eight were civilians working for the Pentagon. (The numbers are based on a CNN news report.) Discounting the monetary costs of the war, the US has certainly paid a high price in her soldier’s lives for Iraqi freedom. Were those deaths “in vain”? I guess that would depend on who you talk to. The Democrats say “YES, they were in vain” quite loudly, while the Republicans say “NO they were not in vain” equally loudly, and hope to continue the fight against radical Islam. Meanwhile the US military bleeds, and Iraqi women and children aren’t being killed in quite the large numbers they were a couple of years ago.
According to statistics posted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the United States suffered 4,435 battle deaths over the course of eight years, with another 6,188 soldiers wounded. That was our revolution. The War of 1812, a three year struggle, cost us 2,260 killed, and 4,505 soldiers wounded. From 1846 to 1898, the entire era of the Indian Wars, saw approximately 1,000 soldiers killed in action. The Mexican War counted 1,733 deaths in battle, 4,152 wounded, and 11,550 “other” deaths in service (“other” generally means deaths from disease, starvation, accidents, and hardship). Our Civil War saw three and a half million Americans, both Union and Confederate, slugging it out over four years. Of these, 215,000 were killed in action, 283,394 died of other causes, 281,881 union soldiers were non-lethal battle casualties along with an unknown number of Confederate wounded. The Spanish-American War saw 385 soldiers killed and 1,662 wounded in combat. World War I cost us 53,402 killed in slightly over a year of fighting, along with 204,002 wounded. Another 63,114 died non-combat deaths. World War II was the “Big One”, costing us 291,557 battle deaths, 671,846 wounded, and an additional 113,842 other deaths in its four year duration. Three years on the Korean peninsula cost us 33,741 American lives in combat, along with 103,284 wounded. Eleven years in Vietnam cost us another 47,424 battle deaths, 10,785 other deaths, and 153,303 wounded. Desert Shield/Desert Storm wasn’t quite as expensive, with 147 battle deaths, 235 “other” deaths, and 467 wounded in slightly less than a year. (As it hasn’t ended yet, the DVA statistics do not include the present conflict in Iraq.) Historically, approximately 41 years of actual warfare have cost the lives of 1,119,098 American soldiers, and have left us the painful legacy of another 1,431,290 non-mortal casualties. In playing with those numbers I find that we’ve averaged 27,295 deaths, and 34,909 wounded, for each of those forty one years. (This is a lot less than those killed on the nations’ highways each year.)
Had we not fought the Revolutionary War, we’d still be paying taxes on British tea I suppose, taking orders from Buckingham Palace, and toasting the "glorious" King (or Queen) at every turn. But we’d have “saved” 4,500 lives. We expended American lives in the War of 1812 to allow US ships to sail the seas unhindered, and to put an end to American sailors being forced into the Royal Navy, where who knows how many more of them would have died in Britain’s incessant “small wars”. The War with Mexico gained us the entire American southwest at a relatively low cost, but I can hardly claim it was a “just” war. The Civil War was expensive, but it did prove to all and sundry that we believe in the constitutional point of view that all men are created equal. It also provided the basis for many of the governmental problems the United States faces today. The War with Spain served little purpose other than to provide a few war heroes, introduce the US Army to the horrors of tropical disease, and made William Randolph Hearst a little richer. WW I saw the end of three empires, the Kaiser’s Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. It saved the empires of Britain and France, along with laying the groundwork for WW II. The Second World War saw the Allies crush Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan along with their threat to the free world, at a very high cost to all participants. It also made the Soviet Union a world superpower, and made the forty-five year long “Cold War” inevitable. Korea was little more than an expensive demonstration of Americas resolve to “halt communist expansion”, as was the long and painful war in Vietnam. I guess the jury’s still out on the mid-east conflict.
With the exception of Vietnam, each of our previous wars were more or less “conventional” wars for their era, and the causality figures reflect that fact. Vietnam was the unusual case of a conventional military force (the United States Army) trying to engage a Guerrilla military force (the Viet Cong/NVA) in a conventional war. Unfortunately for the United States that idea didn’t work very well, as with only a few shining exceptions we’re not real good at unconventional warfare. Nor does it seem that the Powers That Be have learned the lessons of Vietnam either, as once again we’re trying to fight a “limited war” against guerrillas, with more or less conventional forces. But American soldiers… fighting and dieing for the freedom of Iraq? Well, remember that a lot of French soldiers came over here, to fight and die for American liberty during our revolution. Be glad they did, we’d have lost without them.
But still, were all those American wars “worth it”? Not according to the “Better Red than Dead” pacifists of course, who seem to prefer lifelong slavery to individual freedom. Not even the history books can agree on the value of any particular war, depending of course on who wrote the book. Perhaps we would be better advised to ask the previously enslaved American blacks if the Civil War was “worth it”, or the surviving European Jews if World War Two was worth the effort. You might also inquire of the slave laborers that despots always seem to exploit, or the concentration camp victims of totalitarian “justice”. Ask the Iraqi people who have suffered tens of thousands of their relatives, friends, and countrymen killed by radical extremists. And don’t forget to ask the families of those dead Americans if the sacrifice of their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters was “worth it”. Ask them if their loved ones died in vain, ask them if the people of a free nation cannot hold upright the light of liberty for all the worlds inhabitants.
