Justice Trivialized & Propagandized

The decision by the administration to try the 9/11 perpetrators in a criminal court in New York has outraged most conservatives – and most likely a lot of democrats – and remarked the point that these terrorists have committed crimes per se, not war crimes. If they had committed war crimes, they would be tried in military courts since wars are conducted by the military.

The conflict accruing to 9/11 has always been classified as a WAR against terrorism, and the U.S. combatants have been members of the military, not police departments. So...the president and Attorney General Holder have adopted the same stance as the Clinton administration in the 1993 WTC bombing, i.e., that the 9/11 “gang of five” is on the same level as members of the Cripps, one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United States, having wasted innocent citizens and/or rival gang-bangers for years and for whatever reason.

On the basis of what’s been seen in similar events in other countries, the proceeding(s) will become “show-trials.” Think of the trials of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague in 2006. In many ways, these were circuses served up on TV, foreshadowing a virtual repeat in this country, replete with cable-news networks avidly searching for and disclosing “raw meat” on a 24/7 basis.

The potential for Khalid to harangue the judge, the lawyers and the press is palpable, all documented by the mighty cameras. In the 1980s, Khalid attended Chowan College (ironically a Baptist-affiliated school) in North Carolina and earned a mechanical engineering degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Well educated and in good command of English, he can make Islamic fulminations interesting, though he has already admitted his guilt and even requested to be put to death; however, with an opportunity to force into the record and present to the world any propaganda he chooses, not to mention exposing damaging information about U.S. clandestine activities, he is likely not to plead guilty officially in New York.

Khalid’s presence, of course, nullifies one of the administration’s primary purposes in the trial – the condemning of the Bush administration for using water-boarding as torture. Water-boarding neither injures nor kills and is therefore not torture. A well-fed Khalid bearing no ill-effects of anything is testimony to this fact since a reported 183 water-boardings (whether fact or not) has left him quite well and publicly wishing only to exercise with the virgins in Paradise, though he’s probably too intelligent to actually believe that stuff.

In the Fort Hood slaughter, Major Nasan, an American citizen, killed both military members and a civilian on American soil but is to be tried in a military court. In the 9/11 proceeding, the perpetrators, non-citizens, effected the deaths of both civilians and members of the military (Pentagon) on American soil but are to be tried in criminal court, with the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of crimes already admitted. The major has been classified as a terrorist (committing acts of war), so where does that leave the “gang of five?” Are they just hoodlums who’ve committed crimes like armed robbery, since they’re being tried in criminal court?

There seems to be something wrong here. Nasan, the killer of 13 people, will be tried in a very restricted arena, a military court with the trial probably not on TV (at least most of it), while the folks responsible along with the hijackers for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11 will be allowed to strut and swagger all over TV for the whole world to see...sort of like O.J. back in 1994. These hijackers – like Simpson – with some slick lawyering could, if not go free, at least string out this mess for months or years and almost certainly escape the hangman’s noose.

Political correctness militates against saying anything by way of criticism of the president vis-a-vis his Islamic background, but the fact remains that Barack Hussein Obama was born into Islam and spent the first ten years of his life in Islamic households, the first headed by his biological Muslim father, the second by his Muslim stepfather. Later, he sat through 20 years of acerbic sermons by the white-hating Rev Dr. Jeremiah Wright, friend of Muslim Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan, whom he accompanied in the 1980s on a trip to visit Muslim/Libyan butcher Muammar Qaddafi. Is he trying to make a point by moving this business into the domestic court system rather than in that of the military?

This show-trial is made to order for the militant Islamic world, absolutely the best scenario for which it could hope. Given the built-in vagaries of the U.S. Justice system, the gang-of-five will come out of it smelling like a rose in the Muslim world no matter what happens. This shouldn’t happen, particularly at the expense of actually all the intelligence agencies of the civilized world. Obama and Holder need to be turned around on this one but, unfortunately, that can happen only of their own volition – not likely. In the meantime, it stinks!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

