The drumbeat goes on in Lexington by the movers and shakers who seem to be determined to change the downtown from what it is, essentially a repository for financial institutions, offices, entertainment venues, specialty shops, restaurants/bars, apartment/condominium buildings, and government facilities, along with the necessary parking garages. The objective: turn the downtown into a sort of fun-and-games tourist/convention attraction, complete with parks and anything else someone in the university classifies as aesthetic and therefore uplifting.
The attempt has been somewhat derailed by the uprising of some important folks, like UK President Capiluto, who insists that there are more pressing needs for taxpayer money such as the upgrading of the UK campus. The aesthetic-promoting cadre has concluded that some of Rupp Arena’s walls should be converted from solid building material to glass, never mind that the building is just fine as it is. One can only guess at the expense of keeping all those windows clean, the better not to offend visiting sports fans. This is just an example of the wackiness involved in the whole process.
The artists’ renderings of the new plans, including all sorts of new buildings, indicate that Vine Street will be closed from its intersection with Main to Broadway…in other words, the most important section of the street. This means, of course, that the plan requires that the downtown one-way streets must be converted to two-way, the better to enhance beauty, convenience, aesthetics, and, of course, turn the whole area into a gigantic gridlock, with left-turn lanes on a street that was clogged in the 1930s-50s an impossibility. When the attempt to close Vine was made a few years ago (and actually approved in one reading of the ordinance), the citizens would have none of it and screamed “No Way” so loudly that the commissioners’ ears were ringing for a week.
Figures in the hundreds of millions for financing the project(s) have been thrown around as if the money will just magically appear. No one has the foggiest notion of what the cost will be or how it will be defrayed. Two things are certain: (1) People interested in profits are the prime movers, not the citizenry, most of which avoids the area for obvious reasons; (2) Somewhere along the line the government will be tabbed for a huge slug of money. The new KFC Yum Center in Louisville, a sort of house that Pitino (or at least UL basketball) built is facing financial difficulties already. Sooner or later, Louisville taxpayers will get involved but not by choice.
There’s always been a mystery as to why businesspeople and/or firms shell out their own cash for building the malls and other retail areas/businesses, as well as manufacturing facilities, while somehow the citizens are supposed to cough up the funds to prop up anything that happens downtown. The reason people aren’t attracted to downtown is quite simple: the paucity of retail space coupled with the fact that parking is either impossible or too inconvenient to abide. Feeding parking meters is also a non-starter.
Imagine an actual full-sized grocery store anywhere downtown, for instance. Managing carts up and down the garage elevators is laughable on its face. This is not the 1930s-40s, when the population of Lexington was about 75,000, a fourth of what it is now. Even then, there were neighborhood groceries as was the case in even much smaller towns. I grew up in Danville then, when this was the case…two or three sizeable groceries in the business area, along with stores like Montgomery-Ward, and small groceries throughout the town. Now, the largest groceries in Danville are far from downtown, notwithstanding a population of only about 16,000. People go where they can park their cars conveniently and not line up and traverse multi-ramps in garages.
Lexington’s movers and shakers take bus trips to other cities routinely and return with glowing accounts of “how those people are so far ahead of us.” Balderdash! Lexington does not have a riverfront like Louisville or Newport or Minneapolis or a lake-front like Chicago, where a recreational/entertainment area is possible. It’s a locked-in city, quite attractive in its own way and also accommodates venues such as the Opera House, Kentucky Theater, Singletary center, Rupp Arena (among the finest in the country and newly refurbished), and the city-renovated and operated Lyric Theater, costing a cool $6 million to refurbish and $600,000 a year to operate. With the handful of one-way streets in use now, access to these facilities is a piece of cake.
The plan seems to be to completely isolate Rupp Arena from that to which it is attached now and apparently build other buildings on what is now Vine Street. Why? The center of downtown is a huge square-block cow pasture now (okay, paddock in horse country), with no actual hope for putting anything there in the near future. If the movers and shakers feel somehow compelled to just do something, why not attempt it on that perfectly located plot…but not with taxpayer money? There’s room for every kind of frill imaginable there…for the convention-goers, of course. Egad! The economy is in the tank, the city is broke, and the dreamers contemplate costly frills.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Obama's Middle East Incredibility
What a difference three years in a presidency can make! President Obama was very vocal last year in his approval of the so-called “Arab Spring,” giving about as much aid and comfort – actually just hot air – to the insurgents as possible in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. The fact that there’s been little but violence in those countries since the events of last year, along with no recognizable governments except perhaps in Yemen, is a good indicator that the spring was not all that great.
The problem is enhanced when taking into account the fact that the worst of the Islamic terrorist groups, not to mention al Qaeda cells, are propelling themselves into governmental leadership roles. For instance, it appears that the Muslim Brotherhood will wind up running Egypt when the army finally relinquishes control. Mubarak may have been a greedy tyrant (aren’t they all?) but he was a U.S. ally and formed a critical protection of Israel. Now, the entire region is in an uproar and Israel is even more constantly under the gun.
This remarks a lesson not learned by president Obama. This is from the BBC of 19 June 2009: “Mr Obama said he believed Iranian voices should be heard, although he added that he did not want to be seen to be ‘meddling.’” This was during the uprising in Iran when the Iranian government was furnishing weapons to kill American GIs in Iraq and no telling what other kinds of “help” to the Iraqi insurgents and/or al Qaeda cutthroats.
The Iranian government was killing its people in the streets or trucking off protesters to prison for no telling what tortures and beheadings. The “people” in Iran, just as the “people” in Egypt, were attempting to change the government. It was the Iranian version of the “Arab spring” although the Iranis make no claim to being Arabs. The president might have at least awarded some hot air to the Iranis but he didn’t want to “meddle.” Now, the Iranian government has promised to bring turmoil to the nth degree to the Middle East, including with nuclear weapons.
Fast forward to March 2011. For actual reasons no one has yet figured out, President Obama decided to waste Libya, bypassed Congress and by executive order declared war on that benighted nation, dragging in NATO after the worst damage had been accomplished in the first ten days. It then took seven long months and over a billion U.S. dollars to completely wreck the country and bring about the killing of probably thousands – nobody knows the actual numbers, but American/NATO missiles were falling in Libyan neighborhoods, as well documented in the media.
Fast forward to the present. In the daily media, a bedraggled State Secretary Clinton is traveling the world damning Syrian president Assad for doing what all the other tyrants routinely do (Saddam offed 400,000 citizens), kill protesters in the streets. Early last year, she was talking about Assad as a “reformer,” certainly nothing like the horrific Qaddafi, Libya’s strongman. She indicated that members of Congress who had visited Assad considered him a “reformer,” ergo, leave him alone. One remembers the famous visits of Pelosi and Kerry, for instance, who might have furnished that incredibly wrong information.
Now, there are scenes shown on TV daily of Syrians calling for help as thousands are being wasted by Assad, not surprising since his father before him killed them like dogs in the street. Some say up to 25,000 or so and the uprising that precipitated the whole mess was conducted by the…yep…Muslim Brotherhood. The president’s credibility, and Clinton’s, stand at exactly zilch. They stamp their feet and send UN Ambassador Rice to stamp hers at the UN…for what? Obama established his bona fides as commander-in-chief by devastating Libya, population 2 million less than that of New York City, so the “Arab Spring” folks believe he should devastate Syria and hand it over to who knows whom, probably the…yep…Muslim Brotherhood.
But Syria is not Libya. It has an active military strength of 295,000 boots on the ground plus an air force. Moreover, though this sounds harsh, it may be to the final good to do whatever is necessary to see that the murderous Muslim Brotherhood does not capture yet another country.
Has the president learned anything in more than three years in office about foreign affairs? His statement in 2009 alone (just months after taking office) concerning Iran actually took him out of “meddling” anywhere in the Middle East, but that’s just what he’s done, along with Clinton, who looks worn-out doing virtually nothing but roaming the world (keeps her out of Washington’s hair). Now is the time for him/her to shut up and leave the Middle Easterners to their perpetual bloodbaths. The two misguided officials are an embarrassment and should not be in public un-chaperoned.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The problem is enhanced when taking into account the fact that the worst of the Islamic terrorist groups, not to mention al Qaeda cells, are propelling themselves into governmental leadership roles. For instance, it appears that the Muslim Brotherhood will wind up running Egypt when the army finally relinquishes control. Mubarak may have been a greedy tyrant (aren’t they all?) but he was a U.S. ally and formed a critical protection of Israel. Now, the entire region is in an uproar and Israel is even more constantly under the gun.
This remarks a lesson not learned by president Obama. This is from the BBC of 19 June 2009: “Mr Obama said he believed Iranian voices should be heard, although he added that he did not want to be seen to be ‘meddling.’” This was during the uprising in Iran when the Iranian government was furnishing weapons to kill American GIs in Iraq and no telling what other kinds of “help” to the Iraqi insurgents and/or al Qaeda cutthroats.
The Iranian government was killing its people in the streets or trucking off protesters to prison for no telling what tortures and beheadings. The “people” in Iran, just as the “people” in Egypt, were attempting to change the government. It was the Iranian version of the “Arab spring” although the Iranis make no claim to being Arabs. The president might have at least awarded some hot air to the Iranis but he didn’t want to “meddle.” Now, the Iranian government has promised to bring turmoil to the nth degree to the Middle East, including with nuclear weapons.
Fast forward to March 2011. For actual reasons no one has yet figured out, President Obama decided to waste Libya, bypassed Congress and by executive order declared war on that benighted nation, dragging in NATO after the worst damage had been accomplished in the first ten days. It then took seven long months and over a billion U.S. dollars to completely wreck the country and bring about the killing of probably thousands – nobody knows the actual numbers, but American/NATO missiles were falling in Libyan neighborhoods, as well documented in the media.
Fast forward to the present. In the daily media, a bedraggled State Secretary Clinton is traveling the world damning Syrian president Assad for doing what all the other tyrants routinely do (Saddam offed 400,000 citizens), kill protesters in the streets. Early last year, she was talking about Assad as a “reformer,” certainly nothing like the horrific Qaddafi, Libya’s strongman. She indicated that members of Congress who had visited Assad considered him a “reformer,” ergo, leave him alone. One remembers the famous visits of Pelosi and Kerry, for instance, who might have furnished that incredibly wrong information.
Now, there are scenes shown on TV daily of Syrians calling for help as thousands are being wasted by Assad, not surprising since his father before him killed them like dogs in the street. Some say up to 25,000 or so and the uprising that precipitated the whole mess was conducted by the…yep…Muslim Brotherhood. The president’s credibility, and Clinton’s, stand at exactly zilch. They stamp their feet and send UN Ambassador Rice to stamp hers at the UN…for what? Obama established his bona fides as commander-in-chief by devastating Libya, population 2 million less than that of New York City, so the “Arab Spring” folks believe he should devastate Syria and hand it over to who knows whom, probably the…yep…Muslim Brotherhood.
But Syria is not Libya. It has an active military strength of 295,000 boots on the ground plus an air force. Moreover, though this sounds harsh, it may be to the final good to do whatever is necessary to see that the murderous Muslim Brotherhood does not capture yet another country.
Has the president learned anything in more than three years in office about foreign affairs? His statement in 2009 alone (just months after taking office) concerning Iran actually took him out of “meddling” anywhere in the Middle East, but that’s just what he’s done, along with Clinton, who looks worn-out doing virtually nothing but roaming the world (keeps her out of Washington’s hair). Now is the time for him/her to shut up and leave the Middle Easterners to their perpetual bloodbaths. The two misguided officials are an embarrassment and should not be in public un-chaperoned.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, February 03, 2012
Campaign Silliness -- Nth Degree
The quadrennial circus known as a presidential election-year has taken on new meaning this cycle insofar as triviality has been served. The nation has fallen to such depths economically and morally that it seems ungovernable anyway. The republican campaigns have dissolved into catfights and mean-spiritedness, while the president has dipped to a new low of using the annual prayer breakfast for political campaigning of his own.
One looks at all of this and wonders why the most accomplished politicians – in the best sense of that term – never seem to make the scene. In 2008, the democrats put on a show among their candidates that was capped by something as creepy as appearing in some sort of debate before the homosexual community. The following appeared in this space in August 2007:
Aquarius Candidates & the Protected Class
In popular culture, the expression "Age of Aquarius" usually refers to the heyday of the hippie and New Age "movement" of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps this is the reason that national politics and governance are as wacky as they are today with respect to both the Democrats and the Republicans, but more especially with the democrats. The folks in the drivers' seats now are those, such as the Clintons or somebody like Congressman Kucinich, who came of age politically during that era.
Never has serious business been as trivialized as it has been lately with the "sound-bite" debates, which are anything but debates, though the Democrats seem hell-bent on being the most profound trivia-freaks. The TV-debate the other evening staged before an audience of homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, trans-genders, or perhaps just those with no clue as to what they are was instructive. It followed on the heels of a similar debate staged at Soldier Field in Chicago before union-members, where Senator Clinton offered the most sagacious utterance when she told the assemblage that she was "their girl." Their GIRL! Egad!
The debate before the HBLT [actually LBGT?] gang was moderated by Melissa Etheridge (okay just a panelist, along with two others), a high-profile lesbian, naturally, and sponsored by MSNBC, naturally, the news network that masquerades as a propaganda outlet for the Democrat Party. Instead of standing behind lecterns or sitting at desks, the candidates were seated in stuffed, easy-chairs, no doubt the better to display the laid-back, in-your-face approach of the homosexual, bisexual, transgender communities. One expected a wigged and gaudily attired transvestite to take the stage (Los Angeles instead of San Francisco, strangely) and writhe through an appropriate performance (a la "gay" parade histrionics) at any moment during the clambake.
The affair was sponsored by something called the Human Rights Campaign, self-described as "America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality." In other words, the HRC considers its constituents as a victim-class needing special protection – a sort of endangered species, like the famous snail-darter of President Carter's day. These folks are so special in the minds of the Democrat Party that a unique "debate" had to be scheduled just to assure them that the big, bad republicans would be thrown out of office and thus no longer threaten their circumstances and peace of mind. Significantly, the republican candidates have also been offered the opportunity by HRC to "debate" before this assemblage, but took a pass. Now, that would have been entertaining, indeed, since truth might have attacked the gathering and turned the thing upside-down.
Also significantly, senators Biden and Dodd, democrat president-wannabes, couldn't make the scene, leaving the "solicitous six" [including Obama] to hog the whole show. In other words, they didn't get "sucked-in" to this obvious and cynical pander. The members of the audience were interested in "domestic partner" benefits, a euphemism for cadging from all levels of government the goodies that are lawfully and legally allowed those with enough sense of commitment to form and sustain families. The recent amendments to a myriad of state constitutions establishing marriage as the act necessary to effect the appropriate benefits has placed the homosexual community on notice that the "partners," whether stay-at-home or in the workplace, are responsible for their own affairs. This shouldn't be a hardship, anyway, since taking care of families requires infinitely more of everything, including finances, than just affording "shack-up" facilities.
Former senator Edwards, from the get-go of his campaign begun in a New Orleans backyard (instead of his home-state) last December, has pledged to make homosexuals acceptable in the military, thus doing away with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy former president Clinton was stuck with in 1993, when he tried the same thing. It won't work this time, either, and Edwards knows that. The other candidates have to fall in line, whether they like it or not, but the republicans – at least as a whole – will not promise that, if for no better reason the protection of the homosexuals themselves. [Obama now thinks it’s okay for two men to marry each other. What a phony!]
Perhaps the penultimate act of lunacy was committed by prez-wannabe Gravel when he said the other day in New Hampshire that homosexuals make the best soldiers because they understand – GET THIS – real love. Gravel is the only democrat candidate who has had military service (Dodd did six years in the Army Reserve during part of which time he attended law school) and either has to be a total nutcase or at least battling at the bulwarks of insanity. He's also the guy who helped in the divulging of government secrets (Pentagon Papers) when he was in the Senate. Gravel even hinted at the relationship in the foxhole by two soldiers who "love" each other. Disgusting!
At least Hillary didn't, as she had before the unionists, claim that she was the homosexual/lesbians/bisexuals/trans-gender's GIRL, though it might have been a barn-burner performance if she had just said she was their "SIGNIFICANT OTHER," and then jumped out of her recliner and into the arms of Miss Etheridge. What theater!
So…there you have it! One longs for the day before the primaries, when the nomination was determined at the conventions and the speeches meant something. Now, the name of the game is fund-raising, performing before the cameras (misnamed debates), and shoveling manure. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
One looks at all of this and wonders why the most accomplished politicians – in the best sense of that term – never seem to make the scene. In 2008, the democrats put on a show among their candidates that was capped by something as creepy as appearing in some sort of debate before the homosexual community. The following appeared in this space in August 2007:
Aquarius Candidates & the Protected Class
In popular culture, the expression "Age of Aquarius" usually refers to the heyday of the hippie and New Age "movement" of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps this is the reason that national politics and governance are as wacky as they are today with respect to both the Democrats and the Republicans, but more especially with the democrats. The folks in the drivers' seats now are those, such as the Clintons or somebody like Congressman Kucinich, who came of age politically during that era.
Never has serious business been as trivialized as it has been lately with the "sound-bite" debates, which are anything but debates, though the Democrats seem hell-bent on being the most profound trivia-freaks. The TV-debate the other evening staged before an audience of homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, trans-genders, or perhaps just those with no clue as to what they are was instructive. It followed on the heels of a similar debate staged at Soldier Field in Chicago before union-members, where Senator Clinton offered the most sagacious utterance when she told the assemblage that she was "their girl." Their GIRL! Egad!
The debate before the HBLT [actually LBGT?] gang was moderated by Melissa Etheridge (okay just a panelist, along with two others), a high-profile lesbian, naturally, and sponsored by MSNBC, naturally, the news network that masquerades as a propaganda outlet for the Democrat Party. Instead of standing behind lecterns or sitting at desks, the candidates were seated in stuffed, easy-chairs, no doubt the better to display the laid-back, in-your-face approach of the homosexual, bisexual, transgender communities. One expected a wigged and gaudily attired transvestite to take the stage (Los Angeles instead of San Francisco, strangely) and writhe through an appropriate performance (a la "gay" parade histrionics) at any moment during the clambake.
The affair was sponsored by something called the Human Rights Campaign, self-described as "America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality." In other words, the HRC considers its constituents as a victim-class needing special protection – a sort of endangered species, like the famous snail-darter of President Carter's day. These folks are so special in the minds of the Democrat Party that a unique "debate" had to be scheduled just to assure them that the big, bad republicans would be thrown out of office and thus no longer threaten their circumstances and peace of mind. Significantly, the republican candidates have also been offered the opportunity by HRC to "debate" before this assemblage, but took a pass. Now, that would have been entertaining, indeed, since truth might have attacked the gathering and turned the thing upside-down.
Also significantly, senators Biden and Dodd, democrat president-wannabes, couldn't make the scene, leaving the "solicitous six" [including Obama] to hog the whole show. In other words, they didn't get "sucked-in" to this obvious and cynical pander. The members of the audience were interested in "domestic partner" benefits, a euphemism for cadging from all levels of government the goodies that are lawfully and legally allowed those with enough sense of commitment to form and sustain families. The recent amendments to a myriad of state constitutions establishing marriage as the act necessary to effect the appropriate benefits has placed the homosexual community on notice that the "partners," whether stay-at-home or in the workplace, are responsible for their own affairs. This shouldn't be a hardship, anyway, since taking care of families requires infinitely more of everything, including finances, than just affording "shack-up" facilities.
Former senator Edwards, from the get-go of his campaign begun in a New Orleans backyard (instead of his home-state) last December, has pledged to make homosexuals acceptable in the military, thus doing away with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy former president Clinton was stuck with in 1993, when he tried the same thing. It won't work this time, either, and Edwards knows that. The other candidates have to fall in line, whether they like it or not, but the republicans – at least as a whole – will not promise that, if for no better reason the protection of the homosexuals themselves. [Obama now thinks it’s okay for two men to marry each other. What a phony!]
Perhaps the penultimate act of lunacy was committed by prez-wannabe Gravel when he said the other day in New Hampshire that homosexuals make the best soldiers because they understand – GET THIS – real love. Gravel is the only democrat candidate who has had military service (Dodd did six years in the Army Reserve during part of which time he attended law school) and either has to be a total nutcase or at least battling at the bulwarks of insanity. He's also the guy who helped in the divulging of government secrets (Pentagon Papers) when he was in the Senate. Gravel even hinted at the relationship in the foxhole by two soldiers who "love" each other. Disgusting!
At least Hillary didn't, as she had before the unionists, claim that she was the homosexual/lesbians/bisexuals/trans-gender's GIRL, though it might have been a barn-burner performance if she had just said she was their "SIGNIFICANT OTHER," and then jumped out of her recliner and into the arms of Miss Etheridge. What theater!
So…there you have it! One longs for the day before the primaries, when the nomination was determined at the conventions and the speeches meant something. Now, the name of the game is fund-raising, performing before the cameras (misnamed debates), and shoveling manure. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Rape in the Military
The government is its own worst enemy in the matter of first discovering the answer to a problem and, secondly, doing anything about it. This is not to mention that the government is front and center in making the problem, in the first place.
Defense Secretary Panetta was all over television the other day decrying the sad fact that there are so many rapes in the military, presumably reported by women, such fact being the key to solving the problem. The media is full of the subject and has remarked about the problem at the service academies. There were 3,191 and 3,158 sexual assaults reported, respectively, in 2011 and 2010. This seems to be sort of in line with previous years, even more reported for instance in 2009 (3,230). Panetta said “officials” claim that the current number of sexual assaults is about 19,000 (52 per day) since most go unreported. This is about one rape per 84 service-members, a bit hard to believe but so be it. One wonders, though, how anything that’s unreported is so categorically defined.
The genesis of the problem lies in the fact that political correctness insists that there’s no difference between males and females. This amazing philosophy is and has been carried out everywhere in government, from the halls of Congress through all agencies and into the White House. Since there’s no difference between the sexes, there has to be “equal opportunity” at everything and at every level in the military.
Common sense dictates that this philosophy is a bunch of baloney, but common sense and political correctness are mutually exclusive. Go into any city and take the biggest, strongest, meanest women in the local university, teach them to play football and schedule a game for them with an average high-school football team in the city. The boys would kill the ladies. There’s a difference.
That’s just a difference in physical strength and the “killer mentality.” Gender-wise, the difference between men and women is much greater and far more serious. The natural attraction – and often, exploitation – regarding the sexes is obvious to even a middle-schooler. Put the guys and gals together and expect to have problems, and not just problems perpetrated by the guys.
The government created the rape problem when the screwball Congress-people decided that men and women should be thrown together even in boot camps. The fact that this had to be changed (the Marines never even obeyed the edict), lest the fighting force be reduced to absolute minimums in the ability to wage war, has not registered yet with the elitists who clamor for some sort of “equality,” when in some areas “equality” does not exist, never has and never will.
The obvious solution to the current problem is the segregation to the nth-degree possible of men and women in the military. This is not to say women should not serve, merely to say that they should not serve alongside men in close quarters, including but not confined to combat.
Common sense dictates that the fact that they (women) have to report rapes means that they’re out of their depth physically (unable to defend themselves) and therefore are unfit for rigorous duty. This is a terribly politically incorrect statement but it’s true. If they can’t defend themselves physically, how can they be expected to defend not only their country but, more especially, their colleagues?
One-hundred-percent separation is not likely possible but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that something like 95% separation is possible. For instance, no women should serve on a naval vessel unless the entire crew is female. All-male crews have successfully defended the country for centuries, so why not try all-female crews, where, at least hopefully, there would be no natural rapes? The same is true for other military teams, though women should never be in combat for the obvious physical reasons, including on any ship.
Then, of course, there’s the “he said, she said” factor. A woman knows that all she has to do is say she’s been raped and, ipso facto, she’s been raped. In the civilian world, whether she’s told the truth or not, the name of her alleged rapist is spread all over the media, even though he hasn’t even been tried. There’s nothing fair about this but that’s the way it is. Her name, of course, is not divulged. The policy in the military is to transfer out of her unit any woman who claims she’s been raped. The possibilities connected to this allowance are obvious, ergo, reports of rape.
This isn’t to say that rapes do not happen or that they shouldn’t be prosecuted. Apparently, not many are; otherwise, there would be large-scale imprisonments and dishonorable discharges. There’s rarely a witness to a rape, hence, nothing short of DNA to use to convict, and even that’s questionable because the perpetrator can always claim consensual sex, which is hard to prove to the contrary. The answer is so obvious that it will not be entertained in this era of political correctness…simple segregation. Rules can be changed. People can’t be.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Defense Secretary Panetta was all over television the other day decrying the sad fact that there are so many rapes in the military, presumably reported by women, such fact being the key to solving the problem. The media is full of the subject and has remarked about the problem at the service academies. There were 3,191 and 3,158 sexual assaults reported, respectively, in 2011 and 2010. This seems to be sort of in line with previous years, even more reported for instance in 2009 (3,230). Panetta said “officials” claim that the current number of sexual assaults is about 19,000 (52 per day) since most go unreported. This is about one rape per 84 service-members, a bit hard to believe but so be it. One wonders, though, how anything that’s unreported is so categorically defined.
The genesis of the problem lies in the fact that political correctness insists that there’s no difference between males and females. This amazing philosophy is and has been carried out everywhere in government, from the halls of Congress through all agencies and into the White House. Since there’s no difference between the sexes, there has to be “equal opportunity” at everything and at every level in the military.
Common sense dictates that this philosophy is a bunch of baloney, but common sense and political correctness are mutually exclusive. Go into any city and take the biggest, strongest, meanest women in the local university, teach them to play football and schedule a game for them with an average high-school football team in the city. The boys would kill the ladies. There’s a difference.
That’s just a difference in physical strength and the “killer mentality.” Gender-wise, the difference between men and women is much greater and far more serious. The natural attraction – and often, exploitation – regarding the sexes is obvious to even a middle-schooler. Put the guys and gals together and expect to have problems, and not just problems perpetrated by the guys.
The government created the rape problem when the screwball Congress-people decided that men and women should be thrown together even in boot camps. The fact that this had to be changed (the Marines never even obeyed the edict), lest the fighting force be reduced to absolute minimums in the ability to wage war, has not registered yet with the elitists who clamor for some sort of “equality,” when in some areas “equality” does not exist, never has and never will.
The obvious solution to the current problem is the segregation to the nth-degree possible of men and women in the military. This is not to say women should not serve, merely to say that they should not serve alongside men in close quarters, including but not confined to combat.
Common sense dictates that the fact that they (women) have to report rapes means that they’re out of their depth physically (unable to defend themselves) and therefore are unfit for rigorous duty. This is a terribly politically incorrect statement but it’s true. If they can’t defend themselves physically, how can they be expected to defend not only their country but, more especially, their colleagues?
One-hundred-percent separation is not likely possible but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that something like 95% separation is possible. For instance, no women should serve on a naval vessel unless the entire crew is female. All-male crews have successfully defended the country for centuries, so why not try all-female crews, where, at least hopefully, there would be no natural rapes? The same is true for other military teams, though women should never be in combat for the obvious physical reasons, including on any ship.
Then, of course, there’s the “he said, she said” factor. A woman knows that all she has to do is say she’s been raped and, ipso facto, she’s been raped. In the civilian world, whether she’s told the truth or not, the name of her alleged rapist is spread all over the media, even though he hasn’t even been tried. There’s nothing fair about this but that’s the way it is. Her name, of course, is not divulged. The policy in the military is to transfer out of her unit any woman who claims she’s been raped. The possibilities connected to this allowance are obvious, ergo, reports of rape.
This isn’t to say that rapes do not happen or that they shouldn’t be prosecuted. Apparently, not many are; otherwise, there would be large-scale imprisonments and dishonorable discharges. There’s rarely a witness to a rape, hence, nothing short of DNA to use to convict, and even that’s questionable because the perpetrator can always claim consensual sex, which is hard to prove to the contrary. The answer is so obvious that it will not be entertained in this era of political correctness…simple segregation. Rules can be changed. People can’t be.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, January 16, 2012
What Would MLK Say Today?
In a column of 16 January – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – Lexington Herald- Leader’s Tom Eblen remarked that if the assassinated rights-leader were in Lexington, he would make it a point to spend time at Main and Esplanade Streets with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who are still demonstrating at that location but without camping out, of course. Eblen might also have mentioned that at one time this location was a slave-auctioning site, though, come to think of it, he probably did – a sort of veiled allusion.
There’s no argument with the annual observance plus all the streets, buildings and parks named after King, not to mention the multiplicity of statues throughout the country. He was a great man and represented/conducted a great cause – civil rights. He was one of the most important Americans of last century.
Connecting King’s cause with the Occupy cause, however, is an imagination too far. King’s cause was by way of erasing differences in the classes while the Occupiers have made it practically a religious effort to promote class warfare, with the final result being that the government will punish the producers, taking what they cobble together and re-distributing it to the non-producers, the virtual definition of socialism/communism.
The Occupiers’ main ally occupies the White House, though (with a wink and a nod) he has surrounded himself with Wall Streeters and conducts huge fund-raising rallies to cadge campaign loot from them…promising a billion-dollar effort to retain his seat. The fat cats don’t give huge sums without something in return, so the conclusion to be drawn is obvious. To his give-’em-the-spin credit (or blame), he has united the unions and the entrepreneurs, sworn enemies, in support of his incredibly flawed administration, defined from the get-go by a tax-cheat as the Treasury secretary.
The guest speaker at this year’s main event in Lexington is Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor and TV talking-head. From a telephone-interview with Hill, Eblen furnished this statement: “And the gap [between what is had and what is possible, presumably for African Americans] isn’t an intelligence gap, an effort gap, it’s an opportunity gap.” There may be no intelligence/effort gap, but there certainly is no opportunity gap. The civil-rights laws of the 1960s, not to mention even the use of National Guard troops in an effort to inculcate fairness in schools in the 1950s, were designed to guarantee against an opportunity gap, even to the point of establishing quotas.
In fact, the abuse of these laws was demonstrated by SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor, who, using ethnicity as qualifier, ruled against whites in a job-promotion case involving test-scores, and was overturned by the SCOTUS even as she was being confirmed. Hill is too smart not to recognize the gap that actually does exist, to wit, a morality gap.
This introduces another claim by Hill, namely, that America’s core problem is poverty. The largest segment of the population living in poverty is the single-mom-and-family category, especially in the black community, in which more than 70% of babies are born without fathers of record. Contrarily, in 1960 before passage of all the entitlement-legislation, about 75% of black families were headed by live-in parents. If not for an inordinate percentage of abortions in the black community, the numbers of blacks on welfare now would be astounding.
The almost indiscriminate breeding – lack of morals, to many – is responsible for poverty, with the heaviest onus borne by African-American men who do not support their children (especially not marrying their children’s “mothers”), forcing the taxpayers to do it for them. This is not hate-speech, as Eblen probably would have it, but just plain fact.
Rather than express the truth, Hill takes the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton positions – blame whitey. This wears very thin now, after 50 or so years, though the politically correct crowd, probably including Eblen, continues to flagellate itself over something for which it was not remotely responsible – slavery. Racist operators like Hill love it and make a cottage industry out of exploiting it. Only the gullible fall for it.
To see the disconnect of people like Hill with King, one has only to look at the 30-foot statue (tall as a three-story building) of King on the National Mall, created by movers and shakers in the black community. By contrast, the statue of Lincoln is 11-feet shorter and the statue of President Franklin Roosevelt, a four-term president, is merely life-size.
The King statue was designed in China, sculpted by a Chinese artist, delivered in pieces to the Mall and assembled not by Americans, union or otherwise, but by Chinese coolies. It’s no wonder that, towering Mao-like as it does over everything else, it could be called the Great Buddha on the Mall. King is depicted as looking (glowering) down on everyone and everything…within the shadow of the Great Emancipator and the World War II memorial. It’s an “in your face” monstrosity, something King would have rejected, preferring probably something on the order of a pensive Gandhi, perhaps his most important mentor.
Only someone who is politically incorrect would call attention to Hill’s propaganda and the garish statue, but so be it.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
There’s no argument with the annual observance plus all the streets, buildings and parks named after King, not to mention the multiplicity of statues throughout the country. He was a great man and represented/conducted a great cause – civil rights. He was one of the most important Americans of last century.
Connecting King’s cause with the Occupy cause, however, is an imagination too far. King’s cause was by way of erasing differences in the classes while the Occupiers have made it practically a religious effort to promote class warfare, with the final result being that the government will punish the producers, taking what they cobble together and re-distributing it to the non-producers, the virtual definition of socialism/communism.
The Occupiers’ main ally occupies the White House, though (with a wink and a nod) he has surrounded himself with Wall Streeters and conducts huge fund-raising rallies to cadge campaign loot from them…promising a billion-dollar effort to retain his seat. The fat cats don’t give huge sums without something in return, so the conclusion to be drawn is obvious. To his give-’em-the-spin credit (or blame), he has united the unions and the entrepreneurs, sworn enemies, in support of his incredibly flawed administration, defined from the get-go by a tax-cheat as the Treasury secretary.
The guest speaker at this year’s main event in Lexington is Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor and TV talking-head. From a telephone-interview with Hill, Eblen furnished this statement: “And the gap [between what is had and what is possible, presumably for African Americans] isn’t an intelligence gap, an effort gap, it’s an opportunity gap.” There may be no intelligence/effort gap, but there certainly is no opportunity gap. The civil-rights laws of the 1960s, not to mention even the use of National Guard troops in an effort to inculcate fairness in schools in the 1950s, were designed to guarantee against an opportunity gap, even to the point of establishing quotas.
In fact, the abuse of these laws was demonstrated by SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor, who, using ethnicity as qualifier, ruled against whites in a job-promotion case involving test-scores, and was overturned by the SCOTUS even as she was being confirmed. Hill is too smart not to recognize the gap that actually does exist, to wit, a morality gap.
This introduces another claim by Hill, namely, that America’s core problem is poverty. The largest segment of the population living in poverty is the single-mom-and-family category, especially in the black community, in which more than 70% of babies are born without fathers of record. Contrarily, in 1960 before passage of all the entitlement-legislation, about 75% of black families were headed by live-in parents. If not for an inordinate percentage of abortions in the black community, the numbers of blacks on welfare now would be astounding.
The almost indiscriminate breeding – lack of morals, to many – is responsible for poverty, with the heaviest onus borne by African-American men who do not support their children (especially not marrying their children’s “mothers”), forcing the taxpayers to do it for them. This is not hate-speech, as Eblen probably would have it, but just plain fact.
Rather than express the truth, Hill takes the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton positions – blame whitey. This wears very thin now, after 50 or so years, though the politically correct crowd, probably including Eblen, continues to flagellate itself over something for which it was not remotely responsible – slavery. Racist operators like Hill love it and make a cottage industry out of exploiting it. Only the gullible fall for it.
To see the disconnect of people like Hill with King, one has only to look at the 30-foot statue (tall as a three-story building) of King on the National Mall, created by movers and shakers in the black community. By contrast, the statue of Lincoln is 11-feet shorter and the statue of President Franklin Roosevelt, a four-term president, is merely life-size.
The King statue was designed in China, sculpted by a Chinese artist, delivered in pieces to the Mall and assembled not by Americans, union or otherwise, but by Chinese coolies. It’s no wonder that, towering Mao-like as it does over everything else, it could be called the Great Buddha on the Mall. King is depicted as looking (glowering) down on everyone and everything…within the shadow of the Great Emancipator and the World War II memorial. It’s an “in your face” monstrosity, something King would have rejected, preferring probably something on the order of a pensive Gandhi, perhaps his most important mentor.
Only someone who is politically incorrect would call attention to Hill’s propaganda and the garish statue, but so be it.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, January 13, 2012
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, POTUS & Carney
It’s just past one a.m. in the little room off the Oval Office and Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego Mr. Hyde are meeting with President Obama and his press czar, Jay Carney, hereinafter referenced as J, H, O, and C, respectively, if not necessarily respectfully.
**O: Glad you could make it guys, you’ve always been a big help when I need…
**J: Does he never learn, Edward Hyde? We are not guys, especially to the colonists. We are sirs…okay we can be blokes here, Barry since this is so-o-o informal and…
**H: Quite so, Henry Jekyll, but I refuse to meet in this notorious room again. Either we go into the Oval Office or I – as you colonists so aptly put it – take a powder. You asked advice about the Tea Party in this room when last we met, meaning this room is profane and in deference to King George the Third, I…oh, speaking of powder, did you line up the howitzers and blow away the tea party as I might have suggested then?
**J: Easy there, Edward! He just means that the Tea Party should have been sweetened with your profound rhetoric, Barry, absolutely deep-sixed by eloquence and intellect delivered by state-of-the-art teleprompters…most likely my suggestion, though I don’t remember much except how Slick Will made this into a fun room, fit for any kind of orgy, real or imagined. (all enter the Oval Office) And these Styrofoam cups have to go, Barry…it’s fine china for tea or nothing.
**O: Jay, go rouse the kitchen crew and get some appropriate china and delicacies up here in ten minutes or less but don’t mention why…and bring me a beer.
**C: Aye aye sir, commander-in-chief, I’m on my way. (leaves)
**J: Commander-in-chief, Barry? That sounds so…well…haughty.
**O: I’ve commanded everyone to address me that way now since my hugely successful invasion of Libya and the offing of Osama. This month, navy obedience is the order of the day…or something like that…something military, in other words. I checked with the Salvation Army.
**H: Oh, I say, how quaint! Anyone gets out of line gets a good lashing at the mast…39 stripes, blood splattering all over the Congress…
**J: What Edward means is that the mark of a leader is his willingness to exact discipline and…
**H: Ah yes, Barry – Libya! What a stroke of genius and it took only seven months to put the buggers away. All those neighborhoods blown to smithereens by your bombs…blood running in the streets. I watched it every night on BBC, but, I say, Barry, I didn’t know you could invade a sovereign nation by executive order…reminds me of the glory days of Admiral Nelson.
**O: I went to the UN, Edward, or rather, I sent three ladies to work their charms on the UN and say that Qaddafi was mean and had to go and that I could ignore the Congress, the Constitution and the War Powers Act and anything else like maybe a town ordinance or something and just blow him away. (Carney returns, carrying huge tray)
**C: The kitchen crew told me where to go, Commander-in-chief, so I…
**J: Egad, Edward, all that mismatched china…and doughnuts…ugh! When will the colonists ever become civilized?
**H: I can see the papers now, Henry. Commander-in-chief has White House kitchen crew drawn and quartered – navy stuff there, Barry – for disobeying direct order, especially concerning crumpets.
**J: What Edward means, Barry, is that your justice is swift and that the kitchen crew loses a quarter’s pay – three months.
**O: Can we just get down to business. This beer is warm, Jay…ugh. And why are we here? I forgot and even JohnKerry couldn’t remember.
**C: Sorry, commander-in-chief, but the kitchen crew thought it was for our visitors – they drink it warm, you know. And I checked the teleprompter while I was gone and found that we’re here because of the Arab Spring.
**O: Okay, so my problem, gentlemen, is that there’s a threat of an American Spring coming up and…
**J: Aha! And if it goes like the Arab Spring last year, you might be on the way out…is that it, Barry?
**H: Oh…how marvelous! Blood in the streets of Washington, just like 1812 when we burned the place down…oh, hoo hah, what a show! Do you think there might be some beheadings…all those Muslims lurking here and there?
**J: What he means, Jay, is that your problem is serious since the apparatchiks also have to go when there’s a revolution.
**C: H-m-m-m.
**O: Let’s be serious here. We’ve just had Occupy Wall Street terrorists camping out in public parks and…
**H: And doing rapes and all sorts of strange things and using the police cars for bathrooms…
**J: Cool it, Edward. What Edward means, Barry, is that protests can be dangerous.
**C: You think we don’t know that, Henry? Look what commander-in-chief did in Libya to celebrate the Arab Spring…all those dead Libyans. Now we have all those students raising hell about Wall Street and…well, just about all the czars in the White House came from Wall Street. We’ve been in bunker mode, hoping the idiots wouldn’t find out.
**O: Let’s stick to the subject, Jay. Henry, what should I do about an American Spring? I can call out the troops, you know, but that seems so…well somehow fey.
**H: Oh, hahahahaha, I say bring out the Bradleys and mow ’em down on Pennsylvania Avenue.
**J: He asked me, Edward, not you. Edward just means that a show of force is sometimes necessary, Barry. He’s not suggesting you pull an Assad on them…just scare the bejesus out of them but don’t use m-16s.
**H: I say, Barry, it’s like FDR said…the only fear is fear itself or something like that. Besides, you did in the Libyans, so the only enemy you have to fear is by way of reprisal…
**J: And reprisal means the Libyans and the Libyans couldn’t beat your Girl Scouts right now, Barry, since you pulverized them although it took months, not days, as you promised. So, as you Americans say…not to worry! There will be no American Spring.
**C: In other words (starts singing), happy days are here again.
**O: Stuff it Carney and go get me a cold one.
**J: Come, Edward, I can stand the colonists for just so long…uncivilized creatures!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
**O: Glad you could make it guys, you’ve always been a big help when I need…
**J: Does he never learn, Edward Hyde? We are not guys, especially to the colonists. We are sirs…okay we can be blokes here, Barry since this is so-o-o informal and…
**H: Quite so, Henry Jekyll, but I refuse to meet in this notorious room again. Either we go into the Oval Office or I – as you colonists so aptly put it – take a powder. You asked advice about the Tea Party in this room when last we met, meaning this room is profane and in deference to King George the Third, I…oh, speaking of powder, did you line up the howitzers and blow away the tea party as I might have suggested then?
**J: Easy there, Edward! He just means that the Tea Party should have been sweetened with your profound rhetoric, Barry, absolutely deep-sixed by eloquence and intellect delivered by state-of-the-art teleprompters…most likely my suggestion, though I don’t remember much except how Slick Will made this into a fun room, fit for any kind of orgy, real or imagined. (all enter the Oval Office) And these Styrofoam cups have to go, Barry…it’s fine china for tea or nothing.
**O: Jay, go rouse the kitchen crew and get some appropriate china and delicacies up here in ten minutes or less but don’t mention why…and bring me a beer.
**C: Aye aye sir, commander-in-chief, I’m on my way. (leaves)
**J: Commander-in-chief, Barry? That sounds so…well…haughty.
**O: I’ve commanded everyone to address me that way now since my hugely successful invasion of Libya and the offing of Osama. This month, navy obedience is the order of the day…or something like that…something military, in other words. I checked with the Salvation Army.
**H: Oh, I say, how quaint! Anyone gets out of line gets a good lashing at the mast…39 stripes, blood splattering all over the Congress…
**J: What Edward means is that the mark of a leader is his willingness to exact discipline and…
**H: Ah yes, Barry – Libya! What a stroke of genius and it took only seven months to put the buggers away. All those neighborhoods blown to smithereens by your bombs…blood running in the streets. I watched it every night on BBC, but, I say, Barry, I didn’t know you could invade a sovereign nation by executive order…reminds me of the glory days of Admiral Nelson.
**O: I went to the UN, Edward, or rather, I sent three ladies to work their charms on the UN and say that Qaddafi was mean and had to go and that I could ignore the Congress, the Constitution and the War Powers Act and anything else like maybe a town ordinance or something and just blow him away. (Carney returns, carrying huge tray)
**C: The kitchen crew told me where to go, Commander-in-chief, so I…
**J: Egad, Edward, all that mismatched china…and doughnuts…ugh! When will the colonists ever become civilized?
**H: I can see the papers now, Henry. Commander-in-chief has White House kitchen crew drawn and quartered – navy stuff there, Barry – for disobeying direct order, especially concerning crumpets.
**J: What Edward means, Barry, is that your justice is swift and that the kitchen crew loses a quarter’s pay – three months.
**O: Can we just get down to business. This beer is warm, Jay…ugh. And why are we here? I forgot and even JohnKerry couldn’t remember.
**C: Sorry, commander-in-chief, but the kitchen crew thought it was for our visitors – they drink it warm, you know. And I checked the teleprompter while I was gone and found that we’re here because of the Arab Spring.
**O: Okay, so my problem, gentlemen, is that there’s a threat of an American Spring coming up and…
**J: Aha! And if it goes like the Arab Spring last year, you might be on the way out…is that it, Barry?
**H: Oh…how marvelous! Blood in the streets of Washington, just like 1812 when we burned the place down…oh, hoo hah, what a show! Do you think there might be some beheadings…all those Muslims lurking here and there?
**J: What he means, Jay, is that your problem is serious since the apparatchiks also have to go when there’s a revolution.
**C: H-m-m-m.
**O: Let’s be serious here. We’ve just had Occupy Wall Street terrorists camping out in public parks and…
**H: And doing rapes and all sorts of strange things and using the police cars for bathrooms…
**J: Cool it, Edward. What Edward means, Barry, is that protests can be dangerous.
**C: You think we don’t know that, Henry? Look what commander-in-chief did in Libya to celebrate the Arab Spring…all those dead Libyans. Now we have all those students raising hell about Wall Street and…well, just about all the czars in the White House came from Wall Street. We’ve been in bunker mode, hoping the idiots wouldn’t find out.
**O: Let’s stick to the subject, Jay. Henry, what should I do about an American Spring? I can call out the troops, you know, but that seems so…well somehow fey.
**H: Oh, hahahahaha, I say bring out the Bradleys and mow ’em down on Pennsylvania Avenue.
**J: He asked me, Edward, not you. Edward just means that a show of force is sometimes necessary, Barry. He’s not suggesting you pull an Assad on them…just scare the bejesus out of them but don’t use m-16s.
**H: I say, Barry, it’s like FDR said…the only fear is fear itself or something like that. Besides, you did in the Libyans, so the only enemy you have to fear is by way of reprisal…
**J: And reprisal means the Libyans and the Libyans couldn’t beat your Girl Scouts right now, Barry, since you pulverized them although it took months, not days, as you promised. So, as you Americans say…not to worry! There will be no American Spring.
**C: In other words (starts singing), happy days are here again.
**O: Stuff it Carney and go get me a cold one.
**J: Come, Edward, I can stand the colonists for just so long…uncivilized creatures!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Brokaw, Obama & Libya
I’ve just begun reading Tom Brokaw’s latest book, The Time of Our Lives. Each chapter begins with a fact and a question followed by three sections termed the Past, Present and Promise covering such subjects as education, government and social considerations.
I was brought up short on page ten with this paragraph: “The seething of the underclass [Arab Spring?] spread to Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi responded with vicious military attacks on the insurgents that drew international condemnation and resulted in NATO military help for the Libyan rebels.” (bold face mine). Whoa! Libya was attacked via executive order almost exclusively by President Barack Hussein Obama, who announced while beginning a vacation in Brazil on 19 March that he had ordered Americans to bomb the bejesus out of Libya (military targets, but what do bombs know?).
There followed intensive bombing of Libya primarily by the United States for ten straight days at a cost of $55 million per day, after which NATO was supposed to take up the action with Obama “leading from behind,” explaining that the U.S would merely continue to “support” the effort, which he said would be over in days, not months. The effort lasted for seven months and the U.S. wound up providing the lion’s share of everything such as the ammo and logistics, not to mention actual warfare. Cost to the U.S.: $1.1 billion.
In other words, Brokaw grossly misrepresented the truth. The Libya affair was exclusively an Obama project from the get-go, for reasons apparently known only to him since Libya, population two million less than that of New York City, with a troop-strength of only 76,000, has never been a threat to the United States or NATO, which, like the Pentagon, wanted no part of the affair but, also like the Pentagon, was bullied into it. Defense Secretary Gates described Obama’s massacre as done “on the fly,” i.e. with no planning, certainly not by the Defense Department. Both he and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen publicly announced their opposition in a Congressional hearing before Obama did anything. The president overruled them.
Obama instigated his own attempt at genocide by executive order, completely bypassing Congress, which was not consulted. Instead, State Secretary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Rice and White House apparatchik Samantha Power took the project to the United Nations and bullied that bunch of screwballs into approving a resolution to establish a no-fly zone (done in about four days) and the catch-all mandate, “use all means necessary short of foreign occupation to protect civilians.”
The women’s case ostensibly had to do with Qaddafi mistreating his people, an everyday occurrence in the Muslim countries throughout the Middle East. For instance, this is from Voice of America on 21 December, “The United Nations says at least 5,000 people have been killed during the nine-month uprising against the government of [Syrian president Bashar] al-Assad.” In the early 1980s, some 20,000 Syrians were killed by the government of Assad’s father, then the president. This is everyday stuff where Muslims kill each other over religious matters and deciding who will run the country! One wonders if Brokaw thinks another NATO action in Syria might be forthcoming. Perhaps he will ask Obama.
Did Brokaw drink the Kool-Aid concerning Libya? Not likely! He’s smarter than that. The logical conclusion is that he spread the propaganda provided by the White House in the willful destruction of a sovereign nation, never mind that Qaddafi was a tyrant. Most Muslim head honchos are tyrants. His misrepresenting of the Libya matter is on about the same level as that of Dan Rather, his counterpart at CBS at the time, in Rather’s monstrous lie in 2004 concerning George Bush and the Texas Air National Guard.
On page 13, Brokaw wrote this concerning Richard Nixon (or Tricky Dick, as Brokaw called him): “His oval office was a bunker stocked with illegal conspiracies and presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.” Nixon, besides never attacking another nation (Cambodian incursion in 1970 was to interdict supply routes during Vietnam War), finally did bring an end to the Vienam War. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution requires that Congress declare war, but Obama made war against Libya without even consulting Congress. He committed a high crime or misdemeanor, and the War Powers Act was not a factor since Libya had not in any way threatened this nation.
This is the appropriate requirement of the War Powers Act of 1973 for the deployment of the military: “into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.” The U.S. was not involved in any hostilities in Libya or anywhere near Libya when Obama ordered U.S. military action. When Congress declares war, the commander-in-chief prosecutes it, according to the Constitution. In the case of Libya, the United Nations declared war and President Obama prosecuted it. Shameful!
Brokaw, who no doubt took/takes pride in himself as an honest journalist, should have written that President Obama had committed an impeachable offense. Instead, he advanced the well-known agenda of NBC, his former employer, i.e., he provided cover for Obama. The U.S. didn’t even buy Libyan oil, but European NATO nations such as Britain and France did, so those nations had every reason not to disturb the status quo. To satisfy Obama, they spent their own resources for seven months…and for what? No one knows now who/what the government is in Libya.
Rewriting history is not attractive or honest. Brokaw should be ashamed.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
I was brought up short on page ten with this paragraph: “The seething of the underclass [Arab Spring?] spread to Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi responded with vicious military attacks on the insurgents that drew international condemnation and resulted in NATO military help for the Libyan rebels.” (bold face mine). Whoa! Libya was attacked via executive order almost exclusively by President Barack Hussein Obama, who announced while beginning a vacation in Brazil on 19 March that he had ordered Americans to bomb the bejesus out of Libya (military targets, but what do bombs know?).
There followed intensive bombing of Libya primarily by the United States for ten straight days at a cost of $55 million per day, after which NATO was supposed to take up the action with Obama “leading from behind,” explaining that the U.S would merely continue to “support” the effort, which he said would be over in days, not months. The effort lasted for seven months and the U.S. wound up providing the lion’s share of everything such as the ammo and logistics, not to mention actual warfare. Cost to the U.S.: $1.1 billion.
In other words, Brokaw grossly misrepresented the truth. The Libya affair was exclusively an Obama project from the get-go, for reasons apparently known only to him since Libya, population two million less than that of New York City, with a troop-strength of only 76,000, has never been a threat to the United States or NATO, which, like the Pentagon, wanted no part of the affair but, also like the Pentagon, was bullied into it. Defense Secretary Gates described Obama’s massacre as done “on the fly,” i.e. with no planning, certainly not by the Defense Department. Both he and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen publicly announced their opposition in a Congressional hearing before Obama did anything. The president overruled them.
Obama instigated his own attempt at genocide by executive order, completely bypassing Congress, which was not consulted. Instead, State Secretary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Rice and White House apparatchik Samantha Power took the project to the United Nations and bullied that bunch of screwballs into approving a resolution to establish a no-fly zone (done in about four days) and the catch-all mandate, “use all means necessary short of foreign occupation to protect civilians.”
The women’s case ostensibly had to do with Qaddafi mistreating his people, an everyday occurrence in the Muslim countries throughout the Middle East. For instance, this is from Voice of America on 21 December, “The United Nations says at least 5,000 people have been killed during the nine-month uprising against the government of [Syrian president Bashar] al-Assad.” In the early 1980s, some 20,000 Syrians were killed by the government of Assad’s father, then the president. This is everyday stuff where Muslims kill each other over religious matters and deciding who will run the country! One wonders if Brokaw thinks another NATO action in Syria might be forthcoming. Perhaps he will ask Obama.
Did Brokaw drink the Kool-Aid concerning Libya? Not likely! He’s smarter than that. The logical conclusion is that he spread the propaganda provided by the White House in the willful destruction of a sovereign nation, never mind that Qaddafi was a tyrant. Most Muslim head honchos are tyrants. His misrepresenting of the Libya matter is on about the same level as that of Dan Rather, his counterpart at CBS at the time, in Rather’s monstrous lie in 2004 concerning George Bush and the Texas Air National Guard.
On page 13, Brokaw wrote this concerning Richard Nixon (or Tricky Dick, as Brokaw called him): “His oval office was a bunker stocked with illegal conspiracies and presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.” Nixon, besides never attacking another nation (Cambodian incursion in 1970 was to interdict supply routes during Vietnam War), finally did bring an end to the Vienam War. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution requires that Congress declare war, but Obama made war against Libya without even consulting Congress. He committed a high crime or misdemeanor, and the War Powers Act was not a factor since Libya had not in any way threatened this nation.
This is the appropriate requirement of the War Powers Act of 1973 for the deployment of the military: “into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.” The U.S. was not involved in any hostilities in Libya or anywhere near Libya when Obama ordered U.S. military action. When Congress declares war, the commander-in-chief prosecutes it, according to the Constitution. In the case of Libya, the United Nations declared war and President Obama prosecuted it. Shameful!
Brokaw, who no doubt took/takes pride in himself as an honest journalist, should have written that President Obama had committed an impeachable offense. Instead, he advanced the well-known agenda of NBC, his former employer, i.e., he provided cover for Obama. The U.S. didn’t even buy Libyan oil, but European NATO nations such as Britain and France did, so those nations had every reason not to disturb the status quo. To satisfy Obama, they spent their own resources for seven months…and for what? No one knows now who/what the government is in Libya.
Rewriting history is not attractive or honest. Brokaw should be ashamed.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, January 05, 2012
The Senators & Comacho
In a monstrous display of hypocrisy, the Orange Bowl (04 January) head honchos accepted and then dis-invited Camacho sponsorship. The reason: Democrat Senators Lautenberg, Blumenthal and Durbin objected to Comacho, though they made no objection about other sponsors such as Bud Lite and Corona, beer-makers, and Bacardi, rum-maker. So…they were dismayed concerning Camacho’s legal cigars (surely shocked and appalled, the usual reaction by righteous senators when attacked by do-goodism) but figured beer and rum were okay.
After all, enjoying a cigar while driving might cause a bit of smoke to emanate skyward and cause global warming to melt the ice-caps and consequently waste the polar bears and cause Manhattan to become part surf and part beach, but driving while enjoying a good beer or a half-pint of rum could only cause someone to get killed, nothing serious. The choice was easy and the senators showed their superior intelligence in exerting their influence. By the way, the choice was also easy because none of this applied to their states.
This is no brief for tobacco, a harmful substance but certainly not more harmful than alcoholic beverages in any form. Indeed, where using tobacco may be harmful to an individual, it isn’t likely to cause harm to anyone else. Contrarily, the user of alcohol, besides also hurting himself just as in the case of tobacco, risks not only the possibility of hurting others but in thousands of cases every year causes death and destruction to others, making the probability quite substantive. Compared to the cigar-smoker, the imbiber of alcohol is a devil.
Apparently, the good senators felt that the cigar-flashing would deliver the wrong message to young people, as if the young people are not already more knowledgeable about both tobacco and alcohol (and all other drugs, of which tobacco is not one) than the senators. If that was their position, they were sending the message that tobacco is bad but drinking is okay; otherwise, they would have denounced all the forms of danger. To do that and be honest, they would have had to renounce both their drinking habits (if applicable) and the liquor lobby, the latter too great a sugar-daddy to politicians to upset.
The extreme irony, of course has to do with do-gooder Senator Dick Durbin, democrat of Illinois. This advocate for the youth is most famous for his comparing of American GIs (a segment of youth of which he has no understanding) in Iraq to Stalin’s murderous keepers of the Soviet Gulags, the equally murderous Storm Troopers of the butcher Adolph Hitler, who directed the dispatching of 11 million in the 1930s-40s, and Pol Pot’s murderers of millions in the “killing fields” of Cambodia – all recent history.
But that’s not all that establishes Durbin as a paragon of virtue with respect at least to the law and conscience. This is from the Chicago Tribune of 30 December 2008: "U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nevada) said in a statement this afternoon the Senate will not seat anyone Gov. Rod Blagojevich chooses to fill Illinois' vacant Senate post, amid word that the governor is set to name former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris. The statement also is signed by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who has repeatedly urged Blagojevich not to name a replacement for the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The statement specifically names Burris, but applies to any choice the governor might make."
This is from Reuters of 30 December 2008: "KAILUA, Hawaii (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said on Tuesday he agreed that Senate Democrats 'cannot accept' any move by Illinois' scandal-tarred governor to name a replacement for Obama's Senate seat." Get the picture? Durbin joined Reid and Obama in purposefully attempting to violate the U. S. Constitution with respect to the requirements for filling a vacated Senate seat. They committed treacherous acts although they were not successful. Burris was seated and served out the term vacated by Obama. All three – Durbin, Reid, Obama – at this point were tinhorn crooks playing one of the lowest games of politics – ganging up on the perceived vulnerable.
All of this is part and parcel of why citizens hold politicians in such low esteem, including Obama, who stays below the 50% mark in approval ratings, though much of that is due to his blatant incompetence and his proclivity for using the executive to browbeat the Congresspersons and anyone else he deems worthy of his disdain. Disgusting!
Equally disgusting is the subject at hand. Three senators, either so blind to reality or so opportunistic that they can’t see beyond the bridges of their respective noses, disparage the least harmful of two substances in the name of protecting the youth while consequently approving the most harmful. So…does the above apply…or are they just dumb as gourds?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
After all, enjoying a cigar while driving might cause a bit of smoke to emanate skyward and cause global warming to melt the ice-caps and consequently waste the polar bears and cause Manhattan to become part surf and part beach, but driving while enjoying a good beer or a half-pint of rum could only cause someone to get killed, nothing serious. The choice was easy and the senators showed their superior intelligence in exerting their influence. By the way, the choice was also easy because none of this applied to their states.
This is no brief for tobacco, a harmful substance but certainly not more harmful than alcoholic beverages in any form. Indeed, where using tobacco may be harmful to an individual, it isn’t likely to cause harm to anyone else. Contrarily, the user of alcohol, besides also hurting himself just as in the case of tobacco, risks not only the possibility of hurting others but in thousands of cases every year causes death and destruction to others, making the probability quite substantive. Compared to the cigar-smoker, the imbiber of alcohol is a devil.
Apparently, the good senators felt that the cigar-flashing would deliver the wrong message to young people, as if the young people are not already more knowledgeable about both tobacco and alcohol (and all other drugs, of which tobacco is not one) than the senators. If that was their position, they were sending the message that tobacco is bad but drinking is okay; otherwise, they would have denounced all the forms of danger. To do that and be honest, they would have had to renounce both their drinking habits (if applicable) and the liquor lobby, the latter too great a sugar-daddy to politicians to upset.
The extreme irony, of course has to do with do-gooder Senator Dick Durbin, democrat of Illinois. This advocate for the youth is most famous for his comparing of American GIs (a segment of youth of which he has no understanding) in Iraq to Stalin’s murderous keepers of the Soviet Gulags, the equally murderous Storm Troopers of the butcher Adolph Hitler, who directed the dispatching of 11 million in the 1930s-40s, and Pol Pot’s murderers of millions in the “killing fields” of Cambodia – all recent history.
But that’s not all that establishes Durbin as a paragon of virtue with respect at least to the law and conscience. This is from the Chicago Tribune of 30 December 2008: "U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nevada) said in a statement this afternoon the Senate will not seat anyone Gov. Rod Blagojevich chooses to fill Illinois' vacant Senate post, amid word that the governor is set to name former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris. The statement also is signed by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who has repeatedly urged Blagojevich not to name a replacement for the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The statement specifically names Burris, but applies to any choice the governor might make."
This is from Reuters of 30 December 2008: "KAILUA, Hawaii (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said on Tuesday he agreed that Senate Democrats 'cannot accept' any move by Illinois' scandal-tarred governor to name a replacement for Obama's Senate seat." Get the picture? Durbin joined Reid and Obama in purposefully attempting to violate the U. S. Constitution with respect to the requirements for filling a vacated Senate seat. They committed treacherous acts although they were not successful. Burris was seated and served out the term vacated by Obama. All three – Durbin, Reid, Obama – at this point were tinhorn crooks playing one of the lowest games of politics – ganging up on the perceived vulnerable.
All of this is part and parcel of why citizens hold politicians in such low esteem, including Obama, who stays below the 50% mark in approval ratings, though much of that is due to his blatant incompetence and his proclivity for using the executive to browbeat the Congresspersons and anyone else he deems worthy of his disdain. Disgusting!
Equally disgusting is the subject at hand. Three senators, either so blind to reality or so opportunistic that they can’t see beyond the bridges of their respective noses, disparage the least harmful of two substances in the name of protecting the youth while consequently approving the most harmful. So…does the above apply…or are they just dumb as gourds?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, January 02, 2012
PQRI...a Bad Joke?
The latest bureaucratic muddle emanating from Czar-Land, otherwise known as the Obama administration, is something called the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, which ties the payment for medical treatment of old codgers, presumably anyone 65 and up and therefore on Medicare/Medicaid, to a report-card indicating physician-capability. Governmental bureaucrats with non-physician backgrounds will complete the reports that will separate the good doctors from the bad ones and determine the amount of reimbursement…or none…for each. It seems unclear as to what this amounts to vis-à-vis the doctors especially with respect to punishment or certification but, as Speaker Pelosi would counsel, this will be known only after the program is in place.
This could do for the elderly patients what No Child Left Behind has done for education – kill the process. NCLB has developed a national cadre of the mentally-challenged…a hopeless failure. The PQRI, hopefully, will not kill medicine, but don’t bet the farm. If it does, the old codgers may suffer and/or die but…hey…life is not forever.
PQRI will require a bureaucracy of immense proportions since there are some 800,000 practicing physicians in this country. Since it’s unlikely that the physicians will be required to take a written test (imagine the number of non-physician folks required to grade especially the essay questions), the appropriate bureaucrat will probably have to comb through records, follow-up on patient complaints, check the legal archives for lawsuits, practically live in hospitals and physician-offices and try to evaluate such hugely important things as bedside manner or the proper care of a hangnail.
One can imagine the bureaucratic red-tape connected to having a body exhumed in order to discover if a physician took out the wrong lung or left a wayward sponge among the pancreas, the better to determine if the surgeon was perhaps drinking on the job, a certain no-no in PQRI, and must therefore be given an “F” on his report card and, worse, paid nothing. One can just imagine the increased activity in law schools, which always benefit enormously when the Congress/administration comes up with new legislation/regulations concerning anything. Top Czar Sunstein, the chief among regulators, has already stated that animals should have access to lawyers, so one can only imagine how many lawyers will be needed by both bureaucracy and doctors to save the country from malpractice.
What would be the subjects of testing – operating-room procedure; time spent with patient; bedside manner; office manner; sterilization techniques; legible writing of prescriptions (although PQRI demands everything but probing for the appendix to be done electronically, including records and prescriptions); treatment of colleagues, including harassment of nurses by either doctor-sex; harassment of patients; proper suturing/stapling/bone-sawing; full disclosure of successes/failures regarding surgical procedures, including the number of patients who lived/died, and proper preparation of patient for appearing before the “death panels?”
Obviously, nothing but a hands-on approach could effect the proper grades for the physicians. Consider the bureaucrat observing a heart bypass operation despite the fact that he doesn’t know a respirator from an ATM and wonders if the doctor is in danger of freezing the patient to death in hugely lowering his temperature, standard procedure. A grader, probably in disguise, will have to be in or preferably near the hospital nurse-stations to observe physician behavior, with an especial eye to harassment, discrimination, and proper completion of forms, not to mention off-color or ethnic jokes in case someone is offended.
PQRI is an idea that should never have come, an absolute absurdity. The paperwork alone would be monumental, causing a huge increase in what doctors already have to charge in order to hire the huge staffs to handle it. To have government bureaucrats determining the amount to be paid case-by-case concerning Medicare patients is unthinkable. This is regulation carried to a degree unimaginable in a democratic society, clearly driving the health-care system into a socialistic venue, which has always been the goal of President Obama. One can expect that all the thousands of new workers will be unionized as Obama’s debts to union money and warm bodies slaving on the campaign trail will be discharged.
Regulations by czars such as those concerning the proper light bulbs and the proper structure of processed foods, and presidential executive orders such as the assault on Libya resulting in no one knows how many civilian deaths have been the name of the game during Obama’s tenure. The republican candidates are railing against this takeover of the country by stealth, and they’re right. The time has come to put a stop to it and hopefully that will happen in November with respect to both the unbelievably weak Congress as well as the presidency. If this doesn’t happen, this nation will join olde Europe in heading for the ash-heap of history.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
This could do for the elderly patients what No Child Left Behind has done for education – kill the process. NCLB has developed a national cadre of the mentally-challenged…a hopeless failure. The PQRI, hopefully, will not kill medicine, but don’t bet the farm. If it does, the old codgers may suffer and/or die but…hey…life is not forever.
PQRI will require a bureaucracy of immense proportions since there are some 800,000 practicing physicians in this country. Since it’s unlikely that the physicians will be required to take a written test (imagine the number of non-physician folks required to grade especially the essay questions), the appropriate bureaucrat will probably have to comb through records, follow-up on patient complaints, check the legal archives for lawsuits, practically live in hospitals and physician-offices and try to evaluate such hugely important things as bedside manner or the proper care of a hangnail.
One can imagine the bureaucratic red-tape connected to having a body exhumed in order to discover if a physician took out the wrong lung or left a wayward sponge among the pancreas, the better to determine if the surgeon was perhaps drinking on the job, a certain no-no in PQRI, and must therefore be given an “F” on his report card and, worse, paid nothing. One can just imagine the increased activity in law schools, which always benefit enormously when the Congress/administration comes up with new legislation/regulations concerning anything. Top Czar Sunstein, the chief among regulators, has already stated that animals should have access to lawyers, so one can only imagine how many lawyers will be needed by both bureaucracy and doctors to save the country from malpractice.
What would be the subjects of testing – operating-room procedure; time spent with patient; bedside manner; office manner; sterilization techniques; legible writing of prescriptions (although PQRI demands everything but probing for the appendix to be done electronically, including records and prescriptions); treatment of colleagues, including harassment of nurses by either doctor-sex; harassment of patients; proper suturing/stapling/bone-sawing; full disclosure of successes/failures regarding surgical procedures, including the number of patients who lived/died, and proper preparation of patient for appearing before the “death panels?”
Obviously, nothing but a hands-on approach could effect the proper grades for the physicians. Consider the bureaucrat observing a heart bypass operation despite the fact that he doesn’t know a respirator from an ATM and wonders if the doctor is in danger of freezing the patient to death in hugely lowering his temperature, standard procedure. A grader, probably in disguise, will have to be in or preferably near the hospital nurse-stations to observe physician behavior, with an especial eye to harassment, discrimination, and proper completion of forms, not to mention off-color or ethnic jokes in case someone is offended.
PQRI is an idea that should never have come, an absolute absurdity. The paperwork alone would be monumental, causing a huge increase in what doctors already have to charge in order to hire the huge staffs to handle it. To have government bureaucrats determining the amount to be paid case-by-case concerning Medicare patients is unthinkable. This is regulation carried to a degree unimaginable in a democratic society, clearly driving the health-care system into a socialistic venue, which has always been the goal of President Obama. One can expect that all the thousands of new workers will be unionized as Obama’s debts to union money and warm bodies slaving on the campaign trail will be discharged.
Regulations by czars such as those concerning the proper light bulbs and the proper structure of processed foods, and presidential executive orders such as the assault on Libya resulting in no one knows how many civilian deaths have been the name of the game during Obama’s tenure. The republican candidates are railing against this takeover of the country by stealth, and they’re right. The time has come to put a stop to it and hopefully that will happen in November with respect to both the unbelievably weak Congress as well as the presidency. If this doesn’t happen, this nation will join olde Europe in heading for the ash-heap of history.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, December 29, 2011
DNC Memorandum #6
From the office of the ChairWOMAN, 28 December 2011
***Listen up! Enough already about the 90 rounds of golf POTUS has played!!! This is the word to put out in Town Hall meetings. Ninety rounds at four hours each compute to only 360 hours (for recent Harvard graduates), or only 45 working days, just under three months. POTUS does golf for a reason, namely, to invoke awareness of the importance of staying physically fit; however, discourage any talk by unionists that workers should have ten weeks of vacation per year in order to stay fit and do better work as a result. Also, do not show close-up pictures of POTUS if there’s any of what appears to be nicotine stain on his fingers. If by accident such a picture is shown, explain that POTUS has a rare but harmless skin disease known as glandular annulares, or something like that, caused by an allergy to teleprompters, the implication being that he makes a tremendous sacrifice every time he favors the hoi polloi with an eloquent, erudite, non-plagiarizing (for VPOTUS Biden, little joke there), brilliant speech.
***There’s been talk about POTUS and FLOTUS hitting the Treasury for $4 million for the current Hawaii holiday (all the planes and personnel and vehicles and secret-service guys, hairdressers, valets, secretaries, for instance). This must stop immediately, with the explanation that POTUS decided the importance of visiting Hawaii (statehood – 1959), as the last frontier state, outweighed any expense. The other last-frontier state, Alaska (also 1959), was obviously too cold at this time of year so POTUS, FLOTUS and COPOTUS (children of POTUS, for Yale graduates on staff) will honor that state when the weather is warm and the golf courses include mostly grass…probably a few years from now when global warming has made Alaska habitable. Check former VPOTUS Al Gore for the timetable, but do not consult his Inconvenient Truth since that document has been thoroughly disproved now.
***All staffers who appeared at the recent Occupy Wall Street protests but were not arrested will be docked a week’s pay since the objective was to embarrass the police forces account their torture of democrat officials, so designated by your letters under my name. Also, all claims concerning rape, unbearable conditions in the parks, forced use of outside visible facilities (trees and bushes) for bodily functions, frostbite, bedbugs-infestations, cocaine-lite and uncured marijuana will not be honored since POTUS has demanded further cuts and less spending by the DNC, the latter not for public consumption in Town Hall meetings since they sound too republican. When protests resume in the spring, the DNC, on orders from POTUS since 2012 is an election year, will not participate for obvious reasons.
***As the presidential campaigns will be narrowed soon, republicans are expected to question POTUS’s decision to unilaterally and by executive order bomb the bejesus out of Libya in March and finally kill off Qaddafi. This sounds ominously like assassination, prohibited by law, so a red/yellow/black/white paper is to be prepared by the DNC explaining his actions (POTUS’s, not Qaddafi’s), something POTUS could do but for the time-constraints since he is in full campaign-mode. Suggestions concerning his reasons are to be dropped in the Biden Box (through the slot, for recent Harvard graduates) located by the George Bush dart-board. No reference is to be made to Libya’s population (2 million less than that of New York City), the miniscule size of Libya’s military, or oil, especially the latter, which the Brits and Frogs badly need. Also, explain how Libya differed from Syria (it didn’t, actually) since the republicans will taunt POTUS for not attacking Syria. Accuse them (republicans, not the Syrians) of being mean-spirited and unpatriotic.
***As the predictable massacres continue in Iraq now that the U.S. has pulled out, remind everyone in the Town Hall meetings – early if in bars, before the attendees get too drunk – that POTUS was always against that war but do NOT mention that he wasn’t in Congress in 2003 and had no vote. Also, do not mention that VPOTUS Biden and State Secretary Clinton both voted for the Iraq invasion and that Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Senator Kerry was for it before he was against it and that he mentioned that U.S. GIs who fought there were just guys who couldn’t cut it in college. Don’t mention that some 4,500 of them died, lest folks consider their deaths in vain.
***This is from Memo #4: “POTUS has expressed brilliantly that the high unemployment rate is due to the Arab Spring and the Japanese tsunami and nuclear meltdown. He has requested [from the DNC] a red/yellow/black/white paper explaining why this is the case. Not one paper of not even purple has been submitted and White House Chief-of-Staff Daly is threatening to replace me if POTUS’s explanation is not made available and teleprompter-ready within a week.” The ChairWOMAN has been lenient concerning this matter and has tried to mollify POTUS and Daly, especially by suggesting how to drop the unemployment rate overnight from 9% to 8.6% by just declaring that a few hundred thousand folks (who’s counting) had just quit looking for jobs. This is untrue, of course, but the media has accepted this as fact – okay, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, CNN – and have spread this propaganda quite well; however, the explanation POTUS needs for the reason the Arab Spring and Japanese stuff are responsible for the unemployment rate has never been offered. So, heads will roll if this matter is not cleared up, and an explanation claiming that POTUS misspoke due to golf-fatigue will not be acceptable.
***It’s untrue that VPOTUS said in a speech about fair-share that fair is a three-letter word. VPOTUS Biden has declared that he never said that and will not say it again. The exact quote: “Every millionaire should pay his share and that means a five-letter word – fair!”
***It has come to my attention that toilet paper is being used too fast in the Rest Rooms. Be advised that only one panel at a time is allowed, no matter the circumstances, and that Al Gore is keeping tabs and reporting – between massages – his results to POTUS, who has declared all polar bears, seals, and South Pole mosquitoes as endangered species. Also, make a big deal out of the warm winter so far but do not – repeat – do NOT mention last December, when the whole country was under megatons of snow and temperatures were far below normal. In the meantime: HAPPY HUNTING…make that NEW YEAR!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
***Listen up! Enough already about the 90 rounds of golf POTUS has played!!! This is the word to put out in Town Hall meetings. Ninety rounds at four hours each compute to only 360 hours (for recent Harvard graduates), or only 45 working days, just under three months. POTUS does golf for a reason, namely, to invoke awareness of the importance of staying physically fit; however, discourage any talk by unionists that workers should have ten weeks of vacation per year in order to stay fit and do better work as a result. Also, do not show close-up pictures of POTUS if there’s any of what appears to be nicotine stain on his fingers. If by accident such a picture is shown, explain that POTUS has a rare but harmless skin disease known as glandular annulares, or something like that, caused by an allergy to teleprompters, the implication being that he makes a tremendous sacrifice every time he favors the hoi polloi with an eloquent, erudite, non-plagiarizing (for VPOTUS Biden, little joke there), brilliant speech.
***There’s been talk about POTUS and FLOTUS hitting the Treasury for $4 million for the current Hawaii holiday (all the planes and personnel and vehicles and secret-service guys, hairdressers, valets, secretaries, for instance). This must stop immediately, with the explanation that POTUS decided the importance of visiting Hawaii (statehood – 1959), as the last frontier state, outweighed any expense. The other last-frontier state, Alaska (also 1959), was obviously too cold at this time of year so POTUS, FLOTUS and COPOTUS (children of POTUS, for Yale graduates on staff) will honor that state when the weather is warm and the golf courses include mostly grass…probably a few years from now when global warming has made Alaska habitable. Check former VPOTUS Al Gore for the timetable, but do not consult his Inconvenient Truth since that document has been thoroughly disproved now.
***All staffers who appeared at the recent Occupy Wall Street protests but were not arrested will be docked a week’s pay since the objective was to embarrass the police forces account their torture of democrat officials, so designated by your letters under my name. Also, all claims concerning rape, unbearable conditions in the parks, forced use of outside visible facilities (trees and bushes) for bodily functions, frostbite, bedbugs-infestations, cocaine-lite and uncured marijuana will not be honored since POTUS has demanded further cuts and less spending by the DNC, the latter not for public consumption in Town Hall meetings since they sound too republican. When protests resume in the spring, the DNC, on orders from POTUS since 2012 is an election year, will not participate for obvious reasons.
***As the presidential campaigns will be narrowed soon, republicans are expected to question POTUS’s decision to unilaterally and by executive order bomb the bejesus out of Libya in March and finally kill off Qaddafi. This sounds ominously like assassination, prohibited by law, so a red/yellow/black/white paper is to be prepared by the DNC explaining his actions (POTUS’s, not Qaddafi’s), something POTUS could do but for the time-constraints since he is in full campaign-mode. Suggestions concerning his reasons are to be dropped in the Biden Box (through the slot, for recent Harvard graduates) located by the George Bush dart-board. No reference is to be made to Libya’s population (2 million less than that of New York City), the miniscule size of Libya’s military, or oil, especially the latter, which the Brits and Frogs badly need. Also, explain how Libya differed from Syria (it didn’t, actually) since the republicans will taunt POTUS for not attacking Syria. Accuse them (republicans, not the Syrians) of being mean-spirited and unpatriotic.
***As the predictable massacres continue in Iraq now that the U.S. has pulled out, remind everyone in the Town Hall meetings – early if in bars, before the attendees get too drunk – that POTUS was always against that war but do NOT mention that he wasn’t in Congress in 2003 and had no vote. Also, do not mention that VPOTUS Biden and State Secretary Clinton both voted for the Iraq invasion and that Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Senator Kerry was for it before he was against it and that he mentioned that U.S. GIs who fought there were just guys who couldn’t cut it in college. Don’t mention that some 4,500 of them died, lest folks consider their deaths in vain.
***This is from Memo #4: “POTUS has expressed brilliantly that the high unemployment rate is due to the Arab Spring and the Japanese tsunami and nuclear meltdown. He has requested [from the DNC] a red/yellow/black/white paper explaining why this is the case. Not one paper of not even purple has been submitted and White House Chief-of-Staff Daly is threatening to replace me if POTUS’s explanation is not made available and teleprompter-ready within a week.” The ChairWOMAN has been lenient concerning this matter and has tried to mollify POTUS and Daly, especially by suggesting how to drop the unemployment rate overnight from 9% to 8.6% by just declaring that a few hundred thousand folks (who’s counting) had just quit looking for jobs. This is untrue, of course, but the media has accepted this as fact – okay, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, CNN – and have spread this propaganda quite well; however, the explanation POTUS needs for the reason the Arab Spring and Japanese stuff are responsible for the unemployment rate has never been offered. So, heads will roll if this matter is not cleared up, and an explanation claiming that POTUS misspoke due to golf-fatigue will not be acceptable.
***It’s untrue that VPOTUS said in a speech about fair-share that fair is a three-letter word. VPOTUS Biden has declared that he never said that and will not say it again. The exact quote: “Every millionaire should pay his share and that means a five-letter word – fair!”
***It has come to my attention that toilet paper is being used too fast in the Rest Rooms. Be advised that only one panel at a time is allowed, no matter the circumstances, and that Al Gore is keeping tabs and reporting – between massages – his results to POTUS, who has declared all polar bears, seals, and South Pole mosquitoes as endangered species. Also, make a big deal out of the warm winter so far but do not – repeat – do NOT mention last December, when the whole country was under megatons of snow and temperatures were far below normal. In the meantime: HAPPY HUNTING…make that NEW YEAR!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, December 26, 2011
Political Correctness Gone Amok
The gullibility (or intentional bow to political correctness) in this country regarding Islam and its adherents/leaders, especially its ayatollahs, imams and mullahs, etc., is galling. The Christmas-day bombing of a Catholic church in Madalla, Nigeria, in which some 40 people died, was carried out by radical jihadists, a euphemism for murderous imbeciles. It is yet another example of the well-documented requirement in the Koran, the sacred book of Islam written circa 600 by an alleged illiterate named Mohammad, that the “infidel” (anyone not a Muslim) must be killed at every opportunity, especially, one presumes, that can be designed as well as occurring by “accident.”
The Nigerian genocide – simply the latest of myriads of them in Africa by radical Muslims – was not one that accrued to an “opportunity.” It was a blatant, planned bit of butchery carried out in connection with a Christian observance, thus remarking the hated Christians as special targets in the name of “Allah,” the god of the Koran and not to be confused with the God of the Holy Scriptures. Iranian President Ahmadinejad and his on-site ayatollah, Hoseyni Khameini, have made it abundantly and publicly clear that the aim of Islam is the death of every Jew, thus the total condemnation of Judeo-Christianity.
The latest slap in the face to both the U.S. military and the public in general is the decision by the Obama administration to allow Muslim cadets in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear scarves or turbans while in uniform, thus putting its imprimatur on Islam-as-acceptable, an act so despicable as to be considered treasonous. It is but the latest indication that President Obama seems more impressed with the first ten years of his upbringing as a Muslim than with his latter-day testimonies as to his Christianity, learned from his mentor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, who likely would love nothing better than the denigration of the military.
It’s perfectly obvious that the president intends for that turban-policy to be inculcated (executive order by the commander-in-chief without so much as a mention to either the military or Congress?) as soon as possible in all the military branches. Imagine U.S. soldiers in their turbans facing the Taliban or al Qaeda butchers in their turbans. This is sickening. This is the way Obama attacked and devastated Libya – by executive order – so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect him to do the same in this matter. The wimpy Congress is not even a player – just roll over and play dead.
Now that the U.S. GIs have left Iraq, the massacres have begun…all perfectly predictable right from the start of the misguided nation-building effort that George Bush said at the beginning of his first term would never happen. He could have and should have declared victory in May 2003, brought the troops home and finished off al Qaeda in Afghanistan then. The same mistake is being made now in Afghanistan, not least because Americans do not understand Muslim thinking, i.e., that human life, far from being sacred, is expendable whenever some Muslim cleric says it is.
One has only to look at what’s happening in Syria when contemplating allowing the turban to be part of a U.S. military uniform. Muslims (symbolized by the turban/scarf) don’t enjoy killing just any old infidel much more than they delight in wasting each other. Folks who blame the U.S. for the tens of thousands of civilian lives lost in Iraq would do well to remember that virtually all of those lives were snuffed out as Muslims killed Muslims, as in Sunni vs. Shiite vs. Kurd vs. al Qaeda. In Syria, the Muslim government is killing Muslim citizens, just as happened in Yemen, Libya, Tunisia or other Islamic-controlled states. Saddam managed to kill 400,000 fellow Muslims.
When U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan perpetrated his very own massacre at Ft. Hood in 2009, he shouted “Allah Akbar” (or something like that), meaning that his was an act in the name of his god. He might as well have been wearing a turban, the better to display the symbolism involved, namely, that Muslims intend to set up a worldwide Caliphate, presumably cowing “mere mortals” into submission through their terrorist acts of mind-numbing insensitivity, especially regarding women and children. In Muslim-country, life is about the cheapest thing around.
This calls into question, notwithstanding all politically correct bromides to the contrary, whether or not an admitted Muslim should be allowed even to serve in the military, much less dress any old way. Hasan was/is the prime example of what any non-Muslim soldier would have to wonder about when a Muslim GI was at his back. Muslim Jihad “sleeper cells” are known to be in this country. What happens if a cell-member decides to pave his way to the 72 virgins by martyring himself while in the process of killing others? Hasan probably figured to be fatally shot on the spot but he lived, though he probably feels that some day he’ll make it to that paradise.
Turbans and/or scarves? Absolutely not! What happens if a Jewish soldier demands the right to wear a yarmulke instead of the proper uniform cap? What happens when a GI decides it’s against his religion (whether or not true) to wear any kind of headwear? Will Obama just “understand” and put out an executive order that all military folks can wear any old kind of hat/cap desired…or none at all? This administration operates perpetually in the silly-season, especially with respect to the military, of which it has virtually no understanding.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The Nigerian genocide – simply the latest of myriads of them in Africa by radical Muslims – was not one that accrued to an “opportunity.” It was a blatant, planned bit of butchery carried out in connection with a Christian observance, thus remarking the hated Christians as special targets in the name of “Allah,” the god of the Koran and not to be confused with the God of the Holy Scriptures. Iranian President Ahmadinejad and his on-site ayatollah, Hoseyni Khameini, have made it abundantly and publicly clear that the aim of Islam is the death of every Jew, thus the total condemnation of Judeo-Christianity.
The latest slap in the face to both the U.S. military and the public in general is the decision by the Obama administration to allow Muslim cadets in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear scarves or turbans while in uniform, thus putting its imprimatur on Islam-as-acceptable, an act so despicable as to be considered treasonous. It is but the latest indication that President Obama seems more impressed with the first ten years of his upbringing as a Muslim than with his latter-day testimonies as to his Christianity, learned from his mentor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, who likely would love nothing better than the denigration of the military.
It’s perfectly obvious that the president intends for that turban-policy to be inculcated (executive order by the commander-in-chief without so much as a mention to either the military or Congress?) as soon as possible in all the military branches. Imagine U.S. soldiers in their turbans facing the Taliban or al Qaeda butchers in their turbans. This is sickening. This is the way Obama attacked and devastated Libya – by executive order – so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect him to do the same in this matter. The wimpy Congress is not even a player – just roll over and play dead.
Now that the U.S. GIs have left Iraq, the massacres have begun…all perfectly predictable right from the start of the misguided nation-building effort that George Bush said at the beginning of his first term would never happen. He could have and should have declared victory in May 2003, brought the troops home and finished off al Qaeda in Afghanistan then. The same mistake is being made now in Afghanistan, not least because Americans do not understand Muslim thinking, i.e., that human life, far from being sacred, is expendable whenever some Muslim cleric says it is.
One has only to look at what’s happening in Syria when contemplating allowing the turban to be part of a U.S. military uniform. Muslims (symbolized by the turban/scarf) don’t enjoy killing just any old infidel much more than they delight in wasting each other. Folks who blame the U.S. for the tens of thousands of civilian lives lost in Iraq would do well to remember that virtually all of those lives were snuffed out as Muslims killed Muslims, as in Sunni vs. Shiite vs. Kurd vs. al Qaeda. In Syria, the Muslim government is killing Muslim citizens, just as happened in Yemen, Libya, Tunisia or other Islamic-controlled states. Saddam managed to kill 400,000 fellow Muslims.
When U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan perpetrated his very own massacre at Ft. Hood in 2009, he shouted “Allah Akbar” (or something like that), meaning that his was an act in the name of his god. He might as well have been wearing a turban, the better to display the symbolism involved, namely, that Muslims intend to set up a worldwide Caliphate, presumably cowing “mere mortals” into submission through their terrorist acts of mind-numbing insensitivity, especially regarding women and children. In Muslim-country, life is about the cheapest thing around.
This calls into question, notwithstanding all politically correct bromides to the contrary, whether or not an admitted Muslim should be allowed even to serve in the military, much less dress any old way. Hasan was/is the prime example of what any non-Muslim soldier would have to wonder about when a Muslim GI was at his back. Muslim Jihad “sleeper cells” are known to be in this country. What happens if a cell-member decides to pave his way to the 72 virgins by martyring himself while in the process of killing others? Hasan probably figured to be fatally shot on the spot but he lived, though he probably feels that some day he’ll make it to that paradise.
Turbans and/or scarves? Absolutely not! What happens if a Jewish soldier demands the right to wear a yarmulke instead of the proper uniform cap? What happens when a GI decides it’s against his religion (whether or not true) to wear any kind of headwear? Will Obama just “understand” and put out an executive order that all military folks can wear any old kind of hat/cap desired…or none at all? This administration operates perpetually in the silly-season, especially with respect to the military, of which it has virtually no understanding.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Professors & Facts...Mutually Exclusive?
The consensus among “ordinary” people is that the administrations and faculties of most colleges and universities in the U.S. are somewhere near the far-left, lunatic fringe of the Democrat Party or perhaps some other ultra-liberal establishment like the Greens, or maybe something called “Nader’s Raiders.” Without question, these institutions, especially given the tenure factor, are often beset and stuck with profs who spread whacko stuff such as that of the infamous Ward Churchill, onetime prof at the University of Colorado.
In an essay of 2001, Churchill wrote that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the WTC were a natural and unavoidable consequence of what he viewed as unlawful U.S. policy, and he referred to the “technocratic corps” working in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.” Pretty heady stuff and not too copascetic! Eichmann was prominent in the Hitler pogroms in which six million Jews, among about 11 million human beings altogether, were incomprehensibly tortured and killed in the 1930s-40s.
Robert Olson, a professor at the University of Kentucky, writes regularly for the Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky’s second largest newspaper, part of the McClatchy group. In a recent article concerning the U.S. pullout from Iraq and the state of the country left behind, Olson wrote, “Moreover, they [the Shi’a] were brought to power by a Christian nation for its own hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East.” It’s hard to imagine a greater lie than that. If the U.S. had “hegemonic ambitions,” it wouldn’t have pulled out in the first place or at least wouldn’t have before making arrangements preempting Iraq’s oil reserves for this country at this country’s stated price.
Olson also wrote this in the article, as mind-boggling as it is: “It is difficult for all Arabs, not just the Arabs of Iraq, to understand why a country like the U.S. — which fought a civil war in which 4 million people died to save the union — would so nonchalantly destroy another sovereign country.” The people trying to save the Union lived in the North, population 22 million in 1860. According to Olson, more than 18% of them died 1861-65 trying to save the Union. The paper has left that loony-tunes stuff in the online edition, so it apparently stands by Olson’s wacky claim. Weird!
Olson wrote this: “Not only did U.S. policies lead to Shi'a coming to power, but also led to the division of the country between Kurds and Arabs.” Olson apparently forgot that Saddam, an Arab, along with his Sunni-Arab cohorts, gassed and otherwise tried to kill the Kurds years ago precisely because there was a “division of the country between Kurds and Arabs.” When Saddam was captured, pilots from the U.S. and other nations had been flying 24/7 over Kurd territory for about 12 years to keep the butcher from continuing to bomb and gas them.
As laughable as it is, Olson wrote this concerning the pullout: “Washington saw the handwriting on the barricades: it was time to leave.” The schedule for leaving was set during the Bush administration and Washington (Obama) was merely implementing it, just as he was merely implementing an objective established before he took office when Osama was dispatched. Nothing new, although Obama-freaks seem to think he was virtually divine (or maybe a Navy Seal in disguise?) since it happened on his watch.
This is from the Miami Herald (also McClatchy) of 29 October: “First of all, the withdrawal date was set by a Republican president who began this war, George W. Bush. The Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq signed on November 17, 2008, when Mr. Bush was in the White House, leaves no room for ambiguity: ‘All U.S. forces are to withdraw from all Iraqi territory, waters, and airspace no later than the 31st of December 2011’.” Olson was not being just disingenuous, he was being dishonest.
This kind of misrepresentation is unconscionable and should be intolerable in the pages of a newspaper. If the editors expect to be taken seriously, they need to read Olson’s stuff before they print it. If they agree with him, they need to consider another line of work, else the paper’s credibility, if any, is out the window. The actual tragedy, however, lies in the fact that someone like Olson is turned loose on immature college kids to spread this kind of venom. As for the paper, it apparently considers its readers to be dumb as gourds.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
In an essay of 2001, Churchill wrote that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the WTC were a natural and unavoidable consequence of what he viewed as unlawful U.S. policy, and he referred to the “technocratic corps” working in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.” Pretty heady stuff and not too copascetic! Eichmann was prominent in the Hitler pogroms in which six million Jews, among about 11 million human beings altogether, were incomprehensibly tortured and killed in the 1930s-40s.
Robert Olson, a professor at the University of Kentucky, writes regularly for the Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky’s second largest newspaper, part of the McClatchy group. In a recent article concerning the U.S. pullout from Iraq and the state of the country left behind, Olson wrote, “Moreover, they [the Shi’a] were brought to power by a Christian nation for its own hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East.” It’s hard to imagine a greater lie than that. If the U.S. had “hegemonic ambitions,” it wouldn’t have pulled out in the first place or at least wouldn’t have before making arrangements preempting Iraq’s oil reserves for this country at this country’s stated price.
Olson also wrote this in the article, as mind-boggling as it is: “It is difficult for all Arabs, not just the Arabs of Iraq, to understand why a country like the U.S. — which fought a civil war in which 4 million people died to save the union — would so nonchalantly destroy another sovereign country.” The people trying to save the Union lived in the North, population 22 million in 1860. According to Olson, more than 18% of them died 1861-65 trying to save the Union. The paper has left that loony-tunes stuff in the online edition, so it apparently stands by Olson’s wacky claim. Weird!
Olson wrote this: “Not only did U.S. policies lead to Shi'a coming to power, but also led to the division of the country between Kurds and Arabs.” Olson apparently forgot that Saddam, an Arab, along with his Sunni-Arab cohorts, gassed and otherwise tried to kill the Kurds years ago precisely because there was a “division of the country between Kurds and Arabs.” When Saddam was captured, pilots from the U.S. and other nations had been flying 24/7 over Kurd territory for about 12 years to keep the butcher from continuing to bomb and gas them.
As laughable as it is, Olson wrote this concerning the pullout: “Washington saw the handwriting on the barricades: it was time to leave.” The schedule for leaving was set during the Bush administration and Washington (Obama) was merely implementing it, just as he was merely implementing an objective established before he took office when Osama was dispatched. Nothing new, although Obama-freaks seem to think he was virtually divine (or maybe a Navy Seal in disguise?) since it happened on his watch.
This is from the Miami Herald (also McClatchy) of 29 October: “First of all, the withdrawal date was set by a Republican president who began this war, George W. Bush. The Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq signed on November 17, 2008, when Mr. Bush was in the White House, leaves no room for ambiguity: ‘All U.S. forces are to withdraw from all Iraqi territory, waters, and airspace no later than the 31st of December 2011’.” Olson was not being just disingenuous, he was being dishonest.
This kind of misrepresentation is unconscionable and should be intolerable in the pages of a newspaper. If the editors expect to be taken seriously, they need to read Olson’s stuff before they print it. If they agree with him, they need to consider another line of work, else the paper’s credibility, if any, is out the window. The actual tragedy, however, lies in the fact that someone like Olson is turned loose on immature college kids to spread this kind of venom. As for the paper, it apparently considers its readers to be dumb as gourds.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Yanks Gone...Now, the PURGE
This is from Reuters, 19 December: “Iraqi authorities issued an arrest warrant for Sunni Muslim Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi on Monday for suspected ties to assassinations and bombings, a decision likely to fuel sectarian tensions after the U.S. troop withdrawal.” A similar action in the U.S. would be a contingent of U.S. Marshals attempting to arrest Vice President Biden.
President Obama and Biden belong to different churches but to the same party. Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki is a Shiite, religion-wise, while his veep is a Sunni, so these two also don’t belong to the same mosque, there being tense and often bloody relations between Shiites and Sunnis. The political parties to which they belong don’t really matter, since the matter of life and death, as well as that of government, is posited on religion, not politics. Maliki, acording to Reuters, is also trying to get rid of his own deputy prime minister, Sunni adherent Saleh al-Mutlaq, through a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.
All of this would invite a bit of laughter if it weren’t so serious, at least for the Iraqis. One only has to imagine the U.S. president and veep being from different parties to see the analogy…wouldn’t work. The notion that Sunnis and Shiites will just bury the hatchet now that the heavy stuff is over constitutes wishful thinking. The heavy stuff – the purge – has not even started yet.
With only 40% of the population being Sunni, Saddam made the whole country his personal charnel house anyhow, beginning in 1979, dispatching some 400,000 souls and no telling how many others terribly tortured until his overthrow by the Yanks in 2003. He did it by using brute force. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. The American intervention has made it possible for the overwhelming Shiite majority to do its thing. Its “thing” will be treatment in kind – just human nature.
Remember Muktada al-Sadr, the bearded, diminutive Shiite cleric of some sort who put together a huge Shiite army and became a terrible problem soon after the invasion. He later cooled it a bit, then went off to Qom, Iran’s holy city, for a bit of theological training…at least that’s the word. In September, he told his followers to stop attacking Americans until after the end of the year, when there wouldn’t be any Americans. The betting here is that he will elevate himself, using his army, to the ayatollah-ship of Iraq someday, probably cementing his own brand of Shiite-ism with that of Iran. In any case, a few thoughts:
The Crescent-Scimitar of Hate
The future ayatollah had it right
And proved it in Iraq convincingly
That one day, Yanks all gone and out of sight,
Jihad would run its course bloodthirstily;
He proved it when he raised his own armed force
To fight the enemies of Shi’ite might,
Including Yanks and Kurds and Sunnis coarse,
His minions raised their prayers and made the fight;
Then, after using terror, bloodshed, fear,
He called them off…await another day,
The day when Yanks were gone and they would hear
The muezzins wail from towers…the time to slay;
The future ayatollah went to Qom,
The holy city in next-door Iran,
To study there Mohammad’s kingdom-come,
And there to plan his army’s Rubicon;
Not long before, the Sunnis fought Iran
And in the process used their poison gas,
Which means they gassed Shi’ites, with guilt of none,
And also means revenge must come to pass;
So…whether in Iran or in Iraq,
The future ayatollah will insist
All Shi’ites must unite in solid bloc,
Allow no Sunnis even to resist;
The Kurds will either die or bow the knee,
The future ayatollah will insist,
The sharpened Shi’ite scimitar will be
The fate of those who foolishly resist;
The Jihad knows no race or creed or plea,
The scimitar, fine-honed, will purge like fire,
The Sunnis, weak, will not be Muslims free…
They will be thralls or just to hell aspire;
The world will call the purge a civil war,
The future ayatollah will insist,
And then explain it as a holy war
From which Shi’ites will never cease, desist;
United Nations in its sessions met
Will panic at the ayatollah’s scheme
And pass its resolutions, tersely set,
To interrupt the genocidal theme;
The future ayatollah will then scoff
And go about his purge relentlessly
And claim such fiats nil…not worth a cough…
The Shi’ites’ sword will rule and make them free;
And then when Shi’ites rule each Arab state
And form the core of worldwide Caliphate,
They will deliver to the world its fate…
The crescent-scimitar of Shi’ite hate.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
President Obama and Biden belong to different churches but to the same party. Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki is a Shiite, religion-wise, while his veep is a Sunni, so these two also don’t belong to the same mosque, there being tense and often bloody relations between Shiites and Sunnis. The political parties to which they belong don’t really matter, since the matter of life and death, as well as that of government, is posited on religion, not politics. Maliki, acording to Reuters, is also trying to get rid of his own deputy prime minister, Sunni adherent Saleh al-Mutlaq, through a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.
All of this would invite a bit of laughter if it weren’t so serious, at least for the Iraqis. One only has to imagine the U.S. president and veep being from different parties to see the analogy…wouldn’t work. The notion that Sunnis and Shiites will just bury the hatchet now that the heavy stuff is over constitutes wishful thinking. The heavy stuff – the purge – has not even started yet.
With only 40% of the population being Sunni, Saddam made the whole country his personal charnel house anyhow, beginning in 1979, dispatching some 400,000 souls and no telling how many others terribly tortured until his overthrow by the Yanks in 2003. He did it by using brute force. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. The American intervention has made it possible for the overwhelming Shiite majority to do its thing. Its “thing” will be treatment in kind – just human nature.
Remember Muktada al-Sadr, the bearded, diminutive Shiite cleric of some sort who put together a huge Shiite army and became a terrible problem soon after the invasion. He later cooled it a bit, then went off to Qom, Iran’s holy city, for a bit of theological training…at least that’s the word. In September, he told his followers to stop attacking Americans until after the end of the year, when there wouldn’t be any Americans. The betting here is that he will elevate himself, using his army, to the ayatollah-ship of Iraq someday, probably cementing his own brand of Shiite-ism with that of Iran. In any case, a few thoughts:
The Crescent-Scimitar of Hate
The future ayatollah had it right
And proved it in Iraq convincingly
That one day, Yanks all gone and out of sight,
Jihad would run its course bloodthirstily;
He proved it when he raised his own armed force
To fight the enemies of Shi’ite might,
Including Yanks and Kurds and Sunnis coarse,
His minions raised their prayers and made the fight;
Then, after using terror, bloodshed, fear,
He called them off…await another day,
The day when Yanks were gone and they would hear
The muezzins wail from towers…the time to slay;
The future ayatollah went to Qom,
The holy city in next-door Iran,
To study there Mohammad’s kingdom-come,
And there to plan his army’s Rubicon;
Not long before, the Sunnis fought Iran
And in the process used their poison gas,
Which means they gassed Shi’ites, with guilt of none,
And also means revenge must come to pass;
So…whether in Iran or in Iraq,
The future ayatollah will insist
All Shi’ites must unite in solid bloc,
Allow no Sunnis even to resist;
The Kurds will either die or bow the knee,
The future ayatollah will insist,
The sharpened Shi’ite scimitar will be
The fate of those who foolishly resist;
The Jihad knows no race or creed or plea,
The scimitar, fine-honed, will purge like fire,
The Sunnis, weak, will not be Muslims free…
They will be thralls or just to hell aspire;
The world will call the purge a civil war,
The future ayatollah will insist,
And then explain it as a holy war
From which Shi’ites will never cease, desist;
United Nations in its sessions met
Will panic at the ayatollah’s scheme
And pass its resolutions, tersely set,
To interrupt the genocidal theme;
The future ayatollah will then scoff
And go about his purge relentlessly
And claim such fiats nil…not worth a cough…
The Shi’ites’ sword will rule and make them free;
And then when Shi’ites rule each Arab state
And form the core of worldwide Caliphate,
They will deliver to the world its fate…
The crescent-scimitar of Shi’ite hate.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Obama's "Soul Brother" -- the Rabbi
Much has been written and said about President Obama’s religion, especially since he made it clear in 2008 that he had been a part of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright’s church for some 20 or so years, meaning that he had listened consistently to the reverend castigate the country which Obama wanted to lead. For instance, Wright had made it clear that the “white folk” had somehow afflicted the “black folk” with HIV/Aids.
Wright’s church – and Obama’s by extension – was/is a part of the denomination known as the United Church of Christ, which in 2005 officially made it clear that homosexuals should have the right to marry each other. That may or may not have anything to do with the complete 180-degree flip-flop that Obama managed between 2008, when he said marriage should be between a man and woman (as federal law requires), and now, when he claims that his church has it right, putting his imprimatur on eschewing the law as well as a multitude of state constitutions, which have it set in constitutional concrete that marriage is only between a man and woman.
For the first ten years of his life, Obama was raised as a Muslim, both his father and step-father being of that persuasion, the former an African and the latter an Indonesian. He has made it a point to apologize for the United States to nations that are nearly 100 percent Muslim, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He even, by direct order, attacked and destroyed Libya earlier this year, which is characteristic of Muslims in that they kill each other with about as much vim and vigor as they kill the “infidel.”
Now, it would appear that Obama has a “soul brother,” Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of New York City, who said this in a newspaper article the other day: “If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful [Christians], and emboldened faithful [Christians] can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.” There’s not much doubt how the Rabbi feels about Christians, considering them about on the level of the occupants of a zoo, operating on instinct only.
This is what Obama said about working-class voters – most folks – in April 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Granted he didn’t say that for public consumption (seems like it was in the company of the Hollywood elite), but he left little doubt about how he feels about the part of the electorate that includes millions of people who call themselves Christians, i.e., about on the level of the zoo-crowd.
These men typify the cynical, elitist, often pseudo-intellectual university-faculty crowds that look down their noses at the hoi polloi, barely abiding their existence but, at least in Obama’s case, desperately needing them in order to carry out their quintessential degree of opportunism concerning the “bread of life,” as a Christian might put it. Anything goes in order to “get what I want.” This explains the Obama flip-flop on marriage in just a few months, assuming he wasn’t lying in 2008, though one suspects he was. He thinks he needs the miniscule homosexual vote now, takes his own party for granted and says what he thinks will sell.
In the process, Obama makes it clear that his Christianity is not like that of most Christians, to wit, that the scriptures graphically denounce homosexual behavior as abominable and sinful, thus homosexual marriage. Indeed, from Genesis to Revelation, the insistence throughout the Bible is that marriage is between a man and a woman, no matter who the Bible-writer is.
Though he tried desperately in that famous Philadelphia speech ostensibly on race but actually as an effort to vindicate Wright, whom he soonafter threw under the bus anyway, Obama made it plain how he feels about the “typical white person,” to whom he referred in the speech. One wonders, then, if his “spiritual” side is more Muslim than Christian or more nothing than Christian.
Perhaps the rabbi can be excused since he didn’t specify synagogues as objects for burning if Tebow should win the Super bowl, only mosques. Of course, he did mention that Tebow’s crowd might bash gays in the event of a win, and that certainly should put him in favor with Obama, who perhaps will invite him to the White House for a beer, maybe even with Joe Biden in attendence.
Since both men specifically accused Christians of the meanness attached to having a collective jaudiced eye toward immigrants, they would have much to discuss. In his campaign in 2008, Obama called for a national police force to be on roughly the same status as the nation’s armed forces. This reminds of Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s KGB, of course, but it would ceratinly handle those dangerous Christians, especially around Super-Bowl time. The Rabbi might give this a thought. Obama already has.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wright’s church – and Obama’s by extension – was/is a part of the denomination known as the United Church of Christ, which in 2005 officially made it clear that homosexuals should have the right to marry each other. That may or may not have anything to do with the complete 180-degree flip-flop that Obama managed between 2008, when he said marriage should be between a man and woman (as federal law requires), and now, when he claims that his church has it right, putting his imprimatur on eschewing the law as well as a multitude of state constitutions, which have it set in constitutional concrete that marriage is only between a man and woman.
For the first ten years of his life, Obama was raised as a Muslim, both his father and step-father being of that persuasion, the former an African and the latter an Indonesian. He has made it a point to apologize for the United States to nations that are nearly 100 percent Muslim, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He even, by direct order, attacked and destroyed Libya earlier this year, which is characteristic of Muslims in that they kill each other with about as much vim and vigor as they kill the “infidel.”
Now, it would appear that Obama has a “soul brother,” Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of New York City, who said this in a newspaper article the other day: “If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful [Christians], and emboldened faithful [Christians] can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.” There’s not much doubt how the Rabbi feels about Christians, considering them about on the level of the occupants of a zoo, operating on instinct only.
This is what Obama said about working-class voters – most folks – in April 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Granted he didn’t say that for public consumption (seems like it was in the company of the Hollywood elite), but he left little doubt about how he feels about the part of the electorate that includes millions of people who call themselves Christians, i.e., about on the level of the zoo-crowd.
These men typify the cynical, elitist, often pseudo-intellectual university-faculty crowds that look down their noses at the hoi polloi, barely abiding their existence but, at least in Obama’s case, desperately needing them in order to carry out their quintessential degree of opportunism concerning the “bread of life,” as a Christian might put it. Anything goes in order to “get what I want.” This explains the Obama flip-flop on marriage in just a few months, assuming he wasn’t lying in 2008, though one suspects he was. He thinks he needs the miniscule homosexual vote now, takes his own party for granted and says what he thinks will sell.
In the process, Obama makes it clear that his Christianity is not like that of most Christians, to wit, that the scriptures graphically denounce homosexual behavior as abominable and sinful, thus homosexual marriage. Indeed, from Genesis to Revelation, the insistence throughout the Bible is that marriage is between a man and a woman, no matter who the Bible-writer is.
Though he tried desperately in that famous Philadelphia speech ostensibly on race but actually as an effort to vindicate Wright, whom he soonafter threw under the bus anyway, Obama made it plain how he feels about the “typical white person,” to whom he referred in the speech. One wonders, then, if his “spiritual” side is more Muslim than Christian or more nothing than Christian.
Perhaps the rabbi can be excused since he didn’t specify synagogues as objects for burning if Tebow should win the Super bowl, only mosques. Of course, he did mention that Tebow’s crowd might bash gays in the event of a win, and that certainly should put him in favor with Obama, who perhaps will invite him to the White House for a beer, maybe even with Joe Biden in attendence.
Since both men specifically accused Christians of the meanness attached to having a collective jaudiced eye toward immigrants, they would have much to discuss. In his campaign in 2008, Obama called for a national police force to be on roughly the same status as the nation’s armed forces. This reminds of Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s KGB, of course, but it would ceratinly handle those dangerous Christians, especially around Super-Bowl time. The Rabbi might give this a thought. Obama already has.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Herald-Leader Hatchet-Job on Sergeant Meyer
The Lexington Herald-Leader of 15 December featured banner headlines the width of the front page (10.5 inches) and 3.5 inches high concerning the fact that (gasp and three palpitations) there were some irregularities in the account concerning the awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor to Kentucky Marine Dakota Meyer recently by no less than the president. The paper devoted 3.5 full pages in the First Section to the account, prepared by Jonathan Landay, a writer employed by the McClatchy organization, owner of the newspaper, who was embedded in the military unit in which Meyer saw action.
Granted that McClatchy, as well as the Knight-Ridder outfit from which it bought the paper a few years ago, occupies the left-lunatic fringe of the liberal establishment and would naturally turn a jaundiced eye on anything military, this still seemed a bit like overkill. Four people, each standing on a different corner of an intersection, would look at the same auto accident on a calm, cloudless day and come forth with four different accounts. McClatchy apparently believes that in a lengthy firefight involving multiple deaths and wounded everyone involved should recount exactly, precisely, unmistakably, and completely accurately every single thing that happened.
There were, as might be expected, some discrepancies in the accounts concerning the action, but the notion that Landay, who obviously had an agenda, should be taken more seriously than anyone else is laughable. The account deserved a significant mention, not an outright effort (including maps and huge pictures) to virtually demonize Meyer, who certainly did not request consideration for a medal. He was nominated, as per protocol, by his commanding officer. Landay, a civilian the troops had to be bothered with protecting instead of focusing entirely on keeping themselves and their comrades alive, predictably said Meyer deserved the medal, as if anyone should care what he thought. In the online McClatchy bio of Landay, there is no mention that he has had any military experience.
In April 2007, Landay appeared on the PBS leftist corner known as Bill Moyers Journal to condemn directly the mainstream media’s mishandling of its reporting of the Iraqi war as alleged by them and, indirectly, the Bush administration. Dan Rather, famous (actually, infamous) for perpetrating the fraud concerning George Bush and the Texas Air National Guard in 2004, also appeared on the program, so the Landay/McClatchy bias is obvious. Nobody gets farther left than Moyers or more unsusceptible to belief than Rather.
As for the current matter, expect editorial comment in the coming days to the effect that war is bad, shouldn’t happen, volunteers can expect to be killed and that not even a scintilla of discrepancy should ever infiltrate a government document or action, never mind that the paper has to do its share of corrections. Also expect an editorial concerning the near-majestic actions of the president in getting the troops out of Iraq, notwithstanding that he only fulfilled the plans put into place before he became president. After all, his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded after only a few months in the presidency during which he began his worldwide apology efforts, places him on a level that’s nearly otherworldly.
As for the H-L, it has a built-in proclivity for hatchet jobs on entities it doesn’t like and has shown in the past just how seriously it takes this important responsibility. For instance, it didn’t like the idea that Southland Christian Church, probably the second largest church in the state, didn’t hold services on Christmas Day in 2005, and castigated the congregation royally. There was a darker underlying element at work, however, i.e., that Southland represented to the paper the Christian mindset, which is anathema to the “enlightened,” notably those in the editorial department and the “mainstream media” in general.
Or take the “University of the Cumberlands Affair” of March 2006. On seven days of a nine-day period, the paper made the expulsion of a homosexual student who “outed” himself on the Internet just three weeks before the end of the semester, front-page-above-the-fold stuff, positioned in the area devoted to the most important news of the world. This says something about the managerial mentality and professionalism attached to this publication. The school was simply carrying out a school policy, which also meant expulsion for known adultery and fornication.
In addition to the huge front-page segments, pictures, and headlines, the paper dedicated a huge plethora of columns and pictures to the subject on its interior pages, all in the front (A) “news, editorial, op-ed” section. In the process, it furnished free-of-charge in the supposed “news accounts” the information that a protest drawing people from all over the state would be held at UC, Williamsburg, Ky.
In the TV news accounts of that “protest effort,” there seemed to be more interviews with law enforcement people, standing around sort of slack-jawed and obviously wondering why they were there, than with the participants. The paper said “about 50” showed up in a state with a population of about 4.2 million, so there might have been 35-40 actual participants. There were 1,700 students at the school, so it might be correctly assumed that their apathy was evident. They knew and subscribed to the rules.
The question remains, even allowing for the paper’s mindset: Why such an inordinate hatchet-job on Meyer? In each of the matters mentioned above, the paper showed a mean-spiritedness hard to understand but endemic to “liberal thought” in most any area.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
***Addendum: On 16 December, the Herald-Leader posted a small below-the-fold front-page article, with a relatively small inside continuation (one-sixth of a page) noting that both the president and the Pentagon will let stand the account of Meyer’s actions in 2009, notwithstanding McClatchy’s take on the subject based on the “report” of Jonathan Landay.
Granted that McClatchy, as well as the Knight-Ridder outfit from which it bought the paper a few years ago, occupies the left-lunatic fringe of the liberal establishment and would naturally turn a jaundiced eye on anything military, this still seemed a bit like overkill. Four people, each standing on a different corner of an intersection, would look at the same auto accident on a calm, cloudless day and come forth with four different accounts. McClatchy apparently believes that in a lengthy firefight involving multiple deaths and wounded everyone involved should recount exactly, precisely, unmistakably, and completely accurately every single thing that happened.
There were, as might be expected, some discrepancies in the accounts concerning the action, but the notion that Landay, who obviously had an agenda, should be taken more seriously than anyone else is laughable. The account deserved a significant mention, not an outright effort (including maps and huge pictures) to virtually demonize Meyer, who certainly did not request consideration for a medal. He was nominated, as per protocol, by his commanding officer. Landay, a civilian the troops had to be bothered with protecting instead of focusing entirely on keeping themselves and their comrades alive, predictably said Meyer deserved the medal, as if anyone should care what he thought. In the online McClatchy bio of Landay, there is no mention that he has had any military experience.
In April 2007, Landay appeared on the PBS leftist corner known as Bill Moyers Journal to condemn directly the mainstream media’s mishandling of its reporting of the Iraqi war as alleged by them and, indirectly, the Bush administration. Dan Rather, famous (actually, infamous) for perpetrating the fraud concerning George Bush and the Texas Air National Guard in 2004, also appeared on the program, so the Landay/McClatchy bias is obvious. Nobody gets farther left than Moyers or more unsusceptible to belief than Rather.
As for the current matter, expect editorial comment in the coming days to the effect that war is bad, shouldn’t happen, volunteers can expect to be killed and that not even a scintilla of discrepancy should ever infiltrate a government document or action, never mind that the paper has to do its share of corrections. Also expect an editorial concerning the near-majestic actions of the president in getting the troops out of Iraq, notwithstanding that he only fulfilled the plans put into place before he became president. After all, his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded after only a few months in the presidency during which he began his worldwide apology efforts, places him on a level that’s nearly otherworldly.
As for the H-L, it has a built-in proclivity for hatchet jobs on entities it doesn’t like and has shown in the past just how seriously it takes this important responsibility. For instance, it didn’t like the idea that Southland Christian Church, probably the second largest church in the state, didn’t hold services on Christmas Day in 2005, and castigated the congregation royally. There was a darker underlying element at work, however, i.e., that Southland represented to the paper the Christian mindset, which is anathema to the “enlightened,” notably those in the editorial department and the “mainstream media” in general.
Or take the “University of the Cumberlands Affair” of March 2006. On seven days of a nine-day period, the paper made the expulsion of a homosexual student who “outed” himself on the Internet just three weeks before the end of the semester, front-page-above-the-fold stuff, positioned in the area devoted to the most important news of the world. This says something about the managerial mentality and professionalism attached to this publication. The school was simply carrying out a school policy, which also meant expulsion for known adultery and fornication.
In addition to the huge front-page segments, pictures, and headlines, the paper dedicated a huge plethora of columns and pictures to the subject on its interior pages, all in the front (A) “news, editorial, op-ed” section. In the process, it furnished free-of-charge in the supposed “news accounts” the information that a protest drawing people from all over the state would be held at UC, Williamsburg, Ky.
In the TV news accounts of that “protest effort,” there seemed to be more interviews with law enforcement people, standing around sort of slack-jawed and obviously wondering why they were there, than with the participants. The paper said “about 50” showed up in a state with a population of about 4.2 million, so there might have been 35-40 actual participants. There were 1,700 students at the school, so it might be correctly assumed that their apathy was evident. They knew and subscribed to the rules.
The question remains, even allowing for the paper’s mindset: Why such an inordinate hatchet-job on Meyer? In each of the matters mentioned above, the paper showed a mean-spiritedness hard to understand but endemic to “liberal thought” in most any area.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
***Addendum: On 16 December, the Herald-Leader posted a small below-the-fold front-page article, with a relatively small inside continuation (one-sixth of a page) noting that both the president and the Pentagon will let stand the account of Meyer’s actions in 2009, notwithstanding McClatchy’s take on the subject based on the “report” of Jonathan Landay.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
An Arab Spring in Iraq Soon?
The Arab Spring, about which President Obama has spoken glowingly, has gone through the summer and fall with what appears to be disastrous results for Egypt, with the jury out regarding Tunisia. The other uprisings, such as in Yemen, are yet to be judged but one thing seems clear enough, to wit, that Sharia Law will come to the fore as its proponents subdue less sanguinary opponents. The Muslim Brotherhood and the disparate elements of al Qaeda will prevail, not least because the deaths of women and children are simply incidental to strategy requiring that terrorism be the weapon of choice.
A new Arab Spring is likely to take place in Iraq in 2012, not long after the U.S. military presence is nullified, with only a hugely bloated American embassy staff in place, as well as a virtual army of U.S. contractors, who will continue to throw away the hard-earned cash confiscated through taxes from U.S. citizens, at least that part which is not squirreled away by the chief pooh-bahs of the Iraqi government. Governments change…people do not.
Iraq is 60% Shi’ite and Iran is totally Shi’ite, thus this overwhelming match-up of militant religionists will cause blood in the streets. Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shi’ite cleric of some sort at the time, raised his own army after the 2003 invasion by the U.S. and the coalition and waged his own bloody, well-documented war, finally easing off and, according to Jihad Watch, April 2008, departed for theological study in Qom, Iran. He will be a main player in Iraq, perhaps rising to the office of Iraqi Ayatollah, in which case the Iran/Iraq axis will be united and violently opposed to the U.S. and will dominate the Middle East, while at the same time managing huge reservoirs of oil.
The greatly outnumbered Kurds in the Iraqi North, also in the proximity of large oil reserves, likely will not stand to be governed by the Shi’ites in the South, and the Sunnis – Saddam’s gang – will be under the gun big-time as revenge works its way through the system. The memories don’t even have to be long with regard to the 400,000 or so Iraqis killed by the butcher of Baghdad, beginning only some 30 or so years ago.
Civil War is a distinct possibility, if not a probability, and Obama, who seems to fancy himself a golden-voiced diplomat of sorts, as well as whoever succeeds him, will have little influence. Muslims have no qualms about killing each other, but then neither did Americans 1861-65. The difference: both the cause (unity) and the method, warring armies, not terrorism. Muslims, strangely, fight and kill over religious issues. Al-Sadr’s father, an ayatollah, was supposedly killed by Saddam, so revenge is in order.
For his part, Obama contributed to the Arab Spring by invading Libya in March, unprovoked but causing significant death and devastation to that benighted country, already beleaguered by Qaddafi. When he speaks of the military dead vis-à-vis Iraq, he speaks hypocritically. At least the Americans were fighting as an armed force for a cause that received the imprimatur and active support of other nations such as Britain. Obama seems to have acted on either a whim or to prove something.
Obama may have caused as many or more deaths, mostly civilians including women and children, and did it by executive order with no approach to or permission from the Congress. He made sure no American boot touched the ground, thus foreclosing any official report concerning his disgraceful action. Such arrogance and lawlessness are intolerable. In the process, he configured the assassination of a head of state.
Now, State Secretary Clinton is belaboring the Syrian uprising. She has met with something called the Syrian National Council and Obama has called for Syrian President Assad to step down, just as he did vis-à-vis Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya. Both of the latter countries are in a state of chaos. After apologizing to the world for this country, Obama has now become the ugly American, earning distrust throughout the Middle East.
Though he had no vote regarding the Iraqi action since he wasn’t in the Senate in 2003, Obama has boasted of his disapproval of that action; yet, without a by-your-leave from the American people through their representatives, he attacked Libya, population 2 million less than that of New York City. One wonders if he intends to lead NATO from behind again in an attack to wipe Syrian planes from the sky and arm the Syrian National Council. The president is a loose cannon but American citizens are not ready for another war with a country that is no danger to it or the rest of the world.
It’s no wonder the latest polls indicate that about 79% of Americans think the country is headed the wrong way, disapprove strongly of the administration and Congress, and have lost hope. God help the United States in 2012!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
A new Arab Spring is likely to take place in Iraq in 2012, not long after the U.S. military presence is nullified, with only a hugely bloated American embassy staff in place, as well as a virtual army of U.S. contractors, who will continue to throw away the hard-earned cash confiscated through taxes from U.S. citizens, at least that part which is not squirreled away by the chief pooh-bahs of the Iraqi government. Governments change…people do not.
Iraq is 60% Shi’ite and Iran is totally Shi’ite, thus this overwhelming match-up of militant religionists will cause blood in the streets. Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shi’ite cleric of some sort at the time, raised his own army after the 2003 invasion by the U.S. and the coalition and waged his own bloody, well-documented war, finally easing off and, according to Jihad Watch, April 2008, departed for theological study in Qom, Iran. He will be a main player in Iraq, perhaps rising to the office of Iraqi Ayatollah, in which case the Iran/Iraq axis will be united and violently opposed to the U.S. and will dominate the Middle East, while at the same time managing huge reservoirs of oil.
The greatly outnumbered Kurds in the Iraqi North, also in the proximity of large oil reserves, likely will not stand to be governed by the Shi’ites in the South, and the Sunnis – Saddam’s gang – will be under the gun big-time as revenge works its way through the system. The memories don’t even have to be long with regard to the 400,000 or so Iraqis killed by the butcher of Baghdad, beginning only some 30 or so years ago.
Civil War is a distinct possibility, if not a probability, and Obama, who seems to fancy himself a golden-voiced diplomat of sorts, as well as whoever succeeds him, will have little influence. Muslims have no qualms about killing each other, but then neither did Americans 1861-65. The difference: both the cause (unity) and the method, warring armies, not terrorism. Muslims, strangely, fight and kill over religious issues. Al-Sadr’s father, an ayatollah, was supposedly killed by Saddam, so revenge is in order.
For his part, Obama contributed to the Arab Spring by invading Libya in March, unprovoked but causing significant death and devastation to that benighted country, already beleaguered by Qaddafi. When he speaks of the military dead vis-à-vis Iraq, he speaks hypocritically. At least the Americans were fighting as an armed force for a cause that received the imprimatur and active support of other nations such as Britain. Obama seems to have acted on either a whim or to prove something.
Obama may have caused as many or more deaths, mostly civilians including women and children, and did it by executive order with no approach to or permission from the Congress. He made sure no American boot touched the ground, thus foreclosing any official report concerning his disgraceful action. Such arrogance and lawlessness are intolerable. In the process, he configured the assassination of a head of state.
Now, State Secretary Clinton is belaboring the Syrian uprising. She has met with something called the Syrian National Council and Obama has called for Syrian President Assad to step down, just as he did vis-à-vis Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya. Both of the latter countries are in a state of chaos. After apologizing to the world for this country, Obama has now become the ugly American, earning distrust throughout the Middle East.
Though he had no vote regarding the Iraqi action since he wasn’t in the Senate in 2003, Obama has boasted of his disapproval of that action; yet, without a by-your-leave from the American people through their representatives, he attacked Libya, population 2 million less than that of New York City. One wonders if he intends to lead NATO from behind again in an attack to wipe Syrian planes from the sky and arm the Syrian National Council. The president is a loose cannon but American citizens are not ready for another war with a country that is no danger to it or the rest of the world.
It’s no wonder the latest polls indicate that about 79% of Americans think the country is headed the wrong way, disapprove strongly of the administration and Congress, and have lost hope. God help the United States in 2012!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Obama Plays the Class-Warfare Card
One of the most despicable elements regarding either campaigning or governing is the encouragement and exploitation of class-warfare; yet, this is precisely the anchor of the speech that President Obama used to brainwash vulnerable public-school students in his speech on 06 December in Osawatomie, Kansas. As has been the case throughout his presidency in various parts of the world, he used the occasion to apologize to children for the sorry United States of America, which he described as eroding.
He left the students with the impression that greedy rich folks are the reason for the sorry state of affairs, notwithstanding that he’s rich himself and that he and his wife have profited greatly from the system he routinely excoriates on his campaign junkets described as doing the nation’s business and paid for by the taxpayers, while other candidates for office must hustle the cash to do the same. This is blatant dishonesty, which, if they had any incentive (or maybe enough intelligence), the teachers would remark to the students, thus nullifying Obama’s bona fides as a role model or mentor.
The thing that rankles most, though, is his outright lying in that speech. Here is part of what he said: “We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. … Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.”
Rich people had nothing to do with the fact that people who couldn’t afford houses nevertheless were given the privilege of buying them anyway, with the certain outcome being that they would be foreclosed. This stupidity was the result of something that came out of the Congress mostly under the auspices of the Clinton administration.
This is from Bloomberg Business Week by Peter Coy of 27 February 2008: “Add President Clinton to the long list of people who deserve a share of the blame for the housing bubble and bust. A recently re-exposed document shows that his administration went to ridiculous lengths to increase the national homeownership rate. It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place.”
For Obama to use his class-warfare position on this subject is beyond dishonesty… .it approximates the furtherance of fraud. It incites class-envy, something so graphically illustrated in the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, protesters demanding that the government set the wages of everybody so that equity is established without any reference to education, risk-taking, incentive or even work-habits. This is the socialist model or, even worse but applicable, the communist model, the very approach turned down by the Great Depression citzens of the 1930s, even though the unemployment rate averaged about twice what it is now. They were determined that government would not run their lives.
This is from the Glenn Beck Web-site of 23 September 2008: “President Bush publicly called for GSE reform 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted. Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President’s repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities were thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems.” For those who claim bias, Beck listed the warnings, beginning with 2001 and ending with 2005, and this site can be easily googled for verification.
The regulators dissed by Obama were part of the Bush administration and, instead of being part of the problem, were part of the answer, except that people like Obama didn’t listen, including republicans as well as democrats. Obama was a senator, though rarely in the saddle, from 2005 until 2009. All one has to do is check the times the regulators appeared before the appropriate Congressional committees to see where the fault lay. It was not with the regulators but with the supposed “fixers,” which proved that incompetents have no trouble being elected to Congress.
These are the average top-bracket tax-rates for the following decades: 1930s – 57.5%; 1940s – 85.4%; 1950s – 91.3%; 1960s – 78%; 1970s – 70%; 1980s – 48%; 1990s – 37%; 2000s – 36%. There was a time(s) when the legislators decided to finance the government on the backs of the rich. This was never fair, though it’s arguable that a progressive system, with the rich paying somewhat more than others since they have more materially to protect, might be fair. Currently , there are six tax brackets, with appropriate earnings-limits – 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, the latter for incomes over $379,150. Additionally, 47% of households pay no taxes, meaning that little more than half the workers/producers of wealth pay the whole freight.
Those in the top bracket pay 250% more of their income than those in the lowest bracket. When a lowest-bracket tax-payer remits $100 in taxes to the government, his counterpart in the top bracket pays $25,000. The lowest payer’s top earnings-limit is $8500, so he pays $850. The top payer’s lowest limit is $379,150, so he pays $132,702.50 at the same time. If he makes a million bucks, the government gets $350,000, or well over a third of his income. The president doesn’t think this is fair, says so, and, ipso facto, plays the class-warfare card. On a percentage basis, it is more than fair, but he intends to put the government’s back on a tiny number of people, letting them support in many cases those who live on welfare because its a way of life.
Make no mistake. Obama intends to drive the tax rates up on the rich this time and on everybody else next time. This levels the playing field and kills incentive.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
He left the students with the impression that greedy rich folks are the reason for the sorry state of affairs, notwithstanding that he’s rich himself and that he and his wife have profited greatly from the system he routinely excoriates on his campaign junkets described as doing the nation’s business and paid for by the taxpayers, while other candidates for office must hustle the cash to do the same. This is blatant dishonesty, which, if they had any incentive (or maybe enough intelligence), the teachers would remark to the students, thus nullifying Obama’s bona fides as a role model or mentor.
The thing that rankles most, though, is his outright lying in that speech. Here is part of what he said: “We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. … Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.”
Rich people had nothing to do with the fact that people who couldn’t afford houses nevertheless were given the privilege of buying them anyway, with the certain outcome being that they would be foreclosed. This stupidity was the result of something that came out of the Congress mostly under the auspices of the Clinton administration.
This is from Bloomberg Business Week by Peter Coy of 27 February 2008: “Add President Clinton to the long list of people who deserve a share of the blame for the housing bubble and bust. A recently re-exposed document shows that his administration went to ridiculous lengths to increase the national homeownership rate. It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place.”
For Obama to use his class-warfare position on this subject is beyond dishonesty… .it approximates the furtherance of fraud. It incites class-envy, something so graphically illustrated in the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, protesters demanding that the government set the wages of everybody so that equity is established without any reference to education, risk-taking, incentive or even work-habits. This is the socialist model or, even worse but applicable, the communist model, the very approach turned down by the Great Depression citzens of the 1930s, even though the unemployment rate averaged about twice what it is now. They were determined that government would not run their lives.
This is from the Glenn Beck Web-site of 23 September 2008: “President Bush publicly called for GSE reform 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted. Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President’s repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities were thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems.” For those who claim bias, Beck listed the warnings, beginning with 2001 and ending with 2005, and this site can be easily googled for verification.
The regulators dissed by Obama were part of the Bush administration and, instead of being part of the problem, were part of the answer, except that people like Obama didn’t listen, including republicans as well as democrats. Obama was a senator, though rarely in the saddle, from 2005 until 2009. All one has to do is check the times the regulators appeared before the appropriate Congressional committees to see where the fault lay. It was not with the regulators but with the supposed “fixers,” which proved that incompetents have no trouble being elected to Congress.
These are the average top-bracket tax-rates for the following decades: 1930s – 57.5%; 1940s – 85.4%; 1950s – 91.3%; 1960s – 78%; 1970s – 70%; 1980s – 48%; 1990s – 37%; 2000s – 36%. There was a time(s) when the legislators decided to finance the government on the backs of the rich. This was never fair, though it’s arguable that a progressive system, with the rich paying somewhat more than others since they have more materially to protect, might be fair. Currently , there are six tax brackets, with appropriate earnings-limits – 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, the latter for incomes over $379,150. Additionally, 47% of households pay no taxes, meaning that little more than half the workers/producers of wealth pay the whole freight.
Those in the top bracket pay 250% more of their income than those in the lowest bracket. When a lowest-bracket tax-payer remits $100 in taxes to the government, his counterpart in the top bracket pays $25,000. The lowest payer’s top earnings-limit is $8500, so he pays $850. The top payer’s lowest limit is $379,150, so he pays $132,702.50 at the same time. If he makes a million bucks, the government gets $350,000, or well over a third of his income. The president doesn’t think this is fair, says so, and, ipso facto, plays the class-warfare card. On a percentage basis, it is more than fair, but he intends to put the government’s back on a tiny number of people, letting them support in many cases those who live on welfare because its a way of life.
Make no mistake. Obama intends to drive the tax rates up on the rich this time and on everybody else next time. This levels the playing field and kills incentive.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Cain & the Ironies
The ironies connected to politics are mesmerizing. Imagine, for instance, the deep-sixing by especially the mainstream media of Herman Cain in light of the reelection to the presidency of Bill Clinton, the darling of both the media and the Left, in 1992 and 1996. At least Cain denied all peccadilloes, for which no proof has ever been presented with regard to sexual harassment or infidelity. Paula Jones actually sued Clinton in 1994 over his crude propositioning of her in 1991…and won $850,000 worth of revenge. Or…there was Jennifer Flowers…remember her? She claimed a 12-year affair (sound familiar vis-à-vis Ginger and Herman) with Clinton and almost derailed his first run for the office in 1992. The public turned a blind eye. She had tape recordings – killers!
One wonders why the ladies came out of the woodwork to inform on Cain, when none of them offered a scintilla of proof. This is no brief for Cain but the coincidences are far too big a stretch. Attorney Gloria Allred even paraded Sharon Bialek through all the TV gossip shows to describe Herman’s advances in an auto but the only third party to the juicy affair was the spare tire, no help at all in her crusade. The logical question: What was in it for her and the other women and which PI fingered her for the duty? Could the DNC have provided the finances? Only the shadow knows.
Cain appeared to be weathering the storm regarding the first four ladies, who only talked of some sort of harassment, just their words against his. Ho-hum! After Clinton, this was Boy Scout stuff. So…a bigger gun was needed – Ginger White – the clincher (in more ways than one), who simply appeared on the scene and spoke of a 13-year relationship, sometimes (gasp) a sexual one, and, of course, explained that Cain had helped her financially. Was he buying something…or was he just big-hearted, as he said? Only the shadow knows.
Cain might have been guilty in every case, not that it would seem to matter all that much…after Clinton. If so, he might have fessed-up and beaten the rap. In this country, homosexuals are allowed to marry each other in some states so if sexual perversions vis-à-vis natural functions are acceptable what could possibly be wrong with simple infidelity? When he was shepherding the healthcare bill through the Senate in 2009, Senator Baucus was also settling his mistress in Washington, where she also coincidentally got a job in the Department of Justice. If he runs again, he will likely be reelected to the Senate, the obvious sleaze not a bother.
Obama will have a billion or so dollars to put into his campaign and his chances of winning are good. Incumbency has its advantages. If he were to run against another African American, however, especially at this time of recession with which Obama seems unable to cope, all that money might not do the job. One wonders if the White House and all apparatchiks connected thereto decided that the dirt just had to be found. So…the hunt might have been on.
Ginger White was a gold mine regarding juicy turpitude but one wonders what her motivation for coming forward was. After all, by her own account Cain had been her benefactor and might justifiably have been awarded a degree of loyalty. Why would she appear on TV throughout the world and announce she was a whore and that Cain was a solicitor of sex. She said there was no love involved, at least on her part.
There are billionaires in both parties, so coming up with enough cash to entice Ms. White into proclaiming her prostitution would be no problem. George Soros, the Far Left’s bagman, would count a million bucks just chump change. Could potential cash have been her motivation? Or…did Cain figure he’d better cut the affair, assuming it existed for the sake of argument, thus dropping her for fear she might “out” him, only to discover he might have saved himself the trouble? A scorned (and financially challenged) woman can be problematic. Only the Shadow knows.
And the sleaze goes on. One might think Newt Gingrich could not be worried about “outings” of one kind or another since his peccadilloes have been a matter of record for decades. But along comes Minority Leader Pelosi and threatens to expose stuff from a House-committee investigation of Gingrich long ago, thereby probably violating a House rule of some kind…but all’s fair in hate and war. The demos are good at digging up stuff and Pelosi is a good example of the corruption that thrives upon it. The democrats make noises that they hope Gingrich is the candidate because he would be so easy to defeat. Apparently, Pelosi would disagree. With his record, Obama needs to fear any republican.
In the meantime, all the other candidates need to understand that the private investigators and/or capitol staffers are digging.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
One wonders why the ladies came out of the woodwork to inform on Cain, when none of them offered a scintilla of proof. This is no brief for Cain but the coincidences are far too big a stretch. Attorney Gloria Allred even paraded Sharon Bialek through all the TV gossip shows to describe Herman’s advances in an auto but the only third party to the juicy affair was the spare tire, no help at all in her crusade. The logical question: What was in it for her and the other women and which PI fingered her for the duty? Could the DNC have provided the finances? Only the shadow knows.
Cain appeared to be weathering the storm regarding the first four ladies, who only talked of some sort of harassment, just their words against his. Ho-hum! After Clinton, this was Boy Scout stuff. So…a bigger gun was needed – Ginger White – the clincher (in more ways than one), who simply appeared on the scene and spoke of a 13-year relationship, sometimes (gasp) a sexual one, and, of course, explained that Cain had helped her financially. Was he buying something…or was he just big-hearted, as he said? Only the shadow knows.
Cain might have been guilty in every case, not that it would seem to matter all that much…after Clinton. If so, he might have fessed-up and beaten the rap. In this country, homosexuals are allowed to marry each other in some states so if sexual perversions vis-à-vis natural functions are acceptable what could possibly be wrong with simple infidelity? When he was shepherding the healthcare bill through the Senate in 2009, Senator Baucus was also settling his mistress in Washington, where she also coincidentally got a job in the Department of Justice. If he runs again, he will likely be reelected to the Senate, the obvious sleaze not a bother.
Obama will have a billion or so dollars to put into his campaign and his chances of winning are good. Incumbency has its advantages. If he were to run against another African American, however, especially at this time of recession with which Obama seems unable to cope, all that money might not do the job. One wonders if the White House and all apparatchiks connected thereto decided that the dirt just had to be found. So…the hunt might have been on.
Ginger White was a gold mine regarding juicy turpitude but one wonders what her motivation for coming forward was. After all, by her own account Cain had been her benefactor and might justifiably have been awarded a degree of loyalty. Why would she appear on TV throughout the world and announce she was a whore and that Cain was a solicitor of sex. She said there was no love involved, at least on her part.
There are billionaires in both parties, so coming up with enough cash to entice Ms. White into proclaiming her prostitution would be no problem. George Soros, the Far Left’s bagman, would count a million bucks just chump change. Could potential cash have been her motivation? Or…did Cain figure he’d better cut the affair, assuming it existed for the sake of argument, thus dropping her for fear she might “out” him, only to discover he might have saved himself the trouble? A scorned (and financially challenged) woman can be problematic. Only the Shadow knows.
And the sleaze goes on. One might think Newt Gingrich could not be worried about “outings” of one kind or another since his peccadilloes have been a matter of record for decades. But along comes Minority Leader Pelosi and threatens to expose stuff from a House-committee investigation of Gingrich long ago, thereby probably violating a House rule of some kind…but all’s fair in hate and war. The demos are good at digging up stuff and Pelosi is a good example of the corruption that thrives upon it. The democrats make noises that they hope Gingrich is the candidate because he would be so easy to defeat. Apparently, Pelosi would disagree. With his record, Obama needs to fear any republican.
In the meantime, all the other candidates need to understand that the private investigators and/or capitol staffers are digging.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, December 02, 2011
Prexy - 2011-Version
The prexy flew away today,
He does the same most every day,
He rides for free on Air Force One…
Reminds again…he said, “We won!”
He claims his work is never done
But leaves it on his desk undone
And claims to listen on those trips
But mostly rants with loads of quips.
His caucus fusses, fumes and fights –
Those Congresspersons feel his slights
And, wondering, cry “Uncle Tom,
Do you forget where you are from?”
He once would walk Chicago’s streets
To organize on south-side beats
But then he went to Washington,
Where life is easy…much more fun.
He found that Wall Street was his friend –
Discovered money…without end
And soon forgot those sidewalks bare…
To find him on them would be rare.
His game is redistributing
The wealth, of course, but everything,
Like medicines and plastic hips,
Explains it all in TV-clips.
He bit upon the baited hook
Of planet-savers who mistook
As truth outrageous, silly claims
By frauds that Earth was bound for flames.
And even when the frauds were caught,
Their work with lies so fully fraught,
The prexy would not change his mind,
Would lay harsh tax on all things mined.
The prexy says, “No drilling oil,
Far too unsafe for sky and soil;”
Its products cause grim C-O-2,
The very gas he exhales, too.
The theme was “Change” when he campaigned,
He thought the voters greatly pained
By what they saw – things getting worse –
And promised he would bring reverse.
He thought folks wanted Gitmo gone
And campaign-swore to get it done,
Alas, Gitmo is thriving yet
And will not die…not on a bet!
He thought to try jihadists here,
The biggest show in his career,
Alas, the public rose as one
And said, “No way,”…the public won.
He confiscated many banks
And threatened Ford, which said “No thanks,”
But took G-M and Chrysler, too,
And told the unions, “I love you.”
As if that was not quite enough
To save car-makers from his bluff,
He bribed with billions, making deals,
For trading clunkers for new wheels.
Some folks get sick, some live too long,
Some are obese or weak or strong,
The prexy knew that government
Should change this strange predicament.
And so he brought about healthcare
To see that government would share
Its wisdom with the sick and sore,
But, truth to tell, just call the score.
His grand idea, called stimulus,
Meant billions poured on all of us
To make jobs by the hundred thou –
It bombed and things are much worse now.
Alas! He brought more loss, not gain,
And greatly multiplied the pain –
He promised “Change” and kept his word,
He brought a change that was absurd.
He looked around for things that might
Take notice from his sorry plight,
He called upon his wisest geek,
Who said, “Just bomb a place that’s weak.”
And so he ordered out the planes
And missiles marking skyward lanes
To bomb back to the old Stone Age
The folks in Libya...what a sage!
The order was executive,
He knew that Congress would not give
Consent to bomb a sovereign state –
Kill innocents, both soon and late.
The Libyans never posed a threat,
Not then, not now, nor ever – Yet
They were the choice since they were weak –
The strategy…attack the meek.
And so the prexy proved his strength
By bombing Libya, width and length,
Announced it on vacation trip –
Brasilia…a deadly quip.
So now in Libya chaos reigns,
The liberated with new pains,
Disaster throughout all the land
Account the prexy’s brave new stand.
The prexy’s aim – revitalize
His base to help him realize
Another term to finish off
The U-S-A and all who scoff.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
He does the same most every day,
He rides for free on Air Force One…
Reminds again…he said, “We won!”
He claims his work is never done
But leaves it on his desk undone
And claims to listen on those trips
But mostly rants with loads of quips.
His caucus fusses, fumes and fights –
Those Congresspersons feel his slights
And, wondering, cry “Uncle Tom,
Do you forget where you are from?”
He once would walk Chicago’s streets
To organize on south-side beats
But then he went to Washington,
Where life is easy…much more fun.
He found that Wall Street was his friend –
Discovered money…without end
And soon forgot those sidewalks bare…
To find him on them would be rare.
His game is redistributing
The wealth, of course, but everything,
Like medicines and plastic hips,
Explains it all in TV-clips.
He bit upon the baited hook
Of planet-savers who mistook
As truth outrageous, silly claims
By frauds that Earth was bound for flames.
And even when the frauds were caught,
Their work with lies so fully fraught,
The prexy would not change his mind,
Would lay harsh tax on all things mined.
The prexy says, “No drilling oil,
Far too unsafe for sky and soil;”
Its products cause grim C-O-2,
The very gas he exhales, too.
The theme was “Change” when he campaigned,
He thought the voters greatly pained
By what they saw – things getting worse –
And promised he would bring reverse.
He thought folks wanted Gitmo gone
And campaign-swore to get it done,
Alas, Gitmo is thriving yet
And will not die…not on a bet!
He thought to try jihadists here,
The biggest show in his career,
Alas, the public rose as one
And said, “No way,”…the public won.
He confiscated many banks
And threatened Ford, which said “No thanks,”
But took G-M and Chrysler, too,
And told the unions, “I love you.”
As if that was not quite enough
To save car-makers from his bluff,
He bribed with billions, making deals,
For trading clunkers for new wheels.
Some folks get sick, some live too long,
Some are obese or weak or strong,
The prexy knew that government
Should change this strange predicament.
And so he brought about healthcare
To see that government would share
Its wisdom with the sick and sore,
But, truth to tell, just call the score.
His grand idea, called stimulus,
Meant billions poured on all of us
To make jobs by the hundred thou –
It bombed and things are much worse now.
Alas! He brought more loss, not gain,
And greatly multiplied the pain –
He promised “Change” and kept his word,
He brought a change that was absurd.
He looked around for things that might
Take notice from his sorry plight,
He called upon his wisest geek,
Who said, “Just bomb a place that’s weak.”
And so he ordered out the planes
And missiles marking skyward lanes
To bomb back to the old Stone Age
The folks in Libya...what a sage!
The order was executive,
He knew that Congress would not give
Consent to bomb a sovereign state –
Kill innocents, both soon and late.
The Libyans never posed a threat,
Not then, not now, nor ever – Yet
They were the choice since they were weak –
The strategy…attack the meek.
And so the prexy proved his strength
By bombing Libya, width and length,
Announced it on vacation trip –
Brasilia…a deadly quip.
So now in Libya chaos reigns,
The liberated with new pains,
Disaster throughout all the land
Account the prexy’s brave new stand.
The prexy’s aim – revitalize
His base to help him realize
Another term to finish off
The U-S-A and all who scoff.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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