The current war in Iraq is averaging around 800 lives per year, or about one fifth the causalities we suffered in Vietnam. The cause of those causalities is much the same however, mines and booby traps for the most part, treacherous weapons emplaced by fanatics who know full well they cannot defeat us, but can only hope to outlast us, that shortsighted American patience will eventually grow frayed… that once again the American people will demand that their soldiers come home before the job is done… and once again they will allow the enemies of democracy a free hand.
The remains of two U.S. contractors kidnapped in Iraq have been found. With these deaths, and the four US servicemen killed by a roadside bomb just a week after the fifth anniversary of the Iraqi War, we are now mourning 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq. Of those 4,000 military personnel killed in the war, 3,263 have died in combat, and 737 in various incidents such as traffic accidents and suicides. Eight were civilians working for the Pentagon. (The numbers are based on a CNN news report.) Discounting the monetary costs of the war, the US has certainly paid a high price in her soldier’s lives for Iraqi freedom. Were those deaths “in vain”? I guess that would depend on who you talk to. The Democrats say “YES, they were in vain” quite loudly, while the Republicans say “NO they were not in vain” equally loudly, and hope to continue the fight against radical Islam. Meanwhile the US military bleeds, and Iraqi women and children aren’t being killed in quite the large numbers they were a couple of years ago.
According to statistics posted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the United States suffered 4,435 battle deaths over the course of eight years, with another 6,188 soldiers wounded. That was our revolution. The War of 1812, a three year struggle, cost us 2,260 killed, and 4,505 soldiers wounded. From 1846 to 1898, the entire era of the Indian Wars, saw approximately 1,000 soldiers killed in action. The Mexican War counted 1,733 deaths in battle, 4,152 wounded, and 11,550 “other” deaths in service (“other” generally means deaths from disease, starvation, accidents, and hardship). Our Civil War saw three and a half million Americans, both Union and Confederate, slugging it out over four years. Of these, 215,000 were killed in action, 283,394 died of other causes, 281,881 union soldiers were non-lethal battle casualties along with an unknown number of Confederate wounded. The Spanish-American War saw 385 soldiers killed and 1,662 wounded in combat. World War I cost us 53,402 killed in slightly over a year of fighting, along with 204,002 wounded. Another 63,114 died non-combat deaths. World War II was the “Big One”, costing us 291,557 battle deaths, 671,846 wounded, and an additional 113,842 other deaths in its four year duration. Three years on the Korean peninsula cost us 33,741 American lives in combat, along with 103,284 wounded. Eleven years in Vietnam cost us another 47,424 battle deaths, 10,785 other deaths, and 153,303 wounded. Desert Shield/Desert Storm wasn’t quite as expensive, with 147 battle deaths, 235 “other” deaths, and 467 wounded in slightly less than a year. (As it hasn’t ended yet, the DVA statistics do not include the present conflict in Iraq.) Historically, approximately 41 years of actual warfare have cost the lives of 1,119,098 American soldiers, and have left us the painful legacy of another 1,431,290 non-mortal casualties. In playing with those numbers I find that we’ve averaged 27,295 deaths, and 34,909 wounded, for each of those forty one years. (This is a lot less than those killed on the nations’ highways each year.)
Had we not fought the Revolutionary War, we’d still be paying taxes on British tea I suppose, taking orders from Buckingham Palace, and toasting the "glorious" King (or Queen) at every turn. But we’d have “saved” 4,500 lives. We expended American lives in the War of 1812 to allow US ships to sail the seas unhindered, and to put an end to American sailors being forced into the Royal Navy, where who knows how many more of them would have died in Britain’s incessant “small wars”. The War with Mexico gained us the entire American southwest at a relatively low cost, but I can hardly claim it was a “just” war. The Civil War was expensive, but it did prove to all and sundry that we believe in the constitutional point of view that all men are created equal. It also provided the basis for many of the governmental problems the United States faces today. The War with Spain served little purpose other than to provide a few war heroes, introduce the US Army to the horrors of tropical disease, and made William Randolph Hearst a little richer. WW I saw the end of three empires, the Kaiser’s Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. It saved the empires of Britain and France, along with laying the groundwork for WW II. The Second World War saw the Allies crush Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan along with their threat to the free world, at a very high cost to all participants. It also made the Soviet Union a world superpower, and made the forty-five year long “Cold War” inevitable. Korea was little more than an expensive demonstration of Americas resolve to “halt communist expansion”, as was the long and painful war in Vietnam. I guess the jury’s still out on the mid-east conflict.
With the exception of Vietnam, each of our previous wars were more or less “conventional” wars for their era, and the causality figures reflect that fact. Vietnam was the unusual case of a conventional military force (the United States Army) trying to engage a Guerrilla military force (the Viet Cong/NVA) in a conventional war. Unfortunately for the United States that idea didn’t work very well, as with only a few shining exceptions we’re not real good at unconventional warfare. Nor does it seem that the Powers That Be have learned the lessons of Vietnam either, as once again we’re trying to fight a “limited war” against guerrillas, with more or less conventional forces. But American soldiers… fighting and dieing for the freedom of Iraq? Well, remember that a lot of French soldiers came over here, to fight and die for American liberty during our revolution. Be glad they did, we’d have lost without them.