DNC Memorandum #7

From the office of Governor Tim Kaine, convener, 12 November 2009

**Everyone is authorized to declare victory vis-a-vis the recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, primarily on the basis that Creigh Deeds refused help from POTUS and TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States) until it was too late, John Corzine spent too much of his own money and therefore appeared too ambitious, and the democrat in New York-23 (can’t remember his/her/its name) beat out not one but two candidates, proving that when all things are normal the democrats win. The republican governors elected in my state and New Jersey will make no difference since they can’t vote on health-care or cap-and-trade but the representative from New York-23 will be very important, taking into account the defection of 39 (17% of total democrats) in the recent health-care vote in the House. The rumor that Rahm Emanuel has mailed a dead fish to each of the defectors is untrue and Rahm has said he won’t do it again. Speaker Pelosi has promised not to punish any of the defectors and the rumor that she had all the microwaves and coffee-makers removed from their offices through 2010 is untrue. She only removed pencil sharpeners and privileges in the House gym.

**POTUS leaves on his Asian trip today and has asked for help in the fashioning of acceptable apologies to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea for the meanness of this nation (as described by the first lady) until his election. This is an urgent matter and the staffer who rises to the occasion will be given a bonus. CAUTION: Since POTUS listened for 20 years to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who said the “chickens had come home to roost in the U.S. because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he expects any reasonable apology to include the reverend’s wisdom in the matter, with the proper mention of U.S. perfidy. Further Caution: Do not – repeat – DO NOT mention Pearl Harbor or the Korean “Comfort Women,” but make whatever positive use possible of the term “Kamikaze.” For instance, cite Al Gore’s warning that the U.S. is killing the planet in the name of the pursuit of happiness, as per the wrong interpretation of the Declaration.

**POTUS travel plans have been slightly changed. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn was to accompany the president, though not as a reward for publicly dissing Fox News and denying permission to any White House folks to appear on Fox; rather she was to go along because of her recent statement concerning her proclivity to look at the sayings/actions of Chairman Mao whenever she needed to determine a course of action, especially calling attention to the way he outdid Chiang-Kai-shek, in grabbing China for the communists at the end of WWII. Unfortunately, Chiang was an ally of the U.S., while Mao, who is said to be responsible for 40-50 million killed in his grab plus his Cultural Revolution of the 60s-70s, was an enemy. Ms. Dunn has decided to leave the administration at the end of the month, claiming, as usual, the need to spend more time with family. The fact that POTUS has been given a crash course lately in Chinese history in preparation for his trip has nothing to do with this matter, and the staffer who created a poster with a drawing of Ms. Dunn under a bus and placed it by the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush-dart-board will be fired.

**The DNC position on the Fort Hood episode is that no conclusions are to be drawn concerning the killer until the investigation is completed, but it will be alright to quote the e-zines and other publications that call for an investigation into the body politic in the interest of determining how Nasan became a victim of American society and was driven to placing himself in the awkward position of being court-martialed for what is clearly a case of suffering from Pre-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, a condition unknown before now. DNC psychiatrists, led by William Ayers of Weather Underground fame and now a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago and an expert on Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, are looking into the possibility that PTSD is contagious and that Nasan probably caught it from returnees from Iraq and Afghanistan. If this is the case, Nasan is to be congratulated for not killing more soldiers before being gunned down by policemen, who, as POTUS has noted recently in the Cambridge case, act stupidly.

**Senator Kerry is to be commended for his recent adamant position in a hearing concerning global warming, and the public can be glad that his effort was shown on C-Span. In excoriating a poor soul from the American Enterprise Institute (or maybe some other conservative bunch of nutcases – who’s counting anyway), he made it plain that the snow will soon melt entirely from the Himalayas (or some other mountain range – who’s counting anyway) if this country doesn’t change its ways. He made it plain that the UN-IPCC and Al Gore have concluded beyond a doubt that the United States is the worst enemy of the third world (or fourth world – who’s counting anyway) and that this country must take the lead in Copenhagen next month in chastising itself and showing the proper remorse for disturbing the climate to an extent guaranteed, if not corrected, to bring on Armageddon before the end of the century. Misguided American and British climatologists disagree, but the senator is holding his ground and has privately worried that his ski trips to Switzerland may be in jeopardy.

**In keeping with his promise to protect the consumer, POTUS will soon appoint a Fast-Food Czar to carry out his executive orders denoting such important considerations as the amount of meat/grease/cheese/salt-on-a pumpernickel-bun in constructing a cheeseburger and the proper temperature for coffee. French-fries will not – repeat – will NOT be banned as of this writing, but if obesity persists in the elementary schools, the matter will be given another look. All staffers are to check the body-mass chart and add their readings to their profiles. Those who are overweight will be required to secure at least a high-normal reading before the holidays. Those whose sideways shadows at five p.m. are wider than a football will be required to listen to ten lectures each by Professor Ayers on the subjects: “Why Hugo Chavez Had a Right in His UN Speech to Call George Bush a Devil” and “How to Make a Homemade Bomb and Write a Will in Three Easy Lessons.”

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Athletic Lunacy Reigns

Wonders never cease when it comes to the amount of money that’s thrown away in Kentucky through the athletic departments of the state’s universities. The only athletic departments that are said to pay their way through income derived from ticket sales, TV, and other sources are at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. In all the rest of the schools – Murray, Western, Eastern, Morehead, Northern Kentucky, and Kentucky State – millions of dollars are lost each year on a relative handful of students who just happen to be big or strong or fast or all of the above.

No one denies the importance of sports and competition, but there comes a time when taxpayers have a right to suggest that the tail should never wag the dog. In the latest case, that of the firing of football coach David Elson at Western Kentucky, the financial profligacy is glaring. Elson signed a contract extension last January that named him the coach through 2016 – that’s just last January. He’s already been fired by the same guy, athletic director Wood Selig, who gave him that extension. The team has lost every game this year, its first in the premier top-tier NCAA Division I, putting it in the company of such teams as Alabama and Florida, the best in the nation. The knee-jerk reflex was simply to fire the coach.

According to USA Today of 06 October 2008, Elson’s income this year is $250,000. He accepted a buyout of $500,000 for the privilege of being fired, even though without any raises at all (unheard of) he would have made $1,750,000 by the year 2016. One can’t know the provisions of his contract, but wonders what he could have received if he had just decided to sue Western for the whole amount. Billy Gillispie, former basketball coach at UK, just settled a firing orgy by athletic director Mitch Barnhart for a whopping $3 million, and he only had a “memorandum of understanding,” i.e. never a signed contract.

In the USA Today article, mention was made of the fact that Western had been very successful in its former division – I-AA, winning a national championship in 2002. Athletic director Selig was quoted as remarking the fact that even then Western was losing nearly $2 million a year. That’s tax money being sucked down the drain. The wonder is that the University of Kentucky stays in the black since it gave Gillispie $3 million as a buyout; former football coach Hal Mumme a cool million a few years ago to be fired, and former football coach Bill Curry $600,000 in the 1990s to be shown the door.

In order to do its “step up to the next level,” Western renovated its football stadium to the tune of $50 million, never mind that it was losing heavily on football every year. That outlay was not earned by any sport...it was made up of taxes. The change meant that the number of full football scholarships was increased from 63 to 85. At about a conservative $15,000 each to educate, feed, house, and equip a player, that meant another $330,000 to add to the $945,000 already spent, for a total of $1,275,000 in scholarships each year, whether or not the player could write three consecutive grammatically correct sentences or figure simple interest.

There’s something wrong here. A good place to start looking for the cure is in the offices of university athletic directors and presidents. These are actually the people who do the hiring and firing, even though a committee has been appointed to secure a new coach at Western. Has anyone ever heard of that? The athletic director is on the committee, though not the chairman, and he will have the final say, notwithstanding his erratic behavior.

Smart and talented students graduate from high school every year – straight-A folks – but, especially in this recession-damned economy and amidst ever-upward-spiraling tuition and board costs, are forced into jobs instead of professions, while those who are athletically blessed just game the system, aided and abetted by the educators(?), whose elevators don’t seem to reach the top floor. Who pays? The taxpayer pays, along with those who are deprived simply because they can’t run fast enough or aren’t equipped to knock the stuffing out of other people on Saturday.

