Thursday, December 31, 2009

DNC Memorandum #8

From the office of Governor Tim Kaine, convener, 31 December 2009

***This obviously is the last of the memos for 2009 (for the Muslim, Chinese and San Francisco democrats who use different timelines) and begins with big congratulations for a great year of democrats running the government as well as General Motors, Chrysler, AIG, GMAC, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These entities have gone happily into bankruptcy, which has been the plan all along, though Ford and Toyota have escaped thus far. Plans are underway by Rahm Emanuel to see that these companies soon follow, though the rumor that he has arranged for the sabotage of their engines is untrue and he has said he wouldn’t do this again. As per administration instructions, all bonuses to all fat cats are still operative and Wall Street is being considered as the 51st state, though the president is considering Cuba for that honor, since Guantanamo would then be part of the U.S. and he could legally renege on his promise to close it.

***Be looking forward to the trials in New York of the “Gitmo Four.”...or Five...who’s counting? Do not – REPEAT – do NOT mention the fact that the president and attorney general have already pronounced them guilty. To some, this might appear to prejudice the proceedings and require a verdict of “innocent,” but the rumor that this is precisely what is intended is false and Mr. Holder, who arranged for that infamous pardon, has said he will not pass judgment again. Also, do not mention that Obama was born into Islam and spent the first ten years of his life in Islamic households. The rumor that a minaret is to be constructed among the antennae on the White House Roof is malicious/untrue. It was to be constructed at Camp David, with stimulus funds, but the plan is on hold.

***Mean republicans are blaming the “skivvies-bomber” episode on the Christmas Day Delta flight from Amsterdam on DHS Secretary Napolitano and actually bringing up the “Katrina Affair” with respect to democrat complaints in 2005 concerning FEMA and Bush/Brown/Chertoff. This is unfair since there was no hurricane during that flight and the mayor of Detroit did not need to get all nursing-home patients out of town on school buses. Also, the Michigan governor did not need to call out the National Guard. In other words, New Orleans Mayor Nagin and former Louisiana governor Blanco were not involved in order to enhance the chaos. As soon as his crotch-area is healed, the bomber will appear in court to explain why his actions were necessary, and Bill Moyers will invite him on PBS-TV to do the same. Staffers are warned not to show pity, except, of course, about the bad burns. Also, suggesting a good water-boarding might be good to help with the skivvies-challenged bomber’s pain as well as loosening his tongue a bit is a no-no.

***The rumor that POTUS read his Oslo speech from a virus-infected teleprompter is untrue, though he had no intention of upsetting the audience at his Nobel Peace-Award ceremony by suggesting that there are some bad people in the world and that sometimes they must be terminated. This was necessary since POTUS is sending 30,000 more GIs to Afghanistan to kill bad people, though all emphasis is to be placed on the troops’ humanitarian efforts, not their efficient use of the latest rifle. POTUS actually feels that killing people is bad and that water-boarding, which neither kills nor injures, is worse...or something like that.

***The poster picturing POTUS with an icicle hanging from his nose and entitled The Copenhagen Kid placed some time after midnight at the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if 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 has been removed. The staffer who placed it there will be disciplined when he is found, probably by sending him to Iceland without an overcoat, notwithstanding that Al Gore has said Iceland-ice might melt this winter and submerge its own country.

***More to the point, POTUS can’t be blamed for the Olympics going to Rio since Al Gore has said the games might be canceled there account of undue tropical heat, with Chicago the logical alternate. This is typical Chicago politics. POTUS remains committed to cap-and-trade and all staffers are directed to never – that’s NEVER – mention that the earth has been cooling since the 1990s and that the UN-IPCC Global-Warming Commission has been harmed by the discoveries that its main honchos have been lying through their teeth...or their models...or their computers...or whatever. Meanwhile, no staffer is to travel to Copenhagen in the next decade. State Secretary Clinton has just channeled Eleanor Roosevelt again and discovered that Copenhagen is bad magic.

***Please be advised that Major Nasan, the shooter at the Ft. Hood massacre, has been diagnosed by film-maker Michael Moore as suffering from PPTSD (Pre-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder), a new emotional problem encountered account of pre-deployment unease. Mr. Moore is planning a new movie to deal with this problem tentatively titled Multiple-Assassination as Therapy, with the sub-title America Fails Its Own. It will feature an officer so driven to emotional trauma by corrupt/racist/religionist America that he can be healed only through killing GIs, but also so pure-in-heart that he killed only thirteen. It should be a blockbuster. Moore plans to cast an Iranian in the lead, tentatively an Ahmadinejad look-alike.

***The rumor that POTUS delayed making a statement for three days about the recent terrorist attack by the “skivvies-bomber” was because no teleprompter was available and one had to be ordered from Washington is false. Hawaiian teleprompters were perfectly acceptable, but POTUS wanted to be informal and laid-back so that he wouldn’t unduly upset the American people. When POTUS returns from vacation, he will give a complete speech in prime time mostly to warn Muslim nations that the U.S. is developing a gadget that will enter every skivvies-model, -manufacturer, and -type of material in an international database, with a skivvies-detector in every airport. When/if the detector malfunctions, every effort will be made to minimize delays as all men will be required to present their skivvies to a representative of TSA for validation as bomb-free. In the meantime, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Monday, December 28, 2009

Congressional Corruption...DHS-FEMA Failure

The singular most unconscionable activity vis-a-vis the Senate’s passing of a health-care bill was the out-in-full-view buying and selling of votes, particularly the ones involving Senators Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the former a patent wheeler-dealer, business-as-usual piece of earmark perfidy, but the latter a far more serious one involving Constitutional considerations.

Article 1, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence [sic] and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; ...” Amendment 16: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

These provisions have to do with the collecting of taxes and other financial matters but can and must be interpreted with respect to the fairness issue regarding equal treatment for all citizens. In the first instrument mentioned above, the key requirement is: “shall be uniform throughout the United States.” In the health-care bill just passed, Senator Nelson’s state is exempt from all of its Medicaid liability forever, meaning that its financial responsibility must be borne by the taxpayers of the other 49 states. Even a first-grader can understand that this negates any uniformity with regard to the second instrument, since income taxes on citizens/institutions of the other 49 states will be levied disproportionately to those on citizens/institutions of Nebraska in order to make up the Nebraska shortfall. Plainly un-Constitutional!

The definition of apportionment: “an act or result of apportioning; especially: the apportioning of representatives or taxes among the states according to United States law.” The Congress may not apportion income-tax-collections at rates not applicable to ALL the states. Plainly, the Nebraska windfall places its taxpayers advantageously with respect to those of the other “several” states, who are required to pay greater amounts than citizens/institutions of Nebraska. Plainly un-Constitutional!

Amendment 10: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” By injecting the federal government into the Medicaid program of Nebraska, the health-bill tampers with the state’s Medicaid laws, thus violating this Constitutional instrument. Plainly un-Constitutional!

It stands to reason that the attorneys-general of other states and/or their governors view this piece of political chicanery with very jaundiced eyes. No greater power-grab has been seen in recent months, if ever, than this golden parachute to Nebraska, and the wonder is that supposedly conscientious senators could swallow enough vomit to approve it.

This display of legislative crookedness and blatant corruption, unless one marks it down to just plain simple-mindedness, comprises the reason that the Congress currently has an abysmal approval rating. According to Rasmussen (29 October 2009), “just 15% of voters now give Congress good or excellent ratings. ... Forty-two percent (42%) of voters see most members of Congress as corrupt, the highest level measured in over a year.” This is worse than in both the Carter and Clinton administrations (19% and 18%, respectively, according to Gallup, 14 May 2008), when the democrats held both houses of Congress.

The country suffers a leadership vacuum worse than any, perhaps, since the Carter presidency, in both the administration and Congress. DHS (FEMA) Director Napolitano has just done a 180-degree turn with regard to her statements of 27 and 28 December, respectively, concerning the near plane disaster outside Detroit on Christmas day. Her first reaction was the knee-jerk one – just LIE, though she could be cut some slack for her explanation of after-the-fact actions. She went to the Sunday-morning TV biggies to tell her yarn (normal procedure for the lapdog mainstreamers), then recanted the next day.

The president finally got around to making a speech about the near disaster on 28 December. He could have appointed someone with actual bona fides to the DHS-FEMA post, perhaps someone with long-term experience at DHS-FEMA, but he did the politically correct thing – pick a woman at all costs, not that there weren’t women already in DHS-FEMA perfectly capable of doing the job. However, Napolitano is not likely to join the Rev. Dr. (God damn America) Wright and former apparatchik tax-dodger Daschle under the bus, since that wouldn’t be politically correct.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Listen Up! Creator Speaking!

I notice the usual folderol apparent around this time of the year regarding the manger-scene in the Town Square, as if I needed any defending from the nay-sayers who insist that I don’t exist or that I am no different from Confucius or Buddha or Allah...or that Jesus Christ was/is not my Son or that His ministry never happened in order to reconcile Me with what I have created. In the words of a well-known fictional character often quoted at Christmastime – BAH-HUMBUG!

My identification appears on your public buildings and even on your money, whether printed or cast in metal. I appear in the foundational documents of your nation and have been referenced by the leaders of the United States in every generation, not that I am happy with all I have seen throughout your history and am seeing now, for that matter. As did the Israelites of old, you disappoint Me in your arrogance on a daily basis but I have exercised mercy regarding you, whereas I meted out harsh judgments regarding them. I scoff and laugh at the silly claims concerning your changing of the climate cycles I have set in motion, for instance, but I am longsuffering though I will not abide fools forever.

I hear the whining of those who demand My absence from your public life ostensibly to foreclose offending those who either say I do not exist or that I am just one among equals with regard to the “deities” and must not be given a place of prominence. I say to you that if I am so insignificant as to neither exist nor exercise preeminent power, what’s the beef? What harm do those who believe in Me bring to you when they worship Me as Creator and remember the birth of My Son? Would you prefer an equal national obeisance to Allah, whose jihadist followers have pronounced a fatwa against you, the infidel?

I have watched you sinking in your pathetic acceptance of crudity/aberrancy as normal, calling it “diversity” or “unisex” or “gender-neutralism” or “political correctness” or “multiculturalism” or some other equally laughable entity and have experienced cosmic revulsion as a result. You get My drift if you’ve ever been seasick for a week. As My Son said through John the Revelator to the angel of the church at Laodicea, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

I see your churches – multitudes of them full of the living dead – peopled by those who call Me “Father” but are too penurious to care for their brothers and sisters in need. I see them and, of course, at this time of year think SCROOGE for those whom My mention of the “tithe” would offend, and simply PHARISEE for the rest...those who would remove Me from the public square while worshiping their own God – Mammon. As My Son also said through John to the angels of the seven churches in then-Asia, REPENT!

In your halls of administration, legislation and courts I see duplicity, deviousness, downright deception. I see the haggling and the sellouts that are so devoid of shame that they are trumpeted in the media as their purveyors posture in their pretentious press phalanxes, gloating with regard to either winning by the numbers or by the trickery. I see a populace either so ignorant or apathetic, or both, that it puts up with these charlatans, yawns and simply marks their perfidies down to “business as usual.” For their part, many of the solons parade their infidelities, whether adulterous or otherwise. Can you imagine a cosmic gagging, for instance, when a senator sets up his mistress in Washington and places her at the public trough?

So...listen up at this Christmastide! As I said through My prophet Isaiah to My people in the long ago, bring no more vain oblations to Me. Either mean what you say or say nothing. Either do what you profess or profess nothing. Let us reason together. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword. Never have I blessed a nation such as I have blessed you. Satisfy the ways of wickedness at your peril, remembering Sodom and Gomorrah. As I thundered through the fire, smoke, lightning and earthquake at Sinai, obey the ten rules...or else.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Dear Harry...

Dear Senator Reid,

As CEO of the Institute for Modifying All Government Entities (known by its acronym IMAGE), I am writing not to offer services, my usual objective, but to invite you to become an operative of IMAGE. You have demonstrated inordinate potential for success by both your actions and your words, not to mention that you are trailing badly in the popularity polls in Nevada currently and might be looking for work next year, though admittedly you would fit well in any casino setting at home, subterfuge being a natural talent.

IMAGE has many departments/seminars but I mention only a few in which you would be a good fit. One such seminar is labeled the class for Patriotic and Homiletic Outpourings, Objurgations and Evangelical Yammering or PHOOEY, for short. You’ve bravely noted your patriotism by declaring the Iraq conflict as lost and proven your homiletic ability in mini-sermons in the Senate or press conferences wherein you have labeled both George Bush and General Petraeus as liars, in the latter’s case joining State Secretary Clinton, when she was a senator, though she did so right to his face in a Senate hearing and not behind his back. You’ve also indicated your ability to be harsh (but tender) when necessary, placing your arm around Speaker Pelosi in that press conference and explaining what she meant, thus saving her from embarrassment but also putting her on notice that she’d better shape-up. You will join a handful of TV evangelists vis-a-vis yammering by designing methods to induce weeping about the uninsured homeless while separating the “flock” from its hard-earned cash, a vital component of politics, as you know. You noted quite eloquently the other day that people are actually dying too soon, thus violating their Constitutional right to live. You have talents that shouldn’t go unused.

You’re already well-trained to perform in the IMAGE seminar labeled Debating Exercises for Cosmetologizing or Excluding Issues and Tax-talk, or DECEIT, for short. You’ve most notably proven your ability in this area in your handling of the health-care legislation and your preliminary work toward cap-and-trade. You’ve masterfully handled the debate side by simply bargaining for enough votes in your party to foreclose any serious contrary debate. Obviously, the best way to win a debate is not to have it (little joke there). Selling out the whole U.S. to the state of Nebraska vis-a-vis Medicaid was a master-stroke, as was the $300 million sellout of the U.S. to Louisiana, with the result being badly needed votes and even allowing Senator Nelson to make it appear that his objections were all about abortion. Your remarks regarding taxes also indicate a sure debate-killer/winner, that of total obfuscation, the ability to so thoroughly bury in unadulterated crap a subject as to make it completely unrecognizable and therefore un-debatable.

Your well-demonstrated ability toward exercising nepotism in pursuit of gobs of greenbacks qualifies you for conducting the IMAGE activity Seminar for Teaching the Elements of Administrative Looting, known by its acronym STEAL. Whether as helped by you in your office or Nevada state-offices or in those hallowed lobbyists’ offices in Washington, your high-living relatives are the perfect example of how to do the government before it does you. Also, your reception of some $220,000 from the George Soros gang qualifies you indelibly as a looter of some skill, thus perfect for STEAL. Nor does it hurt your reputation that 48% of ACORN’s voter-registrations in Nevada last year were frauds, and, of course, your “suggestion” to Senator Vitter that no investigations be made, lest health-care and the economic recovery be jeopardized by such a distraction.

You would be perfect for energizing IMAGE’s activity labeled Stratagems for Effecting Loyalty and Loot and Obtaining Unaccountability Troubleshooting, known, of course as SELLOUT. In getting both the Louisiana and Nebraska senators on board for health-care, you’ve already shown how you can merit loyalty by getting others to sellout, especially for loot. In getting Lieberman on board, you sold out yourself on the public option thing, or whatever it was, proving both the art of giving and grabbing sellout. By either you or an appointed senator constantly throwing doubt on the CBO or rearranging its figures, you’ve proven it to be susceptible to unaccountable Senate troubleshooting and therefore unaccountable to the public. You are a natural for this endeavor.

Finally, the best part, to wit, all payments for your services made “under the table,” if you get my drift! If you don’t – non-taxable, thus placing you on a par with Congressman Rangel and Treasury Secretary Geightner in the hoodwinking department. Payments will be tendered under IMAGE’s financial department, the Group Responsible for Economic Enterprise Division, known, of course, as GREED. I will anxiously await your answer.

Respectfully,
I.M. Otherself, CEO
IMAGE

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Copenhagen as SHAM!

State Secretary Clinton has ameliorated some of the hard feelings in Copenhagen by promising that the U.S. will ante up its share so that the developing nations will be collecting at least $100 billion a year one of these days from, supposedly, the developed nations. China and India are regarded, at least vis-a-vis the Kyoto Treaty, as developing nations, so her “suggestion” that these countries participate as benefactors is laughable. The money is earmarked to be used by each of the beneficiaries in their handling of climate-change, whatever that means. For instance, just what would the folks in the Congo do to affect climate-change?

The Copenhagen clambake has comprised the mother of all charades. The notion that all the VIPs from governments everywhere who have flown in on their jets and lived the lavish convention-life for a few days would actually achieve anything is taken seriously only by the moon-bats, defined as unthinking or insane leftists. The premise upon which the conference is based, i.e., that man is inducing global warming and thereby endangering the earth – people, animals, real estate – has been proven to be so flawed that this gathering should have been canceled. It has become a huge joke, just as profound as the joke of President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which he himself admitted in Oslo to be at least problematic.

Well...Speaker Pelosi will appear in Copenhagen, as well as Congressmen Henry Waxman and Charles Rangel, at this time the highest-profile income tax cheat in the U.S. (as well as 18 other House members, mostly democrats), so Copenhagen must be important for something. Indeed, President Obama will appear, perhaps hoping for better success than he had in Copenhagen the other day to make sure the Olympics of some future year will be held in Chicago. Out of four entries, the U.S. came in fourth; however, the president did find 25 minutes for General McChrystal to fly in from London and confer with him.

The developing nations need help in fighting disease, especially HIV/AIDS, and for other far more pressing elements such as clean water, hospitals, schools, etc. Common sense indicates that no third-world country has either the means to effect climate or even a reason to be concerned about it. Irrefutable evidence points to the fact that global temperatures have been declining for ten years and are projected to decline for quite some time yet, just part of the cycles that have been in place since the beginning of the earth, at least as far as the experts are concerned. For instance, in the 1650s, the earth, according to the climatologists, was much colder than it is now, but was much warmer in the 1150s, during both of which eras there was no industrialization taking place, unless one supposes horse-drawn wagons to be the same as 18-wheelers.

The U.S. and other countries have wasted billions of dollars already on the global-warming matter. It would appear that warming that occurred during the 1980s-90s resulted from a variance in the sun’s relationship to earth, something that no scientist can affect. The current cooling trend is in place despite an increase in greenhouse gases, a complete mystery to the experts who have conjured up the so-called “manmade global warming” non-entity.

The recently released e-mails passing back and forth among these latest “experts,” especially those connected to the UN-IPCC, have self-indicated their perfidy in making up statistics to prove something that isn’t happening. Plainly, they have misled the public; consequently, the main honcho of the group is no longer at the head of the CRU in Great Britain, while the American counterpart in the mix is being investigated by his own university, Penn State. What these men have done is unconscionable but despite all the latest reliable research proving their big lie, not to mention their own e-mailed self-incrimination, the U.S. and other nations have bought into this scam and made a sham of Copenhagen. This, too, is unconscionable.