But still, were all those American wars “worth it”? Not according to the “Better Red than Dead” pacifists of course, who seem to prefer lifelong slavery to individual freedom. Not even the history books can agree on the value of any particular war, depending of course on who wrote the book. Perhaps we would be better advised to ask the previously enslaved American blacks if the Civil War was “worth it”, or the surviving European Jews if World War Two was worth the effort. You might also inquire of the slave laborers that despots always seem to exploit, or the concentration camp victims of totalitarian “justice”. Ask the Iraqi people who have suffered tens of thousands of their relatives, friends, and countrymen killed by radical extremists. And don’t forget to ask the families of those dead Americans if the sacrifice of their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters was “worth it”. Ask them if their loved ones died in vain, ask them if the people of a free nation cannot hold upright the light of liberty for all the worlds inhabitants.
The current war in Iraq is averaging around 800 lives per year, or about one fifth the causalities we suffered in Vietnam. The cause of those causalities is much the same however, mines and booby traps for the most part, treacherous weapons emplaced by fanatics who know full well they cannot defeat us, but can only hope to outlast us, that shortsighted American patience will eventually grow frayed… that once again the American people will demand that their soldiers come home before the job is done… and once again they will allow the enemies of democracy a free hand.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Gun Ban
Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth. - George Washington
A couple of months ago (Feb. 4th, 2008), Tom Henderson of the Lewiston Morning Tribune wrote an editorial in which he severely castigates the State of Idaho, the National Rifle Association, and of course all us crazy gun owning Idaho voters, for not subscribing to the tenets of the “Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence”. Apparently the Brady supporters score each state on a number of issues including curbing firearms trafficking, strengthening background checks, child safety, banning military-style assault rifles, and making it harder to carry guns in public places. Idaho’s pretty low on their scoreboard I gather.
First off, we can’t eliminate the non-existant “gun violence” in this country. After all, guns are not violent, they are lumps of inert steel, wood, and plastic, and they’re certainly not going to jump off the table and deliberately attack some poor innocent bystander. People are the violent part of the equation, no matter if they’re bare handed, have a gun, or the steering wheel of a car in their hands, and those violent people should be the target of our ire. Certainly we could outlaw all guns and even melt them down, but what good will that do? It certainly won’t solve the social problem of violent people harming other people! Those who want us to get rid of our guns in the name of “public safety” are the same folks who want totally open borders, which makes it much easier for the criminal element to smuggle all sorts of weapons in and I suspect peddle ‘em to various criminal gangs. If the government can’t keep the drugs out after years of a “War on Drugs”, and if Homeland Security is panicy about the possibility of a smuggled “suitcase from allah”, just how do they figure to control a very lucrative market in illegal firearms? Sure we can disarm John Q. citizen by writ of law and a lot of police activity, but what’s going to make John Dillinger obey that law and turn in his gun?
Next is “curbing firearms trafficing”. Okay, just what is “trafficing”? Are we talking about the corner sporting goods store, gun shows, or what? If they’re speaking about bulk sales, the legal sales are already under government supervision. If they mean the illegal market, well, that’s a major problem in every country in todays world, and nobody’s found a workable answer to that yet! If you want to buy a few thousand AK-47s, go to some of the poorest countries in Africa, and they’d be very happy to sell ‘em to you, and even smuggle ‘em into the US, probably at cut rate prices.
Background checks are bit of a joke I think. I’m sure background checks do stop a few people from buying a weapon at the local sporting goods store. But if I were a violent ex-fellon I’d already be aware of that problem, and I’d be buying my gun off the street, for about half the price of a legal firearm. Really, all a background check does is inform the seller that I haven’t been guilty of mass murder… yet. The part about child safety also bothers me. When I was a kid, my Dad taught me how to shoot, and he taught me about firearms safety. That was just something that Dad’s did. When I got older I taught my boys the same thing, in the same manner, and none of us have ever shot anyone by accident, nor are we mass murderers. Common sense, careful teaching, and personal responsibility takes care of that problem, yet nowadays the “Brady Bunch” seems to think that firearms safety comes from a law book.
Military style assault rifles are rather humorous as well. Fully automatic weapons are already banned by law, and have been since the 1930’s. Thus, if you see someone running around with an M-16 in his hands, and he’s not wearing a uniform, you can bet he’s already breaking the law, or it’s a “look-alike” weapon with no more than semi-automatic capabilities. Granted that a semi-automatic can be nasty in it’s own right, still, semi-automatic hunting rifles have been around for a long time, and we’re none the worse for them. If somebody wants to go hunting with a semi-automatic M-16 because “it’s cool”, well, that’s his problem.
Finally we come to the “carrying guns in public places” thing. People have been carrying weapons in public for far longer than this nation has existed. Back when it was common for most folks to be armed, the crime rate was generally pretty low and most people were downright polite despite what you see on TV. After we decided to get “civilized” and quit carrying arms, the bad guys got real brave, and now we have one of the highest crime rates in the world, as the criminals happily victimize an unarmed populance. Our recent spate of mass shootings? What happened when the Colorado Springs church shooter unexpectedly ran into a citizen who did happen to have a weapon!?