Yes...the tail wags the dog in the state of Kentucky, but that’s the way it is throughout Division I. The University of Kentucky aspires to “top twenty” status, but the lie is given to its efforts by its enriching its athletic directors and coaches, while the academics and non-athletes can eat cake and the entire academic program remains in the shadows. The same is true at Western, and nothing is likely to change.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Protective Order as Salvation

The media seems constantly to be reporting increasing numbers of cases involving protective orders, assaults, sexual-abuse, even murder vis-a-vis women caught up in abusive relationships with men. It’s rarely the other way around. In the Kentucky legislature, there is yet another effort to address this situation, the protection, of course, being directed toward the women. The latest high-profile case in Kentucky involved a protective order and the alleged murder of a woman by a former legislator and candidate for the governor’s seat, who was the recipient of the order.

The social engineers – current edition – are appalled by this state of affairs, notwithstanding that they have adopted “political correctness” as their credo, which, translated, simply means “if it feels good, do it as long as nobody gets hurt.” Thus, everything from the weirdest perverted and/or homosexual behavior to most any form of devil-worship to any sort of shack-up arrangement to men-marrying-men and women-marrying-women, with the appropriate reeducation in the public schools concerning these things, of course, is perfectly okay.

But those things are not perfectly okay. Leaving religion out of it altogether, those things are completely contradictory to the natural order of things – biologically, emotionally, intellectually and from a plain-common-sense standpoint. Even though one man’s concept of orgy is the same as another man’s concept of morality, common sense dictates that some things are just plain wrong. There are black-and-white issues, meaning that not everything comes in a shade of gray.

So...how does this relate to the abuse/protective-order mess that clogs up law enforcement, often leads to policepersons getting hurt or killed when caught in domestic cross-fires, requires countless hours of wasted money and other resources, and often amounts to absolutely nothing of consequence?

On September 23, 2008, the Census Bureau released a report explaining how Americans lived in 2007. The report indicated that for the third consecutive year, the majority of the nation's households were headed by unmarried Americans. The report listed 23 states falling into the unmarried-majority category in terms of households and living arrangements – more states than in any previous year. Michigan was added to this list for the first time. In terms of raw numbers, more than 101 million American adults were unmarried – 50.3%. In other words, a huge number of the arrangements were what are commonly called “shack-ups,” and a huge number involved children.

This at one time was the arrangement used by the murdered woman and the alleged killer alluded to above. She was about half his age when they moved in together and they seemed to have been friendly with the bubbly. In other words, they had made no documented commitment to each other, such as a marriage certificate. They co-habited. Then, their arrangement fell apart and the lady, feeling threatened, perhaps justifiably, got a protective order against the guy, something he claimed cost him his job. She was subsequently shot dead one morning on her way to work. Then, all the hand-wringing began.

The hand-wringing began because it was just naturally assumed that society/government/law-enforcement/whatever had failed this woman. This is the case nowadays when a social disruption occurs. The public – the citizens – have somehow caused it all by not being enhanced enough as “Big Brother” looking out for people who might just cause their own problems. The Fort Hood massacre is another example. The toady-headed progressives are wondering how the system failed the murderer of 13 unarmed people on a government installation, of all things. The fact that he was a cold-blooded killer contemptuous of the system doesn’t register with them. They consider him a victim.

It’s politically incorrect to bring up the possibility that an awful lot of the abuse/protective-order business is caused by both men and women who haven’t the depth to make commitments to each other and are mostly interested in the mutual exploitation accruing to just shacking-up. Or...they may be married and lack the will – even when children are involved – to put forth the effort to make their commitment succeed. Either way, mostly out of self-interest, they bicker, fight, do drugs (including alcohol), and, often, abuse occurs. They are contemptuous of the natural order of things. The result: yet another protective order...and maybe much worse.

Included often in the “much worse” is the intolerable torture and killing of children, sometimes by a “significant other” with the mother’s complicity, or a stepfather. To people only interested in lust rather than love, a child can be an inconvenience too bothersome to tolerate. The hardest thing to understand, even in these circumstances, is the torture inflicted upon a child when it would be far more merciful to just slit his/her throat and be done with it.

The person most responsible for this problem is the woman who chooses to let her hormones instead of her brain run her life and hooks up with a stud having the same approach. Women scream for equality, but when they do something this dumb and incur the wrath of the co-habiting scumbags, they run whining to the judge for a protective order. It shouldn’t be this way, political correctness be damned.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

A Terrorist By Any Other Name

As is the case with everything that happens with regard to any governmental entity, the spin-doctors are at work satisfying their political agendas by using the Fort Hood massacre to make their points. The substantive facts are quite clear, to wit, that an army major of Arabic descent and a devout Muslim went on a rampage, killing 13 and wounding nearly 40 others, all unarmed and in the midst of completing paperwork or undergoing examinations and/or receiving the appropriate pre-deployment vaccinations.

The mainstream media, both print and electronic, will not handle the situation in the same way that the hard-nosed conservative media-types will. TIME has already called attention to Fort Hood as one of the army’s most stressed posts, using this terminology – “kindling was hiding in plain sight” – apparently to describe a psychological fire leading to some sort of rage. How something hides in plain sight is problematic, but the point was clear enough, namely, that the shooter simply was not responsible for what he did. He was simply driven to rage and, without saying it, TIME probably feels that George Bush caused it all

Newsweek claimed that Major Nidal Hasan was a symptom of a “military on the brink” and wondered if the massacre presented signals that the worst is yet to come. It added that the U.S. military could be reaching the breaking point if the president decides to send more troops to Afghanistan. The magazine’s point, of course, is perfectly obvious. The New York Times delivered itself of the opinion that Hasan was mortified about being deployed. Both far-left entities probably feel as they do about anything that disrupts what they consider normalcy, i.e., that nasty conservatives are responsible for it. They probably blame George Bush for what Hasan did.

On the basis of the facts that have been delivered to the media thus far, Hasan expected to die as the climax of his rampage, though not by his own hand; rather he meant to be martyred by an enemy, in this case anyone not Muslim. He was foiled in this and unless he is mortally wounded, which seems not to be the case, will stand trial. The reports indicate that he started his day by preparing to die, not to be deployed in even the week of his rampage, perhaps not for more weeks or months. He divested himself of perhaps most of his possessions, even copies of the Koran, his holy book, which, of course, requires the killing of infidels – in this case American non-Muslims – at every opportunity.

Political correctness or diversity-divinity rules the liberal press these days, and so it’s not surprising that the blame for Hasan’s actions will be placed on the body politic in much the same way that the public is faulted when one gang-member wastes another, the whole business being caused by societal neglect of some sort, usually by nasty conservatives who are insensitive to the “needs” of the products of single mothers, poverty, bad schools, etc. After all, Hasan is said to have complained of being harassed in the army after 9/11 because of who he is, Arab and Muslim.

The bullying may have been real or imagined. There are thousands of Muslims in the military, however, and no such other slaughters of innocent people have taken place, though a converted Muslim did kill a recruiter and wound another in Arkansas on 01 June. He was not Arabic, just an American Muslim doing his Islamic duty. Born in Tennessee, he had changed his name from Carlos Bledsoe to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad and had studied jihad with an Islamic scholar in Yemen, according to Jihadwatch.org.

One could say that none of the above applies to drawing conclusions and that such must wait for the investigations(s) by the proper agencies. Fair enough! A defining factor, however, is the testimony of those involved that Hasan mounted a table or something similar and shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) as he began his assassinations, thus remarking his exercise as a religious effort. Suicide was his obvious goal and he could have achieved that without any harm to others. That probably would have negated his theologically certified trip to the virgins in Paradise, however, while being shot in the line of jihad-duty would have made him eligible, though it’s hard to believe a well-educated 39-year-old-man would believe such a thing.

It’s noteworthy that the Muslims creating havoc and planning more havoc in France and Britain currently are mostly young Muslims born in those countries. Hasan’s parents immigrated from the Middle East but Hasan was born in Virginia. He fired at least 100 rounds of ammunition and reportedly has claimed that he was a Muslim first and an American second. He could have done more damage if he had secured an “explosives belt” and simply set himself off in a restaurant, but such a procurement was most likely not possible in Texas. He did the next best thing and murdered as many as he could before finally starting his trip to the virgins, which he will probably not be making as soon as expected.