In the mix is the fact that the U.S. is bankrupt and is in no financial shape to do anything...nor should it, both because there is no climatic emergency and the fact that the U.S. has shouldered the burden inordinately in the fight against terrorism since 2001 in terms of both blood and treasure, making the rest of the world safer and removing a far worse threat than a climate-change, even if one existed.

Third-world populations throughout the world are already choked by Islamic-controlled terroristic governments and should realize that their fight is being waged by mostly this country, though a handful of other nations have contributed, especially Britain and commonwealth nations. Americans are dying every day in this fight while a gaggle of international politicians haggle in Copenhagen about the extent to which the U.S. can be brought to its knees, with U.S. officials – even the president – complicit. This is shameful.

Climate-change has never been about climate. It is strictly a UN-configured international political monster designed to take from some nations and give what is taken to others for reasons that are beyond comprehension. A hundred billion dollars a year – remarked as chickenfeed in Copenhagen – for what? Exactly what will any undeveloped nation do to chill the earth? Absolutely nothing! Disgusting! Will there be an agreement at Copenhagen? Yes! Will it mean anything? Of course not!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Year's End - 2009

Listen, my children, and you shall now hear
Just how it is at the end of this year,
The holiday firs are seen in their glow –
Once Christmas trees, but that weird name must go;
Diversity wields its pure jihad toward God,
It is a religion, worldly and mod,
Look not for Jesus, except at Walmart...
While looking, of course, just fill up the cart.

Never look back at the promises made
A few months ago as the Truth was waylaid
When O and his pols predicted...perforce!...
That those out of work would number, of course,
A mere eight percent and that not for long
As government spent the economy strong;
So...take heart, my dears, just go out and spend...
The prexy said thus...would the bad times all end.

Be glad at this time for a Congress hell-bent
On capping the gases that simply are meant
To make icebergs melt...catch folks unawares
And drown half the country, kill all polar bears;
Be glad that the reps never read cap-and-trade
Since if they had done that they might have been made
To either defeat it or...yes...made to wear
A jacket of strait where dementeds get care.

And think of the climate – especially just now,
This time of the year when to see a snow-plow
Is everyday stuff in much of the land
Where snow heretofore rarely managed to land;
And listen to Al, the guru of gore,
That soon will envelop this land more and more
As humans and beasts all succumb to the cold –
Frozen by warming as temps downward fold.

In case you’ve not noticed, remark now O’s change,
Admittedly, it may just seem a bit strange,
But banking and autos are federalized
And everything everywhere must be downsized;
Put more air in tires and save on your fuel,
And use the right light-bulbs...yeah...don’t be a fool,
The planet is dying, the U.N. has said,
Stop breathing out carbon or Earth will be dead.

At year’s end think not of recession and such –
Obama’s guru of finance said as much...
Recession is over, thus said he to George,
On A-B-C’s Sunday...so go out and gorge,
And simply pretend that the U.S. ain’t broke,
Just use credit cards and be part of the joke...
The veep said bankruptcy is nothing to fear,
Just borrow and spend and be of good cheer.

At year’s end don’t worry...the dollars are sound,
Just go to Beijing, where some billions are found,
And if you want jobs, go to Shanghai and jive,
Those folks make our undies, our shoes...and they thrive;
Don’t look for those things where they used to be made,
The land of the free...ah...but soon cap-and-trade,
Just wire the White House that you’re too big to fail,
Then wait for a check in the very next mail.

At year’s end fret not for old Gitmo soon gone,
Those terrorist dudes will now all face the dawn
In Brooklyn or out on the midwestern plain
Where they can chow down in the land of no pain
And laugh as they strut before TV’s bright light
And spew out their garbage in everyone’s sight,
Praise Allah and jihad...claim judges are dumb –
Like all infidels, with their brains simply numb.

At year’s end don’t worry if you might feel faint,
The Big O and demos are now your new saint,
Their health-care is promised for hangnails or plague
Or bones that are broken or feverish ague;
If you are not young...well...don’t worry at all,
For the lines will not form until they need to call
And simply are told that in six months...about...
They get a knee-joint or a gall bladder out.

At year’s end the parties are just everywhere,
State dinners are normal...quite often the fare,
But take care when crashing, through some staffer’s grace,
You get your brief fame, but with egg on O’s face,
Yet, fret not when questions arise in your fame,
Your name, as like hers, will not suffer some blame,
Executive-priv is the name of the game,
Except when, of course, George the Two is to frame.

At year’s end chill out...don’t be stupid...oh no!
Not like policemen, as described by Big O,
Since he’s got your back from the crib to the grave,
And you from yourself he has promised to save;
And take it from prez, if you’re ever in doubt,
Teleprompters can help, with the stuff they give out,
And don’t hesitate if you’re asked to surmise
About the U.S. – be quick...APOLOGIZE!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Monday, December 14, 2009

Tiger Woods' Legacy

There’s perhaps been the feeling on the part of the self-appointed social engineers, to whom political correctness is the new religion, that their “anything goes” concept vis-a-vis human behavior is now in the forefront among the enlightened and soon to be crammed down the throats of the yahoos who still believe that morality has its place. Oh yeah! Enter Tiger Woods.

This actually has little to do with Tiger’s admitted and probably soon to be ever so much more expanded upon sexual peccadilloes. He hasn’t done any more adulterous stuff than a lot of other folks, but he’s opened the way as a very-high-profile “role model” for people to take a hard look at what still matters in this country – family and fidelity – even if the sophisticated elites don’t get it or don’t like it. In this area, they’re just as dumb as they are regarding non-manmade climate change.

Sponsors such as Accenture and Gillette are canceling/mothballing the golfer not because he won’t be playing for a while but because he violated his marriage vows and turned out to be a two-bit cheat – a hugely wealthy one, of course – but a two-bit cheat all the same. Never mind what either the good ol’ boys or the uppity-ups in the country clubs say or swear in their groups. They still value family. Never mind what either the hanky-panky gals or the sophisticated ladies in the National Organization of Women gab and gossip. Most women still value family.

It’s no accident that the U.S government and most of the states have either statutes or constitutional mandates or both defining marriage as between one man and one woman – or at least one at a time – because this is the design of human nature...just leave God out of it, though God’s way is the key to the whole matter. Biologically, emotionally, and intellectually, the “one-man-one-woman-one-lifetime” pattern is set in concrete.

This pattern has been derailed significantly, especially since the 1950s, but it has remained the natural way and has always been reestablished when people have failed it. Irrefutably inherent to this pattern is fidelity and, while this concept has also been failed by many people, it still is held as the standard by those who consider themselves at least more capable than the animals of exercising mind-over-matter.

Massachusetts may have put its imprimatur on men marrying men and women marrying women but such is not the case virtually throughout the nation. This lurid approach to, and violation of, what is natural with regard to the acceptable coexistence of the genders and the perpetuation of the race is still considered by the vast majority to be THE way...the only way. Sexual perversion, while glorified in the movies and on the TV screens and actually approved in some public schools and especially in universities, is still recognized by the masses of people to be whacko (if not sordidly wicked) behavior and not to be countenanced.

Just so is the matter brought to the fore by Woods. He made a commitment and not only did not keep it but flaunted his violation of it. The fact that he and/or his agents/shills conducted a PR campaign falsely accentuating his fidelity is not the issue as much as is that of his unforgivable treatment of his wife and children. Hanging out with trollops and prostitutes and bedding them, whether for cash or anything else, meant that he could have been carrying all sorts of physical threats to his own family. This was unconscionable. Real men don’t do that.

The two sponsors mentioned above have broken the ice with regard to his high-paying benefactors advertising him and his goodness in the interest of gathering gobs of greenbacks. It’s likely that others, perhaps many, will quietly sever connections. This will cause Woods no undue hardship. His wealth will keep him up very well, thank you. But he will never escape his legacy of infidelity. There’s simply nothing he can do about that. An “indiscretion” might have been “overlooked” but the lurid tales that keep appearing that paint him as a habitual adulterer, as delivered by the girls-for-fame-or-money crowd, have marked him as both terribly flawed socially and a pathological liar.

This in no way denigrates the good things Woods has done. He’s to be commended for them. Nor does it excuse the tramps with whom he cavorted. It merely points to the fact that immorality, especially adultery, is in this supposedly postmodern, intellectually sophisticated society totally unacceptable. Most professional golfers work as hard as Woods or even harder, but he apparently was born with an innate superior ability that makes him probably the greatest golfer since the exercise was invented; yet, he has thrown away the most valuable part of his perceived persona – trust. His personal logo will forever be that Scarlet A. How sad!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

War in Copenhagen?

Predictably, there’s a war brewing at the magnificent Copenhagen Climate Conference at which the powers-that-be from the UN member-nations are attempting to decide just how much each country will not be allowed to contaminate the atmosphere any longer, thus saving the planet from global warming and thus saving both it and therefore people from extinction, meaning that people can count on perpetuating their races from now until time immemorial. The hassle has to do with the so-called developing nations being short-changed by the developed nations, actually a modern byproduct of the colonial era.

Just as is the case in the United States vis-a-vis Obama’s crusade as outlined in his campaign having to do with the proper redistribution of wealth, it’s all about money, the have-nots accusing the haves of mistreating them in the amounts of greenhouse gases (mostly just carbon dioxide) that can be emitted from wherever ghg is emitted, thus curtailing national ambitions regarding industrialization. Their complaint, based on a Danish-government-prepared document, ironically, is probably valid but certainly not surprising.

The notion that any industrialized nation, including the U.S., ever intends to honor whatever requirements are mandated is entirely off-the-wall, especially in a time of economic distress as is now and will be the case for a long time. Indeed, the very underpinning of any communist or despot-run nation such as China or North Korea or most Middle East nations is deception, first practiced on its own people and then on the rest of the world. The underpinning of most democracies has to do with their citizens having the privilege to be free to work and strive for the good life. This will not be forfeited, thus the books may be cooked.

Hanging over the entire shooting-match, of course, is perhaps the greatest fraud since the non-aggression pact signed by Germany’s Adolph Hitler and Russia’s Joseph Stalin in August 1939. The supreme irony lies in the fact that the perpetrators of the false documents central to the UN-IPCC’s global warming fiasco managed to expose themselves rather than being exposed by other parties. Notwithstanding their world acclaim vis-a-vis expertise in things scientific, they actually didn’t realize something fundamental to modern times, i.e., that e-mails, even if supposedly erased, can be either exposed before erasure or retrieved by other experts. The perpetrators in this case urged erasures of willfully constructed misrepresentations but they were too late.

The simple truth is that manmade global warming is a hoax. It doesn’t happen. Warming-cooling cycles have been a staple of history, with no regard to the circumstances/efforts of people at given periods. According to an IPCC chart and taking a base line of zero, the average global temperature in about 1150 during the Medieval Warm Period stood at 6.5. At about the year 1650 during the Little Ice Age, the temperature stood at about 2. Now, the temperature stands at about 4.5, making it about halfway between those two extremes involving periods of no industrialization, meaning that the planet has properties not affected by people, no matter how much they think they can change it.

The Copenhagen clambake, then, has little or nothing to do with science but everything to do with national and international politics. This is clearly seen currently/nationally in the U.S. President Obama, notwithstanding approval by the House of Representatives earlier this year of cap-and-trade legislation no congressman had read, is nevertheless leaning on the Environmental Protection Agency to do his bidding, knowing full well that the Senate will not join the House in drastic measures designed to kill industry, explode taxes out of sight, and make the recession exponentially worse...even though the planet is not only not dying but has been cooling for the last ten years, with further cooling predicted for some time.

Unless the president is just dumb, he must have a reason for actions not based on sound science. The nation’s industries are perpetually bogged down in regulations that are unneeded but raise the cost of everything. This is not to say that regulations should not be in place (and they are) for local benefits, such as cutting down on pollutants like dust or carbon monoxide (car exhausts) or various gases. The climate, however, is beyond man’s control so one can only wonder why the official U.S. line parrots that of the U.N., namely, that people are killing their abode.

Killing commercial and individual incentives is a precursor to establishing socialism, and this seems to be the intent of the administration, with a complicit Congress either willing or just dumb – an unconscionable power-grab. Internationally, cap-and-trade, which has already created tremendous problems in Europe, will drive this country, the greatest industrialized nation in the world, to the lowest common denominator. Copenhagen is a colossal fiasco. Even Al Gore, the poster-person of the doomsday crowd, has reneged. That just about says it all.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

The Lexington Herald-Leader Strikes Again

The skewing of facts, slander, and an unbelievably hostile approach are often combined by the Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.) editors to construct their front-page above-the-fold offerings. An example appeared in the issue of 08 December. Under the headline VERDICT ON EMISSIONS was a picture of the E.W. Brown Electricity Generating Station located some 30 minutes or so from Lexington. Predictably, the picture included a magnificent cloud – albeit white and apparently little more than steam – billowing forth, though strangely not from the smokestacks, from which nothing seemed to be emanating, even though the plant burns 1.5 million tons of coal per year.

The paper was celebrating the fact that the EPA, with the Obama administration unlikely ever to get cap-and-trade legislation passed in the Senate, has been charged with regulating everything involving CO2 by bureaucratic fiat. This amounts to the regulating of virtually everything, though human exhaling – largely CO2 – may escape being restrained, unless, of course, the EPA decides that people should take turns breathing, or perhaps the new health-care “death commissions” will mandate that old codgers or other non-productive citizens may no longer pollute the air by continuing to live and spew pollutants.

The irony lies in the fact that H-L reporters have done a terrific job in recent years by exposing government and quasi-government entities that are steeped in corruption, therefore waking the proper agencies and possibly honest officials from their slumbers and goading them into making corrections and demanding accountability to the taxpayers, whose money they have so freely stolen/wasted. Indictments have already been advanced and some perpetrators are probably looking forward to hard time.

The reporters, however, don’t make up the paper’s composition. The news editors apparently lack the freedom of reporters to just handle...well, just news. Rather, they seem hamstrung by the editorial policies of the paper, a McClatchy publication, meaning that they use the News departments of the paper to advance the paper’s ultra-liberal editorial agenda. Thus, the picture of a steam plant with a lot of billowing steam connected to an account denoting pollution would naturally fit the bill.

The E.W. Brown Plant belongs to Kentucky Utilities, which in turn belongs to a British outfit called E.ON.US. This is from the KU web-site: “KU's power generating system consists primarily of five generating stations - Ghent in Carroll County, Tyrone in Woodford County, E.W. Brown in Mercer County and Green River in Muhlenberg County. All meet or exceed the Clean Air Act requirements applicable in the year 2000.” To get an idea of how the largest of the plants (Ghent) pollutes, consider this: “In late 1994, a scrubber system was installed at Ghent Unit #1 and reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by at least 90%-from approximately 80,000 tons per year to less than 8,000 tons per year.”

Also about Ghent: “Each of the generating units is equipped with electrostatic precipitators designed to remove dust from the gas stream that results from burning coal.” This refers to the Tyrone Plant: “Electrostatic precipitators and other environmental controls have been added to ensure compliance with air and water quality standards.” This refers to the Green River Plant: “In 1974, more than 25 years ago, the company's first commercial scrubber was installed at the Green River Station to clean the emissions from Units 1 and 2. The scrubber removes over 90% of the sulfur dioxide from the flue gas associated with burning coal.”

Modifications were made at the E.W. Brown plant in 1997 that violated some government controls, so KU is now in the process of spending $135 million on its entire system with regard to pollution controls, all this even though the system was in compliance in 2000, according to its claim. The point: The EPA has done quite enough lately with respect to the E.W. Brown Plant and the entire KU system.

This is from the Kentucky Public Service Commission, 20 June 2005: “The new scrubbers at KU’s Brown and Ghent plants are the most expensive of the projects, with an estimated total cost of nearly $660 million. Three scrubbers will be built at the Ghent plant, each serving a single generating unit. A single scrubber at the Brown plant will serve three units. When completed by 2009, they will reduce annual sulfur dioxide emissions by 110,000 tons.” Get the picture. KU was deep into EPA constrictions four years ago. The “regulation highway” has no ending and every new regulation increases the citizen’s cost.

The supreme irony lies in the fact that manmade climate-change is probably the greatest worldwide social hoax in history. Top scientists and climatologists have been irrefutably proving this, not to mention the fact that the backbone of the most recent UN-IPCC report instigating all these regulations has now been exposed as a gigantic fraud. Al Gore has even canceled his appearance at the current climate clambake in Copenhagen, in anticipation of which 3,000 people had already coughed up $3,600,000 to shake his hand.

The paper’s account as a news item was not written by its reporters; rather, it was an offering of the Associated Press, an organization just as liberal as the H-L. The editors decided to editorialize with it, and more’s the journalistic pity. There should have been some balance but, of course, that wouldn’t have advanced the agenda.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Al Gore's Credibility Problem

Dear Al,

You may remember that I wrote you some five years ago offering the services of my organization, the
Rehabilitation-Equipping of Has-beens for Alternatives Bureau (REHAB, for short), designed to remake personas of people who have fallen on hard times - through no fault of their own, of course - into brand new personas strong and smart enough to energize even Nader’s tree-huggers into fire-bombing the Amazon Forests. You subscribed and have profited greatly, especially financially, but now, after dropping our service a few years ago, have fallen on hard times again and indeed could be sued/bankrupted by the world for causing undue panic, intolerable costs, and general unhappiness vis-a-vis your claim that the world is melting into a sort of goulash whipped up by mostly gluttonous Americans driving cars instead of horses. You definitely need a makeover, not least because the data you used in your inconvenient truths turned out to be ultra-inconvenient lies, notwithstanding that you in your scientific un-expertise probably wouldn’t know a hockey stick from a baseball bat, let alone an isobar.

Since your speeches and other activities have been proven to be suspect, your public exhibitions condescending, even to senators, and your financial empire threatened by your attempt to outwit the inscrutable Chinese on cap-and-trade, you could profit again from the REHAB arm known as the Political Rhetorical Options, Private Activities, Gregarious Antics and Necessary Dealings Actuator (PROPAGANDA, for short). For instance, you shouldn’t have cancelled your Climate Conclusion speech on the last day of the Copenhagen Climate Clambake, but should have retooled it to show that you have purposely misled the world in order to bring the subject out in the open and assuage everyone’s fears that the nutcase scientists, of which you aren’t one, have caused by their blatant attempt to take over all the air-conditioning companies in the world. This is not even to mention the 3,000 folks who have already ponied up $3,600,000 just to shake your hand.

