Nothing happens until somebody sells Something!

I don’t know where or when I first came up with the title to this post but its sentiment has served me well for many decades.

Or we can expand it to read, “Nothing happens until somebody builds something”.

Whichever you choose, it is in direct conflict with the views of many who should know better in Washington DC and, worse yet, at least one of those is in line for the presidency.

Now I don’t know about Obama. And Biden only knows what Obama tells him he knows but then for a few more weeks there is Pelosi. She said, and presumably thinks, that unemployment benefits must and should continue because “it’s good for the economy”.

Her view of the world is that when some poor sap gets an unemployment check he or she will spend it immediately at Walmart or Safeway or wherever which would mean that those companies will hire more people who will pay more taxes which will fund more unemployment checks and on and on.

If this were the case, the answer to any country’s financial woes is that everybody quits work and applies for benefits. Really?

Back in the Middle Ages many alchemists took time off for a while from trying to turn lead into gold in order to come up with a machine capable of perpetual motion. This wondrous device once started went on forever.

Unfortunately it didn’t work and what is more it can never work as we understand the laws of physics. And neither can Pelosi’s theory of perpetual financing.

As I understand them, the facts are these.

Employed people pay taxes which go to Government both Local and Federal. Some of those taxes go to provide benefits to those who are unemployed. And those people indeed spend the money they receive. But the “gotcha” is there are leaks in this seemingly perfect circle.

For a start, Pelosi seems to be unaware that the administration of all this incoming and outgoing money needs people and systems which are not free. And, in point of fact, government bureaucracies are just about the most inefficient there are. 

And people who receive the benefit do not send it all back to the government directly or indirectly. It doesn’t take a genius to work any of this out.

But Pelosi is only a genius in her own mind!  

And it shows!

One Picture is worth a Thousand Words

I've been missing for a few days over the holiday and I know I owe some readers a little something. So, with that in mind, here are a few of my favorite quotes about liberals with appropriate attribution

Enjoy!

25) Whenever I read liberals reporting about the goings- on of conservatives I always get the nature-documentary vibe. A liberal reporter puts on his or her Dian Fossey hat in order to attempt to write another installment of” Conservatives in the Mist”. I've followed this particular brand of reporting for years, it's almost a fetish of mine. Most attempts fail. Of these lesser varieties, there's fear ("Troglodytes!"), mockery ("Irrelevant troglodytes!"), condescension ("I had to explain to them they're troglodytes."), bewilderment ("Why don't they understand they're troglodytes?"), astonishment (Dear God, they're not all troglodytes!"), and a few combinations of all the above. -- Jonah Goldberg

24) There are no bad guys on the left. There are only people who’ve been driven to desperation by conservative evil. -- Allahpundit

23) Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago. -- Ann Coulter

22) Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don't like to have another point of view in the room that they don't squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling. -- David Horowitz

21) The reason any conservative's failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It's an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites. -- Ann Coulter

20) Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust.

There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization. -- Evan Sayet

19) It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism -- a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization -- became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent -- not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself -- became the highest virtue. -- Jonah Goldberg

18) But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims -- always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups. -- Ann Coulter

17) Liberals have created, and the minority leadership has exploited, a community of dependent people, unaware of the true route to prosperity and happiness: self-reliance and self-investment. Instead, people are told that America is unjust, unfair, and full of disadvantages. They are told that their only hope is for government to fix their problems. What has happened is that generations of people have bought into this nonsense and as a result have remained hopelessly mired in poverty and despair -- because the promised solutions don't work. And they will never work -- they never have. -- Rush Limbaugh

16) One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do. -- Jonah Goldberg

15) Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values more from the Left than from their religion -- Dennis Prager

14) When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they're doing so for purely selfish reasons. It's the human equivalent of a puppy dog's face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, “please lower my taxes” -- Greg Gutfeld

13) Stupidity is a luxury and you will find time and time and time and again that those who are overwhelmingly on the left are those who can afford to be. -- Evan Sayet

12) With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society. -- Ann Coulter

11) If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they--and we all--can be “liberated.” The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions--the vision--which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback. -- Thomas Sowell

10) Liberals claim to love gays when it allows them to vent their spleen at Republicans. But disagree with liberals and their first response is to call you gay. Liberals are gays' biggest champions on issues most gays couldn't care less about, like gay marriage or taxpayer funding of photos of men with bullwhips up their derrieres. But who has done more to out, embarrass, and destroy the lives of gay men who prefer to keep their orientation private than Democrats? Who is more intolerant of gays in the Republican Party than gays in the Democratic Party? -- Ann Coulter

9) End results that work that don't involve government threaten liberals. -- Rush Limbaugh

8) In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong--surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences. -- Thomas Sowell

7) That is one reason "feelings" and "compassion" are two of the most often used liberal terms. "Character" is no longer a liberal word because it implies self-restraint. "Good and evil" are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one's feelings. In assessing what position to take on moral or social questions, the liberal asks him or herself, "How do I feel about it?" or "How do I show the most compassion?" -- not "What is right?" or "What is wrong?" For the liberal, right and wrong are dismissed as unknowable, and every person chooses his or her own morality. -- Dennis Prager

6) In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the benighted and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear though social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group. -- Thomas Sowell

5) Everyone moralizes. The suggestion that liberals aren't moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about "moralizers." Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion — you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by government on other people’s children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise. -- Jonah Goldberg

4) If you can somehow force a liberal into a point- counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you've said -- unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It's like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder. -- Ann Coulter

3) My analysis is that most faith based systems depend upon an absolute moral order. The declaration of things as absolutely evil or absolutely good, as sin or virtue, puts liberalism into a horrible position because it's founded on no judgment on anything. As a result, any faith that is seriously practiced or understood is a challenge to the politics that depend on constituencies that would rather not be told that their choices are bad and their lives are not virtuous. -- Hugh Hewitt

2) The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? -- Thomas Sowell

1) To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. -- Charles Krauthammer

Grope and Change

Had today's political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow's holiday would have been called "Starvation Day" instead of Thanksgiving. Of course, most of us wouldn't be alive to celebrate it.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. But the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.

Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest European settlers gave us a dramatic demonstration of the fatal flaws of collectivism. Unfortunately, few Americans today know it.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.

That's why they nearly all starved.

When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.

"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many."

Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623.

What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. The problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."

If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free-rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty.

What private property does -- as the Pilgrims discovered -- is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.

Here's the biggest irony of all: The U.S. government has yet to apply the lesson to its first conquest: Native Americans. The U.S. government has held most Indian land in trust since the 19th century. This discourages initiative and risk-taking because, among other reasons, it can't be used as collateral for loans. 


On Indian reservations, "private land is 40 to 90 percent more productive than land owned through the Bureau of Indian Affairs," says economist Terry Anderson, executive director of PERC. "If you drive through western reservations, you will see on one side cultivated fields, irrigation, and on the other side, overgrazed pasture, run-down pastures and homes. One is a simple commons; the other side is private property. You have Indians on both sides. The important thing is someone owns one side."

Secure property rights are the key. When producers know their future products are safe from confiscation, they take risks and invest. But when they fear they will be deprived of the fruits of their labor, they will do as little as possible.

That's the lost lesson of Thanksgiving.

And here's another one as I prepare to fly today assuming the TSA let me. 


Sometime last week a squad of GIs flew from service in Afghanistan back to the U.S. Due to a mechanical problem, their military transport was forced to land in Maine and the troops were booked onto commercial flights to their home airports. Note these guys were still dressed in combat fatigues and were carrying their weapons which were unloaded but they still had ammo. 


This martial sight did not worry the TSA one bit but one GI was made to give up his nail clippers when he was checked out prior to boarding.


You couldn't make this stuff up............. 

Happy Turkey Day

Counting Sheep ................

More than one million Americans have escaped the clutches of the Democrats' destructive federal health care law. Lucky them. Their employers and labor representatives wisely applied for Obamacare waivers earlier this Fall and got out while the getting was good. Now, it's time for Congress to create a permanent escape hatch for the rest of us

Repeal is the ultimate waiver.

As you'll recall, President Obama promised repeatedly that if Americans liked their health insurance plan, they could keep it. "Nobody is talking about taking that away from you," the cajoler-in-chief assured. What he failed to communicate to low-wage and part-time workers across the country is that they could keep their plans -- only if their companies begged hard enough for exemptions from Obamacare's private insurance-killing regulations.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website, at least 111 waivers have now been granted to companies, unions and other organizations of all sizes who offer affordable health insurance or prescription drug coverage with limited benefits. Obamacare architects sought to eliminate those low-cost plans under the guise of controlling insurer spending on executive salaries and marketing.

It's all about control. If central planners can't dictate what health benefits qualify as "good," what plans qualify as "affordable" and how health care dollars are best spent, then nobody can. The ultimate goal, of course: precipitating a massive shift from private to government insurance.

McDonald's, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Jack in the Box are among the large, headline-garnering employers who received the temporary waivers.


But perhaps the most politically noteworthy beneficiaries of the HHS waiver program: Big Labor.

The Service Employees Benefit Fund, which insures a total of 12,000 SEIU health care workers in upstate New York, secured its Obamacare exemption in October. The Local 25 SEIU Welfare Fund in Chicago also nabbed a waiver for 31,000 of its enrollees. SEIU, of course, was one of Obamacare's loudest and biggest spending proponents. The waivers come on top of the massive sweetheart deal that SEIU and other unions cut with the Obama administration to exempt them from the health care mandate's onerous "Cadillac tax" on high-cost health care plans until 2018. _

Other unions who won protection from Obamacare:

-- United Food and Commercial Workers Allied Trade Health and Welfare Trust Fund

-- International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union No. 915

-- Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund

-- Employees Security Fund

-- Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund

-- United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227

-- United Food and Commercial Workers Local 455 (Maximus)

-- United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1262

-- Musicians Health Fund Local 802

-- Hospitality Benefit Fund Local 17

-- Transport Workers Union

-- United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund

-- International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (AFL-CIO)

-- Plus two organizations that appear to be chapters of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA)

Several of these labor organizations did not respond to requests for comment about their waivers. But Jay Blumenthal, financial vice president of the Local 802 Musicians Health Fund in New York, did try to explain: "We got grandfathered in" (his description for getting a pass) because "things were moving so fast" and "we need time now to prepare for the law." In other words: Policy cram downs first, political fixes later. A supporter of Obamacare, Blumenthal told me he "sees no irony," in unions supporting the very health care "reform" from which they are now seeking relief.

Chris Rodriguez, director of human resources at Fowler Packing Company in California's San Joaquin Valley, sees things a little differently. Fowler pursued an HHS waiver because their low-wage agricultural workers would have lost the basic coverage his company has voluntarily offered for years. "We take care of our employees, and we warned (health care officials that) if they imposed this, large numbers of workers would lose access to affordable coverage," he told me. Rodriguez said he's grateful the firm won a waiver, but he did not lose sight of the fact that the very policies passed to increase health insurance access are having the opposite effect: "That's our government at work."

Indeed, some prominent government officials who lobbied hardest for Obamacare are now also joining waiver-mania -- including liberal Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been pushing for an individual mandate exemption for his state of Oregon, and Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is pushing to waive Obamacare's burdensome 1099 reporting requirements of small businesses.

Fearful of retribution by HHS Secretary and chief inquisitor Kathleen Sebelius, who has threatened companies speaking out about Obamacare's perverse consequences, many business owners who obtained waivers refused to talk on the record. One said tersely: "We did what we had to do to survive."

A new House GOP majority now has the chance to protect the rest of America from this regulatory monstrosity.

We want out.


Well I do.


How about you?

A Bird in the Hand ..............

Obama remains fixated by George W. Bush. For nearly two years, Obama and his team have prefaced their explanations for the tough economy, tough finances and tough situations abroad with a "Bush did it" chorus. Apparently, they believed that most of our problems, here and there, either started with George W. Bush, or at least would not transcend him.

At first, it was an easy enough habit to fall into. Things were not in great shape in January 2009 when Obama took over. More importantly, Obama started out with a nearly 70 percent approval rating. In contrast, Bush, like the punching bag Harry Truman, left office with an approval rating in the low 30s.

Obama's serial fixation with his former predecessor made little sense when he first took office -- and has now become a disastrous misreading of political realities.

Recent polls reflect that Bush and Obama are now just about even in popularity at this stage in their first terms.  Obama's supporters in the House have suffered the worst Democratic shellacking since 1938. The president got out of Washington on a foreign tour immediately after the election -- only to be cold-shouldered by fair-weather foreign leaders who sensed weakness. Bush, in contrast, is basking in endless media exposure as he expounds on his best-selling memoir -- appearing above the partisan fray, past and present.

Voters two years ago elected Obama for a variety of reasons -- from unhappiness with Bush and Iraq to the landmark novelty of seeing our first African-American president.

Or let me put it another way.

You, the ones that did, voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not racist. Who will you choose in 2012 to prove you’re not dumb?

The financial meltdown of September 2008 ended for good John McCain's small lead in the polls. That panic also reminded voters of their unease with the Bush deficits and his expansion of government.

Unfortunately, Obama misread all that, and ended up trumping many of the things that Bush did to alienate voters.

Deficits of $500 billion soared to $1.4 trillion ones. Vast but unfunded Bush programs like Medicare prescription drug benefits and No Child Left Behind soon were overshadowed by even bigger ones like ObamaCare. An initial Bush bailout evolved into a gargantuan stimulus and multifaceted takeovers.

The result, fairly or not, was that Bush's financial felonies began looking like misdemeanors in comparison. Tea Party voters saw the Obama medicine as worse than the original Bush disease.

There was the same obsession with, but misreading of, Bush in foreign affairs. The public was turned off by the violence and costs in Iraq -- but otherwise not especially concerned about Bush's largely traditional foreign policy or his anti-terrorism protocols. Too bad a Bush-obsessed Obama was again blind to that simple fact. So when Iraq became largely quiet as Obama entered office, the entire "Bush did it" refrain was rendered obsolete and should have been dropped.

The antiwar Obama had campaigned on closing Guantanamo, ending tribunals and renditions, and critiquing the Patriot Act and Predator drone attacks. But once Iraq was taken out of the equation, Obama quickly discovered that these old bogeymen Bush policies were both useful and relatively popular. So he was forced to keep or expand them. Obama's flip-flop only confused Americans: Why, in hypocritical fashion, was he now embracing the Bush legacy that he used to constantly demonize?

When Obama tried to chart a new and much-heralded "reset-button" foreign policy in loud opposition to Bush's, the irony continued. Most Americans did not want to try the accused architect of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a civilian court, replete with legal gymnastics. They did not think that announcing artificial deadlines for troop withdrawals in wartime was an especially bright idea.

They also did not expect that the much-heralded antidote to Bush's swagger and "Dead or Alive" Texanisms would include bowing to Saudi princes and Chinese dictators, apologizing abroad for America's purported sins, or spreading mythologies about the Islamic world's contribution to the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Just because Bush turned off Europe over Iraq did not mean that an "I'm not Bush" Obama could not turn it off even more by printing billions of dollars, urging European countries to borrow more in reckless American style, and downplaying old alliances with everyone from Britain to Poland.

So here is a polite suggestion for Obama: After nearly two years of governance, free up your own policies to either succeed or fail on their own merits without chaining them to the Bush past. In a word: Let go of a now-smiling and relatively rehabilitated Bush -- before such a fixation consumes you and your presidency.

I don’t think he’ll listen to me. At least I hope not.

Grope or Gripe?

After the 9/11 attacks, when 19 Muslim terrorists -- 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon, 14 with "al" in their names -- took over commercial aircraft with box-cutters, the government banned sharp objects from planes.
 
Airport security began confiscating little old ladies' knitting needles and breaking the mouse-sized nail files off of passengers' nail clippers. Surprisingly, no decrease in the number of hijacking attempts by little old ladies and manicurists was noted.
 
After another Muslim terrorist, Richard Reid, AKA Tariq Raja, AKA Abdel Rahim, AKA Abdul Raheem, AKA Abu Ibrahim, AKA Sammy Cohen (which was only his eHarmony alias), tried to blow up a commercial aircraft with explosive-laden sneakers, the government prohibited more than 3 ounces of liquid from being carried on airplanes.

All passengers were required to take off their shoes for special security screening, which did not thwart a single terrorist attack, but made airport security checkpoints a lot smellier.
 
After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports.
 
The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent.
 
After explosives were inserted in two ink cartridges and placed on a plane headed to the United States from the Muslim nation of Yemen, the government banned printer cartridges from all domestic flights, resulting in no improvement in airport security, while requiring ink cartridges who traveled to take Amtrak.
 
So when the next Muslim terrorist, probably named Abdul Ahmed al Something or other, places explosives in his anal cavity, what is the government going to require then? (If you're looking for a good investment opportunity, might I suggest rubber gloves?)
 
Last year, a Muslim attempting to murder Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia blew himself up with a bomb stuck up his anus. Fortunately, this didn't happen near an airport, or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would now be requiring full body cavity searches to fly.
 
You can't stop a terrorist attack by searching for the explosives any more than you can stop crime by taking away everyone's guns.
 
In the 1970s, liberal ideas on crime swept the country. Gun owners were treated like criminals while actual criminals were coddled and released. If only we treated criminals with dignity and respect and showed them the system was fair, liberals told us, criminals would reward us with good behavior.
 
As is now well known, crime exploded in the '70s. It took decades of conservative law-and-order policies to get crime back to near-1950s levels.
 
It's similarly pointless to treat all Americans as if they're potential terrorists while trying to find and confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon. We can't search all passengers for explosives because Muslims stick explosives up their anuses. (Talk about jobs Americans just won't do.)
 
You have to search for the terrorists.
 
Fortunately, that's the one advantage we have in this war. In a lucky stroke, all the terrorists are swarthy, foreign-born, Muslim males.
 
This would give us a major leg up -- if only the country weren't insane.
 
Is there any question that we'd be looking for Swedes if the 9/11 terrorists, the shoe bomber, the diaper bomber and the printer cartridge bomber had all been Swedish? If the Irish Republican Army were bombing our planes, wouldn't we be looking for people with Irish surnames and an Irish appearance whatever that is.

Only because the terrorists are Muslims do we pretend not to notice who keeps trying to blow up our planes.
 
It would be harder to find Swedes or Irish boarding commercial airliners in the U.S. than Muslims. Swarthy foreigners stand out like a sore thumb in an airport. The American domestic flying population is remarkably homogenous. An airport is not a Sear’s department store.
 
Only about a third of all Americans flew even once in the last year, and only 7 percent took more than four round trips. The majority of airline passengers are middle-aged, middle-class, white businessmen with about a million frequent flier miles. I'd wager that more than 90 percent of domestic air travelers were born in the U.S.
 
If the government did nothing more than have a five-minute conversation with the one passenger per flight born outside the U.S., you'd need 90 percent fewer Transportation Security Administration agents and airlines would be far safer than they are now.
 
Instead, Napolitano just keeps ordering more invasive searches of all passengers, without exception -- except members of Congress and government officials, who get VIP treatment, so they never know what she's doing to the rest of us.
 
Two weeks ago, Napolitano ordered TSA agents to start groping women's breasts and all passengers' genitalia -- children, nuns and rape victims, everyone except government officials and members of Congress. (This is weird because some might like it.)
 
"Please have your genitalia out and ready to be fondled when you approach the security checkpoint."
 
This is the punishment for refusing the nude body scan for passengers who don't want to appear nude on live video or are worried about the skin cancer risk of the machines -- risks acknowledged by the very Johns Hopkins study touted by the government.
 
It is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to keep the government as far away from airport security as possible, and not only because Janet Napolitano did her graduate work in North Korea.

Any further comment that I could make would not be complete without talking about the possible exemption of Muslim women from the TSA’s indignities. 

Think it can’t happen?

I regret that I don’t have the link but there is a YouTube video out there of a group of Muslims going through security in Toronto. Canada’s version of the TSA demanded the woman reveal the face part of her burkaa in order to match her visage to her ID. Well the men with her formed a corral in the way that adult elephants protect their calves and the Canadian security caved. 

She/He/It could have been anybody.

Finally, I’d feel better about the whole mess if someone could point me at one, just one, instance where the TSA had intercepted and prevented just one attack.

Well?




A Codicil - just in case.


Some of the above post was sent to me but without attribution. Then another reader said that Ann Coulter was responsible. I don't know if this is the case or not but, as I said, just in case ........ 

Does the Left Hand know what the Left Hand is doing?

Obama's Asian trip was not quite as big a shellacking as the mid-term elections earlier this month, but it wasn't far behind. The rose petals the Obama White House thought would be strewn in his path at every step have gotten brown and crinkly over the past 18 months.

After a boffo start in India, largely because Obama promised them something he won't be able to deliver on - a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council - and a great big Welcome Home" hug in Indonesia, things went sour in a hurry.

According to the Associated Press:

"Obama failed to achieve a free-trade deal with Korea that was to have been the biggest trophy of his trip, and instead of banding with America against China's currency manipulation, several countries aligned themselves against the U.S."

Let's take that free trade business first. When a President meets with another head of state to sign an agreement on whatever, the general rule is the staffs hammer out agreements on all the major issues, then leave one thing - should this be a comma or a semicolon - to the principals so they can pretend they had a hand in it.

But, Obama went to South Korea without an agreement on cars and beef imports, found that he couldn't charm his way into a deal, and so had to slink away from the negotiating table having promised a Free Trade Agreement which would have added 70,000 U.S. jobs.

The only other time in my memory that a President went to sign a deal and left without making one was President Ronald Reagan's trip to Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986 to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was well known that there was no pre-agreement before they met in Iceland.

But the failed deal in Seoul was not to eliminate nuclear arsenals among the superpowers - but to be able to import and export SUVs and cows.

The President's bad week wasn't over yet. He had hoped to charm the members of the G-20 meeting into wagging their diplomatic fingers in the face of the Chinese who have been systematically tinkering with the value of their currency, the Yuan, to make its exports cheaper against the Euro and the USD.

Unfortunately for Obama, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke had just announced the U.S. central bank would inject into the U.S. economy $600 billion. The Germans huffed, ""What the U.S. accuses China of doing, the U.S.A. is doing by different means."

Bernanke said, in effect, he is the central banker of the United States; not the central banker of the rest of the world and he would do what was in the best interests of the U.S.

Now that must surely make you feel better.


Except for this nugget. When Obama was sworn into his office, gold was selling for about $850 per ounce. As of now, it's about $1400; not because the amount of gold in the world has decreased but simply because it takes more dollars to buy it.


Now, you really should feel better.

Food for Thought!

Do you remember that when you were in school just about the greatest sin was plagiarism? Then, after you graduated and entered the workplace, that very same sin became the norm.

Well, whenever I read something as powerful as the text that follows, no matter how tempting it is, I resist the temptation to claim it as mine own but it deserves as wide an audience as possible and so I reproduce it here.

Even these excerpts are long but the speech given at Hillsdale College a few months ago by Congressman Mike Pence from Indiana entitled "The Presidency and the Constitution" is well worth the read and it should certainly make you think.

“The presidency is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements — from the outset and by definition — impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States

Isn’t it amazing, given the great and momentous nature of the office, that those who seek it seldom pause to consider what they are seeking? Rather, unconstrained by principle or reflection, there is a mad rush toward something that, once its powers are seized, the new president can wield as an instrument with which to transform the nation and the people according to his highest aspirations.

But, other than in a crisis of the house divided, the presidency is neither fit nor intended to be such an instrument. When it is made that, the country sustains a wound, and cries out justly and indignantly. And what the nation says — the theme of this address… What it says, informed by its long history, impelled by the laws of nature and nature’s God… What it says quite naturally and rightly, if not always gracefully, is that we as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded. It says that the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution and impassioned by the Declaration of Independence.

The presidency must adhere to its definition as expressed in the Constitution, and to conduct defined over time and by tradition. While the powers of the office have enlarged, along with those of the legislature and the judiciary, the framework of the government was intended to restrict abuses common to classical empires and to the regal states of the 18th century.

Without proper adherence to the role contemplated in the Constitution for the presidency, the checks and balances in the constitutional plan become weakened. This has been most obvious in recent years when the three branches of government have been subject to the tutelage of a single party. Under either party, presidents have often forgotten that they are intended to restrain the Congress at times, and that the Congress is independent of their desires. And thus fused in unholy unity, the political class has raged forward in a drunken expansion of powers and prerogatives, mistakenly assuming that to exercise power is by default to do good.

Even the simplest among us knows that this is not so. Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh. Therefore, those who are entrusted with it must educate themselves in self-restraint. A republic — if you can keep it — is about limitation, and for good reason, because we are mortal and our actions are imperfect.

The tragedy of presidential decision is that even with the best choice, some, perhaps many, will be left behind, and some, perhaps many, may die. Because of this, a true statesman lives continuously with what Churchill called “stress of soul.” He may give to Paul, but only because he robs Peter. And that is why you must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness. For all greatness is tempered by mortality, every soul is equal, and distinctions among men cannot be owned; they are on loan from God, who takes them back and evens accounts at the end.

It is a tragedy indeed that new generations taking office attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it. In the judiciary this has seldom been better expressed than by Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dictum that, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” In the Congress, it presents itself in massive legislation, acts and codes thousands of pages long and so monstrously over-complicated that no human being can read through them in a lifetime — much less understand them, much less apply them justly to a people that increasingly feel like they are no longer being asked, they are being told. Our nation finds itself in the position of a dog whose duty it is not to ask why, because the “why” is too elevated for his nature, but simply to obey.

America is not a dog, and does not require a “because-I-said-so” jurisprudence to which it is then commanded to catch up, or legislators who knit laws of such insulting complexity that they are heavier than chains; or a president who acts like, speaks like, and is received as a king. The presidency has run off the rails. It begs a new clarity, a new discipline, and a new president.

The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us, we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing…

The modern presidency has drifted far from the great strength and illumination of its source: the Constitution as given life by the luminous and passionate Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document ever written. The Constitution, terse, sober, and specific, does not, except by implication, address the president’s demeanor, but this we can read in the best qualities of the founding generation, which we would do well to imitate. In the Capitol Rotunda are heroic paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the victory at Saratoga, the victory at Yorktown, and, something seldom seen in history: a general, the leader of an armed rebellion, resigning his commission and surrendering his army to a new democracy. Upon hearing from Benjamin West that George Washington, having won the war and been urged by some to use the army to make himself king, would instead return to his farm, George III said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” He did, and he was.

To aspire to such virtue and self-restraint would in a sense be difficult, but in another sense it should be easy — difficult because it would be demanding and ideal, and easy because it is the right thing to do and the rewards are immediately self-evident.

A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it. Other than in a crisis of morality, decency, and existence, such as the Civil War, if he should want to hurry along the Constitution to fit his own notions or designs, he should do so by amendment rather than adjustment, for if he joins the powers of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.

Is the Constitution a fluctuating and inconstant document, a collection of suggestions the purpose of which is to stimulate debate in a future to which the Founders were necessarily blind? Progressives tell us that even the Framers themselves could not reach agreement in its regard. But they did agree upon it. And they wrote it down. And they signed it. And they lived by it. Its words are unchanging and unchangeable except — as planned — by careful amendment. There is no instruction to the president to override the law and, like Justice Marshall, let it catch up to his superior conception. Why is this good? It is good because the sun will burn out, the Ohio River will flow backwards, and the cow will jump over the moon 10,000 times before any modern president’s conception is superior to that of the Founders of this nation.

Would it be such a great surprise that a good part of the political strife of our times is because one president after another, rather than keeping faith to it, argues with the document he is supposed to live by? This discontent will only be calmed by returning the presidency to the great first principles. The president should regard the Constitution and the Declaration like an obsessed lover. They should be on his mind all the time, the prism through which the light of all questions of governance passes. Though we have — sometimes gradually, sometimes radically — moved away from this, we can move back to it. And who better than the president to restore this wholesome devotion…?

Many great generations are gone, but I see them in my mind’s eye, and by the character and memory of their existence they forbid us to despair of the republic. I see them crossing the prairies in the sun and wind. I see their faces looking out from steel mills and coal mines, and immigrant ships crawling into the harbors at dawn. I see them at war, at work and at peace. I see them, long departed, looking into the camera, with hopeful and sad eyes. And I see them embracing their children … who became us. They are our family and our blood, and we cannot desert them. In spirit, all of them come down to all of us, in a connection that, out of love, we cannot betray.

They are silent now and forever, but from the eternal silence of every patriot grave there is yet an echo that says, ‘It is not too late, keep faith with us, keep faith with God, and do not, do not ever despair of the republic.’”

God Bless America