Perhaps Mr. Henderson, we in Idaho don’t have all those anti-gun laws on the books because we don’t believe we need ‘em. But don’t worry, we just might get gun control rammed down our throats anyhow. If you’ve been following the national news of late, you’re well aware that our country is facing numerous major problems. The upcoming presidential election (if it doesn’t turn into another bloodbath over “hanging chads”) will determine what direction our international relations will take over the next four years, and the balance of power in congress will determine just how far down the road to rampant socialism our leaders are willing to take us. But perhaps the single most important decision in our nation’s history will come from the US Supreme Court in the very near future.
The so called “Patriot Act” hurriedly passed in the congressional panic following 9-11 effectively stripped many of our constitutional rights from us, made a mockery of American justice, and I suspect has Lady Liberty in tears. Now the US Supreme Court is being asked to go even further and determine whether or not our Constitution is worth the paper it’s written on. The question, the “test case” as it were, is the legal interpretation of the wording in the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights. If the court determines that the right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed to the individual citizen, there are a lot of current gun laws that will probably go down in flames. But if they decide that the right to bear arms is restricted to “the state” rather than to the citizens, we might as well throw our Constitution and Bill of Rights in the trash, as by legal precedent our Constitution will mean absolutely nothing to the law, and certainly nothing in the eyes of whatever government we then find ourselves shackled with. Our republic will no longer exist; the American experiment in representative democracy will have come to an end. We would be nothing more than unarmed slaves, under the thumb of an all powerful federal government somewhat reminiscent of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling in June, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
A couple of months ago (Feb. 4th, 2008), Tom Henderson of the Lewiston Morning Tribune wrote an editorial in which he severely castigates the State of Idaho, the National Rifle Association, and of course all us crazy gun owning Idaho voters, for not subscribing to the tenets of the “Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence”. Apparently the Brady supporters score each state on a number of issues including curbing firearms trafficking, strengthening background checks, child safety, banning military-style assault rifles, and making it harder to carry guns in public places. Idaho’s pretty low on their scoreboard I gather.
First off, we can’t eliminate the non-existant “gun violence” in this country. After all, guns are not violent, they are lumps of inert steel, wood, and plastic, and they’re certainly not going to jump off the table and deliberately attack some poor innocent bystander. People are the violent part of the equation, no matter if they’re bare handed, have a gun, or the steering wheel of a car in their hands, and those violent people should be the target of our ire. Certainly we could outlaw all guns and even melt them down, but what good will that do? It certainly won’t solve the social problem of violent people harming other people! Those who want us to get rid of our guns in the name of “public safety” are the same folks who want totally open borders, which makes it much easier for the criminal element to smuggle all sorts of weapons in and I suspect peddle ‘em to various criminal gangs. If the government can’t keep the drugs out after years of a “War on Drugs”, and if Homeland Security is panicy about the possibility of a smuggled “suitcase from allah”, just how do they figure to control a very lucrative market in illegal firearms? Sure we can disarm John Q. citizen by writ of law and a lot of police activity, but what’s going to make John Dillinger obey that law and turn in his gun?
Next is “curbing firearms trafficing”. Okay, just what is “trafficing”? Are we talking about the corner sporting goods store, gun shows, or what? If they’re speaking about bulk sales, the legal sales are already under government supervision. If they mean the illegal market, well, that’s a major problem in every country in todays world, and nobody’s found a workable answer to that yet! If you want to buy a few thousand AK-47s, go to some of the poorest countries in Africa, and they’d be very happy to sell ‘em to you, and even smuggle ‘em into the US, probably at cut rate prices.
Background checks are bit of a joke I think. I’m sure background checks do stop a few people from buying a weapon at the local sporting goods store. But if I were a violent ex-fellon I’d already be aware of that problem, and I’d be buying my gun off the street, for about half the price of a legal firearm. Really, all a background check does is inform the seller that I haven’t been guilty of mass murder… yet. The part about child safety also bothers me. When I was a kid, my Dad taught me how to shoot, and he taught me about firearms safety. That was just something that Dad’s did. When I got older I taught my boys the same thing, in the same manner, and none of us have ever shot anyone by accident, nor are we mass murderers. Common sense, careful teaching, and personal responsibility takes care of that problem, yet nowadays the “Brady Bunch” seems to think that firearms safety comes from a law book.
Military style assault rifles are rather humorous as well. Fully automatic weapons are already banned by law, and have been since the 1930’s. Thus, if you see someone running around with an M-16 in his hands, and he’s not wearing a uniform, you can bet he’s already breaking the law, or it’s a “look-alike” weapon with no more than semi-automatic capabilities. Granted that a semi-automatic can be nasty in it’s own right, still, semi-automatic hunting rifles have been around for a long time, and we’re none the worse for them. If somebody wants to go hunting with a semi-automatic M-16 because “it’s cool”, well, that’s his problem.
Finally we come to the “carrying guns in public places” thing. People have been carrying weapons in public for far longer than this nation has existed. Back when it was common for most folks to be armed, the crime rate was generally pretty low and most people were downright polite despite what you see on TV. After we decided to get “civilized” and quit carrying arms, the bad guys got real brave, and now we have one of the highest crime rates in the world, as the criminals happily victimize an unarmed populance. Our recent spate of mass shootings? What happened when the Colorado Springs church shooter unexpectedly ran into a citizen who did happen to have a weapon!?
Perhaps Mr. Henderson, we in Idaho don’t have all those anti-gun laws on the books because we don’t believe we need ‘em. But don’t worry, we just might get gun control rammed down our throats anyhow. If you’ve been following the national news of late, you’re well aware that our country is facing numerous major problems. The upcoming presidential election (if it doesn’t turn into another bloodbath over “hanging chads”) will determine what direction our international relations will take over the next four years, and the balance of power in congress will determine just how far down the road to rampant socialism our leaders are willing to take us. But perhaps the single most important decision in our nation’s history will come from the US Supreme Court in the very near future.
The so called “Patriot Act” hurriedly passed in the congressional panic following 9-11 effectively stripped many of our constitutional rights from us, made a mockery of American justice, and I suspect has Lady Liberty in tears. Now the US Supreme Court is being asked to go even further and determine whether or not our Constitution is worth the paper it’s written on. The question, the “test case” as it were, is the legal interpretation of the wording in the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights. If the court determines that the right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed to the individual citizen, there are a lot of current gun laws that will probably go down in flames. But if they decide that the right to bear arms is restricted to “the state” rather than to the citizens, we might as well throw our Constitution and Bill of Rights in the trash, as by legal precedent our Constitution will mean absolutely nothing to the law, and certainly nothing in the eyes of whatever government we then find ourselves shackled with. Our republic will no longer exist; the American experiment in representative democracy will have come to an end. We would be nothing more than unarmed slaves, under the thumb of an all powerful federal government somewhat reminiscent of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling in June, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
They just don't get it
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?
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?
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.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Local Democratic Caucus
In my role as a “fair and balanced” member of the press corps, I attended the Idaho County Democratic Caucus last Tuesday evening, the first time I’ve been to one of these things. There were 179 people attending (nearly twice the attendance of their last presidential caucus), so I’m tempted to say that the Idaho County Democrats are taking this election very seriously. With my red bordered nametag (red for non-voting observers), I was invited several times (somewhat tongue in cheek I suspect) to join the Democratic Party. Thanks, but no thanks, I’ve been a somewhat contrary independent voter for well over forty years and don’t really plan to change now.
Remembering my Granddaddy’s description of California’s democratic conventions of the 1920’s and 30’s, it appears that things have changed somewhat. I didn’t really expect to see any “smoke filled rooms”, but I didn’t see any serious horse trading going on either, and nary a fist fight. This was more like an old time Sunday church social, with of course somewhat different subject material. Apparently Idaho Counties Democrats are more peaceable people than the Los Angles Irish of a few decades back. I ran into several people I’ve known for a long time, and we did get into politically related discussions, mostly with me asking questions, and they trying to explain their stance to this unreconstructed conservative.
There were signs indicating where the supporters of various candidates were supposed to congregate, and although everybody seemed nice and friendly, I rather thought I might get in a bunch of trouble if I asked where the Republican cheering section was. So, following my well developed sense of self preservation, I wandered over to the designated press and observer area and generally kept my mouth shut. I did get a bit of name recognition though, and despite my reputation as not being all that friendly to Democratic political policies, not a claw or fang came out. I guess they left whatever wide-eyed far left radicals they might have on the rolls at home for the night.
I’ve never been a fan of the Caucus system, probably because I never really understood how they operate. However, in rural areas such as this I can see where they do save the county treasury a lot of money. Holding any sort of public election, with all the mandatory polling places, election workers, and official protocol can get pretty expensive in an area with a comparatively small tax base. This caucus was short and to the point, and doesn’t require polling stations all over the county. Personally I still think I’d prefer a primary election, but the caucus took a lot less time, effort, and expense.
I don’t know of any attempt to determine actual percentages, but from looking at the crowd I would estimate that Hillary had a higher percentage of women supporters than did Obama, which I believe is happening nationwide and should be no surprise. Another thing that didn’t surprise me was the fairly large number of current or retired federal employees attending as delegates. I always did think that the Forest Service was our local hotbed of raging liberal politics. (Oops, gotta watch that “fair and balanced” part.)
Of the 167 voting delegates present, the initial tally was 113 votes for Obama, 43 for Hillary Clinton, with the remainder either for Edwards or uncommitted, about what I might expect in this rural area. Unfortunately, from my viewpoint at least, the sound system left a lot to be desired, my inexpensive tape recorder failed, and thus I missed a good part of the many speeches intended to sway delegates to one candidate or another. These speeches were deliberately kept short, and thus were “to the point”, unlike much of the long winded political oratory by the well known “big guns” we often see on TV. There’s much to be said for living out in the country where most people can generally get their point across in only a few words. The caucus chairman was also kind enough to take a few moments to explain the workings of the democratic caucus system to those of us unfamiliar with the process, which certainly eased much of the confusion on my part.
In general the speeches were of the “Why I’m for So-and-so, and you should be too” genre. I didn’t really hear anything new in praise of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, but I did sort of miss the expected heavy duty digs at the republicans in general, and George W. Bush in particular. These were of course local speakers, not the candidates themselves, or their direct representatives. Several speakers did get a chuckle from the crowd, and a round of applause, from minor comments about the opposition, but these comments were more in fun (I think) than anything else. Nor was there any of the mudslinging and cat fights we’ve seen of late from the candidates of both parties. For the most part, Hillary was described as “caring”, and “A tough lady with political experience”, while Obama was praised as a man who has fought his way up from nearly nothing to a position of national recognition and leadership.
One common thread among the speakers seems to be their candidates desire for government mandated “affordable housing”, “a fair living for everyone”, “economic stability” and “affordable medical care”, perfectly understandable and even desirable points, particularly for lower income people, that we can all easily understand. And all you might note directly descended from FDR’s “New Deal” policies. What I thought conspicuous by its absence is an explanation of just how our government, teetering on the verge of federal bankruptcy, is supposed to pay for all this without a massive tax increase and even more government borrowing. We’re talking tens of trillions of dollars here, each and every year! To my surprise not much was said about the Iraqi war, or the proposed troop withdrawals. I would have expected this to be a major point of discussion. Still, the purpose of the caucus was to select the party’s standard bearer, not to determine campaign issues.
Anyway, after the second and final tally, it was reported that Barrack Obama had 121 votes, which comes to 72.5% of the Idaho County Democratic vote, at the upcoming state Democratic convention. Not exactly a clean sweep, but close enough.
Thank you folks, it was an interesting evening, and I for one appreciate the chance to learn a bit more about the American political process.
Remembering my Granddaddy’s description of California’s democratic conventions of the 1920’s and 30’s, it appears that things have changed somewhat. I didn’t really expect to see any “smoke filled rooms”, but I didn’t see any serious horse trading going on either, and nary a fist fight. This was more like an old time Sunday church social, with of course somewhat different subject material. Apparently Idaho Counties Democrats are more peaceable people than the Los Angles Irish of a few decades back. I ran into several people I’ve known for a long time, and we did get into politically related discussions, mostly with me asking questions, and they trying to explain their stance to this unreconstructed conservative.
There were signs indicating where the supporters of various candidates were supposed to congregate, and although everybody seemed nice and friendly, I rather thought I might get in a bunch of trouble if I asked where the Republican cheering section was. So, following my well developed sense of self preservation, I wandered over to the designated press and observer area and generally kept my mouth shut. I did get a bit of name recognition though, and despite my reputation as not being all that friendly to Democratic political policies, not a claw or fang came out. I guess they left whatever wide-eyed far left radicals they might have on the rolls at home for the night.
I’ve never been a fan of the Caucus system, probably because I never really understood how they operate. However, in rural areas such as this I can see where they do save the county treasury a lot of money. Holding any sort of public election, with all the mandatory polling places, election workers, and official protocol can get pretty expensive in an area with a comparatively small tax base. This caucus was short and to the point, and doesn’t require polling stations all over the county. Personally I still think I’d prefer a primary election, but the caucus took a lot less time, effort, and expense.
I don’t know of any attempt to determine actual percentages, but from looking at the crowd I would estimate that Hillary had a higher percentage of women supporters than did Obama, which I believe is happening nationwide and should be no surprise. Another thing that didn’t surprise me was the fairly large number of current or retired federal employees attending as delegates. I always did think that the Forest Service was our local hotbed of raging liberal politics. (Oops, gotta watch that “fair and balanced” part.)
Of the 167 voting delegates present, the initial tally was 113 votes for Obama, 43 for Hillary Clinton, with the remainder either for Edwards or uncommitted, about what I might expect in this rural area. Unfortunately, from my viewpoint at least, the sound system left a lot to be desired, my inexpensive tape recorder failed, and thus I missed a good part of the many speeches intended to sway delegates to one candidate or another. These speeches were deliberately kept short, and thus were “to the point”, unlike much of the long winded political oratory by the well known “big guns” we often see on TV. There’s much to be said for living out in the country where most people can generally get their point across in only a few words. The caucus chairman was also kind enough to take a few moments to explain the workings of the democratic caucus system to those of us unfamiliar with the process, which certainly eased much of the confusion on my part.
In general the speeches were of the “Why I’m for So-and-so, and you should be too” genre. I didn’t really hear anything new in praise of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, but I did sort of miss the expected heavy duty digs at the republicans in general, and George W. Bush in particular. These were of course local speakers, not the candidates themselves, or their direct representatives. Several speakers did get a chuckle from the crowd, and a round of applause, from minor comments about the opposition, but these comments were more in fun (I think) than anything else. Nor was there any of the mudslinging and cat fights we’ve seen of late from the candidates of both parties. For the most part, Hillary was described as “caring”, and “A tough lady with political experience”, while Obama was praised as a man who has fought his way up from nearly nothing to a position of national recognition and leadership.
One common thread among the speakers seems to be their candidates desire for government mandated “affordable housing”, “a fair living for everyone”, “economic stability” and “affordable medical care”, perfectly understandable and even desirable points, particularly for lower income people, that we can all easily understand. And all you might note directly descended from FDR’s “New Deal” policies. What I thought conspicuous by its absence is an explanation of just how our government, teetering on the verge of federal bankruptcy, is supposed to pay for all this without a massive tax increase and even more government borrowing. We’re talking tens of trillions of dollars here, each and every year! To my surprise not much was said about the Iraqi war, or the proposed troop withdrawals. I would have expected this to be a major point of discussion. Still, the purpose of the caucus was to select the party’s standard bearer, not to determine campaign issues.
Anyway, after the second and final tally, it was reported that Barrack Obama had 121 votes, which comes to 72.5% of the Idaho County Democratic vote, at the upcoming state Democratic convention. Not exactly a clean sweep, but close enough.