Rahm Emanuel contacted REHAB for help when President Obama called policemen stupid and his ratings took a nosedive, and PROPAGANDA convinced President Obama, in light of his acceptance of the global-warming garbage, not to appear in Copenhagen and warn that the sky is falling before accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, as planned. The rumor is that the Oslo intelligentsia hinted that they didn’t need the opprobrium invoked by giving the prize to a ninny, so that also helps explain the change. Before making any further cap-and-trade deals with the Chinese or the Obama administration – this is a freebie suggestion – PROPAGANDA suggests that you sell your private jet, donate your carbon-glut mansion to the SPCA and do a two-year South Pole safari, reading no newspapers while preparing a book on polar bears.

You’re not likely to do this, so perhaps you will profit from help by REHAB’s Institute for Deceptively Innovative Observations of Truth (known, of course by its acronym, IDIOT). In your latest doomsday book, Our Choice, your graphics had the hurricanes spinning in the wrong direction on both the Atlantic and Pacific; Florida almost obliterated; Cuba, Panama, Colombia and Nicaragua completely gone; hurricanes on the Equator, an impossibility; the North Pole completely gone with the South Pole intact, meaning that warming was not global and that hurricanes are too dumb to know where they belong. IDIOT would have never let that happen. Indeed, since Cuba’s mountain is over 6,500 feet high, you should have obliterated all of the U.S. both east and west of the Rockies. Instead, IDIOT would have taken the false data from the IPCC guys – the same stuff you used for An Inconvenient Truth and Our Choice – and proved that broccoli would be growing at the North Pole, polar bears hibernating in the Smokies, and bathing beauties populating the beaches in Greenland, just normal stuff with the kind of global warming you project. You need IDIOT.

Finally, you’ve exhibited the usual liberal weakness when confronted with truth. You’ve retreated from Copenhagen at the very time you could have wreaked havoc with the UN and its insipid IPCC, both institutions having as a prime objective the scandalizing of the United States while at the same time milking it for all it’s worth. REHAB’s Bureau for Activating Condemnatory Kitsch and Blackballing Outrageous Nationalistic Elites (called BACKBONE, for short) could have helped you man up and tell those parasites that CO2 is harmless, coal is beautiful, and SUVs are not tools of Satan. By opting out, you’ve admitted guilt, which is exactly the trip that the Chinese and Indians and Russians always try to lay on the U.S. It didn’t help, either, that you acceded to the little toad’s condition that he would give up those two girls in your outfit, who got lost hunting for a McDonalds in North Korea, only to Bill Clinton. You should have manned up and made Obama insist that only you or Jimmy Carter would be acceptable.

In the meantime, here’s another freebie. Since the “hockey stick” theory has been thoroughly discredited, you should get your advisers together and instruct them to create the proper implement for describing the global warming/cooling cycle since the year 1000, especially taking in the unusually warm years of the Medieval period, which had much warmer temperatures than the current global temperatures without benefit of any significant fossil-fuel emissions from anywhere. It probably would be an inverted boomerang slightly warped with the long (hot) end at the year 1150. Then, you can write another book, perhaps entitled something like No Choice Needed.

Best regards,
I.M Newself, CEO
REHAB

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Gate-crashing, Race & Executive Privilege

One could have expected that it would only be a matter of time before some high-profile black would turn the recent party-crashing event at the White House dinner into a racial incident. Enter Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who had this to say: “The symbolism with this being the first African American president is huge, and along with that comes concern for his safety. What did he get? Must have been 96% of the African American vote.”

It defies all logic that a long-term congressman would make a statement that so lacks any reasonable rationale. In the first place, all the presidents who have ever been assassinated or upon whom assassinations have been attempted were white, and the perpetrators of the acts were also white. Using Thompson’s logic on the basis of history, any would-be assassin of President Obama could be expected to be black, but it’s doubtful that he would ever accede to such a possibility – a slam upon his own race, never mind that more than 35% of men in prison in this country are black, while they represent less than 14% of the male population.

What in the world does the percentage of blacks who voted for Obama have to do with the party-crashing event? Absolutely nothing! In fact, Obama was elected by the white vote. So, Thompson’s totally inane remark makes one wonder if someone who can be that silly can actually head a committee, especially one as strategic as Homeland Security. Would assassination have been okay if Obama had received only 51% or less of the black vote? Egad!

But, the good congressman has ordered up hearings to discover how such a dastardly deed as gate-crashing could have happened. Naturally, he has invited the crashers, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, to join in the fun, with the predictable result that they took a pass, whereupon he threatened to put out a subpoena for their appearance, which, predictably, would likely never be executed. The reason is obvious. Thompson made the horrific error of also inviting folks from the White House to appear, whereupon the appearance of at least one lady was foreclosed by – GET THIS – executive privilege, meaning the president is protecting his Kiddy Korps at all costs.

So...one naturally thinks back to the executive privilege exercised when the Biden-Leahy gang of the Senate Judiciary Committee wanted to keelhaul Cheney, Miers and others over mostly anything, but especially the so-called federal-prosecutor firings, notwithstanding that Bill Clinton fired all prosecutors on virtually his first day in office in one fell swoop without giving any reason whatsoever. This is not to mention that Attorney General Holder is in the process of keelhauling the same folks over whatever he can dream up, mostly torture. Now, however, he’s staring executive privilege in the face by his own president, the one who apparently told him to go after anybody in the Bush administration after promising back in April not to do any such awful thing.

Well...what’s a president to do? Officially, the Secret Service seems to have fallen on its sword in this affair, meaning that nobody in the administration would be faulted. Problem: nobody with walking-around-sense believes that for a second. Late flash: The White House is accepting blame, but still using executive privilege. The Sahalis insist that they were invited...so, by whom? Certainly not the Secret Service! Their names didn’t appear on the invitation list, but there they were, shaking hands and having a terrific smile-contest with the president (who actually forgot to genuflect, probably too smitten by the attractive lady).

So far, the administration through executive privilege has disinvited at least one staffer from the hearings. As usual, and to the great delight of the American Bar Association, lawyers have been hired all around. A lady in the Pentagon is also involved. In fact, one lawyer has already hired another lawyer to protect his total innocence in the matter. In anatomical terms, the Washington-scene incest has never been more obvious, and the president and wife are, if anything, social animals, which may or may not satisfy Congressman Thompson and that 96% of blacks who no doubt are outraged that the Sahalis got the chance to perhaps shoot a poison dart into the president or maybe spike his cocktail with hemlock.

It seems obvious enough that this was an inside job, with the Secret Service (probably about as popular in this administration as “stupid” policemen, as the prez might put it) made the scapegoat, at least intitially. However, some good may accrue to the whole mess, namely, that Holder can start doing his job instead of attempting to crucify anyone in the Bush administration for everything from perpetrating Muslim hangnails to firing people who work at the pleasure of the chief executive.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Coach-Firings = Security!!!

The big news in the sports world these days concerns the annual orgy of college-football-coach-firings, though it’s been displaced, at least temporarily, by the “Tiger Woods Affair” involving the golfer’s strange non-golf-course-driving vis-a-vis his favorite Cadillac, to wit, crashing it into both a fire-plug and a tree, thus making all the dogs in his neighborhood wary of his property and probably furious about the whole thing. It’s no small matter that his wife took a club (a three-iron would do nicely) and busted out both rear windows while practicing her swing at 2:30 a.m.

The police have been thwarted in all their efforts to find out exactly what happened, but the answer is quite simple, though just a rumor. Treasury Secretary Geithner informed Attorney General Holder that Tiger was just like AIG – too big to fail – whereupon U.S. Marshals were sent to Orlando to see that the “Tiger-tale” would be either unavailable or spun into an action making him become ABC News person-of-the-week for not actually breaking the fire-plug and thus flooding his whole neighborhood. Thus endeth the lesson involving the “Affaire”...or at least the one involving the car.

Big-time NCAA coaches have either purposely hit upon a plan to set themselves up for life, or university presidents and athletic directors are too dumb to recognize talent (or non-talent), or recruitment-gone-south has saddled coaches with players who perhaps belong in trade-schools instead of shoulder pads until they graduate to the National Football League or to similar outfits in other countries such as Spain, where watching quarterbacks knocked senseless is almost as gratifying as watching bull-stabbings.

In the case of the first suggestion above, check out Al Groh, just fired at Virginia and paid $4.33 million to go fishing. Or, take the case of Louisville coach Steve Kragthorpe, who is pulling down a cool $2.2 million for the privilege of being fired and going job-hunting during the recession. Earlier this year, Billy Gillispie, the Kentucky basketball coach, collected $3 million from the University of Kentucky to be put out on the street and take his chances, with another $245,000 to his lawyers. It’s a cruel world out there for ex-coaches and their lawyers.

In a recent 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...and just a paltry $500,000 to be fired. The team has lost every game, not surprising at least in conference-play for its first year 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, not the athletic director for having a mind obviously on vacation or maybe entirely off the reservation. That half-a-mil is taxpayer money.

Louisville AD Tom Jurich, who hired Kragthorpe, said “It just didn’t seem like the right fit from Day One.” Kentucky AD Mitch Barnhart, who hired Gillispie, said that Billy just wasn’t a good “fit.” Properly translated, these statements mean that both Jurich and Barnhart are “bad fits” and should be fired and forced to make restitution for the millions they’ve cost their universities. But, just as with the failed banks, these coaches and athletic directors have been given huge bonuses for failing. Both Barnhart and Jurich should be at least in the $600,000 per year range with a couple cars furnished, along with country club memberships and all the rest.

Perhaps the latest of the elite is Charlie Weis, hired by Notre Dame in 2004, given an extension in 2005 worth perhaps $30-40 million to last through 2015, and – yep – just fired. Unless he allowed the ND brass to bamboozle him, he’s probably good for at least $15 million for the privilege of heading back to a coaching job in the NFL, from whence he came. Maybe Weis just wasn’t a good fit. Or, there’s Phillip Fulmer, longtime coach at Tennessee until last year, when the university paid him a cool $6 million for the privilege of being “sacked” – get it – SACKED, just like his quarterbacks too many times. Yeah, he was a bad fit! He only won 152 out of 254 games (a mere 60%), two conference titles and a national title.

A big deal is being made now of the $500,000 the University of Kentucky athletic department (separate entity from academia, of course, a huge business) is awarding the university for non-athletic scholarships, about 33 at $15,000 a pop. The football team gets 83 every year. Since the middle 90s, the university has awarded $4,845,000 to coaches (one basketball, two football) for the privilege of getting rid of them. That money would have meant 323 more scholarships at today’s price, much greater than 15 years ago, but it went down the drain and bought nothing. The only thing for a coach to do that’s better than coaching is – yep – getting himself fired. The students can eat cake.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Sunday, November 29, 2009

UN-IPCC's IMAGE Problem

Dear UN-IPCC Scientist(s),

As CEO of the Institute for Modifying All Government Entities (known as IMAGE, for short), I’m writing to avail you of IMAGE services offered to anyone connected to any government/galaxy, directly or indirectly or accusatorily or inferentially or climatically...you get the picture, I’m sure. The recent exposure of e-mails circulating among the IPCC’s top fortune-tellers (little joke there) has caused much if not most of the public – especially that part with reading ability – to be concerned about your veracity, if not your competence. Recognizing the stark impeccability of your statements and writings, I’m contacting you to note some IMAGE services that can help restore the stupid public’s faith in you.

Accusations are being leveled in the nasty and tiny conservative media, especially within the talking-heads communities, that your warnings that the earth is doomed unless the polar bears are saved is completely contrived. The IMAGE agency that can help you with this charge is an academic one called the SOLAR UNIVERSITY for NORMALIZING SPECIOUS PROGNOSTICATIONS on TEMPERATURES, or SUNSPOT, using its acronym, aptly remarked since huge numbers of hopeless scientists with only Ph.d’s have noted that the “sunspot syndrome” has been cooling the planet for the last 10 years or so and that CO2 plays no role whatsoever in global warming, if any, that’s taken place since 1900. SUNSPOT professors are trained in the art of answering questions with questions and questioning answers with answers. In other words, their long-suit is teaching obfuscation rather than outright prevarication, thus affording you murky but respectable deniability in case you should happen upon an unrecognized truth that could be embarrassing.

IPCC folks have been accused of what the accountants call “cooking the books,” except that in your case it’s cooking the models. Redneck conservatism-freaks fondly call it “garbage in, garbage out.” The IMAGE agency that can help in this area is the ASSOCIATION for LABELING GENUINE OZONE READINGS as ERRONEOUS, or ALGORE, for short. Those pesky e-mails are said to indicate that your actual temperature readings were replaced by what the spin-doctors call...well, spin. ALGORE would have protected you in this area by technicians who can prove that a “black hole” in the ozone layer, caused by South Korean A-tests, caused moisture on the Moon and Mars to adversely skew the barometric-pressure-equations in your models, thus necessitating an IPCC correction, which can be understood only by the IPCC and no other entity, making you guys right...or something like that.

In the unlikely likelihood that you may actually and honestly have made a mistake – though merely impossible conjecture – a Plan B is always furnished by ALGORE to have your derriere well-covered through the scheme known as the PREVARICATION OPTIONS for LAMBASTING AUTHENTIC READINGS, known, of course as POLAR. The experts at POLAR devise ways for you to take contradictory data from other sources – especially those you have shut out from the “peer review” protocol – and explain how it means absolutely nothing, is totally inaccurate and politically motivated, is advanced by Rush Limbaugh and therefore mere hatemongering, and judged authentic by Dick Cheney, using evil Halliburton statistics. Thus, if your critics insist that 2 bear molecules + 2 bear molecules do not equal your total of 5 million bear molecules destroyed by General Motors, Chrysler and Exxon, POLAR will teach you how to prove them wrong, especially using a method devised by Bill Clinton, whose brilliance was forever established when he proved that “is” actually isn’t “is.”

The subject of prevarication leads to the next IMAGE agency that will give you help in the very important area of finances – the BUREAU for EARMARKS, AVARICE and RECOMPENSE, known, of course by its acronym, BEAR. Regardless of what anyone thinks about global warming or climate-change, the name of the game is always money. To continue your invaluable work, you must suggest strongly to legislators everywhere that they enact laws throwing money in huge amounts your way. IMAGE actually employs a package for this purpose using the agencies just mentioned and obviously called POLAR-BEAR, an apt title since anthropologists have determined that within the parameters of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, only four polar bears died – they drowned instead of starving. Thus, in his ability-to-misrepresent vis-a-vis polar bears and cap-and-trade, he has become a self-earmarked billionaire and already has intimate knowledge of how the system works, having been in both the Senate and the vice presidency and various zoos, assuming a difference among them. He has been approached regarding his availability to head POLAR-BEAR since he understands how misrepresentations and payoffs combine to influence legislators.

In closing, may I offer the fact that e-mails never die, though they may fade away some day. Indeed, IMAGE has hacked into UN servers on many occasions, thereby discovering markets for its business, though rednecks in Kentucky have classified IMAGE’s business as blackmail. In any case, please excuse the form-letter used in this correspondence. It was necessary because IMAGE can only guess at those to whom it pertains. Apologies all around for anyone who might be offended!

Best regards,
I.M. Reverself, CEO
IMAGE

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Climatic Scare as Flim-Flam

Shades of George C. Scott and The Flim-Flam Man or Redford and Newman in The Sting, three fine movie-actors portraying the penultimate in the lineup of con artists working their scams on the hapless “mark” about to be had. The current best subject for a movie along the lines of scam-to-perfection would have to do with the climate-change con-men caught in the act of making a “mark” out of the whole world.

The tale would go back a few years, as shown graphically through the efforts of a hacker who somehow ferreted out unbelievably damning e-mails from a server of some sort in Russia, of all places. The would-be con artists messaging each other were/are a gaggle of scientists primarily responsible for the totally specious claim that people are killing the planet through ratcheting up global warming. These characters are the main players – or at least the highest-profile main players because of their “outing” – connected with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

These alarmists have been making the case that mankind, mostly by filling the air with too much CO2, is causing the earth to warm to such an extent that soon the oceans will rise precipitously, inundating whole island-countries, flooding U.S. cities and doing away with all those pristine beaches. They’ve concocted all sorts of graphs and written materials to prove this, and a very gullible and sizeable bunch of folks in high places throughout the world, especially including the United States, have swallowed the stuff, hook, line and sinker, just as any naive “mark” would.

The highest-profile American to purvey this propaganda is former vice president Al Gore, who produced a book and a movie entitled An Inconvenient Truth on the subject, one result being his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, though Gore’s connection to peace is at least problematic. His movie is so rife with misrepresentations that a court order required that all of the lies had to be pointed out to the students in the public schools of England before they could view it, i.e., it was treated as political, not scientific. This, predictably, has not been the case in the schools in this country.

In the damning e-mails, especially involving researchers at the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre in England as well as other scientists such as Penn State professor Michael Mann, a leading figure in the IPCC as well as a leading figure in establishing the “hockey stick” configuration (graph) supposedly remarking an inordinate degree of global heating in the last century, the obvious effort is made to stave off damage. Plainly, the claims made by this group are false, something other credible scientists, especially in the U.S. and Australia, have been saying for some time. Ocean ice during the past summer was essentially equal in volume to the ocean ice in 1981 for the same period, for instance. The earth has been cooling since at least 2002 and is projected to continue cooling, and this obviously has the alarmists in a tizzy. This cooling trend had to be covered-up by the IPCC.

Under the influence of the IPCC, international representatives have already met numerous times since 1997, lately in panic-mode, to “just DO something,” never mind that there’s no actual threat. The 31st session of the IPCC met 26-29 October 2009, in Bali, Indonesia (great vacation spot?). The main tool in whipping every nation into shape is the “cap-and-trade,” vehicle, designed to punish international malefactors, the worst among whom, predictably, is the United States.

Buying into this outrage, the U.S. House passed a cap-and-trade-act earlier this year, with its most notable distinction (other than its horrific constraints on property owners and intolerable cost to the taxpayers) being that none of the lawmakers had read the bill. That’s right...the bill, cooked up by the administration, WAS NOT READ. It has provisions that are horrendous, but the Senate is unlikely even to take up the subject, especially considering the elections next November.

The Obama administration, in the face of all of this and perhaps angling for one-world government, is gearing up for the big IPCC bash in Copenhagen next month, at which time the nations will tell each other just how much each will cut greenhouse gasses in the future. Guess who the bad guys are...you got it, the Yanks.

This clambake is already being watered down in its approach, not least because the climatologists without an agenda have finally started convincing the world that manmade global-warming is a FRAUD. The most credible science now (a very iffy entity at best) seems to be that the earth’s relationship to the sun (especially regarding sunspots) seems to account for some warming and that CO2 is not even a player.

The anthropologists/geologists agree that global warming and cooling trends have been a part of earth-stuff since the beginning. According to them, glaciers at one time reached into Kentucky and the tropical forest of the Amazon at another time(s) was on the perimeter of the Arctic Circle. Then, these guys come along and fraudulently push the panic button, as if they could actually do anything about Mother Nature. Weird! They can’t even get the three-day forecast right much of the time.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Saturday, November 21, 2009

University as BIG BROTHER?

I never cease to wonder at the strange, sometimes ridiculously inculcated rules and regulations in institutions of higher learning having to do with everything from restraints on speech to the use of physical facilities. A student learns early (or else) that there are some words or terms that simply can’t be uttered or written, lest he wind up in some kind of kangaroo-court and consequently face expulsion, if not outright criminal charges or one of those awful group-therapy conclaves. Or...he may face big-time trouble if he expresses an opinion that can bring down the wrath of both students and faculty who subscribe to the absolute requirement in all venues of sophistication that political-correctness must be observed at all costs.

The University of Kentucky has just made it official that no one may smoke on any ground or sidewalk or roadway owned by the university. I’m not a smoker, so this circumstance obviously wouldn’t apply to me, but it reeks of the socialistic approach to everything, to wit, that punishment is the vehicle for bringing about any change, whether needed or not. The university has every right to ban smoking within its buildings. It owns both structures and the elements therein...everything.

However, on the outside, it owns only that which is tangible – the turf, concrete, asphalt, etc. It owns not one cubic centimeter of atmosphere outside those physical parameters. In other words, it does not own the air above or around any of those things, and the atmosphere is the location of the smokers exhaust. One might argue that laws prescribe the amount of exhaust allowed with regard to vehicles and indeed many elements of pollution. These apply to the atmosphere that everyone owns, so why not tobacco smoke?

There may be some validity – however vague – to the claims that secondhand smoke within buildings is harmful. Granted! Both owners and governments have taken notice of this and banned smoking in buildings. No thinking person, however, would claim that outside-smoking is harmful to anyone except the smoker. Consider: To heat many if not most of its buildings, the university utilizes a huge coal-fired facility that spews megatons of carbon into the air, although the actual amount most likely appears nowhere in UK public documents. Or...the university owns scores of vehicles and other machines that constantly spew pollutants as they are used 24/7 in carrying out campus upkeep, policing, transportation, etc.

To come close to the amount of pollution emanating from both the big furnace and the vehicles, there would probably be needed some 100 million or so smokers all doing the chain-smoke thing 24/7. Ironically, however, there are absolutely no regulations even pertaining to the amount of tobacco smoke allowed in the atmosphere...nothing such as the regulations that require coal-fired power-generating plants to install scrubbers and other purifying equipment costing millions in Kentucky alone.

So...why all the hassle about outside smoking – simply punishment leveled at people who are doing no harm? It’s the “Big Brother” syndrome that causes ridiculousness such as this. The university is saving people from themselves by making them either quit or cut down and, more importantly, saving the taxpayers money because smokers wind up getting sick and the state has to take care of them, notwithstanding that the potential costs of the years they forfeit because of their habit sort of offset the actual cost anyway.

The big thing in Kentucky now is not smoking anyway. The “Big Brother” syndrome has kicked in with respect to what’s probably a much greater danger than smoking – OBESITY. Only a small percentage of people at the university smoke, but the United Health Foundation said this month that 30.2% of Kentuckians are obese and that if the rate continues to increase they will eventually cost the state some $6 billion or $1,836 per adult in health-care spending. The same report indicated that smoking is on the decline in Kentucky, now down to 25.2%.

Obesity contributes to all the bad things such as diabetes, heart trouble, and high blood pressure. This being the case, one wonders what the university will do to curb obesity on the campus, a far greater health consideration than anything tobacco causes. These obese people, besides shortening their own lives, pose an even greater threat to the taxpayer, while the smoker population continues to dwindle, down 40% from 35.3% in 1990 to what it is now and dropping.

One supposes the university could mandate the amount of space (atmosphere) anyone on campus can occupy, perhaps based on the body-mass measurements found on charts in the offices of physicians. Students taking up too much space will just have to go home. Obese people (especially faculty) would huff and puff much more carbon dioxide into the air than skinny people, so should they be allowed only so many breaths an hour? After all, Al Gore said the polar bears depend on this.

Foolish? Of course! The outside smoking ban is even more foolish. Even more foolish is the notion that “Big Brother” has the responsibility to determine what can and can’t be eaten. People don’t always use common sense in what they do, but as long as they don’t hurt anyone else they should be left alone. After all, is it fair to discriminate against tobacco-smokers by not persecuting non-smoking tobacco- users...those guys that spit all over the campus, even during baseball games?

Egad! What’s it coming to? The university belches enough CO2 to make any global-warming, climate-change nutcase blanch, but lowers the boom on a guy just taking a smoke. What a laugh!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Friday, November 20, 2009

The Actual Reason for Show Trials?

Concerning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, this is what the president said the other day, "I don't think it [the New York trial] would be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." Attorney General Holder said this: "Failure is not an option. These are cases that have to be won. I don't expect that we'll have a contrary result." New York Governor David Paterson claims that the White House warned him six months ago that the trial would happen, yet it was never announced then and has been made to seem to be a recent decision by the AG, not the president.

These are actions that insult the intelligence and make the public ever more distrustful of the administration. Both the commander-in-chief and the government’s highest Justice official have pre-judged a person headed to court, something that even fifth-graders are taught that the Constitution forbids. A person hailed before a criminal proceeding and a jury of his peers is deemed innocent until PROVEN guilty. Obama taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago and presumably is as smart as a fifth-grader.

So...what’s at work here? Khalid and the other jihad terrorists have been held by military, not civil (police) forces, at least most of the time, since their capture, i.e., under the direct command of the commander-in-chief, not the attorney general. This means that the decision to move them from POW status to criminal status was made/exercised by Obama, not Holder. Their point concerning the ultimate outcome is moot since they have no idea what the outcome will be. One has only to hearken back to O.J. Simpson (1994) to see what can happen in a civilian court trying a criminal case. In Simpson’s civil trial, however and using essentially the same evidence, he was found to be guilty as sin, i.e., responsible for making restitution to the aggrieved but, of course, remaining scot-free.

Years ago, the Congress could have acted to set up a system, probably a sort of military tribunal, to handle the terrorists and satisfy the courts but couldn’t bring itself to do that even though it could pass a $787 billion stimulus bill overnight this year without even reading it. The same was true for cap-and-trade. The “gang of five” was taken into custody years ago and has been interrogated more than just thoroughly, but it’s highly doubtful that any have been apprised of their Miranda-rights, an absolute necessity with regard to a criminal trial in a civilian court. And...not one word any of these guys has said can even be used in this show-trial. All they have to do – or their attorneys – is scream TORTURE and they’re home-free. Confessions or any information obtained under duress are not allowed. The technicalities to cause acquittal are obvious, even though torture has not yet been defined.

Unloading the responsibility for trial-related security upon the New York police, the president has forfeited the guaranteed security with respect to the citizenry that is and could remain in place in Gitmo, which by lease from Cuba is as much a part of the United States as Puerto Rico. Now, every jihad terrorist in this country will be figuring a way to strap on his “explosive belt” and head for the federal building where the trial will be held, as well as all other targets in the Big Apple. The cost in Gitmo would remain just as it’s been for eight years, but the cost to New York will be astronomical even if the feds help pay. The trials could last for months, years – who knows?

So...none of this makes sense, which leads back to the matter of WHY. A good guess has to do with the administration’s ongoing but virtually unnoticed (if it’s in place yet) effort to somehow disembowel the CIA and, to a lesser extent, probably other intelligence agencies, as well. Despite Obama’s firm promise at least as far back as April that no CIA agents would be prosecuted for their actions as they understood the law, all that has changed, although he and Holder are probably more interested in trying to hang somebody – anybody – in the Bush administration over the alleged torture issue. Actually, everyone doing anything vis-a-vis terrorism in the Bush years is at risk.

The problem for O and H is that the public will not be aware of these efforts accruing to yet another broken promise since the work involved will of necessity be carried out in the shadows. Not so with respect to an opportunity to air things in a public forum such as a high-profile trial! It seems obvious that the trials, with respect to establishing guilt/innocence/sentences/whatever, are only secondarily important to the prime objective, namely, the exposing of the Bush administration for doing harsh things in order to slow the rate of terrorism-acts, especially regarding this country.

The supreme irony lies in the fact that Barack Hussein Obama would water-board Eric Holder or do much worse (and vice versa) if to do so would effect the protection of family. One wonders if there are enough red-blooded men left in Congress to call these guys out. Obviously, no, at least not now, but maybe that can change when it finally sinks in that these trials are more political than anything else.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

19 November 1863

What was perhaps the turning point of the Civil War was the bloody battle just outside of Gettysburg, fought in July 1863 in the placid countryside of Pennsylvania. Fifty-one thousand Union and Confederate soldiers were wounded, missing, or dead as a result of the desperate battle. On 19 November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the immortal “Gettysburg Address,” only some 269 words in length but a document that will forever live in the annals of American history. It is fitting in this bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth to recall Gettysburg on the anniversary of his giving this address, not his well-known words but words about Gettysburg and its meaning for today.

GETTYSBURG

The pain, like nothing he had known
Since lacerating foot on stone…
Yes, worse than tissue ripped to bone
When just a boy, one day alone;
Once more alone, with searing pain
- From head to toe a pain-link chain -
His first awareness in the rain
As consciousness he fought to gain.
His mind, befogged, began to clear,
No musketry he now could hear,
No longer…now…that rebel cheer,
Which once was music to his ear.
Flat on his back, he closed his eyes
Against the rain from graying skies
And flinched at hearing anguished cries
Of comrades facing pain, demise.
On yesterday the fight was waged,
As back and forth the lines had raged;
A sniper’s bullet rightly gauged
Had felled him in this crevice, caged.
He opened wide his cracked, parched lips,
To slake the thirst of countless trips
Through hostile fields...some canteen sips,
And chewed-up weeds, tobacco strips.
Now fighting just to stay aware,
He turned his head only to stare
At blood that oozed through matting hair
And dripped on rock…quite tombstone bare.
To turn his head was all that he
Could bear, since pain incessantly
Made movement an atrocity
More feared now than the enemy…
Still gone were sounds of musketry
As twilight settled eerily,
No pounding hooves of cavalry…
The only sound…cried-misery.
He thought of Alabama corn
Just breaking ground that April morn
When tears were shed and love was sworn
And he to shot and powder born,
And then the days of victory
And seeming death-immunity…
All now recalled despairingly,
While facing his mortality.
In haze, he pondered “civil war -
Uncivil war, this blood and gore,
Was it for this, or was there more
That made men kill their brothers for?”
As darkness crept across the slain
And earth was marked by bloody stain,
Red rivulets, formed with the rain,
Made ghastly the pock-marked terrain.
His feeble cries on deaf ears fell,
Or ears of those who shared his hell
And, thus, with him could only dwell,
But not his wretchedness repel.
The thoughts of cotton fields in bloom,
A teenage boy, a small schoolroom,
Danced in and out amid the gloom
With thoughts of an impending doom.
As night wore on, the groans grew less
Throughout the mud of helplessness -
In sound and number less and less,
As comrades entered hopelessness.
Sometimes a scream, sometimes a prayer
Would split the heavy, midnight air…
The screams and prayers of stark despair,
No loved ones…there…to know or care.
He fought to keep his consciousness
And thwart his awful pains’ duress
To make it till the dawn’s brightness,
When rescue would be his redress.
Toward daylight, thoughts consumed his mind
Of her for whom he so repined,
And parents to his will resigned,
And their entreaties he declined.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Then, slipping from his stubborn will,
No longer feeling rainy chill -
“Our Father” wafted toward the hill -
Then morning came...and all was...still.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And four months thence the president
Bestrode this place where lives were spent
And sanctioned it as monument
To those whose deaths were testament
That what was joined by rock-hard will
For four-score-seven lived on still,
Not split asunder…brought to nil,
But still a work that none will kill.
And yet in fourteen decades thence
The nation bears the evidence
That peace is simply recompense
In periodic segments whence
Its military might prevails
Against the day the nation quails
– When leadership is weak and flails –
Before its foes...and freedom fails.
And thence through terror six more years,
As those in God’s name kindle fears,
Bathe innocents in blood and tears,
Change peaceful scenes to fiery biers,
The nation once again must fight
And vows that Gettysburg was right,
Its symbol never dropped from sight –
That freedom reigns through blood-bought might.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Khalid & IMAGE

Dear Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

As CEO of the Institute for Modifying All Government Entities (known as IMAGE, for short), I am writing to avail you of IMAGE services offered to anyone connected to any government, directly or indirectly or accusatorily or inferentially or...you get the picture, I’m sure. You and your colleagues will soon be moving to New York City to take advantage of the best opportunity imaginable to make your case that Islamic jihad is the superior way of life, taking into account the challenge of appealing to the infidels in America that you must, on the basis of spiritual considerations, kill them at every opportunity, though you probably will be too well guarded for any individual effort to be effective. I concede that if you try and are dispatched/martyred and thus consigned to eternal dalliance with the 72 virgins the effort might be worthwhile – but not even spitting at the judge would bring that about.

Victimization is currently the rage in this country, an outgrowth of the social phenomenon known as “political correctness,” which is the ruling factor in all governmental activities such as trials. To help you take advantage of this circumstance, there is an arm of IMAGE known as the Headquarters for Official Liberal Damnation of Egregious Rendition, known for short by its acronym HOLDER. Perhaps you’ve noticed in al-Jazeera, a copy of which you surely receive every day, that Major Nasan, the murderer of 13 Americans at Fort Hood, is being viewed by especially what’s called the “mainstream media” as being disturbed account of Pre-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, an ailment probably caught from GIs returning from the Middle East, notwithstanding its oxymoronic label. The administration also leans toward this conclusion, the tip-off being its insistence that jihad-conduct cannot be charged without further investigations.

Since you’ve been questioned in places other than Guantanamo and been exposed to water-boarding that resulted in your ratting out things like further attacks on the United States, you are, ipso facto, a victim, a magic word in “getting off” on most everything from double-parking to serial-killing. HOLDER will help you prepare news accounts eagerly awaited by such media as the New York Times and testimony – through your lawyers, of course – giving an account of how you were born in Kuwait but whisked away from that paradise (not to be confused with the Paradise of the Virgins) and made to grow up in Pakistan, where beheadings are always in order for anyone smelling of oil or with sand in his shoes, thus experiencing a damning childhood that finally eventuated in a psyche-warping rendition in Turkey or Poland or wherever.

Everything that happens will be televised so you will need to present an image to the public of a caring, religious soul merely carrying out Allah’s will for your life. IMAGE’s agency to help with that is the Theatrical Organization for Righteous Temporizing Undergirding Rhetorical Efficacy, or TORTURE, for short. TORTURE will help you know just how far to go in playing to the cameras during the trial, as well as how to make your pitch to the public as a victim of an insensitive country. TORTURE’s expert on both style and substance is the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. He will teach you how to be heard over at the Statue of Liberty without benefit of microphones. He will teach you the words of some old gospel hymns he uses in his sermons and even a bit of tune to use for effect. He will show you the appropriate African dress and may even loan you some of his sermonic attires – wild when compared to the bongo-like delivery and the “pulpit shuffle.” Or, he may hand you off to Father Michael Pfleger, who will teach you the “altar-bump-and-grind” he used in Wright’s church to ridicule State Secretary Clinton during the campaign last year. Maybe you saw it – groovy stuff, a real crowd-pleaser.

Wright will teach you how and what to damn, mostly the United States. That will gladden the hearts of the liberals (mostly everybody in New York, where the jury will be impaneled) who feel guilty about the water-boarding and almost everything else. Rahm Emanuel, the president’s main gofer, will do some moonlighting for IMAGE (needs the extra money) and will teach you how, what, and when regarding apologies and may even furnish an apology-writer or apology-teleprompter (be sure the right speech is on it). Remember, whether in doubt or not, always apologize, and since you once attended a Baptist college in North Carolina you can help your case by quoting some of the sermons you heard, but you will still need TORTURE to help you in order not to offend the religious mainliners, who consider Baptists as heathens (just a bit of free advice).

IMAGE’s department responsible for properly stroking the powerful is known as the Consortium for Honoring Establishment Nincompoops and Egotistical Yahoos, known, for short, as CHENEY. Never underestimate the need for pandering, and the more shallow the pandered-to, the easier is the task. You may draw a tough judge, so it will be important to impress the Congress with your case in the hope that the solons will call for hearings in the middle of the trial, thus extending it practically indefinitely, as such hearings furnish the legislators with opportunities to show the folks back home their importance, particularly as they make their opening statements, which actually are campaign speeches. For instance, if you just casually mention Abu Ghraib in your testimony you’ll immediately invoke 10 or 12 hearings that could take years while you continue to enjoy life in the Big Apple, eating better than you have in years.

Snowing (American term for “conning”) the Congress-people is made easier since they will never read a transcript of the trial in order to stop appeals. The representatives and senators routinely pass legislation they’ve never read, notwithstanding their current non-efforts at reading costing upwards of trillions of dollars. In perpetual campaign mode, they have no time for anything but holding hearings, raising cash, and gaining earmarks, the latter two tightly connected. CHENEY will also see that you receive health benefits since your official entry into the country makes you a legal immigrant.

Finally, you will need help in the aftermath of your trial, especially with finances. You may be convicted of something but that’s actually the good part, especially since the ACLU will make sure you’re not dispatched by lethal injection or some other barbarous enterprise. IMAGE’s arm for this matter is the Bureau for Unusual-Specialties Honorariums, or BUSH, for short, aptly named since President Bush placed you in this enviable position. BUSH will set up your schedule for speeches, whether in person or via Internet, movies, etc. It will promise a movie on your excellent life directed by none other than Michael Moore and guarantee that Larry King will interview you Live (little joke there), no matter your location, complete with a panel of evangelists to explain that your goodness will make you rich.

You qualify for this service since you have unusual specialties such as combining a Baptist college, a North Carolina university, remarkable skill at beheading, and Osama bin Laden in the grandest terror of all times – known commonly as 9/11. You’ll be in great demand to describe your infidel-dispatching efforts in Serbia, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Pakistan, just to mention a few bloodbaths. BUSH can get you honorariums in the $500,000 per outing range, probably more in Chicago, where William Ayers, a crafty much-appreciated domestic terrorist with the Weather Underground (known as American al-Qaeda) teaches at the university.

In any case, let IMAGE hear from you, and, as a bit of advice, perhaps you might fast for awhile before coming to the Big Apple and shave off all that beard so you will have a gaunt, properly persecuted appearance. Also, plead “not guilty” since pleading “guilty” would be the same as suicide-less-accompanying-homicide and make you ineligible for the virgins. If you escape the death penalty, and thus martyrdom, you can be happy joining fellow crooks on Wall Street and their cohorts in government.

Respectfully,
I.M.Reverself, CEO
IMAGE

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

Saturday, November 14, 2009

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