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Friday, May 3, 2013
WARREN BUFFET'S PLAN TO FIX OUR BROKEN CONGRESS
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Friday, April 26, 2013
DEMOCRATS ARE IN A PANIC; THE PROSPECT OF HANGING FOCUSES THE MIND WONDERFULLY
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Sunday, April 14, 2013
MINDLESS ENFORCEMENT OF BAD LAWS IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR DECENCY OR JUSTICE
!!!!
King's 'Letter' and the law
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe April 14, 2013
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/13171/king-letter-and-the-law
IN HIS "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written behind bars 50 years ago this week, Martin Luther King invokes God 15 times and mentions the words "Christ" or "Christian" 21 times. But he refers to "law" 41 times – more than both of them combined – and thereby hangs a lesson.
King was a Baptist minister and a scholar of theology. He had come to Birmingham with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to head a nonviolent protest against the city's rigid segregation, and he wasn't the only pastor jailed for disregarding a ban on civil rights demonstrations. In an open letter to the local paper, a group of white religious leaders had publicly criticized the sit-ins, warning that such "extreme measures" – which were "led in part by outsiders" – were apt to "incite … hatred and violence." King read the ministers' statement after he was arrested. "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was his response.
Addressing himself to "My dear fellow clergymen," King explained that he had come to Birmingham "because injustice is here." Like Paul of Tarsus carrying the Christian gospel "to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world," he told them, "so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town." He described the protesters' strategy of nonviolent confrontation as a long-delayed response to the refusal of Birmingham's leaders to soften their city's brutal and humiliating racial policies. "We had no alternative except to … present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the … community."
King admonished the clergymen who criticized him as extremist. Jesus too had been an extremist, he argued. So had the Prophet Amos and the English preacher John Bunyan. There were times when it was wrong not to go to extremes, and this was one of them. A great struggle to end the nightmare of American apartheid was underway, he wrote, and it made him weep to see "white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities."
King was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers; such intensely religious language was normal for him. But King didn't write only about God and theology. "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is also a powerful message about the law, and about the dangerous temptation to venerate law and the legal process as ends in themselves.
King's response to the Alabama clergymen is justly renowned as a defense of civil disobedience. He depicted the casual cruelties of Jim Crow in language so affecting that even white Americans would understand why black civil rights could no longer wait. At the same time he insisted that civil disobedience was not a license for anarchy: "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." He had been arrested for doing something illegal – parading without a permit – but that didn't mean he had no respect for the law. Far from it: One who disobeys a law on a matter of conscience and freely pays the penalty for doing so "is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
Yet it shouldn't only be in the context of civil disobedience or the civil rights movement that we take to heart King's caution about bowing to the law merely because it is the law. Too often the law is treated as a seal of approval or as a fetish or as a conversation-stopper: If that's what the law says, that settles it.
Think of immigration restrictionists on the right who have insisted for years that nothing is more salient on the issue of illegal immigrants than the fact of their unlawful status. "When something is illegal, it's illegal," the late congressman Sonny Bono famously said. "Enforce the law." Think, to take an opposite example, of the glee on the left when the Clinton administration tore the young Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives at gunpoint and forcibly sent him back to Cuba. The picture of that raid "warmed my heart," Thomas Friedman exulted in his New York Times column. "This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law."
Law is indispensable to a civilized society. But the mindless enforcement of bad laws is not a substitute for decency or justice. Neither is mindless deference to those with political power ("When the president does it, that means it is not illegal," Richard Nixon believed). Against such thinking, which is more common than many of us like to think, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" remains a powerful inoculation.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).
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Monday, April 8, 2013
!!!!
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky
http://rabbipruzansky.com/
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky
http://rabbipruzansky.com/
The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a
divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence,
economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people
voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama
has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten
million off his own 2008 total. (Note: this was written the day
after the election. The final results indicate that Romney exceeded
McCain’s total by less than one million votes, while Obama received
almost four million votes fewer than he did in 2008 – the first time in
history that a president won a second term with fewer votes than he
scored in his first victory. RSP)
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired. Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That suggests the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that, as Winston Churchill stated so tartly, “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Voters – a clear majority – are easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. Said another way, too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. How could Obama get away with such rants to squealing sign-wavers? See Churchill, above.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. How could he do and say all these things ? See Churchill, above.
One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required and does not solve any discernible problem – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American life.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved.
A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he of the Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with G-d matters more than our relationship with any politician, R or D. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is time for Jews to go home, to Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will always be because it always was has been a repetitive and deadly Jewish mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came – Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But that can also change. The increased aliya in the last few years is partly attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish living in America. Those costs will only increase in the coming years. We should draw the appropriate conclusions.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired. Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That suggests the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that, as Winston Churchill stated so tartly, “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Voters – a clear majority – are easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. Said another way, too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. How could Obama get away with such rants to squealing sign-wavers? See Churchill, above.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. How could he do and say all these things ? See Churchill, above.
One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required and does not solve any discernible problem – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American life.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved.
A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he of the Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with G-d matters more than our relationship with any politician, R or D. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is time for Jews to go home, to Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will always be because it always was has been a repetitive and deadly Jewish mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came – Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But that can also change. The increased aliya in the last few years is partly attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish living in America. Those costs will only increase in the coming years. We should draw the appropriate conclusions.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.
Friday, April 5, 2013
!!!!
PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION
APRIL 5, 2013
A useful pipeline spill in Arkansas
BY WES PRUDEN
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and a pipeline leaking on somebody else’s front yard can be a godsend, too. The environmentalists who were waging a losing war against the proposed Keystone pipeline woke up to the news of a small pipeline leak in Arkansas and thought it was Christmas morning.
If environmentalists were the praying kind, they would say the Arkansas leak was an answer to their prayers. They think it ends the debate over the Keystone pipeline. One green lobbyist says “this should be the nail in the coffin of the Keystone pipeline.” They’re eager to pressure President Obama to veto Keystone.
The Arkansas pipeline, called the Pegasus, was laid down and buried two feet under in 1947, and runs from Patooka, Ill., where it connects to pipelines from western Canada, to refineries in Nederland, Texas. It sprang the leak March 29 at tiny Mayflower, Ark., a bedroom suburb of Little Rock, and spilled up to 5,000 barrels of tar-sands crude through ditches and across lawns of tidy middle-class brick houses, and was stopped just short of the shore of Lake Conway, popular with fishermen. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen.
ExxonMobil, operators of the pipeline, moved quickly when a drop in pressure signaled a leak. Valves 18 miles apart were closed within 16 minutes, shutting off movement of the sluggish crude. About 20 families were required to leave their homes and were put up at nearby hotels by ExxonMobil. Exxon dispatched 120 workmen and 15 vacuum trucks with 33 storage tanks to collect the 12,000 barrels of the oil and water mixture from streets, ditches and lawns. This week they’re steam-cleaning the streets.
To the Luddite environmentalists, life is just one endless tragedy, brought to you by fat Republicans, self-righteous Christians and greedy capitalists who keep inventing evil contraptions like electric lights, indoor plumbing, automobiles, computers and 10-speed blenders. Even bicycles are suspect. They all soak up energy. The Arkansas spill, unless you’re someone on a quiet Mayflower street with oil in the petunia patch, is not insignificant, but not a tragedy.
Mayflower, says one breathless commentator at The Atlantic Wire website, is “a scene straight out of the beginning of a post-apocalyptic movie – thick, black oil running down a suburban street . . . even more dangerous than it looks.”
Most of the people who live in Mayflower are working-class folk, who aren’t happy to see their lawns turned black by oil and are eager to get back into their houses, but they typically understand that “life happens.” Allen Dodson, the county judge (corresponding to county supervisor or manager in other places) says his constituents are mostly concerned about getting home. The oil fumes have “died down,” he says, “and to the untrained nose, it has greatly improved. It smells better than if you were just paving a road.” (Of course, unpaved streets don’t smell at all, if you can keep dogs, horses and pigs away from the dirt.)
Most Mayflower residents, like most Americans elsewhere, are unaware of the thousands of miles of pipeline that run under houses, shopping centers and even schools and hospitals, buried several feet below ground. No one was killed or even hurt at Mayflower, and moving oil in a pipeline is far safer than moving it by train or truck. The difference between a pipeline spill and a train-wreck spill, as the Wall Street Journal observes, is “a lesson in political opportunism.”
Such opportunism is what really smells. The Sierra Club, which never met an endangered slug or snake it wouldn’t embrace, says the Mayflower spill proves that “it’s not a matter of ‘if’ spills will occur on dangerous pipelines like Keystone XL, but rather ‘when’.”
Some oil spills are more fashionable in the compliant media than others. Last week, a Canadian Pacific Railway oil train derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 barrels of crude. This was more than three times the oil spilled at Mayflower, but it went largely unremarked. The implications on safety are profound. As pipelines reach carrying capacity, the volume of oil carried on rail increases – up from 9,000 carloads five years ago to 233,000 carloads last year.
The environmentalists should embrace Keystone if they’e really interested in public safety and pristine countryside. Keystone, with abundant new failsafe technology, will replace pipelines like the Pegasus line through Arkansas. When the 36-inch Pegasus was built right after World War II, few safety requirements were in place, and pipelines, like other parts of the infrastructure, were thrown across the landscape in a hurry, the better to sate pent-up demand for oil and all the things oil makes possible. The mantra was familiar: “Build it and they won’t have to come, because they’re already here.”
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION
APRIL 5, 2013
A useful pipeline spill in Arkansas
BY WES PRUDEN
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and a pipeline leaking on somebody else’s front yard can be a godsend, too. The environmentalists who were waging a losing war against the proposed Keystone pipeline woke up to the news of a small pipeline leak in Arkansas and thought it was Christmas morning.
If environmentalists were the praying kind, they would say the Arkansas leak was an answer to their prayers. They think it ends the debate over the Keystone pipeline. One green lobbyist says “this should be the nail in the coffin of the Keystone pipeline.” They’re eager to pressure President Obama to veto Keystone.
The Arkansas pipeline, called the Pegasus, was laid down and buried two feet under in 1947, and runs from Patooka, Ill., where it connects to pipelines from western Canada, to refineries in Nederland, Texas. It sprang the leak March 29 at tiny Mayflower, Ark., a bedroom suburb of Little Rock, and spilled up to 5,000 barrels of tar-sands crude through ditches and across lawns of tidy middle-class brick houses, and was stopped just short of the shore of Lake Conway, popular with fishermen. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen.
ExxonMobil, operators of the pipeline, moved quickly when a drop in pressure signaled a leak. Valves 18 miles apart were closed within 16 minutes, shutting off movement of the sluggish crude. About 20 families were required to leave their homes and were put up at nearby hotels by ExxonMobil. Exxon dispatched 120 workmen and 15 vacuum trucks with 33 storage tanks to collect the 12,000 barrels of the oil and water mixture from streets, ditches and lawns. This week they’re steam-cleaning the streets.
To the Luddite environmentalists, life is just one endless tragedy, brought to you by fat Republicans, self-righteous Christians and greedy capitalists who keep inventing evil contraptions like electric lights, indoor plumbing, automobiles, computers and 10-speed blenders. Even bicycles are suspect. They all soak up energy. The Arkansas spill, unless you’re someone on a quiet Mayflower street with oil in the petunia patch, is not insignificant, but not a tragedy.
Mayflower, says one breathless commentator at The Atlantic Wire website, is “a scene straight out of the beginning of a post-apocalyptic movie – thick, black oil running down a suburban street . . . even more dangerous than it looks.”
Most of the people who live in Mayflower are working-class folk, who aren’t happy to see their lawns turned black by oil and are eager to get back into their houses, but they typically understand that “life happens.” Allen Dodson, the county judge (corresponding to county supervisor or manager in other places) says his constituents are mostly concerned about getting home. The oil fumes have “died down,” he says, “and to the untrained nose, it has greatly improved. It smells better than if you were just paving a road.” (Of course, unpaved streets don’t smell at all, if you can keep dogs, horses and pigs away from the dirt.)
Most Mayflower residents, like most Americans elsewhere, are unaware of the thousands of miles of pipeline that run under houses, shopping centers and even schools and hospitals, buried several feet below ground. No one was killed or even hurt at Mayflower, and moving oil in a pipeline is far safer than moving it by train or truck. The difference between a pipeline spill and a train-wreck spill, as the Wall Street Journal observes, is “a lesson in political opportunism.”
Such opportunism is what really smells. The Sierra Club, which never met an endangered slug or snake it wouldn’t embrace, says the Mayflower spill proves that “it’s not a matter of ‘if’ spills will occur on dangerous pipelines like Keystone XL, but rather ‘when’.”
Some oil spills are more fashionable in the compliant media than others. Last week, a Canadian Pacific Railway oil train derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 barrels of crude. This was more than three times the oil spilled at Mayflower, but it went largely unremarked. The implications on safety are profound. As pipelines reach carrying capacity, the volume of oil carried on rail increases – up from 9,000 carloads five years ago to 233,000 carloads last year.
The environmentalists should embrace Keystone if they’e really interested in public safety and pristine countryside. Keystone, with abundant new failsafe technology, will replace pipelines like the Pegasus line through Arkansas. When the 36-inch Pegasus was built right after World War II, few safety requirements were in place, and pipelines, like other parts of the infrastructure, were thrown across the landscape in a hurry, the better to sate pent-up demand for oil and all the things oil makes possible. The mantra was familiar: “Build it and they won’t have to come, because they’re already here.”
