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
Sunday, November 29, 2009
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Thursday, November 12, 2009
DNC Memorandum #7
From the office of Governor Tim Kaine, convener, 12 November 2009
**Everyone is authorized to declare victory vis-a-vis the recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, primarily on the basis that Creigh Deeds refused help from POTUS and TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States) until it was too late, John Corzine spent too much of his own money and therefore appeared too ambitious, and the democrat in New York-23 (can’t remember his/her/its name) beat out not one but two candidates, proving that when all things are normal the democrats win. The republican governors elected in my state and New Jersey will make no difference since they can’t vote on health-care or cap-and-trade but the representative from New York-23 will be very important, taking into account the defection of 39 (17% of total democrats) in the recent health-care vote in the House. The rumor that Rahm Emanuel has mailed a dead fish to each of the defectors is untrue and Rahm has said he won’t do it again. Speaker Pelosi has promised not to punish any of the defectors and the rumor that she had all the microwaves and coffee-makers removed from their offices through 2010 is untrue. She only removed pencil sharpeners and privileges in the House gym.
**POTUS leaves on his Asian trip today and has asked for help in the fashioning of acceptable apologies to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea for the meanness of this nation (as described by the first lady) until his election. This is an urgent matter and the staffer who rises to the occasion will be given a bonus. CAUTION: Since POTUS listened for 20 years to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who said the “chickens had come home to roost in the U.S. because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he expects any reasonable apology to include the reverend’s wisdom in the matter, with the proper mention of U.S. perfidy. Further Caution: Do not – repeat – DO NOT mention Pearl Harbor or the Korean “Comfort Women,” but make whatever positive use possible of the term “Kamikaze.” For instance, cite Al Gore’s warning that the U.S. is killing the planet in the name of the pursuit of happiness, as per the wrong interpretation of the Declaration.
**POTUS travel plans have been slightly changed. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn was to accompany the president, though not as a reward for publicly dissing Fox News and denying permission to any White House folks to appear on Fox; rather she was to go along because of her recent statement concerning her proclivity to look at the sayings/actions of Chairman Mao whenever she needed to determine a course of action, especially calling attention to the way he outdid Chiang-Kai-shek, in grabbing China for the communists at the end of WWII. Unfortunately, Chiang was an ally of the U.S., while Mao, who is said to be responsible for 40-50 million killed in his grab plus his Cultural Revolution of the 60s-70s, was an enemy. Ms. Dunn has decided to leave the administration at the end of the month, claiming, as usual, the need to spend more time with family. The fact that POTUS has been given a crash course lately in Chinese history in preparation for his trip has nothing to do with this matter, and the staffer who created a poster with a drawing of Ms. Dunn under a bus and placed it by the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush-dart-board will be fired.
**The DNC position on the Fort Hood episode is that no conclusions are to be drawn concerning the killer until the investigation is completed, but it will be alright to quote the e-zines and other publications that call for an investigation into the body politic in the interest of determining how Nasan became a victim of American society and was driven to placing himself in the awkward position of being court-martialed for what is clearly a case of suffering from Pre-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, a condition unknown before now. DNC psychiatrists, led by William Ayers of Weather Underground fame and now a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago and an expert on Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, are looking into the possibility that PTSD is contagious and that Nasan probably caught it from returnees from Iraq and Afghanistan. If this is the case, Nasan is to be congratulated for not killing more soldiers before being gunned down by policemen, who, as POTUS has noted recently in the Cambridge case, act stupidly.
**Senator Kerry is to be commended for his recent adamant position in a hearing concerning global warming, and the public can be glad that his effort was shown on C-Span. In excoriating a poor soul from the American Enterprise Institute (or maybe some other conservative bunch of nutcases – who’s counting anyway), he made it plain that the snow will soon melt entirely from the Himalayas (or some other mountain range – who’s counting anyway) if this country doesn’t change its ways. He made it plain that the UN-IPCC and Al Gore have concluded beyond a doubt that the United States is the worst enemy of the third world (or fourth world – who’s counting anyway) and that this country must take the lead in Copenhagen next month in chastising itself and showing the proper remorse for disturbing the climate to an extent guaranteed, if not corrected, to bring on Armageddon before the end of the century. Misguided American and British climatologists disagree, but the senator is holding his ground and has privately worried that his ski trips to Switzerland may be in jeopardy.
**In keeping with his promise to protect the consumer, POTUS will soon appoint a Fast-Food Czar to carry out his executive orders denoting such important considerations as the amount of meat/grease/cheese/salt-on-a pumpernickel-bun in constructing a cheeseburger and the proper temperature for coffee. French-fries will not – repeat – will NOT be banned as of this writing, but if obesity persists in the elementary schools, the matter will be given another look. All staffers are to check the body-mass chart and add their readings to their profiles. Those who are overweight will be required to secure at least a high-normal reading before the holidays. Those whose sideways shadows at five p.m. are wider than a football will be required to listen to ten lectures each by Professor Ayers on the subjects: “Why Hugo Chavez Had a Right in His UN Speech to Call George Bush a Devil” and “How to Make a Homemade Bomb and Write a Will in Three Easy Lessons.”
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
**Everyone is authorized to declare victory vis-a-vis the recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, primarily on the basis that Creigh Deeds refused help from POTUS and TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States) until it was too late, John Corzine spent too much of his own money and therefore appeared too ambitious, and the democrat in New York-23 (can’t remember his/her/its name) beat out not one but two candidates, proving that when all things are normal the democrats win. The republican governors elected in my state and New Jersey will make no difference since they can’t vote on health-care or cap-and-trade but the representative from New York-23 will be very important, taking into account the defection of 39 (17% of total democrats) in the recent health-care vote in the House. The rumor that Rahm Emanuel has mailed a dead fish to each of the defectors is untrue and Rahm has said he won’t do it again. Speaker Pelosi has promised not to punish any of the defectors and the rumor that she had all the microwaves and coffee-makers removed from their offices through 2010 is untrue. She only removed pencil sharpeners and privileges in the House gym.
**POTUS leaves on his Asian trip today and has asked for help in the fashioning of acceptable apologies to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea for the meanness of this nation (as described by the first lady) until his election. This is an urgent matter and the staffer who rises to the occasion will be given a bonus. CAUTION: Since POTUS listened for 20 years to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who said the “chickens had come home to roost in the U.S. because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he expects any reasonable apology to include the reverend’s wisdom in the matter, with the proper mention of U.S. perfidy. Further Caution: Do not – repeat – DO NOT mention Pearl Harbor or the Korean “Comfort Women,” but make whatever positive use possible of the term “Kamikaze.” For instance, cite Al Gore’s warning that the U.S. is killing the planet in the name of the pursuit of happiness, as per the wrong interpretation of the Declaration.
**POTUS travel plans have been slightly changed. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn was to accompany the president, though not as a reward for publicly dissing Fox News and denying permission to any White House folks to appear on Fox; rather she was to go along because of her recent statement concerning her proclivity to look at the sayings/actions of Chairman Mao whenever she needed to determine a course of action, especially calling attention to the way he outdid Chiang-Kai-shek, in grabbing China for the communists at the end of WWII. Unfortunately, Chiang was an ally of the U.S., while Mao, who is said to be responsible for 40-50 million killed in his grab plus his Cultural Revolution of the 60s-70s, was an enemy. Ms. Dunn has decided to leave the administration at the end of the month, claiming, as usual, the need to spend more time with family. The fact that POTUS has been given a crash course lately in Chinese history in preparation for his trip has nothing to do with this matter, and the staffer who created a poster with a drawing of Ms. Dunn under a bus and placed it by the bottled-water keg and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger (eating grease okay if Senator Biden does), non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced snack-bar and body-mass-chart, carbon-cap-graph, endangered-species-obituary-wall-chart, blue/red-state-map, and Bush-dart-board will be fired.
**The DNC position on the Fort Hood episode is that no conclusions are to be drawn concerning the killer until the investigation is completed, but it will be alright to quote the e-zines and other publications that call for an investigation into the body politic in the interest of determining how Nasan became a victim of American society and was driven to placing himself in the awkward position of being court-martialed for what is clearly a case of suffering from Pre-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, a condition unknown before now. DNC psychiatrists, led by William Ayers of Weather Underground fame and now a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago and an expert on Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, are looking into the possibility that PTSD is contagious and that Nasan probably caught it from returnees from Iraq and Afghanistan. If this is the case, Nasan is to be congratulated for not killing more soldiers before being gunned down by policemen, who, as POTUS has noted recently in the Cambridge case, act stupidly.
**Senator Kerry is to be commended for his recent adamant position in a hearing concerning global warming, and the public can be glad that his effort was shown on C-Span. In excoriating a poor soul from the American Enterprise Institute (or maybe some other conservative bunch of nutcases – who’s counting anyway), he made it plain that the snow will soon melt entirely from the Himalayas (or some other mountain range – who’s counting anyway) if this country doesn’t change its ways. He made it plain that the UN-IPCC and Al Gore have concluded beyond a doubt that the United States is the worst enemy of the third world (or fourth world – who’s counting anyway) and that this country must take the lead in Copenhagen next month in chastising itself and showing the proper remorse for disturbing the climate to an extent guaranteed, if not corrected, to bring on Armageddon before the end of the century. Misguided American and British climatologists disagree, but the senator is holding his ground and has privately worried that his ski trips to Switzerland may be in jeopardy.
**In keeping with his promise to protect the consumer, POTUS will soon appoint a Fast-Food Czar to carry out his executive orders denoting such important considerations as the amount of meat/grease/cheese/salt-on-a pumpernickel-bun in constructing a cheeseburger and the proper temperature for coffee. French-fries will not – repeat – will NOT be banned as of this writing, but if obesity persists in the elementary schools, the matter will be given another look. All staffers are to check the body-mass chart and add their readings to their profiles. Those who are overweight will be required to secure at least a high-normal reading before the holidays. Those whose sideways shadows at five p.m. are wider than a football will be required to listen to ten lectures each by Professor Ayers on the subjects: “Why Hugo Chavez Had a Right in His UN Speech to Call George Bush a Devil” and “How to Make a Homemade Bomb and Write a Will in Three Easy Lessons.”
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Athletic Lunacy Reigns
Wonders never cease when it comes to the amount of money that’s thrown away in Kentucky through the athletic departments of the state’s universities. The only athletic departments that are said to pay their way through income derived from ticket sales, TV, and other sources are at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. In all the rest of the schools – Murray, Western, Eastern, Morehead, Northern Kentucky, and Kentucky State – millions of dollars are lost each year on a relative handful of students who just happen to be big or strong or fast or all of the above.
No one denies the importance of sports and competition, but there comes a time when taxpayers have a right to suggest that the tail should never wag the dog. In the latest case, that of the firing of football coach David Elson at Western Kentucky, the financial profligacy is glaring. Elson signed a contract extension last January that named him the coach through 2016 – that’s just last January. He’s already been fired by the same guy, athletic director Wood Selig, who gave him that extension. The team has lost every game this year, its first in the premier top-tier NCAA Division I, putting it in the company of such teams as Alabama and Florida, the best in the nation. The knee-jerk reflex was simply to fire the coach.
According to USA Today of 06 October 2008, Elson’s income this year is $250,000. He accepted a buyout of $500,000 for the privilege of being fired, even though without any raises at all (unheard of) he would have made $1,750,000 by the year 2016. One can’t know the provisions of his contract, but wonders what he could have received if he had just decided to sue Western for the whole amount. Billy Gillispie, former basketball coach at UK, just settled a firing orgy by athletic director Mitch Barnhart for a whopping $3 million, and he only had a “memorandum of understanding,” i.e. never a signed contract.
In the USA Today article, mention was made of the fact that Western had been very successful in its former division – I-AA, winning a national championship in 2002. Athletic director Selig was quoted as remarking the fact that even then Western was losing nearly $2 million a year. That’s tax money being sucked down the drain. The wonder is that the University of Kentucky stays in the black since it gave Gillispie $3 million as a buyout; former football coach Hal Mumme a cool million a few years ago to be fired, and former football coach Bill Curry $600,000 in the 1990s to be shown the door.
In order to do its “step up to the next level,” Western renovated its football stadium to the tune of $50 million, never mind that it was losing heavily on football every year. That outlay was not earned by any sport...it was made up of taxes. The change meant that the number of full football scholarships was increased from 63 to 85. At about a conservative $15,000 each to educate, feed, house, and equip a player, that meant another $330,000 to add to the $945,000 already spent, for a total of $1,275,000 in scholarships each year, whether or not the player could write three consecutive grammatically correct sentences or figure simple interest.
There’s something wrong here. A good place to start looking for the cure is in the offices of university athletic directors and presidents. These are actually the people who do the hiring and firing, even though a committee has been appointed to secure a new coach at Western. Has anyone ever heard of that? The athletic director is on the committee, though not the chairman, and he will have the final say, notwithstanding his erratic behavior.
Smart and talented students graduate from high school every year – straight-A folks – but, especially in this recession-damned economy and amidst ever-upward-spiraling tuition and board costs, are forced into jobs instead of professions, while those who are athletically blessed just game the system, aided and abetted by the educators(?), whose elevators don’t seem to reach the top floor. Who pays? The taxpayer pays, along with those who are deprived simply because they can’t run fast enough or aren’t equipped to knock the stuffing out of other people on Saturday.
Yes...the tail wags the dog in the state of Kentucky, but that’s the way it is throughout Division I. The University of Kentucky aspires to “top twenty” status, but the lie is given to its efforts by its enriching its athletic directors and coaches, while the academics and non-athletes can eat cake and the entire academic program remains in the shadows. The same is true at Western, and nothing is likely to change.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
No one denies the importance of sports and competition, but there comes a time when taxpayers have a right to suggest that the tail should never wag the dog. In the latest case, that of the firing of football coach David Elson at Western Kentucky, the financial profligacy is glaring. Elson signed a contract extension last January that named him the coach through 2016 – that’s just last January. He’s already been fired by the same guy, athletic director Wood Selig, who gave him that extension. The team has lost every game this year, its first in the premier top-tier NCAA Division I, putting it in the company of such teams as Alabama and Florida, the best in the nation. The knee-jerk reflex was simply to fire the coach.
According to USA Today of 06 October 2008, Elson’s income this year is $250,000. He accepted a buyout of $500,000 for the privilege of being fired, even though without any raises at all (unheard of) he would have made $1,750,000 by the year 2016. One can’t know the provisions of his contract, but wonders what he could have received if he had just decided to sue Western for the whole amount. Billy Gillispie, former basketball coach at UK, just settled a firing orgy by athletic director Mitch Barnhart for a whopping $3 million, and he only had a “memorandum of understanding,” i.e. never a signed contract.
In the USA Today article, mention was made of the fact that Western had been very successful in its former division – I-AA, winning a national championship in 2002. Athletic director Selig was quoted as remarking the fact that even then Western was losing nearly $2 million a year. That’s tax money being sucked down the drain. The wonder is that the University of Kentucky stays in the black since it gave Gillispie $3 million as a buyout; former football coach Hal Mumme a cool million a few years ago to be fired, and former football coach Bill Curry $600,000 in the 1990s to be shown the door.
In order to do its “step up to the next level,” Western renovated its football stadium to the tune of $50 million, never mind that it was losing heavily on football every year. That outlay was not earned by any sport...it was made up of taxes. The change meant that the number of full football scholarships was increased from 63 to 85. At about a conservative $15,000 each to educate, feed, house, and equip a player, that meant another $330,000 to add to the $945,000 already spent, for a total of $1,275,000 in scholarships each year, whether or not the player could write three consecutive grammatically correct sentences or figure simple interest.
There’s something wrong here. A good place to start looking for the cure is in the offices of university athletic directors and presidents. These are actually the people who do the hiring and firing, even though a committee has been appointed to secure a new coach at Western. Has anyone ever heard of that? The athletic director is on the committee, though not the chairman, and he will have the final say, notwithstanding his erratic behavior.
Smart and talented students graduate from high school every year – straight-A folks – but, especially in this recession-damned economy and amidst ever-upward-spiraling tuition and board costs, are forced into jobs instead of professions, while those who are athletically blessed just game the system, aided and abetted by the educators(?), whose elevators don’t seem to reach the top floor. Who pays? The taxpayer pays, along with those who are deprived simply because they can’t run fast enough or aren’t equipped to knock the stuffing out of other people on Saturday.
Yes...the tail wags the dog in the state of Kentucky, but that’s the way it is throughout Division I. The University of Kentucky aspires to “top twenty” status, but the lie is given to its efforts by its enriching its athletic directors and coaches, while the academics and non-athletes can eat cake and the entire academic program remains in the shadows. The same is true at Western, and nothing is likely to change.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Protective Order as Salvation
The media seems constantly to be reporting increasing numbers of cases involving protective orders, assaults, sexual-abuse, even murder vis-a-vis women caught up in abusive relationships with men. It’s rarely the other way around. In the Kentucky legislature, there is yet another effort to address this situation, the protection, of course, being directed toward the women. The latest high-profile case in Kentucky involved a protective order and the alleged murder of a woman by a former legislator and candidate for the governor’s seat, who was the recipient of the order.
The social engineers – current edition – are appalled by this state of affairs, notwithstanding that they have adopted “political correctness” as their credo, which, translated, simply means “if it feels good, do it as long as nobody gets hurt.” Thus, everything from the weirdest perverted and/or homosexual behavior to most any form of devil-worship to any sort of shack-up arrangement to men-marrying-men and women-marrying-women, with the appropriate reeducation in the public schools concerning these things, of course, is perfectly okay.
But those things are not perfectly okay. Leaving religion out of it altogether, those things are completely contradictory to the natural order of things – biologically, emotionally, intellectually and from a plain-common-sense standpoint. Even though one man’s concept of orgy is the same as another man’s concept of morality, common sense dictates that some things are just plain wrong. There are black-and-white issues, meaning that not everything comes in a shade of gray.
So...how does this relate to the abuse/protective-order mess that clogs up law enforcement, often leads to policepersons getting hurt or killed when caught in domestic cross-fires, requires countless hours of wasted money and other resources, and often amounts to absolutely nothing of consequence?
On September 23, 2008, the Census Bureau released a report explaining how Americans lived in 2007. The report indicated that for the third consecutive year, the majority of the nation's households were headed by unmarried Americans. The report listed 23 states falling into the unmarried-majority category in terms of households and living arrangements – more states than in any previous year. Michigan was added to this list for the first time. In terms of raw numbers, more than 101 million American adults were unmarried – 50.3%. In other words, a huge number of the arrangements were what are commonly called “shack-ups,” and a huge number involved children.
This at one time was the arrangement used by the murdered woman and the alleged killer alluded to above. She was about half his age when they moved in together and they seemed to have been friendly with the bubbly. In other words, they had made no documented commitment to each other, such as a marriage certificate. They co-habited. Then, their arrangement fell apart and the lady, feeling threatened, perhaps justifiably, got a protective order against the guy, something he claimed cost him his job. She was subsequently shot dead one morning on her way to work. Then, all the hand-wringing began.
The hand-wringing began because it was just naturally assumed that society/government/law-enforcement/whatever had failed this woman. This is the case nowadays when a social disruption occurs. The public – the citizens – have somehow caused it all by not being enhanced enough as “Big Brother” looking out for people who might just cause their own problems. The Fort Hood massacre is another example. The toady-headed progressives are wondering how the system failed the murderer of 13 unarmed people on a government installation, of all things. The fact that he was a cold-blooded killer contemptuous of the system doesn’t register with them. They consider him a victim.
It’s politically incorrect to bring up the possibility that an awful lot of the abuse/protective-order business is caused by both men and women who haven’t the depth to make commitments to each other and are mostly interested in the mutual exploitation accruing to just shacking-up. Or...they may be married and lack the will – even when children are involved – to put forth the effort to make their commitment succeed. Either way, mostly out of self-interest, they bicker, fight, do drugs (including alcohol), and, often, abuse occurs. They are contemptuous of the natural order of things. The result: yet another protective order...and maybe much worse.
Included often in the “much worse” is the intolerable torture and killing of children, sometimes by a “significant other” with the mother’s complicity, or a stepfather. To people only interested in lust rather than love, a child can be an inconvenience too bothersome to tolerate. The hardest thing to understand, even in these circumstances, is the torture inflicted upon a child when it would be far more merciful to just slit his/her throat and be done with it.
The person most responsible for this problem is the woman who chooses to let her hormones instead of her brain run her life and hooks up with a stud having the same approach. Women scream for equality, but when they do something this dumb and incur the wrath of the co-habiting scumbags, they run whining to the judge for a protective order. It shouldn’t be this way, political correctness be damned.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The social engineers – current edition – are appalled by this state of affairs, notwithstanding that they have adopted “political correctness” as their credo, which, translated, simply means “if it feels good, do it as long as nobody gets hurt.” Thus, everything from the weirdest perverted and/or homosexual behavior to most any form of devil-worship to any sort of shack-up arrangement to men-marrying-men and women-marrying-women, with the appropriate reeducation in the public schools concerning these things, of course, is perfectly okay.
But those things are not perfectly okay. Leaving religion out of it altogether, those things are completely contradictory to the natural order of things – biologically, emotionally, intellectually and from a plain-common-sense standpoint. Even though one man’s concept of orgy is the same as another man’s concept of morality, common sense dictates that some things are just plain wrong. There are black-and-white issues, meaning that not everything comes in a shade of gray.
So...how does this relate to the abuse/protective-order mess that clogs up law enforcement, often leads to policepersons getting hurt or killed when caught in domestic cross-fires, requires countless hours of wasted money and other resources, and often amounts to absolutely nothing of consequence?
On September 23, 2008, the Census Bureau released a report explaining how Americans lived in 2007. The report indicated that for the third consecutive year, the majority of the nation's households were headed by unmarried Americans. The report listed 23 states falling into the unmarried-majority category in terms of households and living arrangements – more states than in any previous year. Michigan was added to this list for the first time. In terms of raw numbers, more than 101 million American adults were unmarried – 50.3%. In other words, a huge number of the arrangements were what are commonly called “shack-ups,” and a huge number involved children.
This at one time was the arrangement used by the murdered woman and the alleged killer alluded to above. She was about half his age when they moved in together and they seemed to have been friendly with the bubbly. In other words, they had made no documented commitment to each other, such as a marriage certificate. They co-habited. Then, their arrangement fell apart and the lady, feeling threatened, perhaps justifiably, got a protective order against the guy, something he claimed cost him his job. She was subsequently shot dead one morning on her way to work. Then, all the hand-wringing began.
The hand-wringing began because it was just naturally assumed that society/government/law-enforcement/whatever had failed this woman. This is the case nowadays when a social disruption occurs. The public – the citizens – have somehow caused it all by not being enhanced enough as “Big Brother” looking out for people who might just cause their own problems. The Fort Hood massacre is another example. The toady-headed progressives are wondering how the system failed the murderer of 13 unarmed people on a government installation, of all things. The fact that he was a cold-blooded killer contemptuous of the system doesn’t register with them. They consider him a victim.
It’s politically incorrect to bring up the possibility that an awful lot of the abuse/protective-order business is caused by both men and women who haven’t the depth to make commitments to each other and are mostly interested in the mutual exploitation accruing to just shacking-up. Or...they may be married and lack the will – even when children are involved – to put forth the effort to make their commitment succeed. Either way, mostly out of self-interest, they bicker, fight, do drugs (including alcohol), and, often, abuse occurs. They are contemptuous of the natural order of things. The result: yet another protective order...and maybe much worse.
Included often in the “much worse” is the intolerable torture and killing of children, sometimes by a “significant other” with the mother’s complicity, or a stepfather. To people only interested in lust rather than love, a child can be an inconvenience too bothersome to tolerate. The hardest thing to understand, even in these circumstances, is the torture inflicted upon a child when it would be far more merciful to just slit his/her throat and be done with it.
The person most responsible for this problem is the woman who chooses to let her hormones instead of her brain run her life and hooks up with a stud having the same approach. Women scream for equality, but when they do something this dumb and incur the wrath of the co-habiting scumbags, they run whining to the judge for a protective order. It shouldn’t be this way, political correctness be damned.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, November 07, 2009
A Terrorist By Any Other Name
As is the case with everything that happens with regard to any governmental entity, the spin-doctors are at work satisfying their political agendas by using the Fort Hood massacre to make their points. The substantive facts are quite clear, to wit, that an army major of Arabic descent and a devout Muslim went on a rampage, killing 13 and wounding nearly 40 others, all unarmed and in the midst of completing paperwork or undergoing examinations and/or receiving the appropriate pre-deployment vaccinations.
The mainstream media, both print and electronic, will not handle the situation in the same way that the hard-nosed conservative media-types will. TIME has already called attention to Fort Hood as one of the army’s most stressed posts, using this terminology – “kindling was hiding in plain sight” – apparently to describe a psychological fire leading to some sort of rage. How something hides in plain sight is problematic, but the point was clear enough, namely, that the shooter simply was not responsible for what he did. He was simply driven to rage and, without saying it, TIME probably feels that George Bush caused it all
Newsweek claimed that Major Nidal Hasan was a symptom of a “military on the brink” and wondered if the massacre presented signals that the worst is yet to come. It added that the U.S. military could be reaching the breaking point if the president decides to send more troops to Afghanistan. The magazine’s point, of course, is perfectly obvious. The New York Times delivered itself of the opinion that Hasan was mortified about being deployed. Both far-left entities probably feel as they do about anything that disrupts what they consider normalcy, i.e., that nasty conservatives are responsible for it. They probably blame George Bush for what Hasan did.
On the basis of the facts that have been delivered to the media thus far, Hasan expected to die as the climax of his rampage, though not by his own hand; rather he meant to be martyred by an enemy, in this case anyone not Muslim. He was foiled in this and unless he is mortally wounded, which seems not to be the case, will stand trial. The reports indicate that he started his day by preparing to die, not to be deployed in even the week of his rampage, perhaps not for more weeks or months. He divested himself of perhaps most of his possessions, even copies of the Koran, his holy book, which, of course, requires the killing of infidels – in this case American non-Muslims – at every opportunity.
Political correctness or diversity-divinity rules the liberal press these days, and so it’s not surprising that the blame for Hasan’s actions will be placed on the body politic in much the same way that the public is faulted when one gang-member wastes another, the whole business being caused by societal neglect of some sort, usually by nasty conservatives who are insensitive to the “needs” of the products of single mothers, poverty, bad schools, etc. After all, Hasan is said to have complained of being harassed in the army after 9/11 because of who he is, Arab and Muslim.
The bullying may have been real or imagined. There are thousands of Muslims in the military, however, and no such other slaughters of innocent people have taken place, though a converted Muslim did kill a recruiter and wound another in Arkansas on 01 June. He was not Arabic, just an American Muslim doing his Islamic duty. Born in Tennessee, he had changed his name from Carlos Bledsoe to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad and had studied jihad with an Islamic scholar in Yemen, according to Jihadwatch.org.
One could say that none of the above applies to drawing conclusions and that such must wait for the investigations(s) by the proper agencies. Fair enough! A defining factor, however, is the testimony of those involved that Hasan mounted a table or something similar and shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) as he began his assassinations, thus remarking his exercise as a religious effort. Suicide was his obvious goal and he could have achieved that without any harm to others. That probably would have negated his theologically certified trip to the virgins in Paradise, however, while being shot in the line of jihad-duty would have made him eligible, though it’s hard to believe a well-educated 39-year-old-man would believe such a thing.
It’s noteworthy that the Muslims creating havoc and planning more havoc in France and Britain currently are mostly young Muslims born in those countries. Hasan’s parents immigrated from the Middle East but Hasan was born in Virginia. He fired at least 100 rounds of ammunition and reportedly has claimed that he was a Muslim first and an American second. He could have done more damage if he had secured an “explosives belt” and simply set himself off in a restaurant, but such a procurement was most likely not possible in Texas. He did the next best thing and murdered as many as he could before finally starting his trip to the virgins, which he will probably not be making as soon as expected.
None of this is to be construed as a blanket condemnation of Muslims. Such would be untrue and unfair. It is to remark that the minute minority who practice jihad in the name of Allah are in American neighborhoods and/or are becoming converts to a belief system that adversely impacts non-Muslims...to the point of murder. They are terrorists, whether individually or sponsored by governments such as those in Afghanistan and Iran. They must be defeated.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The mainstream media, both print and electronic, will not handle the situation in the same way that the hard-nosed conservative media-types will. TIME has already called attention to Fort Hood as one of the army’s most stressed posts, using this terminology – “kindling was hiding in plain sight” – apparently to describe a psychological fire leading to some sort of rage. How something hides in plain sight is problematic, but the point was clear enough, namely, that the shooter simply was not responsible for what he did. He was simply driven to rage and, without saying it, TIME probably feels that George Bush caused it all
Newsweek claimed that Major Nidal Hasan was a symptom of a “military on the brink” and wondered if the massacre presented signals that the worst is yet to come. It added that the U.S. military could be reaching the breaking point if the president decides to send more troops to Afghanistan. The magazine’s point, of course, is perfectly obvious. The New York Times delivered itself of the opinion that Hasan was mortified about being deployed. Both far-left entities probably feel as they do about anything that disrupts what they consider normalcy, i.e., that nasty conservatives are responsible for it. They probably blame George Bush for what Hasan did.
On the basis of the facts that have been delivered to the media thus far, Hasan expected to die as the climax of his rampage, though not by his own hand; rather he meant to be martyred by an enemy, in this case anyone not Muslim. He was foiled in this and unless he is mortally wounded, which seems not to be the case, will stand trial. The reports indicate that he started his day by preparing to die, not to be deployed in even the week of his rampage, perhaps not for more weeks or months. He divested himself of perhaps most of his possessions, even copies of the Koran, his holy book, which, of course, requires the killing of infidels – in this case American non-Muslims – at every opportunity.