Thank you folks, it was an interesting evening, and I for one appreciate the chance to learn a bit more about the American political process.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Change
In My Opinion – by Bob Fogarty
It appears that the current buzzword in American politics is “Change”. I’ve also noted that the candidates from both political parties are using it in the sense of “it’s time for a political change in Washington, and I’m the best bet”. Well, yes, change is in the air, and it’s high time I’d say. President Bush is finishing his second term in office and now we have a constitutionally mandated change in the regime. However, changing from one party (in this case the Republicans) to the other side of the aisle (the Democrats) doesn’t appear that it’s going to be the answer to our problems. I’ve hears the term “Republicrats” a number of times, and used it myself, as an indicator that the two primary political parties have nearly merged in their goals. This is of course only partially true. Over the last few years the neoconservative republicans have been on a spending spree unprecedented in our history, ignoring the fiscally conservative wing of the party. The Democrats for their part have been weeping and wailing about all that federal spending, but since they’ve become the majority party in congress the spending continues unabated. Both parties have become the free wheeling high rollers so beloved of special interests.
They do differ in their response to the War on Terror however. While the Republicans apparently want to continue their “Romp and Stomp” all over the Arab world, the Democrats want us to come running home with our tails between our legs. Neither option will do the United States any good whatsoever, merely making us an even more inviting target for the terrorists. Both parties pay lip service to the problem of border security, but aren’t doing anything about it. The Republicans want to continue their self proclaimed authority to spy on American citizens, the Democrats continuously wail about that spying violating our civil liberties, while in the meantime the NSA continues reading our mail and the FBI is still checking up on our library cards. Both parties are all in favor of continued illegal immigration, the republicans for “cheap labor” apparently, while the democrats seem to like the idea of even more under privileged (read Democratic) voters, despite the fact that the American public has responded to amnesty for illegal immigration with a resounding NO, several times!
Both parties blame the other for our nation’s financial woes, conveniently not mentioning that congressional free spending has been pushing us to the verge of national bankruptcy for decades. Fiscal moderation apparently isn’t something taught to budding politicians anymore. We might keep in mind that the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by government bankruptcy, not by the number of tanks and planes in the US inventory. The soviets printed money like it was going out of style, with nothing to back it except vague promises. The US Federal Reserve has been doing the same thing to us for over two decades. The soviets were burdened with an enormous, ineffective, and very expensive bureaucracy, something else our federal government seems to favor. Despite all their bragging, the soviet educational system was an abject failure. Our federal control of the US educational system is today failing our kids, and our nation.
The public, in the meantime, has been taken to the cleaners in the form of taxes upon taxes, and a few government mandated corporate profit schemes as well. The Republicans are preaching a massive tax cut, with no corresponding cut in spending. I expect they’ll want to run the presses overtime printing even more valueless paper money. For their part, the democratic presidential candidates are proposing to increase our taxes, which I’m sure congress will find a way to spend on even more pork and earmarks. They’re also proposing that the government require everyone in the country to have some sort of private health insurance, which would be a windfall for the insurance companies. ‘Course they don’t seem to have any suggestions about how we (John Q. Citizen) are supposed to afford that high priced insurance.
It would seem however, that even after seven years of being severely bashed by almost everybody, President Bush still has a sense of humor. Either that, or he’s slipped his trolley completely! In his January 28th State of the Union message he said, “The actions of the 110th Congress will affect the security and prosperity of our Nation long after this session has ended. In this election year, let us show our fellow Americans that we recognize our responsibilities and are determined to meet them. And let us show them that Republicans and Democrats can compete for votes and cooperate for results at the same time.” A moment later he said, “…we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy”. Congress recognizing its responsibilities!? Or that the two major political parties might co-operate over anything besides wrecking the country!? And the concept of allowing Americans to keep their own money certainly wasn’t something he picked-up in Politics 101 or in lectures covering “tax and spend”! Overall, I thought those lines were good for a real belly laugh.
We’ve all heard of the huge national budget each year, and the media is constantly reminding us about congressional pork and earmarks. Wasteful spending and its rabid defense has been a trademark of congress since creeping socialism in the form of FDR’s “New Deal” first hit the streets. Now, if a democrat wins the presidency, it seems that we’re probably going to get a Canadian style socialized medical care system. Don’t get sick under that program, it might be a couple of months, or a couple of years, before a doctor sees you. At the same time I’m not very hopeful about a federally mandated medical insurance program either. After all, something like 30% of Americans don’t have any medical insurance, simply because they can’t afford it. So now, at the snap of congressional fingers, we’re all going to miraculously have the extra few hundred dollars a month to spend on medical insurance? What a deal for the insurance companies!! “But it’s free, it’s free!” the socialized medicine proponents shout from the rooftops. Sorry boys and girls, “TANSTAAFL”, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Somebody’s going to get stuck with the bill, and in this case it’s going to be the taxpayers, again, for only a “few” hundred billion dollars each year.
Certainly any change in the wrong direction, as proposed by liberals and so many Republicans is a step backwards. But there are changes we know must come about. We know we face enemies who want to kill us. We know American jobs are going to Mexico, China, and India. We know our schools are failing our kids. We know our borders are severely leaking. And the proponents of change in Washington aren’t doing much more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Perhaps there really are two Americas, the Washington beltway… and the rest of us.
It appears that the current buzzword in American politics is “Change”. I’ve also noted that the candidates from both political parties are using it in the sense of “it’s time for a political change in Washington, and I’m the best bet”. Well, yes, change is in the air, and it’s high time I’d say. President Bush is finishing his second term in office and now we have a constitutionally mandated change in the regime. However, changing from one party (in this case the Republicans) to the other side of the aisle (the Democrats) doesn’t appear that it’s going to be the answer to our problems. I’ve hears the term “Republicrats” a number of times, and used it myself, as an indicator that the two primary political parties have nearly merged in their goals. This is of course only partially true. Over the last few years the neoconservative republicans have been on a spending spree unprecedented in our history, ignoring the fiscally conservative wing of the party. The Democrats for their part have been weeping and wailing about all that federal spending, but since they’ve become the majority party in congress the spending continues unabated. Both parties have become the free wheeling high rollers so beloved of special interests.
They do differ in their response to the War on Terror however. While the Republicans apparently want to continue their “Romp and Stomp” all over the Arab world, the Democrats want us to come running home with our tails between our legs. Neither option will do the United States any good whatsoever, merely making us an even more inviting target for the terrorists. Both parties pay lip service to the problem of border security, but aren’t doing anything about it. The Republicans want to continue their self proclaimed authority to spy on American citizens, the Democrats continuously wail about that spying violating our civil liberties, while in the meantime the NSA continues reading our mail and the FBI is still checking up on our library cards. Both parties are all in favor of continued illegal immigration, the republicans for “cheap labor” apparently, while the democrats seem to like the idea of even more under privileged (read Democratic) voters, despite the fact that the American public has responded to amnesty for illegal immigration with a resounding NO, several times!
Both parties blame the other for our nation’s financial woes, conveniently not mentioning that congressional free spending has been pushing us to the verge of national bankruptcy for decades. Fiscal moderation apparently isn’t something taught to budding politicians anymore. We might keep in mind that the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by government bankruptcy, not by the number of tanks and planes in the US inventory. The soviets printed money like it was going out of style, with nothing to back it except vague promises. The US Federal Reserve has been doing the same thing to us for over two decades. The soviets were burdened with an enormous, ineffective, and very expensive bureaucracy, something else our federal government seems to favor. Despite all their bragging, the soviet educational system was an abject failure. Our federal control of the US educational system is today failing our kids, and our nation.
The public, in the meantime, has been taken to the cleaners in the form of taxes upon taxes, and a few government mandated corporate profit schemes as well. The Republicans are preaching a massive tax cut, with no corresponding cut in spending. I expect they’ll want to run the presses overtime printing even more valueless paper money. For their part, the democratic presidential candidates are proposing to increase our taxes, which I’m sure congress will find a way to spend on even more pork and earmarks. They’re also proposing that the government require everyone in the country to have some sort of private health insurance, which would be a windfall for the insurance companies. ‘Course they don’t seem to have any suggestions about how we (John Q. Citizen) are supposed to afford that high priced insurance.
It would seem however, that even after seven years of being severely bashed by almost everybody, President Bush still has a sense of humor. Either that, or he’s slipped his trolley completely! In his January 28th State of the Union message he said, “The actions of the 110th Congress will affect the security and prosperity of our Nation long after this session has ended. In this election year, let us show our fellow Americans that we recognize our responsibilities and are determined to meet them. And let us show them that Republicans and Democrats can compete for votes and cooperate for results at the same time.” A moment later he said, “…we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy”. Congress recognizing its responsibilities!? Or that the two major political parties might co-operate over anything besides wrecking the country!? And the concept of allowing Americans to keep their own money certainly wasn’t something he picked-up in Politics 101 or in lectures covering “tax and spend”! Overall, I thought those lines were good for a real belly laugh.
We’ve all heard of the huge national budget each year, and the media is constantly reminding us about congressional pork and earmarks. Wasteful spending and its rabid defense has been a trademark of congress since creeping socialism in the form of FDR’s “New Deal” first hit the streets. Now, if a democrat wins the presidency, it seems that we’re probably going to get a Canadian style socialized medical care system. Don’t get sick under that program, it might be a couple of months, or a couple of years, before a doctor sees you. At the same time I’m not very hopeful about a federally mandated medical insurance program either. After all, something like 30% of Americans don’t have any medical insurance, simply because they can’t afford it. So now, at the snap of congressional fingers, we’re all going to miraculously have the extra few hundred dollars a month to spend on medical insurance? What a deal for the insurance companies!! “But it’s free, it’s free!” the socialized medicine proponents shout from the rooftops. Sorry boys and girls, “TANSTAAFL”, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Somebody’s going to get stuck with the bill, and in this case it’s going to be the taxpayers, again, for only a “few” hundred billion dollars each year.
Certainly any change in the wrong direction, as proposed by liberals and so many Republicans is a step backwards. But there are changes we know must come about. We know we face enemies who want to kill us. We know American jobs are going to Mexico, China, and India. We know our schools are failing our kids. We know our borders are severely leaking. And the proponents of change in Washington aren’t doing much more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Perhaps there really are two Americas, the Washington beltway… and the rest of us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)