New Kerry&Taylor Agent

Mon Cher John Kerry,

Although Je ne suis pas Charlie but appreciate that tu es Charlie, as you would insist that people everywhere should be (dodging fatwas, of course—little joke there), I'm writing to suggest you use the services of the Department for Instilling Promulgations of Love Overcoming Murders and Tortures, usually known by its acronym DIPLOMAT, of which Je suis CEO. Your genius in having James Taylor sing “You've Got a Friend” to the French president the other day, along with your hugging him twice or thrice to calm French discomfiture over the assassinations at “Hebdo,” will move you toward legend-hood in the hallowed ledger of Secretaries of State. It doesn't hurt, also, as rumor has it, that you considered English as your second language at Yale and tried to get “Skull and Bones” changed to “Crâne et Tibias.”

One agency at DIPLOMAT that will help is the Rhythmic Options for Classical Kinetics, known as ROCK, for short. It will help you choose American music that will endear the U.S. to the French, who, as everyone knows, hate everybody up to and including themselves. George Gershwin's tone poem “An American in Paris” comes to mind, having even the taxi-horns in the movement. Also, someone like Tony Bennett singing that pensive “La Vie en Rose” with a cool quartet (piano, sax, bass, drums) would have French women in a swoon, nothing like Taylor and his guitar, blue jeans and sandals?—I don't remember. Bennett would be coat-and-tie, have his hair combed and sing on pitch. “You've Got a Friend” was...well...so ditsy. Parisians don't want friends...they need money and the National Guard to clean out the no-go-zones. ROCK is an unintended acronym but in the U.S. great music is either amplified and done in clouds of mary-jane smoke or consigned to the netherworld.

Another agency for help is tagged Rhyming for Asinine Poems, or RAP, for short. The music (actually people beating mostly on anything handy, sometimes each other) is designed to greatly offend Muslims—actually everyone, though the French may not be offended since the lyrics are sort of racy and the French are known for such things as prime ministers with harems and may not recognize the goodwill gesture. Perhaps the most elite artist is Gangsta-Rapper Drake, so maybe he could go over and “recite” his big hit “The Motto,” which has this uber-intellectual line, “almost drowned in her pussy so I swam to her butt.” Or...you might send another rap-king, Bruno Mars, whose “Locked Out of Heaven” has this French-toned line, “Your sex takes me to paradise.” Get it? The shooters knew they would inevitably be killed and thus headed, according to the late Imam al-Awlaki, to join him in paradise with their own 72 virgins apiece. Another rapper, using a revered rap-word for woman—bitch—is rumored to be putting together a new masterpiece called “Beating Burka Bitches Back to Baghdad Bared and Bruised.” He's already claimed he'll make a half-billion on it. He's mostly using lyrics applied to cops and mothers in the U.S.

Then there's Diplomat's agency, Bureau for Appealing Love Lyrics and Ditties—you guessed it, BALLAD, for short. This is a work in progress since most of the appropriate music was written 1900-1960, especially in the 20s-50s and today's U.S. singers aren't actually singers, a requirement for this music. The male award winners sing into a mike a half-inch from their mouths, sound raspy or hoarse or both and have no intention to sing words anyone will hear over the bedlam of the amps. Maybe someone like Harry Connick could go over and sing old-fashioned stuff like “More than You Know” or “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or “Stardust,” national life-sanity-saving-stuff during World War II and Korea in both France and the U.S. Girl-singers are more interested in bump-and-grind nudity than music so they can't out-French the French in that. Beyonce might go over and lip-synch the French national anthem La Marseillaise like she did the U.S. national anthem during the last inauguration but they would hardly notice. Anyway, if she should take a bow and flash the whole country there might be an incident.

In any case, cher John, give DIPLOMAT some serious thought in the interest of showing solidarity with the French. Let ROCK, RAP and BALLAD help you do better than James Taylor the next time. We also have plans for other nations, too, especially the ones insulted by the administration on practically a daily basis, like the Brits, for instance.

Bien Cordialement,
Je Suis Otherself, CEO
DIPLOMAT

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Big Joke...Deflated Football

The inordinate nationwide interest (furor, too) vis-a-vis the slightly deflated football used by the Boston Patriots in their walloping of the Indianapolis Colts for the right to play in the Super Bowl is strange, at least perhaps to those like me, who figure that cheating has always been a part of the sports-scene. Whether it's a boxer “taking a dive” or nearly the entire Chicago White Sox team in 1919 “fixing” the world series and later called the “Black Sox,” it's just par for the course to get an “edge” over the opponent, often by any means necessary.

In the 1940s-50s, some starters on the University of Kentucky basketball teams apparently “fixed” games not necessarily to lose but simply to guarantee the right point-spread for gamblers and/or themselves (with payoffs) to get well. The reason the players could pull it off was simply that they were so much better than other players that they could hit and miss at will. Three players on another UK team in the early 1990s “fixed” foul shooting in at least one game (maybe more) when in confusion after a foul call on Vandy they twice substituted a player at the foul-line who was not fouled but who was a sure shot for one who wasn't. Nobody caught the subterfuge at the time and the players just figured they were doing “what comes naturally”—getting an edge.

More seriously, during 2009-11 there was a “bounty hunter” effort among some of the NFL New Orleans Saints players and coaches, in which players received bonuses for knocking opposing players out of the game, i.e., hurting them badly enough to gain an “edge.” Quarterbacks knocked out of a game represented an especial accomplishment, removing the most key player. A coach and player were actually suspended for a year but other players in on the butchering just received suspensions for a specific number of games. A broken limb means 6 weeks on the sidelines but a concussion, a favored outcome, while a short-term disability, can ruin a player's life.

Why all the hubbub about the deflated ball? MONEY! The average yearly player's salary in the NFL is a paltry $1.9 million, much less than in the NBA, MLB, and NHL at $5.15 million, $3.2 million, and $2.4 million, respectively. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is guaranteed $110 million 2015-19 while Patriot quarterback Tom Brady (deflated football) will make $24 million 2015-17. The 2014 Super Bowl winning player's (Seattle) bonus was $157,000 counting the playoffs, too. Compare that to the 2014 World Series winning player's bonus of $388,606, not counting the playoffs, which bumped it closer to half a million.

Just as Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing about the coal miner selling his soul to the company store, the professional athlete, especially in football, sells his body for the highest bid. The use of all kinds of drugs that enhance short-term skills cause long-term problems including everything from suicide to Alzheimer's to broken bodies. The baseball scandals of the last few years are just the tip of the iceberg—human-growth-hormone and other drugs pumping up the bodies of folks like Barry Bonds (artificial hitting records) and Alex Rodriguez, suspended for the entire 2014 baseball season. According to Baseball Reference.com, A-Rod's career salary is at $356,285,104.

Neither Patriot coach Belichick nor quarterback Brady had any knowledge of anything as dastardly as “fixing” a football for a game played in the driving rain, according to what both said in separate press conferences. A while back, Belichick—or at least the organization—was fined a half-million for spying on another team in order to discover its defensive signals. I believe spying on other teams doing anything is considered part of the game, so I was surprised at such outrage by the NFL, which lately has been trying to make itself responsible for punishing domestic-violence offenders in its ranks, something that belongs to law enforcement and the courts—another sham.

Players DO strive to win games and honors, as they often claim, though sometimes sanctimoniously; however television, the driver of the huge amounts of money for both players and organizations, corrupts everything it touches. The winning-player's share in the 1968 World Series was $10,937 as opposed to that of 2014, $388,606. That says it all. Players and organizations DO cheat. Spectators know this and generally don't care.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

S-O-T-U...Much Ado about Nothing

Under Article II(3) of the U.S. Constitution, the president is required “from time to time” to inform Congress of the state-of-the-union and make recommendations as to what should be done. Early in President Obama's speech on 20 January, he announced that he would send Congress a budget. According to Article I(7), however, all bills for raising revenue (actually the budget since spending is a determinate) are to originate in the House of representatives, with the Senate proposing or concurring with amendments.

S-O-T-U could be done without the ballyhoo connected to a speech delivered to Congress, the SCOTUS justices, the military head honchos, a balcony with “guests” of the president's wife, a royal promenade in and out, etc. The state-of-the-union address, as is, comprises a circus meant to give everyone involved—with video coverage throughout—an extra 15 minutes of fame. It could be far more concise and detailed if simply delivered in a document and presented to everyone involved, who could then advance it to the media of choice for nationwide perusal.

Until the early twentieth century (pre-Wilson), most presidents merely submitted a written report. With the advent of radio and TV, the temptation to use this constitutional requirement as a purely political ploy has been too great to overcome, thus the s-o-t-u propaganda-machine, complete with all the trappings of a monarchy, even to the bellowing of the sergeant-of-arms that his highness is about to favor the unwashed with his presence, sort of like “h-e-r-e c-o-m-e-s B-a-r-a-c-k, reminiscent of the Carson talk-show intro back in the day.

I stopped listening/viewing this circus some time ago, preferring to simply read the transcript although, admittedly, watching and listening to Ronald Reagan was rewarding just as an opportunity to observe an art-form, actual rhetoric as opposed to mere speechifying. By comparison, Obama has about as much speaking ability and charisma as a bear in hibernation, but then so have most other presidents. Watching grown people clap and act like jacks-in-the-boxes is simply comedic.

I wondered if Nancy Pelosi might not break something in her frantic up-and-down gyrations in a speech I at least partly watched a few years ago. One watched then to see if Veep Biden fell asleep. I tuned in the other night (after reading a book with ballgame ended, sound muted) at 9:54 to catch the end (I thought) of the great speech of 2015 and determined to suffer it through until it ended at 10:11—seventeen boring minutes in which nothing was speechified about the state of the union, while a SCOTUS person slept a bit, or so I thought.

What I heard was what one might expect a coach to say to his team—35 points down—at halftime. It was a colossal pep-talk and had little or nothing to do with how substantive things stand in the nation. Obama spoke of exterminating partisanship and gridlock but has already established gridlock with his executive orders and veto-threats. He spoke of comforting grieving families but didn't mention the humongous lie he perpetrated on the grieving families vis-a-vis the Benghazi massacre. He heralded same-sex marriage as being promoted from a wedge issue to “a story of freedom.” Perversion as freedom? Egad!

Predictably, Obama brought up Ferguson and New York and the son who can't walk around without being harassed, but not his hometown, Chicago, where murders happen well over once a day and “sons” are killed in gangs and girls in cross-fires. Ironically, it has just been announced that the army of prosecutors Obama and Holder sent to Ferguson to create civil-rights charges against Officer Wilson found no grounds for any action.

Obama said that every child should know that he/she matters. Well...as Gomer would say—Shazzam! At least he didn't mention Trayvon Martin, his son if he had one. As a railroader with layovers in Chattanooga back in the day, I discovered that a white guy had better be careful where he walked, although the worst that happened to me was being the target of rock-throwers.

Both the substance and the delivery of this sophomoric 17-minute epilogue/sermon were poorly chosen, poorly done, respectively. I've been though the transcript, a hodgepodge of two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage. I didn't see the term al Qaeda. What I saw was the same old class-war approach and I don't remember seeing the term Benghazi, either, or IRS or Fast-and-Furious or the salvation of Libya...but in my scan I might have missed some things.

But it was great political theater...meaning nothing, except, maybe that the emperor has no clothes.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

“Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) has been the rallying cry of people in both the U.S. and Europe regarding the “Charlie Hebdo Massacre” in Paris a few days ago. However, “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (I am not Charlie). This has nothing to do with what actually happened, but with the victim/cartoonists who created the horns of their own dilemma, whether by malice, honest opinion, artistic endeavor, atheistic philosophy, attempt at comedy/entertainment or anything else. It's abundantly obvious that the Muslim jihadists, ipso facto, must be exterminated.

The cartoonists' viewers can decide—if they even care enough—about the motivation for creating unflattering depictions of Mohammad. Examples of their work are available on the Internet, one such location being here: Je Suis Charlie. Just a cursory examination will indicate that the Hebdo gang reveled in denigrating not just Mohammad/Islam, Christianity/Jesus, Jewry, Catholicism, religion-in-general, government and people. They did it through depicting hate, obscenity and porn, some of it so sophomoric as to cause giggles more than reasoned reaction.

In this country and in Europe, Christianity and Jesus Christ can be lampooned, insulted, denigrated and demeaned, with the public's (including the Christians') managing a ho-hum. Freedom of speech is a Constitutional right and, no matter how offensive it is to some people, cannot be abridged. Moreover, Christians are not disposed to “protecting” God or his good name because they understand that God needs no protection. A feeble Homo-sapiens attempt to either prove or defend God on any basis other than personal faith or scripture is wasting his time. People can't prove God empirically to any greater extent than scientists can empirically disprove God.

Cartoonists and other commentators who make a constant effort to ridicule God and people of faith never realize that they score points only when a reader/viewer rises to the bait. For instance, Herald-Leader resident atheist Larry Webster lampooned Jesus in the 18 January issue, using Christ's physical appearance as the vehicle for ridicule, something completely unknown and therefore eligible for comparison to everything from Popeye to the junk-yard dog. As a person of faith, I just laugh. I'm not the least bit offended. A Charlie Hebdo cartoonist would have compared Christ to the north end of a southbound mule or to Beyonce's derriere if she had bent over while lip-synching the national anthem at the last inaugural.

The same is true with the scientists who claim to know what they can't even imagine. When they tell me the earth is 4.6 billion years old, or 5 billion or any billion, I just laugh. They do well to merely conceive of recorded history of a few thousand years. If they claim the Grand Canyon was carved out by river-erosion over billions of years, that's fine with me, but I reserve the right to believe that the “big split” happened in a minute...a gigantic eruption of some kind perhaps. Even though the data they derive from the data inputted to their computers indicates the earth to be much warmer a thousand years ago than now, I view the exercise as merely interesting, though damning to global-warming alarmists who think they can change the climate and bring-on universal AC.

I'm not a “flat-earther” believing that mankind is only 6,000 or so years old but I believe others have the right to believe otherwise, especially since none of us was around then. When the “big-bangers” write scholarly papers about earth's origins but never locate earth's origins, I grin a bit, yet admit that man is created to and should strive for understanding. When the evolutionists describe how a chimp became me after trying for a billion years...or two...or three, I applaud their effort, hopeless as I believe it to be. Sometimes I wonder if the chimp might be insulted.

Je ne suis pas un fou (I am not a fool). Perhaps this separates me from the Parisian cartoonists, who see what they do as freedom of speech sort of like yelling “incendie en le théâtre” (fire in the theater). Freedom of speech is not foolishness of speech. If the cartoonists want to risk suicide over a smutty adolescent depiction of Mohammad—fine—but only up to the point at which they do not endanger others, like innocent non-cartoonists or police killed in protecting what is actually their non-right to lunacy.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Baptist Editor Blasts Franklin Graham

Baptists Today is a liberal magazine published in Macon, Georgia. Its editor is John D. Pierce, a Baptist minister, who in a recent blog wrote this: “Recently, Nikolai Novikov has been repeatedly fined, jailed, and restricted in his freedom to travel, according to Forum18. His crime: Holding worship services in West Kazakhstan without government permission. Like Novikov, Maksim Volikov is also a Baptist Christian in Kazakhstan. He was fined the equivalent of one’s month’s average salary according to the news service.

These examples — and worse — of real religious discrimination and persecution occurring around the world (to people of various faiths) need to be contrasted with the silly claims that flow from many American Christian leaders who love to play victim. Franklin Graham is such an example with his continual thoughtless commentaries — which, thankfully, he is free to express in this great country.”

Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham and president and CEO of Samaritan's Purse, located in Boone, NC, perhaps the nation's largest worldwide charity, is an ardent participant in the Southern Baptist Convention, accused by Baptist liberals of being “fundamentalist” and therefore ensconced in theological ignorance. Baptists Today is aligned with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a relatively small denomination (actually a consortium of churches not listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches as a denomination) that is an outgrowth of the “split” in the Southern Baptist Convention occasioned about 1979 through 1991 over questions of theology, primarily the ordination of women.

The SBC, with some 16 million members, is the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the U.S. At least half of its members are female and apparently satisfied with the SBC position, but liberals view it as not politically correct, therefore heretical. Theologically, the jury is out—disagreement on all sides, including those with Ph.d.s—but liberals can't tolerate disagreement when it clashes with PC, the new norm doctrinally. The fact that Islam is the driving force currently behind genocide in especially the Middle East and Africa doesn't signify to the PC-crowd as enough to make one wonder about mounting the prayer rug and facing toward Mecca, not to mention the carnage of 9/11.

Pierce's angst was occasioned by his belief that Duke University recently reversed a decision to allow its chapel “bell tower” to be used to call Muslims to prayer on Fridays because Franklin Graham spoke out against it. However, according to the Charlotte Observer of 16 January, Michael Schoenfeld, a Duke vice president, said the university had received hundreds of calls and emails, many of which were quite vitriolic. Translated, some big contributors to Duke financially, as well probably as many others, viewed that decision with enough jaundice to turn off the dollar-faucet. That gets the attention of any college administrator.

Graham did have something to say in a post: “I think it's wrong [muezzin in the bell tower]...I think many people have a problem with it.” Graham mentioned the raping, butchering, beheading of Christians and Jews and anyone not submitting to Sharia Islamic law. While liberal Christian-tourists take vacations worshiping God in the Holy Land—with side-trips to maybe Greece and Italy—Graham shows up in places like northern Iraq and ebola-country in Africa or anywhere there's been an earthquake, tsunami, tornado or displaced refugees.

Unlike most if not all large charities, Samaritan's Purse places its entire financial status on the Internet for everyone to see. According to its federal form 990 for 2013, Graham oversaw a budget of $460 million with 87% of it going directly to ministry (doctors, hospitals, churches, schools, drilling pure wells, housing, disaster relief, etc.), only 8% for fund-raising, and 5% for administration. Perhaps the next largest charitable agency is the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which had a 2014 budget amounting to $299 million that supported 4,793 foreign missionaries.

Liberal Christians in many denominations and churches expend much hot air talking the walk but Graham and the IMB walk the walk, making actions much louder than words. They also take strong stands on other questions such as the absurdity of men marrying men and engaging in deviant behavior, another PC no-no, but while the liberal churches are dying on the vine, these conservatives, if not exactly flourishing as the faith is demeaned from the White House through the media to the man on the street, are at least doing good and holding their own.

As for Pierce and his wholly gratuitous slandering of Graham, he's not alone in that activity. Actually, Graham should be flattered.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Paris March Eligibility?

This is from Aljazeera of 22 August 2011: “Gaddafi repeatedly blamed the unrest on al-Qaeda and a 'colonialist plot.' He called those opposed to him 'rats,' and alleged that they had been influenced by 'hallucinogenic drugs'.” Gaddafi was fighting the U.S and NATO at the time and had mentioned in his infamous UN speech in 2009 that al Qaeda operatives were being held in Libyan jails. In 2003, Gaddafi began turning Libya's weapons of mass destruction over to the U.S. In that UN speech, he also lionized Obama for the obvious reason, a black man as a U.S. president.

Okay...Gaddafi was weird and did strange things like sleeping in a tent when he traveled abroad, though one as susceptible to assassination as he was would be expected to take precautions. His precautions didn't help him in October 2011, however, when Obama's attempt at assassinating him was successful, sort of like the assassination of bin Laden, for which Obama never misses an opportunity to take credit, as commander-in-chief, of course.

It isn't too big a stretch to connect all this with the absence of any high-ranking U.S. representative, especially the president, at the solidarity march of world leaders against Islamic jihad in Paris, France, on 11 January. Gaddafi was about the only Middle East Muslim head honcho in 2009 and 2011 actually fighting al Qaeda, the primary consortium of Islamic jihad butchers at the time. Al Qaeda butchers were trying to take over Libya then but Obama and NATO and the UN threw in with the butchers, who finally did take over Libya and then transported their murderous legions/weapons to Syria.

In Syria, where are those mercenaries now? Who knows? Are they fighting Assad, whom Obama unsuccessfully ordered to leave his presidency in 2011 and turn Syria over to whoever could grab it and keep it? Or, are they a part of ISIS, now in the process of horrifically and incomprehensibly terrorizing northern Syria and most of Iraq, featuring genocide especially of Christians and other religious adherents, and displaying be-headings on the Internet to cow whole populations into submission?

Where did these Muslims, for whom former State Secretary Clinton orated in December (one of those $100,000 speeches/conferences?) we must exercise empathy and respect, get their weapons—both small arms and big stuff? The small arms went from the U.S. to Libyan “freedom fighters” (what a laugh!) and to the freedom fighters in Syria. The big stuff was given by the U.S. to the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, which turned tail and ran before the ISIS onslaught and simply gave ISIS all those big guns, vehicles, rocket-launchers, missiles, RPGs and on and on.

Considering his Libya fiasco, it would have been embarrassing for Obama to take part in the Paris march since he was on the wrong side in 2011. He didn't even send old “God love ya” Biden or State Secretary Kerry (busy in India) or UN Ambassador Power (probably hunting for another Libya to liberate). Attorney General Holder was in Paris but not in the march, although he had time for five TV appearances that day, in which he explained that the terrorists were not Muslim terrorists; rather, they were terrorists “using Islam as their apologetic for murder,” or something like that. People like German Chancellor Merkel and British Prime Minister Cameron do not agree, marched, and prefer calling a spade a spade.

Many of the jihad Muslims in Europe are “home-grown,” i.e., citizens born in Europe. There are an estimated 750 “no-go-zones” in France alone, in many of which insulated neighborhoods the police or fire-fighters dare not go, and where “Sharia Law,” prevails, under which women, particularly, are turned into chattel. From these zones come the young religious fanatics, who ARE driven by Islamic directives in the Hadith and Koran (the words of Mohammad), as well as by the radical mosque functionaries who preach hate and murder. Europeans understand the threat all too well, as should Americans who have become too complacent about 9/11.

The time has come to absolutely forbid entrance to immigrants from any Muslim-dominated country (that's all Middle East countries and many African), including even tourists. There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, or 23% of total population. There are about 6.7 million Muslims in the U.S., 2.11% of its total population.

This is from Pew Research of April 2011: “Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims in the U.S. were born elsewhere. A relatively large proportion of Muslim immigrants are from Arab countries, but many also come from Pakistan and other South Asian countries. Among native-born Muslims, roughly half are African American (20% of U.S. Muslims overall), many of whom are converts to Islam.” The enemy is in the land, especially the young converts, as in Europe (sleeper cells), who mean harm on the basis of their religion. Paris ignored notwithstanding, this is the problem for the U.S.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Professor Skewers Voter-ID Laws

The Lexington Herald-Leader presents on at least a monthly basis a column prepared by a University of Kentucky professor in the interest of making sure that neither UK nor the newspaper (McClatchy-owned) is ever accused of being middle-of-the-road, conservative, or anything other than far-left-fringe. The column in the 10 January issue by history professor Ron Formisano dealt with undue hardships placed on blacks in certain states regarding their ability to vote. The states he picked for enlightenment: Alabama, Texas, Mississippi. The subject: voter ID.

To make his point, Formisano used university football games in those states, noting that most of the players are black but most of the spectators, as well as (gasp) the alumni, are white but didn't mention that 74% of the U.S. population is white. He conceded that the white spectators showed enthusiasm for the playing of the blacks but noted grimly “the efforts of its elected representatives [Alabama in this case] to prevent the young players, black and white, from voting.” The reason: those awful Voter ID laws, though he didn't mention that the laws apply to everyone, black and white, not just football players.

Formisano mentioned other southern states with the abominable, unfair ID-laws on the books, and even conceded that some non-southern states (implying that one might expect better of them) had those laws. His state, Kentucky, whether considered southern or non-southern, has had voter-ID laws for many years, but Formisano didn't describe the hardship it places upon him and others, black or white, football players or not, to cast a ballot.

Most of Kentucky's football players are black and the basketball team is so black that a white guy, if in existence, can expect to play only when UK is ahead by 40 points in the final two minutes. The coach uses a two-platoon system in which all ten starters are black. Though not as boisterous as Alabama's, UK's fans are nevertheless quite supportive of blacks who risk concussions and assorted broken bones every week. The basketball fans' arena-elevators vis-a-vis sanity are one floor short of the top—frenetic! Formisano didn't mention how the skewed numbers of blacks vis-a-vis the demographics are due to to the ID-punished majority white voters. No quotas in sports, just everything else!

Formisano opined that viewing stadiums packed overwhelmingly with whites jogged his memory as to how most of those whites voted in recent presidential elections: 10% for Obama in Alabama in 2008; 10% in Mississippi in 2012; 14% in Louisiana in 2012. He didn't suggest that attendance at football games had any influence on the voting where he claimed “football is a religion,” but one infers that to be his standard for dissing Obama, or maybe mixing metaphors is just his style. He didn't mention that about 93% of the black vote throughout the entire nation went for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, but that fact had nothing much to do with football anyway, so why bother?

The strangest twist that Formisano gave the subject, though having nothing to do with football, was the claim that southern white democrats in the 1960s began becoming the “bedrock of the modern Republican Party,” thereby deserting Lyndon Johnson, civil rights, and all the rest. Well...no! The democrats deserted because of racial prejudice while the republicans were Johnson's supporters, just as they were Lincoln's supporters in the 1860s. But Formisano wrote that republicans moderated the tirades of Alabama governor George Wallace and began using “coded racial language,” whatever that is/was. He gave no examples.

Predictably, Formisano connected all those social upheavals in the South, presumably including the worship of football, with the religious right becoming a “force among southern evangelicals.” Actually, the evangelicals are a force among the religious right. To a committed liberal, southern evangelicals are roughly equivalent to Attila's Huns and would never worship Harvard football.

In finishing, Formisano wrote that everything he had written is well known with regard to “what is now a solid republican South,” and added, “Less remarked upon are the ironic contrasts that now exist between Southern football and the politics of the white South.” So, thanks to the professor, now we know. Hypocritical white southern spectators should be booing instead of cheering in those sanctified stadiums.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Newest Lunacy—Dating Laws

The latest big news in Kentucky (front-page above-the-fold in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 05 January) is that Governor and Mrs. Beshear are (again) pushing the enactment of laws in the new legislature establishing domestic protection for mostly teenagers and 20-somethings who have a problem, defined as “dating couples—people who have not been married, lived together or shared a child.” One wonders what “sharing a child” is but the governor and wife probably mean the conception of a fetus through normal sexual intercourse.

If two unmarried teenagers conceive a child in the backseat during a date and get in a fight some time after the child is born, does one of them apply for a protective order, or would such order be available after their fight only if they hadn't conceived a child? The appropriate definition of domestic: “of or relating to the household or the family.” Since domesticity is not an issue in either case above, what kind of protection do the Beshears have in mind? The legislature has been tied up with this nonsense for ten years, with no action, and there likely will be none this time around.

In 2008, Steve Nunn and Amanda Ross lived together for about six months and were supposedly engaged. They were not married, had a fight(s), and the affair went very sour, with Nunn moving out and Ross filing a domestic-violence petition against him. Nunn was forced out of his state-job in Frankfort in February 2009 and in March 2009 a judge ordered Nunn to neither have any contact with Ross for a year nor possess a firearm during the order's duration. The suggested new legislation would not have been effective in this case.

In September 2009, Ross was shot to death and Nunn was charged with violation of the protective order and murder. In June 2011, Nunn pleaded guilty to murder with aggravating circumstances and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In the meantime, there was a hue and cry for more laws presumably to stop people like Nunn from committing murder and the legislature's time was eaten up over this matter, just as it will be with this new “domestic” matter. The result was “Amanda's Law,” which featured electronic monitoring of people violating domestic orders under certain circumstances such as assault. Would this monitoring have stopped Nunn at six in the morning (with whereabouts unknown) before he could have driven a few minutes and done the deed?

Apparently, Amanda's law is not enough to curtail violence/murder, at least regarding people, young and old, who are just “dating” and get into a fight. How will “dating” be defined in the new law...“going steady” for a certain number of days or weeks? Cohabitation is vaguely definable, whether for short or long periods, though it lacks documentation and therefore actual definition. What will be the age parameters effected by the new law? People vote at age 18, so will the new law involve just people who are minors? Apparently not, since people date when in their 70s-80s and at the time are not married, living together or “sharing” a child. The same is true for people of any age.

Imagine two “dating” teenagers getting into a fight. If the 17-year-old guy has been guilty of assault and the judge orders electronic monitering when the 17-year-old girl blows the whistle and gets a petition authorized, what happens to school-attendance? Will a policeman have to check out the guy every day to see if he actually is in school, or does he just have to quit school or continue as an object of curiosity/derision? If monitoring was vital to Amanda's Law, won't it be vital to the “dating” law?

In KET's Kentucky Tonight program of 05 January, there was no non-partisanship on this subject, Senate majority leader Republican Stivers against it and House Speaker democrat Stumbo for a “dating” law, mentioning that the House has passed such a law for ten years. The progressive (democrat) position is that government must control the “daters,” apparently of any age, while the conservative (republican) position is that current laws are good enough, as was the case before Amanda's Law was enacted.

College “date-rape” is at the core of much of this waste of time, though nobody believes that 20% of all coeds, the current insistence, are violated in some way. Co-ed dorms are a huge part of the problem and girls getting drunk at frat houses are another. The legislature might do some good if it outlawed co-ed dorms and did away with fraternities altogether. Even better, parents should teach their teens that animals “do it instinctively,” while people are given the power of brains over hormones. Instead, the big deal is free condoms—and WHOOPEE!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Dear Al

Dear Rev. Dr. [other degrees & titles] Al Sharpton:

There are bunglers in the operation I head, the Institute for Modifying All Gregarious Entities, known familiarly as IMAGE, so I feel your pain when inferiors must be disciplined, dismissed, even water-boarded occasionally. To see the response to your recent leadership efforts resulting in only two New York policemen ambushed the other day when a dozen would have been preferred must be painful, although a policeman was killed in Florida the very next day. Consequently, I am approaching you with an offer from IMAGE that might help and has to do with reconfiguring your speeches/activities for better results. Obviously, you are among the elite in gregariousness.

The department of IMAGE that will help with the substance of your already rhetorical excellence is known as the Section for Preventing Erratic Eponymy Concerning Hubris-Led Epigrams Sustaining Silliness, known familiarly as SPEECHLESS. The operatives in SPEECHLESS will coach you into avoiding statements that—with all due respect—make you appear out of contact with reality. For instance, your promise made at Ferguson that the prosecutor won a battle in a war your folk will win was like the president's announcement that days-not-weeks would be the length of his seven-month war in Libya and that the result would be the Republic of Libya—free, free at last. Firstly, yours was a dumb exercise of conceit and, secondly, taking on all the police forces in the U.S. is quite silly. The winner of that war—which will not happen despite your erudition—would be quite obvious. You desperately need SPEECHLESS, and perhaps for a while—again with all due respect—that term should define your activity.

Another IMAGE department that will help has to do with methodology and is known as the Test-Energizer for Labeling Egregiousness in Preposterous Responses and Overreaching Mendacious Processes Tantamount to Erratic Rhetoric, known as TELEPROMPTER, for short. As you might guess, TELEPROMPTER instructors will show you the disadvantages of speaking without using notes. For instance, you spoke—surely off the cuff—the other day about death-threats you've received since the two cops were murdered. In the first place, nobody believes that and in the second place you made this tragedy all about you, just like Mayor de Blasio made Garner all about him and his son or just like the president made Trayvon Martin all about him and his non-son. Everything is not all about you except the fact that you are a tax-dodger owing the U.S and New York $4 million now (little joke there...no offense intended). Also, stop raising your hands and shouting “don't shoot.” Your detractors are accusing you of signaling a touchdown or successful three-point-shot when no game and no shooter (except maybe with a gun) is in sight. In other words, don't act like a wannabe referee, coach, umpire, gang-banger or a sort of looney-tunes cartoon character like Roadrunner, or a leftover from the Three Stooges.

In light of your recent efforts in behalf of urging protestors to shut down New York City at Christmastime, you need help from the IMAGE agency known as the Institute for Normalizing Sanity And Negating Inanity, Trivia and Yammering, known as INSANITY, for short. Your “I Can't Breathe” slogan is wearing thin now, especially since you breathe right well amidst your $5 million worth of assets scrounged-up on the backs of folks who actually trust you and whom you've brainwashed into lying down in intersections where they could have a hard time breathing if accommodating an 18-wheeler like just another of the many NYC potholes do. Nor do you do your Cause (whatever it is besides personal enrichment) any good when you trivialize it by commandeering churches—built to honor God, not you—to deliver your diatribes and enhance your Cause's demands for thousands of funerals for policemen to be held in them, perhaps presided over by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Imam Louis Farrakhan in a show of solidarity of your National Action Network with the Nation of Islam, both sharing the slogan “Dead Cops—Now!”

Constantly showing your angst in public has made you seem like a spoiled brat always on the verge of banging his fists and feet on the floor and blaming somebody else (usually republicans or some police-chief—little joke there, nothing personal) for goofing up. The IMAGE arm that will help with this problem is the Agency for Reducing Gnashing of Teeth, known familiarly as ARGOT. At the Brown funeral, you intoned that “Blackness has never been about being a gangster or a thug.” Making that statement encouraged people to think you protested too much, meaning what you said wasn't true. You need help from ARGOT, which also has an anger-management department.

I hope you will consider IMAGE as you plan the protests for yet another trip to St. Louis, as well as your 2015 events, especially the ones you have to invent.

Respectfully,
I.M. Reverself, CEO
IMAGE

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Testimony for CHRISTMAS

There are those who view mankind as just another mammal species in God’s handiwork. I don’t.

Holden Beach

He walked the shore, the sandy shore,
The breakers crashing with a roar,
And wondered as he searched the sea
Why Heaven, hell, or earth must be.
And as he waded through the surf,
His toes engaging miry turf,
He wondered still of Heaven, hell,
And if, indeed, they did indwell
The cosmic scene ordained by God -
Or, if, indeed, there was a God.
He mused aloud, “The earth I see,
Its plants, its creatures, soil and sea,
But even these give no clear sign
That God exists - His form define.”
And then he thought, “But, what of me?
I can control some things I see,
Yet, since I cannot these create,
I must defer to higher state.
And since that higher state at will
Can create things...and life instill,
That higher state is God, of course -
Of all the universe, the force.
But Heaven, hell, or end of time,
To these three things, no reason, rhyme,
Since none of these is known to me,
Since none of these is seen to be,
Since none of these is smelled or heard,
Since each of these seems quite absurd.”
But, as he walked, he spied a bird
Upon the sand…no longer heard,

And later saw a fish long dead
Where it had washed from clear sea-bed.
He then remarked, “Yes, all things die,
The creature, vine, the leaf, and I.
Each has beginning…certainly -
Each has an ending…plain to see.”
He ambled farther down the beach
On toward the end he soon would reach
And asked himself, “Do fish know love,
Or birds feel fear of clouds above?
Do trees know pity, leaves know care,
Or creatures have the grace to share?
Did the beginner have a plan
For merely woman, merely man,
Were all things else designed to be
Sustainer of humanity?”

At beach’s end, he turned around
And started back on solid ground
And pondered, “Since all things must die,
There must not be a reason why
The death of me is different
From any death that God has meant.”
But, then he pondered yet some more,
Not death this time, not as before;
No, this time life was his concern
As he endeavored to discern
If his life might be different
From other lives that God has meant.
He looked at flora, fauna, too,
And deemed that neither one could do
The things that could be done by him -
Indeed, existed just for him.

“If this be true,” he then inferred,
“That creatures all...the fish, the bird,
Exist for succor of mankind,
Then, I am special in God’s mind.”
With that in mind, he then took note
Of distant, distant, sea-borne boat,
And saw the mast by gaff-beam crossed
As it made way, though tempest-tossed,
And then recalled what sailors know,
That cross thus made, though gale winds blow,
Supports the sturdy sail required
To bring the crew to berth desired,
Where, though the sail be cast aside,
Once shore is made...and warm fireside,
Its work has been completely done,
With boat and crew in harbor won.
He walked the shore, the sandy shore,
The breakers crashing with a roar,
Remembered gaff-beam, mast, and sail -
The cross and cloth that would not fail.
He pondered all that God conceived -
The earth, the creatures, seas that heaved,
Beginnings, endings, Heaven, hell -
In vain, of course, he knew quite well…

He could not know Creator’s mind,
Few answers could he hope to find,
But sensed that only for mankind
Were gaff-beam, mast, and sail designed.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

National Police Force?

Then-presidential-candidate Barack Hussein Obama said this in a Colorado Springs campaign event on 02 July 2008: “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.” Nothing could be weirder than this statement especially in light of the attitude Obama has had with respect to the nation's police forces, particularly during 2014...or could it?

This concerns not only the president but also Attorney General Holder, the nation's top law-enforcement official, who has shown the same disdain for police and made race a prime subject in his public utterances, even to labeling the society as “cowardly” with respect to the issue, whatever he meant by that description though he certainly meant “white” society. He and the president share the same habit of jumping to conclusions and making rash statements or taking untoward actions without knowing the facts about specific subjects concerning police matters.

Strong “national security forces” are an absolute necessity in any strictly socialistic government in which citizens are just cogs in the machinery run by the folks at the top, who arrive at the top through whatever means are deemed necessary, the devil take the hindmost. Such societies are sort of marked by the caste system flowing from a “them against us” mindset: black vs. white vs. Latino vs. oriental; rich vs. poor; educated vs. unschooled; south-side vs. north-side, etc.

This is not the American system, at least not yet—factions fighting each other until one is left standing and must keep the others in line, sort of like the Islamic model. It derives in a way from community-organizing, the pitting of one group against another for power or money or whatever privilege is at issue. The notion of mobilizing people for a specific purpose is not bad, even if it sometimes accounts for winners and losers, such as in mobilizing for elections, but organizing for ulterior motives that have to do with personal privilege above all else no matter the adverse impact on others is unacceptable.

Did Obama simply mean the National Guard or the Army Reserves (total strength 560,000+), essentially national security forces made up of civilians for handling floods and other natural emergencies, as well as occasionally for policing riots, looting and property-destruction such as in Ferguson, Missouri twice this year? Obviously not, since these were already in place in 2008 and are also responsible for out-of-country defensive tasks such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Libya doesn't count since that was a “war of choice” waged by the president.

The U.S. Army numbers about 530,000 on active duty. Did Obama mean a civilian national security force just as strong as the army and costing just as much to train and operate? Besides, the U.S. military has proven that it achieves the national security objectives that have been set, so it is perfectly reliable. The country is not in mortal fear of any power on earth.

What would a civilian security force do and what entity would be devised to train it? The president is already the commander-in-chief of the entire military, though the military would never be expected to be used against the nation's citizens...or would it? Hitler managed to do that and was responsible for 11 million dead in the 1930s-40s. Weren't the dreaded Storm Troopers military? The SS (240,000 by 1929) operated the concentration camps. Hitler did have a secret police force called the Gestapo, more dreaded perhaps than the troopers.

Obama didn't elaborate upon either the need, makeup or the uses of a civilian national security force. Could it be that he was not aware of the National Guard and Army Reserves or the Air National Guard in 2008? Or...was he aware of these organizations and had something altogether different in mind? Who would decide what the domestic national security objectives would be? The Congress would handle the entire matter if the U.S. Constitution is obeyed. The days of feared militias, state and otherwise, have long since passed, and a civilian national security force is sort of out of the question.

So...who knows what candidate Obama had in mind? Given his well-documented antagonism (never mind his ceaseless flowery bloviating) for local police forces, perhaps he meant the nationalizing of every force and sheriff's department in the country with—yep—the president as chief-in-chief. That would be just the way to keep the cogs in place, with water-boarding a useful tool...a sort of Fidel Castro approach.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Obama-Holder-Sharpton—Anarchy

As the president's mentor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright, would say, “the chickens have come home to roost.” Two NYC policemen were shot dead in cold blood in Brooklyn by a black man without even seeing their assassin on 20 December, the day after the president concluded his “Ladies' Day Christmas Press Conference” with a lecture about what his recently appointed commission that met the other day at the White House for the purpose of straightening out the nation's policemen was about to do. Across the table from him at that conference sat MSNBC's Al Sharpton, the instigator of movements such as the recent one in NYC calling for “dead policemen now.” Within the context of racism (white, of course), Obama cited Ferguson (Brown) and NYC (Garner) as examples of the need to “do something.”

Two white police lieutenants were beaten on Brooklyn Bridge (where else?) on 13 December as “protesters” continued to try to close down NYC at Christmastime, often lying in the middle of intersections, brainwashed into following people like Sharpton, whose latest claim to fame is cheating New York and the IRS out of $4 million. The bosom buddy of the president can get away with this stuff but nobody else had better try it. It was Sharpton, after the Ferguson riots, who promised retaliation for the death of Brown, a two-bit thief high on marijuana killed by a police officer he had attacked in his patrol car and was still trying to kill when he was shot. It was Sharpton who presided over both burnings of Ferguson as “protesters” exercised their right to “chill out” by looting and burning small businesses.

Without knowing any facts, Obama accused a white policeman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was simply doing his duty, of “acting stupidly” just days after taking office in 2009, and that seems to have set the tone taken by both him and Attorney General Holder toward policemen. Without knowing any facts, Obama rambled on TV for 20 minutes a few hours after the Brown shooting to essentially declare war on police departments. Without knowing any facts, AG Holder sicced both the Justice Department legal eagles and the FBI on officer Wilson (perhaps to bankrupt him) and the Ferguson Police Department, which had no representation on the president's new commission.

Garner, a huge man who possessed a lengthy rap sheet (31 arrests over 27 years), died as a result of resisting arrest, caught on camera, though his resistance is not noted in the mainstream media, only the actions of the policeman. His was a two-bit racket, too—bootlegging illegal cigarettes and thus depriving taxing agencies of $5.85 per pack. Significantly after the two policemen were killed in Brooklyn, Sharpton immediately spoke in behalf of the Garner family (his idea, for sure) to make it plain that the assassin's use of the names of both Brown and Garner in his instagram noting his projected murders had nothing to do with...what (justice, he said)? It had everything to do with Sharpton, retaliation, and his “protesters.”

The most pathetic and apathetic figure in the police murders was NYC Mayor de Blasio, who only days before had castigated the NYC Police Department as made up of insensitive policemen (actually, the whites, one supposes) badly in need of some sort of training allowing them to feel empathy toward the lawless, not exercising deterrence of their actions. Racism is his hangup and he would have been well-advised to simply avoid appearing with the police commissioner at the press conference held after the murders.

One wonders if the mayor would prefer to have all the black men in New York prisons discharged immediately to pursue their activities again on the streets of his city. It's abundantly obvious that NYC policemen view him with contempt. He went to some pain to throw the entire department under the bus, even using his son's ethnicity to shill his slander. Former NYPD headman Kerik stated on Fox News that he felt that both de Blasio and Sharpton had “blood on their hands.”

Now that Obama, Holder, de Blasio and the two-bit-crook Sharpton, without remotely addressing the actual problems associated with black lawlessness, have whipped the nation into a frenzy against law enforcement it will be interesting to see how they react to their individual perfidies. They've given the green-light to anarchy...open season on the protectors of society. Disgusting!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Feinstein's Folly

It would be hard politically to devise a more scurrilous business than the release by Senator Dianne Feinstein's “Torture Document,” a monstrous distortion of events concerning the CIA, composed entirely by democrats and made public on the day that ACA fraud Jonathan Gruber appeared before the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee to testify about both the deceptions accruing to passage of Obamacare and his (and probably the president's) opinion of the voters as being stupid. She had already delivered a 40-minute tirade on the Senate floor in March, and the issuing of this document was the quintessential complement to that performance.

What the lady may not understand is that folks still remember vividly the events of 9/11, in which some 3,000 citizens lost their lives while merely doing their jobs as a result of the heinous crime perpetrated by the Muslim plane hijackers, who crashed four commercial airliners into buildings in NYC and Washington and onto a field in Pennsylvania. In other words concerning torture—Ho-Hum! Imagine the torture—though short-lived—experienced between the time it took a person to jump from the 99th floor until being smashed into nothingness on the street below...or fighting the butchers over Pennsylvania while the plane was being dived at 600 mph into solid ground. Compare that terror to something like sleep-deprivation used on terrorists to encourage their cooperation.

This is not to say that “anything goes.” Permanent damage is not acceptable but temporary discomfort is at the heart of the interrogation effort. The so-called torture was designed to satisfy this protocol. Water-boarding, for example, neither injures nor kills. It merely makes one fear drowning when actually he is not drowning at all. It's even used in some training exercises for special-ops groups in the U.S. military. Bombarding a prisoner with sound for extended periods will not damage that individual, only make him too unhappy to think it's worth it. The same is true with either cold and warmth, taking care not to induce pneumonia or other malady.

Some people have the notion that not even a prisoner's dignity—such as it is or isn't—should be degraded. Rubbish! Extreme embarrassment, such as nakedness, especially before the opposite gender, may work when nothing else will and causes no physical discomfort whatever. Thinking of the measures taken against American GIs by the Japanese and Germans in WWII or the the same against Americans in Hanoi during the Vietnam action, especially physical beatings, starvation and slavery, should make one wonder why the CIA was so easy on the jihad monsters. Read the book Unbroken for an idea, especially concerning the Jap POW butcher-shop called Omori and located in Tokyo Harbor.

Shades of the Church Committee! In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired a Senate committee in the wake of Watergate to shred to the bone the CIA, NSA and FBI. The solons seemed not to understand even after WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam that the world is not Camelot and that rogue nations play by no rules, not even their own at times. There's a time when fighting fire with fire is the only thing that works. The CIA is not a boy-scout-troop and is in the business of spying, just as other nations spend great resources of people and treasure in SPYING. Sometimes, the business gets rough and lives are made intolerable or lost through being apprehended or even assassinated.

As explained by former interrogator Dr. James Mitchell on a Fox News program recently, Feinstein's folly has put at risk the lives of former (and perhaps current) CIA operatives and their families. He's been receiving death threats and was phoned-up once and told to leave his house. These people have targets on their backs...and for what? Since there's no sensible reason for putting them at risk, one wonders if Feinstein operated out of simple spite, mad because of the possibility that some Senate info had been discovered by the CIA. The DOJ has been through all this stuff for years and made no charges.

Congressional staffers are privy to all sorts of information, with the always alluring possibility of blabbing for cash or other favors. Remember the office of then-senator Metzenbaum turning over rocks until discovering Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearing on his nomination to the SCOTUS in a grand effort at having her scandalize Thomas out of the job in 1991? The scheme didn't work but not for lack of trying by dedicated staffers. Maybe Feinstein feared something similar.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Religion & the Rain-Tax

Taxation without enough hesitation (to consider repercussions) in heavily democratic Maryland got so onerous that for only the fifth time in 45 years the citizens rose up mad as hell, said they wouldn't take it anymore, and elected a republican, Larry Hogan, to the state's top spot in November. A most unbelievable tax was recently imposed—something called the rain-tax, aka as the “storm-water remediation fee.” Citizens and institutions must pay a tax figured on the amount of rain-water (probably melted snow, too) that flows from their roofs, driveways, parking lots, maybe even umbrellas into Chesapeake Bay.

Presumably, anyone who can channel his offending H2O into another body of water—say, Lake Erie—gets off scot-free, but what a pipeline! Despite the fact that churches are not usually, if ever, required to pay taxes, like any other non-profit, on real estate or for police and fire protection and other government services, they are required to pay the rain-tax if their parking lots baptize the Chesapeake, according to Joseph Bottum of the Weekly Standard. The Chesapeake is holy ground, too holy for even holy water. Perhaps Pope Francis will look into this sacrilege, surely as important as his recent theological pronouncement that animals will go to heaven, presumably even the naughty ones.

But not to worry about those churches, at least in Prince George's County, especially the small congregations that would need life-support if the tax must be paid! All (or almost all) they need to do is install cisterns/rain-barrels, un-pave their parking lots and replace asphalt/concrete with rock (referred to in scripture as the church's foundation) or “permeable material,” and perhaps replace church roofs with sod—maybe even grow crops in season. If trees are planted in whatever surface will sustain them (maybe even bushes would suffice)...then—VOILA—the tax will be reduced.

Of course, anything government touches it also controls and usually corrupts one way or another. The partial-freebie includes the requirement that the church must become “green-oriented,” whether theologically apropos or not. Ostensibly, the objective is to keep pollutants from entering the bay. One wonders how making the churches conduct “green ministries” satisfies that objective, though the greenies probably claim that the church-rebates encourage some sort of filtering.

Since streets and big-box parking lots, not to mention their square-miles of tar-covered roofs, are saturated with oil, grease, dust and cigarette butts, one wonders if they will be plowed up—or even removed—and replaced with “permeable material” to filter that inevitable rain. Just thinking about it causes a dust-cough, not to mention thoughts of the streets back in the day when literal horsepower was the driver of transportation. Ugh! One can only imagine the runoff from the millions of horse-leavings lathering the streets and stables into the Chesapeake.

The methodology mirrors that of the black leaders in putting the arm on (or using) the churches for action in attaining civil rights...a sort of “what would MLK do” question concerning reversal of the climate. The Chesapeake is just the manmade-global-warming-hoax Jim Crow approach, dear to the president's heart. Who better to “get folks right with climate” (scare them out of global hell) than the preachers, who must now deliver “environmentally-focused sermons” in order to get the tax rebate...all in the name of the thoroughly discredited UN climate-gurus, not God, of course?

The darker side of this was reflected recently in Houston, where the mayor subpoenaed the sermons of some preachers that contained any references to sexuality and gender identity, running afoul of the city's gay-rights ordinance...in her opinion. After all, why shouldn't everyone be free to choose his/her own public bathroom? Almost overnight, she undid that piece of folly, and the preachers/churches in Prince George's County should take note. Those who settled this country did so largely to see that government never again infringe upon their right to freedom of religion and expression.

The mayor took her cue from the current federal approach to government, to wit, governance via fiat, aka executive orders. Explaining recently why he hadn't ordered up something some outfit wanted, the president said that he isn't an emperor. This was only partly right. He's an emperor with no clothes, and the mayor should take note of that.

In the meantime, maybe Maryland legislators should just ask the preachers to pray for seven years of drought, like what happened back in the day when the Israelites moved to Egypt to escape the famine so Joseph could save their bacon...literally. No rain—no problem—pure Chesapeake!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

DNC Memorandum #17

From the office of the chairWOMAN, 11 December 2014

***Listen up! There are no apologies offered for the absence of memos since September. This has been a terribly busy time for the chairWOMAN account having to further deal with the IRS scandals, the Benghazi slaughter, Fast-and-Furious, Syria, ISIS, Ferguson, torture, Gruber, open borders, executive orders rewriting Obamacare/Immigration laws and the election in November, which at best was a Pyrrhic Victory for the republicans since they now have to fix the mess caused mostly by Pelosi and Reid (little joke[rs] there). Pursuant to the “Gruber Hearing” of the tenth, a new DNC agency labeled the Section for Consulting Healthcare Underwriters Managing Erratic Results (or SCHUMER, for short) is being organized and its mission/contents pinned soon to the Bush Dart-Board, now located by the salt-sugar-lactose-peanut-caffeine-free candy-machine, speaking of which everyone is urged to try the new yogurt-spinach-bar that can be ingested, injected or snorted, with a mortar and pestle and/or saline solution provided for the latter two.

***Staffers are directed to NOT—repeat—NOT mention former Defense Secretary Hagel's name unless it is unavoidable such as in the currently hostile press conferences. If the subject arises, the official line is that Hagel is suffering from PTSDDD (post traumatic stress defense department disorder, for recent Yale graduates on staff). Also, no interviews are to be scheduled with anyone connected to Fox News regarding any subject, especially with the lady-anchors, whose bare shoulders and thighs and outrageous cleavage-displays are designed for the huge republican-voting men's audience, which has the same degree of reverse hostility toward Obama as the New Black Panthers have for Georgia-crackers.

***The Gruber brouhaha has attracted unattractive worldwide attention (called L'Affaire Gruber-Mal in France, for instance). This has made it necessary to properly vet all individuals who are in any way connected to government or the DNC. The president, as well as Al Sharpton, his current aide-de-camp, does not trust the FBI, CIA, DEA, EPA, FEMA, the DCI or even OSHA to do the job so another DNC agency is being structured currently for requiring that every operative submit to the Mandatory Intelligence Testing agency (MIT, for short) before taking a job, with the exception of anyone responsible for the president's teleprompters for obvious reasons. In this regard, the wag who clandestinely left in the lounge that poster of the president saying that POLICE ACT STUPIDLY will be sent to the Durbin Re-indoctrination Center & Gulag when apprehended, regarding which Durbin will offer an end-of-year seminar on the similarity of American GIs to keepers of Stalin's gulags, Pol Pot's killing fields, and Hitler's Storm Troopers, a reprise of his statements during the Iraq War.

***The chairWOMAN has been rumored to have said in a speech to the Girl Scouts of Florida that women are justifiably and gradually taking over the government. This rumor is unfounded and the chairWOMAN will not say that again. However, she resents the complaints accruing to the Helen Reddy version of I Am Woman being played over the sound-system throughout the building on the hour. Women are now acting as observers of SEAL training in preparation for their joining the SEALS in the near future. The president requested a year ago a DNC red/yellow/black/white paper to explain why this is both necessary and useful. Only one paper has been submitted and this is unacceptable, so be forewarned...heads will roll if someone doesn't think of at least one valid reason other than “looks cute in uniform.”

***The evil Fox News perpetrators of perverse propaganda cited the president's 20-minute speech on the night of the Ferguson Grand Jury decision as a declaration of war against the police and his next-day travel to Chicago (aka the Illinois killing-fields) as his first campaign stop to promote it, especially as an answer to white racism in general and police racism in particular. The DNC has been tasked to spin this Fox egregiousness into the POTUS's love for the uniforms, but not to mention—NOT MENTION—his race in connection to the last two presidential elections. This is called “grubering,” perfectly acceptable in civil discourse since everyone knows the voters, or at least republican voters, are stupid and haven't noticed.

***As mentioned in September, POTUS is still considering instituting a Department of Gender and has requested another yellow/black/white/red paper on how to do this while still awaiting word from the LBGTQ group as to how many genders there are. This hasn’t been settled yet mainly because the American Conference of Transitioning and Ultimate Personhood (known for short as ACT-UP) still threatens to sue something or somebody if not included in the gender-count, but certainly not in the Q group. Also, a complaint from something called the Platonic Education Department Of Pleasing Habituations in Loving Eroticism (PEDOPHILE, for short) has been lodged with AG Holder, claiming gender-status and threatening action from some Catholic priests account violation of First Amendment rights. The DNC is preparing a summary of Plato's Symposium for all staffers in readiness for any sign that POTUS has evolved on this matter as he did regarding same-sex marriage.

***Be thinking seriously about 2016. Hillary at last report is receiving treatment for CLD (Compulsive Lying Disorder) and should be campaign-tuned for next year's early start. Elizabeth Warren's half-breed (with a little pilgrim thrown in) image is a great crowd-pleaser and she has promised to know the state capitals by April. The thought that another male of any color might be elected is simply too much.

***Have a GREAT HOLIDAY but remember that any mention of Christmas—if found out—means a pink slip.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Misuse of the SEALS?

Freelance photojournalist Luke Somers was killed by his jihad captors in Yemen the other night as Navy Seals attempted to rescue him, the second such attempt. There has been much praise for the U.S. action, authorized by the president. There is another side to this story, to wit, that Americans traveling abroad for no official purpose (military, diplomatic, etc.) should not expect the U.S. to come to their rescue when they are “captured” since to do so puts the lives of other Americans in jeopardy with the attendant fact that such rescues are probably not successful at least half the time.

Suppose the Seal team had lost a member(s) during that hazardous attempt. If that had happened, there would have been no military accomplishment, only the trading of one American life for another, with both being lost anyway. This seems unconscionable. Somers was in Yemen because he had decided to travel in a part of the world in which he knowingly chose to risk his life. The government had not sent him there. He hadn't even been sent there on orders of a news media outfit—he was a freelancer doing his thing, earning a living on the edge.

The aircraft(s) involved in the rescue could have been shot down or destroyed on the ground, with great loss of life in the Seal-6 team, among the pilots and all others on the ground. Thankfully, everyone got out, but one remembers what happened when President Carter sent a military team into Iran in 1980 to rescue the hostages. That caper was damned from the start and shouldn't have happened, but the things that went wrong cost lives, with nothing to show for the effort.

The killing of Osama bin Laden furnishes another example though it at least had a military objective if the killing of bin Laden could be considered such. In the 40-minute foray on the ground that included the crash of a helicopter and the ear-splitting noise of gunfire, Navy Seals could have been killed in exchange, successful or not, of their lives for that of Osama, who in 2011 was probably a virtual non-player in al Qaeda, simply stashed away safely in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a city of some 300,000.

Obviously, a deal had been struck between Pakistan and the U.S. guaranteeing no interference with the attempt other than what might occur in bin Laden's compound; otherwise, the mission would have been suicidal since the action took place less than a half-mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, Pakistan's West Point. The Regimental training Centers of the Pakistan Army are also located in Abbottabad. If any junior officer, aware or unaware of the deal, had instinctively ordered troops to fight the Americans, there would have been a total loss of the Seals either to death or imprisonment.

This is not to disparage either the mission or the president but if the affair had gone awry, the finger-pointing would have been vicious, just as it was for Carter. If Osama could have been taken alive, as Saddam was in Iraq in 2002, and perhaps transported to Gitmo, the mission would have gained a greater importance. But was it worth one American life in the long run?

The president is right in refusing to put an American fighting force anywhere in the Middle East now. In fact, the time has come to withdraw all official personnel from both Iraq and Afghanistan, including all embassy operatives and contract-workers. Any of these people could be captured by ISIS or al Qaeda, with the result being unsuccessful demands for ransoms or beheadings. The alternative would be the loss of life involved in future Seal-team operations to rescue these people.

Without question, all non-military or otherwise unofficial travelers such as Somers should be told by the government in no uncertain terms that U.S. GIs will not be sacrificed to save them if they choose to put themselves in harm's way. The media outlets should be made to understand that neither American lives nor treasure will be expended to attempt rescuing their operatives if/when they are held by Muslim butchers. The Defense Department should not be tasked with the risk attached to rescuing people who often just may be seeking their 15 minutes of fame.

This is another way of saying that the time has come for the Muslims of whatever stripe to be left alone so they can have their inevitable civil wars on their own turf. News of the actions and results is already channeled through Middle-easterners, so the media can arrange to protect its operatives or keep them home.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Obama's Houseboy—Sharpton

I've seen some disgusting political posturing in my time but none more egregious than the picture flashed on TV the other day of the Rev. (maybe Dr. by now) Al Sharpton comfortably seated across the table from President Obama in that much-ballyhooed session dealing with the war currently going on, as the president would have it, between U.S. police departments and black folks. Sharpton had just returned from his glorious rabble-rousing in Ferguson, culminating in about 25 or so small businesses burned out or burned completely down by—yep—black folks, a marvelous victory. No one from Ferguson was invited to the clambake.

Avaricious Al, who might abscond at any time without paying a hotel or restaurant bill, is one of the president's favorite corruption-parasites vis-a-vis both the federal and New York governments. He has the self-enriching habit of collecting income and social security taxes from employees in his National Action Network but never remitting them to the respective government treasuries. Known as “Always Available Al” when demonstrations are in order anywhere and any time, he lives very well and also conducts an inconsequential clambake on MSNBC, the network known—like the Marine Band—as the “President's Own.”

At last count according to the New York Times just last month, Reverend Ripoff owes the U.S. government a cool $3.6 million and the state of New York another $916,000, for a total robbery of the taxpayers of $4,516,000, but this two-bit crook sits across the table from the president to sit in judgment on policemen, not to mention his felony-conviction for fraudulently accusing a New York policeman and prosecutor (law enforcement folks) of the rape of Tawana Brawley in 1987. The whole thing was a hoax, euphemism for LIE; otherwise, Sharpton could have been accused if a rape had taken place.

By contrast, consider the IRS treatment of legendary singer Willie Nelson, a white guy. In 1990, poor Willie owed the feds $16.7 million. In the process of collecting, the IRS took almost everything Nelson owned, including his Texas ranch and 20 properties in four states. That still didn't pay off the debt, so Nelson struck a deal with the IRS to share the proceeds from his album “Who'll Buy My Memories,” which brought the IRS another $3.6 million, still not quite enough but Nelson settled a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and completed some other projects to make up the rest. The debt was cleared in 1993.

Estimated to be worth about $5 million, Stingy Sharpton could pay off his debt...or the IRS, instead of looking up the records on other folks and furnishing them to the White House, could collect just as it did concerning Nelson. That won't happen while Obama is president, so the taxpayers can just eat cake while the man who helped instigate the fires of Ferguson preens in the White House and hobnobs with the likes of Nancy Pelosi and the other glitterati.

So far, it appears that Action-packed Al has not been able to induce looting and burning in New York City and other cities, having to do with another police matter, but perhaps he just hasn't had the time to sufficiently fire up the troops. The protesters are in place and are—no doubt at his bidding or at least approval—trying to bring things to a standstill in their locations. Or...could it be that the president hinted to the righteous, ravenous reverend that now is not the time to slander New York's finest, since New York Mayor de Blasio has already publicly thrown all NYC policemen under the bus...where they belong, of course.

The righteous rev, Obama and Holder got all heated when black teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by a Latino they thought was a white guy while banging the man's head against a sidewalk in Sanford, Florida, in 2012 and Holder sent in the troops to convict the victim/shooter, who was found innocent. They didn't bother to notice when another black teenager, De'Marquise Elkins, shot a white woman twice in Brunswick, Georgia, in March last year and shot her 13-month old baby, Antonio West, to death as he lay in the stroller she was pushing. No white people burned any buildings or looted any stores. Sanctimonious Sharpton was simply the wrong color to stir up some action among the uncivilized whites in Georgia.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Grand Jury Got It Right

A few years ago, I expressed disapproval of Barack Hussein Obama as president but it occurred to me that I didn't know enough about him to be so dogmatic whereupon I bought his book, Dreams from My Father, actually a sort of autobiography introduced in 1995 and updated nine years later. I was surprised at some of the information such as his drug-use as a student (later, too?). From both the words and between the lines, I gathered that he is not crazy about white people.

I've had my share to say about the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent events since August but at least had the media to keep me informed, along with its biases and unbelievable susceptibility to error. So, to be fair and just as I learned about Obama by reading his autobiography, I decided to look at the Grand Jury material furnished by the Ferguson prosecutor concerning the panelists' failure to return an indictment against Darren Wilson, the policeman who killed Brown.

In possession of the facts regarding the shooting, the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, could not in good faith bring charges against Wilson, whom he considered innocent of any crime. Realizing, apparently, that there would be a huge backlash in the absence of a charge, McCulloch wisely simply sent the matter to the Grand Jury, which had been appointed in May and was still in session, to hear all the evidence that could be gathered and return an indictment for a crime...or not.

Usually, a charge for the Grand Jury to consider will be handled in a day and an indictment returned or not, with the evidence presented kept secret, at least for a time. McCulloch wisely chose to make public the entire Grand Jury evidence, including three autopsies, a mega-number of witness testimonies and graphic pictures, every shred of the forensic evidence and all other statements—everything—available on the Internet so everyone could make an informed decision about what happened.

The promise that this three-month proceeding and decision would be published was kept immediately but did not deter the “protesters,” local and professional, from preparing a riot, complete with the looting/burning for two nights of businesses, cars, whatever. They had no intention of examining the evidence and were encouraged by the actions of both President Obama and Attorney General Holder, who had already pronounced their verdict without knowing the facts that Wilson was guilty.

Using the Internet, I didn't examine all the evidence gathered during the mega-hours of 25 Grand Jury sessions but enough to understand that the Grand Jury could have made no other decision. The forensic evidence alone would have been enough but the eye-witness testimonies actually sealed the matter. About the best corroborating accounts were those of a repairman right on top of the scene and another individual who was just out driving around and happened on the scene. The latter witness was apparently in the habit of keeping a journal and updated it meticulously almost immediately after arriving home, before the facts could be forgotten or blurred.

The accounts of these witnesses, one oral and the other written, could virtually have been interchanged because of their near-total similarity, with their greatest usefulness having to do with Brown's actions, especially the position of his arms and his incomprehensible charge at Wilson amid warnings to stop and actual gunfire. The autopsy report on Brown noted that he was under the influence of cannabis (marijuana) to the extent that he was “impaired,” which might explain his strange behavior, including his attack on Wilson in the patrol car. No one in his right mind would have tried that.

It's doubtful that Holder has examined this report and virtually certain that Obama has not taken the time. Instead, he traveled the day after the shooting, looting and riots in Ferguson to Chicago, the nation's homicide Nirvana, where blacks kill blacks routinely, though police seldom, if ever, do. Holder, using taxpayer money, is still trying to squeeze Wilson and the Ferguson police, using federal prosecutors and the FBI in the process.

In his rambling 20-minute speech on the night of the shooting, ironically aired on TV in split screen simultaneously showing him orating and Ferguson burning, Obama made it plain that the police-people in this country are to blame for trouble in locales of “color.” He would be better served to read the report.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

The Lesson of Ferguson

The president is now convening bright folks to determine how the nation's inherently evil police departments can be trained to play nicer to their communities so the citizens will love them like brothers/sisters. The prez sees the police as the enemy, joining the Rev. Al Sharpton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Imam “Calypso Louie” Farrakhan and the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah (God damn America) Wright in being profoundly aware of this anti-religious circumstance.

This became apparent within days of his inauguration in 2009, when Obama, without knowing any facts, accused a white policeman of acting stupidly in Cambridge, where the lawman arrested a black man indulging in a daylight break-in. The man had locked himself out of his house, attempted to break-in, then resisted arrest when justifiably apprehended, but was fortunate enough to be a friend of the top banana. One hopes the prez wasn't dumb in accusing the policeman—just malicious—since ignorance would have been embarrassing for a law professor having the Constitution as his field of expertise.

The prez and AG Holder further perpetrated their war on and disdain of the police in 2012 in the “Trayvon Martin Affair” in Sanford, Florida, even though Zimmerman, whom they accused of murder, was neither white nor a policeman. They didn't realize the facts in time to keep from looking foolish, but Martin, recently expelled from school and doing pot, was shot by Zimmerman as he beat Zimmerman's head against a sidewalk. Maybe the prez thought the insensitive police should have shot Zimmerman instead of furnishing facts that prosecutors used to bring charges that didn't hold up at trial.

Obama and Holder hold racist views but they could at least have had enough intelligence to pick a case for exhibiting their views, intellectual superiority, and super-righteousness other than that of pot-high Michael Brown, who, within minutes of assaulting and robbing a store-clerk half his size chose to walk down the middle of instead of on the sidewalk of a two-way street, attacked and tried to kill a policeman in his patrol car and then tried to kill him outside of his patrol car. The policeman killed Brown in self-defense but the prosecutor, discerning the facts and perceiving no crime, nevertheless turned the case over to a Grand Jury appointed months before and already in session.

The Grand Jury spent three solid months examining witnesses and evidence—everything from three autopsies to scientific facts—and could find no crime with which to charge the policeman; therefore, ipso facto, the policeman was guilty, according to Obama and Holder, who is now trying to bring a civil suit against the policeman to prove who knows what, certainly not premeditated murder, which would be about the only acceptable grounds for a conviction. Meanwhile, the policeman, who may never have even seen Brown before that day, has been forced to resign his livelihood.

Within hours of the Grand Jury's verdict, Obama was on TV prating not about obeying the law but about the fact that police need to present a better picture of themselves to their communities—incredibly insensitive but structured on the racism one can discover by just reading his autobiography of 1995 entitled Dreams from My Father. He hasn't changed. His problem may be due to the fact that he's had all the better of it in being elected to the Illinois State Senate, the U.S. Senate and the presidency—twice...by white people. He simply can't look a gift-horse in the mouth...can't stand prosperity. Sad!

It may be that Obama tries to identify with blacks (he's half-white) to prove something...in this case, that he's on their side in hating the police. The fact that black policemen put white folks in jail doesn't register with him, only that white policemen put black folks in jail, never mind the reasonable explanation that the nation is 75% white and the high school graduation rate for black males is 47%. To qualify for police work, one has to be a high school grad, so black males disqualify themselves by the time they're eligible to vote.

This circumstance should be addressed by Obama but he's too busy engaging in community-organizing on a presidential level, using his expertise to further divide the races. A grade-schooler understands that Michael Brown would be alive today if he hadn't committed three crimes (assault, robbery, but not counting jaywalking) and attempted murder, but Obama may not understand...or institutional racism gone amok.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Obama/Holder Play RACE-CARD

Last August before they knew any facts, President Obama and Attorney General Holder decided that white police officer Darren Wilson was guilty of some degree of murder in the killing of Michael Brown, an African American, in Ferguson, Mo. Holder dispatched his operatives to Ferguson immediately, as well as FBI agents, to make sure that Wilson was found culpable in some way for Brown's death. Obama and Holder, again without knowing the facts, did the same thing in February March 2012 regarding the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, making sure that Zimmerman would be proven guilty, even though Martin was banging Zimmerman's head against a sidewalk in that killing.

Zimmerman, who was neither a law enforcement officer nor a beautiful person, was found innocent. He was not white but a Latino of mixed heritage. Race, of course, was the issue for Obama and Holder, anyway, both of whom seem to have trouble tolerating people they consider white. Obama once said of his grandmother who raised him that she was a “typical white person,” i.e., uncomfortable in the presence of people like him—black.

The prosecutor in the Brown affair, Robert McCulloch, could have charged Wilson with a crime if he'd recognized one. Or, the event could have been managed while an internal investigation was held, with charges made if grounds were discovered for same. The outcry was so great that McCulloch couldn't win either way so he turned the entire matter over to the Grand Jury, which as often as not is the way crimes are handled. After all, Obama and Holder had spoken and acted publicly, so the African-American population figured Wilson would go to trial, a satisfactory outcome.

This, however, didn't stop black demonstrators, local and otherwise, from burning and looting Ferguson in August since the issue was race and Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, is overwhelmingly black. A white officer killing any black is fair game for looting and burning in celebration of civil rights/disobedience. Ten days later (consult u-tube), Kajieme Powell, a black man who had just stolen some sodas and pastry from a nearby store, was shot ten times by two apparently white policemen in St. Louis less than four miles from Ferguson in broad daylight in front of witnesses. Neither Obama nor Holder took note of this killing, though Powell had no gun, just a knife.

Brown had committed both assault on a clerk and robbery at a liquor store in Ferguson just moments before he encountered Wilson, who was trying to apprehend him on the basis of the radioed description of the robber, who, indeed, was Brown, as noted irrefutably by in-store surveillance cameras. The Grand Jury failed to indict Wilson on 24 November, with the complete evidence of its proceedings now available to the public. Brown also assaulted Wilson while the policeman was still in his patrol car and tried to wrestle his gun away from him.

Brown then ran and was not shot in the back. It was only after he turned and confronted Wilson, refusing to heed the policeman's instructions and warning, and charged at Wilson that the officer used deadly force. All the credible witness-testimonies were corroborated by the physical evidence, including three autopsies, both official and private.

Using incredibly poor judgment, Obama, who probably thought he was too heavily invested in an indictment to do otherwise, made a speech that evening on national television, rambling for some 20 minutes mostly about how law-enforcement agencies need to get their act together and play nice to communities. He made it plain by word and body language that Brown's unfortunate demise was the result of a racist act. Wilson was white, Brown was black—case closed—racism. Strangely Obama has still never mentioned Powell but his TV act could be construed as telling the rioters and looters to go for it...burn Ferguson, thus creating catastrophic damage to the black community.

Holder's gang is hard at work now to bring a civil suit to claim that Wilson deprived Brown of his civil rights. Obama strangely flew off to his hometown, Chicago, the next day to further speechify and keep the fires fueled. Chicago is the murder capital of this country (408 homicides so far this year), but virtually all the black people killed there are killed by blacks, not whites or policemen. Shortly after his inauguration in 2009, Obama, without knowing any facts, accused a white policeman of acting stupidly because he justifiably arrested a black man...that just about says it all.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark