gdcritter

MLK Would Not Be Amused

2012-01-16T16:55:00.003-07:00

Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to President Barack Obama, went to Atlanta yesterday to make a "political speech in support of her boss (Barack Obama) and congressional Democrats". She did this on the day before the holiday honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and she made this campaign speech from the pulpit of Martin Luther King's own church — the Ebenezer Baptist Church. In that speech,

"Teachers, and firefighters, and policemen, whose jobs are now in jeopardy because congress, well let me be specific, because the Republicans in congress ..."
Before she could finish her sentence, people in the congregation were laughing, and applauding.

This should produce some comment, particularly since "it would have thrown the left into meltdown mode if done by a Republican", especially since "a voter registration drive was held at the church after the service." Democrats have loudly objected to Republicans even appearing at a church, much less openly politicking and campaigning.

Beyond that, Ms Jarrett and her boss and fellow travelers should be reminded of a few things, such as:

Martin Luther King was a Republican, just like Abraham Lincoln.
The majority of Republicans voted for civil rights legislation in the 1960, while the majority of Democrats voted against it.
It was the Republicans who fought for anti-lynching laws, which were opposed and blocked by the Democrats.
The Ku Klux Klan was was a wing of the Democratic Party. KKK members and leaders served in Congress, all as Democrats.

Ms Jarrett's Obama campaign speech looks like political deception at its finest.

Obama's "Recess" Appointments

2012-01-11T23:46:00.004-07:00

President Barack Obama has now done something truly historic — he has now directly violated the constitution — he quite deliberately made "recess appointments" while the Congress was not in recess. He put Richard Cordray in place as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, knowing the Senate won't confirm him since Obama had already named him to that post some time ago through a legitimate process, and Democrats and Republicans in the Senate has made clear he won't be confirmed. He also put three union functionaries on the National Labor Relations Board, people he hadn't even bothered to nominate legitimately.

Obama justifies his actions with the transparently phony claim that "When Congress refuses to act, and as a result hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them."

In other words, Obama is really saying
And the fact of the matter is he can't, either legally or legitimately, do what he has done.

It looks like Obama just wants to create a huge fight with Congress. Certainly he must realize his huge slap in the face of the Democratic Party controlled Senate insures he won't get any cooperation from them. You can't ask someone for favors right after you've kicked him in the privates. And I'm sure Obama felt freer to take these actions because Congress had already passed the omnibus spending bill for the year. That means they can't just refuse to fund the offending agencies.

Naturally, Obama's big supporters (like Harry Reid & Nancy Pelosi — or is that Harry Pelosi & Nancy Reid) made excuses for his blatantly and explicitly unconstitutional actions. As they will for anything he does.

Personally, I don't think people in this country are as backward and ignorant as President Obama and his Chicago political machine believe they/we are. I think the much more likely poll truth will be this:
... and not just for Republicans — he's already had that effect on this Democrat.

More comments here.

Just remember — every dictator has said (and may have talked himself into believing) his actions were for the good of his country.

New Mexico State Question: Red or Green?

2012-01-09T20:04:00.003-07:00

Yes, New Mexico has an official state question. The New Mexico State Question really is “red or green?”

To me, it seems the best answer to the question is “Yes!” But others may differ. And I must admit that, while I knew and enjoyed red chile when I was growing up in Tucson, I hadn't run across green chile there. Once I got to Albuquerque, though, I very quickly became addicted to green chile.

But I still enjoy both red and green. Here are some of my personal preferences. In enchiladas, it should be red. With carne adovada, also red. On hamburgers, it's got to be green. In and on burritos, green. In and on a chile omelet, definitely green. Huevos rancheros, green — except at Teofilo's 'cause their red chile is so rich.

And I nearly always prefer chile to jalapeños — I want flavor, not just heat.

New Mexico Centennial

2012-01-06T08:33:00.003-07:00

Let's party!!

All year!!

It's the New Mexico centennial! On this date, January 6, in 1912, at about 11:35 a.m. New Mexico time, President William Howard Taft signed the proclamation and New Mexico became a state.

That's something to celebrate!

Celebrate with us! Answer the State Question: red or green?

Navajo Code Talkers

2012-01-02T13:34:00.005-07:00

The Navajo code talkers worked in the US Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Their work remained classified for decades after the war. The code talkers were told not to discuss the important service they had provided, and they honored that commitment. Even their families didn't know what they had really done in the war.

Fortunately, the code talkers' work is no longer classified. The Navajo code talkers have an official web site. And some of the World War II code talkers are still alive — including just one of the "original 29" who created the code used with their native language. They made it a code within a code that even other Navajos couldn't decipher. They used their code and language to transmit military information in real time, in the one way that was never broken by the Japanese enemy. Overall, during World War II, the Marine Corps trained a total of 375-420 Navajo recruits to work as code talkers.

The Navajo code talkers are slowly becoming better known. And they are helping to preserve this important part of history, contributing to several books on the subject. Among these, the sole remaining "original 29" code talker is co-author of one book, while men from the second group contributed to another.

We met two of the code talkers — two of the second group of code talkers, the first group after the original 29 — who used the code in the Marine Corps' island-hopping campaign across the Pacific Ocean. They are among the men who contributed to the code talker memoir. These two men, and their code talker compatriots, are working to fund tribal educational endowments.

Kee Etsicitty and Jack Jones at a book signing
in Albuquerque, New Mexico, December 2011

Yes, we were proud to buy a copy of their book, and were honored to be able to have them sign it.

So many years later, these men still serve.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T18:12:00.003-07:00

Thanks to a good friend half a world away.

Arrogance

2011-12-30T22:07:00.003-07:00

No comment is possible.

Obama Actions on Jobs

2011-12-30T22:02:00.003-07:00

President Barack Obama is "focused like a laser" on job creation, according to his supporters. So what has this focus accoumplshed?

In other words, not much.

If these are the results of his focus on jobs, can we please get him to focus on something else? Anything else? Please?

The Age of the Internet Age

2011-12-27T11:13:00.002-07:00

From American Digest

This is an absolute truth. I also own a MITS-Altair 8800B computer. And I still have some programs stored on IBM punch cards, which go back still further.

That means that either

I'm older than I feel, or
The computer age — much less the internet age — isn't all that old.

A Modern Christmas Parable

2011-12-25T09:59:00.001-07:00

I heard Paul Harvey tell this story on the radio at Christmas time a few years ago. I liked it then, and it's only grown on me since. But my attempts to find a copy of the story were unsuccessful — until earlier this year, when I found a similar (but different) story. That enabled me to find the one I remembered, at last. It's still worth sharing.

Paul Harvey: A Modern Parable
As read on the radio

Unable to trace its proper parentage, I have designated this as my Christmas story of "The Man and the Birds." You know the Christmas story, the God born a man in a manger, and all that escapes some moderns — mostly, I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions, and this one's so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable:

Now, the man to whom I'm going to introduce you was not a Scrooge; he was a kind, descent, mostly good man, generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn't believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmastime. It just didn't make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn't swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man.

"I'm truly sorry to distress you," he told his wife, "but I'm not going with you to church this Christmas Eve." He said he'd feel like a hypocrite, that he'd much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed, and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier, and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound, then another, and then another, sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window; but when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They'd been caught in the storm, and in a desperate search for shelter had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.

Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in, so he hurried back to the house, fetched breadcrumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted, wide-opened doorway of the stable. But to his dismay the birds ignored the breadcrumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them; he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me, that I'm not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow; they would not be led or shooed, because they feared him.

If only I could be a bird, he thought to himself, and mingle with them and speak their language! Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm . . . to the safe warm barn . . . but I would have to be one of them, so they could see and hear and understand. At that moment, the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sound of the wind, and he stood there listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. . . . And he sank to his knees in the snow.

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas!

Image thanks to ZIP

An AT&T Phishing Expedition

2011-12-23T14:19:00.006-07:00

A friend of mine once had his e-mail through a (now long-defunct) organization called flash.net (How many of you even knew such an outfit existed!?) He also had his web hosting through them. The e-mail address continued to be active even as flash.net was bought out by others including Prodigy and (most recently, even though that was years ago) AT&T.

This year, AT&T decided it didn't want to support these "legacy" accounts any more. They notified everyone their web hosting support was going to end. With plenty of warning, my friend moved his web hosting to another organization — after verifying that the e-mail account (which had long since been passed to yahoo) would be unaffected.

Then, this week, he received a very suspicious e-mail, reproduced here:

---LAST WARNING---
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 12:18 PM
From: "AT&T Mail Service" <bardgym@bellsouth.net>
This sender is DomainKeys verified
To: undisclosed-recipients




Due to the congestion in all flash users and removal
of all unused flash Accounts, flash .net would be
shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to
confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login
Information below after clicking the reply button,
              
* User name:

* Password:
                 
* Date of Birth:
                             
* Country Or Territory:

After following the instructions in the sheet, your
account will not be interrupted and will continue as
normal. Thanks for your attention to this request.
We apologize for any inconveniences.

Warning!!!: Account owner that refuses to update
his/her account after three days of receiving this
warning stands the risk of losing his or her account
permanently.

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3768 -
Release Date: 07/16/11 06:56:00

Given the level of attention AT&T had previously given to former flash.net users, he figured they might not be aware of these messages. He figured he ought to tell them about what he'd received. He went to the att.com pages and found where a sub-page said to report security concerns. He forwarded the suspicious message to them at the e-mail address identified there. His message said:

Thought you should know about this.
(Just in case you didn't already.)

The message bounced. He checked some more and, figuring it was just a glitch, re-sent it like this:

Thought you should know about this.  (Just in case you didn't already.)

secure@att.com is the address identified to use for this purpose on the
web page http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=19318

Once again, his message bounced. Once again, he got a message like this:

Failure Notice
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 4:55 PM
From: "MAILER-DAEMON@yahoo.com" 
This sender is DomainKeys verified

Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message to the
following address.

<secure@att.com>: Remote host said: 553 information.
(#5.7.1) [BODY]

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

I'm not sure what this means. But if the e-mail address AT&T advertises for reporting security issues doesn't work, that seems to say AT&T doesn't really want to know about them.

Getting Older Sneaks Up On You

2011-12-23T10:15:00.002-07:00

From American Digest

This would be funnier if it weren't so true.

The Day World War II Began for the U.S.

2011-12-07T15:06:00.002-07:00

Seventy years ago today, the United States Pacific fleet was attacked by Japanese naval aircraft. Twenty ships were damaged or destroyed, including four battleships sunk or destroyed.

Seventy years later, the USS Arizona still weeps.

There is an interesting sidelight to the attack and the sinking of the Arizona. In battle, the Japanese navy used torpedoes and naval artillery to sink enemy ships. They apparently did not have penetrators — armor piercing bombs — available for use. In the Pearl Harbor attack, the primary objective was to sink all the U.S. battleships and aircraft carriers — or as many of them as they could. They would want to use their bombers in that effort as well as their torpedo planes. To do that, they made their own penetrating bombs, adapting 16" artillery shells for that purpose. It was one of these improvised bombs that destroyed the Arizona and turned it into a cemetery.

Bosque Farms Centenarian Passes

2011-11-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

Just last month, we celebrated Erlinda Garley Moya's 100th birthday. Tomorrow we have her funeral Mass.

Bosque Farms and Peralta have lost a strong lady. No — lost isn't the right word. As Deacon Eddie said at Mrs. Moya's Rosary this evening, we haven't lost her because we know where she is.

But she has left us — after 100 years, 1 month, and 2 days of a very full life. She will be missed.

How to Save on Taxes

2011-11-19T00:25:00.000-07:00

Become an illegal alien!

Obama Actions on Jobs

2011-11-19T00:20:00.003-07:00

President Barack Obama is "focused like a laser" on job creation, according to his supporters. So what has this focus accoumplshed?

Obama decided to delay (at least) the Keystone XL pipeline that would have brought Canadian oil to the US and created at least 20,000 jobs.
Obama's Agriculture Department has decided to delay (at least) drilling in Ohio's Utica shale that would have created more than 200,000 jobs.
Obama's Interior Department continues to stall deepwater drilling for oil, despite supposedly having lifted the moratorium (ban) it imposed, thus blocking restoration of the Gulf region's jobs and oil production.
"The President’s plan is to simply say ‘no’ to new energy production," House Natural Resources Committee chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash, said to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar during a Congressional hearing.

If these are the results of his focus on jobs, can we please get him to focus on something else? Anything else? Please?

Both Sides of His Mouth

2011-11-18T23:13:00.003-07:00

A prime example from the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto:

Two Former Enron Advisers in One!
• "There's obviously a relationship between tax rates and revenue. That relationship is not, however, one-for-one. In general, doubling the excise tax rate on a good or service won't double the amount of revenue collected, because the tax increase will reduce the quantity of the good or service transacted. And the relationship between the level of the tax and the amount of revenue collected may not even be positive: in some cases raising the tax rate actually reduces the amount of revenue the government collects."--from "Economics," by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman and Robin Wells (Mrs. Krugman), second edition, 2009
• "In Democrat-world, up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue. . . . But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy."--Krugman, New York Times, Nov. 18, 2011

Clearly, President Barack Obama and his supporters believe the second Paul Krugman, and not the first. But it was the first that won the economics prizes.

Veterans Day, 2011

2011-11-11T09:43:00.002-07:00

In 2007, Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote an open letter of thanks to America's veterans that is a must read — especially today. Here's an excerpt:

And it is also true, that unless one has been in battle, one does not truly understand the depth of your passion for liberty. To families that have borne no soldiers, you are an enigma. To cowards, you are a shaming presence, a constant reminder of their weakness. To your parents, you represent both the mountaintop of pride, and the deepest valley of concern that mothers and fathers can ever know. And to most of us ordinary citizens, you are the unseen, under-appreciated protectors of all that we hold dear.

Military men and women really are different. Like their brothers and sisters in fields such as firefighting and law enforcement, they are the ones who run toward the fire and toward the firefight, not away. They are the sheepdogs, the ones who protect the sheep from the wolves — but whose presence makes the sheep uncomfortable. They're not all the same; they come in all types. But they share that difference. Sometimes you can see it in their eyes. Sometimes you can see the difference without being able to see who they are.

Even when you're not be able see the difference, the difference is still there. But whether you see the difference or not, whether you are aware of them or not, they are the ones who are there to be a deterrent — and, if necessary, a force for protection and rescue. They are the men and women who have secured and preserved our freedom. To them, along with Kyle-Anne Shiver, I say

You serve and fight for the greatest Nation in the history of civilization. There has never been a grievous wrong that good Americans have not sought to rectify. There has never been a just cause on which America has turned her back for long. You, our soldiers, have been and continue to be, the greatest force for freedom and human rights ever gathered. You have raised our flag around the world, not for domination, but to bring greater liberty and a better way of life. You are the reason America remains a beacon of hope to the entire world.

To all our veterans, and to all who serve, THANK YOU!

Supercommittee Democrats' Bait & Switch

2011-11-10T21:49:00.004-07:00

There had supposedly been negotiations between the Democrats and the Republicans on the "supercommittee". The Republicans had made what appeared to be a good offer. The Democrats "had sounded amenable to the possible deal, but their position suddenly hardened after going back to their caucus." Translation: They got their orders, from whoever, and followed them.

A little more detail:

Sen. Pat Toomey had worked out a framework that he considered pro-growth and a reasonable first step toward fiscal restraint, while making a major concession to Democrats on revenue in the interests of getting a deal. Max Baucus especially had sounded open to it and a sub-group of the supercommittee had been discussing it seriously — but no more.

Apparently, the Democrats on the committee were ordered to "dump" the agreement.

Why do I say that? The Democrats claimed they wanted a "balanced" approach, one that included revenue increases as well as spending cuts. Their intransigence was there would be no deal at all without revenue increases. To get a deal, the Republicans gave the Democrats what they said they wanted. Revenue increases — half a trillion dollars over the ten year period. But, from the Democrats' perspective, there was one thing wrong: The Republican plan had revenue increases, but not tax rate increases, and what the Democrats really want is tax rate increases.

In short, the Republicans gave the Democrats what the Democrats said they wanted, but the Democrats lied.

I also saw on TV an analyst saying (approcimately)

The Democrats have always regarded the "supercommittee" as a scam — a means of conning the Republicans into accepting major tax increases.

We can only hope the Democrats don't get what they want.

UPDATE: Here's further confirmation. Once again, as in past years, their proposed "deal" is $1 in spending cuts for $1 in tax increases. Trouble is, the tax increases always take effect and the spending cuts always prove to be mirages.

All the supercommittee Democrats want is huge tax increases.

The "Christmas Tree Tax"

2011-11-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

The Obama Administration announced the imposition of a new fee on the sale of every Christmas tree in the nation. The new levy was first announced in the Federal Register yesterday. It is being imposed to fund a public relations campaign to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States.”

Opponents popped up immediately. One opponent said “The economy is barely growing and nine percent of the American people have no jobs. Is a new tax on Christmas trees the best President Obama can do? And, by the way, the American Christmas tree has a great image that doesn’t need any help from the government.”

But the Administration is adamant that the new levy is not a tax — it is a fee. The White House has sent out its spokesmen to push this assertion. In one instance, White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told ABC News that “I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama Administration is not taxing Christmas trees. What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign, similar to how the dairy producers have created the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign.”

I guess it can't be a tax since it's being done by an executive department and not by Congressional legislation. But this White House statement is quite dishonest. If it were true, there would be no need for government involvement. And there would be no government involvement. If it were true, the industry groupd would implement the fee, and Christmas tree sellers — at worst — would have to choose between paying the fee or withdrawing from the organization. But this fee is mandatory. It is implemented by the government, to be used for projects managed by the government. And you can bet the first costs paid from the fee will be for the government bureaucrats to manage the program — in this case, the new federal Christmas Tree Promotion Board. That's not "an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself." Especially since a significant number of Christmas tree sellers don't want it and are pretty vocal about saying so.

The only bright spot in this story is that the White House has apparently wised up just a little. It has announced that implementation of the new tax/fee will be delayed, and its existence will be revisited. Since I'm feeling a bit cynical today, I'll guess that means they'll put it through at a time they think people won't notice till it's too late.

How the O-2s Really Got to Viet Nam

2011-11-06T16:44:00.005-07:00

It may not be new, but it's new to me.

Just a week or so ago, I was sent a link to a Thailand Aviation article on a Navy observation unit — VO-67 — that used P-2 Orion anti-submarine aircraft in Viet Nam for jungle surveillance. The aircraft were modified versions of the P2V-5F aircraft, redesigneted as OP-2E. The occasion for the article was the unit being awarded a Presidential Unit Citation forty years later.

In that article, it talked about the cooperation between the Navy surveillance aircraft and a unit of Air Force FACs (Forward Air Controllers) flying O-2A aircraft, a military version of the civilian Cessna Skymaster.

The FACs flew every day and night (mostly night) to identify the latest changes in anti-aircraft emplacements for use in the flight planning for the larger P2V-5F/OP-2E aircraft.

By happenstance, just a few days later, an old Air Force friend (and F-4 Phantom pilot) sent me a story about the O-2 and included his own observations on the aircraft. They make a good story, and it's good history.

Continue reading -->

The Scariest Thing I've Seen

2011-11-01T14:56:00.005-07:00

In line with the scary holiday just past, here is the absolutely scariest chart I have seen in months. No, years. Maybe decades.

It was bad enough after 2001. But the leaps beginning with the first Pelosi-Reid budget (2008) are really bad! This cannot continue!

Happy Halloween

2011-11-01T14:29:00.005-07:00

The above image shamelessly cribbed from Classical Values. I just couldn't resist.

[late, too ... penalty flag thrown]

The 1%-er

2011-10-23T22:26:00.003-06:00

Look at this

Is this more readable?

I am the 1%
Enterred the Army at 17
Worked through college with 3 jobs
Minimal loans - paid off in 4 years
Started companies, worked to the top of the ladder

Now, only 1% has served
Only THIS 1% never whines - we work, raise families,
Contribute to society EVERY single day.
And we defend your rights, too
Even if we would never agree with them

I am, a 1%-er

Bosque Farms Centenarian

2011-10-23T21:41:00.004-06:00

There was a big party in Bosque Farms, New Mexico, yesterday. It was a celebration of the 100^th birthday of Erlinda Garley Moya — born here in 1911, before New Mexico was a state. People came from all the surrounding towns, and then some, to help celebrate.

A program of family pictures showed pieces of Erlinda's life. And she was serenaded by an excellent guitar-playing singer.

There was a nice write-up about Mrs Moya in the La Vida section of the Valencia County News-Bulletin yesterday. Unfortunately, that article has not been made available online — so it's been replicated here.

Obama Endorses the "Occupy" Movement

2011-10-23T09:35:00.003-06:00

President Barack Obama has endorsed the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. He says "We're on the same side." He says the Occupiers are really just like the Tea Partiers.

Obama makes these statements despite the HUGE difference in behavior — and goals — between the two groups. And despite the fact that he ignored the Tea Parties when he wasn't insulting them and lying about them, while he endorsed the Occupiers. The Tea Parties leave their demonstration areas clean, while the occupiers trash the places they infest. The Tea Parties want smaller, less intrusive government while the occupiers see government as the answer to all their wishes. (Can you say lying hypocrite?) And yet, no matter how Obama wants to camouflage it, the occupiers are extreme leftists, far outside the mainstream of American politics.

Even so, Obame still endorses the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. . . just like his close friends the union bosses and Chicago Communist organizers, as well as Ir an, North Korea, and Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez. Plus, of course, the CAIR Islamist pressure group. And that doesn't even count the endorsements by the Nazis, Communists, fascists, socialists

. . . and all the other left-wing extremists.

And the media — still in thrall to Obama — "reported" on the occupiers and their message — after conspiring with them to help them craft it.

Given the folks that are have endorsed and supported them, I think I'd rather be in the opposition.

"Occupy" Movement Spawns a New Affiliate

2011-10-18T13:59:00.001-06:00

The Protesters of "Occupy Wall Street"

2011-10-16T19:47:00.005-06:00

"The mere existence of our demonstration will bring about major changes in our society." "The mere existence of our demonstration will bring down this society." A lot of the "Occupy Wall Street" and similar protesters seem to believe one or the other of these statements, at least according to the statements they gave to the press. They are unanimous about being against the "greedy rich millionaires" (mostly bankers) they blame for the country's economic problems — the "1%". That's why they are calling themselves the "99%".

The protesters have gotten a lot of support. Millionaires George Soros, Michael Moore, and AlGore are backing them. So are some union leaders and a number of politicians including Barack Obama and his top political adviser. In fact, when the owner of the park they're occupying wanted them to leave for a while so it could be cleaned, he got leaned on by a bunch of Democratic Party politicians to let the protesters stay.

It's not just the political Left that is supporting these protesters. The media have also been taking up their cause.

Contemplate this: The Occupy Wall Street folks drew more broadcast network stories in the first nine days of coverage (with 24 stories) than the Tea Party drew in the first nine months (with 19 stories). [emphasis added]

Their biases also show in the stories' contents, as captured by a cartoonist here.

To me, the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters seem to be mostly unemployed folks taing on protesting as their "job". Some of them are being paid to be protesters. And there are some interesting claims about the places the money for that is coming from. With all that, and with the additional things the protesters say they want, here is what I think is a more accurate view I found of the percentages that matter.

And yet they have the nerve to pretend they are the 99%!

Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta

2011-10-04T23:20:00.004-06:00

It's amazing! It's spectacular! It gets tens of thousands of people to willingly join long lines of traffic at 4 a.m. And this year is its 40^th appearance. It is — as it has been for forty years — the world's largest hot air balloon event. It's the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

Mrs Critter and I were there for the first day of this year's fiesta. We were there for the special commemoration of the life and impact of Sid Cutter who owned New Mexico's first hot air balloon, co-founded the Albuquerque Aerostat Ascension Association — still the world's largest community ballooning organization, and co-founded the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. We were there for the Mass Ascension, which launched 345 hot air balloons in one hour, and many more before and after that official hour. It was all amazing!

Want to see something of the Mass Ascension of the balloon fiesta's opening day? Look at the pictures here.

Voting & Driving in Saudi Arabia

2011-09-29T10:09:00.005-06:00

Saudi King Abdullah has issued an edict allowing women in Saudi Arabia to vote for the first time. Meanwhile, a woman was sentenced to 10 lashes for driving a relative to the hospital.

Interestingly, it turns out there is no actual law against women driving in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi courts sentence women for driving anyway.

This juxtaposition provides a clear example of cognitive dissonance. And it sets up others. Like this:

Best Debate Line

2011-09-23T10:55:00.004-06:00

p>The best line to come out of the GOP presidential candidates' debate last night came near its end. And it came from one of the debate's "also rans" — former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson when he said

My next door neighbor's two dogs have produced more shovel-ready jobs than this current Administration.

Maybe it's too bad Johnson has almost no chance in the presidential race. He certainly makes the race more interesting.

Update: I have now heard the audio clip for myself, and have corrected the line as Gary Johnson gave it.

The Media Got It Wrong

2011-09-20T15:48:00.000-06:00

The stock market took a dive yesterday morning. The headlines said it was because of worries over the financial situation in Europe.

BULL

The stock market's movement Monday morning was just a reflection of the futures market's movement Sunday afternoon. And that market took a dive immediately after the White House let out the information that President Barack Obama would be calling for $1.5 trillion in tax incraeses. I saw the graph showing that movement Sunday evening.

To put it as charitably as possible, the media got it wrong! The alternative choice is that the media deliberately lied to us.

Obama's "Stimulus Junior"

2011-09-18T14:27:00.006-06:00

President Barack Obama gave his speech and introduced his "jobs bill" ten days ago. Two things were said at that time about how the bill's expenditures would be paid for: (1) that the White House would release the revenue details in the next week, possibly at the same time as the bill itself, and (2) that the "supercommittee" formed under the debt ceiling bill would be tasked to find the money.

It appears he has actually done both.

At least one Congressman has read the text of the bill Obama sent to the Congress (but which has apparently not yet been introduced by anyone). He noted in an interview that a late section of the bill requires the debt ceiling "supercommittee" to increase its revenue/savings target by the cost of this bill. Elsewhere in the bill are the $467 billion in tax increases Obama has proposed to pay for the $447 billion estimated cost of his jobs/stimulus bill. (This, too.) Thus, the bill's cost is apparently "paid for" twice. Does the Administration intend more spending than it has acknowledged, and is using this opportunity to raise the extra money they want? Or is this a recognition that its proposal to pay for this bill with tax increases that have already been rejected — by Democrats and Republicans alike — is not serious?

There are other things wrong with this bill, too. Among these are:

Obama's bill creates at least two new federal bureaucracies, neither related (so far as I can determine) to job creation. This continues the Administration's pattern of using various bills and proposals to add to the bureaucracy and the national regulatory burden.
Most, if not all, of the spending proposals are repetitions and continuations of the same old tired things Obama had in his failed 2009 stimulus bill. They didn't work then, and they almost certainly won't work this time, either. That must be why Obama and his followers are calling this a jobs bill instead of a stimulus bill. The Obama people still want to pretend the stimulus worked, but they know the American people know that's bunk — which is why they won't use the stimulus term.
If spending on these proposals didn't help create jobs in 2009 and 2010, how are they going to create jobs now in 2011 at half the spending level?
Pretty much all the spending proposals are recycled from Obama's failed 2009 stimulus bill. So this is a "green" bill. The Administration pretends that "green" and recycling are good things, but I doubt that recycling failure is worthwhile.
Obama's bill raises taxes in a recession. Obama himself has said that's exactly the wrong thing to do. Obama and his people must know this. Therefore, either that statement or his current proposal is fraudulent and unserious.
Obama's bill raises taxes on the very people he's calling on to hire people. Increasing their costs is the surest way to insure they won't create any new jobs.
Obama's bill assumes, but apparently does not state, the expiration of the "Bush tax cuts" (required by the Democrats' previous intransigence). That expiration means a tax increase for everyone who pays taxes — as well as many who no longer do. That's a part of the tax increases Obama has been pushing for since before he became president. And that one alone — even without the additional tax increases Obama proposes — will be the largest tax increase in the history of the United States. Another massive job killer, again courtesy of Barack Obama.

Beyond all of this, there's something else we all should have noticed. Obama is proposing permanent taxes to pay for his extremely temporary stimulus. That is the bottom line. This is just another way — another attempt — for Obama to accomplish what he wants in raising taxes on "the rich". And as with Bill Clinton, it appears Obama's definition of "the rich" is "everyone with a job".

The original Obama stimulus was a total failure. His recycled "stimulus junior", if enacted, will be no better. At best.

Two final words on Obama's recycled "green" "stimulus junior":

Never Forget!

2011-09-11T09:48:00.002-06:00

“One of the lessons of 9-11 is that evil is real and so is courage.” That is part of what President George W Bush had to say yesterday — September 10, 2011 — at the dedication of the memorial to the heroes of Flight 93. He went on to say

At the moment America’s democracy was under attack, our citizens defied their captors by holding a vote. The choice they made would cost them their lives, and they knew it. Many passengers called their loved ones to say good-bye, then.
Many passengers called their loved ones to say goodbye then hung up to perform their final act. One said, “They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you.” Another said, “It’s up to us. I think we can do it.”
In one of the most stirring accounts, Todd Beamer, a father of two with a pregnant wife with a home in New Jersey, asked the air operator to join him in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Then he helped lead the charge with the words “Let’s roll.”
With their selfless act, the men and women who stormed the cockpit lived out the words, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” And with their brave decision, they launched the first counter offensive of the war on terror.

Three other flights had already been lost. The people on Flight 93 knew that, and refused to be the fourth. They took action. They counterattacked. They prevented the jihadists from accomplishing their mission.

Now it is ten years since their attack — the largest attack ever on the American homeland. Some may have forgotten, but I have not. We still have an implacable enemy, an army of jihadists striving to attack us by whatever means they can manage — by force of arms if they can, by deceit and deception otherwise.

Here's part of what we must remember: Our enemies are adherents of an all-consuming political ideology committed to world conquest. (A political ideology, like Communism or fascism, not a religion as people in the West understand the term.) We can't meet them on just one battlefield. We must oppose them everywhere they bring their lies — everywhere they attempt to subvert or attack us.

And we need to get ahead of the power curve and attack them where they are weakest, in logic and reality. Their entire ideology is based on deceit and deception. Their leadership understands that — and their adherents must be made to understand it, and to understand how thoroughly they have been duped. The alternative is exterminating them like Saladin and Richard the Lionhearted destroyed their predecessors in faith, the assassin and thug cults — both of which have now been reduced to being just words in our dictionaries instead of active Islamic sects.

Certainly, whether by force of arms or by force of intellect, every ideology like that of the jihadists — every ideology that preaches to its adherents that they much kill all who don't believe in their ideology the way they do — must be exterminated.

All this is part of what we must NEVER FORGET!

The Plan That Isn't There

2011-09-10T22:00:00.002-06:00

Once again — action was called for, and Obama gave a speech.

And it wasn't even that good a speech. It was full of attacks on straw men and caricatures. Some said it made a mockery of the debt deal that was only a couple of months old. Whether that was true or not, it certainly proposed something like $450 billion in new spending without proposing where the money would come from. (The White House said it would take them at least a couple more weeks to come up with that proposal.)

What's even worse is this: President Obama intoned “Pass this bill now!” at least 17 times in his speech, but there is no bill! (The White House promised they might have a proposal to Congress “maybe sometime next week” — which makes me think of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's statement that “We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it.”)

I guess that's why even folks on the floor of the House during the speech (and everyone else who heard it) were incredulous about what Obama was saying (see the “Historic Hysterics” item, talking about Obama's “travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham of a speech to a joint session of Congress”). It seems nobody, including Barack Obama, thought this speech's proposals were really serious. Just another phony excuse for a phony set of proposals from a phony excuse for a president.

I'll be glad when we can get an adult into the Oval Office again.

Mayor Bloomberg Is Wrong, Or Worse

2011-09-03T11:36:00.003-06:00

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack is coming in a week. There are plans for a ten year memorial at Ground Zero in New York.

New York mayor Mike Bloomberg won't allow any clergy or first responders at the memorial. He won't allow them to participate. He says there "isn't room" for them.

There seems to be some interesting hypocrisy in play here. Mayor Bloomberg has been one of the big supporters of the project to convert one of the buildings close to Ground Zero into a mosque — a jihadist-supporting mosque, apparently, based on statements by the mosque's promoters. At the same time, his office is a big part of the reason the city has not allowed the rebuilding of the St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was damaged in the 9/11 attack. Whether one supports or opposes either project, the combination of these two positions is improper.

What the mayor's office has against the first responders — the police and fire departments — is not known. Could it be that the first casualty among the first responders was the fire department's chaplain, Father Mike Judge? Or maybe it's just the rather extreme New York version of political correctness.

As a direct result of Bloomberg's 9/11 memorial directives, Mrs Critter and I have decided there "isn't room" for his magazines (including Bloomberg BusinessWeek and Bloomberg Markets) and other publications from Mayor Bloomberg's companies in our home, and have cancelled our subscriptions. That may not make a dent in Bloomberg's reported $18 billion worth, but these days magazines are having a hard time attracting subscribers.

And we simply cannot support anyone who acts like Mayor Bloomberg.

UPDATE: It gets even worse. Now, apparently, Bloomberg is excluding many (at least) 9/11 victims' families from his "commemoration". These people are disgusting. At best.

No Depression, No Jobs

2011-09-02T23:57:00.002-06:00

The Obama economy is the worst in 75 years. Here's just one example showing why, and what the impact is on those the regime ignores.

The latest figures say there was NO GROWTH in jobs in August — for the first time since World War II. And you KNOW the revision that comes next month will revise the jobs numbers down, not up. And that's with the regime "cooking the books" by removing from the labor force numbers those who have exhausted their unemployment insurance. Even without correcting for that — even using the data the way it would have been used when Obama took office — the calculated unemployment rate would be well over 11½%.

The policies of the Obama Administration have damaged the US economy. It's time to stop the regime.

The Right Idea

2011-09-02T11:01:00.000-06:00

The right idea:

If “market failure” is an excuse for taking power away from markets, shouldn’t “government failure” be a reason to take power away from government?

We've certainly had lots of government failure lately.

Overlooked in Flyover Country

2011-09-01T17:37:00.004-06:00

Living between the coastal regions, in “flyover country”, you get used to being dissed and overlooked. Doubly so if you live in my state. (It's surprising how many people in the US think New Mexico is a foreign country!) It's not a recent phenomenon, either — there's a reason Aldous Huxley placed the Savage Reservation of Brave New World (published in 1932) in New Mexico. Living here, we learn to expect it.

But then, once in a while something gets written that both captures and satirizes that view of New Mexico and the rest of flyover country. Today there's a new example of that in an article titled “Cry in the Wild Goes Unheeded” in the Albuquerque Journal.

At issue is a painting called “St. Francis in the Desert” and the exhibit featuring it at the gallery of the Frick Collection in New York.Giles Pennington, retired in the New Mexico town of Los Ojos, says he found in 1999 where Giovanni Bellini in around 1480 set this painting. His finding doesn't match what many of the traditional art “experts” say.

When he heard about the exhibit, he contacted the curator. He got a reply, and when he read it,

I realized what the curator was thinking: How could a retired guy from a mountainside overlooking a lake in northern New Mexico know more than we do about our painting?

I can't do Mr Pennington's piece justice. Just go read it.

Obama Jobs Plan, Again

2011-09-01T11:33:00.002-06:00

President Barack Obama said in August that he would reveal his plan for creating jobs and putting Americans back to work — right after he finished his vacation with his elite friends on Martha's Vineyard.

If that sounds familiar, it should. That was Obama's promise in August of 2010 — just over a year ago. I suspect he will make the same promise in August of 2012.

When something needs to be done, Obama makes a speech.

NLRB Supports Union Coercion

2011-08-31T16:03:00.002-06:00

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is supposed to be an "honest broker" able to mediate between unions and businesses. But that's not the way it is now. Under the Obama Administration, the NLRB is a partner to the unions.

The latest example: The National Labor Relations Board announced on Tuesday a decision in the Lamons Gasket case that overturns its own 2007 Dana Corp. decision and effectively ends workers' rights to even request a secret ballot election on unionization.

The Dana Corp. decision allowed workers the opportunity to request a secret ballot election within a 45-day window following a “card-check” organizing effort. Card-check organizing efforts are when union bosses try to get workers they’re targeting to sign cards indicating they want to have a union election.
What union bosses often neglect to tell workers is that if enough workers sign cards, there’s no need for an election. They’d already be unionized.

And now, after such "abusive card-check campaigns", the workers will have no recourse against forced unionization.

To me, the worst aspect of this is not that the NLRB has taken its orders from the unions and done the unions' bidding. Again. It's not even the NLRB's direct, blatant, and extreme violation of the rights of the workers it is supposed to protect. To me, the worst aspect of this the totalitarian behavior of the Obama Administration. Congress considered the unions' card-check legislation, recognized what an abuse it was, and refused to pass it. So the Obama regime, unable to get its way by legislation, determined to get its way through regulation. Unable to get its way through democratic or even semi-democratic processes, it issues orders by executive fiat. Again.

These people have no respect for the law, no respect for democracy, and no respect for the will of the people. They're making us look more like a Banana Republic every day.

There is never a legitimate reason to deny people — workers or otherwise — their right to a secret ballot.

Just more Obama hope & change.

Governor, Packing Heat

2011-08-30T22:55:00.001-06:00

Susana Martinez, now the governor of the state of New Mexico, qualified for a "concealed carry" permit while she was a prosecutor in Las Cruces, New Mexico. As governor, she now has a security detail. But she has also requalified for her "concealed carry" permit — with both .38 and .45 caliber handguns.

Her husband, Chuck, is a retired undersheriff in Doña Ana County (the county with Las Cruces as its county seat). Susana commented "Chuck will never admit it, but I'm the better shot."

Susana Martinez scored 100% with both handguns at her requalification.

Registration may be required for the links from the Albuquerque Journal.

Today's Proof of Global Warming

2011-08-27T14:21:00.001-06:00

If global warming is real, how can they still be skiing in the West? And it looks like they'll be able to ski there, this year, all year round.

Who would have expected a 365 day ski season for the year at Lake Tahoe? It's an endless winter!

And it definitely must be global warming.

Washington DC Earthquake

2011-08-26T22:16:00.000-06:00

The Weather Channel says this week's east coast earthquake was caused by an unknown fault line running under Washington and through Virginia.

It is now being called Obama's Fault, though Obama will say it's really Bush's Fault.

Other theories are that it was the founding fathers rolling over in their graves, or that what we all believed to be an earthquake was actually the effects of a $14.6 trillion check bouncing in Washington.

What He Said!

2011-08-26T22:10:00.002-06:00

One of the great contributions of Judeo-Christian moral teachings — as well as those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and others — is that they made clear to us that men are not and need not be slaves to an animal nature. They teach that humans can exercise self-control, and can be civilized and live by the rules of a society.

Sadly, not all humans are civilized. What is worse, some make a fetish and a societal rule of following a practice of being uncivilized, and deliberately behaving like animals, and like uncivilized people no better than those in the backward pagan tribes of one of the sixth century's least civilized regions.

But there is a difference: Those sixth century people didn't know any better. These people do. Or should.

And that's why I say “what he said!” in support of this at Planck's Constant.

Obamas Party While the Economy Burns

2011-08-24T14:13:00.001-06:00

It's not just Barack. And don't expect to see this in the major press in this country — they're still supporting and covering for Obama. But here's another tidbit about the Obamas priorities, and their version of "shared sacrifice".

The Daily Mail is carrying White House reports the Obamas have spent more than $10 million on vacations in the past year. The article ties the vacation spending to "vacation junkie" Michelle Obama because of the several vacation trips she took without her husband, as well as the vacation trips she took with him (like the current vacation on Martha's Vineyard). The White House source says "It's disgusting. Michelle is taking advantage of her privileged position."

It has long appeared that both Barack and Michelle are taking full advantage of their positions to get anything they can get. You might say they're just in it for the perks.

It appears the only U.S. press coverage of this story is in the National Enquirer. (Just like the John Edwards stories? This one, just as an example? For a long while, the Enquirer was the only publication covering that story. Is the National Enquirer becoming mainstream?)

It is increasingly clear we can't rely on the major media to keep us informed, except where it fits their agenda.

Wells Fargo Cheats Its Customers

2011-08-23T00:08:00.001-06:00

Last week, Wells Fargo announced it would begin charging its debit card customers $3/month for the privilege of accessing their own money. They are doing this as a test, in five states including New Mexico, to see how much they can cheat their customers before they rebel.

Now Wells Fargo has announced their free checking will now cost $7/month. According to the news reports, this charge is not being tested, but is being applied nationwide.

I don't have an account at Wells Fargo (thank heaven!). But if I did, I would close that account right now, and move it to a legitimate bank. Wells Fargo is clearly the worst of the worst.

Four Part Harmony

2011-08-21T15:06:00.003-06:00

Barbershop music has a distinctive sound that comes from its four part harmony. In that harmony, each of the four voices has its particular place and vocal responsibility.

Bill Biffle has been singing barbershop music for a long time. He is the past president of the Barbershop Harmony Society (also known as SPEBSQSA — the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America), of which he has been a member for something over 36 years. I think that qualifies him as experienced in this art form.

I heard this description from him a couple of months ago. While there can be exceptions, depending on the specific musical arrangement, in general the four voices in four part harmony line up like this:

Leads are responsible for the melody of the song. (The Quartet Curmudgeon commented that their job is to sing the melody as loudly as possible while keeping it pretty.)
Basses must drive the song. They are responsible for keeping the beat and rhythm going, at the proper tempo.
Tenors are the icing on the cake, floating above the melody and providing color for the song.
Baritones are the mortar (or the grout) of the chorus or quartet. They make everything work together. And the baritones' notes fill in the chords and make them ring.

That combination is why four part harmony sounds so fantastic. Duets and three part harmonies are nice, but they don't reach inside and grab you like a good four part harmony does.

Listen for yourself. Check out the links in the posting on the 2011 Barbershop Harmony Society Mid-Winter Convention last January, or listen to the New MexiChords here or on the YouTube link from the New MexiChords web page.

Overwhelming Force, the Quickest Path to Peace

2011-08-09T10:48:00.002-06:00

General Leslie Groves, head of the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bombs, had predicted it would take two bombs to get the Japanese to surrender — one to stun them and a second to demonstrate the first wasn’t a fluke or a one-of-a-kind. As of August 9, 1945, General Groves was right. Hiroshima had been destroyed by an atomic bomb, and it had apparently made no difference.

A second mission had been planned for August 11, but an incoming weather system made the planners decide to move it up by two days. This mission would use the “Fat Man” atomic bomb, the same type as was tested in the Trinity Test in New Mexico less than a month before. The bomb was carried by the B-29 bomber named Bockscar (sometimes written as Bock's Car), piloted by Major Charles Sweeney. The bombing mission's target was Kokura; it only went to its secondary target, Nagasaki, because the target point could not be positively identified through Kokura's smoke and haze.

This seems like a clear application of the concept that overwhelming force is the quickest path to peace, and the way to save the most lives. But, as is often the case, there’s more to the story than that — and it provides further support for this concept.

Japanese physicists were involved in nuclear studies in the 1930s, just as European and American physicists were. By 1940, the Japanese had determined that they had access to more than enough uranium in Korea and Burma to make an atomic bomb. An atomic bomb project was started in April 1941, but the Japanese project determined by late 1944 that it could not produce a bomb in time to affect the war.

The knowledge they built up during their atomic bomb project was put to use in August of 1945. The story is told that physicists sampled the debris after the Hiroshima bombing, and reported that the city had been destroyed by an atomic bomb built of uranium. To the Japanese authorities, that meant it was probably one-of-a-kind because they knew uranium was so difficult to enrich sufficiently that “they can’t possibly have another.” Given that, the Nagasaki bombing surprised them. They sampled debris again in Nagasaki, as they had in Hiroshima, and reported that a plutonium bomb had been used. This was a shock to the authorities, because it meant to them that the U.S. could have a nearly unlimited number of such bombs, depending on a production rate they had no way to know. (The next plutonium bomb was already on its way to the B-29 base on Tinian Island; the planners had reportedly targeted Tokyo for this bomb.) Suddenly the choice the Japanese authorities faced was very stark, indeed — surrender or incineration.

Whether you think General Groves was right, and it would have taken the use of two atomic bombs to bring about a surrender regardless of their type, or whether you think the key factor was the realization that there could be more such bombs on the way — whichever view you hold, it seems clear that two atomic bombs were necessary to end the war without a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands. Overwhelming force proved to be the quickest path to peace.

Today is the anniversary of Bockscar's flight to Kokura and Nagasaki, the anniversary of the day World War II — in the Pacific Theater — really began to end.

More information on the atomic bombs and their use in 1945 to end World War II can be found in Nuclear History, as well as in a number of other sources. Separate parts of the “Nuclear History” article deal with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the earlier Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico.

The Day World War II Began to End

2011-08-06T15:11:00.003-06:00

Today is August 6th, the 66th anniversary of the day the crew of the Enola Gay dropped the never-tested “Little Boy” atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. That was the day the war between Japan and the United States — which began with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 — finally began to end.

The pilot for that mission was Colonel Paul Tibbets, who had named his B-29 Superfortress bomber for his mother. (Any reminder of home was welcome!) After the war's end, he and others of the Hiroshima mission crew visited the National Atomic Museum (now the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History) a number of times. On one such visit, Tibbets spoke with a writer for the newspaper of the Sandia National Laboratories, a conversation written up for the Sandia Lab News in 1998. He and other surviving crew members later put up an internet page.

The Enola Gay’s mission was flown from Tinian Island. There, the 509^th Composite Bomb Group had three weaponeers. These were the men responsible for actually arming the nuclear bombs in flight and making sure they would operate as designed when they were dropped from the B-29s. I met one of these three, Leon Smith, many years later. By a flip of the coin, the other two weaponeers flew on the missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Smith would probably have flown on the atomic bomb mission to Tokyo had that mission been necessary, but flew on the post-war test at Bikini Atoll instead.

Smith was asked by a Japanese documentary film crew (including three individuals from Hiroshima) a number of years later how he felt when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He recounted his response as follows:

I pointed out there had been a long war — intensive battles starting in the South Pacific, moving ever northward toward Japan. I talked about the 30,000 Japanese soldiers, 20,000 civilians, lost on Saipan. On Iwo Jima, which was roughly halfway to Japan and a fighter base, 60,000 Marines went ashore, and suffered the highest casualty rate they’d ever suffered in any Marine operation. The Japanese had 21,000 defenders. 20,000 died. The battle for Okinawa had just been completed at the end of June. There over 100,000 Japanese soldiers died. 125-150,000 civilians.
General Marshall believed that defending Japan were 2.3 million soldiers, 4 million navy men, and 28 million armed civilian militia. I said the invasion was scheduled for November of ’45. I thought the casualties would have been simply unreal — beyond comprehension.
I said, “How did I feel when the bomb was dropped? I felt a sense of relief.” I was confident that the war would soon be over. That I could go back and see my wife whom I’d seen very little since our marriage in 1941. The U.S. and its allies could go back to their homes and their families. And the Japanese could go back to their families. Yes, I felt a sense of relief.

Today is the anniversary of the Enola Gay’s flight to Hiroshima, the anniversary of the day Leon Smith’s relief began.

Obama Parties While the Economy Burns

2011-08-05T23:01:00.006-06:00

U.S. President Barack Obama didn't let Thursday's disaster in the financial markets disturb his party scheduled for that night. After all, one must keep one's priorities straight, mustn't one? His one concession was keeping the White House party, attended by celebrity supporters and Democrat party leaders, off the official schedule so it wouldn't be quite such an up-front deliberate slap in the country's face. It seems to me that action demonstrates a knowledge of guilt. But that guilt didn't stop the partying, or even slow it down.

The partying for the extended celebration of Obama's birthday continued. One subsequent celebration included former chief of staff (now Chicago mayor) Rahm Emmanuel.

While that was going on, apparently, Standard and Poor's downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating. The reasons given for the downgrade are, in part,

The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics.
More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.
Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government's debt dynamics any time soon.
The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to 'AA' within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.

It sounds like Standard and Poor's is saying the same thing I have been saying: Our problem is that government spending has exploded and is out of control. What we have to do is rein in spending.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama received a birthday greeting for his fiftieth birthday.

Happy 50th Birthday Mr. President! While surprises are for birthdays, it is no surprise to the American people that your failed economic policies — from TARP to your health care bill — have resulted in disaster for our economy. Since taking office, unemployment has remained at or near 9 percent for 28 months, America has added $3.4 trillion in debt in 29 months — the equivalent of about $4 billion per day — we have an anemic housing market with record foreclosures, and an average price of nearly $4 for a gallon of gas. Even your budget did not receive one single vote in the United States Senate — and the icing on the cake — a stock market slide of nearly 800 points in the last 5 days.
While it may be hard to hear the American people’s frustration over the pop of the champagne corks and R&B bands at your $30,000/person birthday party, the citizens of this nation are suffering under your failed leadership. The best present you can give the American people will be for you and your failed economic policies to be defeated in November of 2012.
— Allen West (R-FL)

Why is it that what keeps running through my mind is "Nero fiddled while Rome burned"?

What They Told Us About the Debt Bill Wasn't True

2011-08-05T21:30:00.004-06:00

They told us if a deal wasn't made to raise the debt ceiling, the financial markets would be in turmoil. In that case, it might produce a day on the stock market like this — a drop of more than 512 points in a single day — the worst day since the financial crisis started with the bursting of the housing bubble (and FNMA and FMCC) in 2008.

Oh, wait. . . . Congress did pass a debt ceiling deal. On Tuesday. And that stock market graph is what we got on Thursday. (Wednesday was bad, too — just not quite as bad as Thursday.) They told us this wouldn't happen if that bill was passed. They were wrong, and what we got was this.

They told us passing a debt ceiling bill ceiling bill would keep this from happening, too. But, of course, the real threat to the U.S. government credit rating, then as now, was the fact that our government's debt was approaching — and now has passed — our government's annual income. And that's because our spending is completely out of control. So they misled us on this, too.

Or maybe it's just that they don't have any idea what they're doing.

Obama Got His Debt Ceiling Deal

2011-08-03T01:26:00.005-06:00

President Barack Obama has gotten his "compromise" debt ceiling deal, and has now gotten it passed through both houses of Congress. The House of Representatives passed is yesterday evening (Monday), the Senate passed it today (Tuesday), and the President immediately signed it. Everything happened fast.

The markets issued their judgment fast, too. The US markets said unequivocally that no deal would be better than this deal. The foreign markets agreed, too.

And it looks like my analysis of last week was spot on. Apparently there's almost no cut in spending till after the presidential election. But the spending takes place immediately, and House Majority Leader says it will be eaten up by the time we reach 2013. (That's a continuing $1.6 trillion per year deficit through that time, though the White House had previously claimed the deficits would be reduced — just like the unemployment rate.) It really is a case of "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

There is a way to fix this, and it ties in with the "supercommittee" that will have to develop most of the spending cuts in this deal. The key issues are that we really need to cut spending — or at least stop its increase rather than merely reducing the rate of increase — and we need to avoid raising taxes and shoving the economy back into recession.

So here's what we do and how we are told the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will score it relative to the current profligate baseline spending level (remembering that spending has increased by $1 trillion per year since Obama took office — and that is now part of the baseline).

Immediately freeze spending, cancelling all programmed automatic spending increases. (Cutting spending — perhaps to where it was when Obama took office — would be better, but we'll take what we can get.) We are told the CBO will score this as a $9 trillion cut in spending over the next ten years.
Immediately block the impending tax increase that's the largest in US history, now labeled as stopping the end of the Bush tax cuts. This will prevent a new/repeated/continued recession. We are told the CBO will score this as a $5 trillion debt increasse in the coming decade.

The combination of these two (a) actually stops spending increases, (b) avoids shoving us into recession, and (c) scores out as a $4 trillion debt reduction over ten years. An additional $1 trillion in new spending for the same period can be avoided by repealing Obamacare. That would be an appropriate initial step toward getting the federal government's profligate spending under control.

Some Budget Options

2011-07-28T17:25:00.001-06:00

Congressional negotiators are trying to reach a deal on spending cuts to get $1, $2, or $4 trillion dollars in spending cuts (relative to "the baseline") over the next ten years. That is intended to enable them to get agreement on raising the debt ceiling to allow continuation of the current obscene spending rates. That $1, $2, or $4 trillion dollars in spending cuts translates to an average of $100, $200, or $400 billion less spending per year, probably back-loaded to the later part of the ten year period. (That sounds to me a lot like "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.") Being delayed like that most likely means that — most likely — the debt ceiling and debt would quickly go up but the spending cuts would probably never actually occur.

But the bigger problem is that, even if the spending cuts do occur, they won't get us out of the current unconscionably large budget deficits. The cuts need to be bigger.

So here are a couple of budget cutting suggestions that will do a lot better:

- We are told a large number of current laws have built in escalator clauses that will increase their spending levels by a total of more than $9 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Put a freeze on those escalators and we've saved $9 trillion over those same years.

- Government spending has increased by more than $1 trillion a year since President Barack Obama took office. Get rid of that increased spending and we've saved more than $10 trillion over ten years.

These may be oversimplified, but it seems to me either one of these would do a lot better at cutting bloated government spending than anything being discussed in Congress.

Obama: Majority Want Higher Taxes

2011-07-23T14:42:00.003-06:00

President Barack Obama has taken up Vice President Joe Biden's refrain that it's patriotic to want to pay higher taxes. Or, as the headline on one story put it, patriotic Americans want to share in the sacrifice and pay higher taxes. He also said at his press conference that 80% of the US population want to pay higher taxes.

This last, in particular, gets several reactions from me. One is questioning whether these people can really believe this, or are they just trying to con us. (Note that, in his press conference, Obama also said that tax cuts kill jobs!) A second is captured in this cartoon:And third is noting that somewhere between 47% and 51% of our population (depending on your choice of source) pay no income taxes at all, so they figure they won't be the "someone else".

No, I do not believe Obama's 80% statement. And I'm not alone in this — neither does much of anyone else. In fact, this statement has now been identified as one of Obama's ten biggest lies.

All this comes as part of White House PR efforts associated with the debt ceiling negotiations, in which President Obama is still following his obsession to increase taxes on the country. (He doesn't say that, though — he insists on using the words "increase revenue" to try to make people think he's not out to increase taxes.) That obsession came back to the surface this week as he raised by 50% (an additional $400 billion on top of the $800 billion to be gained from tax reform)the amount of debt reduction he insisted come from increased revenues. That bait-and-switch is what made Speaker John Boehner walk away from the White House negotiations. (It's hard to try to negotiate with someone who, when you compromise, adds extra demands.)

Obama keeps talking about "shared sacrifice". When he uses the term, he means higher taxes. But I agree with the writer who noted that

Real “shared sacrifice” doesn’t involve seizing more funds from the small minority of the people who pay the vast majority of our taxes.

The Last Shuttle Landing

2011-07-22T18:27:00.004-06:00

With the pre-dawn landing of the space shuttle Atlantis in Florida this morning, this thirty year long program of manned space flight has come to an end. This mission was the 135^th space shuttle mission, and was officially designated STS-135 (STS is short for Space Transportation System).

This is the end of an era of manned space flight that began with the challenge issued by President John F Kennedy on May 25, 1961. "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth," President Kennedy said at the time. Work toward that goal progressed through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. President Kennedy's challenge was fulfilled on July 16, 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. Flights under the Apollo program continued through 1975.

The space shuttle program first reached into space on April 12, 1981, with a flight of just over two days. Subsequent missions have carried a variety of satellites into orbit (including the Hubble Space Telescope), carried various orbital experiments and technology developments, and performed a number of more mundane missions including satellite repair and carrying modules and supplies for the International Space Station.

The space shuttle program was originally conceived to involve many more launches, and much more frequent launches, than have actually occurred. The idea was to have up to 50 shuttle launches per year, with the reusable vehicle intended to drive down launch and operating per-mission costs. (The space shuttle is the only reusable vehicle ever launched into space.) Each shuttle was designed to have a working life of 100 flights over a 10 year period. The three surviving shuttles (of the five that were built — not counting the non-space-qualified Enterprise test vehicle) have all had longer working lives with many fewer launches; Atlantis ended its career today at the close of its 33^rd flight.

With today's end of the space shuttle program, the United States has no manned space flight capability.

Space Shuttle Program
First Launch — April 12, 1981
Final Landing — July 22, 2011
135 Total Flights

A Legal Truth

2011-07-18T20:28:00.002-06:00

A business law professor I had a class from years ago taught us a truth that proven again today:

There is law, and there is justice.
And if in some case those two are the same, that's coincidence.

Incredible Insurance Ignorance

2011-07-14T12:31:00.004-06:00

Here's a tale from someone who is or was, as they say, "unclear on the concept". Totally.

When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won't name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company -- let's call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I'd like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn't serious insurance.

Let me translate a little bit of this stupidity. "[W]hat it was set up was to meet the legal requirements." That would be the legally required liability insurance, to compensate others for damage you do. "{T}his was set up not to actually provide insurance[.]" Not intended to cover his own vehicle, under coverage he evidently did not purchase. So this guy clearly had just the legally required liability insurance coverage, and no coverage for the repair of his own car. And he didn't know the difference.

But then insurance is insurance is insurance. Right? If you have insurance of any flavor, it should take care of everything. Right?

The tale makes me wonder how anyone could get through high school, much less college, and not know such basic information? Especially since this kind of information is given routinely by every driver's training class and every auto insurance agent. (After all, the insurance agent wants to sell you the additional coverage, so it's in his interest to make absolutely sure you understand that liability coverage doesn't cover your own car at all.) How incredibly ignorant and just plain dumb does one have to be not to know something this basic? One would be tempted to put something like this down to deliberate stupidity.

And why didn't he file a claim against the other driver's liability insurance? Since he says he got rear-ended, the other driver was (probably) at fault and a claim could/should be made against that driver's liability insurance. Why did he apparently not know enough to get the other driver's insurance information so he could file such a claim? That, too, is awfully basic. Since he didn't, this tale indicates this young man never looked at any of the information provided by his insurance company — you know, the standard stuff with titles like "What to do if you have an accident". More incredible ignorance.

It turns out this individual is still as ignorant as ever. Right after telling the tale above, he got to the reason he was telling his tale, as he went on to say.

Now, it's one thing if you've got an old beat-up car that you can't get fixed. It's another thing if your kid is sick, or you've got breast cancer.

It's hard to believe anyone could possibly be this dumb-as-rocks ignorant. This must be one of those fake things that gets passed around by e-mail periodically. Except it's not. This story was told in an interview given as part of the push to get the Obamacare bill passed. The interview was on CNN. It is now on YouTube, and is linked here.

Being as charitable as possible, this level of ignorance could be real and, if so, may be at least partly responsible for this same individual repeatedly telling what turns out to be, at best, a highly misleading story about his mother's supposed difficulty getting her health insurance to pay her medical claims in her last month of terminal cancer. He keeps insisting the insurance company was trying to avoid covering his mother's medical bills, a statement that is simply not true. The only claim denied was a separate disability insurance claim, not any claim for coverage of her medical bills. It would take someone who is dumb-as-rocks ignorant, or suffering from deliberate stupidity, not to know the difference. The alternative is that he is, and has been, simply lying.

Senator McConnell's Gambit

2011-07-13T23:52:00.001-06:00

There are a lot of stories running around with titles like "McConnell Caves" and "McConnell's Retreat". They're all talking about the fallback plan floated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). That plan, if passed by Congress, would allow President Obama to raise the debt limit in three stages. Each debt ceiling increase would be required to be accompanied by spending cuts of the same size.

This plan has already gotten approving comments from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Arizona Senator John McCain. None of these approvals is likely to gain much additional Republican support for the plan.

I wonder if there isn't something else involved in this gambit. If Obama and the Congressional Democrats accept McConnell's plan, they commit to spending cuts equal in size to each of the three debt ceiling raises — but there are no tax increases. Thus, under this plan, the spending cuts come but Obama's obsession with raising taxes fails. And the chances of the House passing this plan after that are very small.

The Lockbox Has Been Stolen

2011-07-12T14:33:00.003-06:00

President Barack Obama says Social Security checks may not go out next month if the debt ceiling isn't raised before then.

"I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Mr. Obama said in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, according to excerpts released by CBS News.

"[T]here may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." That directly says the legendary Social Security Lockbox — or at least what was in it — has been stolen. Somebody needs to go to prison for this, just as someone would if it happened in the private sector.

UPDATE: I like Jim Hoft's take on the ever-petulant Barack Obama: "Obama: I May Not Send Out Social Security Checks If I Don’t Get to Raise Taxes"

The Source of the Problem

2011-07-12T14:21:00.000-06:00

President Barack Obama publicly and repeatedly blames the Republicans for the problems in reaching a deal in the debt ceiling negotiations. But the Wall Street Journal's Review and Outlook column has encapsulated the real source of the problem quite nicely, in one sentence:

President Obama demanded again yesterday that Republicans raise taxes in return for giving him the debt-limit increase he's also demanding.

As they say, "Nice of him to be so accommodating."

Obama is insisting that any package include tax hikes (euphemistically referred to as "reductions in tax expenditures"). This is Obama's obsession. How much does he want? His negotiators are demanding about $1 trillion in new taxes. And even that isn't enough to satisfy his cronies. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) have produced a plan calling for an additional $2 trillion in new taxes. These new taxes would be in addition to the nearly $1 trillion in additional taxes incorporated in the Obamacare bill.

There is one more small thing they're not admitting when they talk about this. These new taxes — whether $1 or $2 trillion or more — are on top of a baseline that assumes the expiration of the so-called "Bush tax cuts". Those tax rate reductions cut taxes for everyone who paid taxes, removing a whole lot more people from paying taxes at all in the process. Making them expire is already a tax increase of close to $1 trillion dollars — and Obama and his minions want another $1-2 trillion in new taxes on top of that?!?!?

Every time there's something new on this story, it just keeps getting worse!

Nancy Pelosi Disconnected From Reality

2011-07-12T13:39:00.000-06:00

We have known for a long time that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-SanFran) has a tenuous grasp on reality at best. Now it is clear she has completely lost touch with reality.

At Thursday’s White House meeting between President Obama and congressional leaders, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out in stark terms the awful economic repercussions of allowing the debt ceiling to lapse. Everyone in the room agreed that defaulting on U.S. debt would be disastrous and that something must be done. At that point, Nancy Pelosi asked: Why couldn’t the debt ceiling be decoupled from deficit reduction?
Her query, after so many weeks of reports and talks centered on deficit reduction tied to a debt ceiling deal, visibly surprised some leaders in the room, several Republican and Democratic sources say. Obama politely informed the House Minority Leader, those same sources say, that that train had left the station weeks ago.

A Tale of Two Patients

2011-07-08T19:31:00.002-06:00

Two different patients & two different doctors' offices.

Two patients limp into two different medical clinics with the same complaint. Both have trouble walking and appear to require a hip replacement.
The FIRST patient is examined within the hour, is x-rayed the same day and has a time booked for surgery the following week.
The SECOND sees his family doctor after waiting 3 weeks for an appointment, then waits 8 weeks to see a specialist, then gets an x-ray, which isn't reviewed for another week, and finally has his surgery scheduled for 6 months from then.
Why the different treatment for the two patients?
The FIRST is a Golden Retriever.
The SECOND is a Senior Citizen.
Next time take me to a vet!

This would be a funny joke if it weren't so true.

Back when President Barack Obama was trying to justify his massive takeover of the American health care system, through his Obamacare bill (a.k.a. the horribly misnamed "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", or PPACA), one of his justifications was that private insurers were denying so many claims. Of course, he failed to mention that Medicare — our national health care program for senior citizens — denied medical claims at more than twice the rate of the private insurers. More examples, more coverage horror stories, have been coming out since then. Here is one more to add to that list.

Let me introduce Mrs Erlinda Moya. She has lived more than 99 years; she will soon have her 100^th birthday. She is loved by the members of her parish, and cared for by her daughter and family. Her health has been good but, just in case of a medical need, she is covered by both Medicare and Medicaid (under the disabled and elderly waiver), as well as by Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Not long ago, Mrs Moya got an infection in a toe. It was a stubborn one, and she was hospitalized. It took a while to find an antibiotic that was effective against her infection, and the toe had to be amputated. Medicare paid for all of the medical care, and all the supplies and facilities that were needed.

The doctors said Mrs Moya would need IV antibiotics for another five weeks to completely get rid of the infection. Medicare wanted to put her in a nursing home for that five weeks to handle the IV infusions. That would keep her instutitionalized, and away from her family. The family, naturally, wanted to bring her back home instead. And they were told that, while Medicare would cover the full nursing home cost (more than $7000), Mrs Moya would have to pay $60 a day for the five weeks (a total of $2100) if the family took her home. There's no way her limited income could cover that kind of cost!

Medicare didn't want to budge. They weren't interested in saving $5000 and getting a better medical outcome by letting Mrs Moya go home to her family. (And that's assuming the $2100 is a government rate as well as a private-pay rate.) Medicare was only interested in pressuring the family into putting her in an institution. They wanted to pay $7000 unnecessarily for institutional care, or make Mrs Moya pay $2100 to be with her family. Those were their only choices.

That is bureaucratic stupidity, at best.

Fortunately for Mrs Moya, another solution was found — a solution outside the Medicare system. A caring case worker put the family in touch with Walgreen's, from which they obtained the antibiotics at a nominal cost for infusion by Mrs Moya's son. As a result, Mrs Moya is with her family, is improving, and is looking forward to her 100^th birthday.

There is a lesson to be had here. Programs don't care about people. Bureaucracies don't care. Rules and regulations don't care. But — sometimes — individual people do care. The system makes it hard for them to do so, but sometimes they do anyway. And when they do, they can sometimes find a way to force an unwilling bureaucracy to use at least a little common sense.

There is also an epilogue. Mrs Moya's tale touched Mrs Critter. As is frequently the case, she took action in response. She wrote to Senator Jeff Bingaman about it. She noted that Mrs Moya has voted for Senator Bingaman many times, and now she needs some protection from a system too big to care. What she got in return was a form letter that stated "I understand your concerns regarding the new health care reform law." and claimed major benefits for "the new health care reform law" (Obamacare) including the claim that "it significantly reduces the federal deficit by $1 trillion dollars." (At least he got the amount right - he just got the sign wrong.) Interestingly, the Senator's letter never names "the new health care reform law", either as Obamacare or as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - Obamacare's formal name.

This response angered Mrs Critter, and she replied to Senator Bingaman saying

Senator and staff,
I am so frustrated at the way you waste my money!!! I wrote to you about a specific case of Mrs. Moya, a 99-year old woman who has Medicare, Medicaid, and Blue Cross Blue Shield and her family's frustrations securing the care she needs and you respond with a FORM LETTER. She is a real live person whom YOU have failed. If you have failed her and simply fold your hands, THAT is the real answer to my concerns about how OBAMACARE will fail the nation. The health care you have imposed on us now has failed Mrs. Moya -- what a waste of taxpayer dollars!!! Obamacare will be bigger and much more expensive and will fail all but the politicians. Yes, I am angry that you respond to a real life situation with a form letter and sit on your hunches while Mrs. Moya and her family struggles with her health care situation. You are useless!!!! We should start by cutting your staff and your retirement benefits should be need-based.
GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

So there is no good news on the bureaucratic front. The only good news is still that Mrs Moya is with her family, is improving, and is looking forward to her 100^th birthday.

We Have a Spending Problem

2011-07-07T14:49:00.003-06:00

The debt was merely a problem back in 2003-8. The debt has become a crisis now.

What has made the difference?

Tax rates haven't changed in the last eight years. Only spending rates have, leaping upward since 2008.

We don't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.

Q.E.D.

With the current tax rates, tax collections increased rapidly from 2003 through 2007. That only changed when the economy went into the toilet in 2008, thanks to the bursting of the housing sub-prime mortgage bubble. With tax collections increasing, and some (though not much) spending restraint, the deficit came down from 2004 through 2007, before the bad economy started it rising again.

Barack Obama became president in 2009, and immediately started making things worse. With him in the White House, there was no longer any restraint on the profligacy of the Pelosi-Reid Congress — indeed, Obama's spending demands made things worse.

Tax rates did not change, but spending rates did. The deficit exploded, tripling from what it had been before. And the reason was the spending increases, since there were no tax cuts.

The problem we now have with the deficit and the debt ceiling has been created by out of control spending, not by insufficient taxes. The solution to the problem is to roll back the spending increases that created the problem.

Get the spending cuts now. We can discuss tax hikes later, if we think they're really needed.

Party Leaders Prove My Point (Updated)

2011-07-06T00:29:00.006-06:00

I began a recent posting by saying

It is frequently claimed that concern over vote fraud is unwarranted, that there are few or no false or fraudulent voter registrations, and that little or no vote fraud actually takes place.

In an Albuquerque Journal guest column (subscription/registration required for link), Lisa Chavez, Chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Valencia County here in New Mexico, made precisely these claims. She also claims, in the words of the headline on her piece, that "Voter ID Talk Just a Cynical Effort by GOP to Limit Votes". She makes the same claims in the oolumn's text. She claims, for example, that

The real issue here is that both nationally and locally, the GOP knows that they have to stop intimidated and disenfranchised groups from voting if they want to stand a chance in the 2012 elections.
It's that simple.

She rails against the new state voter fraud investigation, triggered by apparent findings of non-citizens who registered to vote and actually voted, calling it a waste of millions of dollars and again asserting its purpose is voter suppression. She thinks we should ignore the evidence and pretend it doesn't exist, as she does, and simply push the story that everything is fine.

Ms Chavez must know her claims are false. And she must know her claimes about Republican motives involve malicious projection, just like the recent charges by Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-FL) that the Republicans want to bring back the Jim Crow laws, a charge so flagrant and reckless she had to retract it.

It seems to me that, if one wants to follow Ms Chavez and Ms Wasserman Schulz into conspiracy theories, one would note the close cooperation between the Democratic Party and ACORN, ACORN's nationwide voter registration fraud activity (including their insistence on registering voters only as Democrats), and the ACORN vote fraud activity already proven in several states. It appears to me the party trying to mess with our electoral system is the party that's protesting so much -- the Democrats.

In the meantime, I have a few questions for Ms Chavez and her fellow travelers. These include

Where are all the people you claim have no photo ID and no ability to get one? Where are their complaints that they can't buy a beer, cash a check, or rent a video, or enter a federal building, or travel around the country by most modes of transportation, or drive a car, or get a job, or . . . (so many other things), or even buy Sudafed over the counter? The evidence seems to say there are not large numbers of people without photo IDs — the notion that there are is false, it's a myth. And even if it weren't a myth, every voter ID law I've ever heard of includes a provision for free IDs for such people, just in case there really are some. Why do you ignore that?
With all the things an ID is required for, how is it that an ID requirement is only discriminatory in voting? How could asking for ID be discriminatory only when it comes to voting? If it is discriminatory in voting, then it is discriminatory in all those other areas, and we have a major national need to take action to end these vestiges of discrimination that are occurring throughout our society. If it is not discriminatory in all these other areas, then it is not discriminatory in voting, either, and the claims to the contrary are simply dishonest. Or, paraphrasing James Taranto,
Our answer is that their claim of discrimination is a dishonest and divisive partisan appeal to blacks' [and other minorities'] fears of racism — fears that, in this instance, do not appear to have any basis in contemporary reality.
How can you claim voter ID bills are sinister plots to suppress minority and Democrat votes when reality shows they haven't worked that way?
Some opponents of election security laws also declare that they are part of a sinister plot to depress voter registration and turnout, especially among minority voters who are more likely to vote Democrat. Here too the facts do not support the claim. Georgia's photo ID requirement was in place for both the 2008 and 2010 elections, when turnout among minority voters was higher than average. Likewise, Arizona's proof-of-citizenship requirement for registration has not impeded minority voters from registering.
Why do you ignore the evidence? Even I have seen it reported repeatedly, even in our local newspapers (see, for example, links cited here and here and here). Others have noticed, as well, as noted (for example) here and here. And that doesn't include the voter fraud and voter registration fraud proven in other states (through convictions and guilty pleas) and not prosecuted here. Explain to me how this evidence doesn't really exist.
Why aren't you welcoming this probe? If there really is no vote fraud, as you claim, the probe will show that. You only have something to worry about if your claims are wrong or dishonest.

It appears to me that Ms Lisa Chavez, Chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Valencia County in New Mexico, probably (1) knows vote fraud is a significant problem, (2) knows or has a good idea what the vote fraud investigation is likely to find, and so (3) has written a cynical rant to try to divert our attention and — if she's lucky — derail the investigation so the vote fraud status quo can continue. In reality, she's just "pounding the table"^*.

UPDATE: The Albuquerque Journal has published a guest column today (July 7) by Victor S Contreras, Jr. Mr Contreras is Chairman of Hispanos Unidos. Mr Contreras is a supporter of strong voter ID laws. And he really destroys the testimony of Daniel Ivey-Soto, a paid lobbyist for the New Mexico Association of County Clerks Affiliate. He points out that Ivey-Soto has said absolutely contradictory things at different times, all depending on what claims needed to be made to derail the current voter ID bill. His opposition to any kind of voter ID requirement is his only constant. He supports laws allowing people to register and vote on the same day. No photo ID required. As Mr Contreras notes, this would be "Hit-and-run voting, with no way to detect it."

While Mr Ivey-Soto now asserts there is no solid evidence of voter fraud, he previously sang a different tune.

Additionally, Ivey-Soto’s current stand that there is no fraud contradicts a statement he made when he was the New Mexico elections director in 2007 [emphasis added]. He was asked at a meeting of the state’s county clerks how same-day registration would not enable voter fraud. The Albuquerque Tribune printed his response: “I can’t. But I can’t guarantee there isn’t fraud going on now. … I know people who have gone on Election Day and voted multiple times because they knew people who weren’t going to vote. I’ve never participated in that, but I know people who have.”

In other words, like many other opponents of voter ID requirements, he knows there is a large vote fraud problem. It's just that, for whatever reason, he doesn't care.

As I have said before, anyone who opposes a serious voter identification requirement is objectively promoting vote fraud. That's why a large majority of New Mexico voters (apparently 85%) favor a voter ID law, but that doesn't matter since that 85% obviously doesn't include the Democrats serving in the legislature. I wonder why the Democrats are insisting on killing any and all voter ID proposals. (Maybe I shouldn't wonder.)

^* "If you don't have the facts,
and you don't have the law,
then pound the table."

White House Deficit Talks Ploy

2011-07-06T00:27:00.000-06:00

CBS News is reporting that

Amid ongoing efforts to work out a deal to raise the debt ceiling, the New York Times reports that the White House is offering up tens of billions of dollars' worth of reductions in Medicaid and Medicare programs - if Republicans agree to increase tax revenues.

Sorry, but this is nothing new. This is what the Obama Administration has been pushing since the debt ceiling question first came up, with emphasis on the White House (and Democrat) insistence that any debt ceiling bill must include tax hikes. And if the Republicans accept this, then, as Weasel Zippers notes

That way Obama can blame Republicans for raising taxes and cutting Medicare.

This, from the White House, is more politics than policy.

Note, too, that the Obama Administration wants to make more cuts in Medicare after having just stolen a half trillion dollars from the program in the Obamacare bill (horribly misnamed as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA) last year. In other words, the Obama Administration has already ended "Medicare as we know it".

Default Is Obama's Choice

2011-07-05T01:00:00.001-06:00

Obama Administration officials continue to say that "the nation's borrowing will exceed its $14.3 trillion limit on Aug. 2 and that economic shockwaves around the world would result from the first financial default in U.S. history." I have pointed out before that this is a direct and deliberate lie.

I'm not the only one say this. (If I were, you all would be fully justified in ignoring what I said — unless my evidence and argumentation convinced you.) Here are just a couple of the others making the same point.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on Michele Bachmann's appearance on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday:

Earlier Sunday, Bachmann had harsher words for those warning economic calamity unless Congress raises the government's borrowing limit by an August deadline.
"It isn't true that the government would default on its debt," Bachmann told CBS' "Face the Nation." She later added, "It is scare tactics."
Instead, she said the U.S. could avoid a default by paying only the interest on U.S. obligations while lawmakers work on a deal to cut spending dramatically as part of a new debt ceiling.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey insists that

the Treasury can easily pay interest to bondholders first. The remaining funds would cover about two-thirds of the budget, and the president would simply be forced to make drastic cuts because he lacked money to pay all the bills.

President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are like the guy who wants to buy a big screen TV but needs to buy groceries and pay his mortgage, but doesn't have enough money to do all three. He should pay the mortgage and buy the groceries, and has enough to do that with more left over. He could decide to default on his mortgage so he can buy the TV he wants. But if he does so, that default is his choice. It simply is not necessary.

Germany's White Rose Movement

2011-07-05T00:57:00.001-06:00

History fascinates me. And it does so for the same reason science does. I always want to understand why things happen/happened. But it's also fascinating to see some of the things that didn't work, and attempts by people and groups that failed. They're instructive, too.

Today's case in point is Germany's White Rose Movement. I hadn't known about them, but they were a group at Munich University before and during World War II. They opposed Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis). They printed leaflets describing the horrors of the Holocaust, trying to bring national and international attention to the Nazi government's program of genocide. The movement spread these leaflets through affiliated groups in major cities throughout the German Reich.

They were not very successful. Most of the world wanted to — and did — ignore them. The Nazis wanted to exterminate them, and did execute the leaders of the movement and most or all of the movement's Munich members in 1943. The movement did reach someone's conscience, however, as Allied aircraft dropped some of their leaflets over Europe later in 1943.

Very few of the White Rose Movement's leaflets survive and, like the movement itself, they have been nearly forgotten. But a collector is now donating one of these rare leaflets to the British Holocaust Center. The White Rose Movement may remain fairly obscure but, partly as a result of this donation, they will not be forgotten.

Happy Fourth of July!

2011-07-02T20:33:00.004-06:00

(image above from The Astute Bloggers)

God Bless America!

And remember why we celebrate.

Obama's "Balanced Approach"

2011-07-01T21:26:00.003-06:00

President Barack Obama and his partisans in the Congress say they want a "balanced approach" for deficit reduction. They want to use a combination of spending cuts and tax increases ("tax expenditure reductions") to bring down the deficit. They absolutely do not want to reduce the deficit through budget cuts alone. (President Barack Obama said "We can't simply cut our way to prosperity.") In fact, the Obama Administration and its partisans don't want to have any budget cuts at all. (Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said "We have to raise taxes on small business so government programs don't have to shrink.") But they may accept some budget cuts as a necessary evil. If they're forced to.

Let's step back and take a look at the problem. Tax rates haven't changed in the last eight years. Only spending rates have. With the current tax rates, tax collections increased rapidly from 2003 through 2007. That only changed when the economy went into the toilet in 2008 thanks to the bursting of the housing sub-prime mortgage bubble. The deficit came down through 2007, too, but went up somewhat in 2008 (slightly, by comparison to later values).

But things changed in 2009. With Barack Obama in the White House, there was no longer any restraint on the profligacy of the Pelosi-Reid Congress. Tax rates did not change, but spending rates did. The deficit exploded, tripling from what it had been before. And the reason was the spending increases, since there were no tax cuts.

The problem we now have with the deficit and the debt ceiling has been created by out of control spending, not by insufficient tax revenues. The solution to the problem is to roll back the spending increases that created the problem.

But the secondary problem is that President Obama and his Congressional partisans, independent of anything else, just want a massive, and unnecessary, tax increase as part of any debt ceiling increase deal. Since that insistence does not really address the deficit problem's cause, it may be that Obama and his partisans simply want to maintain his principle that the answer to deficit reduction (as all other questions) is raising taxes. If he fails, and if it is proven that we really can "cut our way to prosperity", then he is done and his presidency will rest among the other failed presidencies. Right alongside that of Jimmy Carter.

Obama Wants to Raise Your Taxes

2011-07-01T21:22:00.001-06:00

The economy is in bad shape, and getting worse. Manuracturing data suggest a new recession may be starting. If the economy isn't in a new recession, it's in danger of falling into one. It's shaky. It almost certainly cannot withstand any substantial shock.

So what does President Barack Obama want to do? He wants to raise taxes. A lot. $400 billion or $600 billion, depending on whose reporting you listen to. He wants to increase business and investment costs by that huge amount, taking that amount out of the economy that can't afford that kind of shock.

Yes, business and investment are the target — especially business. As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said to Congress (approximately), "We have to raise taxes on small business so government programs don't have to shrink."

But we really do want government programs to shrink. The federal government and its programs are bloated and overly intrusive into the lives and actions of the people and the states. And the federal government wastes and squanders huge amounts of money every year. In addition, the government's increasing regulatory overreach is yet another huge drag on the economy.

There's another problem for Obama, too. The Congressional Budget Office says tax hikes are not necessary. So Obama's proposed tax hikes are both damaging to the economy and unnecessary — except maybe ideologically.

Or maybe President Obama thinks his tax hikes will be as ineffective in damaging the economy as his stimulus was in assisting it.

Even John Lennon Grew Up

2011-06-29T12:03:00.001-06:00

I'm sure this is a paraphrase, but I've heard it said that

If you're 20 and not a liberal, you have no heart.
If you're 40 and not a conservative, you have no brain.

Today we learn, from his last personal assistant, that even John Lennon grew up. And once he grew up, many of the thoughtless positions of his younger days embarrassed him.

It's clear it took a lot of folks a lot longer to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s than was once the case, and that seems to be the case even more in today's society. But if even someone with as much invested in the liberal mindset as John Lennon can eventually grow up, maybe there's at least a little hope for some of our liberal politicians.

Transparency, Obama Style

2011-06-26T23:46:00.006-06:00

This story is revealing in SO MANY WAYS.

When President Barack Obama and his Administration don't like a court ruling, they ignore it. When they don't like a law, they ignore it, too. When they want a law to do something other than what Congress defined, they change it — unilaterally, and without even bothering to try to get Congress to give them what they want. That sounds a lot more like a dictator than like a traditional U.S. president.

In the present case, the Obama Administration's Labor Secretary is about to change the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act by executive fiat, substantially expanding what a company has to report in relation to any attempted unionization of its workforce. Not coincidentally, this will provide a lot more opportunities for intrusive investigations of any charges, real or imagined, against those companies.

They say they're doing this as a transparency measure, but that is a transparent lie. To see why, just look at another time the Obama Administration changed that same law.

Soon after taking the oath of office, Obama undid union financial disclosure requirements mandated by the very same 1959 law. Before the Obama transparency rollback, unions had to fill out LM-2 forms reporting the total value of all benefits received by union officers, the names of parties involved in union asset transaction, and all union receipts. Now, thanks to Obama, unions do not have to disclose any of these financial transactions to their members.
In 2008 the president of the largest Service Employees International Union in the country, Tyrone Freeman, resigned after it was revealed he stole $1 million from the $9-an-hour home health workers he supposedly represented. Freeman's embezzlement only came to light after the Los Angeles Times delved into the SEIU's LM-2 forms.

It would appear that, by the time the investigation was maturing enough to result in criminal charges, Barack Obama was president and the same thing happened to this case as happened to the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia. (That would be dropped, for — apparently — no legitimate reason.)

Congress passed the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act to protect workers. The Obama Administration twisted it to protect its union leader friends, and is now moving to twist it again to help its union friends even more.

Protection for Obama's friends and supporters, and harassment for those who have to deal with them. These are the actions of a dictator, not a leader.

Tax Hikes or Spending Cuts

2011-06-24T20:06:00.002-06:00

Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting article on the debt limit debate. It says

Trying to convince slash-the-government Republicans on Capitol Hill that tax increases will be necessary to bring down the nation’s federal debt is a thankless job. So is convincing them it’s in their political interest to help President Barack Obama and the Democrats raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.

It also says

Republican leaders, maneuvering for advantage in the debt debate, say they’ll allow the nation to default unless the deal includes steep spending cuts and no tax increases.

And that's just in the first paragraph.

There's a lot wrong with this. Starting with the latter part first, the article's author (Julie Hirschfeld Davis) accepts without question the Obama-Geithner talking point that not being allowed to borrow massive further amounts of money automatically means a U.S. default. That is not true! Any U.S. default will be a direct and deliberate choice by the Obama Administration. If they want to claim that would be the appropriate choice to make, they should explain why. But with or without that explanation, it really offends me to have them pushing as doctrine something that is so completely not true.

So how do we get out of this mess? Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wants the debt ceiling raised by $2.5 trillion right now. That would allow the Obama Administration to keep spending at or above the current obscene rate until after Barack Obama's re-election campaign is over. I can appreciate that Obama would like to avoid having this issue discussed during the campaign, but that seems like the wrong approach to me since it says that nothing would be done about actual deficit reduction during that time. It seems to me the most important thing to work on is actual deficit reduction, not on another band-aid to allow us to kick the can down the road and avoid dealing with the problem for a while longer.

How do we go at actual deficit reduction? A good start would be to get rid of the extra trillion dollars a year in government spending added on by Barack Obama and his friends in Congress. That, by itself, would bring the deficits down to only about 50% over George Bush's biggest deficit. Even if that's not the approach taken, however, it is clear that most of the deficit reduction must be by spending reduction.

What about the tax increases the Bloomberg Businessweek article says are necessary? Certainly the Democrats are insisting on tax increases as part of the package. In fact, the Democrats' insistence on tax hikes was the reason the Republicans left the negotiations. Even Nancy Pelosi says so, quite directly.

There's a problem with the Democrats' demand, however, and that's that they have used that same scam so often before. Time and again, the Democrats have promised spending cuts in return for tax hikes. And time and again, somehow the tax hikes happen and the spending cuts never materialize. I think the Republicans have finally realized the only way to get the spending cuts is to insist on them alone. If, as the Bloomberg Businessweek article says, tax hikes are really necessary to bring down the debt, there will be plenty of time to consider them after large-scale spending cuts are locked in.

Islam, Slavery, & Conquest

2011-06-23T01:01:00.001-06:00

The headline says Ahmadinejad launches attack on 'slavers and colonizers' of the West. My first thought was "That little turd has a lot of brass." Later, when I was feeling exceptionally kind, I thought it might be ascribed to Ahmadinejad's extreme capacity for projection.

Islam accepts, promotes, and preaches slavery — and has from its beginning. Mohammed kept slaves, and Islam promotes Mohammed and everything he did as the perfect example for all to follow. As a result, fewer centuries ago, Muslim slavers captured the Africans that were sold to Western slavers for transport and sale outside Africa. Even now, slavery continues in a number of Muslim countries and Middle Eastern authorities advocate jihad to capture victimes to be sold as slaves to help those countries reduce their debt levels.

Slavery provides other insights into Islam, through that same link to Mohammed and his actions. From my observation, there is nothing more racist and xenophobic than an Arab Muslim — and it would appear a Persian Muslim is not far behind. And it all comes from the Arabic language and the Islamic doctrine. It's not bad enough that Arabic commonly uses the same word for slave and for black African. These are people who are arrogant enough to believe their god speaks seventh century Arabic, incorporated in the Quran and since that time translated into modern Arabic so that modern Arabs and others can (perhaps) understand the words.

By contrast, what do we find in the West? The Catholic church prevented Muslim-style chattel slavery from existing in its areas of influence, ruling that one could own a man's work but not his soul. And then Western Protestants, English and American, ended slavery altogether in areas they controlled.

Westerners ended slavery where they could. Muslims continue it.

Colonizers? It seems to me that the West has now progressed to the point that it doesn't take over the places it feels it has to send its troops. Only the Muslims still do that, and insist of reconquering areas they once held. In fact, a look at history shows conquest is the only reliable way Islam has ever been spread.

Islamism, A Modern Phenomenon

2011-06-19T23:02:00.001-06:00

It's always worth waiting for David Warren's columns in the Ottawa Citizen to be posted online. That's especially the case with one recent column. In that column, he goes after the "conventional wisdom" that he says the multiculturists and our rulers are prisoners of.

The issue is Islamism, the ideology responsible for 9/11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the terrorist "culture of death". Warren notes, quite correctly in my view, that

"Islamism is not a medieval recrudescence." This despite the fact that some related elements have surfaced in the past.
"It is instead an ultramodern phenomenon, of the age of fascism and communism ..."
It "is the product not of rekindled religious faith, but of the exact opposite."

Note Mohammed Atta spending his last night before 9/11 getting lap dances at a strip club, an Osama bin Laden's library of pornography. These are not the actions of people commited to religious beliefs.

Warren notes that religious people "do not make suicide bombers; never did and never will. Suicide bombers are recruited from among the young, mostly male, bored, frustrated, and indulged products of a debilitating consumerism (as our terrorist profiles show again and again)." These are wolves in sheep's clothing, using religion as camouflage to protect themselves and their fascist jihad ideology. (They protect themselves while sending others to die for them.)

We need to properly identify the enemy so we can identify the right strategy to use against it.

SecDef Gates on Afghanistan

2011-06-19T22:36:00.001-06:00

Michael Dunn, President of the Air Force Association, sent an e-mail to the Association's members following up on the statements by Defense Secretary Robert Gates about support for the NATO action in Afghanistan. As President Dunn observed (with data for backup)

NATO's (without the US) GDP is about $2T more than the US.
Their population (without the US) is almost double the US.
They have about one million more troops than the US.
But they provide only about 1/3 as many troops for Afghanistan as the US.

He noted that "You can draw your own conclusions, but … it seems Sec Gates' points were supported by the data."

Meanwhile, the military forces our European NATO allies keep losing support and morale. The British military, for example, has been shrinking for years, and is losing many of its best officers, who are asking to leave the service as "voluntary redundancies".

Looks to me like there's more than one thing wrong with this picture.

Arizona Fires, New Mexico Smoke

2011-06-19T22:27:00.004-06:00

The Wallow Fire, in eastern Arizona south of Springerville, is now the largest fire in Arizona history — now having burned well over 780 square miles. It ahd the Horseshoe 2 fire further south have sent a lot of smoke over New Mexico and other areas, making visibility (and breatheability) very bad in places like Albuquerque and Denver.

As often happens, Albuquerque Journal cartoonist Trever captures the issue perfectly.

Every Home A Toxic Waste Dump

2011-06-15T23:18:00.002-06:00

By order of Congress, the light bulb we have all knows will be history. It won't be able to be sold any more, anywhere in the country. In its place, Congress wants us all to buy the "curly fries bulb", A.K.A. compact fluorescent bulb. These things are expensive, don't last anywhere near as long as they like to pretend, and contain mercury. That means that, when one breaks (as always happens to bulbe in homes), you have toxic waste that comes under Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.

My reaction: Let There Be (100 Watt Incandescent) Light!

Where did Congress get the authority to require that every home and workplace in America become a toxic waste site? That doesn't sound very Green to me!

The Green Thing

2011-06-15T14:13:00.001-06:00

This came in my e-mail, and I thought it was worth giving wider distribution. I just wish I knew who wrote it so I could credit it properly.

In the line at the store, the cashier told the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bag because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."
The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. The former generation did not care enough to save our environment."
He was right, that generation didn't have the green thing in its day.
Back then, they returned their milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.
But they didn't have the green thing back in that customer's day.
In her day, they walked up stairs, because they didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. They walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300 horsepower machine every time they had to go two blocks.
But she was right. They didn't have the green thing in her day.
Back then, they washed the baby's diapers because they didn't have the throw-away kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.
But that old lady is right, they didn't have the green thing back in her day.
Back then, they had one TV (if that), or one radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, they blended and stirred by hand because they didn't have electric machines to do everything for you.
When they packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, they used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, they didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. They used a push mower that ran on human power. They exercised by working so they didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.
But she's right, they didn't have the green thing back then.
They drank from a fountain when they were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time they had a drink of water. They refilled their writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and they replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
But they didn't have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or rode the school bus instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. They had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And they didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.
But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful the old folks were just because they didn't have the green thing back then?
— Author Unknown

And all these things bring back lots of memories. Guess that says I'm getting old.

I'm glad for the modern conveniences we have today. But I have a lot of good memories, too.

New NM Vote Fraud Investigation

2011-06-13T23:49:00.002-06:00

It is frequently claimed that concern over vote fraud is unwarranted, that there are few or no false or fraudulent voter registrations, and that little or no vote fraud actually takes place.

If that's the case, then

Why were more than 201,700 voter ID cards (over 18%) sent out by the New Mexico Secretary of State in 2006 returned as undeliverable by the Post Office?
Why did New Mexico's then-U.S. Attorney, David Iglesias, fail to take any action on vote fraud cases even when he reportedly had an iron-clad case and a confession (a failure to act that was apparently at least partly responsible for his termination).
Why did the New Mexico Secretary of State, in the earliest phase of investigation, find dozens of voter registrations by individuals holding non-citizen drivers licenses? (New Mexico is one of only two states to issue drivers licenses to non-citizens.)

Now a new voter fraud inquiry by the State Police is beginning, with more than 64,000 cases (more than 5% of all registered New Mexico voters) being referred for investigation.

The evidence is piling up. How much more must we find before we finally take some appropriate action? It seems to me appropriate steps would include implementation of a strong voter ID requirement, followed by a full culling of the voter lists to get rid of the moved, dead, and nonexistent voters.

And this is just in New Mexico, without saying anything about the voter registration fraud and vote fraud that have been found in other states.

Islam Influenced U.S. Founding Fathers

2011-06-13T22:37:00.002-06:00

That's what one of President Barack Obama's recent appointees says. A summary of the YouTube video series by Dr Azizah al-Hibri says

Were the freedoms outlined in the U.S. Constitution influenced by the Quran? Professor Azizah Y. al-Hibri, President of Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, Islamic scholar and law professor at the University of Richmond, discusses the influences of the Quran and early Muslim history on Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. Listen as Dr. al-Hibri explains the implications of the Quran on U.S. Constitutional principles from freedom of religion to the separation of church and state.

She's right, in a way, but not in the way she seems to think. Islam did influence Thomas Jefferson, the fledgeling United States, and the Founding Fathers. Much of that influence was occasioned by the Barbary Coast caliphates attacks on shipping, taking U.S. seamen and civilians to be sold into slavery. These pirates promised safe passage for shipping in return for payment of tribute (protection money). The ambassador from Tripoli explained to Jefferson and John Adams that they did this because

"That's what we do. We are commanded to do so by Allah." Jefferson later wrote that the Tripoli ambassador told him, "It was written in their Koran that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman (Muslim) who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to Paradise."

Thomas Jefferson was shocked. He bought and read the Koran. He learned what Islam was about. As a result, "Jefferson’s resolve to fight had its genesis in his reading the Koran as the best source of all things Muslim. Jefferson knew that 18th century Americans were in danger from what we call today conservative, Wahhabi-type, radical Islam." This was the early 19th century jihad. Jefferson sent the Navy and the Marines against Tripoli and the Barbary Coast. (Remember "... to the shores of Tripoli"?) This was the first foreign war for the U.S., and the beginning of the end for the Islamic caliphates. And it spared most of the world that kind of barbarism for nearly 200 years. That is the kind of influence Islam had on the Founding Fathers and the early history of the United States.

I also seriously doubt that bit about the influence of "early Muslim history" on Jefferson since that early history was separated from Jefferson and early U.S. history by more than 1100 years.

The Censorship of Huckleberry Finn

2011-06-13T21:05:00.001-06:00

Last night, on 60 Minutes, they re-ran a piece on the new efforts to ban or censor Mark Twain's masterpiece novel Huckleberry Finn. Some — including some book publishers — have tried to hit what they think is a "middle ground" by simply replacing the word "nigger" everywhere Twain used it with the word "slave". That seems a reasonable "compromise", right?

Except for a couple of key things:

That kind of change bastardizes Twain's greatest novel. Twain chose his words very carefully and specifically.
The replacement is entirely innacurate. Jim describes himself as a nigger, and Jim is a free black man, not a slave.

These people should just leave well enough alone. Attempts like this never work out well.

D-Day, 67 Years Ago Today

2011-06-06T14:11:00.002-06:00

67 years ago today, 160,000 troops stormed the beaches of Normandy. Along with 24,000 paratroopers dropped into the area a few hours earlier, they began the final invasion of the European continent.

Omaha Beach was the most restricted and most heavily defended of the invasion beaches. One of the units landing on that beach that day was the 29^th Infantry Division — the Blue and Gray Division. The division included National Guardsmen from the Virginia and Maryland area, and men who were not yet in the Army when the 29^th shipped out to England.

Maybe today would be a good day for a movie that includes the Normandy invasion. A good one that provides a good sense what the landing felt like (according to one of the men who was there) is Saving Private Ryan. (When the movie ends, consider that all its action took place in just one week.)

Today would also be a good day to read the day's commemorations at Blackfive, specifically this and this and this, and to consider how terribly high the stakes were on D-Day in 1944.

Tian An Men Remembered

2011-06-06T14:07:00.002-06:00

22 years ago, in China — June 4, 1989

We need to remember this bravery, these events.

And, the way history usually works, it won't be long till one of 1989's demonstrators from Tian An Men Square becomes part of the senior leadership of China.

[Reposted from 2010. I'm a couple of days late — again. But I still remember.]

Egypt Opening to Gaza

2011-05-31T00:15:00.001-06:00

Egypt is permanently opening its border crossing into Gaza. In response, at least 400 al Qaeda terrorists have already moved into Sinai, ready to move from there into the Gaza strip — presumably to take up operations against Israel.

What could possibly go wrong?

Memorial Day, 2011

2011-05-30T00:06:00.005-06:00

I have seen a number of Memorial Day tributes, today and in past years. This one — originally posted in 2001 and reposted for today's holiday — is one of the best. Go read it all. You'll be glad you did.

I would also say that saying “thank you” is not enough.

Enjoy your holiday, and remember why we have it.

Mediscare

2011-05-29T23:36:00.004-06:00

We keep hearing from the Obama Administration, and from other associated Democrats, that Republican proposals to reform Medicare — especially the plan put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — “will end Medicare as we know it.” The latest I've seen push this is new Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-FL) on CBS' Face the Nation this morning. She said Ryan’s plan would “throw seniors to the wolves” and result in insurance companies “dropping them for pre-existing conditions, and denying them care.” [Quotations are approximate, written down from short-term memory during the show.]

As with so many statements coming out of the Left these days, there are a few things wrong with these statements. Among these are:

“Medicare as we know it” is already ending. Democrats insured that when they stole a half trillion dollars from the program as part of their Obamacare bill (disingenuously titled the “Patient Protection and Affordable Cara Act”). Democrats’ claim that taking that amount of money from the program, and cutting its already substandard reimbursement rates, will make the program viable for a much longer time than would have been the case before. These claims completely ignore reality and/or are deliberate falsehoods.
Underlining the above, Medicare’s actuary says that, under what is now the current law, Medicare will be bankrupt within a decade. Translated, that means Medicare is now a “dead man walking.”
That means something must be done to save the program. Is the Ryan plan the way to do that? Good question. But the Ryan plan is the only one on the table. The Democrats haven’t presented a plan. It looks like the Democrats’ plan is to suck their collective thumbs and expect a miracle. (Frankly, that makes less sense than relying on holding the winning lottery ticket!)
The Obama Administration and the rest of the Democrats are especially incensed at the Ryan plan’s use of health care policies issued by existing health insurance companies. Rep. Ryan says that just mirrors the practice used in Medicare Part D (the prescription drug program), which he says is costing 41% less than expected — unheard of for a government program. He says that is because Part D makes use of the competition inherent in the private sector’s free market. If verified, this would make a fairly compelling argument for something like this plan.
As noted above, a primary part of the Democrats’ argument against using private insurance companies is the claim that puts seniors at risk because the companies will deny seniors needed medical care. Their solution is to keep all decisions under Medicare. In this case, however, the “cure” is worse than the disease. The AMA’s National Health Insurer Report Card for 2008 (apparently the latest year available) shows that Medicare denies claims at twice the insurance company average, and at a higher rate than any individual private insurer surveyed. In other words, keeping seniors in “Medicare as we know it,” and away from the private insurance companies, is dangerous to their health.

It seems to me the best that can be said of the Democrats’ arguments is that they don’t hold water. (It really looks more like they are disingenuous and false.) And that's not even counting the vicious deliberate bullshittery of the Democrats' at showing a Paul Ryan stand-in pushing Grandma over a cliff, which is most similar to the Left’s deliberate lies to seniors in previous decades that Republicans “want to take away your Social Security” and “ are going to make you eat dog food — if you can even afford that.”

The Ryan plan may not be the best attempt at a solution. (And, of course, no initial proposal ever gets through Congress unmodified.) But the hysterical pseudo-arguments the Democrats are putting up are making the Ryan plan look pretty good. All the Democrats are providing is demagogic scaremongering. And that’s not worthy of any participant in a democracy.

When "Land for Peace" Goes Bad

2011-05-23T21:48:00.005-06:00

Noise is being made that Egypt may abrogate the peace treaty it agreed to with Israel.

Does that mean Egypt will give back the land it received from Israel under that treaty? (That would be the entire oil-rich Sinai.)

UPDATE: The conflict is not about land.

Defaultophobia

2011-05-22T15:23:00.001-06:00

We keep hearing from the Obama Administration, and from other associated Democrats, that if the debt ceiling isn't raised by some date (from last week to next August or so) the United States will default on its debt. Most of the associated Democrats keep saying that hitting the debt ceiling means an automatic default by the United States, with all the economic damage that would entail. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is being more reasonable and responsible, reporting that he can move money around among accounts (including taking "contributions" — involuntarily — from government workers' pension funds) and can delay the government's default until August. (Geithner is asking for a debt ceiling increase that will let the Administration keep at their profligate spending until after the 2012 election.) These people keep making these statements in hopes of panicking Congress into raising the debt ceiling without any attempt to rein in the spending that is the cause of this problem.

The problem with these scary statements is that they are untrue. The Obama Administration and its associated Democrats are simply lying. Default, if it occurs, will be the Obama Administration's deliberate choice.

How can I say that? Easy! The government takes in a lot more income than is necessary to pay the interest on the debt and to redeem government bonds as they mature. Of course, applying that income to debt service will require cutting spending in other areas. By a lot. Not borrowing (or printing) still more money will also require cutting spending. By a lot. Will that be painful? Yes — a lot more painful than if the Democrats come to a spending cut agreement with the Republicans. Plus, if they do that, they can work out a deal to get a debt ceiling increase — hopefully a more limited one — in the bargain.

Thus, again, any default will be the deliberate choice of the Obama Administration. And all their prattling about automatic default is just demagogic scaremongering.

The Progressive Budget Dangerous to the Nation

2011-05-21T00:15:00.002-06:00

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Democrats will not propose a budget for fiscal year 2012. Indeed, he says it would be "foolish" for Democrats to do so.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Democrats' left wing, believes differently — and has proposed their answer to the budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan. As Barron's notes

It claims to balance the budget in 10 years . . . . But it does so entirely with tax increases.

HUGE tax increases. (That does seem to be the usual Progressive answer to virtually everything.)

Barron's also says

We are always amazed by people who believe that spending cuts depress the economy while tax increases have no harmful effect.

I agree with them. That view strikes me as a sort of deliberate stupidity.

Sen. Bingaman and the NLRB Boeing Ruling

2011-05-20T23:31:00.002-06:00

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) says Boeing is not allowed to move a 787 Dreamliner production facility to South Carolina. In saying that, the NLRB is being dishonest since Boeing is adding an additional 787 production facility, not moving its existing 787 facility from Washington state. It is also, quite apparently, simply repeating the false statements made to it in the union complaint.

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman thinks that's just fine.

“They're asking to investigate what the motivation was for the move to South Carolina,” he said. “I think that's well within their rights to ask for that investigation, and it seems appropriate to see what the investigation concludes.”

That is, Senator Bingaman isn't supporting an investigation into whether Boeing's decision was legitimate, or even properly supported. He is supporting investigation of Boeing for a possible thought crime.

That's not legitimate. Nor, it seems to me, is it legitimate for an arm of the federal government to be telling a private company what states it is, and is not, allowed to operate in.

Obama's Middle East Speech Dumb or a Fraud

2011-05-19T22:34:00.008-06:00

President Obama made his Middle East policy speech today. In one part of it, he laid out his vision for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. A few things stood out to me in press reports of the speech.

Number one — with a bullet — is that Obama's feelings and beliefs are frozen far in the past. In this case, in about 1966. Obama must know the pre-1967 borders were indefensible. They were part of why all the surrounding Arab states attacked Israel repeatedly between 1948 and 1967.

Yes, it could be that I'm wrong about his frozen-in-time viewpoint, but that would require that he is actively and deliberately antagonistic to Israel and supportive of the deliberately racist Arab position.

Regardless of this, Obama has made the position of Israel a lot more dangerous. He has supported the position of those claiming Israel has no right to exist over the position of Israel (and the United Nations, which mandated Israel's creation).

Despite apparently promising — repeatedly — that he would not advocate the division of Jerusalem, he has now (in his speech) done precisely that. In doing so, he has shown that the word of the United States cannot be relied on, that it can change from president to president. That makes us appear more like a garden variety third world country, not like the world's sole remaining superpower.

And one other thing struck me. Obama insists “The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.” But by insisting on this right for the Palestinians, he explicitly denies this same right to the Israelis. To see why, just look at the map below. Is there any rational way to connect the territory on the West Bank (by the Dead Sea) with the Gaza Strip (on the Mediterranean coast) without cutting Israel into two parts, or taking a large fraction of Israel's already small territory? There doesn't seem to be a solution — unless Obama plans to move everyone from Gaza to the West Bank. Or the other way around. (That might be better — confine all the terrorists and their supporters in the Gaza Strip and seal them up there.)

I have no idea what exact words will be used when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu meets with President Obama tomorrow, but I think I can divine the meaning of whatever words he will use:

Are you really as dumb as you sounded yesterday, or is it all an act? Or do you think we're really that stupid?

If Barack Obama has any honor at all, Prime Minister Netanyahu will be right and President Obama will take back his rhetoric and not make such demands. If he doesn't, then Knesset members are right and Obama is no different than unrepentent Arab terrorist Yasser Arafat.

The only other alternative is that Obama is really as ignorant and inexperienced as he appears to be. And that would mean the United States is in a lot more trouble than we have thought.

Barbershop Harmony in Albuquerque

2011-05-13T13:58:00.004-06:00

'Nuff said.

UPDATE: The show was great!

New Definition of Chutzpah

2011-05-07T21:46:00.000-06:00

If you look up "chutzpah" in the dictionary, you will find the definition has been changed since earlier this week. That's because al Qaeda has released a statement on the death of Osama bin Laden which has been reported in English translation here (also reported here) that includes this:

Even when the Americans managed to kill Osama, they managed to do ONLY that by disgrace and betrayal. Men and heroes only should be confronted in the battlefields but at the end, that’s God’s fate.

This from an organization of professional cowards who

have never yet enterred an actual battlefield
have never acted as soldiers of any sort, preferring to operate in a manner that would embarrass common thugs
target women, children, and other defenseless people, avoiding situations where they might be confronted by those who might conceivably fight back
are led by those (like bin Laden) who extoll the virtues of martyrdom to their ignorant followers while keeping themselves safe from risk and harm

Amazing that al Qaeda could have the degree of arrogance and self-delusion to make such a statement. These barbarians make the lowest primitives look civilized. And that's not counting their extreme chutzpah.

White House Gang Can't Shoot Straight

2011-05-04T18:50:00.005-06:00

Descriptions of the raid that killed Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, as provided by President Barack Obama and senior members of his administration, have been changing day by day. That's not good, because the various descriptions contradict each other. And it's not just people mis-speaking, either — the official White House story of the raid has been changing. For example, Obama and administration officials said Osama bin Laden

was part of the firefight
used a woman as a human shield, and
was shooting from behind his human shield

Later, administration officials were saying bin Laden

wasn't shooting
wasn't armed, and
didn't use a human shield.

Contradictions like these simply had to be addressed:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday publicly revised the administration’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, telling reporters that the Al Qaeda leader wasn’t armed during the assault and didn’t use one of his wives as a shield.

Carney tried to explain:

“What is true,” Carney said, is that “we provided a great deal of information with great haste.”
“Obviously, some of the information was — came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated upon,” he said.

The Associated Press story, as printed in the Albuquerque Journal (apparently not available online) had a somewhat extended version of the same statement, saying

"We provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you, and through you the American public, about the operation and how it transpired and the events that took place there in Pakistan," Carney told reporters Tuesday. "And obviously some of the information came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on."

It seems to me that Carney and the White House have embarrassed themselves here. This explanation is simply not believable. After all, Obama and the senior administration folks monitored the raid's progress in real time. In other words “Barack Obama watched US special forces' raid in 'real time'”. Another account put it this way

WASHINGTON -- From halfway around the world, President Barack Obama and his national security team monitored the strike on Osama bin Laden's compound in real time, watching and listening to the firefight that killed the terrorist leader.

The White House even released a photo taken during the raid.

The Situation Room: Obama and his National Security Team watching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan (White House photo)

So the White House didn't have to wait for information on the raid, its progress, and its results to come in "piece by piece" and get assembled. They heard and saw it happen. Under these circumstances, the narrative contradictions that have come out of the White House and the administration are — at best — extremely unlikely to have occurred by accident.

At the very least, the White House has a lot of explaining to do.

The White House did something good in giving the raid task to a highly competent military organization to carry out. But in its information handling since that time, this White House has demonstrated the level of competence we have come to expect.

UPDATE: Now CIA director Leon Panetta claims there was no live video feed during the raid. In an interview with PBS, as reported in the London Telegraph, Panetta said,

"Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
"We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.

The sequence and timing of the claims/admissions raises more questions, the most important of which is this: Are they slow (etc.) in getting actual information out, or is this another cover-up? (Some folks are fairly clear what they think the answer is.)

Osama bin Laden Is Finally Dead

2011-05-01T22:27:00.001-06:00

We'd heard earlier today that the local Air Force Base went to a higher alert level, but the only thing said about why was "orders from higher headquarters". Guess tonight's announcement explains the reason.

Glad he's dead. Glad it was a US operation. Now to get the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership team.

U.S. Government Printing Gas Coupons

2011-05-01T14:05:00.002-06:00

There's a new report the U.S. government is now printing millions of coupons that are each good for one gallon of gas. I was suprised to read that. But I've checked it out, and it's true!

UPDATE: And they're already printing another set for future use.

A Modified Easter Story

2011-04-30T00:45:00.000-06:00

The cause for the apparent timing problems in the gospels — conflicts between different calendars. This is reported as a new discovery. But it's not. I've been aware of this, because of news reports, for more than forty years. (That also implies it's been known for significantly longer than that.) The only thing new is this individual's suggestion that Easter should be on a fixed date on our current calendar version.

Sorry, but that strikes me as dumb. The date of Easter ties absolutely to the date of Passover — new calendar or old. And that means it should still be on the lunar calendar, and not fixed on our current solar calendar.

One can quibble, but the existing definition of Easter makes sense as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

Superman Renouncing U.S. Citizenship

2011-04-29T23:46:00.001-06:00

That's what I read. My reaction: He had U.S. citizenship? I always thought he was an illegal alien!

gdcritter

MLK Would Not Be Amused

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The Age of the Internet Age

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The Day World War II Began for the U.S.

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How to Save on Taxes

Obama Actions on Jobs

Both Sides of His Mouth

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Obama's Middle East Speech Dumb or a Fraud