None of this is to be construed as a blanket condemnation of Muslims. Such would be untrue and unfair. It is to remark that the minute minority who practice jihad in the name of Allah are in American neighborhoods and/or are becoming converts to a belief system that adversely impacts non-Muslims...to the point of murder. They are terrorists, whether individually or sponsored by governments such as those in Afghanistan and Iran. They must be defeated.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

How the Guv-Grinch Stole/Restored Christmas

Apparently it’s not enough that the mainstream media, TV media, local media, national media, and all other possible media spend interminable amounts of resources calling attention to the fact that Kentucky is southbound off the charts as far as everything from obesity to smoking to pill-popping to low graduation rates to a bad football season is concerned. Oh no...without any known provocation Governor Beshear had to add to that list his recent directive that the official state Christmas tree was no longer to be called a Christmas tree; rather, it must be referenced as a HOLIDAY TREE.

It’s bad...bad...bad when Kentucky makes the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News but that’s just what happened on Thursday evening when the garrulous Irishman poked fun at the Kentucky guv, who has actually had the good sense to reverse himself...or at least enough gumption to realize that a few hundred thousand people in his state take Christmas seriously, even if only as a time to celebrate whether for the right reasons or not. He might even have thought about 2011 and the fact that Kentuckians might not appreciate a governor who disses Christmas, and might even dis him right out of the catbird seat, if not for religious reasons, perhaps for not having enough common sense to run the state.

After all, why pick a totally unnecessary fight with the whole state? Right in the middle of a battle with the State Senate over slots, casinos, and state bankruptcy, the guv – obviously on a very slow day at the capital – decides to do away with probably the highest profile and most religiously significant symbol of the whole year. It’s perfectly obvious, since there was no indication that the guv had an extremely high fever accruing to perhaps the swine flu and driving him to distraction, that Beshear fell under an attack of the (gasp) Diversity Syndrome, which has as its most defining and deadly virus/bacterium/protoplasm/whatever the infectious cell called by its Latin term MINORITUM RULIUM.

Face it! If as much as .000005% of the Kentucky population (about 20 folks) doesn’t like the term Christmas, the term just has to go, lest those 20 folks feel like a rhinoceros has been driven up their respective noses. Trauma like that can be very serious...enough to make a democrat suffer rigor mortis if anyone even suggests that the Big O doesn’t jog on the Potomac on the rare occasions he isn’t on Air Force One.

One wonders if the guv might be considering taking the cross out of Holy Week since it recognizes the death of Christ just as the Christmas tree remarks his birth. After all, other people (thieves and murderers) were put to death on the cross, negating any religious significance, just as the Christmas tree might have a slightly secular flavor to it.

Or, why put American flags on the graves of former military folks on Memorial Day since that’s plainly discriminatory vis-a-vis all the other residents of the cemetery who were not veterans ere their demises? Indeed, the act of placing those flags even discriminates against the living, just as the tombstones do. Fairness is fairness and diversity demands lockstep in recognizing the value of MINORITUM RULIUM. It’s a cinch that through the millennia of history a lot more people have died than are alive today, so why should that majority exert any sort of recognition over today’s living minority? One can only be thankful that the deceased do not have access to M-16s to make a point about those flags and stones.

Maybe the guv didn’t catch it last year when Washington’s governor, Christine Gregoire, allowed a small rabid group of atheists to place a display next to the nativity scene in the capital. It read in part: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds." The atheists have their Solstice Parties in December (in the summer, too) and Christians haven’t been in the news for constructing nativity scenes next to their Solstice Trees, currently for sale by American Atheists as advertised on the Internet for $20.00. Nobody cares if they greet each other with a “Merry God-Is-Dead,” so what’s the big deal?

Or...perhaps the guv didn’t notice what happened when WalMart dissed Christmas a few years ago, favoring the “Happy Holidays” approach. That little mistake was redressed in 2006 and now Christmas is a big deal. Boycotts can be very convincing.

This is not to say that groups not favoring or appreciating symbols of Christmas should not make their point. They have their own observances and are welcome to them by Christians who, for the most part at least (nutcases in every group, of course), make no objections. Jews have Hanukkah, with their Menorah as symbol, Muslims have Ramadan, possibly with a sword as symbol, and atheists can go climb their Solstice Trees (or telephone poles if they like) and scream that Abraham was a bullfrog and Jesus an itinerant, money-grabbing TV evangelist.

So...a word to Governor Beshear might be in order, namely, “Thanks for recognizing a significant error in judgment and please – on a slow day in the capital – try video games or a round of golf or watch a program of commercials interspersed by a football game, but don’t – REPEAT – don’t mess with Christmas again!”

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Political Spin & Backlash

The spin-doctors are already hard at work concerning the off-year elections just completed, especially those in Virginia and New Jersey, in which the republicans were successful in gubernatorial races – by a landslide in Virginia. Both states were in the Obama camp in 2008 and helped put him in office.

The bizarre situation in New York’s 23rd district pointed unmistakably to the fact that democrats disguised as republicans will no longer be tolerated in the party, except maybe in New York, especially since the conservative candidate came so close to winning the seat. The official republican candidate (spending at least $900,000) was so far behind that she actually dropped out before the election and threw her support to the democrat. Republican leaders – the ones holding the purse strings – will think twice before doling out money again to sure-fire losers.

The democrat spin is that the races mean little as far as the elections next year are concerned, in which all House and a third of the Senate seats will be up for grabs. Republicans spin the results straight into the White House, claiming that these very important elections are a referendum on what is happening (more aptly, perhaps, what is NOT happening) in the Obama administration. The republicans seem to have a better spin, especially since the democrat leaders in both the administration and the Congress are constantly galloping off in different directions and seem clueless as to how to marshal their forces into a cohesive unit to bring about Obama’s promised CHANGE. The nation is better off for this.

Obama campaigned vigorously in both states but especially in New Jersey, even resorting to the insulting use of “robo-calls,” those bothersome recorded phone messages received when one is eating dinner or trying to have a conversation with a friend. Through 23 October, loser Corzine had spent $23.6 million, all but a million of it his own money, while winner Chris Christie had spent $8.8 million. Both had plenty of funds left.

This brings up the question of just who gets to run the country. Corzine, using his vast wealth, spent $63 million and $40 million, respectively, to gain the Senate and later the governorship in 2005. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just spent $85.2 million to succeed himself, after convincing the New York governing body to do away with the two-term limit. This stinks. More and more, government seems to be becoming the playground for rich folks who have the time and money to use it as a toy or perhaps some sort of power-grab, either real or imagined. They’re so out of touch that it’s scary.

Besides surrounding himself with “czars” and other apparatchiks (or just plain nutcases) with questionable, even shady, backgrounds – think Van Jones or Cass Sunstein or John Holdren or Anita Dunn (follower of Mao?), for instance – Obama has exerted little in the way of leadership. He signed a $767 billion stimulus bill with the prediction that the unemployment rate (7.6% in January) would not go beyond 8%. It is now at 9.8%, an increase of 29%, and rising. The democrats voted it out, the republicans had none of it, and nobody had read the bill before voting.

The House – without republican support – approved a cap-and-trade bill designed to virtually take the U.S. out of the world market while at the same time raising taxes exorbitantly on U.S. citizens. Again, nobody had read the bill before voting. Presumably, Obama has read neither bill since he has been in campaign mode all year, thus having little time for the actual business of running the government. To add insult to injury, Vice President Biden reckoned the other day that the stimulus had saved/created one million jobs at the same time people are signing up by the tens of thousands for unemployment compensation. This is ludicrous, just as ludicrous as his remark a while back that spending was necessary in order to avoid bankruptcy, or something like that.

Add the current health-care imbroglio/confusion in both the administration and the Congress to the mix and it’s not hard to see why people are voting their disaffection for what they undeniably see as the downhill trend of governance. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that no one – even if he/she has read it, a virtual impossibility – understands the House or Senate version of the health-care bill under consideration, some 2,000 pages long. The number of new bureaucracies it requires is mind-boggling, some 35 at least and each designed to generate as much red tape as possible. By contrast, someone has said the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was made up of 26 pages.

It isn’t unusual for elected officials to default on their campaign promises, but the Obama default is gargantuan. Virtually nothing he’s promised, at least of any consequence, has happened or even come close. People are beginning to understand just how at sea the government is, realizing on the merits that government giveaways – think clunkers and bank bailouts – lead to bankruptcy and that lack of experience is devastating. The onset of the Carter administration in 1977 and its eventual and total failure is remembered by a huge number of voters, who can see the same thing happening again, though for different reasons. It’s no wonder that voters in these key states reacted as they did, and the wannabes to either attain or keep office next year are watching...with fear and trembling.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark