Boy Columnist, aka Larry Keeling, of the Lexington Herald-Leader, opined on 20 August as to whether or not the oil companies are lowering gas prices in an effort to help republicans in the November voting. He has a right to any opinion, but in all honesty should mention that gas prices rose by only 35% from $1.70 in September 2001 until January 2007 (republican administration and congress for nearly 6 years), when the price reached $2.30, and when the democrats took over Congress. Since January 2007, the price under the no-drill democrats had risen to $4.07 a month ago, for an increase under the no-drill democrats of some 77% in just 18 months. The experts attribute the recent decline in prices to $3.72 as the product of significant public lowering of driving (billions of miles), thus easing demand and not by any artificial tampering by the oil companies.
The lead editorial of 20 August was headed Parasitic growth risk to farm fund. Fanfare, please! Waste has been found in the use of public money for "agricultural ventures." This is probably true, but the democrats have ruled the state auditor's office for…well, how long. The blame is Fletcher's, of course, according to the paper, but…just the usual boilerplate. This is the editorial board that keeps pushing for millions in local tax money to be dished out to "farmers" in Fayette County in behalf of bribing them not to "develop" their land, no matter how far from the service area it is and therefore any possibility according to the zoning requirements of doing so for years and years, if ever. One remembers the huge H-L layout last fall picturing the mayor handing out an enormous sum to folks whose land was not remotely developmental. This is the boondoggle that the "insiders" have designed for the great unwashed (taxpayers) to ignorantly ante up. Get ready for another huge H-L layout soon, when another handout should be in the offing. Since this makes no sense, one wonders what the incentives for what amounts to official theft are, as well as to whom or for whom and by whom. Is it another case of raiding deep pockets to "enhance" other pockets of any size?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
DNC Memorandum #33
DNC Headquarters; Dr. Howard Dean, chair-penguin (Save a Glacier Today)
***The white-papers, also called black- and somewhere-in-between-papers (to observe diversity, the ruling ethic currently) that have been returned with regard to Senator Obama's need for a definition of a "typical Muslim person" have been unsatisfactory, though the senator has expressed gratitude that the staff has defined the "typical white person," mainly along the lines of those who are never in fear of anybody anywhere, especially nearby, and never grasping or even (gasp – added for effect) reading the Bible, against all firearms, and having constant warm feelings for illegal immigrants, who should have all the welfare benefits available. The anonymous staffers who returned papers describing the "typical Muslim person" as anyone wearing a suspiciously large belt under either a coat or a burka will be fired if apprehended. Also, it should be noted that no responder made an effort to define roadside bombs as religious icons, like candles, for instance. This needs to be remedied for an obvious reason – the Islamic-fanatic vote.
***There has been snickering reported around the bottled-water tank and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger, non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced, snack-bar and body-mass-green-chart about Obama walking on the Elbe River in Berlin. The senator has said he did not say he did and will not say it again. Also, the report that Michael Moore hired those 200,000 Berliners to scream and throw underclothes at him (just the women, of course) is false and Moore has sworn he will not do that again…in Denver. Be aware of your dress at the convention. You may appear laid-back in sandals, no ties, and no cocktail dresses (that diversity thing again…the young people treated as king-makers), but cover all tattoos and remove all rings, especially those in noses, lips, tongues and other places that can be seen. Navel rings are okay, since navels are never to be seen. Along with a multiplicity of old hippies, there are still some old un-hip democrats (will they never leave us?) who take a dim view of "body art" and "body ring-racks" and have threatened to stay home in November if Obama appears too dippy.
***The rumor that Senator Obama has suggested that the Colorado legislature vote to ban smoking and dipping snuff and chewing Redman anywhere inside buildings or anywhere on the outside is untrue, but any staffer seeing him light up at any time is to report this to me. This includes in all areas, especially restrooms (but watch out for Senator Craig – little joke on the republicans there). Note: All staffers are required to never go near – much less eat in – a fast-food establishment, and pamphlets explaining how obesity causes carbon emissions and immediately kills penguins and snail darters and polar bears will be available for distribution throughout Denver. When you canvass neighborhoods, pass out these pamphlets and do not -- REPEAT -- do NOT laugh in the process. Also, condensed copies of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth will be available, though at that time and altitude it may seem incongruous, especially since this summer has been cooler than last summer and nothing like the torrid summers of the 1930s, when Oklahoma got so hot and dry, most of it blew over to California.
***The suggestion has been taken under advisement with regard to handing out dollar bills at the convention and throughout Denver to prove that Senator Obama is not racist and does not want his picture on a dollar bill anyway, but just wants everyone to know he is "not one of them," as he has made clear. The rumor that he has said he would consider replacing Abraham Lincoln on the five-dollar bill is untrue and the senator has said he never said that and will not do so again. The wag who is reported to have said in the above location that Obama wouldn't dare touch the Twenty in fear that Andrew Jackson would come back from the grave and exorcise him personally has been reprimanded and assigned to the hottest part of Brownsville, Texas, for door-to-door canvassing through November.
***Senator Clinton and former president Clinton are actively working for Senator Obama by contacting all super-delegates in the interest of unity, which they consider attainable by a unanimous election of the nominee. The fact that Clinton (either one) is suggesting that the majority of voters is made up of women is not to be taken as a grab by Clinton of the nomination, as she has explained, and Bill has mentioned the same approach with regard to the fact that this demographic applies in the black community as well and added that a third term is allowed four years after a term in office. Hispanic democrats are advised not to take umbrage at this, since their guy, Bill Richardson, may be positioned for the veep spot, although success in Iraq has hurt his argument for withdrawal of all troops at midnight of the first day in office. Adulterer-in-chief John Edwards (little joke there) has suggested that the first executive order, instead, be structured to not only allow but practically beg homosexuals to join the military, in which former Senator Gravel said during the primaries that they excel, particularly since they learn to love their comrades through sharing foxholes.
***Accruing to the debate of Senators Obama and McCain at Saddleback Church the other night is the need for position papers to be used by Senator Obama (anyone calling him Obamessiah will be fired) on the subject of when life begins, the definition of a rich person, and the exact location of Georgia (not the state next to Alabama, for recent PhD grads – little joke there). Note: Comparing a fetus to an old codger in a coma has already been ruled out for obvious reasons. Both are helpless, but one is not in some forsaken womb instead of the graveyard, where he ought to be, but isn't, thus the need for the definition of life and what can and cannot be done with life, once the definition of same has been established…or something like that. After all, I'm just a doctor, not a philosopher.
***Michael Moore is preparing a new movie tentatively titled Saddleback Mountain featuring a racist interview of two presidential candidates, with one whipping out a copy of the Constitution and beating the other half-to-death with it. Little imagination is needed to see that this approaches an actual documentary, and may be called such as soon as it is vetted by the group called AGHAST, which stands for Agency Googling Hospices and All Sites for Torture. The movie will also include water-boarding and the need for better brain-puncturing procedures used in late-term abortions, the latter subject requested by Senator Obama and Dr. Me, since brain-puncturing violates the Hippocratic Oath…or something like that.
***Finally, the rumor that the Clintons will use a smoke-bomb during voting at the convention in Denver is untrue, and both have said they will not mention this again. Also, there will be no possible opportunity for hanging chads, since the delegation from Florida will not be allowed to vote. If this changes, there will be a roll call of individual delegates, and one Supreme Court judge has promised to be in attendance.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
***The white-papers, also called black- and somewhere-in-between-papers (to observe diversity, the ruling ethic currently) that have been returned with regard to Senator Obama's need for a definition of a "typical Muslim person" have been unsatisfactory, though the senator has expressed gratitude that the staff has defined the "typical white person," mainly along the lines of those who are never in fear of anybody anywhere, especially nearby, and never grasping or even (gasp – added for effect) reading the Bible, against all firearms, and having constant warm feelings for illegal immigrants, who should have all the welfare benefits available. The anonymous staffers who returned papers describing the "typical Muslim person" as anyone wearing a suspiciously large belt under either a coat or a burka will be fired if apprehended. Also, it should be noted that no responder made an effort to define roadside bombs as religious icons, like candles, for instance. This needs to be remedied for an obvious reason – the Islamic-fanatic vote.
***There has been snickering reported around the bottled-water tank and non-trans-fat, non-hamburger, non-hotdog, non-dairy-product-of-any-kind, non-chocolate, non-smoking (smoking okay if Obama lights up), veggie-fortified, yogurt-enhanced, snack-bar and body-mass-green-chart about Obama walking on the Elbe River in Berlin. The senator has said he did not say he did and will not say it again. Also, the report that Michael Moore hired those 200,000 Berliners to scream and throw underclothes at him (just the women, of course) is false and Moore has sworn he will not do that again…in Denver. Be aware of your dress at the convention. You may appear laid-back in sandals, no ties, and no cocktail dresses (that diversity thing again…the young people treated as king-makers), but cover all tattoos and remove all rings, especially those in noses, lips, tongues and other places that can be seen. Navel rings are okay, since navels are never to be seen. Along with a multiplicity of old hippies, there are still some old un-hip democrats (will they never leave us?) who take a dim view of "body art" and "body ring-racks" and have threatened to stay home in November if Obama appears too dippy.
***The rumor that Senator Obama has suggested that the Colorado legislature vote to ban smoking and dipping snuff and chewing Redman anywhere inside buildings or anywhere on the outside is untrue, but any staffer seeing him light up at any time is to report this to me. This includes in all areas, especially restrooms (but watch out for Senator Craig – little joke on the republicans there). Note: All staffers are required to never go near – much less eat in – a fast-food establishment, and pamphlets explaining how obesity causes carbon emissions and immediately kills penguins and snail darters and polar bears will be available for distribution throughout Denver. When you canvass neighborhoods, pass out these pamphlets and do not -- REPEAT -- do NOT laugh in the process. Also, condensed copies of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth will be available, though at that time and altitude it may seem incongruous, especially since this summer has been cooler than last summer and nothing like the torrid summers of the 1930s, when Oklahoma got so hot and dry, most of it blew over to California.
***The suggestion has been taken under advisement with regard to handing out dollar bills at the convention and throughout Denver to prove that Senator Obama is not racist and does not want his picture on a dollar bill anyway, but just wants everyone to know he is "not one of them," as he has made clear. The rumor that he has said he would consider replacing Abraham Lincoln on the five-dollar bill is untrue and the senator has said he never said that and will not do so again. The wag who is reported to have said in the above location that Obama wouldn't dare touch the Twenty in fear that Andrew Jackson would come back from the grave and exorcise him personally has been reprimanded and assigned to the hottest part of Brownsville, Texas, for door-to-door canvassing through November.
***Senator Clinton and former president Clinton are actively working for Senator Obama by contacting all super-delegates in the interest of unity, which they consider attainable by a unanimous election of the nominee. The fact that Clinton (either one) is suggesting that the majority of voters is made up of women is not to be taken as a grab by Clinton of the nomination, as she has explained, and Bill has mentioned the same approach with regard to the fact that this demographic applies in the black community as well and added that a third term is allowed four years after a term in office. Hispanic democrats are advised not to take umbrage at this, since their guy, Bill Richardson, may be positioned for the veep spot, although success in Iraq has hurt his argument for withdrawal of all troops at midnight of the first day in office. Adulterer-in-chief John Edwards (little joke there) has suggested that the first executive order, instead, be structured to not only allow but practically beg homosexuals to join the military, in which former Senator Gravel said during the primaries that they excel, particularly since they learn to love their comrades through sharing foxholes.
***Accruing to the debate of Senators Obama and McCain at Saddleback Church the other night is the need for position papers to be used by Senator Obama (anyone calling him Obamessiah will be fired) on the subject of when life begins, the definition of a rich person, and the exact location of Georgia (not the state next to Alabama, for recent PhD grads – little joke there). Note: Comparing a fetus to an old codger in a coma has already been ruled out for obvious reasons. Both are helpless, but one is not in some forsaken womb instead of the graveyard, where he ought to be, but isn't, thus the need for the definition of life and what can and cannot be done with life, once the definition of same has been established…or something like that. After all, I'm just a doctor, not a philosopher.
***Michael Moore is preparing a new movie tentatively titled Saddleback Mountain featuring a racist interview of two presidential candidates, with one whipping out a copy of the Constitution and beating the other half-to-death with it. Little imagination is needed to see that this approaches an actual documentary, and may be called such as soon as it is vetted by the group called AGHAST, which stands for Agency Googling Hospices and All Sites for Torture. The movie will also include water-boarding and the need for better brain-puncturing procedures used in late-term abortions, the latter subject requested by Senator Obama and Dr. Me, since brain-puncturing violates the Hippocratic Oath…or something like that.
***Finally, the rumor that the Clintons will use a smoke-bomb during voting at the convention in Denver is untrue, and both have said they will not mention this again. Also, there will be no possible opportunity for hanging chads, since the delegation from Florida will not be allowed to vote. If this changes, there will be a roll call of individual delegates, and one Supreme Court judge has promised to be in attendance.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Campaign Foolishness
The election season gets sillier by the minute. John Edwards was an actual contender in the primaries, though he had to know full well that his peccadilloes would be aired sooner or later, probably sooner if had won the democrat nomination. Senator Obama was hopelessly naïve in not realizing that his associations with strange people would lead to hassles that he could have avoided by getting out in front of the curve.
Candidates still parade their families before the public as if that has any connection to establishing their fitness for office. If Obama had known about the damage his wife could wreak in her statements about the nation being "mean" or the fact that she was not proud of the country virtually all of her life…another way of saying she hated it, he might have told her to stay at home and take care of the girls. Edwards' exploitation of his wife has been sickening, especially in light of his lurid infidelity and continuing episode, apparently, of "mistress subterfuge and support."
McCain and Obama "debate" in a church in California, notwithstanding that to do so stretches the First Amendment past the limit, since each man will be interested in making political points, not "testifying." It is more than probable that neither of them has much of a theological background (not said in unkindness, since the same would apply to most people). So… after they say they have the "faith," what else do they have to offer? Does anyone suspect that they will in any way denigrate Islam, which has as a tenet of its faith the command that Muslims "off" infidels (everyone else) at every opportunity? Of course not! That would lose votes in Michigan, a vital state.
Senator Obama pledged to help Senator Clinton recoup her $12.5 million investment in her losing campaign, and apparently expected everyone to both believe him and be impressed. It was actually a dumb thing to do and made any thinking person suspect ulterior motives, not to mention judgment on about the level of a kindergartener. Why should he or anyone else give a fig about Clinton's risking some of her multi-millions for any reason…except maybe in illegal futures-trading? He thought he could buy her support.
Did Obama buy Clinton's support? Oh…yeah! While he's been on vacation, the Clintons (Bill much in evidence) have literally "stacked" the convention. Support! Egad! Anyone who believes that this is not a blatant move on their part to snatch the nomination is eligible for a "bridge-offer," something like the Brooklyn Bridge for ninety-five cents. Obama caved on the roll-call vote thing vis-à-vis Clinton's bid, proving a wimpyness not suitable for running the country. He should have told Clinton and her screeching gang to bug-out…but he didn't. What would he do if the nation were threatened…look around for someone to "support" him…or maybe someone with whom to have a talk?
Now, the word is out that the candidates are mulling the veep choices with nary a thought regarding that person's qualifications for the office of the president in case the president should meet a Muslim imam in a dark alley. Word is that McCain may be looking for a pro-abortion running mate to make the NOW girls happy, since he is on the record concretely as against abortion. Make sense? Of course not! Obama may be looking for someone to ingratiate him with those "racist" southerners. Both are looking for states with huge electoral votes. George Bush picked a veep candidate from a state with three (count 'em) electoral votes. What if he'd picked someone from New York?
One tries not to either watch or even think of the campaign ads or, especially, the millions wasted on their cost – millions, as some are bound to remind, that could be used for humanitarian reasons. The ads are marked with silliness and condescension, the objective seeming to be the edification of the "great unwashed" out here in the boondocks. Paris Hilton? Berlin hunk? How unrelentingly silly and insulting can it get?
Then, there's the length of these superficial exercises in what some (the candidates) call patriotism, while others yawn and just wonder why the fuss? It's almost gotten to the point of "Who cares, anyway?" The obvious egotism and opportunism (admitted egocentrism for Edwards, not to mention his admitted narcissism) is enough to make one grab for Pepto. Perhaps the silliest episode in the coming days will occur at the Democrat Convention, when the gloves come off and the Clintons go at it with Obama.
This actually would be laughable – this silly campaigning that goes on virtually during the entire election cycle of four years. But, it isn't. The selection of the president, a presumptive world leader, should not devolve into the chicanery in evidence now on all sides. This country deserves better.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Candidates still parade their families before the public as if that has any connection to establishing their fitness for office. If Obama had known about the damage his wife could wreak in her statements about the nation being "mean" or the fact that she was not proud of the country virtually all of her life…another way of saying she hated it, he might have told her to stay at home and take care of the girls. Edwards' exploitation of his wife has been sickening, especially in light of his lurid infidelity and continuing episode, apparently, of "mistress subterfuge and support."
McCain and Obama "debate" in a church in California, notwithstanding that to do so stretches the First Amendment past the limit, since each man will be interested in making political points, not "testifying." It is more than probable that neither of them has much of a theological background (not said in unkindness, since the same would apply to most people). So… after they say they have the "faith," what else do they have to offer? Does anyone suspect that they will in any way denigrate Islam, which has as a tenet of its faith the command that Muslims "off" infidels (everyone else) at every opportunity? Of course not! That would lose votes in Michigan, a vital state.
Senator Obama pledged to help Senator Clinton recoup her $12.5 million investment in her losing campaign, and apparently expected everyone to both believe him and be impressed. It was actually a dumb thing to do and made any thinking person suspect ulterior motives, not to mention judgment on about the level of a kindergartener. Why should he or anyone else give a fig about Clinton's risking some of her multi-millions for any reason…except maybe in illegal futures-trading? He thought he could buy her support.
Did Obama buy Clinton's support? Oh…yeah! While he's been on vacation, the Clintons (Bill much in evidence) have literally "stacked" the convention. Support! Egad! Anyone who believes that this is not a blatant move on their part to snatch the nomination is eligible for a "bridge-offer," something like the Brooklyn Bridge for ninety-five cents. Obama caved on the roll-call vote thing vis-à-vis Clinton's bid, proving a wimpyness not suitable for running the country. He should have told Clinton and her screeching gang to bug-out…but he didn't. What would he do if the nation were threatened…look around for someone to "support" him…or maybe someone with whom to have a talk?
Now, the word is out that the candidates are mulling the veep choices with nary a thought regarding that person's qualifications for the office of the president in case the president should meet a Muslim imam in a dark alley. Word is that McCain may be looking for a pro-abortion running mate to make the NOW girls happy, since he is on the record concretely as against abortion. Make sense? Of course not! Obama may be looking for someone to ingratiate him with those "racist" southerners. Both are looking for states with huge electoral votes. George Bush picked a veep candidate from a state with three (count 'em) electoral votes. What if he'd picked someone from New York?
One tries not to either watch or even think of the campaign ads or, especially, the millions wasted on their cost – millions, as some are bound to remind, that could be used for humanitarian reasons. The ads are marked with silliness and condescension, the objective seeming to be the edification of the "great unwashed" out here in the boondocks. Paris Hilton? Berlin hunk? How unrelentingly silly and insulting can it get?
Then, there's the length of these superficial exercises in what some (the candidates) call patriotism, while others yawn and just wonder why the fuss? It's almost gotten to the point of "Who cares, anyway?" The obvious egotism and opportunism (admitted egocentrism for Edwards, not to mention his admitted narcissism) is enough to make one grab for Pepto. Perhaps the silliest episode in the coming days will occur at the Democrat Convention, when the gloves come off and the Clintons go at it with Obama.
This actually would be laughable – this silly campaigning that goes on virtually during the entire election cycle of four years. But, it isn't. The selection of the president, a presumptive world leader, should not devolve into the chicanery in evidence now on all sides. This country deserves better.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
L'Affaire Edwards
On CNN on 09 August, democrat strategist Paul Begala said, regarding the John Edwards affair, that Edwards didn't order anyone to be tortured, did not violate the Geneva Convention, and did not forge a document that "led us into war." He just cheated on his wife…happens every day. If a "love child" (actually, lust-child) should be his…well, 30% of all white births are "love children" and 70% of all African-American births are "love children," so what's the big deal?
This kind of tawdriness was a big deal when Newt Gingrich, a republican, was caught. It was a big deal when homosexual Senator Craig, another republican, was caught. It was even a big deal when "Slick" was caught, but, after all, he was a president dallying with a young woman snapping her thongs (gasp) during working hours. It's a big deal because Edwards was most likely negotiating a quid pro quo in May when he threw his gang to Obama – something like "my guys for the attorney general's chair, or maybe even another shot at the veep spot." He didn't back Obamessiah for nothing and certainly not until he knew which way the nomination was going.
Shack-ups (or hook-ups or whatever fornicators are doing nowadays) are counted in the millions these days, so why did the National Enquirer and, finally, the mainstream media get all bent out of shape over Edwards' indiscretion? After all, Slick Willie got elected to a second term, never mind Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and all the other rag-tag sleazy possibilities. He even earned an impeachment, but didn't come close to removal from office. Has the American citizenry lost its collective sophistication, to wit, that anything's okay if it feels good, the devil take the hindmost.
Of course, if l'affaire vis-à-vis Monica Lewinsky had been made public in 1996, when apparently it was actually going on, Clinton might have taken a fall that election year, but the lurid details didn't come to light until much later, when he was safely ensconced in the Oval Office for a second term. By 1996, people had had a chance to forget the peccadilloes brought to light much earlier. Edwards doesn't have it so good, so political hacks like Begala make haste to change the subject, but quick. When in doubt about anything – even the levees along the Mississippi – blame George Bush, but puh-leeze…change the subject.
But the subject won't go away. The mainstream media have been forced to confront it, never mind that their fair-haired boy with the $400-haircuts has given the telling of lies a new start and new significance. The fact that Edwards actually ran for veep in 2004 and the presidency in this election cycle blows the mind, not because he didn't have the right but because anybody dumb enough to believe a high-profile apparatchik jerk like himself could get away with adultery and a cover-up so transparent as his (just the usual political knee-jerk – the BIG LIE) could be smart enough to run the country. The mainstreamers chose to let him off because they form the democrat fifth column, but it didn't work.
It has gotten worse as further information keeps rolling out about the glamour candidate who engaged the services of a company starting in July 2006 that wasn't even licensed until a bit earlier that year and AFTER Edwards met his new girlfriend, who virtually was the company. His campaign was probably its only client for work for which Rielle Hunter had little experience and paid her some $114,000 for six months work. It seems obvious enough that the company and the payments were designed to keep Ms. Hunter around, and for little else. There were some YouTube segments on the Internet, as if they were worth that kind of money, and they could have been handled by a rank amateur, probably for free by a volunteer.
During his campaign, Edwards made speeches about morals, the family and family values, with all this lurid stuff marking him as the quintessential hypocrite, but which he mistakenly thought would never come to light. Throughout 2007, when the question concerning his peccadilloes came up, he told lie after lie, this man who probably had hopes of becoming attorney general. During all that time, the mainstream media gave him a pass, never made an issue of it. At the beginning of one of those YouTube fiascos, he said ,"I actually want this country to be who I am." As he indicated in his valedictory delivered AFTER he had been undeniably caught, he was so narcissistic and egocentric that he actually believed what he said. Imagine a country with his morals…disgusting!
Edwards didn't operate in a vacuum in 2007. He announced his campaign in December 2006, the year of l'affaire, in a backyard in New Orleans, eschewing his own state for that event. He campaigned hard and spent the money of a lot of trusting citizens, all the while apparently being brazen enough to think he could escape his own foot-shooting.
In the mix, it appears that his campaign finance-person was also being serviced by Ms. Hunter and has even said that he, a married man with a family, is her child's father, though Edwards visited with Ms. Hunter just a few days ago during more than five hours of a night in a Los Angeles hotel. Ms. Hunter lives in a three-million-dollar house in Santa Barbara and has received plenty of money from an Edwards backer. He denies any knowledge of this, but should know full well that nobody believes that.
More will come to light in the coming days, and one thing is for sure…indeed, has already started, namely, the dredging up again of John Cain's misconduct all those years ago, entirely similar to that of Edwards. It's enough to make any citizen scream "A PLAGUE ON ALL YOUR HOUSES!" and look for someone else. But, of course, Edwards is out of it now, and it isn't likely that he has any political future…and he shouldn't have.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
This kind of tawdriness was a big deal when Newt Gingrich, a republican, was caught. It was a big deal when homosexual Senator Craig, another republican, was caught. It was even a big deal when "Slick" was caught, but, after all, he was a president dallying with a young woman snapping her thongs (gasp) during working hours. It's a big deal because Edwards was most likely negotiating a quid pro quo in May when he threw his gang to Obama – something like "my guys for the attorney general's chair, or maybe even another shot at the veep spot." He didn't back Obamessiah for nothing and certainly not until he knew which way the nomination was going.
Shack-ups (or hook-ups or whatever fornicators are doing nowadays) are counted in the millions these days, so why did the National Enquirer and, finally, the mainstream media get all bent out of shape over Edwards' indiscretion? After all, Slick Willie got elected to a second term, never mind Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and all the other rag-tag sleazy possibilities. He even earned an impeachment, but didn't come close to removal from office. Has the American citizenry lost its collective sophistication, to wit, that anything's okay if it feels good, the devil take the hindmost.
Of course, if l'affaire vis-à-vis Monica Lewinsky had been made public in 1996, when apparently it was actually going on, Clinton might have taken a fall that election year, but the lurid details didn't come to light until much later, when he was safely ensconced in the Oval Office for a second term. By 1996, people had had a chance to forget the peccadilloes brought to light much earlier. Edwards doesn't have it so good, so political hacks like Begala make haste to change the subject, but quick. When in doubt about anything – even the levees along the Mississippi – blame George Bush, but puh-leeze…change the subject.
But the subject won't go away. The mainstream media have been forced to confront it, never mind that their fair-haired boy with the $400-haircuts has given the telling of lies a new start and new significance. The fact that Edwards actually ran for veep in 2004 and the presidency in this election cycle blows the mind, not because he didn't have the right but because anybody dumb enough to believe a high-profile apparatchik jerk like himself could get away with adultery and a cover-up so transparent as his (just the usual political knee-jerk – the BIG LIE) could be smart enough to run the country. The mainstreamers chose to let him off because they form the democrat fifth column, but it didn't work.
It has gotten worse as further information keeps rolling out about the glamour candidate who engaged the services of a company starting in July 2006 that wasn't even licensed until a bit earlier that year and AFTER Edwards met his new girlfriend, who virtually was the company. His campaign was probably its only client for work for which Rielle Hunter had little experience and paid her some $114,000 for six months work. It seems obvious enough that the company and the payments were designed to keep Ms. Hunter around, and for little else. There were some YouTube segments on the Internet, as if they were worth that kind of money, and they could have been handled by a rank amateur, probably for free by a volunteer.
During his campaign, Edwards made speeches about morals, the family and family values, with all this lurid stuff marking him as the quintessential hypocrite, but which he mistakenly thought would never come to light. Throughout 2007, when the question concerning his peccadilloes came up, he told lie after lie, this man who probably had hopes of becoming attorney general. During all that time, the mainstream media gave him a pass, never made an issue of it. At the beginning of one of those YouTube fiascos, he said ,"I actually want this country to be who I am." As he indicated in his valedictory delivered AFTER he had been undeniably caught, he was so narcissistic and egocentric that he actually believed what he said. Imagine a country with his morals…disgusting!
Edwards didn't operate in a vacuum in 2007. He announced his campaign in December 2006, the year of l'affaire, in a backyard in New Orleans, eschewing his own state for that event. He campaigned hard and spent the money of a lot of trusting citizens, all the while apparently being brazen enough to think he could escape his own foot-shooting.
In the mix, it appears that his campaign finance-person was also being serviced by Ms. Hunter and has even said that he, a married man with a family, is her child's father, though Edwards visited with Ms. Hunter just a few days ago during more than five hours of a night in a Los Angeles hotel. Ms. Hunter lives in a three-million-dollar house in Santa Barbara and has received plenty of money from an Edwards backer. He denies any knowledge of this, but should know full well that nobody believes that.
More will come to light in the coming days, and one thing is for sure…indeed, has already started, namely, the dredging up again of John Cain's misconduct all those years ago, entirely similar to that of Edwards. It's enough to make any citizen scream "A PLAGUE ON ALL YOUR HOUSES!" and look for someone else. But, of course, Edwards is out of it now, and it isn't likely that he has any political future…and he shouldn't have.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Obama, the Military & National Police
This is from MSNBC-TV (a democrat propaganda agency, as well) of 13 February 2007: "Stumbling out of the gate, Sen. Barack Obama said in his first presidential campaign news conference that the lives of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq were 'wasted.' He quickly retracted the statement, and later apologized to anybody he offended." Offended? Anybody? One wonders if he understood that he had offended literally millions of Americans or their relatives who had fought or are now fighting the nation's enemies.
This is MSNBC again, on 01 November 2006: "The war of words, tough even for this hard-fought campaign season, came after [Senator John] Kerry told a group of California students on Monday that those unable to navigate the country’s education system 'get stuck in Iraq'." Obama thinks, never mind the meaningless retraction, that the GIs who die have made the ultimate sacrifice for nothing, while Kerry thinks, never mind his preposterous explanation of something about a joke, that those GIs are too dumb to go to school. Words mean something and those spoken spontaneously mean the most since they reveal the actual mindset of the speaker.
Obama and Kerry share the Clinton doctrine known as LTG – Loathe the Military. Obama has not been able to fully admit that the "surge" has worked in Iraq and that great progress is being made there. To do so would be his admission that heroic GIs doing what he has never had to do – face death on a daily basis – have not died in vain. One can only wonder what Kerry might say today, since he testified in 1971 before a Senate committee that American GIs had killed 200,000 (count 'em) Vietnamese civilians a year back in the sixties. He probably doesn't know what he would say, come to think of it, seeing as how he said he voted for the Iraq War before he voted against it, as if that meant anything
These instances should be taken within the context of Obama's constant harping on his intention to bring massive CHANGE to the country. Perhaps the most recent defining aspect of that change accrues to his current effort to be sure he isn't seen as a white person, and certainly not the "typical white person" he has described, using his grandmother as a paradigm, as being fearful of those around her. The other typical whites he has described as paranoid Bible-grasping, gun-toting posses on the lookout for pesky immigrants. He made this non-white affirmation abundantly clear in Berlin during his campaign stop there and elaborated on it last week by making sure everyone knew he was not the same color as those guys on the one- and five-dollar bills – Washington and Lincoln.
The most dangerous aspect of CHANGE, however, has to do with Obama and the military. One remembers the approaches of both Carter and Clinton, to wit, let things slide militarily. Tax and spend in the interests of establishing a socialistic state, in other words, while ignoring the high cost of security. BUT, even that change is not as mind-boggling as the one he mentioned in a session on 02 July in Colorado Springs, where he said: "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
One wonders what "national security objectives" Obama had in mind when he indicated the need for a national police force to achieve/enforce them, as well as just who he meant in his plural attribution to the source(s) for determining those objectives. In other words, who helped him decide what a national police force would do. One immediately thinks of such terms as KGB (Soviets), Gestapo (Hitler's Germany), and the Stasi (Honecker's communist East Germany). These police establishments participated in the most heinous of crimes against their own people. They were the national police.
The insidiousness of such a thing as a national police force to hold sway over the civilian population is unthinkable, incomprehensible in this country. In socialist/communist societies, this is commonplace, indeed the only way to keep the citizens subservient enough to insure the common welfare of the dictators and their minions who run the governments, including also running the military. Terrorism is the hallmark of "national policing," in which citizens just disappear or live in dread of the three o'clock a.m. knock on the door…and then disappear. The accounts coming out of communist China now that have to do with repression in advance of the Olympics should be chilling enough, not to mention the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 (several hundreds shot dead by the Chinese Army).
Oh…yeah…just what this country needs – a national police force. Did Obama mean that? After all, his remarks were not in his prepared speech. This means he spoke SPONTANEOUSLY, ergo, he said just what was on his mind and has been on his mind and will remain on his mind. The time has come for citizens to take a long, hard look at this candidate, who makes it a stock-in-trade to suggest that he's not like the white guys who have held office…another way of saying it's the black guy's turn. It's the laying on of the guilt-trip, the old "you owe us" mantra of the reparations gang, a kingpin in which is the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Coincidence? Hardly!
National Police Force…Egad! Obama isn't against the use of force, but does he favor military force to keep the peace vis-à-vis the world…or a national police force to keep…what?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
This is MSNBC again, on 01 November 2006: "The war of words, tough even for this hard-fought campaign season, came after [Senator John] Kerry told a group of California students on Monday that those unable to navigate the country’s education system 'get stuck in Iraq'." Obama thinks, never mind the meaningless retraction, that the GIs who die have made the ultimate sacrifice for nothing, while Kerry thinks, never mind his preposterous explanation of something about a joke, that those GIs are too dumb to go to school. Words mean something and those spoken spontaneously mean the most since they reveal the actual mindset of the speaker.
Obama and Kerry share the Clinton doctrine known as LTG – Loathe the Military. Obama has not been able to fully admit that the "surge" has worked in Iraq and that great progress is being made there. To do so would be his admission that heroic GIs doing what he has never had to do – face death on a daily basis – have not died in vain. One can only wonder what Kerry might say today, since he testified in 1971 before a Senate committee that American GIs had killed 200,000 (count 'em) Vietnamese civilians a year back in the sixties. He probably doesn't know what he would say, come to think of it, seeing as how he said he voted for the Iraq War before he voted against it, as if that meant anything
These instances should be taken within the context of Obama's constant harping on his intention to bring massive CHANGE to the country. Perhaps the most recent defining aspect of that change accrues to his current effort to be sure he isn't seen as a white person, and certainly not the "typical white person" he has described, using his grandmother as a paradigm, as being fearful of those around her. The other typical whites he has described as paranoid Bible-grasping, gun-toting posses on the lookout for pesky immigrants. He made this non-white affirmation abundantly clear in Berlin during his campaign stop there and elaborated on it last week by making sure everyone knew he was not the same color as those guys on the one- and five-dollar bills – Washington and Lincoln.
The most dangerous aspect of CHANGE, however, has to do with Obama and the military. One remembers the approaches of both Carter and Clinton, to wit, let things slide militarily. Tax and spend in the interests of establishing a socialistic state, in other words, while ignoring the high cost of security. BUT, even that change is not as mind-boggling as the one he mentioned in a session on 02 July in Colorado Springs, where he said: "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
One wonders what "national security objectives" Obama had in mind when he indicated the need for a national police force to achieve/enforce them, as well as just who he meant in his plural attribution to the source(s) for determining those objectives. In other words, who helped him decide what a national police force would do. One immediately thinks of such terms as KGB (Soviets), Gestapo (Hitler's Germany), and the Stasi (Honecker's communist East Germany). These police establishments participated in the most heinous of crimes against their own people. They were the national police.
The insidiousness of such a thing as a national police force to hold sway over the civilian population is unthinkable, incomprehensible in this country. In socialist/communist societies, this is commonplace, indeed the only way to keep the citizens subservient enough to insure the common welfare of the dictators and their minions who run the governments, including also running the military. Terrorism is the hallmark of "national policing," in which citizens just disappear or live in dread of the three o'clock a.m. knock on the door…and then disappear. The accounts coming out of communist China now that have to do with repression in advance of the Olympics should be chilling enough, not to mention the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 (several hundreds shot dead by the Chinese Army).
Oh…yeah…just what this country needs – a national police force. Did Obama mean that? After all, his remarks were not in his prepared speech. This means he spoke SPONTANEOUSLY, ergo, he said just what was on his mind and has been on his mind and will remain on his mind. The time has come for citizens to take a long, hard look at this candidate, who makes it a stock-in-trade to suggest that he's not like the white guys who have held office…another way of saying it's the black guy's turn. It's the laying on of the guilt-trip, the old "you owe us" mantra of the reparations gang, a kingpin in which is the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Coincidence? Hardly!
National Police Force…Egad! Obama isn't against the use of force, but does he favor military force to keep the peace vis-à-vis the world…or a national police force to keep…what?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Obama the "Berliner-Celeb"
Now that enough time has passed in the week since Senator Obama's famous conquest of Berlin, at which appearance he became a worldwide celebrity basking in the glow of universal warm-fuzzies, as Senator McCain's ad recently displayed regarding Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, a lovable "hunk" to the women and a properly domesticated male to both the women and, as Governor Schwarezeneggar would have it, all the "girlie-men," one might look past the o-o-hs and a-a-hs to consider what he said then and now. In the process, one can be happy not to be listening to the constant uh-uh-uhs and broken sentences and thoughts Obama presents in press conferences and interviews, all thanks given to the marvelous teleprompter as used in Berlin and sorely missed off-the-cuff.
The senator – right out of the gate – played the race-card in Berlin with this statement: "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city." Yeah…General Eisenhower and presidents Kennedy and Reagan were white, therefore privileged – that's the gist of what Obama meant, never mind that he has done exceedingly well as a black in the American system, and hasn't done diddley-squat for Berlin. By contrast, Eisenhower gave West Germany back to Germans and Reagan gave all of Germany and all of Berlin back to Germans.
It's amazing that Obama brought up the subject of race in Berlin, where being in the wrong race meant near-certain death at the hands of Germans in the 1930s-40s, six million Jews and five million "other-than-German" types simply murdered, with a bit of torture thrown in, of course. The allied armies discovered corpses to be about as thick as flies when they made the scene in 1945…not even given a burial, decent or otherwise. General Patton grew sick at the sight.
The race-card is alive and well these days, too, for Obama, who made it plain this week that his face certainly doesn't appear to be similar to the faces on the one- and five-dollar bills, that belong to white men, one of whom was the father of the nation and the other, its savior. That he would mention himself in that esteemed and heroic company is virtually blasphemous. Perhaps it's the "our turn time" concept that the candidate is using to exploit the public, never mind that blacks still make up only a little better than 12% of the population. Senator Clinton had a better "our turn" argument, with respect to the ladies, who make up more than half the population. Neither race nor gender should decide the office, and Obama merely annoys people with this approach.
In Berlin, this is what Obama said: "And that's when the airlift began … But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning." This is the sort of pandering that marks a candidate as being short on substance and long on flattery. The airlift was carried out primarily by U.S. pilots who flew around the clock from June 1948 until May 1949 and kept enough supplies moving into Berlin, even in the rigors of a cold winter (hauling coal by air), to keep Berliners alive. In the darkest hours, it was the ministry of these selfless airmen that kept hope alive, not the Berliners. Obama is also short on history, but not on oratory.
In Berlin, Obama said this: "People of the world - look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." In the first place, "a world that stands as one" has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, and the wall didn't come down because a continent came together (Europe is always hopelessly fractured politically), but it was knocked down primarily through President Reagan's resolve as abetted by that of the American citizenry. The challenge WAS too great for the "world that stands as one," (Egad!) but not too great for the United States. Obama is history-challenged or his speech-writers are nincompoops…or both.
Obama said this in Berlin: "As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. … This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands." This is the penultimate example of crass disingenuousness, not to mention a fear tactic that insults any intelligent person.
Save the planet? Indeed! This is the kind of unmitigated arrogance that merely annoys. The climate is going through a not unusual warming cycle (check the 1930s for some actual, unrelentingly hot weather, then followed by cooling until the 1970s). Obama was – and still is – playing the "climate-card," even though the outrageous claims in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, with respect to manmade activities, are routinely being shot down now by renowned scientists, proving the UN-IPCC report to be false. Glaciers reached all the way into Kentucky eons ago, according to the experts, and then warmed away when there were no manmade carbon-belching machines, probably before the time of the wheel.
This was a "piece de resistance" by Obama in Berlin: "This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons." He just doesn't get it. There will never be a world without nuclear (or worse) weapons, and this country would be led by a fool if he didn't realize this and tried to disarm this nation. Quite the opposite is needed – the best technology in the world to provide the state-of-the-art weaponry to keep this country safe.
Finally, this, in Berlin: "With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again." Such arrogance! It's hard to remake anything that one hasn't made, in the first place. The leaders of this country, as well as the citizenry, need to be concerned with all the world's people, but the notion that the world can be remade is merely silly. Most of the world's people don't want to be remade, though they do want help. The job of president is first, to keep this country safe, and second, to furnish as much help as is possible to everyone else. That's the U.S destiny, and Obama can let the Berliners speak for themselves.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
The senator – right out of the gate – played the race-card in Berlin with this statement: "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city." Yeah…General Eisenhower and presidents Kennedy and Reagan were white, therefore privileged – that's the gist of what Obama meant, never mind that he has done exceedingly well as a black in the American system, and hasn't done diddley-squat for Berlin. By contrast, Eisenhower gave West Germany back to Germans and Reagan gave all of Germany and all of Berlin back to Germans.
It's amazing that Obama brought up the subject of race in Berlin, where being in the wrong race meant near-certain death at the hands of Germans in the 1930s-40s, six million Jews and five million "other-than-German" types simply murdered, with a bit of torture thrown in, of course. The allied armies discovered corpses to be about as thick as flies when they made the scene in 1945…not even given a burial, decent or otherwise. General Patton grew sick at the sight.
The race-card is alive and well these days, too, for Obama, who made it plain this week that his face certainly doesn't appear to be similar to the faces on the one- and five-dollar bills, that belong to white men, one of whom was the father of the nation and the other, its savior. That he would mention himself in that esteemed and heroic company is virtually blasphemous. Perhaps it's the "our turn time" concept that the candidate is using to exploit the public, never mind that blacks still make up only a little better than 12% of the population. Senator Clinton had a better "our turn" argument, with respect to the ladies, who make up more than half the population. Neither race nor gender should decide the office, and Obama merely annoys people with this approach.
In Berlin, this is what Obama said: "And that's when the airlift began … But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning." This is the sort of pandering that marks a candidate as being short on substance and long on flattery. The airlift was carried out primarily by U.S. pilots who flew around the clock from June 1948 until May 1949 and kept enough supplies moving into Berlin, even in the rigors of a cold winter (hauling coal by air), to keep Berliners alive. In the darkest hours, it was the ministry of these selfless airmen that kept hope alive, not the Berliners. Obama is also short on history, but not on oratory.
In Berlin, Obama said this: "People of the world - look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." In the first place, "a world that stands as one" has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, and the wall didn't come down because a continent came together (Europe is always hopelessly fractured politically), but it was knocked down primarily through President Reagan's resolve as abetted by that of the American citizenry. The challenge WAS too great for the "world that stands as one," (Egad!) but not too great for the United States. Obama is history-challenged or his speech-writers are nincompoops…or both.
Obama said this in Berlin: "As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. … This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands." This is the penultimate example of crass disingenuousness, not to mention a fear tactic that insults any intelligent person.
Save the planet? Indeed! This is the kind of unmitigated arrogance that merely annoys. The climate is going through a not unusual warming cycle (check the 1930s for some actual, unrelentingly hot weather, then followed by cooling until the 1970s). Obama was – and still is – playing the "climate-card," even though the outrageous claims in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, with respect to manmade activities, are routinely being shot down now by renowned scientists, proving the UN-IPCC report to be false. Glaciers reached all the way into Kentucky eons ago, according to the experts, and then warmed away when there were no manmade carbon-belching machines, probably before the time of the wheel.
This was a "piece de resistance" by Obama in Berlin: "This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons." He just doesn't get it. There will never be a world without nuclear (or worse) weapons, and this country would be led by a fool if he didn't realize this and tried to disarm this nation. Quite the opposite is needed – the best technology in the world to provide the state-of-the-art weaponry to keep this country safe.
Finally, this, in Berlin: "With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again." Such arrogance! It's hard to remake anything that one hasn't made, in the first place. The leaders of this country, as well as the citizenry, need to be concerned with all the world's people, but the notion that the world can be remade is merely silly. Most of the world's people don't want to be remade, though they do want help. The job of president is first, to keep this country safe, and second, to furnish as much help as is possible to everyone else. That's the U.S destiny, and Obama can let the Berliners speak for themselves.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Obamessiah's Overseas Campaign
The world is probably witnessing a "first in history," at least as far as the U.S. is concerned, to wit, a presidential candidate campaigning in the Middle East and Europe for the highest office in this country. Having announced a foreign relations platform guaranteed to save the world, before he left on this tour, he is now in the process of getting it rubber-stamped by the jihad crowd, whose stock in trade is comprised mainly of stoning bad girls and beheading anyone who takes the name of Mohammad in vain, and the citizens of Olde Europe, who just naturally hate this country and don't give a fig who runs it as long as it can be claimed to be badly done and sends troops to save their bacon when one of their countries does mean things to another(s).
Barack Hussein Obamessiah plans to speak at the Brandenburg Gate and has been told once an hour by his handlers that it's not located in Sioux City, the better for him to know where he is. The word is that he's been practicing John F. Kennedy's famous pronouncement when he spoke in Berlin in 1963: "Ich bin ein Berliner." Getting the hang of speaking German with a New England accent is a bit much, so he'll have to settle for a smooth Hawaiian chant. He might have tried for Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" proclamation in 1987 when the Gipper spoke in Berlin but that would have been too republican as well as too obvious in terms of what it takes to stand tall and walk the talk…McCain style.
Since the on-scene reporters lack the proper gravitas to understand and describe/interpret such an earth-shaking event, the millionaire news anchors of ABC, CBS, and NBC have all tagged along the better to advance the networks' extensive Obama propaganda machine. They were shut out of the action in Afghanistan (weekend time off), but will get their chance to ooh and aah as the great one deigns to breathe his intellect upon them Jimmy Carter style, complete with grumbling on foreign soil about the monster cowboy from Texas. He will need to practice the Carter smile but be careful not to break his jaw in the process or possibly establish an insulting smirk, something he might have learned from wife Michelle, who smirks about her "mean country" (probably the reason she didn't make the scene).
Obama will feel at home in the Middle East, since he should understand that folks there are just like the paranoid folks he described in Pennsylvania – typical white people (like his grandma) who are suspicious of folks not like them, clutch their Bibles to their hearts and keep their shotguns at the ready. In the Middle East, they keep their beheading swords at the ready, their Korans out of the toilet, and their women covered so nobody can tell what their ethnicity (or measurements) might be, ergo, they will understand B. Hussein, whose middle name probably makes them quiver with the same ecstasy described by MSNBC's Chris Mathews when he mentioned last February that an Obama speech made a "thrill go up his (Matthews' ) leg." TV anchors can be weird in spouting democrat boilerplate but still make millions while their legs do funny things. One wonders if Matthews should see a psychiatrist or a neurologist.
The messiah has two fellow-senator tagalongs in Hagel and Reed, the former a much decorated Vietnam vet and the latter a graduate of West Point and former army officer. This arrangement is probably meant to give Obama some commander-in-chief bona fides, but one wonders if he just needs someone to help him with the when and where and method concerning a possible need to salute. He's already said plainly what he plans to do militarily, so there's actually no need for him to meet with the military on this trip, but the photo-ops are of the utmost importance. Expect to see the senator, who experienced 143 Senate work-days from January 2005 in his first term until announcing for the presidency early last year, eating with the GIs and feigning satisfaction with the food (while probably wondering if his underarm deodorant is working in the 120 degree weather). Thousands have spent years in Iraq/Afghanistan while Obama worked the equivalent of just under five months in the Senate and has been AWOL since February 2007.
The poop about this trip is that Obama must meet with world leaders to learn something about foreign affairs so that he can take his best shot in behalf of the U.S. in making policy decisions. Never mind that foreign-affairs specialists who have been in the business for decades still have problems, he's supposed to incur enough gravitas in a week or so to make him an expert. Actually, Barack probably means to let everyone know that he's a team player and that all he said about that terrible world-trade and anti-globalization stuff was just politics, meant to get elected, not govern. Democrats are one-world-government people but republicans still believe in looking out for this country as a first and foremost consideration. Olde Europe will love Obama, the best reason imaginable for seeing that he's never elected. One wonders if he would be in favor of adopting the euro, and even if he might so indicate (privately, of course) that fact to the French and Germans. Egad!
Elections are always silly seasons, but this one takes the cake, with a candidate campaigning overseas primarily because he has no idea what has been happening overseas. The messiah will be in big trouble if he mentions Sioux City at the Brandenburg Gate.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Barack Hussein Obamessiah plans to speak at the Brandenburg Gate and has been told once an hour by his handlers that it's not located in Sioux City, the better for him to know where he is. The word is that he's been practicing John F. Kennedy's famous pronouncement when he spoke in Berlin in 1963: "Ich bin ein Berliner." Getting the hang of speaking German with a New England accent is a bit much, so he'll have to settle for a smooth Hawaiian chant. He might have tried for Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" proclamation in 1987 when the Gipper spoke in Berlin but that would have been too republican as well as too obvious in terms of what it takes to stand tall and walk the talk…McCain style.
Since the on-scene reporters lack the proper gravitas to understand and describe/interpret such an earth-shaking event, the millionaire news anchors of ABC, CBS, and NBC have all tagged along the better to advance the networks' extensive Obama propaganda machine. They were shut out of the action in Afghanistan (weekend time off), but will get their chance to ooh and aah as the great one deigns to breathe his intellect upon them Jimmy Carter style, complete with grumbling on foreign soil about the monster cowboy from Texas. He will need to practice the Carter smile but be careful not to break his jaw in the process or possibly establish an insulting smirk, something he might have learned from wife Michelle, who smirks about her "mean country" (probably the reason she didn't make the scene).
Obama will feel at home in the Middle East, since he should understand that folks there are just like the paranoid folks he described in Pennsylvania – typical white people (like his grandma) who are suspicious of folks not like them, clutch their Bibles to their hearts and keep their shotguns at the ready. In the Middle East, they keep their beheading swords at the ready, their Korans out of the toilet, and their women covered so nobody can tell what their ethnicity (or measurements) might be, ergo, they will understand B. Hussein, whose middle name probably makes them quiver with the same ecstasy described by MSNBC's Chris Mathews when he mentioned last February that an Obama speech made a "thrill go up his (Matthews' ) leg." TV anchors can be weird in spouting democrat boilerplate but still make millions while their legs do funny things. One wonders if Matthews should see a psychiatrist or a neurologist.
The messiah has two fellow-senator tagalongs in Hagel and Reed, the former a much decorated Vietnam vet and the latter a graduate of West Point and former army officer. This arrangement is probably meant to give Obama some commander-in-chief bona fides, but one wonders if he just needs someone to help him with the when and where and method concerning a possible need to salute. He's already said plainly what he plans to do militarily, so there's actually no need for him to meet with the military on this trip, but the photo-ops are of the utmost importance. Expect to see the senator, who experienced 143 Senate work-days from January 2005 in his first term until announcing for the presidency early last year, eating with the GIs and feigning satisfaction with the food (while probably wondering if his underarm deodorant is working in the 120 degree weather). Thousands have spent years in Iraq/Afghanistan while Obama worked the equivalent of just under five months in the Senate and has been AWOL since February 2007.
The poop about this trip is that Obama must meet with world leaders to learn something about foreign affairs so that he can take his best shot in behalf of the U.S. in making policy decisions. Never mind that foreign-affairs specialists who have been in the business for decades still have problems, he's supposed to incur enough gravitas in a week or so to make him an expert. Actually, Barack probably means to let everyone know that he's a team player and that all he said about that terrible world-trade and anti-globalization stuff was just politics, meant to get elected, not govern. Democrats are one-world-government people but republicans still believe in looking out for this country as a first and foremost consideration. Olde Europe will love Obama, the best reason imaginable for seeing that he's never elected. One wonders if he would be in favor of adopting the euro, and even if he might so indicate (privately, of course) that fact to the French and Germans. Egad!
Elections are always silly seasons, but this one takes the cake, with a candidate campaigning overseas primarily because he has no idea what has been happening overseas. The messiah will be in big trouble if he mentions Sioux City at the Brandenburg Gate.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, July 21, 2008
Town-Hall Meetings & Casinos?
Here is the first sentence of an Associated Press account of 10 July: "Gov. Steve Beshear is planning a series of town hall meetings across Kentucky in an effort to regroup from a rocky start as the state's top-elected official." Here is the second sentence: "Beshear Chief of Staff Adam Edelen said the town hall meetings are intended to help the administration retool its agenda in the wake of uncertain economic times and a rough first go-around with the General Assembly this spring."
Well…which is it, the first explanation or the second? Is the Kentucky governor trying to burnish a badly damaged image or is he actually interested in finding out things he already knows? And, by "rough go-around," did Edelen mean to drag the legislature into the governor's troubles?
Town-Hall meetings have been in the forefront of politics in this country for well over a year, as they are in especially the last year of every four-year presidential-election cycle. They are designed for one thing only – as campaign efforts in the drive to win an election. The governor is starting almost four years ahead of time with regard to his situation, but only a few months ahead of time concerning the November elections in the state, the results being absolutely vital to his "retooling" of his agenda, which has only one item at present – casino gambling, euphemistically referred to by the pooh-bahs as "gaming."
Perhaps the main subject in his now infamous trip – because of wasting thousands of dollars to fly everybody but the Frankfort street-sweepers – to Pikeville/Virgie last week was casino gambling, a subject near to the governor's heart since he sees it as the pathway to financial glory…for the state coffers, of course, though one always has to wonder just which official is getting what in the run-up to effecting the proper legislation, bill-signing, etc. In the early 90s, state officials were on the make (or make that "take") over other matters, and quite a few of them went to the Big House for their trouble. If Bill Clinton hadn't fired all the federal prosecutors right after taking office, without giving any reason, there might have been some more vacations taken where the barbed wire crowns the fences around pastures not frequented by cattle.
Make no mistake. The governor will conduct 12 more "town-halls" before the dust clears (Somerset and Winchester on 21 and 24 July, respectively) and the major motive for same will be drumming up support for casino gambling come next January, when the legislature enjoys its "short" biennial session. That it can do anything in 30 days will be problematic, given the usual performances by the solons, but that may be why the guv is getting such an early start on getting his ducks in a row, the major element of such effort probably being to make the gambling the preserve of the horse-racing crowd, rich folks perennially whining about the travails of the "sport."
Naw…the guv's not worrying about his 39% approval rating last April…is he? He's just "retooling the agenda," meaning, "get the word out that the state will go bankrupt if more suckers do not join the lottery crowd and lose their money in the slots or by way of cards, roulette wheels, etc., in these uncertain economic times, as Edelen would have it.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Well…which is it, the first explanation or the second? Is the Kentucky governor trying to burnish a badly damaged image or is he actually interested in finding out things he already knows? And, by "rough go-around," did Edelen mean to drag the legislature into the governor's troubles?
Town-Hall meetings have been in the forefront of politics in this country for well over a year, as they are in especially the last year of every four-year presidential-election cycle. They are designed for one thing only – as campaign efforts in the drive to win an election. The governor is starting almost four years ahead of time with regard to his situation, but only a few months ahead of time concerning the November elections in the state, the results being absolutely vital to his "retooling" of his agenda, which has only one item at present – casino gambling, euphemistically referred to by the pooh-bahs as "gaming."
Perhaps the main subject in his now infamous trip – because of wasting thousands of dollars to fly everybody but the Frankfort street-sweepers – to Pikeville/Virgie last week was casino gambling, a subject near to the governor's heart since he sees it as the pathway to financial glory…for the state coffers, of course, though one always has to wonder just which official is getting what in the run-up to effecting the proper legislation, bill-signing, etc. In the early 90s, state officials were on the make (or make that "take") over other matters, and quite a few of them went to the Big House for their trouble. If Bill Clinton hadn't fired all the federal prosecutors right after taking office, without giving any reason, there might have been some more vacations taken where the barbed wire crowns the fences around pastures not frequented by cattle.
Make no mistake. The governor will conduct 12 more "town-halls" before the dust clears (Somerset and Winchester on 21 and 24 July, respectively) and the major motive for same will be drumming up support for casino gambling come next January, when the legislature enjoys its "short" biennial session. That it can do anything in 30 days will be problematic, given the usual performances by the solons, but that may be why the guv is getting such an early start on getting his ducks in a row, the major element of such effort probably being to make the gambling the preserve of the horse-racing crowd, rich folks perennially whining about the travails of the "sport."
Naw…the guv's not worrying about his 39% approval rating last April…is he? He's just "retooling the agenda," meaning, "get the word out that the state will go bankrupt if more suckers do not join the lottery crowd and lose their money in the slots or by way of cards, roulette wheels, etc., in these uncertain economic times, as Edelen would have it.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Governor Beshear's Costly Excursion
Office-seekers on every level make much each election cycle of erasing all government-waste and -fraud virtually overnight upon assuming office. This is the mantra in Kentucky, where waste and fraud are as justifiably expected as the next sunrise, horse races, bourbon/moonshine, and various grades of tobacco, not to mention marijuana in secluded areas, usually in the knob/mountainous regions. The waste and fraud are never erased but the citizens are so inured to this circumstance that they give it a ho-hum and continue channel-surfing.
Case in point: Lexington Herald-Leader reporter/columnist Ryan Alessi went to some pain in the 19 July edition (front-page-above-the-fold-first section) to give Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear some notice concerning his gobbling up of the state's money in treating his capitol-gang to a three-airplane round-trip excursion to Pikeville, Ky., on the seventeenth, though the meeting they attended was in Virgie, Ky., (population: 2768), requiring more transportation on the ground. Alessi also laid it on the governor over this trip on the Kentucky Education Television program COMMENT on the eighteenth. The cost, not counting that which applied on the Virgie end: more than $7,000.
The guv's spokesperson made it plain that time was saved in the process – time so valuable that a 350-mile round-trip requiring some six hours by highway had to be avoided. The plane trip(s) and additional ground transportation at Frankfort to and from the airport and Pikeville airport to and from Virgie (a distance of 15-20 miles) probably took no less than four hours, so a strategic TWO hours were saved for these important people.
A check on the Internet with Bus Bank turned up the information that a deluxe motor-coach seating 45-55 people and equipped with air-conditioning and a bathroom, of course, would cost between $600 and $1500 per day, depending on further amenities such as a hostess, obviously not needed for this excursion, which would have taken 9-10 hours, including the "town-hall" meeting at which only the governor spoke. Typically, excursions such as this one are figured at about $20 per person per day.
The kicker, though, is in the fact that the trip was made by the governor and 15 state officials, all of whom could have been accommodated on the two state planes that were used, which seat a total of 19 people. This makes one wonder why a private plane, at a cost of $4474, was chartered, when the two state planes, at a combined cost of $2614, could have handled the whole entourage, with three seats to spare. The question: who were the passengers who had no business on a strictly business trip? The extra plane could hold 11 people, making their transport cost $407 per person to fly Frankfort-Virgie and return.
A further question would have to do with any possible considerations accruing to the fact that the government's Beechcraft King Air cost $1320 to operate for the trip while the private plane, also a Beechcraft King Air seating the same number of people cost $4474, far more than three times as much. What connections could this suggest between the governor and the operator of the private service? One wonders what the state auditor might say about this, although she may have been one of the officials on the trip.
This stinks, of course, especially since the governor plans 12 more such "town-hall" trips around the state, with the expectation being that a similar rip-off is in the offing each time. For probably no more than $1000 the transportation right to the front-door in Virgie, bypassing Pikeville airport altogether, could have been effected on a luxury motor coach, such coaches seen all the time throughout the state. No official would have had to drive and could have snoozed on the return trip and been back in Frankfort by midnight. Disgusting! If the governor thinks this stuff will help the 39% approval rating he enjoyed in April at the end of the legislative session, his elevator is not reaching the top floor.
Actually, the governor posited his entire campaign last year upon his promise to bring casino-gambling to Kentucky (thereby forestalling bankruptcy), such gambling actually to be handled by the horse-racing crowd if it, whether if agreed to by the governor or not, could get away with it by getting the legislature to ante-up. The fractious legislators, recognizing the unfairness to other operators and no doubt understanding prices to be paid at vote-time this November, killed the putsch. Having ignored an actual problem January-March, that of restructuring the state pension-system, the governor convened a special session of the legislature in June at a cost of $60,000 per day that did in five days what it couldn't do in three months, thus more waste and fraud.
And so it goes in Kentucky. Sound familiar?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The Political Odd-Couple
Political candidates pull the most transparently devious stunts, apparently under the impression that the public is so collectively gullible that it will swallow anything as authentic. Big news: According to the candidates themselves, Senator Clinton is hitting the campaign trail with Senator Obama (in tow?) in order to help him save the nation…BUT in the process Senator Obama will help the hapless Clinton recoup her $12.175 million "loan" to her campaign, just part of its deficit of some $22.5 million. It's hard to believe but she spent (or misspent) $207 million contributed by a gullible public in her lost cause. How many free lunches would that buy?
Who do they think the average Joe Blows are…idiots to be conned into believing that either of these candidates is interested in saving the nation? Senator Obama is interested in being president and is willing to "buy off" Clinton in order to get the female and union vote. Clinton is interested in getting her money back, hopefully with interest, and will swallow her pride in the process. The best thing that can happen for her is the defeat of Obama in November; otherwise, her chances in 2012 are out the window…unless Obama should be elected and then be as inept as Jimmy Carter. Thus, Obama will need to handle her very carefully. In their love-in in Unity, N.H., (unity – get it, giggle, giggle) on the 28th, they praised each other as something only marginally less than the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus…this, after explaining for months why each other shouldn't be president.
Or…take the latest Obama gaffe. In a recent performance he made mention of the fact that the mean republicans will come after him now, inducing FEAR in the populace because he is (gasp and three palpitations) a BLACK MAN. Even after his weird statement in Philadelphia in March about his own grandmother being a "typical white person," i.e., AFRAID of those of another color in her vicinity, he said something this dumb – playing the race card, never mind that his speech in Philadelphia the day before was billed as a speech about RACE, even though it in part was actually a defense of his then pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, a rabid anti-American.
Apparently thinking that the "average" American can't put two and two together and never checks the news, he made that weird statement in the Hollywood fundraiser a few weeks ago concerning the white folks in Pennsylvania regarding their FEAR of immigrants, and even placed it in the context of their being so uptight that they held their guns close-by and grasped their Bibles. Now…that's an attempt at genuine fear-mongering. So, according to Obama, is the "typical white person" a paranoiac so scared of anybody of another race that he/she becomes a recluse with a gun in one hand and the Bible in the other? The race-card again, this time combined with creating fear.
On 25 June, African-American pastors, led by the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Alveda King, a former member of the Georgia state Legislature and the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., marched on the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters to demand that candidates refuse donations from Planned Parenthood. They believe that Planned Parenthood allows racist donors to designate their money to go to fund abortions of blacks. Planned Parenthood has outlined a $10 million campaign to fund candidates who support abortion. Dr. King mentioned in a TV interview on Fox News that of the 50 million abortions since 1973, 14 million (or 28%) have been performed on black women; however, they make up only 13% of the population.
According to Michael Gerson of the Washington Post (02 April 2008), "Obama's record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion -- a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called 'too close to infanticide.' Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be 'punished with a baby' because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life." Punished with a baby? Crisis pregnancy? Egad! Of all the candidates throughout the nation, who will receive the lion's share of that $10 million?
To get an indication of the elitism possessed by Obama, notice that he hired Clinton's former campaign manager to be chief of staff for the vice presidential nominee, whoever that will be. In other words, the veep nominee either won't have the good sense or the permission to hire his/her own chief of staff. Weird! In the Unity rally, Obama promised everything to every American but a piece of the moon and made it clear that under his power the nation will take over the cradle-to-the-grave existence of every citizen. Egad! By the time Labor Day rolls around, Obama will have said too much to be credible, and the average Joe Blow will understand.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Church Homosexual-Problem
In the Anglican Church tradition, of which the American Episcopal Church is a part, the Lambeth Conference is held every ten years, the last one in the summer of 1998. Next month in Canterbury, England, at the University of Kent, Lambeth 2008 will be held. It will be attended by the more than 800 bishops of the Church, who will come from throughout the world, representing some 73 million congregants, the vast majority of them outside both England and the United States.
A 20-day affair, the conference will have as its focus these elements: Biblical interpretation / Hermeneutics; Ecumenical Management; Anglican identity, the role of bishops; Issues of Covenant; Listening Process (within the Communion); Engagement with other faiths; Evangelism and Mission; Gender and Sexuality; Relationships, Social and family relationships; HIV/Aids; Millennium Development Goals.
According to the BBC of 14 February 2007, the head of the Anglican Church and Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams has said that he fears that the Church may split over the row sparked by the appointment of openly gay US bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. Robinson is the bishop for all of New Hampshire. He and his "partner" were also "united" on 07 June in a civil ceremony, followed by a church celebration, the obvious implication being that they are now married, notwithstanding both biblical and legal principles obtaining that marriage can only be enacted by one man with one woman. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that homosexual behavior is deemed by Robinson to be both biblically and legally sound.
Katharine Schori, the presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church, is publicly on the record as approving both same-sex marriage and the ordination of homosexuals to ministry. Churches and even entire dioceses are currently aligning themselves with overseas arms of the church, particularly with bishoprics in Africa. They have to accept the loss of church property to do so, notwithstanding that congregations have paid in part or in whole for these properties and their maintenance. Such are the legalistic entanglements endemic to hierarchal governance of religious entities.
The 1998 conference was marked by dissension so profound as to be palpable over the homosexuality question. Especially the African bishops, representing 38.6 million congregants, more than on any other continent, including that of England, where it's the official state church, made it clear then that same-gender marriage (goofy as a possibility on biological grounds alone, notwithstanding scripture edicts) and ordination of homosexuals, a clear consequent adjunct, would not be acceptable. Thus, the die has been cast for the meeting in July – stormy.
Roiling the ecclesial waters will be Robinson, banned understandably from attending the conference officially, who plans to be in Canterbury as an outside observer of some sort, thereby calling attention to himself as the highest-profile bishop there, anyway, and to the profligacy he represents. This will antagonize the Africans all the more, but it mainly says a lot about Robinson as a representative of the militant, hard-core homosexual community in this country that constantly demands attention all out of proportion to its importance, not to mention the perversions it represents as perfectly normal. Then Joint-Chiefs Chairman Marine General Peter Pace caught a fury of criticism from the mainstream media last year when he used the term "immoral" to characterize homosexual acts.
Six of the eight democrat president-wannabes (Dodd and Biden declined) appeared before some sort of Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual group for a full debate a few months ago to glorify the homosexual way of life and promise everything from gay marriage to out-of-the-closet homosexuals in the military. Predictably, the republican candidates wouldn't touch that outfit with a ten-foot pole. This, however, is indicative of the inordinate drive in the country, now overseen largely by the hippy-dippy boomers, toward a weird political correctness that violates even the obvious physiological attributes of human beings.
The other mainline denominations that have allowed the homosexual question to demand a fixation on the problem of affirming the homosexual lifestyle or not, notwithstanding its total condemnation in both biblical testaments, have seen their memberships riddled since 1960, during a large part of which time the homosexual question has overshadowed everything the church should be doing. Since 1960, the Episcopal denomination has decreased in membership by 48%; the United Methodists by 25%; Presbyterian (USA) by 44%; Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) by 74%, Evangelical-Lutheran by 31%.
By contrast, in the last 48 years the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon, Mitt Romney's church), which adamantly condemns homosexual behavior and insists that those addicted to it can be "healed," has grown in membership by 243%. The Southern Baptist Convention, in which the homosexual question is considered unworthy of even a thought, has grown by 76% to a membership of more than 17 million, according to the National Council of Churches statistics for 2007.
So…will Robinson make his point in Canterbury and probably cause schism, the penultimate act of self-interest and indication of super-ego? It remains to be seen, but hopefully the time will soon come when the inordinate drive toward some sort of weird political/social correctness in this country, the ugliest aspect of which is the attempt to normalize sexual perversion, is short-circuited and the relatively few left in many denominations can start rebuilding.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Elitist Reverse-racism?
It has been the habit of those of the liberal persuasion to assign racism to only white people, never to those of any other race, such habit configured graphically in the "mainstream media," for instance, including especially the coast papers and ABC/CBS/NBC and their cable outlets. The trash-talking of white people as virtual cannibals vis-à-vis those of color has become a cottage industry, and the sponsors of these garbage-spewers go along because, after all, profit is the theme and self-flagellation a redeeming virtue anyway.
In an interview with Steve Kroft of CBS "60 Minutes," Michelle Obama indicated that she didn't worry about assassination since Barack Obama, being a black man, could be shot just going to the gas station. The ugly context of that statement is that of racism. Most U.S. citizens are white, so her husband, she seems to think, is at the mercy of white racists, who would be called "white supremacists" by Ms. Obama's minister, the Rev. Doctor Jeremiah Wright, who is on the record as claiming that white racists/supremacists invented AIDS and inoculated the black community with the dread disease.
Much has been made about Hillary Clinton's comment that the '68 campaign ran into June, at which time Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated. She was simply offering a time-frame for previous campaigns but the mainstreamers made the remark into a veiled threat perhaps suggesting that Obama had better not make any trips to the gas station. This turned Clinton's remark into one of racism…ugly, but no uglier than Ms. Obama's actual racial slur, in the first place, which came well before the Clinton remark.
Michele Obama's comment leads into this statement, made in her speech at the University of South Carolina: “Because sometimes it’s easier to hold on to your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your own ignorance… That’s America. So the challenge for us is are we ready for change?” This, in turn, leads into the Barack Obama wisdom offered at some Hollywood bash that people like the folks in Pennsylvania (typical whites noted in his racism speech in Philadelphia, with his grandmother as a paradigm?) are paranoid religionists grasping their Bibles and hunting down immigrants. Since most of the people in S.C., the U.S., and Pennsylvania are white, it's racism again.
Some folks might term these examples as "reverse racism." They would be right. This is enhanced by Michele Obama's previous statement that the U.S. is a mean country, another echo of the Rev. Dr. Wright, who said the U.S. should be damned by God, and connected the nation's meanness with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, operations that actually ended the worst war in history. Barack Obama, notwithstanding any claims to the contrary, knew about the reverend's reverse-racist remarks and reacted by pushing the minister out of his campaign circle.
This sort of racism is not just the garden-variety type. More accurately, it could be termed elitist reverse-racism. In other words, the Obamas (Michele putting everyone on notice through her activities that she's a main player), display elitism in its most pronounced form, not pretty. The mainstream media don't call this stuff elitist racism because Obama speaks from the mountain and must soon part the waters leading to CHANGE as he does the Moses thing, leading the whiteys out of their wilderness of ignorance, as Michele Obama would put in, citing her South Carolina speech.
The elitists, after all, are the ones with the wisdom to identify CHANGE and point the nation toward it. The elite racists (or reverse-racists), as seen in the Obamas, are those sagacious ones who can drag the whites (okay, everyone, to be fair) into the 21st century, perhaps kicking and screaming, to be sure, but acknowledging the elitist superiority. Perhaps this CHANGE has been described, but, if so, the description has escaped this corner. So far, it has been more of a rhetorical gimmick than anything else…sort of like the famous Howard Dean SCREAM of 2004, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.
It's no accident that Barack Obama has made a supreme effort to engage the youngest of the voters. He has a winsomeness that is attractive, can make a good rehearsed stump-speech (though stumbles badly off-the-cuff), and is relatively young at age 47. His charisma can carry him with the young, who have neither the knowledge nor experience to separate truth from fiction nor personal appeal from genuineness, but do love the notion of CHANGE, just for the heck of it. By contrast, John McCain is labeled a hopeless anachronism, though not appearing as such to the smartest of the youngsters, despite his having both the knowledge and experience to run the country.
So…this column might be termed as one greatly evincing a certain racism, even elite racism. That's for the reader to decide, of course, but level heads should consider the elements of elitist reverse-racism…not pretty, but out there. For instance, is Obama so thoroughly disconnected from Wright that he won't attempt to inculcate reparations, an objective near to the reverend's heart? To do so would point to the quintessential elite reverse-racism…make the whites (most of the taxpayers) ante up to whoever can make a claim, thus admitting a guilt never operative…but appropriate for financial considerations.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Problem: Gas or Ethics?
It's been interesting to watch the "oil barons" in the hearings being admonished by the likes of Senator "Leaky" Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. It's interesting and funny to wonder why these millionaire executives appeared before this committee on 22 May, which has little to do with oil or commerce of any kind. One has to conclude that the whole affair last week was an effort for a select bunch of prima donna democrats to get their faces before their constituents in a "good cause" before taking their Memorial Day break from the hard work of legislating, never mind that the Judiciary Committee is concerned with matters of law, courts, judges, prosecutors, etc., not oil.
The execs made it plain enough that given the right to extract oil from areas owned by this country they could do wonders to bring down the price of gasoline. The committee members didn't want to hear that. They wanted to penalize the companies (windfall taxes) for making money (private enterprise) and the execs, in particular, for making more than they thought appropriate, never mind that they would make as much as they could themselves, given the opportunity. The deals they make just to stay in office might make the oil execs look angelic.
These Judicial Committee democrats know virtually nothing about the oil business, little more than how to pump gas at the self-serve. They and their colleagues in the Congress seem to think it's perfectly okay for coal-mining companies to ravage the topography of the poor states of Kentucky and West Virginia in fulfilling the demand for power but not okay to drill for oil in lands already owned by the nation or off the coasts, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, notwithstanding the offshore oil rigs off both the Texas and Louisiana coasts, which haven't suffered even slightly because of their presence, not to mention the inland wells all over the Southwest that don't seem to damage the scenery or anything else unduly.
Senator Durbin seemed to wonder if the execs had "any concerns about what you're doing to this country with the prices that you're charging and the profits you're taking." This is the senator who likened American GIs in Iraq to Hitlers' Nazi SS troops, Pol Pot's thugs who murdered a couple million in the infamous "killing fields," and the keepers of the Russian Gulags. This was Durbin's way of sabotaging the military effort in Iraq, so to have the gall to ask anybody else about what they're doing to this country was transparently self-serving and made the senator look foolish, though he probably thought the folks back home would consider him an ethical giant looking out for their gas prices.
For Senator Feinstein, it was a matter of lacking an "ethical compass about the price of gasoline." She saddled the oilmen with "just a litany of complaints, that you're all just hapless victims of a system." The broken system is in the Congress, which is responsible for the tardiness of the U.S. in ratcheting up its oil production years ago and…yes…the oil industry is a victim of this Congressional incompetence. There are rigs offshore vis-à-vis her state of California, though the Federal Ninth Circuit Appeals Court would dearly love to have them outlawed. Feinstein probably would, too, but she obviously dare not mention it.
One is "shocked and appalled" (as the politicians are wont to say when attempting to besmirch a fellow politician) at the obvious allusion by the senators to the matter of ethics – or lack thereof – of the people who are responsible for providing the gas, through drilling and/or refining, that is used in this country, especially since the ethical problem lies with them. The senators, about half of whom are millionaires or multimillionaires, are not bothered by the gas prices since their salaries range from $169,300 to $188,100 (leadership positions) plus extensive perks. House Speaker Pelosi makes $217,400. Despite being eminently well-paid, they lack the ethical concern for the average citizen making far less to make it possible for the oil companies to do what they can to alleviate the problem.
Senator Clinton is not on the Judiciary Committee but she is a good example of the ethically-challenged. Notwithstanding that she told General Petraeus to his face last fall that she considered him a liar, she concocted a lie about the 1996 snipers in Bosnia (a total of none) from whom she and Chelsea had to flee for their lives that was so outrageous as to make her a fit subject of the Senate Ethics committee. Even worse, hubby Bill and daughter Chelsea (16 at the time) have had to go along with it during the campaign, assuming they knew full well that Clinton was repeating to crowds this false tale, apparently never realizing that the perfectly peaceful event was all on tape. Then, there was her lie about the woman whose baby died for the mother's lack of $100 to pay a hospital emergency-room charge.
No…the ethical matter has much less to do with the gas execs than with the ethics of the senators and congresspersons. Senator Obama reckoned that in 20 years of attendance at the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright's church, he never heard the rev say any of the bad things that by now millions of others have heard. Does anybody believe this? Of course not! If he didn't hear Wright's garbage, he had to be sound asleep in the pew, something hard to do within the hearing of the screaming Wright, who might put the screaming Howard Dean (Iowa 2004) to shame for sheer volume, if not coherence.
Obama, at last notice at least, was still a member of Wright's church, which has this in its statement of faith: "We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." In light of this, how true is Obama to the native land called the USA? Do his Kenyan roots and his relatives there, including cousin Odinga, the prime minister, mean more to him than his roots in this country? Who knows? He hasn't renounced that part of the statement of faith.
The gas situation IS a problem of immense proportions that affects every area of life, but there's little hope of assuaging it until the "ethical Congress" gets itself off dead center and starts legislating sensibly (and a bit more ethically?) instead of many of its members sitting around and counting their money and being "shocked and appalled" that anyone would take notice.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Obama or Clinton...Who Cares?
With the primary season nearly over, one looks in wonderment at the Democrat Party vis-à-vis its two candidates, amazed at how these people have risen to the top of the heap. Surely a political party can do better than being satisfied with a couple of folks who started years ago to get the prize, raised a ton of money, and blew it on a public unable or unwilling to demand competency. Senator Clinton is even investing some $10 million of her own fortune in the process, notwithstanding the fact that such august
entities as NBC/MSNBC have declared categorically that Obama is the winner.
Senator Obama has come from nowhere – literally – and has adopted the "messiah approach" for his campaign, the white knight on the white horse turned into the black knight on the black horse to save the nation, mostly white. August entities (okay, like NBC/MSNBC) have aided and abetted in this effort by presenting him as the absolute savior…of the world, no less. His wife has even declared that only now, with her savior-husband in the place of success, is she proud of her country for the first time in her adulthood. She's been referred to as his "bitter-half" but enhances that image only when she speaks, which is often.
Last fall, Clinton reckoned in an appearance before the congressional black caucus that the government should give $5,000 to each baby when she/he escapes the womb to face a cruel world. Since about 4,000,000 babes arrive each year, that works out to some $20 billion in just the first year. Not to be outdone by even herself, in Iowa she allowed that it would be a good idea to give every earner a $1,000 tax-cut per year in behalf of her/his IRA. This amounts to more than the baby-boon (up to $25 billion), but she would pay for it with higher estate taxes (taxing the dead…okay no opposition there). Then…about those driver-licenses she thought would be great for illegals…before she thought that maybe they wouldn't be so great…well…get the picture? She hasn't mentioned babies or IRAs for a long time and obviously doesn't need the driver-license thing to raise its ugly head again.
Poor Obama was breezing along when – VOILA! – it was discovered that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was, if not a subversive, at least an accomplished racist and USA-hater deluxe. That wouldn't have mattered, of course, except that Obama never left the congregation over a 20-year period even in light of the reverend's totally off-the-wall assertions such as that the U.S. government (maybe during the Reagan era?) invented HIV/Aids and purposely plagued the black community with it. It didn't help that Obama's loud-mouthed wife characterized the nation as Wright did, to wit, a mean place. Obama developed the theme with his remark about the "typical" folks grabbing their guns and Bibles and forming a posse to hunt down immigrants. Egad!
Last fall, Clinton said, "I say this nation can shatter the highest glass ceiling – because that’s what Americans have been doing for over 200 years." In other words, the gender card is now being played, since that's the key to "glass ceiling" language. It's the ladies' turn, and that serves as presidential qualification. Obama, with apparently little sense of history but good vibes concerning diversity, has stated that he would sit down for a conversation on important matters with Iran's President Ahmadinejad without any preconditions, such as that the Big A retract his statement that Israel is to be erased from the map. These people are scary.
Chamberlain tried dancing with the devil (Hitler) in 1938 through appeasement and helped buy England and the whole world seven years of incomprehensible bloodshed. He offered up Sudetenland Czechoslovakia, with no argument against Hitler's simply taking it. Would Obama offer up Israel, thus starting a conflagration unimaginable to the human mind? Who knows?
Clinton spoke of 35 years of experience while in New Hampshire, changed it to 16 years in South Carolina, and actually has held office for only seven years? But that sort of waffling is nothing compared to her totally incomprehensible fabrication of coming under sniper fire while on a trip to Bosnia in 1996. A lie that outrageously huge and meticulously calculated and repeated until she was caught should evoke a humongous doubt of her ability to be commander-in-chief…or even remain as a senator. The only thing that could drive a deception of that magnitude is blind ambition, something she shares with Obama, who, like his wife (and Clinton's hubby Bill), shifts into tongue-mode with his brain still in neutral.
McCain has ambition, too, plus decades of service in both the military and the Senate, but it's not as blind as that. He knows what it's like not to live in a fantasy world and – yes – rubs a lot of conservatives the wrong way, but he actually lived a long torturous ordeal infinitely worse than anything Clinton could imagine or lie about. He doesn't make much of it, but Clinton turned her falsehood into an event extraordinaire in an effort to prove a mettle she was never called upon to exhibit. Disgusting.
McCain has imposing credentials, though he's had his inconsistencies. His concern, for instance, with manmade global-warming/climate-change is a sop to the loonies who think the Kyoto Treaty is found in the Bible. He's bound to understand this nation's top scientists, who pooh-pooh the UN/Algore-conjured "inconvenient truth," but he, to his detriment, will play along. In any case, by comparison with Obama and Clinton, and notwithstanding the non-likelihood of election, he is a far superior candidate in terms of both wisdom and strength.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Friday, May 16, 2008
Theologian Marty's "Pew-Game"
In the Christian Century of 06 May is an article entitled Pewless by Martin Marty, with this as the opening statement, "This spring a certain Christian layperson has been criticized for not exiting his local church when he disagreed with something his pastor preached." Obviously, Marty was referring to Barack Obama, 20-year congregant at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, pastored until this year by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, whose shrill denunciation of this country, complete with vivid exposures of his rants in the media, especially on all major TV channels, have been much in public view this year.
On his personal Web-site, Marty is described thusly, "Marty is one of the most prominent interpreters of religion and culture today. Author of more than 50 books, he is also a speaker, columnist, pastor, and teacher, having been a professor of religious history for 35 years at the University of Chicago." Also on the Web-site, along with a listing of his earned Ph.D, is a list of 75 honorary doctorates he has received, an average of one per year since his was five years old. Octogenarian Marty suggested an imaginary board-game for congregants (using pews instead of icons) to play with respect to the way they react to a given preacher's sermons. He posited 10 situations and then noted the reactions and consequent moves among the pews, including exiting, to be expected/executed…or not.
Marty's intent was to purge Wright and Obama of the baggage they carry, the former for claims so outrageous as to be exponentially racist and on the fringe of lunacy, and the latter for apparently at least not disagreeing by his constant presence rather than finding another church. Marty has made the claim, as well as Obama, that in his attendance at Wright's sermons he never heard the stuff Marty calls "sound-bites" that have been presented over and over everywhere, including the Internet. Indeed, in an hour-long interview on PBS with Wright on 25 April, Bill Moyers, while himself trying to purge Wright using powder-puff conversation, made the monstrous mistake of reproducing the preacher's remarks "in context," meaning that his screaming performances were lengthened and enhanced to the point of disbelief. Moyers must have been on something…not milk, either.
Marty mentioned or touched on such subjects as preaching about the prosperity gospel; the preacher "not wearing a United States flag over her robe;" avoiding controversy; the scriptural justness of wars fought by the U.S.; good news to the poor; "secular humanists, Islamofascists, rappers and anyone other than standard-brand heterosexuals;" "gospel-rooted living;" few seconds of strident, edgy language; sinners throwing the first stone; and letting a few angry words trump clergy acts of kindness. It was a kind of slap at Wright's detractors that was less tongue-in-cheek than accusatory toward those who have also heard Wright but heard something Marty didn't. The subjects speak for themselves, favorites when valuing the liberal positions of each over those of conservatives.
It's probable that in academia Wright's railings are far more widely accepted than in the general public. This is true, also, in some religious denominations, those that are liberal in both religious and social matters, caught up more in political correctness than anything else. Even at that, it's hard to understand why someone as highly esteemed as Marty in the religious area would persistently attempt to make Wright credible, notwithstanding his connection with Wright as his one time pupil and his recent statement in The Chronicle Review of 11 April 2008 condemning the Wright-approved award to Louis Farrakhan and the charge that the government invented AIDS and then plagued the black community with it. Apparently, even Wright-admirer Marty was compelled to say something.
Wright's church is a part of the United Church of Christ denomination, with Bill Moyers a fellow adherent. In its national synod in 2005 in Atlanta, the United Church of Christ became the first mainline Christian denomination to support same-sex marriage officially when its general synod passed a resolution on affirming "equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender." Since same-sex marriage is outlawed either constitutionally or by legislative fiat, or both, in nearly all the states, not to mention the Congressional passage of the same thing in 1996, one wonders how Wright, Moyers, and Marty approach this subject legally but, more importantly, as a religious matter.
According to CNSNEWS.COM of 03 March, Obama approves of same-sex unions (not called marriages) as in line with Christ's Sermon on the Mount, though Christ didn't mention it. Hillary Clinton takes the same position, though probably not for the same reason. In both cases, the practice of homosexual behavior is condoned, even encouraged, though the scriptures vehemently condemn this behavior in both Testaments. In 2004, according to the National Council of Churches Yearbook, the UCC was comprised of 5,850 churches; by 2007, that figure had dwindled to5,567, a drop of 5% in just three years, with an 8% loss of total membership. Apparently, a lot of UCC folks walked out (though not Wright's church), individually and by congregations. Just as a common-sense, practical matter, homosexual behavior is aberrant, abhorrent, filthy, and unnatural. To condone it in any was is to flout both law and scripture.
In what pew does this leave Marty, if any? Obama, after being forced to make a speech after the blanket airing of the so-called "sound-bites" and an awkward, stumbling press conference following Wright's weird, racist address to the National Press Club, has finally roundly condemned the rants of Wright. Marty hasn't, at least across the board, so he's in limbo with the lib elitists, especially in academia, not where a theologian of his stature should be.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Politics for Millionaires Only?
The most repugnant circumstance applying to the effort to gain public office in the past few decades, especially since the immediate aftermath of the Democrat Convention of 1968, is the objective by many elective wannabes to "buy" – yes, PURCHASE – the office. Politics has become a millionaire's game, a toy or a distraction or an obsession, something to fill a life no longer demanding work for the support of it or its dependents. Some candidates still must work at fundraising, especially the first-timers, who can then use incumbency, as nearly all politicians do, to stay in office, selling whatever it takes to maintain the prize, but the biggest prizes, by and large, belong to the people with money.
Item: Senator Clinton ran out of money earlier this year and "loaned" herself a cool five million or so. She began running out of money again a short time ago, necessitating another personal "loan" of about the same amount. These are not loans, of course, though they can become loans if she's elected since she will then have the power to get back her investment in one way or another. How simple to tell a foreign government, for instance, that what it wants is readily available if the right palm is crossed…with the proper absolutely discreet method of payment (the Lincoln bedroom loved by the Chinese in the 90s?). If she loses, she's lost her investment, but not to worry, she has millions left and hubby Bill can make the loss back in no time by just making speeches.
By December 2007, Mitt Romney had written more than $17 million to his campaign – a loan, of course – that now represents a very bad investment…but not to worry again because Romney is worth millions. Candidates who don't accept government money can give their campaigns all they want; otherwise, they're limited to $50,000. John Edwards accepted government money, at least suspecting strongly that the gamble was too risky, which shows just how smart he was, although Edwards' $400-haircuts are another indicator that rich folks can vie for office and not sweat the details.
Bruce Lunsford is a rich guy in Kentucky (Vencor honcho, though Vencor went down the tubes but Lunsford didn't) who spent a cool $7 million in the Kentucky Democrat primary gubernatorial race in 2003 only to become discomfited, pull out, and support the republican in the election. In 2007, he sank a similar amount trying to get the same office, lost the primary election, and has just thrown in a million or so in the democrat primary race against another rich guy (financing himself, of course) to grab the seat of Senator Mitch McConnell.
Lunsford is something like $15 million into politics-investment with nothing to show for it, but not to worry since he has multimillions spread around here and there. With his other investments consistently covering him with assets, he has little to do so why not just try to buy a senate seat, especially since this seems to be a good year nationally for democrats? Some bored people buy motorcycles; others buy elective offices. Lunsford's opponent the other day tossed in $500,000 to his campaign in order to get elected, buy his toy and – oh yes – save the nation.
The best way to get to be governor in Kentucky is to buy the lieutenant governor spot, then using the position for whatever's necessary (bought and sold), buy the governor's seat. After spearing the lt.-guv seat in the 90s, horseman Brereton Jones went on to grab the governor's chair, during the four-year term of which he spent oodles of time "getting back" his investment. Indeed, his adjutant general (an appointive job) was rewarded with 18 months in the Big House for putting the arm on his subordinate officers to pony up and see that Jones's investment was made whole. That's a legal no-no, but the general took the fall, not the guv. The governor before him introduced the novel idea of not only recouping the investment but collecting interest on it, as well. He later went wildly bankrupt and carried a number of his "friends" down with him. Rich people don't have to actually have all that money…just have smarts enough to make folks think they have it. It's always interesting to see the crooks undone by fellow crooks.
A lot of folks think TV is the corrupter, and it is, in a way. However, it was the replacement of the national conventions with state primaries regarding the selection of a nominee that is the actual culprit. This cockamamie restructuring of the system after 1968 has resulted in protracted election seasons that demand megabucks to be sustained. Obama had hardly found his Senate desk in 2005 before he began running for the presidency, was already a sure bet in 2006 and an actual announced candidate nearly two years before the 2008 November election. Clinton has been at it just as long currently, though she actually started her presidential run along about 2001, when she arrived in the Senate from her adopted state, New York.
After the fiascos occasioned by the disallowance of the primary votes in two of the largest states, Florida and Michigan, coupled with the inordinate length of campaigns and their intolerable costs, the democrats will surely change some more rules after this year's dogfight. Clinton and Obama have turned the exercise into a circus – a very costly circus – as well as completely boring a public long since jaded by the posturing, lying, and transparent opportunism easily identified as central to the candidates' efforts.
Obama and his wife have made millions so he's anything but poor but has raised a ton of money working toward a possible incumbency. He and John McCain have proven that people like Clinton and Romney, as well as Lunsford in Kentucky, can pour their money into the risky business of politics but are by no means guaranteed success.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Is the Lady a Tramp?
The coarseness of current society, especially as compared with that of even 40 years ago, is shocking and appalling, as the politicians often claim when trying to make someone else look bad. The "tell-all" book is a good example of the lengths to which some people – especially celebrity types, whether talented or smart…or not – will go for gathering in greenbacks or just for the sake of notoriety, that 15-minutes-of-fame thing.
The latest example of coarseness is provided by TV personality Barbara Walters, who is just shy of being an octogenarian and perhaps wonders if people 100 years from now will not be aware of her important existence unless she acquaints them with earth-shaking truths about herself, as accounted in her recently released book, "Audition." After all, she once actually discussed with actress Katherine Hepburn the notion of what kind of a tree a person would aspire to being. That kind of sagacious enterprise should be a part of both history and philosophy.
Of course, a lot of folks write autobiographies so the secret for sell-value is to advertise unusual things to be found in the book. The big deal with the Walters tome is the titillating subject of her being some sort of tramp as she climbed the ladder of success. I haven't read the book, nor will I, but the big splash ad-wise is that she (gasp and three palpitations of the liver) had an affair back in the 70s with Senator Edward Brooke while he was a married man. Okay, she went out with other guys, too, like financial guru Alan Greenspan and Senator John Warner, though perhaps not when the latter was married to Elizabeth Taylor, another gal who "got around," at least multiple-marriage-wise.
What better way to advertise the book than to appear on the "Oprah" TV clambake and bare all – not clothes but titillations. So, she and Oprah discussed the meaning of mistress – hey and hello! – and decided they were not in that class. Okay, I read about that since I don't watch Oprah. Not being mistresses, they had to be something…so try fornicators or adulterers, whatever. Oprah also admitted to hanky panky, a wonderfully glorified exercise in the postmodern society of today…the "anything goes" thing.
Walters also discussed her senatorial hanky panky on the talking-head show, "The View," something else I never watch…but, hey!…I read about it. It used to feature total nincompoop Rosie O'Donnell but now is blessed with the profound insights of Whoopi Goldberg and an assortment of women, Walters included (she owns the show), guaranteed to have answers to all the world's problems. These are gals who have crashed through the glass ceiling to the ethereal level of millionaire-idiocy.
Poor Edward Brooke! Naw…shed no tears for him, though one wonders why Walters waited these 30-odd years to humiliate him in her book. The old guy was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and deserved to be let alone. Well…folks in Washington were probably on to the later Walters indiscretions, so a brand new scandal had to be introduced to enhance the notion of tramp-hood as paramount and, more importantly, to sell the book…Brooke can just eat cake.
Walters is and/or will be making the grand tour and appearing on all the talking-head shows such as Oprah and appearing on the cable and morning TV gossip-mongering ménages of mediocrity to hawk her book, all the while driving Brooke's reputation into further extinction. As for Greenspan and Warner, why should they care? Tramp-conduct is a certain sign of super-sophistication in the 21st century, and those two guys (and whatever others are still slithering under Walters' rocks) may have helped it right along. Only the Shadow knows. Walters is just the face of the degeneracy into which the nation is sliding.
According to Entertainment Tonight, Michele Obama recently said, concerning her ET-alleged crush on actor Will Smith, "I think it's the ears. I'm drawn to the ears. Obviously." How's that for profoundness among the celebrities? And this woman dreams of being the first lady? Well…she simply proved that shallowness is the "in thing" now and that sex is all that matters. Sexy ears? Good grief! That sounds like politico-free-lancer (and former Slick Willie operative) Dick Morris's weird obsession with toes.
Walters will sell her books, though certainly not to me. I have the heart of a hickory tree, the hardest wood used in this country. I don't buy her philosophy that bad is good. Not to put too fine a point on it and with the hope of offending not a few, I offer the words of Paul the Apostle: "God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap" (Galatians 6:7). As the sexy, senseless sophisticates gain the ascendancy, the nation gains the decadency. As Joe Biden said of John Edwards' utterances, Walters' documented trip through tramp-hood is so much FLUFFERNUTTER!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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