Kerry the Troglodyte

So…it’s official – Senator John Kerry is to be the next State Secretary. But for a colossal blunder in November of 2006 in California, Kerry might have been running against Obama for the democrat nomination instead of desperately politicking now for this new job. This is what Kerry said in California, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

This was Kerry’s backhanded way of calling the troops ignoramuses, but the subject of Iraq also reminds of Kerry’s famous remark during his 2004 unsuccessful presidential campaign that he “was for the war before he was against it” (non-funding it with $87 billion)…or something like that. For that matter, his running mate, John Edwards – whom he deserted in his endorsement of Obama – also voted for the Iraq action, as did then-Senator Clinton.

In a CBS Face the Nation appearance in December 2005, Kerry said, “And there is no reason, Bob [Schieffer], that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the – of – the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not ... Iraqis should be doing that.” Not only did Kerry accuse American GIs of crimes but he actually said that Iraqis ought to be carrying out those crimes, as if that would make the crimes okay. Egad!

This is from the Boston Globe of March 25, 2004, “In a question-and-answer session before a Senate committee in 1971, John F. Kerry, who was a leading antiwar activist at the time, asserted that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being ‘murdered by the United States of America’ and said he had gone to Paris and ‘talked with both delegations at the peace talks’ and met with communist representatives.” At the time, Kerry was a Navy Reserve officer committing an act of treason (defined as “the betrayal of a trust: TREACHERY”) with the enemy while Senator McCain and others were caged like dogs and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton.

This means that by the time he made that statement (his exact words, “So what I am saying is that yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America …”), Kerry’s comrades/nation had murdered [his word] 1.6 million Vietnamese 1964-71 (or almost 4 percent of the population for 1970), mostly civilians – women, children, and old men. Kerry also said this about American GIs: “They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads.” In a Meet the Press interview, he said his language was sometimes “excessive.” EXCESSIVE! He’s never offered a scintilla of proof for that wacky accusation. Regarding morality, he betrayed his country in France and lied to Congress in 1971.

In an Op-Ed piece for the New Hampshire Union Leadera few years ago, Kerry said, “Iraq has made America less safe. The terrorists are not on the run. Terrorist acts tripled between 2004 and 2005. Al-Qaida has spawned a decentralized network operating in 65 countries, most of them joining since 9/11.” According to Kerry, terrorists in significant numbers apparently had just started crawling out from under the rocks, but they’ve been crawling all over the world for decades, especially during the 1990s, when his democratic administration seemed totally unable or unwilling, or both, to significantly try to stay their hand.

Witness the WTC, 1993; Somalia, 1993; Riyadh, 1995; Dhahran Khobar Towers, 1996; U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (at least 257 dead), 1998; USS Cole, 2000, and, finally, 9/11, the terrorist tribute to eight years of Bill Clinton and John Kerry. Did Kerry believe the Girl Scouts were at work in those catastrophes while Bill Clinton was the commander-in-chief? Most recently, Obama attempted to prove that al Qaeda (terrorism) was all but dead when he lied through his teeth about the Benghazi affair…so Kerry should feel at home in his administration.

Of course, if Kerry hadn’t made that stupid remark in 2006 he might have been well-advised to dodge the 2008 race anyway since the “Swift-boaters” would have marshaled humongous forces against him. In only a few months in 2004, they effectively helped blow Kerry completely out of the water on the basis of both his Vietnam-induced conduct (remember tossing the medals over the fence) and his refusal to release the bulk of his military records, including a number of purple-hearts awarded for unbelievably dubious “actions.”

Both Kerry and Hillary Clinton had good things to say about Syria’s President Bashar Assad. They knew (or thought they knew) the territory but they didn’t know squat. Senators Kerry and Dodd (both angling for the big ring in 2008) met with Assad in December 2006. This is what the White House (Bush) had to say: “We discourage the travel of members of Congress to Syria because we believe it undermines the cause of democracy in the region and particularly Lebanon's government,” White House spokesman Blair Jones said (USA Today, December 2006). That was nothing new for Kerry, who had tried – egotistically – to undermine his government while Americans were dying in Vietnam.

On the basis of Obama’s latest subterfuge regarding Benghazi (blaming a movie for the violence in a UN speech long after the massacre), he and Kerry deserve each other. Their levels of intellect and perfidy are about the same.  Kerry's a sick joke.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Guns, Pundits, TV-Gurus

Besides publishing a plethora of letters to the editor, the papers have been full of punditry since the school-shooting in Connecticut. As usual, the arguments have to do with whether or not to ban this or that type of gun, the latest villain being the “assault rifle,” a gun capable of spraying bullets so fast that no one can get out of the way. The murder-by-gun rate has been steadily going down nationwide for some time now, but that doesn’t stop the ban-the-gun crowd from being hysterical.

A local columnist (Lexington Herald-Leader) even dragged Jesus into the discussion in the 22 December Op-Ed section, citing the episode in which Jesus remonstrated with Peter concerning Peter’s violence toward an official of some sort. What he didn’t mention, however, was that only a few hours earlier during the last meal with his disciples, Jesus told them to arm themselves even if they had to sell part of their clothing to do so. Two of them had swords already. They were to be used for self-defense, not aggression.

The Peter episode was a special case having to do with Christ’s mission and nothing to do with circumstances occurring later to his followers. Tradition has it that all but one of the disciples were violently murdered anyway, not surprising since all of them, including Jesus, were slaves to the Roman Empire.

Though he’s done nothing about guns during the last four years (except send hundreds to Mexico, currently unaccounted for), the president held the usual after-the-fact press conference, which induced the predictable next-day result, to wit, gun stores selling more guns than ever. Indeed, Wal-mart announced that after the latest presidential conference, its stores – or at least some of them – just sold-out, at least of some of the types. This fear-mongering from the White House is good for little more than that.

People don’t trust government for much in the first place, and have no desire to be at any kind of mercy of the government, in the second place. People with good sense (lets out a lot of the pundits, if not most of them) understand that the problem is with people, not with guns. Laws mean virtually nothing when self-protection is the issue.

The TV-networks are among the guiltiest participants in fomenting unrest in the “gun-matter” (especially cable) by sensationalizing mass murders to a degree unimaginable among people having a grain of common sense. It’s practically a 24/7 thing among the cable outfits that goes on for days. It’s no wonder there are “copycat killings” as these murderers gain far more than a paltry fifteen minutes of fame.

There have been 484 murders in Chicago this year, but has any cable network documented the funerals as they took place? In Connecticut, however, the cable outfits especially, but the mainstreamers as well, have stayed on the matter like a dog on a bone, even to being on-scene for funerals, thus invading the privacy of these bereaved people to an extent that connotes gross insensitivity.

I don’t watch these things to any extent but I surfed over to CNN the other day and Anderson Cooper was interviewing a family of one of the victims so I surfed away only to surf back a while later and he was still at it…with the same family. It’s a sort of “Barbara Walters syndrome” – stay at it until you get everybody crying or give up and go on to the next potential weeper. This is disgusting. It’s sort of like asking a survivor what kind of tree he’d like to be if he wasn’t a mourner. Do these million-dollar TV-gurus have any common sense or sense of propriety at all?

So…the president has appointed yet another commission to “study” the problem and has even appointed the vice president to whip it into shape…sort of like telling a sailor to try spitting into the wind. Besides, the recommendations of various Commissions mean nothing to him. The members of the Bowles-Simpson Commission concerning the recession and something to do about the sad state of financial affairs in this country might as well have gone to Philadelphia. For Obama, it’s as if they never had a meeting.

Vice President Biden’s commission will meet and eat, produce a document, and everyone will have a warm-fuzzy feeling. The prez will pay no attention to it. Life will go on…sadly for many, but it will go on. Nothing much will change the statistics.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Cruiser-Caper-Corruption

Corruption and/or outright rip-offs of the taxpayers on all levels of government are legendary in this state and city though to probably no greater extent than in other states. The recent appointing by the governor of his constant thorn-in-the-flesh, the State Senate president, to a judgeship and golden parachute pension-wise, as well as two other opposition senators previously given the same treatment, is a good example, though this bit of skullduggery has backfired so far. This was blatant corruption.

Teachers and law-enforcement/safety personnel can retire in their early fifties and draw full pensions for the rest of their lives, now close to an average of 30 years. Nearly a third of all retired Lexington policemen and firefighters have added to their already sizeable pensions a “disability” enhancement, meaning extra thousands. The people responsible to the taxpayers for negotiating contracts with these people or their unions know a good vote when they see it and, believing the state’s pockets have no bottoms, give away the store, something that can’t happen in industry, in which competition requires a realistic accounting.

The latest example in Lexington is a case in point. A policeman arrested a lady a few months ago for cause but apparently decided to let her forego the rap in exchange for a “quickie” in the back seat of his cruiser. She must have thought it over later, got mad, and accused him of rape, of which he has just been cleared in a trial but convicted on lesser stuff. He was on duty, apparently unhurt in the “payoff” and the whole lurid mess was consensual.

Latest news: This policeman, on the force for just ten years, has just resigned and filed for a disability pension, which means that, if awarded, will grant him up to 75% of his current wage, untaxed, for the rest of his life. Apparently, he’s just discovered this terrible injury acquired on duty though he was suspended last July and hasn’t been on duty since then. Most likely, it will be a back injury (the usual), but probably not incurred in the little escapade in the cruiser.

Based on the 2010 record, this policeman – on the basis of a 40-hour week – earned about $70,720, not accounting for overtime. If he gets the 75% rip-off, he can collect over $53,000, untaxed, until he dies, meanwhile working at anything else he chooses. If he’s stuck with the lower limit of 60%, he will get only get about $42,000 or so until he cashes in.

The odds are, though it will take a few months, that he will collect, though he was physically able to do his job (not injured, in other words) on the night he decided guilt or innocence in the backseat of his cruiser. One can only wonder if a sexually transmitted disease would qualify him for such a great pension, an attack of gonorrhea, for instance, on the 60% level, or (gasp) syphilis, that might require the 75% payout each month.

Sound harsh? Of course, it does…until one considers that this was a grown man, an officer of the law and apparently not suffering unduly. More to the point, the taxpayers should not be subjected to this kind of larceny. With the right amount of money spread around, most anything can be bought and sold in government, the place where the treasury belongs to everyone, meaning that it belongs to no one and is subject to being rifled at will.

The corruption/rip-off infiltrates every aspect of state endeavor. Just recently, two assistant football coaches (called coordinators but they’re just assistants) at the university were awarded yearly contracts for $550,000 and $500,000. The head coach makes millions per year. None of the men have anything to do with academics, supposedly the main concern of the university, where a newcomer to the faculty might knock down $60,000 or so if he/she is lucky.

Over the last considerable time, people in the far reaches of the county have been paid mega-millions for promising not to “do business” on their land, though their farms are businesses and though both Planning-Zoning and the City Commission already completely control land-use. This is a classic example of rip-off, with the taxpayers being the collective patsy. Disgusting!

Stay tuned for the results of the “cruiser caper” and potential injuries.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Bastogne, December 1944

Depending on the perspectives people have, there are many opinions regarding the so-called turning point of World War II. Some say the war in the Pacific was turned around at Midway in the spring of 1942 when the core of the Japanese navy (its carriers) was defeated, never mind that that horrifically bloody conflict lasted through August of 1945, when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Others will point to D-Day, 06 June 1944, when the bloody, costly invasion by the Allies of the European continent at Normandy took place. Still others will claim that the matter was decided when allied fighters could escort bombers all the way to the targets mainly in Germany and back to their bases in England. Before that, it was considered practically a miracle if a bomber crew lived through 25 missions. Allied fighter pilots made short work of the German-Luftwaffe threat, the result being the absolute devastation of German efforts to manufacture war-making materiel as German cities were laid waste.

It's doubtful that any one thing can be determined to be the turning point, but a significant effort started on 16 December 1944 that eventuated in heroism defined to the nth degree. Remarked this month on its 68th anniversary, it was called the Battle of the Bulge and centered in large part around a city in Belgium called Bastogne. Allied troops and commanders, mostly American, were taken entirely by surprise in the Ardennes area on the German-Belgian border when the Germans mounted a last-ditch offensive, code-named Greif, with 38 divisions during what some termed the "coldest winter in memory." The ensuing battle was by far the worst in terms of lives and materiel lost during the European campaign. If the weather had not made flying impossible for days, the affair would not have caused the terrible problem it did, since by December of 1944 the German Luftwaffe (air force) had practically ceased to be, giving the Allies complete control of the skies.

It was during this campaign that American General McAuliffe, when offered a chance by the Germans to surrender his badly outnumbered army at Bastogne, simply replied, "Nuts." Until that German offensive began, it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the Allies reached Berlin. Indeed, there had been talk of Americans going home by Christmas. All that changed overnight when the surprisingly well-equipped German hordes descended upon the Ardennes. The tide was turned eventually, not least because of a break in the flying weather and the advance of General Patton's Third Army, and the German forces were driven all the way back to where they started by late January 1945, but the toll in lives and other resources was horrendous. Of the 81,000 American casualties, 19,000 were killed-in-action and another 23,554 captured. The most horrible atrocity in the European theater also happened during the battle when 86 American prisoners were massacred by German soldiers at Malmedy. This was reminiscent of the infamous Bataan Death March of 1942 in the Philippines, when Japanese soldiers brutalized and killed American prisoners in the early stages of the war.

Was the Battle of the Bulge a turning point? Of course it was, just as the other incidents mentioned above were turning points. The Germans meant to drive all the way through Belgium and Holland to the North Sea, thus splitting Allied forces and gaining access to ports. Their attack was a total surprise, and they were aided by weather so bad that it constituted, on its own, an enemy almost as deadly as the gunfire, with deep snows and frigid temperatures a constant threat simply to survival, much less success against the enemy. It is to the eternal credit of the men who fought there that they would not be denied victory against the weather and the enemy. Most of the American GIs who fought there are dead now. Their average age at the time was said to be twenty-two. Thousands were just teenagers. The nation owes them gratitude so profound as actually to be impossible to comprehend or adequately express, to say nothing of the fact that free nations the world over were delivered by the Americans in the Ardennes in December-January 1944-45. In their honor:

Bastogne

Isaiah 1:18

The scarlet and the snow…the crimson and the wool
Isaiah seemed to know - but not this fiendish ghoul -
This battlefielded ghoul that graced a frigid hell
Saw each a bloody fool, whose life it would expel;
But, not unlike God's seer, it stared down years of time
When it would leech - as here - young blood while in its prime;
The scarlet, deadly sin…not bleached in falling snow…
And wool, with life within, dripped crimson - friend and foe.

The scarlet and the snow…the crimson and the wool
Isaiah had to know - but not a tyrant fool
Who reasoned not with God…but came, instead, to kill,
Who made his minions plod toward graves that thousands fill,
Who was incarnate sin…the scarlet, crimsoned wool…
His god - himself within - though simply Satan's tool;
But, in that icy hell…where tens of thousands fell,
No tyrant fool would dwell - the proud knew all too well.

The scarlet and the snow…the crimson and the wool
Isaiah could but know God reasons with no fool;
So, scarlet ruled the day…and crimson ruled the night,
As sin engaged full sway…the snow and wool to blight;
Men's scarlet-crimson gushed, as - brave - they fought to death,
Their screams of pain not hushed…till final, rasping breath;
But, right would win the day sin's scarlet-crimson spawned,
When wrong was made to pay…and hope, again, had dawned.

The scarlet and the snow…the crimson and the wool
Isaiah - did he know? - about each frozen pool
Of red that stained the earth, when warmed and gone to ground,
Of blood that gave rebirth…pure wool in earthly mound,
Where buglers sound the dirge for freedom-fighter's loss,
Where mourners yet emerge…from fields of star and cross.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The soldiers - friend and foe - from summer years have gone…
And where, then, did they go? - they went to cold Bastogne.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Griever-in-Chief

The president expressed remorse
When acting as Griever-in-Chief,
The murders at the school, of course,
Provided need for some relief;
It was a heinous crime – obscene –
Dead kindergarteners so pure,
A gory, bloody, numbing scene –
Young lives so sure they were secure.

Their teachers, too, were shot outright –
One minute, normal…next one, dead,
Townspeople viewed that gory sight
And traded Christmas cheer for dread;
And, as is always sure the case,
The questions came forth instantly…
So, where was God when this took place?
Well, God was there…illegally?

The president did what he could
And sort of blamed society
But folks collectively just would
Not launch a heartless killing-spree;
No one could get into the head
Of him who perpetrated death,
Not least because he, too, was dead,
He brought about his own last breath.

Was shooter evil or insane?
No one will ever know, of course,
But blame, remorse among the sane
Are normal as a prime recourse;
Such massacres are nothing new,
On street-corners they happen, too,
Since as from when mankind was new,
Descendents all its flaws renew.

The president might have a point
Called Culture Shock…with his amen,
Since time is surely out of joint
When men, he said, may marry men,
Since that bespeaks perversion, coarse,
Society can ill-afford,
Why should he not expect, of course,
Perversions all across the board?

Or, when he staged his massacre
Attacking Libya…and for what?
In no way could a threat occur
From that poor nation’s polyglot;
His was a massacre of choice,
Bombs raining down on children there,
For seven months did he give voice
To grief for Libyans dying there?

And so it goes with massacres,
A nation, world inured to them,
Collective wail when each occurs,
With grief cried for the gross mayhem;
But mark it well – when nations fail
To follow God’s expressed decrees,
There will be terror, grief, travail –
Griever-in-Chief should warn of these.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Climate Contrivance

It has been interesting recently to watch the TV newscasts (the “mainstream” ones) with regard to the terrible threat of manmade global warming, which by people who have bothered to pay attention know to be a hoax. The latest ones noticed in this corner have been foisted by NBC and ABC, featuring unbelievable “scare” prognostications. On one network, for instance, the coastlines around Florida and the East Coast were shaded in red to show the extent of the inundation of sea water occasioned by the melting Arctic ice floes or the melting ice in Greenland.

In one of the Newscasts (ABC, I believe) someone sort of slipped up and managed what Shakespeare would have called an “aside” by almost whispering something about what must have been thought a strange anomaly, i.e., the ice buildup in Antarctica…in other words, the re-freezing of melted Arctic ice, thus neutralizing the threat to the “red zones.” He quickly recovered and went on explaining the dire consequences of operating cars and heating houses.

It’s inconceivable that in this administration there’s no one actually cognizant of the way things are, ergo, there’s an agenda that has to be advanced notwithstanding the facts, not least the one that there’s been no warming in at least the last 12 or so years, whether considered manmade or otherwise.

Anecdotal stuff is all the rage now, everything from a hot July this year to Sandy the hurricane, as if anomalies have never occurred or as if anything can be considered an anomaly in the first place. Modern records go back virtually no distance compared to the age of the earth, as if anyone actually has an idea about that.

Take Chicago on Christmas day: In 1982, the temperature rose to 64 degrees; in 1983, the temperature fell to –17, a differential of 81 degrees. Does that prove anything? No! The hottest decade on record was 1936 – at least in this state, Kentucky. So what? It was 70 degrees here yesterday…proved nothing, especially since November was unusually cold.

According to the University of Illinois Cryosphere Today data based on that of a number of agencies such as NASA, the Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Area is growing, as it has been exponentially since 1984. It reached a record in 2007 and is currently (September) nearly 2 million sq. km. greater than its lowest volume in 1986.

The current projection is that a new record for southern sea-ice volume will be reached in 2013. This is the entirely credible data that’s ignored by the media, which seems to be a propaganda arm of the administration, President Obama having announced his “fear” of manmade global warming often enough, not to mention his promise in 2008 of bankrupting energy-producing agencies and making electricity costs “skyrocket,” something happening in Kentucky (among lowest energy-cost states) now as plants are being regulated out of existence – this after all the millions spent for years on “scrubbing” emissions.

When the Gore-Obama combine grabbed the Nobel peace prizes for 2007 and 2009, respectively, apparently for warring successfully against warming and accomplishing the goal of cool peace, U.S. citizens were being frightened about everything from losing Coney Island and the Miami beaches to the extinction of (gasp) the polar bears, four of which actually died of drowning though Gore warned of their apparent starving to death (I never read the book or saw much of the film).

Before Obama could collect his million or so and teleprompt himself as savior of the planet in Copenhagen and Oslo in 2009, The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its partners in crime, not to mention robbing Gore of the whole prize in 2007, were thoroughly discredited by their own electronic admissions, considering themselves intellectual guru-giants vis-à-vis climate but lacking even the elementary knowledge that e-mails never die.

In the final analysis, it could be said that climate-science, while incredibly useful but only if people pay attention and act thereon, is among the least understood of the disciplines, not because of brilliant scientists who recognize scientific discipline itself, but because of the totally undisciplined amateurs or agenda-drivers such as the president and Gore look-alikes, who intend to prostitute it for use in attaining personal goals.

The world is not overheating – North becoming a bit warmer, South becoming a bit colder (a tie) – although folks in Greenland might appreciate farming again, as they did a few centuries ago.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

End of an Era?

Much of the noise in Washington today is budget-oriented, the fiscal-cliff stuff and the inability of the parties to dissolve the gridlock associated with the bankruptcy into which the nation is devolving. This is the most important item for the attention of the president and Congress, and President Obama is back on the campaign trail ostensibly to stir up the citizenry to the point that it will bring pressure on not him but the Congress – okay, the nasty republicans – to just DO something, actually whatever he says.

Much of the noise in Washington today has to do with the “Benghazi Massacre” and especially the sex-scandals associated with it – titillating stuff that will eventuate in a bunch of hearings, though currently it should take a back-seat to the fiscal problems. UN Ambassador Rice has already made the deadly mistake of meeting with republican senators in an effort to smooth the way to a successful nomination as State Secretary. These meetings usually take place AFTER a nomination, not before. She just dug herself a deeper hole, especially since other matters of disqualification will probably soon be front-and-center.

The greater worry, however, lies in the demographics that are driving the nation into a culture wholly foreign to that which has made it the inordinate success of more than two centuries. The brief success-description is tied up in the term Western Civilization, involving economics, art, education and a distinct emphasis on personal accomplishment and accountability as impacted by the freedom to take risk and achieve.

The History Channel has just done a series on the men (not officially in politics) who made the country what it is – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Tesla, Edison, Morgan, Ford, for instance. These people, most of whom amassed great wealth, were ruthless competitors in many ways and had to be finally regulated to greater and lesser degrees by government, but they got things done. Now, people like them are practically regulated out of existence.

The most popular cultural pastime currently is the total denigration of the white male, the collective person driving Western Civilization. He is vilified as insensitive, i.e., unable to “care,” at least in the way and degree possessed by women and minority groups. He is the most tragic figure caught up in the incredibly stupid emphasis on diversity and a multiculturalism designed to bring him and everyone else down to the level of the lowest common denominator.

Political correctness militates against saying it, but the fact is that the white male (white people generally) is becoming not an endangered species in this country but a species destined for falling off the cultural cliff and leaving the nation in the hands of people without the tradition of Western Civilization, ergo, the drive and background to move forward.

The major culprit lies in the demographics. The U.S. birthrate has fallen to 63.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. By contrast, that figure in 1957 was 122.7 (Pew Research Center). This has to do with mostly white women since whites make up about 75% of the population. Indeed, the current rate barely sustains the whole population, much less just the whites.

In 2007 (last available figures), there were 480 abortions among black women for each 1,000 live births (32%). Among white women, it was 144 abortions for each 1,000 live births (13%). This amounts to 312 abortions for each live birth in the two groups, 23%. Whites are headed into minority status, while blacks, already a minority, will join whites in becoming less a part of most power structures. In 2010, immigrants represented about 13% of the population while foreign-born mothers accounted for 23% of all births. The conclusion is obvious.

Most European birth-rates are already below the level of sustainability for what might be called the Caucasian factor. This will happen soon in this country as the white male (Western Civilization) becomes more marginalized. In a sense, this was demonstrated last year when the president completely bypassed Congress (predominantly white males) and sent three women (now a protected species though in the majority) to the United Nations to gain permission to attack Libya. The result of that incredibly un-Constitutional and now obviously insane escapade is obvious.

The election just completed involved the tipping-point for the near and probably distant future of the nation as it slides away from its Western Civilization roots and into a European style of governance – unemployment rate standing at 11.7% now, much worse in countries like Spain and Greece. These were once proud nations that couldn’t stand prosperity or rid themselves of corruption and thus slid from Western Civilization into socialism. This will be the U.S. ere long.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Sports-Corruption Redux

It seems that the athletic departments of the Universities of Kentucky and Tennessee are competing to see which can provide the best soap opera in town. Their football coaches have already been fired, attendance at games has dropped dramatically, especially at Kentucky, and there seems to be a general malaise connected to each. Okay…the attendance at Tennessee averaged only 94,642 per game (102,000 capacity) last year but is somewhat worse than that this year.

It’s all about money. Translated, this often means it’s all about incompetence and overstaffing, to say nothing of salaries bloated all out of proportion. The guy in the hot seat is the athletic director, though the presidents are complicit in whatever he messes up. Not many years ago, the president of Vanderbilt did away with the athletic director’s office and put accountability in his own office.

Tennessee’s athletic department is enjoying a current deficit for 2011-12 of $3.98 million. The reason: It’s in the process of paying buyouts to the former coaches of football, basketball and baseball, as well as the former athletic director, all of whom were fired and paid handsomely for the privilege of getting the axe. The football coach, Philip Fulmer, had a 152-52 record over 17 years but that wasn’t enough to save him, fired in the middle of the 2008 season and paid $6 million in the bargain.

Making matters worse in the current firing of Tennessee’s Derek Dooley, the university must pay him a cool $5 million, thereby increasing overnight its deficit to some $9 million. Added to the millions he’s been paid during his three-year tenure, this little nest-egg means he will never have to work again unless he just wants to.

There’s practically a cottage industry conducted by athletic directors and coaches in the matter of hijacking the taxpayers’ money, using the pink-slip method. Kentucky football coach Joker Phillips (three seasons) is being paid $2.55 million for being fired but athletic director Mitch Barnhart will probably earn a bonus for being smart enough to fire Phillips for just that paltry amount.

Barnhart was smart enough to fire former basketball coach Billy Gillispie (two-year tenure – “he didn’t fit”) three years ago and the university had to pay Gillispie (and lawyers) only $3 million for that privilege, even though, unbelievably, there had never been a signed contract. Getting rid of two coaches in a four-year period for only $5.55 million marks Barnhart as surely one of the wisest athletic directors in the nation. It’s a shame he isn’t teaching in the economics department instead of wasting his administrative genius on sports.

Contracts mean nothing in college sports. In order to come to UK, Barnhart was required to pay $100,000 to Oregon State for jumping his contract. Not to worry, UK paid that $100,000 for Barnhart, so he’s cost the institution $5.65 million…BUT UK has not been in trouble with the NCAA during his tenure, meaning he’s been smart enough to have someone see that violations don’t occur…or at least can’t be discovered...so far.

UK football coach Hal Mumme was fired in 2001 (before Barnhart’s tenure) and paid $1 million for that privilege. His immediate predecessor, Bill Curry, was fired but only for a measly $600,000. So…in the last 16 or so years, UK has paid a total of $7.25 million in buyouts to coaches it hired to extended contracts and then cancelled according to specifications noted in those contracts. Coaches and AD’s are smart enough to cover their backs financially.

UK paid Memphis State $200,000 to buy out current basketball coach John Calipari’s contract when Calipari came to UK in 2010, jumping his contract. So…the actual amount paid as an absolute loss financially stands at about seven-and-a-half million big ones. This is only what’s known about, considering the assistants who will be losing their jobs, but it’s only money. What could that squandered $7.5 million have meant academically, nearly all of it in just the last four years?

Just before he retired in 2011, UK Prexy Lee Todd, who had become Barnhart’s close friend (and benefactor), raised Barnhart’s salary by 26% to $600,000 (plus a myriad of “incentive” bonuses already in place) and locked him into his position until 2019, so firing him would be extremely costly.

On the basis of Wall Street establishments regarding huge bonuses for incompetence, Barnhart would probably own part of the UK campus by now. Currently, he’s among the highest paid AD’s in the SEC (second-highest last year).

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Benghazi

Benghazi was a massacre –
Some claimed it did not have to be,
Forewarned that it could well occur,
Officials met…did not agree;
For days and weeks the plea was raised
By those upon the Libyan sand
For greater force as buildings blazed,
Explosions heard throughout the land.

But president stood firm, declared
That brutal thugs were neutralized,
So, four who died were ill-prepared,
Their danger hardly realized
By those in power who would not heed
The warnings by those on the ground…
By bureaucrats who felt no need,
Who felt the warnings were not sound.

Predictably, the hammer fell,
Surprising no one on the ground,
As torture, murder then befell
Americans to terror bound;
But president could not admit
Assassination had not meant
That terrorism was forfeit
To one act of his intellect.

And so deception slyly drawn
Was foisted on the citizens,
The word was passed by just next dawn
Protesters there were denizens
Inflamed by film on Internet
Insulting their iconic god.
And then their forces, grimly met,
Grew violent to praise their god.

And praising Allah meant bloodshed
By Muslims throughout all the world,
But in Benghazi those four dead
Were not the targets of rocks hurled;
No…they were victims of attack
By terrorists well-trained to kill
And burn the buildings fiery black
With rockets, bullets and great skill.

The president knew within hours
Of all that happened in the night,
Indeed, officials watched for hours
The scene unfold, sometimes by sight
Through circling drone surveilling there,
The flames engulfing Consulate,
And dialogue with others there
Attacked elsewhere, who feared their fate.

Elections were two months away,
The president had campaigned hard
And tried with fervor to allay
The fear that jihad was not barred
By him or any other powers,
That terrorists still held full sway.
Benghazi, though, in those sad hours
Proved he was wrong, with hell to pay.

So…on next morn he made a speech,
Along with State Department head,
To the effect a U.S. leech
Had made a film that caused four dead;
It was a lie, as he knew well
But took that line for weeks to come,
It was a lie straight out of hell,
Should earn impeachment…thought by some.

United Nations was the scene,
The place to set the record straight
Two weeks beyond the deaths obscene,
Where life jihad would desecrate;
The president there made his speech
And blamed the film for frightful acts
And there the truth he did impeach –
His speech devoid of just the facts.

Perhaps he thought the people dumb
Or not concerned with truth and such
Or simply in recession – numb,
About most things not caring much;
He could be right, with nothing changed,
He could be wrong, still nothing changed,
But his response, so ill-arranged,
Will make a legacy deranged.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Sin-Tax Rides Again

Hunting for new revenue, the state administration (Kentucky) is angling for all the new taxes it can get away with. A possibility that has been floated is the increasing of taxes on a pack of cigarettes from 60 cents to $1.00. There’s no argument with this except that it just represents another example of the class warfare that marks the federal government these days, too. Let the smokers pay the freight!

The lead editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 20 November was highly in favor of increasing the cigarette “sin tax” by the 50% mentioned above. Here is a claim in the editorial: “Type 2 diabetes is part of a grisly smorgasbord of disabling ailments that studies have linked to smoking.” Yeah…smoking contributes to heart disease, lung disease, throat disease and just about all other diseases anyone can imagine…probably a bad appendix, too.

However, the paper has been diligent in broadcasting the fact that OBESITY is a prime cause of diabetes, especially in Kentucky. Actually, obesity is a prime factor causing diabetes throughout the nation, whether people smoke or not. A prime factor in causing obesity/diabetes is the fact that the people – all people – have the nagging habit of eating, maybe half or more of them eating too much for their own good…so what else is new?

Would the obesity/diabetes problem be solved by installing a tax on food? Why not? Make the tax steep enough and folks will eat less, thus lowering their disposition toward diabetes. Of course, raising or leveling taxes on anything is designed to enhance revenue, meaning that if the tax discourages consumption the tax is useless or at least much smaller than anticipated.

Since such a tax would be much more discriminatory on retired folks or disabled folks or lazy folks, the old class warfare comes into play again. Or…why not base both the cigarette and food tax (and probably every tax) on the body-mass-index of people, thus making it attractive to be slim? Scanners in food-stores could instantly determine the BMI and charges adjusted accordingly. Again, loss of consumption means loss of taxes, so what’s a state to do?

A buyer can buy a horse in Kentucky for a cool million and pay no sales tax ($60,000) if he just ships it out of state. That’s a bone to the horse industry that’s indicative of how everything is done in Kentucky – based on the special interests of the people with enough money to buy from government anything they want. The horse can probably be shipped back later, but with its official residence somewhere else.

If there has to be an increase in the “sin tax” now, why not make it fair, the most destructive “sin” element in Kentucky being beverage alcohol? Imagine the amount of revenue to be collected if the current tax on alcohol were raised by 50%. Alcohol is known to cause everything from cirrhosis of the liver to brain damage to car/truck-wrecks that take thousands of lives every year. Beer-drinkers are known to stretch the bounds of (gasp) obesity/diabetes, just like cigarettes. Fair’s fair.

Okay…that introduces more class warfare, this time against the topers, unless, of course, booze is reclassified as a food, made of grain and all the rest. I don’t smoke and have never tasted beer or whiskey so I don’t have a dog in this fight tax-wise. What bothers me is the constant, unrelenting ability of the special interests to run the state. This includes all groups, from the teachers’ union to coal interests to tobacco growers to the horsy crowd to any outfit with the long-green.

According to a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in September 2010, 20% of adults in the U.S. smoke. According to a report by Gallup in July 2010, 67% of U.S. adults drink alcohol. So…if revenue enhancement is a problem for the state and class warfare, as well as special interests, is to be the final arbiter of who pays the freight, a large part of the solution seems to be that the topers, who cause a great deal more misery, owe big-time, not the handful of smokers.

Alas, the smokers will probably get the hit, and if they don’t get out of the way fast enough, another kind of hit from a drunk driver.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Re-Shuffling Time

One looks at the current scene in the capital and wonders whether to laugh, cry, take a sedative or kick the cat. It’s new-appointment time so speculation has to do with who will succeed State Secretary Clinton, who has stayed out of the country since the Benghazi Massacre and is (or was – who knows?) now in Australia in her important role as official U.S. wine-taster. Defense Secretary Panetta has also been absent quite a lot and in Australia, perhaps to check out Aussie beer.

UN Ambassador Rice has been all but deified to take Clinton’s place, and she has the main credential, namely, an inordinate ability to lie. Clinton graphically described her 1996 narrow escape from terrorist-snipers in Bosnia during the 2008 campaign (ran for her life, with Chelsea hanging on). It didn’t happen, of course, as the film she should have known about proved. It was a monstrous lie. Her latest monstrous LIE about Benghazi and the infamous film has cemented her fitness for office (actually grounds for an immediate firing).

Rice lied to five major networks on the same day about what happened at Benghazi but the president took her off the hook in his 14 November press conference (the first in 8 months), simply stating that she reported what she’d been told, but didn’t say who lied to her. He also said he would, if he desired, nominate her, despite statements by Senators McCain and Graham (“outrageous,” the cads) that they would work to defeat the nomination, as if they could in Harry Reid’s dysfunctional Senate.

Defense Secretary Panetta is said to be on the way out, too, so a replacement must be found. Senator John Kerry has expressed an interest in the State job and perhaps in the Defense slot as well. He carries some baggage, of course, in both areas. When he cashed in his Purple Hearts in the Vietnam conflict (lost about a half-day’s work account serious wounds, one self-inflicted), he returned to Naval Reserve status and went to Paris to meet with North Vietnamese folks and undercut U.S. efforts to end that conflict, not that a lowly navy lieutenant actually mattered, no matter the size of his ego then, and still huge. That was state-department business.

He also threw his medals “over the fence somewhere” in a sort of hippy-dippy “Jane Fonda protest,” an extreme act of “loyalty” to the Navy (denied later). As a result, he was “swift-boated” by the Naval officers who knew him back in the day and who helped him lose his bid for the presidency in 2004.

Kerry voted for before he voted against the Iraq action, perhaps checking some poll or other to have his mind made up for him. He is definitely not secretary material for either job and a Senate hearing concerning either would be the best show in town. Especially since Kerry has continued his deceptions in campaigns as recent as 2004, every senator should read or reread the extremely well-documented (19 pages of notes) Unfit for Command before even considering him for any position. A greater fraud than Obama, he’s a pathetic liar and a disgrace, but that might qualify him in this administration.

Geithner will be leaving as Treasury Secretary. He’d cheated Uncle Sam out of four years worth of taxes when nominated in 2009 but paid up for only two (seems like about $38,000) since the other two dissolved account statute of limitations and he was too, too patriotic to pay an honest debt anyway. Obama nominated or was about to nominate some other tax-cheaters to jobs but they bowed out, as was not the case with former Senator Daschle, who paid up well over $100,000 but was too smeared anyway to get a job.

This tendency to cheat on taxes, of course, makes Daschle the front-runner for the Treasury job but he may have skipped some other tax-payments in the interim and may prefer not to pay up only to lose another costly chance at being a bureaucratic nabob anyway. Majority Leader Reid might be right for Treasury based on his information during the campaign that Romney had paid no taxes for ten years. A LIE of that magnitude qualifies him for any position in the cabinet.

Jack Abramoff, lobbyist extraordinaire, has been out of jail for a couple or so years and has even written a book about Washington corruption, so he might be a good choice for Treasury…he knows how to handle and mishandle money. Maybe Bernie Madoff could be sprung from his 150-year sentence to handle Treasury. Maybe he could cheat Europe and India out of a few trillion.

Of course, musical chairs could be in order for the cabinet. Homeland Security diva Napolitano might fit in at State. She had the wisdom to replace the term “terrorism” with “man-caused-disaster,” and warned early-on about keeping an eye on those potentially dangerous GIs retuning from the Middle East. She could be replaced by Attorney General Holder, who sues whole states when they have the audacity (of Hope) to enforce federal laws, keeping in line the administration’s anti-state posture.

The vice president has very little to do so maybe he could take over Holder’s bailiwick and sue the Catholic Church for daring to question the judicious use of abortions as population-control.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Women - Protected Species?

After each election, the editorial board at the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., can be expected to deliver a commentary bashing white men, the implication being that they have ruined the country and kept women and minorities from assuming their rightful places in government, in the bargain. Ditto for this year. The thrust of the editorial of 09 November was that there isn’t enough DIVERSITY in Kentucky government, with the usual statistics to show that evil white men are threatening again, up to their old tricks.

Ironically, the second paragraph of the editorial included the news that the presidential election was not primarily decided by white men but by women (the largest segment of the population, more than half) and people of color. A little farther on came the claim that “we will be left behind” if the white-male MINORITY continues to run things. The editorialist probably did not see a strange conflict there, but the paper’s bias is what it is. One thinks logically that the victims (women, a majority, plus minorities) could vote the white-male bums out of office and replace them with saints from the regions of gender and color but, alas, such seems hard to do.

It makes sense to the H-L that women and minorities should take their places according to their percentage of the population – seems perfectly reasonable. How would it be if half of all the infantrymen (make that infantrypersons) in the army were women when wartime came around? Or policemen? Or firemen? Or power-forwards in the NBA or linebackers in the NFL? Silly? Of course!

The actual statistics relating to the above were carved out by the people with the credentials to do those jobs. Women make up 13.5% of the army but they are officially precluded from combat for reasons that are perfectly obvious, as found out quickly when integrated boot camps were tried. A similar circumstance obtains for the other professions mentioned. Parity is good for some things but not others, presumably. Even the editorialist might agree…nah…probably not.

Okay…those are physical things. Officeholders don’t need strong backs…they need strong minds and ambition. In Kentucky, there may be far more of the latter than the former but there’s nothing stopping women and minorities from attempting the heavy non-physical lifting that leads to the electorate and the bureaucracy. Indeed, women outnumber men handily now on college campuses and make up more than 45% of law school students so surely they have the strong minds. Constantly caterwauling about their mistreatment got old long ago but the editorialist seems not to have noticed.

As usual, the editorial cited the fact that women make about $10,000 per year less than men in Kentucky, with the supposed implication being that the legislature should do something about that, never mind that market-economics dictate who gets what and how much, not the government, something learned in economics 101. Wage and price controls have been tried and failed, of course, although the current administration in Washington seems hell-bent upon bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator level.

This brings one to the admittedly chauvinistic question, to wit, is there some inherent superiority in women that qualifies them to be treated deferentially? Are their intelligence and drive so off-the-charts that in their over-qualification they must be a protected species, thus exempting them from contending in the hard games of politics and everything else? Physical strength is not noted. One has only to guess what might happen to a woman playing right tackle for the Giants even if she measured 275-lb., stood 6-4, and was hopped-up on steroids and did breast-feeding on the bench.

Predictably, the usual red herring is dwelt upon in the editorial, namely, that over half the single-parent families headed by women with young children in Kentucky live in poverty. No mention was made of the single-parent families headed by men. Maybe there aren’t any of those. The editorialist stated that many if not all the economic issues debated on the state and national levels are “women’s issues.” That doesn’t leave very many if any as men’s issues, but men are the devils (especially those evil minority-WHITE men) who got everything out-of-whack in the first place…right?

As for the single-mom poverty…72.1% and 35.9%, respectively, of black and white babies are born with no fathers of record, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In other words, women lack the power and supposedly the wit NOT to get in the poverty position? Men can be fornicators and adulterers but only women can be recognized as prostitutes or dumb or unlucky enough to get hooked up with the wrong guy, whether legally or otherwise. Constantly whining about what is mostly just being sex-happy won’t change a thing, and a lot of those poor gals probably are not all that unhappy with Uncle Sugar feeding their kids, doling out food stamps and checks, and paying 80% of their rent while they pig-out on cheeseburgers and fries, anyway.

Or…they can always go to San Francisco, where it was noted in the same issue of the paper that the government will finance all sex-change processes for those who can’t afford them. Then they can become single-dads and step up a notch.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

The Meaning of 47%

Though Romney mentioned the figure “47%” in what was more a planning meeting than a rally or speech, it is now clear what he meant and what many have said for a while. When 47% of the adult population pays no taxes, it can be expected that most of that group will vote for the candidate whose main contention is that the nation can be run on the backs of the people who DO pay taxes. That’s nearly half the vote, and that candidate has just been reinstalled for another four years.

The consensus is that some 23 million people who allegedly would work if they could find a fulltime job are not working, so part of a conclusion is that many of them won’t bother to look hard for work because somehow the government will take care of them. This means they also will not buy products, the production of which makes jobs, because they won’t have the money to make purchases. They also will not become part of the tax-base, and so the vicious circle expands.

The thought in this corner is that the just completed election was pivotal, i.e., the nation, instead of returning to the capitalistic system of government that has made it the envy of the world, will continue on the current road to becoming a welfare (socialistic) nation. The healthcare law was the last bit of pavement applied to that road, and it’s hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

The chief whiners for special consideration – women, Latinos, blacks – furnished the immense pluralities with regard to wedge issues, but the net effect was economic. This is strange in that the law of the land allows for abortion on demand, the women’s main issue, so they could have voted their pocketbooks instead of their emotions. The president likely wants free condoms for women but in fits of passion they might not…

Latinos are scared out of their skulls over immigration, so they went for the guy who will attempt now a universal program of amnesty, never mind what his pre-election rhetoric has been. The democrat party stands to gain from a huge influx of Mexicans, especially, since this group is rapidly becoming the largest ethnic group in the nation already. Latinos voted their emotions but they killed the economy in the process. In many places, they also form a large welfare group being sustained by those who work. Think bankrupt California.

The blacks did what the blacks always do – voted a welfare-state setup (Democrat Party), meaning a tremendous drain on the treasury to sustain all the entitlements of the sixties plus all of the entitlements of one kind or another since then. The black family has virtually ceased to exist as one result of all the welfare. This is a generational matter now firmly entrenched. It will not improve, as 72.1% of all black births involve no father of record (2010), meaning single-mother, poor families that will be sustained by the government at great cost…a permanent underclass.

It sounds racist to bring up any of this but the demographics are what’s killing the system. It could be worse. In 2007, for instance (last available figures), there were 480 abortions among black women for each 1,000 live births, nearly half, so the insensitive way to look at that is that the welfare problem could be much worse absent that circumstance. Among white women, it was bad (or good), also, with 144 abortions for each 1,000 live births.

This situation has obtained for decades; otherwise, the population of the nation since Roe/Wade would probably include some 70 million or more people, result of both abortions (about 52 million) and the possible progeny of the earliest abortions, beginning 40 years ago. Making abortions as part of “healthcare” is quite cost-efficient, in other words, getting rid of the little fetuses, saving billions down the road.

Sixty-two percent of white men and 56% of white women voted for Romney, but 98% of black men and 99% of black women and 71% of all Latinos voted for Obama, according to exit polls. The conclusion to be drawn is obvious. Just as in 2008, the whites (72% of all voters) who voted for Obama, actually elected him, so racism is not operative.

The most damning figures relative to the economy are that 60% and 52%, respectively, of those in the age groups 19-29 and 30-44 voted for Obama, meaning that they have bought into welfare-as-normal. While it sounds politically incorrect to say it, this amounts to an amazing ignorance of how the nation has functioned until the last decade. This includes college students, who even now can’t find work upon graduation and could hardly expect anything to get better, at least soon, in a new Obama administration, which believes in taxing the workers – and not just the wealthiest, who already pay by far the most taxes – to support the non-producers.

As George Will wrote recently, in the 64 years (816 months) from Truman to Bush 43, there were 39 months of unemployment at 8% or above. In Obama’s tenure of just 46 months, that circumstance obtained in 43 months, 10% worse in just 5% of the time. Unbelievably, he was reelected. Unfortunately, unless he learns economics 101, this will continue. The unemployment rate – all things considered – is much worse than 8% now.

That tipping-point has arrived.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Columnist – Fully Evolved or…?

In an Op-Ed piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 03 November, Roger Guffey, a retired math teacher, took to task Georgia Congressman Paul Proun, a physician, account Proun’s dissing of human evolution. One supposes Proun has studied the human body about as well as Guffey but is the object of the predictable sarcasm accorded by the elitist evolutionists to those daring to disagree. In this case, Guffey is glad Proun is not from Kentucky, where, presumably, Guffey thinks idiots are expected to live…maybe not having evolved as fast as others from the…say, Neanderthal stage.

Guffey asks a series of questions which he seems to believe science incontrovertibly endorses as answers, therefore facts. Guffey asks why animals are tortured (his take on experiments) in order to find cures for human ailments, if evolution does not rule. The best answer might be another question, to wit, why haven’t animals tortured humans to find cures for their ills. The reason is obvious but anathema to the evolutionist or the politically correct, to whom the god of diversity mandates animals and humans to be on the same level.

Guffey asks why hemoglobins of humans and chimpanzees are “almost identical” but “very different” from those of dogs. He didn’t answer that but seems to mean that humans and chimps have evolved (didn’t say in which direction) while dogs haven’t, but doesn’t the true evolutionist believe that EVERYTHING evolved from a one-cell something? Humans and chickens have two lower limbs (almost identical?) but both are “very different” from snails. So what!

Guffey implies that snake venom is processed for injections to save humans bitten by snakes. Conclusion: Snakes and humans are in the same evolutionary chain? That might be news to most “evolution” anthropologists. His reasoning seems to be that all things share “some underlying physiological principles.” Well, of course! Physiological is defined as: “characteristic of or appropriate to an organism's healthy or normal functioning.” One hopes for healthy snakes and healthy humans no matter their origins. Who wants venom from an unhealthy snake?

Guffey mentions that pig heart-valves are successfully implanted in humans, thus establishing pigs somewhere in the chain. He didn’t say where. Plastic valves are also implanted in human hearts and they work fine. Is that because of the physiological attributes of the plastic, which is not a living organism at all? Among other components, plastic is made up of resins that come naturally from trees. Does that establish an evolutionary connection between human tissue and pine bark?

Guffey mentions that some babies are “occasionally” born with tails as extensions of the tailbone (human, presumably), implying the evolutionary connection between humans and apes. Some babies are born with Downs Syndrome or without limbs or an extra kidney or blind or as homosexuals, at least according to some regarding the latter. Exactly how do those “accidents of birth” fit into the evolutionary process?

Guffey’s shtick, of course, is that the actual explanation of the universe and everything in it is or will be found in science. He also mentions the Big Bang theory of beginnings, for instance, as characterized by Proun as a “lie.” There’s no argument here with science, by using which great discoveries are made every day that eventuate in a constantly improving standard of living.

Guffey’s actual, predictable hang-up with Proun, however, derives from religion, in which millions of people find their own answers as to the beginnings of and the consequent course of nature, including people, something those who actually have no explanation for the beginnings (scientists like Guffey) resent anyone else having. God can’t be seen, weighed, has no atomic number and therefore can’t exist, or at least can’t create anything.

On this “religious” note, Guffey ends his article, stating dogmatically that Proun “clearly feels comfortable citing Biblical verses that support his view of the world.” Problem: Guffey didn’t cite a single verse he accused Proun of citing, unusual for a scientist, whose mantra is “facts developed through research.”

Guffey’s final shot at Proun notes that Proun has been married four times and wonders if Proun “is as comfortable citing the verses on divorce” or just cherry-picks passages attracting voters. Is as comfortable as what? Well…as comfortable as citing the verses Guffey cited that Proun cited, which, of course, was none. And this is a treatise by a scientist?

Religionists claim that man was created by God essentially as is, has evolved from nothing, has been changed only slightly by his environment, and possesses a soul, another thing that can’t even be found, like a liver or a spleen, so for the math teacher it can’t exist; otherwise, it would surely have appeared in the evolutionary timeline by now.

By the way, one wonders what sort of creature Guffey, as part of the “chain,” is evolving into right now.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Anyone Seen Hillary?

Has anyone seen State Secretary Clinton lately? She was very prominent in the Rose Garden with President Obama on 12 September, when the impression was given that the “Benghazi Massacre” eventuated from the temper tantrum thrown by Libyans occasioned by a film showing Mohammad as a number of bad things, all of which are true. She later very publicly declared that the filmmaker would be arrested and prosecuted.

Whoa! Prosecuted for what? Never mind her exalted status as a graduate of the Yale Law School, she either didn’t know that prosecution for exercising freedom of speech (the film) is not possible or she knew by then that the guy could be canned for a parole violation of some sort or both or none. She wouldn’t have said that absent permission from Obama, a Harvard Law guy, although any prosecution for anything would be announced by the appropriate federal prosecutor, not the president or the state secretary.

To say that Clinton has taken a low profile since the egregious gaffes (actually outright lies) took place is to understate the situation. The film had nothing to do with the bombings and deaths of four Americans, even though the administration insisted that to be the case for days but finally realized too late for the learning that reporters had apparently ferreted out gazillions more information than anyone in the government. As a result, Obama and Clinton – as well as their apparatchiks – have been exposed as perpetrators of a cover-up far more serious than any attempted by Richard Nixon, who resigned under pressure.

Clinton should have been fired on the spot no later than 14 September, but the president couldn’t do that because he was not only a co-conspirator but the official actually responsible for the attempt at cover-up. Instead, as late as 16 September, UN Ambassador Rice was spouting this known LIE on five major networks. The administration-think (by wacky wonks) apparently was that the great unwashed would never catch-on or if they did would not care one way or another.

Now, it’s known that the proper investigative group that should have gone to Benghazi was not even activated; rather, the president sent (or tried to) the FBI, making the terrorist attack a simple crime. Weird but explainable…to have done the right thing would have been to admit that terrorism is alive and well in Libya, the terrorism brought on by Obama’s stellar leading from behind last year.

Well…Clinton got out of Dodge, and none too soon because the brickbats are flying. It would be even worse if the hurricane hadn’t hit the east coast and captivated attention for a few days, but the subject won’t go away, despite the fact that the “mainstream media” won’t touch the Benghazi affair with a ten-foot hard-drive.

The fact is that the president should be quickly impeached; indeed, he should have been impeached last year when he attacked defenseless and un-provocative Libya, in the first place. If he’s reelected, the first thing the House should do is handle articles of impeachment. Conviction and expulsion from office would not happen in the Senate but the point ought to be made that declaring a war without Congressional fiat and then covering up an egregious dereliction of duty should not go unpunished in some way. People on the ground in Libya had been imploring the administration over and over to send more security. Clinton’s outfit refused but the buck lay on Obama’s desk, as he finally admitted under pressure.

So…where is dear Hillary these days? As noted way over on page 10 of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., she has been gracing Croatia with her presence and straightening out the situation in Syria. Croatia, one remembers, is next-door to Bosnia, where Hillary claimed during her 2008 campaign to beat out Obama that she had to run and flee sniper fire in 1996, never mind the monstrous measure of that LIE. She was met on he tarmac by a welcoming party complete with the traditional child for a big hug. Of course, that’s Hillary just being…well, Hillary.

For a long time, Hillary has been dealing with something called the Syrian National Council, apparently some sort of group of Syrians in exile but has finally decided that she’s getting nowhere and stated in Croatia (one wonders why she was in Croatia) that some sort of consortium had to be formed with people doing the fighting (insurrectionists) being represented. She has pushed for a clambake in Doha, Qatar, next week, at which hundreds seem to be expected – the more the merrier – to figure out how to get Assad out of office.

The actual effort has to do with deciding just who among the rebels should be given guns, about the same as with Libya last year. The results of that are seen in the current movement of ammo and al Qaeda types to Syria to cause as much bloodshed as possible there. There are already enough guns in the Middle East to take care of wars for much of the rest of the millennium, but the U.S. has to keep playing the Ugly American and adding fuel to the fire…and, oh yes…helping Obama look PRESIDENTIAL!

Disgusting!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Liberals Ignore Libya

In an Op-Ed piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 30 October, Robert Olson, characterized as a Middle East analyst, discussed the importance of Syria to many nations, including the U.S. It was an informative piece that also included Syria’s importance to Russia, Iran, and China, the gist being that these nations resent “unilateral approaches” of the U.S., to Olson an obvious villain, though the actual villains are the colonialists such as Britain and France, which drew the lines in the sand.

The element that makes all the Middle East important to other countries is oil, something to fight over if push comes to shove. Without that commodity being in the picture, other nations would be content to let the Muslims fight each other constantly, mostly over religion, something they’ve done for centuries. Other nations’ only interest would be in competing for the jihadists’ weapons trade.

Olson made this statement near the end of the piece: “Since many of these calamities are due to the U.S. decision to pursue a war of choice in Iraq, Americans are responsible for a goodly portion of these sad events.” All wars are wars of choice, i.e, fight or not fight, regardless of the reasons or non-reasons.

In the matter of Iraq, Olson didn’t mention that the top intelligence services of many countries, including Britain and Russia, insisted that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but this was not a unilateral U.S. action anyway. Many other nations, especially Britain, formed the anti-Saddam coalition. The mistake was in attempting nation-building, a mistake now being seen in Afghanistan, where American GIs are routinely “back-shot” by their “friends.”

Saddam finally consented to allow inspectors back in Iraq in September 2002, after they had been denied access for some four years, while Saddam did who knows what. They returned in November 2002. From September until their return (and even after that until March 2003), Saddam could have done anything (and probably did) with his weapons, which were not found. The betting here is that they went to Syria, despite the Sunni-Shiite contention, another reason for the U.S. not to get involved in Syria.

Olson is the typical liberal analyst. By referencing “war of choice,” he actually meant “just” and “unjust” wars, as determined by any individual. But giving Olson credit for not meaning that (who knows?), it has to be remarked that the ONLY war of choice for which there is absolutely no explanation in which the U.S. has engaged since 1991 (the Kuwait thing, by any definition a “just war” sanctioned by the UN), was carried out in March-October 2011 by President Barack Hussein Obama, when he ordered the U.S. military to rain bombs and missiles on Libya.

Olson ignored Libya as if it doesn’t exist (even with its oil, sold mostly to Europe) even though the “Benghazi massacre,” which would never have happened absent Obama’s idiotic order to attack Libya in the first place, has dominated the news for seven weeks and been a primary subject in the recent debates. Instead, Olson whined about the carnage in Syria, though didn’t mention that Barack Hussein Obama raised Syrian insurrectionist hopes with his pronouncement that Syrian President Assad just had to go, and then, of course, didn’t deliver.

Even though Libya was not only not a threat to this country but had relinquished much if not all of its WMD (at least the nuclear elements) to this country, Obama wanted to bomb Qaddafi and sent his three “lady-Amazons” (Clinton, Rice, Powers) to the UN Security Council to “get permission,” completely bypassing Congress and in direct violation of both the Constitution and the War Powers Act as well as in direct contradiction to the advice of his top military officials.

The cover for this was that Qaddafi was killing his people just like Assad and all the other Muslim rulers do routinely. Somehow, Obama hasn’t noticed his responsibility regarding Syria, about the size of North Dakota. With Russia, Iran, Lebanon and China on his side, Assad pays no attention to Obama, who has disgraced the office and should have been impeached over his Libyan massacre. Now, the “Benghazi massacre” has come back to haunt him, and the only response the administration has made has consisted of one egregious lie after another.

One wonders about Obama’s motivation concerning Libya. Since he acted so erratically, it may be that he’s a hopeless narcissist, working out some sort of fantasy regarding his Commander-in-Chief position. How better to feed it than to take on a nation with a military force less than one-twentieth of one percent the size of the U.S military? He’s such a narcissist that he actually thinks he had something to do with the wasting of Osama. The book on that event will be written some day.

But Olson the liberal didn’t bother with Libya. After all, hasn’t Obama said terrorism was being defeated? Admitting Obama’s unspeakable errors regarding Libya, not the least being his administration’s intolerable lack of security for U.S. government workers there, would be unthinkable to any liberal. Yeah…Obama’s disastrous "war of choice"!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Chauvinism or Common Sense?

WARNING! The following is a now unacceptable mishmash of chauvinism not easily tolerated by the timid mind vis-à-vis the requirements of diversity, which is the latest inhabitant to take up residence on Mt. Olympus, designated as the god-of-lunacy, that deity to which one may apply for deliverance from the horrors of unisex, now seen most prominently in the world of sports, including both those activities conducted according to the rules and the others, by far the majority.

It had to happen, not least because of Title 9, which changed the nature of the games forever, putting men in their place as unmercifully as a female divorce lawyer does in baring her teeth and all but masticating the poor male caught in her grasp. What happened, you ask? Women have invaded and will soon take over all sports enterprises in the land.

It started (not counting the redistribution to women of sports-department wealth on college/university campuses a few years back) when the gals demanded and, of course, received permission to invade male locker-rooms and interview players, thus invading their privacy amidst the smell of sweat and various liniments and the raucous remarks in the locker-room, known as the “land of the four-letter-word”…all while being sure to be properly ogled by players and TV-viewers, actually the main reason for the whole enterprise.

The big thing on campus is having lady managers for the men’s teams. Are there any male students as managers for the women’s teams? Surely not! They couldn’t lay their hands on the women. These girls are at the beck-and-call of the players and coaches, making one wonder if they have some kind of reverse-discrimination hang-up. This was never the case back in the day when men enjoyed camaraderie, the guys taking care of each other.

The lady reporters, all attractive, of course (eat your heart out, Brent Musburger), now roam the sidelines at football games to report instantaneously the grief being felt by any player traumatized by an injury or a personal problem like handling a (gasp) DUI charge. The zaniest thing, however, is the on-field halftime and game-end interviews with coaches, who have obviously been told to cooperate or else. They usually say something of magnificent wisdom like “my guys are getting beat,” and the lady interviewer treats it as something straight from…where else…Mt. Olympus, or maybe the Oracle at Delphi.

The most recent aggravation, however, is the lady play-by-play announcer or analyst, who seems to be connecting a teleprompter reading with each play and pitter-patter concerning same. The gals have never seriously played football so they understandably need help, but one hopes they will not get passionate about the action, in which case they sound like the proverbial fishwife. The ladies do play basketball and have some knowledge of the sport, but who wants to announce a women’s basketball game?

The NFL admitted it needed help when it allowed employment (or coercion) of scantily-clad “cheerleaders,” adding a bit of cheesecake to the game in case the guys get bored during the endless commercial “timeouts.” But everyone knows that has nothing to do with sports, just entertainment, so the ladies, who seem to be stopping by on their way to their regular jobs at strip joints, supply the ogling material. This also explains why the attendance is 100% for the Olympic “sport” of beach-volleyball, wherein the ladies cavort in their bikinis in the sand, even if the nearest beach is a thousand miles away. Women’s mud-wrestling will probably be next…all those clinging clothes!

Is nothing sacred anymore? The ladies do the newspaper sports-pages and write about things of which they can have little or no been-there/done-that knowledge. Okay…it’s a discrimination thing, as played out in Augusta National finally having to admit a couple of unwelcome women into membership. But it stinks, just like it stank when the social engineers insisted on integrated boot camps in the military. There are “guy” things and “gal” things, but today there are only “unisex” things, never mind that women and men are not the same biologically or emotionally or athletically. The boot camps had to be re-segregated for obvious reasons, but sports integration, unfortunately, is here to stay.

Then, there are the men who coach women’s teams and, in the vein of this subject matter, should bug out. There must be women who coach men’s teams but none readily come to mind. When the guy pats his point-guard on the derriere and sends her into the game he’s out of line, and his wife probably thinks so, too, although the money involved can look mighty good. The girls basketball coach at the University of Kentucky knocks down a cool $750,000 a year, while an associate professor might make about $50,000.

Women should coach women and men should coach men, and never the twain should meet, just as they should never meet on a battlefield. The same goes for the referees and the umpires. Nothing looks sillier than a 5-2, 110-pound woman referee staring up a 7-foot power-forward, or a 6-6 male referee staring down a 5-2 lady guard.

Okay…you were warned…call me a chauvinist! The women may have a bit of catching-up to do, but they should bust the glass backboard and take care of their own business and stop whining about equal opportunity. Nothing is equal in sports; otherwise, there would be no game.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

DNC Memorandum #11

From the office of the chairWOMAN, 25 October 2012

**Listen up!!! There’s been some complaining account the recording “I am Woman” being played throughout the building every hour at 90 decibels. This complaining is to stop. The reason for this noise is that everyone is to be reminded that a major POTUS campaign theme is the “Romney War on Women.” POTUS’s campaigning with Sandra Fluke and his insistence that she speak at the convention are paying off, even though I had to shorten my remarks. A new program is in the works called Obamacondomcare and will become a part of Obamacare after the reelection. Under the act, a doctor refusing to do an abortion at any fetus-stage will face 30 years in prison, and a daily government-allocation will be made to all women older than five years of two super-slimy-fail-safe-exotic condoms, featuring the two-second automatic-unrolling feature for overwhelming passion- attack panic. Also, a billion dollars will be budgeted for research into converting the pregnancy problem from women to men, who, even in POTUS’s new homosexual marriage-mode, cannot conceive and therefore actually be married.

**Be WARNED that any mention of the film “Innocence of Muslims” in any town-hall or other meeting will be grounds for drastic discipline (even criminal charges) or outright termination (job, not life, for bimbo interns). POTUS and his people, such as State Secretary Clinton, have not yet devised the proper accounting for what happened in Benghazi (massacre, for recent Harvard grads). If any participant mentions that POTUS and Clinton have been “all over the map” on this, remind him/her that POTUS said Romney had been “all over the map,” too. For obvious reasons, the accounting will be made after the reelection and since it is an in-house accounting will make POTUS appear as commander-in-chief of the whole world while leading from behind, a brand-new concept not yet understood by the hoi polloi. Do NOT try to explain this concept. Three professors at MIT have worked on it for a year and recently were discovered baying at the moon in Harvard Square.

**Door-to-door canvassing is now top-priority. Since there have been reports of residents being traumatized by rings and tattoos, this is the new rule: Nose-tongue-eyebrow-navel-pinkie-lip-nipple- and other rings must never be in evidence, requiring removal of or otherwise hiding them. Long sleeves and full-length pants are to be worn in the case of tattoos on legs and arms, and turtlenecks must be worn to hide neck-tattoos, popular now. In the Bible-belt, there’s to be no cleavage shown except in venues such as men’s service clubs, in which case there’s no limit and staffers may wear Monica-pins, as well. In the rest of the country, most anything goes, though bikinis are not allowed. The ring business also accrues to safety, since two heavily ringed Howard-Dean canvassers were struck by lightning in Kansas in 2004 and didn’t survive.

**There have been further questions about Senator Reid’s assertion that Romney has paid no taxes for ten years, notwithstanding elements that sort of refute his claim, such as tax returns, making Reid either loony-tunes or a humongous liar. As it was in August, a request has been made that the DNC find Reid’s informant, since in the pressing business of the Senate and time-consuming vacations the senator can’t remember who it was. The only response (anonymous) I’ve received designated his informant as “a little bird,” which I did not find amusing. So, a tire-gauge and light-bulb personally signed by POTUS will be awarded to the staffer who solves this problem.

**Rumors circulating around the bottled-water keg (D.C. water unsafe) and non-salt, 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/BP/Limbaugh/Romney-dartboard that Candy Crowley will replace VPOTUS on the ticket account her sterling outing of Romney as a liar in the town-hall debate are untrue. A consulting firm determined that, while she possessed gravitas, she lacked the VPOTUS smirk used so effectively in the Veep debate. The rumor that I referred to it as the “jerk-smirk” is untrue and I will not say that again. Also, the rumor that VPOTUS plagiarized the smirk from David Letterman is untrue, as is the claim that Letterman told a gorgeous assistant in a usual tete-a-tete (use your imagination) that VPOTUS would wreck his jaw trying to emulate it.

**On the obvious assurance by the pollsters that POTUS will remain POTUS after the election, the usual jockeying for positions in the new Obama administration could be distracting. Do NOT be distracted but feel free to recommend me for any cabinet post, preferably State or Defense but NOT Homeland Security or Labor. My hair’s as good as Hillary’s any day. Come to think of it, so is a Golden Retriever’s. I have the credentials, not the least important being my second job as a Congressperson, though it doesn’t pay as much as DNC chairWOMAN. Note the sacrifice! Since to the victor belongs the spoils, read up on cronyism and act thusly in the coming days. POTUS is said to be planning a novel, win or lose, on the subject after the reelection, with the working title “Solyndra & the Czars.” His co-writer is said to be Chinese, recommended by the sculptor of the MLK Jr statue on the Mall, and rumored to have run the company that ran the POTUS/czar’s solar-panel company out of business.

**On the unthinkable and wholly impossible chance that POTUS will lose the election, be advised that there will be no severance pay and no laudatory referrals account the DNC predictably being blamed, thus making a referral worthless anyway. I will still be in Congress but don’t come near my office since all my time will be used in planning how to take Pelosi’s job, which pays more.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Newest Can of Worms

The new can of worms now being opened in the Middle East is the direct result of one of President Obama’s most idiotic moves, namely, the unprovoked attack on Libya last year that he ordered and then went on vacation in Brazil to announce to the world, claiming earlier that the “little war” would be over in days, not weeks. It lasted seven months and went far beyond the initial aim, accomplished in four days, of establishing a “no-fly zone.” The administration has never divulged what it knows about the Libyan deaths caused by the U.S. and NATO, i.e., if it knows anything…or cares.

The act of making war on Libya was whitewashed under the rubric of saving the Libyans from their dictator/tyrant of two generations – Moammar Qaddafi. This is what the ladies the president sent to Washington presented to the Security Council, which, with key abstentions, said “Go get Qaddafi, we don’t like him, either.” Why should Russia or China care about Libya, population 2 million less than that of New York City, which sold its oil to Europe (not the U.S.) anyway?

Defense Secretary Gates, who had inveighed mightily against this tragic mistake and was in Russia when the dear leader announced his “little war,” pronounced it as done “on the fly.” Translated, this means without sufficient planning. As transparent as it was, his statement understated the fact – total disaster not surprisingly perpetrated by a president who probably doesn’t yet know a salute from an obscene gesture…or care to know.

Now, as Obama’s mentor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, would insist, the chickens have come home to roost. The problem: how to deal with insurgents/rebels to whom fighting (sometimes just each other) is all they know to do. Libya is a mess, for which the administration had/has virtually no understanding, as evidenced by the overwhelming incompetence recently exhibited regarding the safeguarding of American workers in that benighted country.

Four Americans died, one, the ambassador, probably tortured, as well. It’s obvious that the administration (Obama) knew exactly what happened but rather than admit it, simply manufactured a falsehood of immense proportions, blaming a planned terrorist attack on a movie about Mohammad, progenitor of the cult of Islam. Then, the apparatchiks like UN Ambassador Rice and press-spokesman Carney were sent out to TV-land to spout the line. It didn’t work and now the citizenry knows all about what happened – or at least as much as the administration, which, actually, may not be much at all.

But…what to do with those pesky insurrectionists who now have nothing to do in Libya except fight each other, which does get old after a while, especially for the al Qaeda types to whom beheading is such a joy.  Thanks to all the goodie-good nations in 2011, they have more weapons of all kinds than they know what to do with, so why not collect the weapons, go on over to Syria (about the size of North Dakota) and join the rebels there – Muslims against Muslims…perfectly normal and in a small area of 23 million people – just the right size and type for close-up killing.  

The Libyan “little war” was over in October 2011, but the Libyan government (such as it was, if anybody knew) was already parleying the next month with folks like the Turks in the interest of making Syrian President Assad get out of Dodge (okay, Damascus), preferably with his toes turned-up. The latest news is that this is what’s happening – sorta like al Qaeda bivouacking with the dissidents (though no one knows one from the other, with regard to agendas).

So, in April this year, the Lebanese impounded a ship headed for Tripoli, Lebanon, that was loaded with weapons from – you guessed it – Libya. The weapons were headed for the Syrian rebels and had to be transported across Lebanon, now under the control of the Sunni Muslims, no friends of Assad, who leans on Iran’s Ahmadinejad and the Shiites.

But why not just land the weapons, which bore various Libyan markings, in a Syrian seaport – Lattackia or Tartous, both close to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city? Don’t the Iranians land their ships in those ports? Well…yes, but Aleppo has been under attack by the Syrian military for a long time and Syria still has an air force that could wipe out any movement around either port. As the weapons are smuggled into Syria through Lebanon, the Middle East will become even more of an international catastrophe going somewhere over there to happen.

All of this is to say that if Obama’s attack, with his glorious new military tactic called “leading from behind” (the mother of all oxymorons), had never happened, this Libya/al-Qaeda intrusion vis-a-vis Syria would not be threatening world peace today. Qaddafi would have finished his purge, a very routine happening in Muslim-controlled countries (as in Syria now and Egypt and Tunisia earlier) and Obama wouldn’t be up to his ears in lies.

As it is, world leaders must have been wondering ever since Obama, with absolutely no provocation and no approval of Congress, decided to jump Libya – sorta like an elephant settling an argument with a gnat. He can’t come clean on this because there was NO reason for the Libyan massacre, either in March – October 2011 or that of the Americans on 11 September.

This nation is leaderless.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Prez-Debate-II Recap

Obama and Romney sort of went mano a mano in their debate on the sixteenth, a bit of refreshment from the blinking lights and beeps signaling when a candidate can and cannot express himself. The vast majority of prepared questions were not asked, though one could never have believed they would be used. Some eleven or so questions were used and read by participants in the Town-Hall setting.

Moderator Candy Crowley of CNN (Obama cable-supporter) did fairly well although she made a critical error in trying to neutralize a humongous Obama lie concerning the Benghazi attack on 11 September. I watched as he and State Secretary Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden on 12 September and solemnly declared that the Benghazi slaughter was due to passions aroused by a film that Obama made sure everyone understood was made by an American.

Since he mentioned much later something about terrorists, Crowley tried to connect the two statements, which only made matters worse for Obama since it indicated that he knew the actual circumstances surrounding the Benghazi attack; otherwise, he would have had no reason to mention terrorists. He should admonish whoever prepared his remarks, and Crowley later acknowledged her perfidy in attempting to advance the cover-up.

Whereas President Nixon tried to cover up a simple burglary in 1974, Obama tried to cover up an incident in which four U.S. government employees were killed. Nixon resigned. Obama flies above an “insignificant” event like the betrayal of U.S. workers. Nixon was at the mercy of a democrat Congress, 56% majority in both houses, but Obama has the Senate in his pocket. Even worse, UN Ambassador Rice was sent out to perpetuate Obama’s humongous lie all over TV at least four days after the truth was known. Benghazi-gate is a much worse cover-up than Watergate, by any measure.

Strangely, as always seems the case, the moderators in the debates are culled from left- or far-left-leaning networks, respectively this year, Jim Lehrer (PBS), Martha Raddatz (ABC), Candy Crowley (CNN), and Bob Schieffer (CBS). The latter three networks are firmly in the Obama corner, as any valid consensus of observers would indicate. Indeed, a Raddatz ex-husband heads the Obama Federal Communications Commission and both she and her current husband have been connected to PBS, for which he is still a 30-year employee. ABC’s head guru, George Stephanopoulos, was Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff.

Romney put to rest any question as to who is the better speaker, as well as who thinks better on his feet. Obama came out swinging but he was backed into his corner by Romney over such things as the energy quagmire, the huge added costs to the taxpayers of Obamacare, and the results of lowering tax-rates. Obama has no background in economics but Romney knows chapter-and-verse regarding the financial systems worldwide and how they work.

Romney’s fluidity of speech, sometimes almost too rapid-fire, contrasted sharply with Obama’s broken sentences, pauses apparently to decide what to say, and general unease, perhaps even anger. Romney kept battering Obama’s record for the last four years, particularly with respect to his energy policies, magnified by forcing Obama’s hand in the matter of his granting less than half the number of licenses for drilling, compared to preceding years.

Obama tried the lame claim that 5 million jobs had been created during his tenure but Romney shot it down by mentioning the 5 million jobs lost – zero accomplishment. Romney also bore down on the fact that the actual unemployment rate is 10.7%, for which Obama had no answer, not even arguiung the current untrue claim of 7.8%. Obama had no answer to Romney’s correct assertion that instead of cutting the deficit in half, as he promised in 2008, Obama has doubled it.

Perhaps the most amazing and totally unexpected statement made by Obama was that he took responsibility for the now-known denial of on-site requests for beefed-up security for U.S. workers in Libya that were made over a substantial period. State Secretary Clinton had already thrown herself under the bus for that debacle in her statement in Peru the day before the debate. Did Obama not know that, or was he just pushed to the wall by Romney and had to morph into Trumanism (the buck stops here). Throwing himself on his sword was totally out of character, this from the guy who said policemen acted stupidly and supposedly has no clue about the “Fast and Furious” botched U.S.-to-Mexico gun-running scheme that has cost many lives.

This reminds of how things are done in this administration. Obama ordered the U.S. military to carry out an unprovoked attack on Libya, a sovereign nation, last year and announced his action in Brazil, whereupon he went on vacation for nearly a week while Libyans were dying. Clinton took responsibility for Libya but announced it well over a month after the fact not in Washington but in Peru, safely out of the country. This is exponential weakness. After his Rose Garden deception, Obama took off for Las Vegas and points west (one activity a silly talk-show – entertainment) while Americans were dead and the Libya situation required the commander-in-chief, as Obama often alludes to himself, to be on the job in Washington. Disgusting!

This election is a turning point in the nation’s history. Will the U.S. slide into socialism conducted by weak-kneed leaders, or will it return to its roots?

And so it goes.
Jim Clark