Political correctness or diversity-divinity rules the liberal press these days, and so it’s not surprising that the blame for Hasan’s actions will be placed on the body politic in much the same way that the public is faulted when one gang-member wastes another, the whole business being caused by societal neglect of some sort, usually by nasty conservatives who are insensitive to the “needs” of the products of single mothers, poverty, bad schools, etc. After all, Hasan is said to have complained of being harassed in the army after 9/11 because of who he is, Arab and Muslim.
The bullying may have been real or imagined. There are thousands of Muslims in the military, however, and no such other slaughters of innocent people have taken place, though a converted Muslim did kill a recruiter and wound another in Arkansas on 01 June. He was not Arabic, just an American Muslim doing his Islamic duty. Born in Tennessee, he had changed his name from Carlos Bledsoe to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad and had studied jihad with an Islamic scholar in Yemen, according to Jihadwatch.org.
One could say that none of the above applies to drawing conclusions and that such must wait for the investigations(s) by the proper agencies. Fair enough! A defining factor, however, is the testimony of those involved that Hasan mounted a table or something similar and shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) as he began his assassinations, thus remarking his exercise as a religious effort. Suicide was his obvious goal and he could have achieved that without any harm to others. That probably would have negated his theologically certified trip to the virgins in Paradise, however, while being shot in the line of jihad-duty would have made him eligible, though it’s hard to believe a well-educated 39-year-old-man would believe such a thing.
It’s noteworthy that the Muslims creating havoc and planning more havoc in France and Britain currently are mostly young Muslims born in those countries. Hasan’s parents immigrated from the Middle East but Hasan was born in Virginia. He fired at least 100 rounds of ammunition and reportedly has claimed that he was a Muslim first and an American second. He could have done more damage if he had secured an “explosives belt” and simply set himself off in a restaurant, but such a procurement was most likely not possible in Texas. He did the next best thing and murdered as many as he could before finally starting his trip to the virgins, which he will probably not be making as soon as expected.
None of this is to be construed as a blanket condemnation of Muslims. Such would be untrue and unfair. It is to remark that the minute minority who practice jihad in the name of Allah are in American neighborhoods and/or are becoming converts to a belief system that adversely impacts non-Muslims...to the point of murder. They are terrorists, whether individually or sponsored by governments such as those in Afghanistan and Iran. They must be defeated.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, November 06, 2009
How the Guv-Grinch Stole/Restored Christmas
Apparently it’s not enough that the mainstream media, TV media, local media, national media, and all other possible media spend interminable amounts of resources calling attention to the fact that Kentucky is southbound off the charts as far as everything from obesity to smoking to pill-popping to low graduation rates to a bad football season is concerned. Oh no...without any known provocation Governor Beshear had to add to that list his recent directive that the official state Christmas tree was no longer to be called a Christmas tree; rather, it must be referenced as a HOLIDAY TREE.
It’s bad...bad...bad when Kentucky makes the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News but that’s just what happened on Thursday evening when the garrulous Irishman poked fun at the Kentucky guv, who has actually had the good sense to reverse himself...or at least enough gumption to realize that a few hundred thousand people in his state take Christmas seriously, even if only as a time to celebrate whether for the right reasons or not. He might even have thought about 2011 and the fact that Kentuckians might not appreciate a governor who disses Christmas, and might even dis him right out of the catbird seat, if not for religious reasons, perhaps for not having enough common sense to run the state.
After all, why pick a totally unnecessary fight with the whole state? Right in the middle of a battle with the State Senate over slots, casinos, and state bankruptcy, the guv – obviously on a very slow day at the capital – decides to do away with probably the highest profile and most religiously significant symbol of the whole year. It’s perfectly obvious, since there was no indication that the guv had an extremely high fever accruing to perhaps the swine flu and driving him to distraction, that Beshear fell under an attack of the (gasp) Diversity Syndrome, which has as its most defining and deadly virus/bacterium/protoplasm/whatever the infectious cell called by its Latin term MINORITUM RULIUM.
Face it! If as much as .000005% of the Kentucky population (about 20 folks) doesn’t like the term Christmas, the term just has to go, lest those 20 folks feel like a rhinoceros has been driven up their respective noses. Trauma like that can be very serious...enough to make a democrat suffer rigor mortis if anyone even suggests that the Big O doesn’t jog on the Potomac on the rare occasions he isn’t on Air Force One.
One wonders if the guv might be considering taking the cross out of Holy Week since it recognizes the death of Christ just as the Christmas tree remarks his birth. After all, other people (thieves and murderers) were put to death on the cross, negating any religious significance, just as the Christmas tree might have a slightly secular flavor to it.
Or, why put American flags on the graves of former military folks on Memorial Day since that’s plainly discriminatory vis-a-vis all the other residents of the cemetery who were not veterans ere their demises? Indeed, the act of placing those flags even discriminates against the living, just as the tombstones do. Fairness is fairness and diversity demands lockstep in recognizing the value of MINORITUM RULIUM. It’s a cinch that through the millennia of history a lot more people have died than are alive today, so why should that majority exert any sort of recognition over today’s living minority? One can only be thankful that the deceased do not have access to M-16s to make a point about those flags and stones.
Maybe the guv didn’t catch it last year when Washington’s governor, Christine Gregoire, allowed a small rabid group of atheists to place a display next to the nativity scene in the capital. It read in part: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds." The atheists have their Solstice Parties in December (in the summer, too) and Christians haven’t been in the news for constructing nativity scenes next to their Solstice Trees, currently for sale by American Atheists as advertised on the Internet for $20.00. Nobody cares if they greet each other with a “Merry God-Is-Dead,” so what’s the big deal?
Or...perhaps the guv didn’t notice what happened when WalMart dissed Christmas a few years ago, favoring the “Happy Holidays” approach. That little mistake was redressed in 2006 and now Christmas is a big deal. Boycotts can be very convincing.
This is not to say that groups not favoring or appreciating symbols of Christmas should not make their point. They have their own observances and are welcome to them by Christians who, for the most part at least (nutcases in every group, of course), make no objections. Jews have Hanukkah, with their Menorah as symbol, Muslims have Ramadan, possibly with a sword as symbol, and atheists can go climb their Solstice Trees (or telephone poles if they like) and scream that Abraham was a bullfrog and Jesus an itinerant, money-grabbing TV evangelist.
So...a word to Governor Beshear might be in order, namely, “Thanks for recognizing a significant error in judgment and please – on a slow day in the capital – try video games or a round of golf or watch a program of commercials interspersed by a football game, but don’t – REPEAT – don’t mess with Christmas again!”
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
It’s bad...bad...bad when Kentucky makes the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News but that’s just what happened on Thursday evening when the garrulous Irishman poked fun at the Kentucky guv, who has actually had the good sense to reverse himself...or at least enough gumption to realize that a few hundred thousand people in his state take Christmas seriously, even if only as a time to celebrate whether for the right reasons or not. He might even have thought about 2011 and the fact that Kentuckians might not appreciate a governor who disses Christmas, and might even dis him right out of the catbird seat, if not for religious reasons, perhaps for not having enough common sense to run the state.
After all, why pick a totally unnecessary fight with the whole state? Right in the middle of a battle with the State Senate over slots, casinos, and state bankruptcy, the guv – obviously on a very slow day at the capital – decides to do away with probably the highest profile and most religiously significant symbol of the whole year. It’s perfectly obvious, since there was no indication that the guv had an extremely high fever accruing to perhaps the swine flu and driving him to distraction, that Beshear fell under an attack of the (gasp) Diversity Syndrome, which has as its most defining and deadly virus/bacterium/protoplasm/whatever the infectious cell called by its Latin term MINORITUM RULIUM.
Face it! If as much as .000005% of the Kentucky population (about 20 folks) doesn’t like the term Christmas, the term just has to go, lest those 20 folks feel like a rhinoceros has been driven up their respective noses. Trauma like that can be very serious...enough to make a democrat suffer rigor mortis if anyone even suggests that the Big O doesn’t jog on the Potomac on the rare occasions he isn’t on Air Force One.
One wonders if the guv might be considering taking the cross out of Holy Week since it recognizes the death of Christ just as the Christmas tree remarks his birth. After all, other people (thieves and murderers) were put to death on the cross, negating any religious significance, just as the Christmas tree might have a slightly secular flavor to it.
Or, why put American flags on the graves of former military folks on Memorial Day since that’s plainly discriminatory vis-a-vis all the other residents of the cemetery who were not veterans ere their demises? Indeed, the act of placing those flags even discriminates against the living, just as the tombstones do. Fairness is fairness and diversity demands lockstep in recognizing the value of MINORITUM RULIUM. It’s a cinch that through the millennia of history a lot more people have died than are alive today, so why should that majority exert any sort of recognition over today’s living minority? One can only be thankful that the deceased do not have access to M-16s to make a point about those flags and stones.
Maybe the guv didn’t catch it last year when Washington’s governor, Christine Gregoire, allowed a small rabid group of atheists to place a display next to the nativity scene in the capital. It read in part: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds." The atheists have their Solstice Parties in December (in the summer, too) and Christians haven’t been in the news for constructing nativity scenes next to their Solstice Trees, currently for sale by American Atheists as advertised on the Internet for $20.00. Nobody cares if they greet each other with a “Merry God-Is-Dead,” so what’s the big deal?
Or...perhaps the guv didn’t notice what happened when WalMart dissed Christmas a few years ago, favoring the “Happy Holidays” approach. That little mistake was redressed in 2006 and now Christmas is a big deal. Boycotts can be very convincing.
This is not to say that groups not favoring or appreciating symbols of Christmas should not make their point. They have their own observances and are welcome to them by Christians who, for the most part at least (nutcases in every group, of course), make no objections. Jews have Hanukkah, with their Menorah as symbol, Muslims have Ramadan, possibly with a sword as symbol, and atheists can go climb their Solstice Trees (or telephone poles if they like) and scream that Abraham was a bullfrog and Jesus an itinerant, money-grabbing TV evangelist.
So...a word to Governor Beshear might be in order, namely, “Thanks for recognizing a significant error in judgment and please – on a slow day in the capital – try video games or a round of golf or watch a program of commercials interspersed by a football game, but don’t – REPEAT – don’t mess with Christmas again!”
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Political Spin & Backlash
The spin-doctors are already hard at work concerning the off-year elections just completed, especially those in Virginia and New Jersey, in which the republicans were successful in gubernatorial races – by a landslide in Virginia. Both states were in the Obama camp in 2008 and helped put him in office.
The bizarre situation in New York’s 23rd district pointed unmistakably to the fact that democrats disguised as republicans will no longer be tolerated in the party, except maybe in New York, especially since the conservative candidate came so close to winning the seat. The official republican candidate (spending at least $900,000) was so far behind that she actually dropped out before the election and threw her support to the democrat. Republican leaders – the ones holding the purse strings – will think twice before doling out money again to sure-fire losers.
The democrat spin is that the races mean little as far as the elections next year are concerned, in which all House and a third of the Senate seats will be up for grabs. Republicans spin the results straight into the White House, claiming that these very important elections are a referendum on what is happening (more aptly, perhaps, what is NOT happening) in the Obama administration. The republicans seem to have a better spin, especially since the democrat leaders in both the administration and the Congress are constantly galloping off in different directions and seem clueless as to how to marshal their forces into a cohesive unit to bring about Obama’s promised CHANGE. The nation is better off for this.
Obama campaigned vigorously in both states but especially in New Jersey, even resorting to the insulting use of “robo-calls,” those bothersome recorded phone messages received when one is eating dinner or trying to have a conversation with a friend. Through 23 October, loser Corzine had spent $23.6 million, all but a million of it his own money, while winner Chris Christie had spent $8.8 million. Both had plenty of funds left.
This brings up the question of just who gets to run the country. Corzine, using his vast wealth, spent $63 million and $40 million, respectively, to gain the Senate and later the governorship in 2005. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just spent $85.2 million to succeed himself, after convincing the New York governing body to do away with the two-term limit. This stinks. More and more, government seems to be becoming the playground for rich folks who have the time and money to use it as a toy or perhaps some sort of power-grab, either real or imagined. They’re so out of touch that it’s scary.
Besides surrounding himself with “czars” and other apparatchiks (or just plain nutcases) with questionable, even shady, backgrounds – think Van Jones or Cass Sunstein or John Holdren or Anita Dunn (follower of Mao?), for instance – Obama has exerted little in the way of leadership. He signed a $767 billion stimulus bill with the prediction that the unemployment rate (7.6% in January) would not go beyond 8%. It is now at 9.8%, an increase of 29%, and rising. The democrats voted it out, the republicans had none of it, and nobody had read the bill before voting.
The House – without republican support – approved a cap-and-trade bill designed to virtually take the U.S. out of the world market while at the same time raising taxes exorbitantly on U.S. citizens. Again, nobody had read the bill before voting. Presumably, Obama has read neither bill since he has been in campaign mode all year, thus having little time for the actual business of running the government. To add insult to injury, Vice President Biden reckoned the other day that the stimulus had saved/created one million jobs at the same time people are signing up by the tens of thousands for unemployment compensation. This is ludicrous, just as ludicrous as his remark a while back that spending was necessary in order to avoid bankruptcy, or something like that.
Add the current health-care imbroglio/confusion in both the administration and the Congress to the mix and it’s not hard to see why people are voting their disaffection for what they undeniably see as the downhill trend of governance. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that no one – even if he/she has read it, a virtual impossibility – understands the House or Senate version of the health-care bill under consideration, some 2,000 pages long. The number of new bureaucracies it requires is mind-boggling, some 35 at least and each designed to generate as much red tape as possible. By contrast, someone has said the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was made up of 26 pages.
It isn’t unusual for elected officials to default on their campaign promises, but the Obama default is gargantuan. Virtually nothing he’s promised, at least of any consequence, has happened or even come close. People are beginning to understand just how at sea the government is, realizing on the merits that government giveaways – think clunkers and bank bailouts – lead to bankruptcy and that lack of experience is devastating. The onset of the Carter administration in 1977 and its eventual and total failure is remembered by a huge number of voters, who can see the same thing happening again, though for different reasons. It’s no wonder that voters in these key states reacted as they did, and the wannabes to either attain or keep office next year are watching...with fear and trembling.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The bizarre situation in New York’s 23rd district pointed unmistakably to the fact that democrats disguised as republicans will no longer be tolerated in the party, except maybe in New York, especially since the conservative candidate came so close to winning the seat. The official republican candidate (spending at least $900,000) was so far behind that she actually dropped out before the election and threw her support to the democrat. Republican leaders – the ones holding the purse strings – will think twice before doling out money again to sure-fire losers.
The democrat spin is that the races mean little as far as the elections next year are concerned, in which all House and a third of the Senate seats will be up for grabs. Republicans spin the results straight into the White House, claiming that these very important elections are a referendum on what is happening (more aptly, perhaps, what is NOT happening) in the Obama administration. The republicans seem to have a better spin, especially since the democrat leaders in both the administration and the Congress are constantly galloping off in different directions and seem clueless as to how to marshal their forces into a cohesive unit to bring about Obama’s promised CHANGE. The nation is better off for this.
Obama campaigned vigorously in both states but especially in New Jersey, even resorting to the insulting use of “robo-calls,” those bothersome recorded phone messages received when one is eating dinner or trying to have a conversation with a friend. Through 23 October, loser Corzine had spent $23.6 million, all but a million of it his own money, while winner Chris Christie had spent $8.8 million. Both had plenty of funds left.
This brings up the question of just who gets to run the country. Corzine, using his vast wealth, spent $63 million and $40 million, respectively, to gain the Senate and later the governorship in 2005. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just spent $85.2 million to succeed himself, after convincing the New York governing body to do away with the two-term limit. This stinks. More and more, government seems to be becoming the playground for rich folks who have the time and money to use it as a toy or perhaps some sort of power-grab, either real or imagined. They’re so out of touch that it’s scary.
Besides surrounding himself with “czars” and other apparatchiks (or just plain nutcases) with questionable, even shady, backgrounds – think Van Jones or Cass Sunstein or John Holdren or Anita Dunn (follower of Mao?), for instance – Obama has exerted little in the way of leadership. He signed a $767 billion stimulus bill with the prediction that the unemployment rate (7.6% in January) would not go beyond 8%. It is now at 9.8%, an increase of 29%, and rising. The democrats voted it out, the republicans had none of it, and nobody had read the bill before voting.
The House – without republican support – approved a cap-and-trade bill designed to virtually take the U.S. out of the world market while at the same time raising taxes exorbitantly on U.S. citizens. Again, nobody had read the bill before voting. Presumably, Obama has read neither bill since he has been in campaign mode all year, thus having little time for the actual business of running the government. To add insult to injury, Vice President Biden reckoned the other day that the stimulus had saved/created one million jobs at the same time people are signing up by the tens of thousands for unemployment compensation. This is ludicrous, just as ludicrous as his remark a while back that spending was necessary in order to avoid bankruptcy, or something like that.
Add the current health-care imbroglio/confusion in both the administration and the Congress to the mix and it’s not hard to see why people are voting their disaffection for what they undeniably see as the downhill trend of governance. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that no one – even if he/she has read it, a virtual impossibility – understands the House or Senate version of the health-care bill under consideration, some 2,000 pages long. The number of new bureaucracies it requires is mind-boggling, some 35 at least and each designed to generate as much red tape as possible. By contrast, someone has said the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was made up of 26 pages.
It isn’t unusual for elected officials to default on their campaign promises, but the Obama default is gargantuan. Virtually nothing he’s promised, at least of any consequence, has happened or even come close. People are beginning to understand just how at sea the government is, realizing on the merits that government giveaways – think clunkers and bank bailouts – lead to bankruptcy and that lack of experience is devastating. The onset of the Carter administration in 1977 and its eventual and total failure is remembered by a huge number of voters, who can see the same thing happening again, though for different reasons. It’s no wonder that voters in these key states reacted as they did, and the wannabes to either attain or keep office next year are watching...with fear and trembling.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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