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Friday, March 22, 2013
DOCTOR'S NOTES FROM A SESSION OF THE MODERATE REPUBLICAN SENATOR SUPPORT GROUP
!!!!
Bethesda Mental Health Clinic
Moderate Republican Senator
Tuesday’s Session:
Once again, late to get started due to J. McCain and L. Graham’s arriving late from Palm Steakhouse. Have repeatedly told them to leave the restaurant earlier — hard to do, apparently, because they’re always forced to enjoy large desserts sent to them from a large national teachers’ union. When I suggested to them that perhaps this is part of the problem they’re experiencing with rank-and-file members of their own party, they called me a crackpot. Also: They were carrying leftovers, which made the session room smell like an Outback Steakhouse. Session did not start well.
Some members of the group related, during the sharing session, that they found the term “RINO” to be hurtful and offensive. A senator from a midwestern state mused aloud about the possibilities of adding the term to a list of forbidden “hate speech” terms in a bill currently being written by Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.). There was general enthusiasm for this kind of thing. “Reaching across the aisle” was a phrase many members used.
Therapist attempted, at that point, to use this as a teachable moment. Could it not be, therapist asked, that the whole point of being a Republican was to oppose this exact kind of legislation? So in this case, “reaching across the aisle” wouldn’t be compromise as much as capitulation. How does the group respond to that?
Patient McCain flicked leftover mashed potatoes on therapist.
Session ended early.
Friday’s Session:
Once again the session started late, this time due to several members’ arriving from a lengthy closed-door negotiation meeting, in which serious budgetary matters were discussed. Several of the more “conservative” members of the group were frustrated by some of the other members’ intransigence on the matter of taxes. Again, therapist chose to re-frame this discussion through the lens of the members’ ongoing feelings of “displacement” and “not fitting in” to the prevailing mood of their own party. What would, therapist asked, a rank-and-file member of the party view as an
acceptable middle-class tax rate? J. McCain and others muttered, “Zero!” with great irritation.
And what was the sense of the group, therapist asked, in terms of an effective middle-class tax rate?
The group displayed great consensus and agreement. “Ninety percent,” said one member of the Senate Republican caucus.
Therapist then tried to illustrate effective compromise techniques: How about somewhere in the middle, he asked. How about a middle-class tax rate of 45 percent?
The entire group of moderate Republicans nodded enthusiastically. They saw how compromise was possible, and how a certain decision can be framed for the electorate as a “win” for both sides. All members of the group were comfortable predicting that their counterparts in the Democratic party would embrace this idea. Several left early to leak the plan to their contacts at the New York Times.
The session ended on a high note.
DOCTOR’S NOTES
Moderate Republican Senator
Support Group
Tuesday’s Session:
Once again, late to get started due to J. McCain and L. Graham’s arriving late from Palm Steakhouse. Have repeatedly told them to leave the restaurant earlier — hard to do, apparently, because they’re always forced to enjoy large desserts sent to them from a large national teachers’ union. When I suggested to them that perhaps this is part of the problem they’re experiencing with rank-and-file members of their own party, they called me a crackpot. Also: They were carrying leftovers, which made the session room smell like an Outback Steakhouse. Session did not start well.
Some members of the group related, during the sharing session, that they found the term “RINO” to be hurtful and offensive. A senator from a midwestern state mused aloud about the possibilities of adding the term to a list of forbidden “hate speech” terms in a bill currently being written by Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.). There was general enthusiasm for this kind of thing. “Reaching across the aisle” was a phrase many members used.
Therapist attempted, at that point, to use this as a teachable moment. Could it not be, therapist asked, that the whole point of being a Republican was to oppose this exact kind of legislation? So in this case, “reaching across the aisle” wouldn’t be compromise as much as capitulation. How does the group respond to that?
Patient McCain flicked leftover mashed potatoes on therapist.
Session ended early.
Friday’s Session:
Once again the session started late, this time due to several members’ arriving from a lengthy closed-door negotiation meeting, in which serious budgetary matters were discussed. Several of the more “conservative” members of the group were frustrated by some of the other members’ intransigence on the matter of taxes. Again, therapist chose to re-frame this discussion through the lens of the members’ ongoing feelings of “displacement” and “not fitting in” to the prevailing mood of their own party. What would, therapist asked, a rank-and-file member of the party view as an
acceptable middle-class tax rate? J. McCain and others muttered, “Zero!” with great irritation.
And what was the sense of the group, therapist asked, in terms of an effective middle-class tax rate?
The group displayed great consensus and agreement. “Ninety percent,” said one member of the Senate Republican caucus.
Therapist then tried to illustrate effective compromise techniques: How about somewhere in the middle, he asked. How about a middle-class tax rate of 45 percent?
The entire group of moderate Republicans nodded enthusiastically. They saw how compromise was possible, and how a certain decision can be framed for the electorate as a “win” for both sides. All members of the group were comfortable predicting that their counterparts in the Democratic party would embrace this idea. Several left early to leak the plan to their contacts at the New York Times.
The session ended on a high note.
Monday’s Session:
Several members arrived early, during office hours, to request an increase in the dosage of their anti-depressants. Apparently, some members of the group are experiencing increased levels of anxiety and depression as they attempt to integrate themselves into the framework of their own party. The stress of raising taxes and increasing government programs and oversight has led several members to display erratic and irrational behavior. L. Graham and J. McCain, especially, have complained about being “dislocated” and “confused” due to the cognitive dissonance of their current position.
A few of the senators wondered if perhaps there was a sense that they had been in Washington too long, that they had become part of a system that seeks, as its primary goal, not the guarantee of the liberty and freedom of our citizens but the enlargement and solidification of the federal behemoth. Perhaps it was not the voters who needed to be educated, they suggested, but the ossified and complacent senators. These senators spoke eloquently to the group, and managed to create a powerful impression on many of the members until it was discovered that they had wandered into the wrong session room.
They were directed to the Southern Democrat Support Group session, and the Moderate Republican Senator Support Group recommenced.
Session ended early, when J. McCain and L. Graham left to attend a film screening at Arianna Huffington’s house.
Several members arrived early, during office hours, to request an increase in the dosage of their anti-depressants. Apparently, some members of the group are experiencing increased levels of anxiety and depression as they attempt to integrate themselves into the framework of their own party. The stress of raising taxes and increasing government programs and oversight has led several members to display erratic and irrational behavior. L. Graham and J. McCain, especially, have complained about being “dislocated” and “confused” due to the cognitive dissonance of their current position.
A few of the senators wondered if perhaps there was a sense that they had been in Washington too long, that they had become part of a system that seeks, as its primary goal, not the guarantee of the liberty and freedom of our citizens but the enlargement and solidification of the federal behemoth. Perhaps it was not the voters who needed to be educated, they suggested, but the ossified and complacent senators. These senators spoke eloquently to the group, and managed to create a powerful impression on many of the members until it was discovered that they had wandered into the wrong session room.
They were directed to the Southern Democrat Support Group session, and the Moderate Republican Senator Support Group recommenced.
Session ended early, when J. McCain and L. Graham left to attend a film screening at Arianna Huffington’s house.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
BRAVO MAINE GOVERNOR PAUL LePAGE
!!!!
Meet Maine 's New Governor --- In case you haven't heard about this guy before, his name will stick in your mind!
The new Maine Governor, Paul LePage is making New Jersey 's Chris Christie look like an enabler. He isn't afraid to say what he thinks. Judging by the comments, every time he opens his mouth, his popularity goes up.
He brought down the house at his inauguration when he shook his fist toward the media box and said, "You're on notice! I've inherited a financially troubled State to run. Observe...cover what we do...but don't whine if I don't waste time responding to your every whim just for your amusement."
During his campaign for Governor, he was talking to commercial fishermen who are struggling because of federal fisheries rules. They complained that 0bama brought his family to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park for a long Labor Day holiday and found time to meet with union leaders, but wouldn't talk to the fishermen. LePage replied, "I'd tell him to go to hell and get out of my State." The Lame Stream Media crucified LePage, but he jumped 6 points in the pre-election poll.
The Martin Luther King incident was a political sandbag, which brought him National exposure. The 'lame stream' media crucified him, but word on the street is very positive. The NAACP specifically asked LePage to spend MLK Day visiting black inmates at the Maine State Prison. He told them that he would meet with ALL inmates, regardless of race, if he were to visit the prison. The NAACP balked and then put out a news release claiming falsely that he refused to participate in any MLK events. He read it in the paper for the 1st time the next morning while being driven to an event and went ballistic because none of the reporters had called him for comment before running the NAACP release.
He arrived at that event & said in front of a TV camera, "If they want to play the race card on me they can kiss my ass", and he reminded them that he has an adopted black son from Jamaica and that he attended the local MLK Breakfast every year that he was mayor of Waterville. (He started his morning there on MLK Day.)
He then stated that there's a right way and a wrong way to meet with the Governor, and he put all special interests on notice that press releases, media leaks, and all demonstrations would prove to be the wrong way. He said any other group, which acted like the NAACP could expect to be at the bottom of the Governor's priority list!
He then did the following, and judging from local radio talk show callers, his popularity increased even more: The State employees union complained because he waited until 3 P.M. before closing State offices and facilities and sending non-emergency personnel home during the last blizzard. The prior Governor would often close offices for the day with just a forecast before the first flakes. (Each time the State closes for snow, it costs the taxpayers about $1 million in wages for no work in return.)
LePage was CEO of the Marden's chain of discount family bargain retail stores before election as governor. He noted that State employees getting off work early could still find lots of retail stores open to shop. So, he put the State employees on notice by announcing:"If Marden's is open, Maine is open!"
He told State employees: "We live in Maine in the winter, for heaven's sake, and should know how to drive in it. Otherwise, apply for a State job in Florida !"
Governor LePage symbolizes what America needs; Refreshing politicians who aren't self-serving and who exhibit common sense.
THE LAW IS THE LAW So "if" the US government determines that it is against the law for the words "under God" to be on our money, then, so be it.
And "if" that same government decides that the "Ten Commandments" are not to be used in or on a government installation, then, so be it.
I say, "so be it," because I would like to be a law abiding US citizen.
I say, "so be it," because I would like to think that smarter people than I are in positions to make good decisions.
I would like to think that those people have the American public's best interests at heart.
BUT, YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE I'D LIKE?
Since we can't pray to God, can't Trust in God and cannot post His Commandments in Government buildings, I don't believe Government (Federal, State and Local) and its employees should participate in Easter and Christmas celebrations which honor the God that our government is eliminating from many facets of American life.
I'd like my mail delivered on Christmas, Good Friday, Thanksgiving & Easter. After all, it's just another day.
I'd like the" US Supreme Court to be in session on Christmas, Good Friday, Thanksgiving & Easter as well as Sundays." After all, it's just another day.
I'd like the Senate and the House of Representatives to not have to worry about getting home for the "Christmas Break." After all it's just another day.
I'm thinking a lot of my taxpayer dollars could be saved, if all government offices & services would work on Christmas, Good Friday & Easter. It shouldn't cost any overtime since those would be just like any other day of the week to a government that is trying to be "politically correct."
In fact....I think our government should work on Sundays (initially set aside for worshipping God....) because, after all, our government says that it should be just another day....
What do you all think???? If this idea gets to enough people, maybe our elected officials will stop giving in to the "minority opinions" and begin, once again, to represent the "majority" of ALL of the American people.
SO BE IT...........Please Dear Lord, Give us the help needed to keep you in our country! 'Amen' and 'Amen'
These are definitely things I never thought about but from now on, I will be sure to question those in government who support these changes.
Friday, March 8, 2013
IN WASHINGTON IT IS NOT THE SHARKS BUT THE MINNOWS (AKA DINOSAURS) WHO NIBBLE GOOD MEN TO DEATH
!!!!
MARCH 8, 2013
The tall talker and the old geezers
BY WES PRUDEN
Talking is the national sport in Washington. For the old geezers in Congress it’s more fun than watching baseball, complaining about the weather or remembering sex.
Nobody drones on like a United States senator and nobody loves the sound of his raspy voice like a senator. Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky who stars in the bad dreams of every Republican geezer in town, talked for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor this week to delay a confirmation vote on John Brennan as director of the CIA, and earned only the scorn of the geezers.
Mr. Paul’s remarks occasionally strayed a few degrees over the top (enough of the Hitler comparison), decrying the prospect of using drones against American citizens in America, but he strayed no farther over the top than almost any congressman on almost any day on Capitol Hill. Mr. Paul argued at length (though not at record length) that killing an American, even an evil terrorist with an American passport, deprives him of the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
Challenging Barack Obama on anything will earn anybody the sneers and scorn of Democratic senators, but some of the Republican geezers joined the din of disdain, mostly about the temerity of a freshman senator talking when he should be listening to a housebroken geezer talk. It’s not the sharks who trouble the waters in Washington, but the minnows who nibble good men to death.
John McCain of Arizona rebuked the filibusterer just as he was sitting down, and just after Mr. McCain and a few of his Senate pals emerged from a cozy dinner with President Obama in the glow of fine wine and the warmth of a full belly of beef. Mr. McCain had a little patronizing advice for his talkative colleague: “Calm down, senator, the U.S. government cannot randomly target U.S. citizens.”
The presidential loser of '08 sent further advice on how to win friends and influence voters. “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids. I don’t think what happened is helpful to the American people.”
Nobody expected Mr. Paul’s filibuster to stop the confirmation of John Brennan, the senator least of all, but he set out to sound an “alarm” about the use of drones in what he calls the threat to Americans by their own government. He had written to the White House to inquire whether the government could order a drone strike against an American on American soil, and Attorney Gen. Eric Holder replied with reassurance that does not necessarily reassure. He said drones are limited to killing in conflict zones in Pakistan and Yemen, and the government has “no intention” to bomb any place specific.
So far the argument is about drones and the word “random.” How vague can the word “random” be? The U.S. government can, and already has, targeted American citizens without due process. The government had no drones at Ruby Ridge, where government agents targeted and killed a teenage American boy, and had no drones at Waco, where government agents set fire to a religious compound and 76 men, women and children burned alive, Americans all. The government’s record is not a good one. The government’s “intentions” can change, and “random” is a word even a jackleg lawyer could parse far into the next decade. It’s just not cricket to say so, and a geezer never would.
The confirmation hearings of John Brennan and Chuck Hagel reveal a lot about how Washington works, how weak and well-meaning geezers can conflate the good of the country with the good of their own biases. John McCain and Lindsay Graham took Chuck Hagel apart at his confirmation hearing, leaving him humiliated as few nominees have been humiliated. But when crunch time came, they fell into line, voting to confirm him despite all the flags they raised at his hearing, as if to say, “just kidding, guys.”
John Brennan escaped close scrutiny over his role in the fiasco at Benghazi, where four Americans, including an American ambassador, died because the Obama White House could not or would not send the help the ambassador begged for -- not even a drone.
The geezers know better, but it’s easier, quieter, and more refined to do nothing. When Rand Paul, over the top or not, stood up to demand answers to some of the questions the geezers themselves raised, he was ridiculed and told, like an irritable child, to calm down. Geezers think their role is to pour oil over troubled waters, when they should be striking a match.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
MARCH 8, 2013
The tall talker and the old geezers
BY WES PRUDEN
Talking is the national sport in Washington. For the old geezers in Congress it’s more fun than watching baseball, complaining about the weather or remembering sex.
Nobody drones on like a United States senator and nobody loves the sound of his raspy voice like a senator. Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky who stars in the bad dreams of every Republican geezer in town, talked for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor this week to delay a confirmation vote on John Brennan as director of the CIA, and earned only the scorn of the geezers.
Mr. Paul’s remarks occasionally strayed a few degrees over the top (enough of the Hitler comparison), decrying the prospect of using drones against American citizens in America, but he strayed no farther over the top than almost any congressman on almost any day on Capitol Hill. Mr. Paul argued at length (though not at record length) that killing an American, even an evil terrorist with an American passport, deprives him of the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
Challenging Barack Obama on anything will earn anybody the sneers and scorn of Democratic senators, but some of the Republican geezers joined the din of disdain, mostly about the temerity of a freshman senator talking when he should be listening to a housebroken geezer talk. It’s not the sharks who trouble the waters in Washington, but the minnows who nibble good men to death.
John McCain of Arizona rebuked the filibusterer just as he was sitting down, and just after Mr. McCain and a few of his Senate pals emerged from a cozy dinner with President Obama in the glow of fine wine and the warmth of a full belly of beef. Mr. McCain had a little patronizing advice for his talkative colleague: “Calm down, senator, the U.S. government cannot randomly target U.S. citizens.”
The presidential loser of '08 sent further advice on how to win friends and influence voters. “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids. I don’t think what happened is helpful to the American people.”
Nobody expected Mr. Paul’s filibuster to stop the confirmation of John Brennan, the senator least of all, but he set out to sound an “alarm” about the use of drones in what he calls the threat to Americans by their own government. He had written to the White House to inquire whether the government could order a drone strike against an American on American soil, and Attorney Gen. Eric Holder replied with reassurance that does not necessarily reassure. He said drones are limited to killing in conflict zones in Pakistan and Yemen, and the government has “no intention” to bomb any place specific.
So far the argument is about drones and the word “random.” How vague can the word “random” be? The U.S. government can, and already has, targeted American citizens without due process. The government had no drones at Ruby Ridge, where government agents targeted and killed a teenage American boy, and had no drones at Waco, where government agents set fire to a religious compound and 76 men, women and children burned alive, Americans all. The government’s record is not a good one. The government’s “intentions” can change, and “random” is a word even a jackleg lawyer could parse far into the next decade. It’s just not cricket to say so, and a geezer never would.
The confirmation hearings of John Brennan and Chuck Hagel reveal a lot about how Washington works, how weak and well-meaning geezers can conflate the good of the country with the good of their own biases. John McCain and Lindsay Graham took Chuck Hagel apart at his confirmation hearing, leaving him humiliated as few nominees have been humiliated. But when crunch time came, they fell into line, voting to confirm him despite all the flags they raised at his hearing, as if to say, “just kidding, guys.”
John Brennan escaped close scrutiny over his role in the fiasco at Benghazi, where four Americans, including an American ambassador, died because the Obama White House could not or would not send the help the ambassador begged for -- not even a drone.
The geezers know better, but it’s easier, quieter, and more refined to do nothing. When Rand Paul, over the top or not, stood up to demand answers to some of the questions the geezers themselves raised, he was ridiculed and told, like an irritable child, to calm down. Geezers think their role is to pour oil over troubled waters, when they should be striking a match.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
IT TAKES BIG BUCKS TO MEET WITH THE PRESIDENT
!!!!
MARCH 5, 2013
The fire sale at the White House
BY WES PRUDEN
Bubba was a piker. The Clinton White House sold sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom that were cheap at the price. Barack Obama is auctioning off access to His Grandiosity for really big bucks. Unlike Hillary, Michelle doesn’t even have to straighten up the room and make up the bed when the guests leave.
The White House reacted with considerable heat Monday to editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post scolding the president for putting “major campaign donors” on an “advisory board” and giving them frequent “access” to the president. This little perk was said to be going for a half-million dollars.
“Any notion that there is a set price for a meeting with the president of the United States is just wrong,” Jay Carney, the president’s mouthpiece, told reporters at the White House.
The wording of Mr. Carney’s remarks, which are usually carefully measured to make sure the spokesman’s brain is engaged before his mouth moves, raises speculation that the price of the access is set on a sliding scale. This could pose problems for the president and his men. If the CEO of Ajax Widgets LLC pays $500,000 for a cup of coffee and a breakfast bagel with the president, he won’t be pleased to learn that the CEO of Acme Anvils, Inc., got the president’s ear for $475,000, and maybe got two bagels and a strawberry shmear on the side.
The Washington Post, in its editorial, decried the sale of access as “behavior that has become all too common in this town and carries more than a whiff of influence-peddling.” The New York Times detected more than a whiff, of something like genuine stink. An advisory board, the newspaper said, “is nothing more than a fancy way of setting a price for access to Mr. Obama.”
This contretemps, so far the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, is nevertheless enough to shake the president’s supreme self-confidence, rattle the White House dishes and make the floor tremble beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. This scolding comes not from right-wing websites, but from two of the most prominent pillars of the cult. Prominent pillars are not supposed to behave like that. On what other meat might an awakening media feed?
This followed Bob Woodward’s falling out of love with Mr. Obama, partly over the president playing games with the sequestration but mostly over the president’s failure to deploy the carrier USS Harry S. Truman. Mortuary Bob, who burnished his considerable reputation with his famous interviews with the dead and the comatose, tried to make it up to the president at the end of the week with an invitation to the Obamas to dine at the Woodward manse.
Taken all in all, these are not particularly happy days for His Grandiosity. After weeks of crying wolf, the White House retreated Sunday from the president’s fervent predictions that the world as we know it would end at midnight March 1, when the sequestration cuts would take effect. The sky remained resolutely overhead, though in some places there were deep gray clouds and in some places rain, but not the sky, fell.
The track record of the doom-criers, even the president, is not good. Geezers remember when were told that airplanes would fall from the sky, everybody’s bank account would be erased, and restaurants would decline to honor dinner reservations after the beginning of the new millennium because all the computers were programmed to die at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. Even the ancient Mayans got into the act when someone thought they remembered that their calendar predicted death, destruction and other inconvenience for the modern age. Only yesterday, everyone was about to fall off the fiscal cliff. The sequestration rescued us.
“We lost the bet on just how intransigent the Republican majority can be,” a Virginia Democrat told Politico. “We made a mistake betting on reasonable compromise ultimately prevailing. We bet on that and lost.” The president bet he could come up with the idea of sequestration and when it actually happened nobody would remember that he was the elusive daddy.
The president and his partisans in Congress were high on a champagne buzz a month ago when they thought the Republicans, dazed by the election results, had been permanently scared into raising taxes whenever the president felt a whim coming on. Mr. Obama imagined that he could cry wolf twice a day and get a new tax increase each time. The “shock” of sequestration has given the Republicans a booster shot of testosterone. And just in time, too.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
MARCH 5, 2013
The fire sale at the White House
BY WES PRUDEN
Bubba was a piker. The Clinton White House sold sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom that were cheap at the price. Barack Obama is auctioning off access to His Grandiosity for really big bucks. Unlike Hillary, Michelle doesn’t even have to straighten up the room and make up the bed when the guests leave.
The White House reacted with considerable heat Monday to editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post scolding the president for putting “major campaign donors” on an “advisory board” and giving them frequent “access” to the president. This little perk was said to be going for a half-million dollars.
“Any notion that there is a set price for a meeting with the president of the United States is just wrong,” Jay Carney, the president’s mouthpiece, told reporters at the White House.
The wording of Mr. Carney’s remarks, which are usually carefully measured to make sure the spokesman’s brain is engaged before his mouth moves, raises speculation that the price of the access is set on a sliding scale. This could pose problems for the president and his men. If the CEO of Ajax Widgets LLC pays $500,000 for a cup of coffee and a breakfast bagel with the president, he won’t be pleased to learn that the CEO of Acme Anvils, Inc., got the president’s ear for $475,000, and maybe got two bagels and a strawberry shmear on the side.
The Washington Post, in its editorial, decried the sale of access as “behavior that has become all too common in this town and carries more than a whiff of influence-peddling.” The New York Times detected more than a whiff, of something like genuine stink. An advisory board, the newspaper said, “is nothing more than a fancy way of setting a price for access to Mr. Obama.”
This contretemps, so far the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, is nevertheless enough to shake the president’s supreme self-confidence, rattle the White House dishes and make the floor tremble beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. This scolding comes not from right-wing websites, but from two of the most prominent pillars of the cult. Prominent pillars are not supposed to behave like that. On what other meat might an awakening media feed?
This followed Bob Woodward’s falling out of love with Mr. Obama, partly over the president playing games with the sequestration but mostly over the president’s failure to deploy the carrier USS Harry S. Truman. Mortuary Bob, who burnished his considerable reputation with his famous interviews with the dead and the comatose, tried to make it up to the president at the end of the week with an invitation to the Obamas to dine at the Woodward manse.
Taken all in all, these are not particularly happy days for His Grandiosity. After weeks of crying wolf, the White House retreated Sunday from the president’s fervent predictions that the world as we know it would end at midnight March 1, when the sequestration cuts would take effect. The sky remained resolutely overhead, though in some places there were deep gray clouds and in some places rain, but not the sky, fell.
The track record of the doom-criers, even the president, is not good. Geezers remember when were told that airplanes would fall from the sky, everybody’s bank account would be erased, and restaurants would decline to honor dinner reservations after the beginning of the new millennium because all the computers were programmed to die at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. Even the ancient Mayans got into the act when someone thought they remembered that their calendar predicted death, destruction and other inconvenience for the modern age. Only yesterday, everyone was about to fall off the fiscal cliff. The sequestration rescued us.
“We lost the bet on just how intransigent the Republican majority can be,” a Virginia Democrat told Politico. “We made a mistake betting on reasonable compromise ultimately prevailing. We bet on that and lost.” The president bet he could come up with the idea of sequestration and when it actually happened nobody would remember that he was the elusive daddy.
The president and his partisans in Congress were high on a champagne buzz a month ago when they thought the Republicans, dazed by the election results, had been permanently scared into raising taxes whenever the president felt a whim coming on. Mr. Obama imagined that he could cry wolf twice a day and get a new tax increase each time. The “shock” of sequestration has given the Republicans a booster shot of testosterone. And just in time, too.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
WE HAVE SEEN THE BOOBS AND THEY ARE US
!!!!
March 1, 2013
GOVERNMENT-BY-FAKE-DISASTER-MOVIE
By MARK STEYN
A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter announced that she was bored of American politics and spending her days watching Turner Classic Movies. I confess that, when it comes to Beltway melodrama, I, too, am fighting vainly the old ennui, and minded to plump up the pillows and settle back with a bucket of bonbons and a beribboned Shih-tzu for an all-night Norma Shearer marathon. At least, unlike Washington, there's a chance you may catch something you haven't already seen a hundred times before. For example, I've a yen to see "Roberta" (RKO, 1935), in which Irene Dunne sings: “Yesterdays.”
I believe that was the last known use of this blameless and mellifluous word until it was conscripted by the political class for this month's dreary Mayan Apocalypse of the Month thrill ride. Say what you like about those Mayan guys, but they only schedule an apocalypse once every 5,126 years. Only Washington would try to pull it off every six weeks.
If I understand correctly, by the time you read this, the planes will be dropping from the skies; the drip-feeds in every emergency room will be dry; every creature on the endangered species list will have broken free from our pristine federally manned national parks to be left for roadkill in the potholed asphalt of America's crumbling interstates; you'll turn on your bathroom faucet only to find the town reservoir choked with fecal coliform; the ebola virus will be rampant across Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and other swing states, where it will nevertheless enjoy higher approval ratings than Marco Rubio and every other prospective GOP nominee. The sequester supposedly cuts $44 billion from the federal budget – or from the rate of growth of the federal budget. Whatever. $44 billion is about what the United States government borrows every nine days, so it's not a lot. But it's apparently responsible for everything that matters in American life.
That being so, maybe it would be easier to reinstate this critical $44 billion and cut the other $3.8 trillion, which is apparently responsible for nothing other than Harry Reid's beloved federally funded cowboy poetry festival and the cost of the dress uniforms for the military detachment accompanying the First Lady at her Oscars appearance. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, warned of "over 170 million jobs that could be lost" thanks to the sequester. There are only 135 million jobs in America, but the sequester gods are so powerful they can eliminate every job in Canada, Britain and Germany, too. Why, because of this weekend's looming Mayan Apocalypse, President Obama declined to deploy a carrier to the Persian Gulf, concerned that it might be left on the other side of the planet, completely sequestered with no fuel to limp back home and insufficient stores in the mess hall larder to cook up federally compliant slop. So, when the mullahs go nuclear and drop the big one on Tel Aviv, it will be the fault of the Republicans for failing to agree to a prudent, balanced, fiscally responsible plan - like the Senate's latest deficit reduction proposal, which, as is traditional, increases the deficit (by $7 billion).
It's not just the U.S. fleet and air traffic control and clean water that have been swept into the garbage can of history by Sequestageddon, but even the most venerable Beltway colossus. In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, but surely Bob Woodward is here to stay – or so we thought until he ventured some very mild criticism of the president's negotiating technique, which appears to be a cross between a suicide-bomber and Cleavon Little taking himself hostage in "Blazing Saddles." In a flash, Woodward's four decades of loyal service were forgotten, and the court eunuchs of the Obama media turned on their own: He's about one news cycle away from being revealed as on the take from the Koch brothers and the real father of Trig Palin.
Speaking of the First Lady's Academy Awards appearance, I see she gave the Oscar for Best Film to Ben Affleck's movie "Argo." If you haven't seen the picture, it's about a group of government operatives whose ingenious plan to achieve their objectives depends on creating a fake movie as a cover story. Obama seems to have taken this inspiring tale to heart.
In the Affleck version, the fake movie is a space opera for which John Goodman rustles up a few cheesy costume designs for some generic aliens. They make a promotional brochure, take out an ad in Variety and hold a well-attended press conference, awash in cocktails and canapés. But there is no movie. And so it goes with Obama's monthly cliffhangers. The White House press corps show up for the reception, and they all excitedly report the intriguing teasers about the white-knuckle thriller coming soon to your town: This weekend, "Les Sequesterables," starring Maxine "I Dreamed A Dream" Waters and a cast of hundreds of millions of downtrodden laid-off extras; next week, "Zero Debt Thirty," in which Paul Ryan proposes cutting $30 from the federal budget, and all civilized life comes to an end; next month, "Django Short-Changed," in which a retired bounty hunter discovers his Social Security check is a buck seventy-three lower than usual because cruel plantation owners like Mitt Romney aren't willing to pay their fair share; and, coming soon, "No Silver Linings Playbook," in which Barack Obama warns yet again that total societal collapse is just around the corner but at the 11th hour manages to avert it by swooping in with a daring, last-minute tax increase.
Government-by-fake-disaster-movie seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Every Republican attempt at fiscal discipline now ends with both higher spending and more taxes: that's the way it went with the Christmas blockbuster "Fiscal Cliff," and that's the way to bet with "Les Sequesterables," too. Even the IRS can't keep up: "tax season" is upon us, and yet they're not accepting tax returns from millions of Americans because the IRS hasn't yet managed to process the tax changes passed in the dead of night at New Year. American government is a joke – and, sadly, not one of those jokes that everybody takes seriously and kicks up a fuss about, like Seth MacFarlane's "We Saw Your Boobs" song that the New Yorker attacked for its "hostility to women in the workplace," or Joan Rivers' joke about Heidi Klum's Oscars gown that Abraham Foxman's Anti-Defamation League is busy issuing stern denunciations of. No, in an America in which every throwaway gag is a hate crime, Obama's fake disaster movie of the month is the only joke we all go along with, even though he's insulting our intelligence far more than Seth and the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus singing "We Saw Your Boobs" to Anne Hathaway and Halle Berry.
Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?
If you really believe that, then America is going to die, and a gullible citizenry willing to give this laughable charade the time of day will bear ultimate responsibility. We have seen the boobs, and they are us.
©MARK STEYN
March 1, 2013
GOVERNMENT-BY-FAKE-DISASTER-MOVIE
By MARK STEYN
A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter announced that she was bored of American politics and spending her days watching Turner Classic Movies. I confess that, when it comes to Beltway melodrama, I, too, am fighting vainly the old ennui, and minded to plump up the pillows and settle back with a bucket of bonbons and a beribboned Shih-tzu for an all-night Norma Shearer marathon. At least, unlike Washington, there's a chance you may catch something you haven't already seen a hundred times before. For example, I've a yen to see "Roberta" (RKO, 1935), in which Irene Dunne sings: “Yesterdays.”
"Yesterdays
Days I knew as happy sweet sequester'd days..."
I believe that was the last known use of this blameless and mellifluous word until it was conscripted by the political class for this month's dreary Mayan Apocalypse of the Month thrill ride. Say what you like about those Mayan guys, but they only schedule an apocalypse once every 5,126 years. Only Washington would try to pull it off every six weeks.
If I understand correctly, by the time you read this, the planes will be dropping from the skies; the drip-feeds in every emergency room will be dry; every creature on the endangered species list will have broken free from our pristine federally manned national parks to be left for roadkill in the potholed asphalt of America's crumbling interstates; you'll turn on your bathroom faucet only to find the town reservoir choked with fecal coliform; the ebola virus will be rampant across Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and other swing states, where it will nevertheless enjoy higher approval ratings than Marco Rubio and every other prospective GOP nominee. The sequester supposedly cuts $44 billion from the federal budget – or from the rate of growth of the federal budget. Whatever. $44 billion is about what the United States government borrows every nine days, so it's not a lot. But it's apparently responsible for everything that matters in American life.
That being so, maybe it would be easier to reinstate this critical $44 billion and cut the other $3.8 trillion, which is apparently responsible for nothing other than Harry Reid's beloved federally funded cowboy poetry festival and the cost of the dress uniforms for the military detachment accompanying the First Lady at her Oscars appearance. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, warned of "over 170 million jobs that could be lost" thanks to the sequester. There are only 135 million jobs in America, but the sequester gods are so powerful they can eliminate every job in Canada, Britain and Germany, too. Why, because of this weekend's looming Mayan Apocalypse, President Obama declined to deploy a carrier to the Persian Gulf, concerned that it might be left on the other side of the planet, completely sequestered with no fuel to limp back home and insufficient stores in the mess hall larder to cook up federally compliant slop. So, when the mullahs go nuclear and drop the big one on Tel Aviv, it will be the fault of the Republicans for failing to agree to a prudent, balanced, fiscally responsible plan - like the Senate's latest deficit reduction proposal, which, as is traditional, increases the deficit (by $7 billion).
It's not just the U.S. fleet and air traffic control and clean water that have been swept into the garbage can of history by Sequestageddon, but even the most venerable Beltway colossus. In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, but surely Bob Woodward is here to stay – or so we thought until he ventured some very mild criticism of the president's negotiating technique, which appears to be a cross between a suicide-bomber and Cleavon Little taking himself hostage in "Blazing Saddles." In a flash, Woodward's four decades of loyal service were forgotten, and the court eunuchs of the Obama media turned on their own: He's about one news cycle away from being revealed as on the take from the Koch brothers and the real father of Trig Palin.
Speaking of the First Lady's Academy Awards appearance, I see she gave the Oscar for Best Film to Ben Affleck's movie "Argo." If you haven't seen the picture, it's about a group of government operatives whose ingenious plan to achieve their objectives depends on creating a fake movie as a cover story. Obama seems to have taken this inspiring tale to heart.
In the Affleck version, the fake movie is a space opera for which John Goodman rustles up a few cheesy costume designs for some generic aliens. They make a promotional brochure, take out an ad in Variety and hold a well-attended press conference, awash in cocktails and canapés. But there is no movie. And so it goes with Obama's monthly cliffhangers. The White House press corps show up for the reception, and they all excitedly report the intriguing teasers about the white-knuckle thriller coming soon to your town: This weekend, "Les Sequesterables," starring Maxine "I Dreamed A Dream" Waters and a cast of hundreds of millions of downtrodden laid-off extras; next week, "Zero Debt Thirty," in which Paul Ryan proposes cutting $30 from the federal budget, and all civilized life comes to an end; next month, "Django Short-Changed," in which a retired bounty hunter discovers his Social Security check is a buck seventy-three lower than usual because cruel plantation owners like Mitt Romney aren't willing to pay their fair share; and, coming soon, "No Silver Linings Playbook," in which Barack Obama warns yet again that total societal collapse is just around the corner but at the 11th hour manages to avert it by swooping in with a daring, last-minute tax increase.
Government-by-fake-disaster-movie seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Every Republican attempt at fiscal discipline now ends with both higher spending and more taxes: that's the way it went with the Christmas blockbuster "Fiscal Cliff," and that's the way to bet with "Les Sequesterables," too. Even the IRS can't keep up: "tax season" is upon us, and yet they're not accepting tax returns from millions of Americans because the IRS hasn't yet managed to process the tax changes passed in the dead of night at New Year. American government is a joke – and, sadly, not one of those jokes that everybody takes seriously and kicks up a fuss about, like Seth MacFarlane's "We Saw Your Boobs" song that the New Yorker attacked for its "hostility to women in the workplace," or Joan Rivers' joke about Heidi Klum's Oscars gown that Abraham Foxman's Anti-Defamation League is busy issuing stern denunciations of. No, in an America in which every throwaway gag is a hate crime, Obama's fake disaster movie of the month is the only joke we all go along with, even though he's insulting our intelligence far more than Seth and the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus singing "We Saw Your Boobs" to Anne Hathaway and Halle Berry.
Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?
If you really believe that, then America is going to die, and a gullible citizenry willing to give this laughable charade the time of day will bear ultimate responsibility. We have seen the boobs, and they are us.
©MARK STEYN
THE BIRD THAT CAUGHT A SPY
!!!!
Back in the days of the cold war Whitaker Chambers, the Editor of Time Magazine who was formerly active in the Communist Party USA, told the FBI that he had served as a contact with a traitor in the State Department, Alger Hiss. The FBI and Congress questioned Hiss for hours on end, but they could not get him to say anything that linked him with Chambers. Then one of the agents of the FBI recalled that Chambers had said that in idle conversation with Alger Hiss, Hiss had said that one of the proudest moments in his life as an avid bird watcher was when he spotted and recorded a Prothonotary Warbler, a relatively rare bird.
The next time Hiss was questioned under oath the FBI interrogator asked him what his hobbies were and Hiss said that he was an avid bird watcher. The interrogator shared with Hiss some his own successes in bird watching and Hiss not to be outdone boasted of the time that he spotted a Prothonotary Warbler.
With this confirmation of the testimony of Whitaker Chambers, the FBI was eventually able to obtain sufficient evidence to convict Hiss and send him to prison for espionage for the Soviet Union.
For this reason and for others, we should do all we can to protect this beautiful little bird.
- Leo Rugiens
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Back in the days of the cold war Whitaker Chambers, the Editor of Time Magazine who was formerly active in the Communist Party USA, told the FBI that he had served as a contact with a traitor in the State Department, Alger Hiss. The FBI and Congress questioned Hiss for hours on end, but they could not get him to say anything that linked him with Chambers. Then one of the agents of the FBI recalled that Chambers had said that in idle conversation with Alger Hiss, Hiss had said that one of the proudest moments in his life as an avid bird watcher was when he spotted and recorded a Prothonotary Warbler, a relatively rare bird.
The next time Hiss was questioned under oath the FBI interrogator asked him what his hobbies were and Hiss said that he was an avid bird watcher. The interrogator shared with Hiss some his own successes in bird watching and Hiss not to be outdone boasted of the time that he spotted a Prothonotary Warbler.
With this confirmation of the testimony of Whitaker Chambers, the FBI was eventually able to obtain sufficient evidence to convict Hiss and send him to prison for espionage for the Soviet Union.
For this reason and for others, we should do all we can to protect this beautiful little bird.
- Leo Rugiens
Saturday, March 2, 2013
TEXANS KNOW A TYRANT WHEN WE SEE ONE
!!!!
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