The leadership crisis

Yesterday the founder of the Davos Forum, Klaus Schwab, informed us that:

“Solving problems in the context of outdated and crumbling models will only dig us deeper into the hole.”

He states that capitalism must be reformed.

Across the world, President Barak Obama in a statement released by the White House on the 30th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision on abortion rights stated:

“we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”

In an article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal entitled “The New American Divide” Charles Murray argues that there is a cultural divide that has never occurred in this country that threatens to rip the nation apart as its leaders and upper class become ever more insulated from the rest of the country. Single parenthood, long-term joblessness, and the loss of religion have all jumped to historic levels in the majority of the country while the Upper Class has become ever more isolated.

Rather than the American Way of the 1960′s we now have deeply divergent class differences that do not bode well for the democratic experiment.

I picked the references from Hr. Schwab and the president for a reason. It goes to the heart of the matter. The crisis we are facing was identified by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in its earliest form and by the social welfare driven policies of government over the past 50 years. It is the disintegration of both faith and family that is at the heart of the issue.

One can not have laws without morality. There has to be an underlying philosophical code to the social compact. As the Left and its institutions have sought to extirpate the Judeo-Christian basis for our Constitution and laws, the moral and ethical limits to wrong conduct have been severely weakened. The Jon Corzines and Angelo Mozillos and Newt Gingrichs and Nancy Pelosis begin to feel invincible. On a corporate level Apple and Nike disassociate themselves from the sweatshops in Asia producing their products, while General Electric and Goldman Sachs game to government and the system to the tune of billions. In a financial crisis based upon bad decision after bad decision after bad decision there were no consequences for those decisions. Any fines or settlements were paid out of other people’s money.

And this evening, we are to be lectured by the president on “fairness”. Every time I hear that term I know the system is once again being gamed. Fairness is equal treatment under the law. Fairness is equal opportunity. But the president has a very different idea of fairness.

How fair is it to take the life of a 7 month old fetus? According to the president’s own words, it is simply equal opportunity.There is something deeply disturbing about such a worldview.

Hr. Schwab considers the capitalist model to be outdated when in fact it is capitalism run wild, or rather cronyism, that is the issue.

The cultural divide outlined by Mr. Murray began when the social norms began to crumble in the 1960′s. In 1965 Moynihan identified the destruction of the African-American family as a national crisis. Trillions of dollars in social programs later, it would seem that society as a whole is unraveling.

For without core values, the center cannot hold. We don’t need more rules and regulations. The Federal Code is 80,000+ pages already. We do need common sense and a recognition of the common ethical standards, the Tao as C.S. Lewis put it, that underlies all else that we do.

Perhaps if our president did not engage in purposely misstating reality we could begin to recover our national soul. Perhaps if the bankers looked within, we could begin to recapture that which has made this country great.

 

 

One solution to several problems

The United States has been faced with a lot of problems lately. A massive trade deficit; turmoil in the Middle East, job losses, and a lack of competitiveness among them. Let’s look at some of the critical issues.

1. The economic and military stakes related to our energy supply continue to rise. As we artificially constrict domestic energy production Teheran has continued to raise the stakes in the Straights of Hormuz. The control of the flow of oil is their primary weapon as Der Spiegel points out. This a threat to the global economy, not just our own. It will continue to be the primary flash point for conflict until we address our energy dependence pragmatically.

War is a very expensive proposition, and ever since the Great White Fleet a top concern of our defense establishment has been fuel resources. Today’s biofuels programs are politically correct but will do little to either reduce the military’s carbon footprint or strategic energy reserves. Continued reliance on unstable or uneconomic sources places our ability to defend our nation in jeopardy.

2 – On December 31, USA Today reported that gasoline and other petroleum derivatives have become America’s leading export industry at over $88 Billion in 2011. For the first time since the 1960’s, energy exports are leading the way and if allowed to grow, have the power to revive our economy.

3 – On December 27, the Wall Street Journal reported that the boom in shale gas production has spurred a race by the U.S. chemical industry to build petrochemical based manufacturing plants in places like West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and elsewhere. Jim Fitterling, a VP at Dow Chemical, pointed out that the United States now has the lowest cost for natural gas outside of the Middle East. Petrochemicals are critical to the modern economy. From the clothes you wear to the drugs you take to the house you live in, to the food you eat these products are the backbone of the economy. And you can’t get them from solar or wind or geothermal power.

The United States is experiencing one of the biggest energy booms in its history in places like North Dakota and Pennsylvania and West Virginia and even New York. New and massive fields recently discovered offshore have reversed the decline in stated oil reserves for the first time in many years. The Alberta oil sand deposits are paying off after 30 years of promise. This sea change has the potential to create millions of manufacturing jobs. Jobs we desperately need.

4 – Our current administrations policies are strongly opposed to conventional energy production.  It has done every single thing it can to stymie these developments. From their program to block the Keystone XL pipeline to the invocation of the Jones Act to block drilling in the Cook Inlet to the EPA’s suspicious report (commentary here & here) on contamination at the Pavillion, Wyoming site to the 18 month delay imposed on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, our government has implemented a policy that will cause clear and present danger to our nation.

5 – From its investment in Solyndra to that in Fisker to the guarantees backing RFK Jr’s BrightSource Energy, the administrations track record of backing alternative energy programs has established a substantial record for cronyism and poor performance. These projects passed no technical or economic litmus tests but do make great sound bites.

We have a dangerous policy conflict that must be resolved. We have the opportunity to create a new wave of prosperity and a chance to reduce the potential for conflict or be relegated to the sidelines of history. It is common sense versus current government policy.

When faced with the facts one can draw some objective conclusions. First, many of our current policies are not working to resolve the critical issues facing the nation.

Second, as the Iranians raise the possibility of a combination of oil crisis and debt crisis we would  be hit with a 1-2 punch to the global economy.

Third, the Middle East is undergoing an earth-shaking change of its own and will be a very different place in the next decade. Whether these countries will be friendly or even stable is a deep concern. Unstable energy supplies equals unstable global security . Ten years of war and trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost have done little to address this prime issue.

In the meantime, the opportunity to turn the economy around, shield our country from some of these shocks, and create long-term well-paying jobs  is staring us in the eyes.We have been talking about energy independence and reducing our trade deficits for the past 40 years and we have a golden opportunity sitting right in front of us.

At a time when the majority of Americans seem to agree that our national debt is unsustainable and in itself a clear and present danger to our security as Admiral Mullen recently testified to Congress there has never been a better case for moving forward responsibly and rapidly on conventional energy exploitation.

Technology exists today to both safeguard the environment and extract natural resources more efficiently than ever before. But the Luddite manner and Gaia worship have got to go. An accelerated program to exploit North American natural gas and oil must become a national priority.

We have a window of opportunity to do the greater good for the many and even for our planet if we manage our resources well. We cannot afford to walk away from this one.

The Amish Influence in the NBA

People who have been following the NBA this year may notice a number of top players sporting a new hirsute look. From Baron Davis, said to have originated the trend, to James Harden to Lamarcus Aldridge, big beards are the new style.

In a background interview given by one team’s equipment manager, he stated that white men in overalls, plain spoken and driving horse drawn buggies have been seen at a number of arenas around the country. Are the Amish moving in on the NBA, and why?

Some credit the recent lockout for the new trend. Many players with extra time on their hands in addition to physical conditioning spent many hours contemplating the implications of a lost season. Some also gave deep thought to an eventual post-NBA life where the late nights and nightclubs would fade away.

As expected, when asked Amish leaders had no comment except to say that “We live simply. Dress plainly, and reject pride, arrogance, and haughtiness. We accept the Will of Jesus.”

Whatever the reason, beards seem to the year’s biggest trend. That and jamming the lane.

It’s The Great Halloween Party Cover Up, Charlie Brown

Today’s Post gleans another gem from Jodi Kantor’s book “The Obamas”, this one concerning a Halloween party in October 2009 at the height of the recession in which the leading lights of Hollywood did the decorating and planning. Johnny Depp hosted the party in character as the Mad Hatter while Tim Burton added his macabre touch. George Lucas even flew in Chewbacca.

I am not sure which is more offensive. A party held at the height of the recession that resonates of Marie Antoinette.

The cover – up by the White House.

Or the slavish connivance of a docile media.

The White House schedule is well publicized and extensive and is examined under a microscope daily by the media and by foreign powers. I’m sure the Chinese and MI5 knew and charged it down to the peccadilloes of a weak president. That not a single reporter thought to ask, and that even TMZ and E! with their armies of paparazzi missed this one is highly suspicious.

While Americans were losing their jobs and the economy was running aground, a worse example cannot be imagined of the petty abuse of the office and perquisites of the presidency. Unless of course it was the Majorca trip, or the Copenhagen trip, or the London trip. Any way you look at it our president and his spouse are livin’ large on our dime.

The White House under this administration has made its reputation for its lack of gravitas. As we fold our tents in Afghanistan and watch as our president creates straw men only to knock them down, there is a rising taste of bile in our collective gullets.

Having a party is no big thing, but the consistent and aggressive cover up is.

The Media’s OWS Con – California Edition

Several weeks ago a major breaking story about the OWS protesters at University of California  – Davis was reported. Dramatic accounts and photographs of campus police pepper spraying students protesting tuition increases were broadcast worldwide. Pundits declared their horror at the heartless cruelty of campus police. The news coverage was brutal and provoked a global outcry against police repression.

But we are being fed a false picture by the media. What wasn’t shown except on sites such as Youtube (courtesy of a student videographer, presumably one of the protesters) was the circumstances leading up to the incident.

The problem arises when, after having arrested a number of protesters, other protesters surround the police and deliver a threat. In a call and response reminiscent of kindergarten, the leader shouts “We will let you leave. If you let them free.” with the chant echoed by the crowd.

The police them inform several of the leaders of this leaderless movement that if they do not step aside they will be pepper sprayed. The protesters then chant “From Davis to Greece; F*$k the police.” The police seem rather bemused when the students begin to chant “don’t shoot students!” while continuing to block the path of the police. After repeated warnings, the protesters advise each other to cover their eyes.

The pepper spraying is rather anticlimactic. The police continue to order the protesters to move to the side as the crowd around the 10 or so protesters blocking the drive and the subjects of the pepper spraying screams and boos. The incident takes place over a course of 15 minutes, and there was no police brutality evident as defined in the manuals and guidelines.

Naturally, the chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi, was forced to backtrack from her initial support of the campus police. Katehi was later quoted as saying “they were not supposed to use force”.

The chief of the force was placed on leave while an investigation is conducted and two of the officers involved were suspended.

Funny how those breaking the law have become so insistent upon its application upon those who were tasked to enforce it. I wonder how many of those same students protesting the tuition hikes are actually paying their own tuition?

In Los Angeles, the dope smoking, hobo convention, and gay sex in the latrines went unnoticed in the fervor to report on “the movement, man”. Up in Oakland Angela Davis, a violent revolutionary in the 1960′s once on the FBI’s Most Wanted list is a vocal supporter and her Communist zeal remains undiminished. She was joined by Congresswoman Barbara Lee and former Obama White House official and political lightning rod Van Jones. The “Occupy the Ports” plan was a cause looking for an issue, but no one was quite sure how it fitted and it fizzled rapidly. This seems to be a recurrent theme in the Occupy movement.

Today, Kiplinger released their rankings of the best tuition values at American universities and UC Davis came in as one of the top values, along with several of the other UC campuses. The juxtposition of this news and that of the protests might thus seem dissonant to a reasonable person.

There is an illogic loose in the world. The media write the story and cuts and pastes the narrative hoping that no one digs too deeply. The same propaganda techniques used successfully in the communist bloc during the Cold War are recycled and regurgitated. But the question remains half a year later “to support what”?

At least the Davis protesters had a specific grievance whether one agrees or disagrees. Overall the OWS Movement, if it can really be called a movement, has been a grab bag of  inchoate “no’s” to the status quo. A grab bag of grievances if you will. There has been no catalysis even after 6 months of intense among and between the protesters and constant media attention. A revolving parade of telegenic activists, all with their own agendas looking for “street cred” has not been able to help verbalize a coherent message. The “99%” have had an amazing run but are looking more and more like the <1%.

And so we have college students protesting a tuition hike most will never have to pay at a university that has been ranked as one of the best values for the quality of education in the world. It makes no sense at all, really. Much like the OWS movement and the media circus surrounding it. Maybe Shepard Fairey can make a poster like he did for Obama. Oh, he did?

The Age of the Mediocre

Has anyone noticed how mediocre society has become in the past 20 years?  Fine art, music, film, literature, politics, radio, television etc.,  really are in a doldrum.  The postwar flowering of New York as the world’s cultural center has turn now into a monolithic mass of mediocrity. The same people reading the same newspapers watching the same television eating at the same restaurants with the same friends discussing the same things put out the same piles of junk every day. We have squeezed our children into the same politically correct, sterile boxes and wonder why they turn their backs on us in favor of video games or the internet.

It starts with education. 40 years after the experimentation began, the bureaucrats of the education establishment have figured out how to teach absolutely nothing in the most efficient and painless way possible. Any flavor or zest for education is sterilized and homogenized to be taught in the same standardized manner that anesthetizes the student and retards the learning process. Grade inflation has led to reduced expectations and a dumbed down society.

Media went through incredible consolidation in the 1980′s and 90′s. Clear Channel, Time/Warner, Fox, and others all went on merger and spending sprees, with the result that we now have a velveeta media. The same squishy, uninformative feel good groupthink from all sides. Scandals are manufactured and celebrity for the sake of celebrity is celebrated. All the while, the hard news is minimized or trivialized until it blows up. Kiplings five friends are instead discarded in favor of pushing slanted agendas with sloppy or inaccurate reporting. There’s no wonder the major media is dying on the vine. With their incredible bias to the left, they have managed to alienate close to 50% of their available audience. Thus we see the New York Times, the LA Times, the Rocky Mountain News, and Seattle Post Intelligencer all falling by the wayside. In New York and LA especially, the Times have become nothing more than soapboxes for provincial ideologues ranting to the like minded.

In Hollywood, you have a choice of blow ‘em up mind garbage, ultra dysfunctional self involved vanity projects, or some twisted version of cops & robbers. Until the 1960′s, Hollywood churned out a  diverse product with perhaps 10 new films hitting the theaters weekly. Now all rides on $100 Million in special effects. In music, Elvis has left the building. It has become a mindless drone unless one seeks out the truly unique in hidden niches. Much of the best music is being written in places like Brazil or Mexico, with the occasional African or Middle Eastern artist thrown in. Otherwise it seems to be overproduced, dishonest crap. Frank Zappa wrote about television in the early 1970′s;

” You will obey me while I lead you

and eat the garbage that I feed you

Until the day that we don’t need you

Don’t go for help, no one will heed you

Your mind is totally controlled

It has been stuffed into my mold

and you will do as you are told

Until the rights to you are sold”

Pretty prescient. High culture has been abandoned to its own shrinking ghetto in favor of bling. Back in the 1930′s, Frank Capra described helots as graspers and takers; people who had and cared for things and only things and the world is basically being run by them to the exclusion of all else now. The ancient Spartans described helots as slaves who were ritually mistreated and degraded. That sounds like a complementary description these days. Those on the inside will foist the lowest common denominator garbage on the rest of us simply because they can get away with it.

Open a book, listen to something outside the box, read foreign newspapers on the internet, seek out the weird and wonderful and offbeat. Break the stranglehold of the mediocre on our country.

Deflecting Blame

The AIG scandal sums up the Washington game today. Slip in an earmark or special favor, get paid handsomely, and blame someone else. It’s political 3 card monty and special interests have been playing the game for years. Wall Street contributed billions and played both the Democrats and Republicans in their effort to grease the path to profit. The unions on the other side get nice fat pork projects. ACORN, Obama’s pet organization, gets hundreds of millions to organize and spread their gospel, and GM gets billions to continue in their moribund ways. It’s a matter of who you know and how much you buy a favor for. The rumor is that certain congressmen have price lists.

The corruption is worse than at any time in history. Even during the Hayes administration, there was some decorum. These days it is a formalized industry with K Street at the nexus. Goldman Sachs simply sends another Treasury Secretary to replace the last one, and their interests are covered for the next 4 years. They pit interests against one another to keep the volume up and misdirect attention from their deals, all the while creating paper tigers to scare their constituents.

People can no longer trust the media. Secret listserv sites coordinate the liberal propaganda machine and commentators paid by the networks coordinate in secret with White House staff every morning to determine today’s message. Slime the opposition, change topics every day, and push as radical an agenda as they can seem to be the operative philosophy. It seems that 1984 was just a few years late in coming.

The New Fascism – AIG episode

What we are seeing now with the pile on at AIG is an attempt to open up class warfare. Executive compensation is absurd today in many sectors. Boards of directors have been supine and shareholders have allowed top management to dictate far beyond the reasonable checks and balances normal to corporate governance. And yet we now have a lynch party getting ready to hang a bunch of executives who were legally compensated to stay at a failing institution to clean the place up before they turn off the lights. Sometimes in business, you need to do these things, much as you might not like it.

The issue of ridiculous compensation  seems to go back to Michael Eisner in 1992. Just before Bill Clinton came into power with a promise to raise taxes, Eisner gave himself a $200 Million bonus, perhaps the largest in history until that time. Eisner, one of Clinton’s top supporters, wasn’t stupid. He got his as best he could as fast as he could, but what a hypocrite. Since then, it’s been Sally bar the door. Welch, Kozlowski, anyone at Goldman Sachs, and thousands of other senior executives suddenly decided they were absolutely critical to their companies success, or rather that they could get away with it too. Instead we got a bunch of 2 bit MBA hacks who knew little about their companies core competencies and made their money through M&A in most cases. The investment houses egged them on, with all those juicy fees (and bonuses) as the payoff. So today, we have a debt loaded corporate sector where core capabilities have been outsourced and offshored. In a technology based global economy, our leadership class has sold us out for 30 pieces of inflation adjusted silver.

And now while  a dollar/year CEO who just started and a bunch of people are trying to unwind the biggest rats nest in American economic history, the real crooks; the ones in Congress and left wing special interests, have identified AIG as the new Louis XVI. “Off with their heads” is the rallying cry for the new sans culottes at Harvard and Yale and HuffPo and ACORN. As they eat their arugula salads and drink Fiji water they rant against the unfairness of it all and “sticking it to the Man” like some bad 1960′s B movie. Check out Hollywood and entertainment compensation if you want to see some real economic crimes.

The United States was built upon al foundation that we are all equal under the law. However, today, there is an philosophy of entitlement at the upper levels of our society that protects the rich and powerful. We are at risk of a permanent oligarchy who will maintain their privelidge by any means necessary. But it is not the AIG executives in this case who deserve our censure, but rather their predecessors and enablers on Wall Street and in Congress. For clearly the fault lies squarely on Capitol Hill. Campaign contributions lubricated favorable legislation, and Obama and Geithner and Dodd are in this up to their necks. They have been  duplicitous in their denials. AIG is simply a convenient distraction. A shiny, noisy bauble to distract the rubes as the oligarchs try to shove more statism down our throats and cover up their criminality with fiat rather than constitutionally sound law.

9-11 changed a lot of things in our society. We need more security today, and with technology, some of this means a very careful monitoring of the threat posed by real enemies using advanced technology. New technologies have been put into place that can easily be abused by those with no moral quandaries. While the Left called Bush fascist, I never really worried about my own personal freedom or privacy or that of the vast majority of us because I trueted him to do the right thing. That is rapidly changing. There is evil afoot, and it is not just external threats. I become very afraid when I can no longer trust my government or corporate leadership to do the right thing. There is far too much opportunity now of an accrual of power to those who would abuse it in their own personal interests. We have already seen what happens when greed and hubris combine with the means to pry open the safe.

In Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1932 it was the industrialists and bankers who backed the fascists. Without the Krupps and Thyssens, there would have been no Hitler. If we allow AIG to be singled out in this manner, is there that much difference? They are the convenient patsy. The full power of the state is a terrible weapon, which is why our Constitution is such a powerful document. It cleary limits such conduct. And yet Congress in its wisdom has decided to tread along the edge of a slippery slope. Too many times, I have heard excuses that we the people are powerless. We the people are being used, and we the people have become very lazy. It is at times like these, when despite their unpopularity, we must defend the rights of those who are unfairly singled out. There is a systemic problem that must be dealt with according to the rule of law, the rules of good corporate governance and of moral conduct. Allowing a bunch of power drunk crooks to use AIG to cover their own malefactions is not the answer.

3 Card Monty

The Chinese government has just spoken. They do not trust the United States government to maintain the value of the Dollar and have outlined the skeleton of a plan for the IMF to implement a new global reserve currency based on Special Drawing Rights (SDR’s), a basket that in the past consisted of a mix of U.S. Dollars, Euros, Japanese Yen, and Pounds Sterling. This has all been brought about by the absolute irresponsibility of the U.S. government in maintaining the integrity of the dollar. The immediate effect could well be the onset of significant inflation. Most currencies today are back only by the creditworthiness of the country issuing them, and the global consensus seems to be that Uncle Sam has become a deadbeat.

50 years of budget games have led us to this precarious position. Taking Social Security and Medicare off budget and then using fiscal 3 card monty to move many other hugely expensive programs including the Iraq war off budget has created an untenable position. When factoring in underfunded pension obligations, state budget shortfalls, etc. we simply will not have the money to pay down these obligations, perhaps within our children’s lifetimes. How they can hold to the same standard of living is a dire question.

The Republicans blame the Democrats and vice versa, but the reality is that it has been a shell game from the beginning. The people in power want to stay in power, so they buy off special interests and the American people with more and more expensive programs. Well, the Chinese are going to put a stop to all of this. Just like borrowing from the bank, the Chinese are now our bankers and they will be ready to foreclose if we continue down this path. We have to get our financial house in order as best we can as fast as we can.

What we cannot do under any circumstances is to have repeated Trillion $ programs to bail us out. Wall Street has been insulated and has been milking the crisis. The money under TARP 1 was promptly redeposited back into T Bills while the central problem, toxic mortgage debt, has still not been addressed. Even more money flooded in under the stimulus bill and then the budget. Suddenly, U.S. debt has exploded by $4 Trillion+. Tomorrow, Treasury Secretary Geithner is preparing the same old Washington remedy; throw money at the problem. Sooner or later we must fix the problem rather than treat the symptoms.

I will try to post some ideas on fixing the crisis, but I know it will take an objective, non-partisan solution. It’s not about faction. It’s about the continuing viability of our country.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place!

If that’s the last thing we ever do, as the song goes. The world is mired in recession. Leadership has basically come up with 2′s, 3′s and 12′s in their dealings with the crisis. World markets are laughing at the U.K., and the U.S. is right behind them in the clown show that is their excuse for an economic recovery plan. The two leading capitalist nations are on the brink of meltdowns, and yet massive spending programs have done little to nothing in relieving the crises which began the meltdown. In the UK, the money has gone primarily to support the banks. Here in the USA, President Obama has used the shotgun approach and is funding every liberal democrat’s wet dream as if he won the golden ticket in the Willie Wonka movie.

The problem is, though, that the cupboard is bare in both London and Washington. Instead of exercising fiscal restraint and common sense, both Gordon Brown and Obama propose to spend their way out of the crisis with money they don’t have and won’t have under their ongoing plans to stifle their economies. While proposing increased taxes on the “rich”, Obama somehow thinks that the producers will rise to the occasion and somehow lift us all miraculously out of the mire. Yet every prior recession and depression ended only when business began to recover and industry got back on its feet. That will not happen if taxation is oppressive. The rest of the world is almost done financing our debt, and the bill is coming due. The loss of the dollar as the benchmark currency is a symbol of the fall of America.

And yet there are alternatives. Past economic trends clearly indicate that industry and technology are the path forward. Whether the Industrial Revolution or Renaissance or Internet revolution, it is science, industry, and knowledge that help all boats rise. The problem is that today, our Western leadership has hocked our technology inheritance overseas to Japan and China and Taiwan in the interest of cheap consumer products. Government and corporate management consist of lawyers, marketers, and MBA’s who have little or no understanding of technology and who do not value the means of production. Rather, they prefer mergers and acquisitions and a management style that benefits the very few insiders at the expense of their employees, shareholders, suppliers, and customers. The big names in technology in North America; Apple, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, etc. really don’t make anything anymore. Rather, they package a few ideas and have someone else do the manufacturing. How can one understand the opportunities if one doesn’t understand the processes that lead to those opportunities? A few companies still understand this vital key to the puzzle.Look at Intel and Cisco for example.

In government, even key organizations such as DARPA have forgotten enabling technologies in favor of flashy programs with short term payoffs. The basic research organizations; Bell Labs, PARC, SLAC, and even Livermore and Sandia are either gone or focus on the high profile. Science and technology are done in the weeds in our modern world these days. There is little low hanging fruit in terms of discovery.

Aviation, rocketry, electronics, and medical technology all began modestly in small labs or garages or small factory floors. Today, we need to reexamine our priorities. For all the talk of green energy, the boom will be short lived, and the economics are still prohibitive without heavy government subsidies. Once the base is installed at @ 15% of total energy production/consumption, there will be little requirement for the high paying jobs our leadership now tout as the way forward. But it will be the men and women working in small organizations who are willing to risk it all on their dream who make the real difference in the long run. There are vast new horizons out there. We just need to get out of the way, make sure there is a reasonable degree of safety, and let our basic American inventiveness take advantage of the opportunities.

Obama’s European Vacation

Well it seems our president had a really good time in Europe. He got to meet the Queen, discuss important matters of state for @ 10 hours at the G 20 photo op and sort out the world’s problems. He went to Strasbourg, a lovely city, to both receive the adulation of his admirers and meet with the NATO heads. But what was really accomplished?

The whole G 20, including China, Japan, Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and the rest came up with a whopping $1 Trillion for economic troubleshooting. Since neither the U.S. nor the U.K have much left to contribute these days, perhaps that’s all anyone was willing to commit beyond their own borders. Right now, it seems like economically it is every country for itself. The rumblings of nationalism and protectionism are still out there, and little else was agreed upon or discussed.

At the NATO summit, Obama was promised 46 French policemen and a player to be named later when he needed combat troops to fight the Taliban. Not the kind of success he was hoping for, I think.  In the meantime, he also mentioned that he would like to eliminate nuclear weapons, which is a nice thought when you’re at home smoking a joint, but try selling that to the Pakistanis and Iranians. The thing is that membership in the nuclear club is expensive and these folks really think they need the things. The whole India/Pakistan thing, the Iran/Israel thing, and yes, even the US/Russia thing are all dead serious Armageddon scenarios that any chess player knows end in checkmate for both sides, which is one reason MAD theory works. We are living in an asymetric world, and when North Korea is helping all sorts of tin pot mullahs and dictators  arm themselves with the very best in dirty bomb technology, it’s just a bit of a problem for the world’s superpower to willingly relinquish that power. Kumbayah is for the Girl Scouts, not national policy.

Otherwise, trading kisses with the Sarkozys does not qualify as a successful presidential trip. This was a photo op, nothing more. At home, Congress is battling on everything from a pork filled budget to carbon offsets to card check, with clearly socialist policies in the ascendence. We used to have a Constitution in this country which was honored. Today, it seems it is honored in the exception rather than the general. So come on back, Mr. President and chastise some more bankers or auto execs or other capitalists. After all, with your deep and comprehensive grasp of industrial policy, economics, and technology, you should be able to lead us all to the promised land.

Die Walkurie – Opera Review

The other night I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Opera with my beloved in Los Angeles, seeing Wagner’s Die Walkurie. Opera can be amazing; uplifting, tragic, sublime, but my impression of Wagner was of some proto Nazi thug with a lot of Nietzschean and Freudian overtones. Well that part is correct, but he could write a hell of an opera.

Placido Domingo is getting on a bit. It happens to us all, but as a performer it must be especially cruel to have to husband one’s gifts. By all accounts he has been a tremendous boost to culture in Los Angeles. Without a lot of fanfare, LA has become one of the leading arts cities on the planet. Mr. Domingo played Siegmund, the doomed male twin in the incestuous and adulterous relationship that is at the core of Die Walkurie. This is the second of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and lays the groundwork for the balance of the Operas, which will all be performed next year. Domingo’s Siegmund was a wonder; devastated, conflicted, rapturous, joyous, and doomed. All of this was sung and acted at a level which is very rare to experience. The other singers; Vitaly Kovalov, Linda Watson, and Michelle DeYoung all found the heart of their characters; Kovalev as the amoral and deeply conflicted Wotan;  Watson as a deeply moving Brunnhilde, and DeYoung as the wronged wife of Wotan, Fricka, confronted with the fruits of his infidelities and as the guardian of marriage and hearth the moral heart and prime agent of the heartbreak and despair to follow. It is her rectitude and will that propels all that follows.

Wotan must find a pure and free paragon to regain the Rheingeld or Valhalla will fall. His son, Siegmund, is, he thinks, that agent. However, in Sigmund’s love affair with his twin sister Sieglinde, who is in a loveless and desperate marriage to Hunding, he breaks moral bonds and as Fricka demands, must pay the price for his sins. Wotan must remove his protection, and Siegmund must face his enemies alone. Anje Kampe as Sieglinde is magnificent. Desperate, emotionally terrorized and despairing, she is fatefully reunited with her twin in a doomed affair.

Achim Freyer’s production is spectacular and to the point. Surrealist, Freudian overtones define the characters and action. There are dwarves, giants, demons and monsters in this world. The gods are oversized and incredible. Brunnhilde is swathed in a massive cloak of feathers that take three to operate. Swords become light sabers, and all the while, the sands of time inexorably trickle away towards an inevitable conclusion. The scale is massive, appropriate for Wagner, and yet very human. A simple bench at the center of the stage becomes much more as Wotan confronts his own despair and the betrayal of his mortal son. Brunnhilde knows her fathers heart and must obey him without question, and yet in her love of her half brother she chooses to support Siegmund and Sieglinde to her own inevitable doom. Ms. Watson does a masterful and entrancing job in both singing and acting the role of a demigod.

The conclusion is foreordained. The Walkurie abandon their sister, who is cast into a a deathlike sleep. It’ s a short summary, but it is the journey that is magnificent. In a world where high culture seems to fade from view at an ever faster rate as even artists commoditize and monetarize their product, Die Walkure stands as a masterpiece. I can only hope that next year’s Cycle meets this very high standard.

Pirates, Arrgh!

It’s hard to believe that the nations of the world are countenancing piracy on the high seas. Somalia, perhaps the most screwed up place in the world, is the home to a bunch of desperate thugs who will to go far out to sea to hijack huge container ships along with anything else that looks like a target of opportunity. We know who the pirates are and where they live and still do nothing.

In 1802, President Jefferson ordered the U.S. Navy’s U.S.S. Constellation, Chesapeake, Constitution, Enterprise and Intrepid to stand off the coasts of the Barbary states (Morocco, Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis)and engage the pirates, whose business had been good for hundreds of years predating on ships of many nations. The Koran apparently allowed this conduct against infidels; murder, slavery, and ransom were all a part of it. It was a business and business was good. The suppression of piracy  was one of the first tasks of the new U.S. Navy, and they were very successful, leading to a treaty in which Jefferson agreed to pay $60,000 ransom.

Piracy was another story elsewhere. In the Caribbean, it depended most upon national interests. Spanish, British, and French pirates were another instrument of state, with Letters of Marque to offer legal protection in the home country of many privateers. If caught by the other side, however, justice was swift and painful. Hangings, keelhaulings, auto da fe’s etc were common. Even today, the Straights of Malacca near Singapore still harbor the occasional pirate, but strong anti piracy measures by the regional governments have kept this in check.

Now, we have the most powerful country on earth  indecisive and clueless on what to do in the face of a new threat. We seem to be able to fight two wars, but a bunch of reckless tribesmen with AK-47′s, 12.5mm machine guns, and RPG’s, all considered light weapons, are holding the world’s merchant fleet hostage. Two days ago, several pirates were killed and captured by French commandos on a private yacht that had been commandeered. One hostage died. Unfortunately, the only thing thugs understand is force, and with it, the threat of annihilation.

There is really only the one solution to stop this bad joke. Sink all their boats, kill enough of them to dissuade them, and perhaps then destroy their homes and goods pour encourager les autres as the French say. We have the technology to find them and track them, and more than enough to militarily defeat them. Sometimes it does become necessary to use maximum force. But until the Europeans and Filipinos and others show some spine, it will be a thankless task. People will die, including hostages and our own, but what is the alternative? The Taliban has been funding themselves with the proceeds of drug trafficking, and now the Somalis will be able to purchased bigger and better guns. To allow it to go any further is to allow another nest of viperous enemies to grow stronger and hurt us even more.  The attacks have been made by Muslims against infidels and thus the Islamic world either doesn’t care or approves of the pirates actions; Europe seems to be incapable of action. The Chinese have sent several ships to protect their own merchant fleet and we have heard almost nothing of Chinese vessels being boarded. It is American, European, and smaller states whose ships and crews are most at risk. One thing I do know is that the Navy can and will gladly do the job if so ordered. It’s in their DNA. Decatur and Bainbridge are two of the most hallowed names in Navy history and both relished such a fight.

Welcome to 1984 – 25 years late

The Department of Homeland Security recently released a report, “Rightwing Extremism – Current Economic & Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization & Recruitment”. The report is the product of the Extremism & Radicalization Branch of DHS and was sent to federal, state, and local authorities around the country on April 7 with the goal of deterring and preventing terrorist attacks against the United States.

First, there is no specific information for such a report of domestic right wing terrorist activity. The cause for this radicalization, they say, is the economic downturn and the election of an African American president. The report states that right wing extremist groups are using these issues as recruiting tools. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and harsh economic circumstances in the 1990′s are cited as historical antecedents. The possible restriction of firearms sales and return of military veterans are also cited, as is the murder of three Pittsburgh police officers by an individual expressing racist ideology and antigovernment  beliefs last week. Illegal immigration is also identified as a flash point. However, the evidence cited is very weak.  Another example is proposed legislation for mandatory gun registration, tagging, and ammunition control. The last statement is of deep concern, as it has not yet appeared on any news or other media outlets. Who is doing the proposing? Where has this legislation been introduced?

Somehow, the communists and “one world” government are thrown into the stew as well, and then disgruntled military veterans are identified as one group to watch. At the same time, the report notes that after the Oklahoma City bombing, membership in militia groups dropped significantly. The report cites the internet and availability of information on the tools of the soldier’s trade as sources for information.

Overall, this is a dog’s breakfast written to obtain a specific end; greater control by Homeland Security. Somewhere along the line, government took leave of its senses and now sees a threat under every rock and bush. One of the primary concerns of many citizens has been the possible effect of restrictive gun legislation and as a result they have reacted logically by purchasing more guns and ammunition. At the same time, the administration has proven to be remarkably consistent in maintaining the Bush Administration’s secrecy, wiretapping and other security prerogatives while now seeming to expand those restrictions further. Why? The timing is very suspicious. Tomorrow, April 15, Tea Parties will take place throughout the country to protest out of control spending and fiscal irresponsibility at both state and federal levels. If you are an accountant or loan officer, the state and Federal governments would basically would have been cut off from credit markets long ago. It’s not about emotion, it’s about numbers. Could the Department of Homeland Security be afraid of the Tea Party movement?

Think about the various restrictions that have been put in place since 2001; increased surveillance and wiretapping; an oppressive and sometimes arbitrary TSA; militarization of police forces, and now a significant and unpopular political shift  to the left of what most of us expected. Statism is resurgent as the United States Government attempts to gain control of banking, insurance, and the automotive industry. This has never been done before in our history and is diametrically opposed to the founding principles of the Constitution. And yet there has been little discussion of these great seismic events.

We can of course slough these issues off and go back to watching television or playing video games, or we can discuss them as adults. Socialism and Naziism are really two sides of the same coin. Each wants to control society, by force if necessary. Orwell was a committed socialist until his participation in the Spanish Civil War opened his eyes to the evils of left wing socialism… where he saw the true face of socialism. In Spain, a movement that was portrayed as democratic and liberal was transformed by ideologues into the mirror image of their Fascist opponents. Thousands were murdered for not being socialist enough as determined by the Comintern.

In 1984, Winston Smith’s job was to falsify and expunge records that conflicted with the regime’s propaganda. Government surveillance and indoctrination were pervasive and language was redefined to further the regimes goals.  The Ministry of Truth is actually a Ministry of Lies. Informers are everywhere, and the Thought Police enforce conformity with terror and death. The Ministry of Love is in fact the agency for torture and execution. The cult of Big Brother, the all knowing, all powerful leader is enforced with the gun and imprisonment.

Unfortunately, there are too many parallels today for us to ignore the significance of 1984. London has become to most surveilled city on the planet, while a culture of fear has arisen, despite the fact that crime in America is at historic lows. To date, government has done little or nothing to assuage the fears of those who might feel their civil liberties and economic futures are in jeopardy. Corporatism rules, and the Administration is clearly playing favorites. And yet our Constitution is clear in that it is a document that exists to enfore the rights of the individual, not government or large corporations. These are all deep concerns.

Bruce Springsteen is a Putz

Bruce Springsteen played the other night in Los Angeles to a crowd of over 12,000 adoring fans. He brought a message of hope and perseverance to Los Angeles, at least those who could afford tickets that went up to $500/each. Very proletarian. $40 T shirts, $100 sweatshirts all whizzing off the shelf as the merchandising machine gobbles up every available dollar as he preaches the virtues of the common man.

Back in 1972 – 73 Bruce would play the local high school and Villanova beer blasts and up and down the Jersey Shore and had an electricity that bound us up in his dreams.  In 1975 we stood on our chairs screaming with delirium at the Bottom Line as he roared into full blown rock & roll  stardom. But then, sometime thereafter, something changed. The lyrics became darker. The music more reflective. The politics more apparent. There was a populism and sympathy for the working man; the same high school kids who partied and roared back at him a couple of years earlier now grown older and perhaps care worn with the burdens of responsibility and perhaps this was reflected  in his own hegira. Years of touring tend to burn one out after a while and even if the money’s good and the lifestyle is a teen dream, perhaps one does begin to think of higher things. But the music got darker, and every now and the he would come out with a rock & roll classic, but somewhere back then he lost me.

I have seen the good and the bad here in America and overseas. I have seen real poverty and suffering. I’ve seen death both violent and peaceful. I’ve seen the pain people, often the ones closest to each other, inflict on each other. But somehow, I have always had hope and dreams not of darkness on the edge of town, but of light, of opportunity, of the incredible love we can have for one another. Where Mr. Springsteen sees hopelessness and despair, I see people trying to change their lives, not giving up or giving in to self pity. I see people trying to step in, sometimes not successfully, to help those in dire need. I see faith in action and the difference it makes to our society as a whole.

It’s a screwed up world. Always has been, and probably always will be. We can be a part of the problem or part of the solution. Either way, we have to look at the facts objectively and determine our best course of action. And we have to be true to our principles. Bruce is, I’m sure, true to his. But I have a real problem being lectured by people who have my best interests at heart and want me to do what they tell me. 70% of the time they’re wrong anyway, and I’m an ornery cuss who can think on his feet and do just fine for myself. I really don’t like the very wealthy who have successfully insulated themselves from the rest of us then calling themselves the common man and telling us that socialism is the way forward. It stinks of hypocrisy. He got his. I just want mine. Fair & square, but one of the cornerstones of this society is opportunity. Bruce got his shot and made the most of it. There was no state radio as in Europe dictating playlists of Udo Juergens or Heino in the late 70′s as the Germans did. He had American free form radio where a DJ could go into the studio and play the same song over and over because he loved it and had faith and got his audience to buy into the craziness. The German kids would listen to AFN to find out what was really good. And yet Bruce’s  “progressive” politics would usher in more control, more “fairness”, more uniformity in an industry which has become almost completely homogenized.  Well going back a few years, Huey Long was not especially fair once elected, and as Orwell said and we found in Eastern Europe from 1917 – 1989, some pigs are more equal than others. And if today’s Democratic leadership is the benchmark, it’s okay to lie,  evade taxes, take bribes, steer funds to political supporters for “apolitical” work, and 20 other sins. Sorry Bruce, I ain’t buying.

There is a  trend in the country today to be “counter culture”. The reality is that the counterculture has become the culture. Tats, piercings, gangsta lean, left wing politics, and self entitlement have converged into a mess of muddled thinking. The herd differentiates itself identically. We all want more of the pie, but don’t want to work for it. The kids who studied engineering and built things went into financial management and MBA programs and create nothing except vapor and go to Springsteen concerts to validate their bonafides. Hey, the music is great, but the reality is that it’s a dream, a diversion.

So Bruce, when your CFO comes in with next week’s box office and swag numbers and you step onto your G4 remember to think of the real working men and women. The ones who go to church and join the Army and pay their taxes and struggle to do the best for their children. Who don’t complain and feel sorry for themselves or entitled. Who can’t afford Bruce Springsteen tickets. Who fought and died and won in Iraq as you and your leftist buddies said the war was lost. Who are the ones who donated hundreds of millions for the Tsunami or Katrina and do so again and again even as our ruling class bankrupts the country with sophistry and corruption. You’re a part of the problem, not the solution. As another band wrote.

“same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.”

Energy Hypocrisy

I remember the first Earth Day, back @ 1972 or so. Fairmont Park in Philadelphia was wall to wall with kids who had ditched school for one of the largest free concerts in the city’s history. All of us were committed to building a better world, and 30 years later, in many ways, we have. Pollution in North America is much lower, and rivers that were environmental nightmares in 1972 have thriving fish populations today. As we understand more, we can act more effectively.

Today, we are faced with energy and environmental hypocrisy on an unprecedented scale. The science would be laughable if the effects were not so evil. Cap & Trade has been demonstrated in Europe to have no significant effect except to make insiders rich. EU directives such as the lead free initiative and RoHS show little or no understanding of scientific principles or the true environmental cost of bureaucracy directed legislation. And recent news reported in Australia, but not here, has clearly shown that rather than shrinking, the Antarctic and Arctic icepacks have been growing, partially as a result of the holes in the ozone layer. Sunspot activity is at a historic low.

Our president today visited a windmill factory to promote his vision of energy independence. He called for a new era in energy exploration. This after closing the Yucca Flats nuclear storage site, shutting down much of the oil shale exploration in the Upper West, shutting down further exploration in Alaska and offshore, and stating clearly that coal fired plants would be put out of business.  A very curious energy policy indeed.

The plant the president visited used to employ 15,000 workers making Maytag refrigerators. Today it employs 90 in an industry where manufacturing will fade rapidly once the infrastructure is built out. This leads us into a new and glorious future? He called for each of us to replace one incandescent bulb with a fluorescent bulb. This is energy policy? It is idiocy, and what is amazing is that is being reported with a straight face by the media.

Apparently, this week’s nostrum is wind power. There’s only one problem with this. It is an irregular energy source and is both expensive and very difficult to build to generate high volumes of power. Driving past the Palm Springs wind power farm for the past 30 years, I am struck with how often the majority of the windmills are idle. Same with the field at Altamont up north. Either the potential usage for the power generated doesn’t match needs, or the price offered is too low to make it profitable for the owners to run them. The problem is similar to that facing the natural gas plant near my house which only runs when the price is right. The advantage with gas, however, is that it’s an instant on, constant volume source. These fields have been in operation for 20 years or more, so what’s the advantage, exactly?  The issue with wind and solar is that they are irregular sources of power. If Obama’s plan for electric cars is to succeed, the demand for electricity will soar, and the infrastructure, already on the brink of failure, will collapse.

We are being hoodwinked on energy policy. Nothing has been done to either reduce our reliance on fossil fuels or gain energy independence. Changing lightbulbs, checking our tire pressure,  and adding windmills does not a national energy policy make. Whether you’re reading science fiction or scientifically analyzing industrial policy, one of the key factors for building cities of the future or going to the stars is cheap energy. The current policies are doomed to failure.

California Dreaming

There will be an election in mid May to determine the future of California. In all likelihood, only 20-25% of the electorate will turn out, as it is a special election on proposed tax hikes, which according to California law must be approved by referendum.

Several weeks ago, a kabuki drama took place in Sacramento. With a budget shortfall for 2009 approaching $40 Billion (yes, Virginia, billion), the state legislature, which has been dominated by the Democratic party for the past 50 years, voted with the help of three sacrificial Republicans to raise car taxes, the income tax, sales tax, and other taxes to the highest overall tax rate in the country. Not a penny in spending cuts was proposed. To further exacerbate the issue, California had record revenues for the prior 5 years from a hot economy where housing was turning over every 18 months at record prices. The legislature managed to spend 125% of that income as well. In the legislative vote, the Republican leadership apparently conspired with the Democrats to pass the budget and tax increases. Only a very few voices, among them Chuck DeVore, called “bullshit” on both parties and tried find an honest solution.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected on the recall of Gray Davis, he promised us a top to bottom review of state revenue and expenditures and with great fanfare called it the “California Performance Review”. He hired Donna Arduin, an experienced Wall Street analyst who had great success in Florida and elsewhere in balancing budgets, to run the state Department of Finance and get to the bottom of the trouble. The CPR was due approximately 1 year after that announcement.

I ran into Donna about that time and asked her when the report would be released, and she told me in a few weeks or month. Two weeks later she resigned to go back into the private sector. Nothing has been heard from her since, and since that time, the CPR has been  a black hole. Repeated requests to the Governor’s office, the Department of Finance, and state legislators have turned up no sign whatsoever that this document even exists. With the state facing bankruptcy, one would think that an objective financial analysis of the balance sheet would be at the top of the list of things to do. Instead, we are faced with the Wizard of Oz. “Don’t look behind the curtain!”, “Ignore the man pulling the levers!”. How have we become so completely irresponsible? How have our leaders gotten away with this? The LA Times, the John & Ken show, and the Orange County Register apparently have zero interest in pursuing the story.

As a businessman, I am faced with the most difficult economy I have seen in 30 years, and have had to take measures to ensure the health of the company. Pay cuts, reduced overhead, reduced travel, and reduced investment are all part of what is necessary to survive. Everybody sacrifices so we can all survive. I guess the exception is government. There have been no pay cuts, no reviews, no cost cutting. In fact, this is the time of year when budgets get blown out. One of the little secrets of government budgeting is “use it or lose it” at the end of the fiscal year. As a government manager, if you don’t spend your budget by the end of the fiscal year, it will theoretically be reduced next year. Thus Caltrans catches up on maintenance work, the city police helicopter gets extra hours to burn the gas budget, and agencies hold training seminars and off site meetings to ensure the money gets spent, wisely or not. Look it up or ask any state manager. It doesn’t matter whether the funds are used wisely; they simply have to be used. This is not conducive to good planning and budgeting.

So our legislature has punted on the budget issue, and can then blame those terrible voters if they get shot down. In the interim, they have coopted every special interest group they can find to fund their “Yes on 1A” campaigns. If there’s slops in the trough, the special interests want their piece of the action. In the meantime, the people of California are taking it on the chin.  Taxes for an average family of 4 making $75,000/year will go up $1,000 – $1,500. For people making more, the hit will be much worse. And yet our state services rank at the bottom of the nation. Education, infrastructure, and other critical functions of a state government have fallen by the wayside as the politicians give lip service to improvement.

Come May 19, we will vote, and a lot of people are very unhappy with the fiscal irresponsibility. If the measures are voted down, California will be in technical bankruptcy. $16 Billion (yes, Billion) of the Federal government’s bailout money will be allocated to the budget shortfall, but this is not enough. And what will happen then? My guess is that the politicians will blame the voters and dither and lie as the state’s credit rating is shredded and real cuts must finally be made. Earlier this year, I received a promissory note from the state Controller for my tax refund. I paid my taxes, but then they have the nerve to tell me they’ve spent the money I loaned them for 9 months and can’t pay it back. How is this right? How can we trust such a spendthrift bunch of grifters? And where are the reporters? The republicans? Anyone standing up for common sense and doing the right thing? Have we sunk so low?

Socialism in Our Time

I woke up this morning to read that the proposed bailout deal for Chrysler would give the United Auto Workers 51% of the company, while at GM, they are proposing that the UAW get 41%. This seems like rewarding the fox for ravaging the henhouse. I am somewhat amazed that there has been little outcry. Between the auto industry power grab and what the government is doing to the banking industry, it has become clear that rather than adhering to the Constitutional principles of our country, the current administration has an aggressively socialist agenda. This is, simply, the greatest challenge of our time. There seems to be no debate, no national conversation as Obama continues his predations on capitalism and his policy to steer the country left. Most of the media is silent or quietly egging him on.

My first experience with the UAW was when I was a boy.  My father’s company sold materials to the auto manufacturers, and I learned that the company salesmen always drove the car from whatever manufacturer they were dealing with, and by God, never a foreign car. To park in a Big Three parking lot driving an import invited vandalism and mayhem. Later on, I began working with a wide range of subcontractors as well as the Big Three, and found out how things work today. An example. We recently installed a machine at a Big Three plant. Normally (including the Japanese auto manufacturers), it takes one of our technicians and a customer technician 3-4 hours to install a machine. At the Big Three plant, it too a carpenter and helper to uncrate the machine; a rigger and helper to place it; an electrician and helper to wire it; a plumber and helper to run the compressed air line, and two engineers to supervise the process. No one cared, and no one took ownership of the project, and it took 3 days just to hook up a machine. This is the daily reality of a UAW run plant. Workers leave dirt on the floor during the week so that they can claim overtime cleaning up on Saturdays instead of cleaning as they go. Simple things one does at home become sagas in the interest of overtime. Then, if a UAW worker gets laid off, they really aren’t laid off. They maintain full pay. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

Recently, a study was done of a Ford plant in Germany and another in the UK. The German plant had flexible work rules and a cooperative attitude between workers and management. The cost/hour for labor was higher than in the UK. The UK plant had an extremely adversarial relationship between management and labor, and restrictive work rules. The German plant produced 20% more cars per day with 20% less labor with an overall manufacturing cost @ 30% below the UK plant. This is the reality of the U.S. auto industry as well. Gross inefficiency, and everyone knows the reasons. In a global economy where manufacturing has migrated to China because of reduced costs, how can we ever expect these companies to be competitive?

GM’s latest plan is to borrow $11 Billion in addition to the $15 Billion already borrowed from the government and then give the government 50% of the stock in the company and the UAW 39%. This leaves the shareholders and bond holders with 11% of a company that is pretty well doomed to failure. That senior management is complicit in this travesty is simply amazing. That there is no discussion of fundamental changes in compensation or work rules is criminal negligence. At Chrysler, the proposal is 55% for the UAW, 35% for FIAT ($8 Billion investment) and 10% for the bondholders and government. For this, the UAW has agreed to forgo cost of living adjustments (which were built into the contract at exorbitant rates), their Easter Monday holiday, and overtime will only be paid for work beyond 40 hours/week.

Thus shall ownership of America’s largest industry pass into the hands of the workers. A central tenet of Marx is the ownership of the means of production by labor, so how can this not be Marxist? As several banks who were originally forced to take TARP funds to cover up the weakness of others, now try to repay those “loans”, they are finding that the federal government will not accept the money back, and instead wants to convert these loans into equity. Sounds like a rigged game to me. That many of the bondholders are recipients of TARP funds is also of concern. Are these companies being forced to acquiesce to government pressure? Who are the bondholders? How much are they giving up? what is the real deal behind the scenes? There sems to be an awful lot of self dealing on the part of the government in this handover.

This power grab goes well beyond even Roosevelt’s social programs of the 1930′s. Never before has our government both tried to steer ownership of a key industry into the hands of it’s donors and supporters, and at the same time tried to coerce another key industry into handing ownership over. This reeks of 1920′s Italy or 1930′s Germany. Even the Bolsheviks were more honest in their aims. Congress, the Republicans, and the media are so far silent. Can we give up our most deeply held principles so readily? Can we transform the United States into a socialist state simply by government fiat? Where are the constitutional scholars protesting this? Where are the outraged reporters investigating cui bono? When we were promised hope and change, I do not believe this is the hope and change most of us expected.

Bait & Switch at Chrysler

So Chrysler is scheduled to enter into a 60 day miracle bankruptcy where the government injects another $6+ Billion,the UAW gets 51%,  Fiat gets 30%, the government gets the balances and the creditors get screwed. On top of it, Obama is angry with the hedge funds for crying out as they’re getting screwed. This deal is a stinkeroo for the shareholders, for the taxpayers, for the creditors, and ultimately for the UAW as well.

Chrysler has several good brands but are in a dormant market at present. Until the economy turns around, they will be challenged to meet payroll. We all know the problems, and #1 on the list are the union contracts and underfunded retirement mandates. And yet so far, despite the dire state of both GM & Chrysler, the UAW has basically refused to make any concessions. This is like the crew refusing to man the lifeboats on the Titanic.

Chrysler operates under the laws of the United States and in a bankruptcy, the law is well defined. The judge and the receiver/trustee have clearly defined fiduciary responsibilities. Creditors have a place in line as secured and unsecured. there is precedence and order. But what we now have is a president directly involving himself and dictating the form of the reorganized company. How does this jibe with our laws? In addition, it is assumed that several of the bondholders were recipients of TARP bailout money, further complicating the issue and the potential for conflicts of interest. Will the government exert undue pressure as they seem to have with TARP? Is the government pushing a political agenda rather than an equitable one? To think that this can be resolved in just 60 days is just plain nuts. Delphi, GM’s former parts subsidiary, has been in bankruptcy for over 3 years with far fewer complexities.

The proposed ownership is also out of whack. While it is true that the obligations by Chrysler to the UAW are considerable, contracts are normally open to be renegotiated by the receiver, so those obligations would be modified considerably, perhaps to a point where the company can make a profit once more. So why the push for 51% for the UAW? They have been absolutely uncooperative in their negotiations. They are a root cause of the problem in the first place, and they are receiving preferential treatment. Is this simply another political payoff?

Commercial negotiations are sensitive and confidentiality is required. However, the government seems to be using this excuse to gain advantage for their supporters. Rather than being postpartisan, this government has demonstrated itself to be hyperpartisan. In too many cases to date it has been found that they simply lie when the facts disagree with their conclusions. As they redefine the lexicon, we are entering the grounds of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Chrysler was in reasonable shape when it was sold to Daimler Benz and bad mistakes were made, but putting the fox in charge of the henhouse in the form of  UAW ownership is not a viable solution for the company’s long term survival.

For the good of all parties concerned, the negotiations must be honest and make the most sense for all parties concerned. Right now, it doesn’t seem so.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa – LACMA

The new exhibition at LACMA previewed the other night, and it was sensational. Focused on the lifestyles of the rich and famous 1,940 years ago, it illustrates the sheer magnificence and beauty of the ancient Roman lifestyle if one were lucky enough to be of the upper classes. An eclectic mix of donors to the museum got first chance, and by the look of it the show will be very successful.

The colonies around the Bay of Naples (Neapolis) hosted a number of emperor’s villas as well as those of senators, generals, and the great families. Rome in summer is miserable, and even today, Naples and the Amalfi Coast are a wonderful getaway. The eruption of Vesuvius encapsulated Pompeii and Herculaneum, a smaller and wealthier enclave, near the base of the volcano. When one sees the actual distance the ash and lava had to go, the magnitude gets to you.

The exhibition selected @ 150 pieces from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, The Scavi (excavations) museum, The Louvre, the museum in Baia, another local city, and many others around the world. If not the cream of the crop, the pieces in the exhibition highlight the greatness that was Rome in a way few other exhibitions have been able to convey. Rome in its earlier days was a bit like Puritan New England. Frugality, duty, and virtue were the highest callings. The historian Livy was quoted thus 150 years after the fall of Pompeii:

“no republic was ever greater, none more virtuous or richer in good example, none into which luxury and avarice entered so late, or where poverty or frugality so honored. For it is true that the less wealth there was, the less desire there was. More recently riches have imported avarice and excessive pleasures with a craving for luxury and wantonness to the ruination of ourselves and everything else”.

So the seeds of decline were sown  as seen by Cato, Plutarch, and others of civic virtue as the Empire accreted the wealth of conquest. Pompeii was The Hamptons of its time, with similar extravagance and decadence. As such, the art that is left behind has a magnificence that only Rome itself exceeded. The pleasure palaces were an escape from the mundane frugality of the metropolis.

Pompeii was a city of perhaps 20,000, lively, earthy, and living the good life. The exhibition centers around the villas, of which there were quite a large number. The context of many of the pieces does not come through, as the location and surrounding artifacts would have given a better feel for the piece. They must be viewed in an artistic rather than archaeological context, which is appropriate since LACMA is an art museum.

The first pieces one comes upon are busts of several emperors and dignitaries. Those of Julius and Augustus Caesar convey gravitas and are magnificent. Another of a young Caligula hints of dissipation, decadence and evil. Nero’s buts depicts a wastrel. Flabby, egotistical, and with his own brand of malice. Another bust, of Gaius Cornelius Rufus is a magnificent exposition of the sculptor’s abilities.

Deeper into the exhibition are marvels of sculpture, painting, and artisanal excellence.  Wall paintings carefully removed and framed convey a richness of experience and wonder at the diversity of Roman life. Whether a mosaic of Plato and his students or a drawing of a centaur caught in the act of kidnapping a Greek girl or the frescoed walls of villas, all are rich, lively, and engaging even 2,000 years later. One magnificent discovery was a gladiator’s helmet detailed with the Fall of Troy. the metalworking is magnificent, and it hard to reconcile such a work of art, as it even then would have been considered, entering the ring of violence and death. Basins and tables and other furniture show a rare level of craftsmanship. A skyphos (deep wine cup) of obsidian inlaid with gold and semiprecious stones depicting Egyptian gods and themes is stunning in its elegance and freshness. Was it made in Egypt or locally?

There are more than 100 other pieces, all of them magnificent to see. For a taste and feel of Rome at its height, the exhibition is an elegant and well laid out guide to some of the most beautiful treasures ever to be collected in one place.

Fix It Again Tony

With all due courtesy, I still do not understand how FIAT makes any sense whatsoever in the Chrysler deal. It seems they are getting 20% of the company for nothing, and what do they really bring to the table? An excellent distribution and service network in Italy? FIAT has been clear that there is no cash or even commitment involved for their percentage of Chrysler. How does this deal make sense?

The trio of the UAW, FIAT, and the federal government owning and running Chrysler sounds like Moe, Larry, and Curley Joe at their best. FIAT is the Italian automobile industry, and own Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and of course, Fiat.  It is intertwined with the Libyan and Italian governments. In 2005, an agreement to sell the Fiat automobile marque to GM was cancelled, with Fiat receiving a $2 Billion cancellation charge. That says something about their core holding. Now we are expected to believe that FIAT will create a new, low cost manufacturing base for Chrysler in America. When the biggest problem is union wages and work rules, I think this is doomed from the outset.

The accusation that the Obama administration has issued threats against Chrysler’s bondholders is also very disturbing. Since when has an administration resorted to thuggery to ram through a business deal? Since when do they have the authority to do so? Last I looked, there an entire body of bankruptcy law that governs the Chrysler case. It is best for government and FIAT to step out and for Chrysler try to void some of the contracts that have been strangling them for the past 40 years and put their operating costs in line with non union manufacturers, who have been doing just fine, thank you, without government handouts.

California – What Next?

The polls indicated that Propositions 1A et al will be going down to defeat. What next? Technically, the state cannot go bankrupt, but it can and will be in default on much of it’s debt. The credit rating will immediately plunge as the state does not have the revenue to pay its bills and meet its commitments. IOU’s will start going out again almost immediately. How much longer the banks will accept these is one of the questions that will have to be answered.

But what does our legislature plan as a back up position? So far, there has been little or no discussion of spending cuts. California’s expenditures outpaced revenue by 20-25% in the good times, and the state is still spending at the same rate. Since Schwarzenegger’s election, the state has added 50,000 additional employees. The legislature is spending $25 billion more than they receive. This year’s budget deficit is $42 Billion because of the revenue drop off.

The state employee’s unions are the primary culprits. The inmates have taken over the asylum. Our prisons cost twice as much per inmate to run as any other state.  Our teachers are the highest paid in the country, by 25%, and yet California has one of the worst records on education in the country. To top it off, it is virtually impossible to fire incompetent or even criminal teachers. The largest political contributors in the state are the unions, and our legislature has become “pay to play”.

So what do we do? A general recall of all politicians? The debacle that led to these propositions showed how even the Republicans have gamed the system. The state’s voting districts have been gerrymandered to ensure Democrat dominance with nice, safe Republican seats for the permanent minority. Schwarzenegger has mentioned the possibility of a constitutional convention in order to subvert spending caps and mandates. Perhaps it may be in order, but not for his reasons.

The fallout economically across the world will be significant. In addition to California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio are on the brink. This could be the last straw. The federal government, while it has the ability to print money, can no longer finance its own debts. Our largest creditors are turning off the taps as the try and figure out how we will ever repay the trillions of dollars owed as two of the largest sectors of the economy, banking and automotive, collapse and are nationalized. This doesn’t take into account high risk debt overseas, which is barely under control as well. The lending windows are closing all over the planet.

So far, most of the pain of the recession has been carried by the individual and the investor. Government has been exempt and is growing at an unprecedented level. This is not the prescription for economic recovery. To pay for the huge deficits, government needs tax revenue, which comes from as many people working as is possible. Companies make money. Companies pay taxes. Same with individuals. But if government  raises taxes, especially with unemployment over 11%, this kills economic growth. California needs to re-learn this lesson. For too many years, the sense of entitlement by government here has led to an ever increasing burden on the people of the state. They make sure we pay through the nose for the priviledge of living here. Reagan had it right. His tax cuts did stimulate the economy while increasing government revenue. His ideas on shrinking government, applied properly, reduce the burden on the taxpayers. And for goodness sake, we all should be paying taxes. The top 10% pays 90% right now, and the bottom 35% pay nothing. Everyone needs to pay to ensure they have chips in the game. It’s very easy to vote to raise other people’s taxes. It’s also unfair.

Major cost cuts, renegotiation of union contracts, and the reduction of foolish legislation must all be at the top of the list if California is ever to recover from this debacle. otherwise, we might as well rename it Alta California, because it will be just as bad as in Mexico.

Obama’s Economy Takeover

So it’s now shaping up that the President is rewarding his supporters at the UAW with 55% of Chrysler and 40% of GM through no real effort on their part. This is the single largest and most damaging political payoff in history. And it’s being done with little or no consideration or discussion of the consequences. This also represents approximately 20% of our entire economy, and the largest segment of the manufacturing sector left in North America.

This follows the president’s takeover of the banking industry. When the TARP funds were disbursed, there was little discussion of securitization or how the funds would be accounted for. Now we find out that the administration is thugging its way into controlling interest of several of the largest banks and many other financial institutions. Undue pressure has been applied already in the Chrysler bankruptcy, and we can expect the same when GM is reorganized. There has been no accountability on Wall Street as well to date, and the people who scammed us seem to have disappeared into the woodwork. Since so many Wall Streeters supported the president, this should come as no surprise. Banking & financial services represents another 20% of the economy.

Then we come to health care, where the administration and its allies in Congress are preparing to ram through a single payer health care system, taking over another 20% of the economy. Again, there has been little discussion.

The administration is also strong arming some of the states on the use of the bail out funds. In California, one example is the strong arming of the state government to restore pay cuts for unionized health care workers. otherwise the state will lose $7 Billion.

Lastly, the administration has moved the Census office from the department of Commerce to the White House, the better to be able to manipulate the results to political advantage.

So what we have so far is the government mugging 60% of the total economic output of the country, mugging the states, and mugging the constitution.

Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty clear on the responsibilities of the federal government. It has been far exceeded by government fiat over the years. But under the 4th Amendment, we are protected from unlawful  seizure, while under the 14th Amendment, the government must respect all of the legal rights of the individual (or corporation) according to the law of the land. Under the 5th Amendment, individuals are protected by due process as well. And yet it seems that there have been violations of all of these constitutional guarantees have been violated in the rush for Obama’s control of the country.

60%…….wow….the government is trying to rip off 60% of our entire economy….They are, in giving ownership of GM and Chrysler to the UAW fulfilling one of Karl Marx’s prime goals, ownership of the means of production by the workers. This can only be called communism. And our Congress is whistling while they deprive the people of our country of their fundamental rights. Homeland Security gets stronger and issues declarations that those whop do not agree with the Democratic Party agenda must be monitored. This is not Orwell. This is not the Soviet Union. This is happening today right here in the United States and the press is silent. We are marching lockstep into our own shackles of incompetence, favoritism, and sloth.

I  believed in Obama’s good intentions at one time, but I can do so no longer. The same man who promised a new era in integrity has appointed far too many crooks and insiders. His chief of staff acts more like a mafia don, and his minions vilify and threaten and degrade their opponents for simple differences of opinion. His colleagues in Congress are clearly guilty of felonies and yet sit immune to prosecution. The Speaker of the House lies about her knowledge of harsh interrogation tactics. These facts have all been documented. Corruption is rife. The media are simple whores to the id. This is a situation where the combined deceased predecessors of Mr. Obama must be rolling in their graves at 78 RPM. Maybe he can harness that energy in his green initiatives. Obama is pushing the country as far left as he can as fast as he can.

The country is at a crossroads. We have more crises looming on the horizon and as P.J. O’Rourke once said, “giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys”. We can do better. We must do better. For our own survival, we must, at this time, just say no.

White Houseology

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal introduces a new academic discipline to the world, namely White e. In an analysis by Elliott Abrams entitled “The Power of the First Impression” he studies the nuances of the upcoming  meeting between President Obama  and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, much as a corps of analysts used to study the inner workings of the Kremlin. Who appears with whom; what is both said and unsaid, and who is standing where on the podium on May Day have all become deeply relevant to the understanding of the workings of today’s United States government, rather than that of the Soviet Union for 70 years.

This follows on to an accretion of power to the White House that has never before been attempted. In the first 100 days, the president has appointed special “czars” and new offices at an unprecedented pace, in many cases bypassing his own Cabinet. He has politicized the Office of the Census by bring this into the White House. He has an  Auto Czar who is attempting to hand over the controlling interests in both Chrysler and General Motors to the president’s supporters in the Unions, and he has a special health care task force that has remained completely under the radar until the time comes to spring his plan on a pliant Congress.

There is no transparency. Geithner, Richardson, Daschle,  et al put paid to that prevarication. Tax cheats run the Treasury while the Automotive czar seems to have a pall over his activities related to pension funds and a penchant for bullying. There are rumors of thuggery in the White House’s dealings with the Chrysler creditors and threats to those who ask the wrong questions or oppose the president on principle.

These are not the actions of an American government. These are a cross between Chicago and Argentina and the Soviet Union. The apparatchiki go to the exclusive stores like G.U.M. while the rest of us are figuratively on the bread lines. If you’re an insider, you’re golden. The law is for everyone else.

So now we must read the tea leaves to discover our real national policy. Our president’s first call when elected was to Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine, surely a strange choice in a world dominated by global economic crisis and the War on Terror (conveniently renamed). His “Blame America” tour of Europe went over like a lead balloon with no gain to show for it. Why? The White House wants to nationalize banks and the automotive industry and health care.  Much of this is going on behind closed doors as the dimwits who call themselves the Republican leadership bicker about ideology instead of recognizing the challenges of providing a counterweight to such an audacious program.

So perhaps at some land grant college or a private university, a chair will be endowed in White House Studies to try and understand how an individual elected with only 52% of the vote socialized the bastion of democracy. As our principles of freedom and enterprise are turned on their ears, perhaps those academics will be allowed to publish freely to explain to us how and why it happened. Perhaps not. Because right now, no one seems to care.

The Age of Specialization and its effect on our National Discussion

I would believe that most people would agree today that we have been in an age of specialization for the past 60 years or so. The old adage “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist” has been replaced in many fields with “it does”. The drive to excel and to comprehend the diverse fields of human existence, whether science or medicine or to succeed at the top of ones profession takes a single minded devotion to ones specialty, and society is the weaker in the long run for this in some ways.

At one time I was very involved in Olympic level sports and came into close contact with many champions. The most common characteristic I saw was a single minded dedication to ones discipline. Swimmers and skaters probably had it worst. 2-3 hours in the pool or on the ice before class, 3-4 hours afterwards, and somehow trying to stay eligible academically takes up all of ones waking hours. One of the other characteristics of many of these people was also a very limited intellectual or social outlook. At the same time, professionally, I have met some of the most brilliant scientists and engineers on the planet. The same habits exist among many in these professions. The same can be said for doctors, Wall Street analysts, and many other disciplines. Talk to a college or professional coach sometimes. When the job requires ultimate focus, peripheral matters suffer, whether its family or current affairs or sometimes personal habits a la’ the nutty professor.

The stakes have grown higher . The pressure to perform across the spectrum has never been higher. But we are losing some very important values in the process. Perspective, a more rounded world view, conversation, free inquiry. Today, more people rely on received wisdom than ever before, and yet the purveyors of that wisdom are themselves constrained by economics or political faction, as Washington once expressed it,  so that a diversity of opinion is lacking. Thus, the herd mentality is reinforced at the expense of critical thinking. Hannah Arendt proposed the theory of the banality of evil, where there is a tendency for ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without thinking about the results of their inaction or action. It is a rejection of personal responsibility. Both because of the pressures of modern life and the subtle manipulation of emotion and opinion by those seeking to promote one agenda or another, we are once again faced with momentous events with little real debate on the merits of proposed fundamental changes in the way we live.

There has never been a greater need for understanding than today. There has never been a greater need for discussion and dialog on the hard issues facing us than now. As one faction or another claim advantage, the reality is that the house of cards that has been the Western economic system is in real danger of collapse. Somewhere along the way, our “leaders” forgot that life is based on the facts, not on what you want them to be. In America, the government is printing money out of control while our creditors have told us clearly that they will no longer loan us the money to finance this deficit spending. The government, business, banking, and economy have been based upon manipulation and accounting tricks. We now have hard dates on the bankruptcies of Medicare and Social Security and yet nothing is being done to ameliorate the problems. Government, notoriously inefficient, is now poised to take over the automotive, medical, and banking sectors. This is not a recipe for recovery. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Think for yourself. Read. Talk to people. Do not rely on one or even a few sources of information. Listen to opposing views. And then think “what is good for our country”. The answers will be inevitably painful, but if we are to survive, we must confront the issues honestly and openly and with all the facts. And we must also recognize that we have laws and a Constitution that we must also follow. This seems to have been forgotten in a headlong rush to avoid disaster.

Printing Funny Money

In case no one has noticed, the U.S. Dollar is about to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency after almost 70 years. This is a cataclysmic event in terms of both confidence and monetary policy. For many years, the United States has relied on the debt markets to finance our economy.  As a part of this compact with our debtors, the government and Federal Reserve, as their part of the bargain, agreed to maintain a prudent fiscal policy that would support the value of our money. But as our trade deficits grew, we ran up larger and larger debts to our creditors, both foreign and domestic.

At the same time, the whole world has watched as first Bush and then Obama have run up incredible deficits at a time when we are running out of money and credit. The most recent news is that both Social Security and Medicare, which are now 50% of the country’s budget,  are estimated to be completely bankrupt by 2037 and 2017 respectively. In personal terms, basically everyone under the age of 50 is screwed. Congress knew this was brewing for Social Security when looking at the statistics as far back as 1955. Medicare has been on life support almost from its inception.

While Bush ran up his own deficits at an alarming rate, under Obama TARP and the profligate and completely misnamed Recovery Act blew the doors off of all previous spending records to the tune of some $3-4 Trillion ($3,000,000,000,000 -$4,000,000,000,000). All the while, Congress added more and more gasoline to the fire in the form of pork. The Administration has de facto nationalized the banking sector and has begun the same for automotive. Health care is next. I am sure productivity and innovation will rise immediately. In terms of foreign exchange and the dollar, the pressure is unsustainable.

The country faces other economic crises. California, New York, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio are our very own Nigeria’s, Zimbabwe’s, and Haiti’s. I hate to say it, but the issues are in many ways related to systemic corruption  in our country as well. There has been no accountability on so many levels, and the unions have become the new privileged class, with gold plated benefits and guaranteed no trade contracts as the rest of us scrape by. All the while, the people who got us into this mess; the politicians, the Wall Street wunderkinds, and the corporate elite got theirs already and have run for the hills, leaving the rest of us to hold the bag. In Congress, “play for pay” is an everyday reality.  Our society operates on  “who you know” rather than “what you know” on a grand scale. As Midnight Oil once said “the rich get richer,  the poor get the picture”.

Monetary policy is not rocket science. It’s about trust more than anything else. Our dollar is backed by the “Full Faith & Credit of the United States”. The problem is that very few people have  Faith in the U.S. government any more. They do not trust the government to maintain a stable currency. 3 years ago, the Iranian, Venezuelan, and Russian governments proposed an alternative to the dollar using a weighted basket of currencies, specifically for oil transactions. These countries do not have our best interests at heart. Later, when the recession started and China was already holding over $690 Billion ( as of 12-08) in American debt, a specific warning was delivered to our government by the Chinese not to devalue their investment. Then we passed a $2 trillion+ budget. The Chinese have now warned us three times publicly and probably feel they have done all they can. Today, the Financial Times reports that the Chinese will do business in RMB Yuan and Brazilian Reals. The devaluation and eventual irrelevancy of the dollar has begun.

The cost of imports will go up at a time when the US has never before been more reliant on imports. The cost to borrow will skyrocket, placing tremendous pressure on the Treasury and the government, and making doing business even more difficult. More U.S. debt is being offered than at any time in history in a debt market that has shrunk precipitously and has grown wary of the US exporting inflation. The Fed will be forced to buy our own debt, fueling inflation. The buying power for the consumer will drop precipitously. These are all economic realities and will leave us broke and beaten down. The good news would be that American exports will be very competitive, except the only thing we seem to export any more is debt. The printing presses with continue to run 24/7, and at some point the debt monster will see us printing $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000 bills for general circulation. The lessons of Weimar Germany will have to be repeated for a whole new generation.

There are answers, but first we must place our house in order. 60 years of financial recklessness must be rectified, and we must learn from our mistakes once again. As Ortega y Gasset once said, “those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it”.

Integrity

It seems every day now we hear of one politician or another, or someone else in the leadership class blatantly lie to us. The New York Times latest plagiarism case, where Maureen Dowd stole the ideas of a blogger and called them her own, is only the latest in both admitted and denied cases at the Times that stretch back 10 years to Jayson Williams. They have repeatedly spiked stories that disagree with their narrative, and published stories that are factually inaccurate despite knowing the truth. Today, Jon Chait, a liberal blogger stated that reporting is overrated. In the network news, you can pick your political slant, and with it their spin on the news. The facts don’t seem to matter if they do not agree with the narrative.

Unfortunately, the problem goes all the way to the top. The current occupant of the White House has corrected himself or retreated on so many promises at this point that it has become difficult to take what he says seriously. This is very dangerous for the world. Whether it was his promises to have the most ethical and transparent administration in history, or his stance on enhanced interrogation techniques or his promises of fiscal restraint, the man is basically a liar of the first order. The Speaker of the House has been caught in an indefensible position on her knowledge of waterboarding and yet continues to deny the truth. In Congress, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Charles Rangel, and several others have all been caught stealing or taking bribes and nothing has been done. Are they immune to prosecution? In the Stevens case, while his conduct was reprehensible, the prosecution lied to nail a conviction. These are simply the daily headlines these days.

Madoff, Mozilla, and a host of other crooks simply say “oops” as they have tanked our economy and stolen  billions of dollars of the nation’s wealth. Corporate presidents cut the hearts out of their companies and outsource/offshore in the name of “maintaining profits” when the reality was that they were doing so strictly to line their own pockets and run for the nearest tropical island. In California, the propositions voted on were known to be lies. Our own legislature and governor point blank lied to us.

And yet there has been no discussion of ethics or morals. Why did this occur? Why did they decide to take the easy way out? Why did they lie so blatantly? Who the hell do these people think they are? Why are there no consequences?

And yet if you are reasonably decent and moral and pay your taxes and go to church, you are classified as a right wing religious nut. Obama, who not only is a proponent of partial birth abortion, but who has also now forced doctors, nurses and hospitals (many religiously affiliated) to perform abortions against their moral principles, spoke at Notre Dame, and many in the Catholic hierarchy finally said enough is enough. Obama stated that reasonable people can disagree, but partial birth abortion is inherently unreasonable and we all know this. Who is the real nut?

And yet, it seems there may be some push back building. The Tea Parties have been an honest response by ordinary people to the abuse of power. These have been denigrated by the left, and yet the people who have attended are those most ordinary (or perhaps extraordinary) of people; retirees, teachers, small businessmen, housewives, students, and kids. The salt of the earth, basically. They have said “I’m tired as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”.  We need more discussion around the dinner table of what is right and wrong. The churches need to preach to the faithful. The pundits must spread the word. Words have meaning, and we will not be lied to. Our country is in a world of hurt right now, and it is time to work towards some basic reforms.

Obama vs Cheney – The Rumble on the Potomac

After reading the speeches of both the president and former vice president, a few things stood out. First, Obama stated ” for the first time, we are providing the resources to take the fight to the Taliban and extremists in Pakistan”. Well gee, I wonder how all those who have served there for the past 8 years feel about that? More taking credit for policies already underway under Bush. He then went on at length about his own background, and proceeded to blame the prior administration once again for Guantanamo and torture. He then states his opposition to waterboarding and how it was illegal. And yet there were clearly strong legal arguments for the tactic to be used, and the policy was debated at the very highest levels at length. The methods were not used without some incredible soul searching, and were believed in good faith to be the only way to obtain critical information to protect the country. Remember, it happened to three individuals on three occasions each. One of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the mastermind of 9/11 and personally beheaded Daniel Pearl. In any court in the world, he would have received the most serious of penalties. In many countries, including our own, his life would have been forfeit. This is the guy who said he couldn’t wait to get to New York and talk to his lawyer. He thought he was already gaming the system when he was arrested. And Mr. Obama condemns these practices despite the opposition of the current and 4 (FOUR) prior directors of the CIA. I always thought one hired the best people available and listened to their advice. But I digress.

The president then went on the show his fundamental misunderstanding of our enemy. He spoke of waterboarding as a recruiting tool for the enemy, and the maltreatment of our troops because of it. And yet we are dealing with one of the most evil enemies the country has ever known. Even the Nazis observed the Geneva Conventions in the West. The Taliban and Al Quaeda, and Muslim terrorists in general, were using assassination, suicide bombing, beheadings, and terror even before we entered the fray. Much of this Muslim fanaticism goes back over 100 years. It has nothing to do with our niceness and goodness and desire to be seen as the good guys. They simply hate everyone except those who believe in their apocalyptic vision. These terrorists are murdering far more of their coreligionists than Americans.

The president then went on to discuss Guantanamo and its failings, and yet only 2 days ago he authorized the resumption of military tribunals. No other country will take these prisoners, and the recidivism rate is 1 in 7. These people really hate us and will go right back to killing Americans if given the chance. So the president contradicts himself once again. Only yesterday Congress spoke very clearly and refused to authorize funds to close Guantanamo both because they do not want these bad guys in the country, and because there is no plan. How can we take the president seriously with these facts in evidence? It’s all talk. The president calls all of these “abuses” a rallying cry for our enemies, and yet they need no rallying cry beyond “death to the infidel”. You simply cannot get along with people who have no desire to get along with you. Ask Jimmy Carter.

The president calls his opponents fear mongers, and yet these are serious policy issues where the president and his supporters have been left in the unenviable position of being caught out in significant misstatements of fact. On the one side you have Nancy Pelosi, Arlen Specter, Harry Reid and the president. On the other are the aforementioned CIA directors, most of Congress, and the professionals at the CIA and Justice Department. The president further clouds the issue with his selective release of documents while withholding others that could provide some clarity. Pure politics.

The president then somehow rationalizes first his decision to release photographs of Abu Ghraib and then to withdraw his decision. When one’s SecDef, his Joint Chiefs of Staff, his National Security Advisor, and his CIA chief and his predecessors all say the same thing and he still has doubts, it’s obvious we have a president who is either very naive, very stupid, or who has his own agenda. I would bet on the latter. His trope of “strict legal tests” just doesn’t fly in face of his actions to date. He has been far too casual already with the law he says he will uphold. Look at the Chrysler mess. Lastly he asks that we rise above politics while blaming Bush. Pure lawyerly BS.

On the other hand, Cheney’s remarks were concise, to the point, and well organized. His purpose was to set forth and defend  the strategic thinking behind the Bush Administration’s policies.  He briefly reviewed the state of the nation before and after 9/11, the horrible events that led us to engage our enemies, and the rationales for what the Bush Administration did. He  factually leads us through the discussions and debate on the issue of waterboarding and other EIT’s, and the moral arguments that took place. I truly believe that these discussions would never have even taken place in such a structured manner in any other country. Most other countries, with the exception of the Vatican, are much more cold blooded, and even the Vatican had its Borgias and Colonnas.

Cheney points out where he feels the president has done the right thing, and where he feels the president is mistaken. The is little rancor and little partisanship in his speech. Rather, he defends the record of the Bush administration. He challenges the president where he feels it is necessary.  He points out the fallacy of Obama’s elimination of certain terms such as “enemy combatant” and “Global War on Terror”, and yet it it is not simply semantics, but rather a fundamental reversion to the pre 9/11 thinking of our battle with extremists as legal, rather than military. Try selling this concept to the Army Ranger being shot at with a .50 cal or RPG. “You have the right to remain silent”….BLAM!

This was Point/Counterpoint at the highest level, and as such is good for our national debate. But yet so much of the debate revolves around posturing that it has become a farce. So much seems to be overturning policies that worked simply for the sake of doing so. And yet the president has been forced to back down both by his advisers and by Congress.  This is good for the country. But there is a failing in gravitas, and far too much willingness to “Blame America”. One of our cardinal principles has always been not to start fights, but to finish them, and that fight began in earnest on 9/11.  The sooner we take away the rhetoric and the political element in our national defense policy, the better. I would rate this a unanimous decision for Cheney on this one.

Bankrupting the Country and How to Fix It

Today, President Obama was interviewed on C Span and was held to account for once. In the interview, he admitted the United States Government is out of money.Yup, we’re broke. Busted.  This week, the Treasury will auction $100 Billion in T Bills. That is the rub. If my president tells the whole world we’re out of money, why would I then buy American debt? This could be the flash point for a new economic crisis. The idiocracy is firmly in place.

We are in a deep recession of our own making. There is plenty of blame to go around for the causes, but the country seems to have forgotten that you don’t spend what you haven’t got and that you plan for a rainy day. Obama somehow blames our health care policy in his interview. How about unchecked government spending and the most corrupt spending/stimulus bill in our history?  $1.7 trillion in bank relief funds. Poof! gone. $700 Billion in Pork…Poof! and yet no one says a word. He can try to blame his predecessors, but in just a few months, he has taken ownership of the crisis lock, stock and barrel.

Supposedly the UAW has offered concessions in the Chrysler and GM reorganizations, and we have no idea what they are. 25% of the country’s already beleaguered manufacturing sector melts down and there is no transparency from a president who took it upon himself to involve his office directly. A president who promised transparency. What is left of American manufacturing? Military? Aerospace? Medical? Telecom infrastructure? That’s about it, folks. and that does not make for a healthy economy.

The only way to get out of such a recession is to work our way out. To invent, to apply elbow grease and put in more hours and work harder than we ever have before to set things right. To put our manufacturing sector back on track and build value and well paying jobs. The old warning about ending up doing each others laundry has come true. What use is a financial sector if no one has any money? What value is a “service” sector if no one can afford those services?

We have a government that is utterly out of touch with reality. They are enacting carbon offsets, forbidding oil drilling, making the automotive industry even more inefficient, and pretty much doing all they can to throw a monkey wrench into our ability to save ourselves. Nationalizing the banks only makes matters worse, as does socialized medicine. On top of it, they want to tax us as never before. This is a recipe for disaster.

The perspective from Taiwan and China is interesting. Times are challenging in Asia as well, but they are reacting differently. They are investing in the future, building nuclear power plants, building necessary infrastructure, making their industries more efficient, and carefully navigating the financial markets. The Taiwan stock market is up based upon their leading indicators that the world will still demand notebook computers, cell phones and all of the other electronic paraphernalia of modern life. In contrast, HP, IBM, and 50 other American companies gave up on manufacturing in favor of reaping short term profits. Now it will bite them right in the read end. Who needs HP or IBM or Apple? They’re just labels. the intellectual property and know how reside in Taiwan, China and Japan.

Recovery in the United States will be significantly delayed because of the bad decisions of our management class and political leadership. However, there is hope. We must invent and make and take back what until the 1990′s was  American leadership in technology and manufacturing. We must generate cheap energy. Green technologies are for the most part highly subsidized. We must find better and more cost effective ways, or until we can, hold off on chasing foolish chimeras. This is a time for hard headed decision making and a ruthless attention to following through. The highly adversarial nature of business must be placed in check so that the best decisions for all of the stakeholders are made. Pride and vanity must be put aside.

Mr. President, please stop shooting our country in the foot every other day. Focus on what is going to get this country back on it’s feet again instead of some cockamamie socialist vision of a kumbaya world. Otherwise, we will end up a very poor client state of China in record time.

Our Economical Dilemma

The other day, Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury stated that the “era of complaint politics has ended” just prior to his trip to Beijing to discuss monetary policy with the Chinese government. Last week, I saw Nancy Pelosi’s jet on the ground in Beijing where she had remarkably cordial meetings with Chinese leadership and mentioned nary a word on human rights or trade. Welcome to the new paradigm. In a few short days, the new administration managed to a – blame Bush, b-succumb on human rights, and c – kow tow to Chinese economic sensitivities. The Chinese hold over $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds at a time when we must market another $2.5 Trillion plus to finance our reckless recovery plan. In banker talk, this is called having ones client by the throat. The fundamental paradigm of U.S. – China relations has irrevocably changed.

The Chinese are facing their own deep problems. Their economy is dependent upon exports in a world that has reduced consumption precipitously. Up to 200,000 factories have closed and perhaps 20,000,000 industrial workers are unemployed. The stock market is down 60%+, and predictions for economic growth that had reached 15% have been revised downwards to 6-7%.  The rumor is that should growth fall below 6% and unemployment rise further, regime change could be in the air. China graduates over 6 million students from college alone every year, and must create huge numbers of jobs just to maintain equilibrium. They have announced their own $600 Billion stimulus package.

The difference is that in China you’ll see new bridges and ports and real infrastructure while in America you’ll see a high speed rail link between Disneyland and Las Vegas (one which was repeatedly voted down by the electorate, by the way). Otherwise, it’s all sort of nebulous, but you will know it’s being spent from the special Obama signs each project will have. In China you’ll see Hope. In America something else.

America has been financing a consumer economy that can no longer stand on its own. Nations arise and fall because of their industry, and yet America has become a land where we produce little of what we consume. Inflation was kept in check by low priced goods from overseas, but even with this brake on inflation, consumption has dropped precipitously, putting even those companies who supplied the unending demand in danger. Wall Street will remain in quietude for some time to come as banks try to recover and our government fiddles with the knobs trying to prevent another melt down.

In reading of the 17th Century, something similar happened. During the wars between the French and English, both countries basically at one point ran out of money. An amazing state of affairs, but true. Economic activity ground to a halt for years, and only renewed when the British Government founded the Bank of England and established common sense economic policy. The maturation of natural philosophy into science and industry occurred at the same time. Then, the engines of growth took off once again and didn’t slow down for centuries.  The Industrial Revolution began and wealth proliferated. All boats rose. We need to lay the groundwork for a new Industrial Revolution.

Look around you. We are living in a derivative society. A society of the mediocre. Our films, our literature, our art our culture all have reached the lowest common denominator. The only endeavor that has reached an apogee is bullshit. In politics, art, banking, and across the spectrum, we excel as never before in touting our own greatness. Instead we need to get a dose of humility, and that may be the blessing of this crisis.

One of the common threads throughout the build up to this crisis has been a loss of morality and of God. Anything goes. Pundits, because one can not call them philosophers because they have no philosophy, declare God dead and Darwin triumphant, and yet they offer no coherent vision of man’s place in the universe. And yet we come ever closer to understanding Isaiah’s words, written 2,700 years ago by a man who had very little understanding of the world around him in a world lit only by fire. Perhaps a shepherd or even a learned man of his time, nevertheless, he had no concept of the deep complexity of the world around him, and yet he wrote that God had spoken to him saying “as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts”.  There is a certain part of us that takes its challenge from this, I believe, and continues to struggle for knowledge.

And yet, as we delve deeper and deeper into the subatomic level and as we reach further and further into our universe, we see the incredible truth of these words. It is a never ending quest. And for the majority of humanity, we have made tremendous accomplishments.  Lifespans have increased, and with them a greater demand on our resources and so thus our responsibility to each other to wisely use them.

This crisis is, I think, pointing us in the right direction. Crisis clarifies the thinking and wipes away the cobwebs to allow us to consider the important things. In the past 100 years, man has tried to reinvent himself as something he isn’t. False constructs abound. The desire to overturn the old rules simply for the sake of the id or the ego is slowly drowning in its own ennui.

In the meantime, its about survival, and that means trial and hard work. Economically, it will require creativity, trust, and innovation. The old values will see one through. There are mixed signs ahead, and there may be many more challenges, but we must redefine our goals and our methods. It may be months or it may be years, but with the knowledge we are learning every day, I think the best is yet to come.

A Nuclear Iran?

Yesterday, our Dear Leader stated his opinion that Iran should be able to have it’s own nuclear power industry. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with this, but reality is very different indeed. The Russians have been assisting Iran in building it’s nuclear power industry, which after Chernobyl should allay any concerns. Of course the spent fuel would never be used for improper purposes.  Lots of assumptions there not based in fact.

Iran now has over 10,000 centrifuges running 24/7 to separate out U-238 into U-235, the stuff that makes nuclear weapons go bang. Of course Mahmoud only has the best of intentions for this. He tells us at Friday night prayers every week. Interspersed with the obligatory “Death to America” chants are his threats against Israel, a hallmark of his administration. If it walks like a nuke and it quacks like a nuke and has a half life like a nuke, it’s probably a nuke.We must take his rhetoric seriously. He does.

Now good friend Mahmoud doesn’t just have issues with the Israelis. He is ecumenical in his ambitions. There’s no love for the Gulf Arabs or Iraq, and he’s been meddling in Afghanistan for quite some time as well. The hell of it is that with the prevailing winds and those wonderfully competent Iranian rocket scientists and Israeli Patriot missiles, the odds are that any device launched would detonate or break up somewhere over the West Bank or Jordan. Since our friends at Hamas are so friendly to us and to their neighbors, as they say in Brooklyn, my nose bleeds for them.

And what of our Dear Leaders’ words and actions in the Middle East to date? His first call when sworn in was to Abbas, and now that Mahmoud is running around the Middle East acting like the cock of the walk. Not a lot of compromise there these days. But then again, Abbas has his own issues with Hamas, who pretty much hate everyone except their own except when they’re having a vendetta of some kind or another over someones lack of dedication to suicide bombing or pointless rocket attacks. Obama in the meantime paid homage to King Abdullah as keeper of the Holy Places recently, and is today doing a meet and greet in Riyadh before his stump speech in Cairo.

The Israelis, realizing they are basically screwed, have hardened their line as well. The settlements are going forward and a new breed of conservative hardliner is in the ascendancy. Remember, their backs have been to the wall repeatedly in the past 60 years, and it was only US assistance that helped them defeat 6 invading armies in 1973. Now that assistance from the U.S. is no longer a foregone conclusion,there is an opening for Assad in Syria and Hezbollah and the rest, who I am sure Obama can reason with.  And if anyone can smell a drop of blood on the sand, it’s an Arab. Any signs of weakness or an opportunity for a cheap shot and it’s “game on”. The war clouds will gather, and once again the jezzails will come out and the stories will be told sort of like Baghdad Bob’s bedtime tales, but hey, who’s really paying attention? They will see an opening and try to exploit it.

And all the while, the puppeteers in Iran, who have been running the convoys containing rockets into Gaza and guns and advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, will be seeing another patsy just like Jimmy Carter. Mind you, it is not the Iranian people necessarily who have the beef. It’s just the men with guns.

And back in America, between carbon offset cap & trade, highly subsidized and inefficient solar and wind power, reduced on and offshore exploration and drilling, Ted Kennedy’s invisible windmill farms off the Cape, clown cars, shuttered coal fired power plants, etc. we will be just fine and dandy, thank you as we slouch back to a 19th century lifestyle. Nuclear power plants are okay for Iran, apparently, but not for us.

President Obama’s Fiscal Irresponsibility

It was reported  that President Obama was on Capitol Hill this afternoon admonishing the Congressional Leadership to enact “pay as you go” legislation to control spending. He was quoted as saying “the reckless fiscal policies of the past have left us in a very deep hole”. Associated Press in a separate article then reported that he has also asked for $2.5 Trillion in exemptions in spending limits to pay for his new health care bill. Watch what the man says and then what he does. To date he has either signed legislation or proposed such as follows:

$2.5 Trillion in Recovery Funds

$787 Billion in Stimulus Funds

$1 trillion in TARP Funds

$ 100 Billion in Auto Bailouts

$2.5 trillion in his new exemptions for Health Care

_______

$6.887 trillion

…..in just 5 months

Never before in our history has a president spent so recklessly. And his comments come during  a  news cycle where more and more newspapers, businessmen, economists and others are recognizing that his efforts are simply not producing the desired results. Rupert Murdoch, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Chinese bankers, and many others are all saying “enough”. Instead of these fiscal actions easing the financial markets, the specter of inflation is rearing its head and unfortunately, economic history tells us it’s going to get worse. The president stated ” we have done more than ever, faster than ever, more responsibly than ever, to get the gears of the economy moving again”. And yet his “Buy American” provisions are rankling our allies and threatening to initiate a repetition of the effects of the Smoot Hawley Act of 1930, which was generally acknowledged to have deepened the Great Depression into the worst in history. Taken together, his actions, and they are his alone, forebode bad economic times for our country just when the signs of global recovery have begun to sprout. Will it affect the global system? You bet.

In Asia, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Japan are slowly digging themselves out of the financial mess. Western Europe is also recovering. This is all now endangered by our reckless fiscal policies. The inflationary monetary policies of the United States are in danger of being exported globally, and at the same time, markets for materials and goods manufactured or produced overseas will dry up as the United States can no longer afford them. As our manufacturing sector has been especially hard hit, this will only compound the economic damage. We must to an extent export and work our way out of this recession.

And yet our president continues to blame his predecessors to what purpose? While it is true that between Social Security and Medicare and deficit spending our finances have been unsound for some time, Mr. Obama is accelerating this trend at an unprecedented rate. He seems to acknowledge the issue, but then continues to spend like a drunken sailor. His passive/aggressive fiscal policy seems destined to ripsaw our economy into client state status in record time. His drive to nationalize health care can only promise even greater deficits as evidenced by self evident data of the Medicare fiasco. The results are out there for any of us to see, but no one seems to be paying attention.

Quietly, the leaders of nations as disparate as Russia, Germany, China, India, Brazil, and Japan are all consulting with each other on how to react to an unprecedented financial event. The reserve status of the Dollar is in great doubt, but what will replace it? What does one do when the economic powerhouse of the world endangers itself with self inflicted wounds? How does one react to the potential for a meltdown of unprecedented proportions? How do you get a raging alcoholic to stop drinking? One who one day admits his problem, and then next denies it? The first thing is to take away the keys so they don’t drive over a cliff. Then get them into rehab. We must face the facts and make common sense decisions. Maybe someone out there is listening, but so far, I see little evidence.

The $9 Trillion Dollar Man

” Obama’s Spending Plans May Pose Political Risks”

So says today’s Washington Post, one of the decidedly more liberal newspapers in the country. They have Obama’s stimulus spending at some $9 Trillion (not my number…the Post’s ) now over 10 years, rather than the $1.7 – 2.5 – 3.0 Trillion that was originally bandied about when the bill was being considered. Funny how the truth comes out afterwards. Think about it. Nine…Trillion….Dollars....that you and I, and our children, and our children’s children, and their children unto generations unknown will be saddled with. That is if there’s much of a country left by that point. We may be broke as the Balkans and just as fragmented by then if this continues.

The Republicans told Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party leadership no. The bankers told them no. The tea parties told them no. The Chinese and other lenders told them no. And yet they went ahead and did it anyway.

The article repeats once again Mr. Obama’s quote from his speech last week to Congressional leaders…. “The reckless fiscal policies of the past have left us in a very deep hole”. No Mr. President, it is your reckless fiscal policies that have left us in the hole. It was bad before, but under your plan, it’s impossible.

And what will the money spent accomplish? No one really knows, but hey, it’s all good. Except the money won’t be worth a Continental when The President done. Way back when our country was founded, the Continental Congress, printed their own money with no backing. It quickly became worthless. There was runaway inflation and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 inserted Article 1, section 10 into the Constitution that made gold and silver the only legal tender in the United States for this specific reason. We are rapidly headed once again down the slippery path.

The President is the ultimate hypocrite. His lecturing Congress on fiscal responsibility is like  Madonna lecturing Cher on chastity ( the virtue) and good taste. Kent Conrad (D-ND), that noted fiscal conservative and head of the Senate Budget Committee said ” The second five years is where we’re on a completely unsustainable course”. Should I laugh or throw up?

The Post article speaks of desperation and utterly meaningless gestures such as trying to save $100 million back in April. Finally the Post, that media bulldog, is putting Obama’s new math together. It is and always was a fiscal Potemkin Village.

The good news is that much of this can be fixed. There are actually signs the economy is beginning to pull out of the nose dive. The global freakout of last November is being replaced with a sense that life does go on, and in many sectors, people and companies are doing their best to work harder and live within their means. Automotive is and will remain a wreck, and those sectors touched by Obamania will feel the effect, but even this has its limitations and we will find a way forward.

Congress, on their part, can reverse the damage if they have the guts. It’s doubtful, but there is hope. Rahm Emmanuel is hoping for tax reform and Medicare and Medicaid reform. How about some common sense and getting the mobility walker and penis pump/erectile dysfunction scams put to bed for a start?  Gee whiz, just think of the possibilities if it wasn’t a politically driven slush fund. Emmanuel’s definition of tax reform, by the way, is soak the rich who aren’t Obama supporters. Tax cheats and frauds abound in the new administration and that’s the way they’ve run things so far, so why think they’ll change?

This isn’t about Republican or Democrat really, because Republicans like Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins all voted to approve this fiscal insanity, and truth be told, a lot of the “moderate” Republicans simply hid behind the bushes to save their seats and didn’t do their job in speaking out against it. There is little to no fiscal sensibility in Washington, or for that matter on Wall Street these days. It’s been all about greed and who you know for the past 20 years. The ethical rules no longer apply. But if we are to reverse this train wreck, they must.

But out here in the hinterlands, many of us know you don’t spend what you don’t have. It’s funny, because this philosophy holds true mainly in the Red States. California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan have been run in an utterly irresponsible fashion and are on the brink. All of them vote Blue.  QED, Mr. Watson!

The first step in a 12 step problem is recognition that there is a problem. Just perhaps, this is beginning to happen. there is much more to be done, and there are many policies that just don’t make sense. But this one is front and center now.

Media Bias Crosses Another Line

The world today is a curious place. Depending on where you get your information,the same story can be reported in  black or white. Politics seems to inform articles that have no political content, and the agreed upon objective standards that informed the political dialogue at one time seem to have been completely trashed. The media rank with Congress (< 20% approval) in their public approval ratings, and our country suffers from a lack of objectivity.

Thirty years ago I remember reading about Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief in the 1920′s and 30′s. At the time, after the First World War, there was a love affair with the Soviet Union. The staid, Christian nation states of Central Europe had to a great extent engaged in a meaningless war that betrayed their core values and killed a generation of their young men. Communism was an attractive alternative, and it attracted many. Many people turned their backs on the past in the search for new meaning and political stability. Duranty was one of these. His reports from the Soviet Union were glowing with promise. As the civil war wound down, he found himself at the nexus of the society of the new man, and like John Reed, became a flack for the regime. Stalin was consolidating his dictatorship, and between pogroms, the Ukrainian holocaust, and purges, it was the advent of a new, terrible dictatorship. And every week the readers back in New York and Washington and Boston believed Duranty’s reports as true. Except they weren’t. 5,000,000 kukaks were starved to death, many thousands of political opponents were sentenced to the gulags or shot in the back of the head at the Lyubyanka, and later on, virtually the entire officer corps was exteriminated on the brink of World War II. And not a word was said. Everything was glorious in the worker’s paradise.

Duranty was only the most egregious case, but there were many others. Politics has informed the reportage of the New York Times for the past 60 years. But there is a difference between what is on the editorial page and what is on the front page. People expect and deserve the facts. Kipling’s 6 honest serving men; What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who, are the glue that allows people to believe the basic truths of the news. When these facts are slanted, whether in Hearst’s penny press or today’s Times, we all suffer.

This bias is not exclusive to the Times, but rather pervades what many call the mainstream media these days. Whether the television news or weekly magazines or large city press, there is a lockstep to the left, it seems, the exceptions being Fox News and a few openly political organs such as National Review and the Weekly Standard. Limbaugh is vilified it seems, almost as often as the preacher condemns Satan at Sunday Meeting. What is odd is that there seems to be no concern that the free exchange of ideas takes place. There is no desire to arrive at an objective truth. A liberal associate wrote to me the other day and said  “It all goes back to Plato and the view that most people are stupid, except for that wise elite who should have the power to rule”,  implying that somehow this is a modern conservative viewpoint.  And yet this educated person should know his Plato better. Plato wrote The Republic as a Socratic dialog with opposing viewpoints competing in the arena of ideas. The issue of the masses has always been difficult, especially in hierarchical societies, and there has always been a need to balance short term, perhaps more visceral, decisions with those grounded in the long term. This is why in our country we have the House and the Senate.  But the attitude of my correspondent is indicative of much of the problem. There is a need today to demonize one’s opponents and count coup at every turn. At the same time, the way Washington works is to create straw men and then raise as much money as possible for one’s cause while maintaining a polite distance from the ideologues and ensuring the invitations on the cocktail circuit continue to arrive in the mailbox. It works this way on both sides of the aisle. These days it is fashionable to be on the Left. The use of the term “progressive” is back in vogue. Progressive = leftist in the political dictionary, just to be clear. And in the media today, we are seeing this in spades.

Last week, David Letterman took a  joke too far and implied a highly inappropriate relationship between Alex Rodriguez and Sarah Palin’s 14 year old daughter. Andrew Sullivan, a purported conservative, has been reprehensible in his innuendo on the subject. Katie Couric the CBS Evening News anchor, and reportorial descendant of Walter Cronkite, the Apollo of American newsmen, in a “comedic” speech at Princeton just last week called first for a more moderate dialog and then savaged Palin.  Cronkite doing such a speech while still at CBS would have been unthinkable. He was a newsman first and last and certain lines were not crossed.

Today, ABC News announced that they would be broadcasting from the Blue Room at the White House, focusing on the upcoming health care debate. This has been arranged by Linda Douglass, the White House communications director for health care and a former ABC reporter until 2006, and the broadcast will include a Town Hall event with the president. We can almost be sure that Time and Newsweek will chime in with their own “objective” studies. A couple of month back, it was revealed that there is a teleconference every morning of reporters and other media to discuss talking points for the day run by Rahm Emmanuel. Participants have included George Stephanopoulis and James Carville, both of whom somehow have reporting jobs with ABC and CBS respectively. The top management of General Electric, who own NBC and MSNBC,  has been accused with at least some cause of muzzling criticism of the administration to conform with their politics. Notice a trend?

The Washington Post admitted on Sunday that the estimated cost for the stimulus bill over 10 years will be over $9 Trillion, and yet this has been reported nowhere else in the mainstream media. I will repeat it again, because it flabbergasts me…Nine Trillion Dollars. And no one says a word. Why? Paul Krugman states the case for foreign exchange balancing out the inevitable rise in interest rates through the foreign exchange mechanism. This used to be called devaluing the currency. Again, a very strange idea taken as wisdom within a fashionable bubble.

These are no longer political issues, but rather existential ones. They cross party lines, because if we do not balance our budgets, the country will be broke and very bad things will happen. Our cost for food, or imported oil, or that new television will skyrocket, and the disestablishment of the middle class will accelerate as we all end up in the poor house. Our nation may never rcover, and the great experiment that is America will have failed. And our media are leading the many into this maelstrom, playing the magic flute leading us to our demise.

The Appearance of Impropriety

Over the past several months, we have all watched as the Obama administration has taken shape. There have been a number of very disquieting developments in this period.

In November, the president-elect was said to have raised over $744.9 Million (George Washington University – presidential campaign finance) in his election campaign. Earlier in the year, he promised to abide by campaign spending limitations, a promise he broke when he saw the large pot of gold he could tap into. Of greater concern were the sources of this funding. It was reported at the time that some donors were using debit cards, which in many cases are untraceable, with names like Saddam Hussein, Mickey Mouse, and Superman. Obvious pseudonyms. Because Obama opted out of matching Federal funds, he had no obligation to report his sources of income. The FEC’s hands were tied and the FBI was uninterested in pursuing the matter. Part of this was his unprecedented use of the internet, but there is a deep concern where that kind of money comes from. To put this into perspective, the U.S. donations for the 2004 tsunami were $1.874 Billion, and Katrina $3.574 Billion (IUPUI Center on Philanthropy). Those were two of the worst disasters in history and donations crossed all lines. This was a lousy political campaign, and during hard times no less.

Mr. Obama then promised the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” on November 12, and banned lobbyists from his transition team. This turned out to be untrue as well, as that team was riddled with lobbyists. He then nominated over a dozen appointees for cabinet level positions who had either failed to file income taxes or outright evaded them (Geithner). Avoidance is acceptable, but evasion is criminal. Geithner is the Secretary of the Treasury, to whom the IRS reports. Clearly a conflict of interest, but “it was for the good of the country”.

The president has also consolidated power within the White House in unprecedented fashion. Instead of having his Secretary of State as the primary representative of the United States overseas, he has special representatives for almost every major region and issue, few of whom coordinate or cooperate with the State Department. There are “czars” for all sorts of issues, and policy is discussed and formed behind completely closed doors. This is true for the GM & Chrysler deals, the TARP bailout, health care and other key issues. When Hillary Clinton tried this in 1992/1993, lawsuits were fild opening these discussions. Obama learned from this and acted accordingly. Nevertheless, it is still most likely illegal. His refuisal to allow reporters to view White House visitor’s logs also has direct bearing on the matter.

The president’s disrespect of the rule of law is also an issue. In the case of both TARP and the auto bailouts, strong arm tactics were used by the White House and the Chrysler deal especially seems to be crafted out of whole cloth. The UAW, one of his biggest supporters and the primary cause of many of the auto companies difficulties in the first place, ends up with controlling interest, and somehow FIAT ends up with 20%  of the company and access to government funds. The shareholders, the bondholders, the dealers and their employees, and the white collar employees,  not to mention the taxpayers, were all, to put it bluntly, screwed and undue, and possibly illegal pressure was used by the White House to do it. In exchange, the UAW was supposed to grant concessions, but we still don’t know what those are.  Basically it’s a multi billion dollar payoff.

The White House also moved the Census Bureau under their control. The census determines the political landscape, and in itself could be considered a political plum with hundreds of thousands of short term jobs. Jiggering the Census results could result in a permanent Democratic majority. ACORN has been linked to this effort, and are already being investigated in several states for voter fraud. Are these the people we want determining the political landscape for the next 10 years? To my knowledge, no president has ever been so blatant in their grab for power. The Justice Department also dropped an airtight case against the Black Panthers in Philadelphia for voter intimidation. In this case there were witnesses and the incidents were recorded on video, but somehow it just wasn’t worth pursuing. So much for freedom to vote in North Philly.

The Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorists has also been a legal and political football. It now seems the president is slowly dispersing prisoners, a few to Bermuda, some to Palau, a couple to Italy. On the terrorist charges, the president has all but stopped any action, and the families of the victims have become furious. We have in our custody the masterminds for both the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and the 9/11 attacks and yet they have not faced justice after years of delays. Any way you look at it, this is not just.

Lastly, the president has fired three Inspectors General of federal agencies under dubious circumstances. The first, for Americorps, was investigating misuse of funds by the St. Hope Foundation, a charter school program in Sacramento, CA  This IG obtained an agreement to restitute 50% of the $800,000 funded on the basis of misuse of funds. This was then followed by the accusation by the executive director of St. Hope, that the founder, former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson, deleted hundreds of e mails related to the case to avoid investigation. The president has already come under heated criticism for this. Unfortunately, this was then followed by the firing of Neil Barofsky, the Inspector General for the TARP program at the Treasury Department, who was appointed only a few months ago by this same president to act as watchdog on over $2 Trillion in federal expenditures to Wall Street, those paragons of virtue. The IG of the International Trade Commission, where cases like dumping and tariffs are determined, has also been summarily dumped by the president.  In all three cases, the White House has been stonewalling requests by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

Whether in law or in government, the appearance of impropriety is normally enough to trigger both alarms and investigations. In the case of the Obama administration, we are seeing neither so far. If it walks like a duck and it smells like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. There has been a trail of ethical lapses that is unmatched in presidential hstory. The accusations against Bush and Cheney were unmatched in their vitriol, but here, where we have a clear trail of evidence, not a word is being said. This is politics Chicago style squared, and our country is the lesser for it.

Democrats with their hands out and Republicans with their pants down

What is going on with our political system today? It is as if, as Mugatu said in that film classic, Zoolander, they are all taking crazy pills. The president is stage managing the news while we have a significant number of politicians on the Democratic side either raving mad dog looney or on the take. On the Republican side, it seems they just can’t keep it in their pants or come up with a coherent ideology. Their time seems to consist of chasing other men’s wives or conspiring with their Democratic colleagues as in California, to continue the spending spree that generates the money in bribes and payola for these reprobates to indulge in their sybaritic pastimes. Dodd has his “cottage” in Roundstone, Ireland and Sanford flew all the way to Buenos Aires for some tail. There’s your global warming problem in a nutshell. John “Ramses XIV”  Murtha builds  monuments to himself in the outer reaches of Pennsylvania while thinking no one is paying attention, and John Ensign comes clean because his aide’s hubby is trying to shake him down. What kind or world do we live in?

Perhaps it is  time to move the federal government someplace honest and clean, like Las Vegas or Baghdad, and turn Washington into a combination of Williamsburg and Six Flags. The  Congressional office buildings can be turned into a house of mirrors .  We could maintain the architectural integrity of the Capitol and build the rides around  and under the facades. This way to the Teapot Dome! Use the insidious Disney line strategy to sucker the bumpkins into Murthaworld (which sounds much like the Underworld of Greek mythology). Everyone rides in a little electric car and gets paid off as they pass the PMI cave where  trolls hand out fools gold. GM and Chrysler can build that one. Old Fiat 500′s would be perfect if for some reason Chrysler can’t put something together for a few years. At least that way we’d get something back for the 20% of the company Obama gave away. The whole thing could be staffed by the UAW, but would only be open for 4 hours/day and don’t go on Mondays or Fridays because the wheels will fall off. Every hour on the hour, the statue of Lincoln in his Memorial could be wired to zap the hiney of some miscreant politician. People would line up for that one, I think. Up by Union Station, they could build Barney Frank Land; adults only of course, and equal opportunity. As part of the educational aspect of the park, Geithnerworld where the Treasury used to be could teach creative accounting.

The reality is that between the venality of Congress and many state legislatures and the mendacity of a president intent on  “Chicago Rules” our country is in deep trouble. The news is being manipulated on an Orwellian scale and the ideas being brought to the table, without open discussion and debate mind you, are cockamamie and clearly deleterious to the welfare of our country. Our leaders are betraying us every day and debasing themselves and their offices. The Boomer Generation and their successors are found wanting. We have met the enemy and he is Us, as Walt Kelly wrote.

Contrast this with the Founding Fathers, who put their lives and sacred honor on the line for the sake of a philosophy; freedom under God, and that all men are created equal. Pretty simple. We are squandering our inheritance. We are screwing up any legacy left for our children and their children’s children. The noble ideas which have seen the country through invasion and civil war and holocaust, and which fundamentally delineate not our own basic human rights, but those around the world, are being whored to the highest bidder. It was France who looked to America in 1789, and then the world.  Our constitution has been the model for many others. These simple ideas were the light of the world. And without the sacrifices of the Continental Army and the willingness of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and so many others to take a stand for what is right, the world today would be a very different and much darker place. Today we are edging closer and closer to that reality for the most base of reasons. Sex and money. Is this how future historians will write of us? Will selfishness and greed be our epitaph?

These issues cross party lines and it doesn’t matter whether one is Republican or Democrat. The hemorrhaging of our culture has to stop, and we must act like adults. The signposts of history are clear. The pendulum has swung too far. Hard work, right conduct, and common sense must be applied. Deconstruction, revisionism, and hedonism must abate. The false gods of vanity and envy and nihilism must be put aside. We must elect officials who truly embody the citizen/servant ethic and then all of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.The Renaissance occurred because  the works of Aristotle and Plato and Ptolemy, in the arts and philosophy and science were rediscovered and built upon. It seems we must rediscover some of these basic principles once again.

Tom Wolfe wrote about the arts in the middle of the 20th century that “New compounds began succeeding each other in a berserk rush”. It was the flavor of the month in art, in philosophy, in sexuality, in conduct, even in monetary theory. Wolfe said about music that composers had become so exquisitely abstract that “no one from the outside world had the slightest interest in, much less comprehension of what was going on”. This translates across society today. there is a reason things are called “classic”. They translate across the ages. As we try to rebuild our society, we must keep this in mind.

A Trillion$ here, a Trillion$ there – The Health Care Fiasco

Senator Max Baucus (D- Montana) the head of the Senate Finance Committee, threw a $1 Trillion/year price tag for his proposed health care bill onto the table this morning to see how others would react. Having done this, we should all know by now to double or triple the number because these folks just can’t seem to play it straight. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, a faction of the Democratic Party is trying to ram through a climate change bill that would be the largest tax increase in American history. It seems that they just can’t seem to help themselves from grabbing other people’s money.

The fact that Medicare has been predicted to be bankrupt within the next 8 years by the Congressional Budget Office phases them not in the least. With one massive program going down the tubes, why not propose an even larger and more out of control program? In addition the Veteran’s Administration medical program has been terribly administered and is broken, and Walter Reed Hospital, which used to be one of the crown  jewels of the military medical system, was just recently closed because it had fallen apart. So what exists is a broad spectrum of federal medical care programs having broken down at the same time.

In the meantime, Medicare now approves scooters and Viagra. From a common sense perspective, it would seem a much better idea to limit funding to what really matters if an organization is facing financial problems. Instead, Medicare has become an arena for political favor as vendors angle for contracts. And now the Democrats in Congress and the President want to expand this into a whole new level of federal expense just as government is breaking the bank with TARP, stimulus packages, auto bailouts, and continuing resolutions loaded with pork. This makes no sense at all.

So let’s go over the costs again. Remember, this is all new spending, and the cupboard is already bare:

$ 750 Billion      TARP

$      1 Trillion    Stimulus Spending cost per year

$150 Billion     Cap & Trade Costs per year

$ 1.5 Trillion    Universal Health Care Bill cost/year

$100 Billion    Auto Industry bailout

Remember, the money for the stimulus, auto industry, and TARP  is already on the books and is being spent. So in 2010, according to these generally accepted numbers, we will be saddled with another $2.75 Trillion in spending. The total federal budget for 2008, Bush’s last year, was $2.9 trillion. In other words the president’s proposals will double our federal budget at a time we can ill afford to keep pace with 2008′s spending. Where will the money come from?

From a care standpoint, it is quite obvious that service and treatment will suffer. Such a large program cannot help but compete with the private health care industry, so it will eventually have to cut into this sector to find revenue, further accelerating the demise of the world’s best health care system. We will be left with a national health care network more akin to the nightmare county hospitals in large urban areas where patients are left in the hallways and emergency treatment can take hours. Is this the change we voted for?

The crazy part is that in most cases, the people in Congress don’t even read the bills they are voting on and only find out the details afterwards. It’s all a con conceived in back rooms and rushed through so the rubes can’t see how they’re being fleeced. And then, to add insult to injury, Congress is exempt. They will still have access to the best care available, on our dime of course, as we line up for our 5 minutes with a doctor. There has to be a better way.

The Great Climate Change Legislation Ripoff

The House Democrats did their best to bury the climate change bill as deep as possible under the cover of night yesterday. A 1,200 page monstrosity was hidden from view before the vote, and then between pork and earmarks to get certain legislators on board, and buyoffs for the coal and energy companies that distort the economics even further, we have one of the most poorly thought out pieces of legislation in history instead of a common sense approach to our environmental problems. Cap & Trade has already proven to be a scam in Europe, but the beneficiaries are the big financial houses and multinationals gaming the system, not the environment. Germany “wants us to do more” according to Frau Merkel, and yet they have been shuttering their nuclear power plants as they grow more reliant on Russian natural gas for their needs. This is the twisted path we are crafting for ourselves. Tying ourselves into pretzels as we do very little to actually improve the environment.

When you have Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the National Association of Manufacturers and U.C. Chamber of Commerce on one side, and the multinational corporations who are gaming the system on the other, you get the idea. One congressman was bought of by calling already subsidized industrial byproducts biofuels so that they can qualify for double tax credits….another congressman got a hurricane research center and Bobby Rush, the Chicago congressman from the Black Panther Party got some funding for low income households, but what is simply amazing in reading The Hill or Politico or the New York Times or the Washington Post at 2:00pm the day after, almost 24 hours after the bill passed, neither the legislators who voted on the bill nor the sycophantic press nor Al Gore nor Barack Obama nor do we the people know what the hell was really in it! Nancy Pelosi is ecstatic it passed, but doesn’t seem to know. Henry Waxman, it’s prime sponsor, doesn’t seem to quite know either. So then when it blows up in their faces in 2-3 years, they can say “gee, we didn’t know!”. This is the height of irresponsibility, and the Republican leadership should be just as ashamed they did not use every legislative tactic to force an open discussion and examination beforehand. This is not the Soviet Union or Ruritania. Or is it?

My job is involved more deeply every day in green technologies. We get under the hood and see how it all fits together and works. The solutions being discussed in that field are not definitive, nor are they even well developed intermediate answers yet. Using the technical term, they are half assed. In photovoltaic, or solar energy, the reality is that it can only ever account for perhaps 15% of the overall grid demand. It works only when the sun shines and because of things like clouds and seasons, even when gauging the efficiency of cells/modules, results vary with operating conditions. It will work great to help meet peak demand during the summer, but cannot help at night in the middle of winter. There is already a clear history of these limitations in Spain, where there was a huge surge, and then a precipitous fall in the photovoltaic industry. So we know what we are getting into. Wind, wave etc are all marginal sources at best.

One of the other issues we have to look at are electric cars. Nice idea, but where will the power come from? Same thing with those science fiction movies and Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. All of these goals require abundant, cheap electricity. Cap & Trade does nothing to get us there. Zero, zip, nada. It is meant to force us to improve efficiencies, bt you can’t get blood from a stone nor cheap, clean electricity out of thin air.

There are two solutions out there, but no one seems to want to talk about them. The first is nuclear energy. The second is the transmission system.  The very first thing a conservationist looks at is, you guessed it, conservation. The current grid was built out  in the 1960′s at a time when utilities were government regulated and owned the lines. The first thing to be jettisoned when deregulation came to the power industry was the transmission system; the wires. They are expensive to maintain and don’t generate much revenue. So as a result, power loss across the lines themselves, because of lack of maintenance has risen from @ 5% 15 years ago to close to 10% today. This is a simple maintenance issue. However, the longer the current has to travel, the more that gets lost in transmission as well. This can be improved by adding more lines at greater efficiencies but is expensive and companies don’t want to bear the cost. That’s why the federal government gave utilities monopolies in the first place.  So they could afford to build the infrastructure and amortize it over 20-30-50 years. Now we’re back in the same boat again. The Smart Grid will  be a significant factor, as will having photovoltaic closer to the place of use. This may improve efficiencies by say, 25 or 30% best case. That’s pretty amazing. But the problem is that demand growth already outstrips supply by 25% per year and has done so for many years. Think again about all those electric cars and the burden they will place on the grid. We will need huge amounts of electricity at a time when Cap & Trade is shutting down coal fired plants across the country.

The elephant in the living room is nuclear power. Under Bush, 50 new plants were being submitted to the regulatory process. Today, they are to an extent in limbo. President Obama, who pushed for Cap & Trade, has offered no solutions to date that meet the reality check. Nuclear power is the cleanest, most efficient, lowest cost solution, and as the technology progresses problems such as supply ( there’s not a lot of uranium out there), and safety (so far the only fatal major accident was Chernobyl, and that was a horrible design flaw issue) will be further improved as will generating efficiency, reducing costs even further. The Chinese get it and are building plants. The French rely on nuclear for 40% of their needs. Here in the US of A, our legislators would rather enrich those same Wall Street dirtbags who got us into the financial mess by creating a whole new Ponzi scheme.

Well, at least you know where I stand on the subject.

Obama, Chavez & Castro

Honduras is faced with an unusual problem this week. The democratically elected president tried to force a referendum on holding a new constitutional convention in contravention of Hondura’s 1982 constitution. The Honduran Congress voted Mr. Zelaya out of office and a new president, the head of the Congress, was immediately appointed to serve out Mr. Zelaya’s remaining term.  The Supreme Court affirmed the decision. Mr. Zelaya was flown out of the country to exile in Costa Rica.

President Obama joined with Hugo Chavez, the dictator of Venezuela, and Fidel Castro, the most repressive dictator in the Americas for the past 50 years, in condemning this “coup”. Mr. Chavez has been busy for the past few weeks trying to close Venezuela’s last opposition television station so that he can control the news while Cuba only last week detained more dissidents.  AP and others are reporting the array of leaders in the Americas condemning this state of affairs. But we must ask ourselves another question. Why after stating his noninterventionist policiy in Iran is Mr. Obama so quick to speak out forcefully on much more opaque situation?

Mr Chavez has, since 1999, amassed power and curtailed human rights in his own country while subsidizing leftist parties throughout the Americas. In August 2007, two Venezuelans later identified as government agents, were arrested in Argentina at the Buenos Aires airport carrying a suitcase destined for the election campaign of Claudia Kirchner, the leftist candidate. A week before, another $800,000 was allowed through by another Argentinian official, who was later forced to resign. Other payments originating in Venezuela totaled hundreds of thousands more. Ms. Kirchner won the election and aligned her country with Venezuela immediately. The same thing has happened in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia,  Paraguay, and it is believed by most Hondurans, in Honduras. Venezuelan influence and money have funded the elections of leftist leaders in all of these countries as the Bush administration was otherwise engaged and seemingly did not care. The political landscape is once again favoring statists and dictators, and when a reaction to the onslaught on the rule law occurs our president comes  down on the side of the bad guys.

Chavez think’s he’s  Fidel for the 21st century and idolizes his mentor. His goal is to outshine Simon Bolivar himself. His allies include Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and Russia, some of the most repressive regimes in the world. Under his leadership, crime and economic inequality have skyrocketed in Venezuela and yet his desire to create a cult of personality is unique in its audacity in face of the facts. Repression and intimidation rule now in Venezuela. And don’t be fooled. Chavez has been reading Marx since he was 10 years old and has a messianic complex.

There is a mentality prevalent in Latin America that governments, not the markets, create and manage wealth. This crosses ideologies. It can be seen in Peronism in Argentina or Chavismo in Venezuela or the transnational Bolivarian empire which Chavez is trying to build. Markets, capitalism, and  religion are the enemy. To the Left, Jesus is a Marxist revolutionary. To them Juan Peron is a nationalist liberal, not the fascist dictator who destroyed one of the wealthiest countries in the world. There is a worship of thugs and crooks who as long as they spout the ideological diatribe of the populist, get away with wholesale theft and oppression. At the same time, the oligarchies are probably the strongest in the world. They use the Church as a shield for their plunder. The middle road of moderate capitalism is thus the exception rather than the rule.

So in Honduras there is a clash between the Constitution and the desire of the president to rewrite that constitution in the Bolivarian idiom. The reality seems to be that the goal is a dictatorship similar to that in Venezuela. With the Statists, you get one free election and then the darkness. Honduras barely has its head above water. It has the MS 13 to deal with and one of the highest murder rates in the Americas. Zelaya was actively trying to shut down the opposition media and replace it with his own. There were massive protests in the streets against him, and the two other pillars of government decisively opposed his actions.

So where does President Obama stand? Why of course with Castro and Chavez. What else would one expect from a community organizer? It fits his own world view. While the Europeans have called for mediation, Obama has taken a hard line. He has called the coup illegal despite the actions of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court. This is the same president who 2 weeks ago cautioned for nonintervention in Iran, where the election was fraudulent and the regime repressed demonstrations violently. So far in Honduras, the rioting and protests have been limited. So why the aggressive stance now? Hillary Clinton has stated that the United States believes the situation has “evolved into a coup”. If the Congress and e Supreme Court have ruled decisively against the president, what then is supposed to happen? The Congress was discussing impeachment proceedings. Shouldn’t we allow the Hondurans to sort this all out first before acting precipitously? Hugo Chavez stands ready to invade and the Cuban Army are no slouches. These are  ideologically driven stormtroopers still. How will President Obama react then? Could the Hondurans count on American support, or perhaps we’ll just leave them dangling in the wind.

Back in the 1990′s a wonderfully titled book called “The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot” was published. It tore into the hypocrisy and venality of the power structure throughout the continent. I sense today that it’s authors might want to focus their efforts a few degrees of latitude north. Obama’s statements should be worrisome for anyone who truly values freedom.

Dependence Day

We Hold these Truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”.

Pretty simple, and stunning its simplicity,  beauty, and truth. Read it to a villager in Niger or China or South America, and it has the same impact. The same basic yearnings unite all of us. And yet today in the country of its origin, we seem to have forgotten the opportunity given us by our forefathers. In the interest of comfort and safety the American people have slowly conceded many freedoms in increments and ceded critical thinking to others. In the interest of  power, some would limit these freedoms. In the interest of greed, others would coopt these freedoms. all of this from within, not without. These are issues we ourselves must discuss and debate, and yet there is little of the philosophical discussion of man’s place in the world and our duties and responsibilities, only rights we seem to invent as we go along.

The punk band The Clash wrote of a right not to be killed. Not a bad idea. But we don’t have the right to color television or a new car or to expropriate our neighbor’s stuff. We have freedoms and then some clearly outlined rights. Too often these days, everybody knows their rights, and these get kind of weird at times (ask any 12 year old) but not their responsibilities and duties. These go hand in hand.

We live in a world of dependence; on our parents when we’re young, on each other where we work and live; on the value of the money we earn; on our most basic services. But beyond this it’s all dependent on the choices we make, and we have to make these from knowledge, not ignorance. Responsibly, knowingly, and considering all of the options. It’s called free will. We were endowed with this gift by our Creator. It allows us to choose our path and build cathedrals or skyscrapers or write symphonies. It also allows us to hurt ourselves or enslave others. The Declaration outlines the grievances of the colonists against tyranny and liberates them. But it does not liberate them from responsibility. Rather, it very clearly calls on that responsibility to their Creator to act in a certain manner they felt was unassailable. With respect, with charity, with tolerance for one another within certain clearly outlined modes of conduct. This was dismissed by the adage “times change”. It is true, but they should change for the better and it is for us to do this using our better instincts.

Today we are risking what independence we have left. We are battered financially and our leaders don’t seem to have done a very good job in presenting us with viable alternatives to help us regain our standing. Greed rules, and “what’s in it for me” are the operative philosophies. Morality and gravitas are mocked openly, and pseudosciences are replacing the wonder of opportunity and invention and creativity. We are presented with a rapidly expanding picture of our universe, and we are watching “Dancing with the Stars” instead. Cults of celebrity and the absurd have more credence than the fundamental truths. Deconstructionism and revisionism in the face of the facts dominate intellectual discourse. The Id takes precedence.

The signposts are still there though. The Declaration can never be erased, but as Ronald Reagan said “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States when men were free”.

It all goes back to the basics in the end. The same philosophies that propelled Western Civilization are those that will propel us into a better future. This is not a time for sophistry or cant, but for common sense, hard work, and a rededication to the principles of our fathers. No one ever said it was going to be easy, but the beauty is that we have a road map in the Declaration and the Constitution and the founding principles.

In defense of Sarah Palin

I think we were all stunned today when the governor of Alaska announced her resignation. Obviously under pressure, she outlined her accomplishments as governor and left a mystified Alaska press corps. What we do know is that she has been vilified beyond any public figure in recent memory by much lesser people than herself for no reason except that she was a threat to the established order.

It didn’t seem to matter whether it was from the right or left, the Beltway elite and their sycophants descended like carrion birds on Ms. Palin and her family. Even the Mafia doesn’t go after spouses and children. And despite this; despite the 50 ethics charges and the unprecedented legions of opposition researchers that descended on Alaska like dung beetles, nothing was found. And the vilification continued anyway. The most vile things were said by people who should certainly know better; television personalities, news anchors, politicians. It should be remembered that these kinds of things can have a funny way of biting you in the ass later on.

What ever happened to the American sense of fair play? What happened to our common decency? What happened to our respect for getting out there and getting involved and getting things done? Are we jackals simply ripping each other into bloody shreds now? For there are no lions left… only mangy, sadly twisted buffoons crawling out of their ratholes on the Upper East Side and Georgetown and most of the statehouses in the country conning the rest of us with a cacophony of lies.

As our president lies to us again and again… As our Congress’ approval rating descends below zero. As scandal after scandal bares the lies and venality and whoredom of Pelosi and Reid and Ensign and Sanford and Rangel  Congress has the gall to pass an$800 Billion stimulus bill overloaded beyond comprehension  with pork and a  multi Trillion dollar sham of a climate change bill without reading them and the press gives them a hall pass and then vilifies someone who actually gives a damn and steps up to do what she thinks is right.  It’s like having the country club set golf clapping as the looters carry off anything not nailed down. What the hell is the matter with us?

Those same values of Ms. Palin go back 10 generations and were the ones that got this country through a revolution and a civil war and the struggle for civil rights. She embodies the philosophy of “do the right thing”. Have our values skewed so badly?

Was Harry Truman brilliant? FDR didn’t think so. Grant was considered a drunk and a fool and a failure. Dwight Eisenhower was buried at the Pentagon in the shadows when his country called upon him. The United States Army was 10 million strong and great leaders arose from the ranks to carry us through our darkest days. It’s funny and it is exceptional that in this country leaders arise from the mundane to accomplish great things. It is what separates this country from all others.

Ms. Palin has done some great things already. Streamlining state government and cleaning out the detritus is not an easy thing. One automatically makes enemies in the bureaucracy and the gravy train. She stood up to some of the most powerful businessmen in the world and helped build a pipeline that would otherwise probably not have been built. In Alaska, environmentalism means making peace with the bears and the moose in your backyard. I have found people who are dealing with nature every day much more practical and solution oriented than theorists sitting behind desks 4,000 miles away. When you depend upon that environment for your livelihood, you respect it.

Taking up the gauntlet of a presidential campaign is a scary thing. As Truman said, ” if you can’t take the heat stay out of the kitchen”. But when is enough enough? I think we have reached a tipping point. I think we must all, regardless of our political beliefs, say “no more will we countenance the vile and disgraceful blood sport politics has become”. I may or may not vote for Ms. Palin if and when she  runs for office. But I will judge her on her actions and deeds, not some twisted propaganda.

But we must now hold all our leaders and ourselves to a higher standard. The nuclear warfare politics have to stop. We must say “enough’ to the jackals. As they say, “speak now, or forever hold your peace”.

A Bloody Honduras?

So Mr. Zelaya’s plane was not allowed to land at Tegucigalpa airport as had been reiterated several times by the interim government. Zelaya’s supporters tried to rush the fences and shots rang out, killing at least a few. The Nicaraguan army  is rumored to be mobilizing towards the Honduran border. And this could all have been averted with a measured response from our president.

Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s president, is an avowed communist and ally of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. None of them have much respect for the rule of law or human rights. He has few illusions about Mao’s dictum about political power. Now, faced with a crisis in which perhaps hundreds or thousands may die, and in which all of the branchs of President Zelaya’s government including his own party are aligned against him, Mr. Zelaya has returned to Managua vowing to try again tomorrow.

Common sense seems uncommon these days. But to me, it would seem that the United Nations, the OAS, Mr. Obama, and his allies might want to prevent bloodshed rather than encouraging it.

AP quotes the director of the Latin American Studies Institute, Harley Shaiken,  one of the most leftist academics in the country, as saying about the interim regime “they miscalculated. I think they thought it would play as a constitutional change, as the Supreme Court and Congress were involved. But that’s not how it played. He called it “a combination of arrogance and isolation fueled by the traditional oligarchy in Honduras”.

Now if my president allied himself closely with Hugo Chavez and tried to hold an election, as Zelaya did, in direct violation of the Constitution, I would be deeply worried about that president’s intentions whether in Honduras or anywhere else. If I were in the Senate or Supreme Court I would consider taking action. If then that same president then took to the streets with a mob to try and steamroller the issue, again against the law, would that constitute a valid reason for the Hondurans to remove him from office? Mr. Shaiken’s analysis reveals his own  bias. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of people AP and the media go to on a regular basis.

Honduras, and common sense, are at the brink. The blood will not be on the hands of the Honduran people and government, but on those of Mr. Zelaya, Mr. Ortega, Mr. Chavez, and Mr. Obama.

Iran’s Descent into Fascism

Seemingly unnoticed by many, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced that they had taken over the nation’s security and warned political opponents that there is no middle ground. This is a dangerous new development in the aftermath of the recent elections.This is being portrayed as a takeover of the country, which in essence means that the democratic facade of Iranian politics has now been cast aside and what is left is a dictatorship.

The Guard’s support for Ahmedinejad is absolute, as he was formerly a high ranking member. A major crackdown is underway, with some of the allied mullahs calling for executions of dissenters. They also immediately threatened Iran’s opponents with retaliation for any criticism. This was not the government. It was the Army.

The opposition is preparing to commemorate those killed in a 1999 attack by government thugs on students in dormitories of Teheran University in which dozens of students were beaten, some quite severely. That incident was the result of student protests of harsh new censorship laws at the time. It resulted in protests across the country for 5 days afterwards.

Today the lines have been drawn sharply. The Revolutionary Guard are in charge and have warned the dissidents clearly that they will maintain control by any means necessary.What we are seeing is the crushing of any remaining dissent within Iran, and the emergence of a blackshirted dictatorship with no pretence of dissent. This is the nazification of Iran. We will know more on Thursday, but when one side has all the guns, they usually win.

Obama’s Big Mistake on Honduras

New information has been published about the genesis of the Honduran political crisis that contradicts the policies undertaken by the OAS, U.N., Obama, Chavez, and Castro. All of them have been calling the situation in Honduras a coup and are attempting to force Mr. Zelaya upon the country, and yet it seems that the decisions of the Honduran government  have  perfectly legal underpinnings  based upon their Constitution.

In this document, Title II, Chapter 3, Article 42 clearly states that “la calidad de ciudedano se pierde – por coartar la libertad de sufragio, adulterar documentos electorales o emplear medios fraudulentos para burlar la voluntad popular”. In English this translates to “the quality of the citizen is lost if ” they limit the freedom of suffrage, adulterate electoral documents, or to use fraudulent means to deceive the popular will.” This would seem to be a reasonable and clear case of Mr. Zalaya adulterating electoral documents.

Why did our State Department’s experts on Latin American law not translate something so fundamental to the underpinnings of the president’s decision to join in the condemnation of Honduran government? Why the rush to judgment? Why the continued support of a populist whose own people have renounced him and who is supported by our enemies?

Shoddiness and a roughshod interpretation of the law, whether ours or those of other countries, is a hallmark of the current administration. There is a deeply disturbing lack of respect for the rule of law. To Obama, a lawyer, the law means what he wants it to mean and his interpretation is far to the left of the American public. He is clearly wrong on this one.

Suicide California Style; Driving the bus off the cliff in Sacramento

California is in the midst of the worst budget crisis in its history. The state is $41 billion in the hole and the State Assembly still dithers onwards putting the hard decisions off till October. The major banks, according to the Wall Street Journal, have informed the state that they will not accept the state’s IOU’s. This is a very bad thing. It is the height of irresponsibility in itself, but when considering the seriousness of the crisis, the leadership should be tarred and feathered.

To give one a sense of the outright crazo stupidity of the leadership, one must consider Karen Bass (D – Wilshire/Los Angeles) the Speaker of the Assembly. Remember, the state has already cut many employee’s salaries and forced many  to take furloughs as well as an interim measure, and yet Ms. Bass, when asked by Tavis Smiley on June 15 the simple question “we know that today is the deadline for a balanced budget and  obviously it’s not going to happen today” responded:

“well actually in fact we have a budget that is in place”

Today, July 11, there is no budget in place. When asked why the State legislature did not cut their own salaries and budgets when cutting others,she replied that she had two children in college, a non sequitur.  Ms. Bass should realize that a lot of us are making similar sacrifices. She, on the other hand, is driving the state over the side of a cliff while enjoying all the perks and entitlements of the office.

So far, the state has taken only very limited half measures, and the latest fantasy of the Left seems to be that it was all the fault of Prop 13 . This is patently false. When enacted, Prop 13 limited the property tax  on residences to 1% of the full cash value of the property at the time of sale. The Democrats argue that this has crippled the state. However, California also allows a 2% annual assessment increase, and has the highest turnover of residential sales in the nation. Thus every time the property sells it is reassessed and property taxes levied accordingly. In addition, hundreds of thousands of new homes have been built in the state, and under Mello-Roos legislation, most areas with significant construction levied a 2%+ tax for a fixed period of time, usually 5-10 years, in order to pay for infrastructure, so those costs have been covered.

The reality is that California has experienced record state tax revenues from all sources for nigh on 20 years, and in the past several years has managed to outspend this by 20+%. In 2008, when the state was faced with a $20 Billion imbalance, the difference was 25%. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected, the state’s population has slowed growth considerably, and yet the state government has added over 100,000 jobs. Whole new classes of employees such as home health care providers (unionized by the SEIU) have been created.

But it gets worse. California has 12% of the nation’s population, but over 30% of it’s welfare recipients. To top it off, the Democrats in the state legislature refuse to allow any investigatory function to probe fraud and abuse of the system. That same refusal holds true for the home health care sector, where suspicions of abuse are rife. There is simply no accountability for most programs today. California has become a magnet for graft. And the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome, who wants to run for governor, announced that he wants all the food in San Francisco government facilities under his jurisdiction to be organic. This is not fiction. It is our reality.

The Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the  world, is being starved for water by the decision by a Federal appellate judge to turn off the floodgates to protect the Delta Snail Darter, a potentially endangered fish that may or may not be indigenous to the Sacramento River. As a result, orchards that take 20 years to bear fruit are dying, and the agricultural industry has crashed. The official unemployment rates in Fresno and Bakersfield and Modesto are 15-20%, but the casual rate, after the unemployment runs out, is over 30%. And this is hitting hardest those who can afford it the least. Family farms and farm workers. Life is tough enough in the Valley. Now some judge in San Francisco has made it impossible. Where are the United Farmworkers on this issue?

Drive through the business parks in Southern California. The most common sign in many now is “For Lease”. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, especially in manufacturing. Fishing grounds have been closed because of overfishing. The forests have been closed for logging. Even slant drilling for offshore oil has been blocked as the price of oil has risen.  But Senator Dianne Feinstein recently got an exception from the Interior Department that will allow a company in which her husband has a significant financial interest in to mine gold in Northern California. Where are the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle on this story?

If you have studied economics, it is well understood that wealth is only created by four industries; manufacturing, real estate, natural resources, and agriculture. Everything else is a service industry. The state government of California has created a perfect storm that has brought all four pillars of our economy to their knees. Basic wealth is what pays the taxes for government and for schools and for doctors and for transportation and for laundries and for the movie industry. Much of our economy is built on disposable income, and without the fundamentals it will all eventually collapse.

Go to Sacramento and speak with our legislators and you will find so many one note Charlies it’s scary. Whether it’s gay rights or protecting developers or environmentalism or the unions, so many of our legislators have either been bought or have such a limited range of knowledge we may never get out of the mess we’re in. California is fighting for its life. There are common sense solutions, but far there is little common sense being applied. Do we stand and watch as the bus tumbles end over end down the side of the cliff or do we act?

If Shepard Fairey Can get Away With It

July 9, 2009 – Protests in Iran

Today marked the 10th anniversary of the violent suppression of student protests at Teheran University in 1999 against the closing of opposition newspapers and the arrests of reporters and editors. Several people were killed and hundreds injured and arrested that day and in the riots in the days after.

Today, opponents of the Ahmedinejad regime again took to the streets to commemorate that event and renew their call for greater freedom. The protesters are mainly students and the people one would see on the street any day of the week; old men, housewives, workers, small businessmen. They live in a society where they have already been warned of dire consequences for their peaceful protests. The videos that have come out show people marching and chanting. There is little violence on the part of the protesters both today’s protests and in the aftermath of the recent election. And yet, to quell these demonstrations, the regime has used dogs, clubs, and guns. It has also been reported that many of the Basiji, the paramilitaries most responsible for the violence, do not speak Farsi. The police have fared better in public opinion, but not much.

In The Guardian, a doctor working in a large hospital in Teheran paints a dark picture. While the official death toll from the recent protests is listed at 20, the doctor’s hospital had recorded 38 riot related deaths, while a colleague at another hospital nearby reported 10. The Basiji have been confiscating the identification cards of the dead and wounded. Medical staff are under pressure to hide the casualties, and one doctor committed suicide. Many of the victims had multiple gunshot wounds and the downward trajectory path through their bodies indicates that the shooters would probably have been at an elevated location such as rooftops. this was premeditated state terrorism.

Video on the web shows thousands of protesters today. Not nearly the numbers seen in the recent demonstrations, but with the threats by the government of the most severe consequences, this is not a surprise. Dozens of known activists have been arrested in the past week to prevent the movement from growing, and cell phones and computers are being confiscated to examine call and e mail histories.Government agents are searching Facebook and Twitter to identify their opponents. The opposition has grown from the supporters of Mousavi to include a broader spectrum of Iran’s population more concerned with the direction of the government.

In response, the government has undertaken an Orwellian propaganda campaign to both crush dissent and promote their version of the truth. The aforementioned doctor wrote something about the state of government pervasiveness and control that must be repeated.

” Whoever you are in Iran and whatever you do, it is easy to doubt yourself. Many of us who witnessed this state aggression watch Iranian news and listen to the authorities and start to question what we saw. The bias is so great you begin to feel isolated, question what you have witnessed. At night, the Basiji swept the riot zones and cleared away evidence. They want us to think nothing happened. They want us to be blind.”

This same philosophy of government holds true today in many countries, including the United States and Britain. Whether in Teheran, or London, or Tegucigalpa, or Washington, we must hold our leaders to account for the truth and for the defense of basic human rights. In the meantime, watered down statements by the G-8 leaders guarantee the killings and oppression will continue until the unlikely event Iranians rise up against their dictator. Far more likely in this world of prevarication and appeasement, the jackboots will do their best to crush the human spirit. We are seeing the flowering of Islamofascism. Soon will come the uniforms and rallies once again unless we give both moral and concrete support to the basic human dignity of the least among us.

Does Cap & Trade Doom our World?

Jim Hansen, the director of of NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in Maryland is one of the country’s primary researchers on the causes of climate change. His work is grounded in science, and he’s very worried about carbon levels and their effect on global weather and water. He wrote an article posted on the Huffington Post today that caught my attention. One of the primary issues with the climate change debate has been the scientific underpinnings. There is considerable disagreement over cause and effect, but I for one am always willing to listen to a logical argument. Mr. Hansen’s topic this morning was the absolute worthlessness of the Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade bill. I agree. He points out several inconvenient truths about the bill, including:

. It guts the Clean Air Act, removing the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants
. It sets meager targets – 13% less CO2 emissions in 2020
. It sabotages carbon reduction by providing fictitious offsets by which others are paid to preserve forests, while logging and deforestation will simply be moved elsewhere.
. It has no provisions for preventing insider trading by participants.
. It provides no pricing structure for carbon, which allows no foundation for an understanding of the mechanisms for carbon reduction and cost/benefit analysis
. It is “astoundingly inefficient”

What has been passed is clearly a profiteer’s paradise with literally no benefit to the environment. Mr. Hansen then goes on to discuss setting a specific carbon fee which would be the equivalent of perhaps $1.00/gallon of gasoline. He discusses greater efficiency in the devices consuming energy. He then discusses  a dividend for carbon reduction. I can agree with much of this as well.

I strongly agree that we must  become much more efficient in our consumption of the world’s resources. Whether it is fisheries or minerals or forests, we now live in a time where we know for certain the earth’s resources have hard limits. We must dig and drill deeper to find minerals and materiel, and we are overfishing our oceans.  We are throwing away as much as we consume. These are facts, not politics. As a matter of common sense and at the very least, we must ensure that the lungs of our planet, the forests and phytoplankton and bacterioplankton, are preserved in order that life on the planet may continue.

As the global population increases or even if it stabilizes, the demand for resources simply because of the transition of so many economies into higher technology and better living conditions cannot be accommodated for much longer unless we become more efficient. Look at computer technology. The cost drops exponentially as we implement better and lower cost manufacturing methods and materials. But even there, many of the environmental dictates make little sense because they were driven not by hard data, but by bureaucracy and politics similar to Cap & Trade.

Let me use an example. In the 1960′s and early 70′s certain chlorinated solvents were used in the manufacture of electronics as cleaners and developing solutions. They were highly efficient, safe and could be recycled, but there was a concern because of atmospheric damage. These materials were slowly phased out under the Montreal Protocols. The replacement was first milder solvents, and then water based solvents, and with each changeover, the chemical efficiency was reduced substantially. Instead of releasing chlorinated hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, greater and greater quantities of energy and water as well as other materials which have their own deleterious effect on the environment, were used. The characteristics of those original solvents are well known. They are the most efficient and lowest cost technologies in this case. Would it not be better to make the original process much more efficient and improve recycling? At a 10X efficiency improvement? 20X? Sometimes innovation can be both more cost effective and better for the environment. We need to do better.

Cap & Trade will, along with the growing energy demands of our world, put a huge strain on power generation. The use of coal has gone from 1485 million tons in 1965 to 2929 million tons in 2005 (source: BP). Cap & Trade can only eventually force the closure of the most inefficient plants in a logical world. However, the world is not logical. The developing world overwhelmingly uses coal and is not about to stop any time soon. The two largest users, China and India, refuse to have anything to do with Cap & Trade. So where does that leave us? That is the crux of the issue. Even under aggressive timetables carbon dioxide reduction goals will not be met under this legislation. But someone’s going to get rich, which I am sure was the intention all along. You see, the oligarchs in Washington and on Wall Street really don’t care as long as they get theirs. The planet may die but they will be seated in the First Class lounge of the Titanic.

The shift to alternative energies will place a massive demand increase on the electrical power grid. For the long term, this is the only solution. The increase in demand by electrical devices alone will ensure this, and if personal transportation goes electric, the demand and strain on infrastructure will increase exponentially. We need more efficient energy and we need it fast. Nuclear is the only real option long term for the world’s infrastructure. It is also the cheapest technology. Nuclear can also generate hydrogen cheaply as an alternative to oil from a virtually limitless supply of water, and hydrogen burns clean. And yet little has been done to accelerate implementation of the technology. It is clearly the the best solution, and with accelerated work on safer, more efficient new technologies we can meet the need to reduce carbon missions and increase the overall available power to the requirements necessary to build a better world. But in Washington, Bonn, Rome, London, and Moscow, there is only silence.

When I see an old airplane taking to the skies I stand in awe of the men who built it. It’s durable, and like they say, they just don’t build them like that anymore. But planned obsolescence is part and parcel of commerce today. The environmentalists talk about recycling and green materials, but the reality is that in most cases this construction simply reduces the durability of the product and we throw it away more quickly. Look at a Weber barbecue built 10 years ago and one built today. The more recent vintage will almost certainly end up at the dump much sooner. Better product quality and lifetime is another area for improvement.

Politics is driven by knee jerk response in many cases. Mass propaganda machines whether in commerce or politics stand ready to sell a product or candidate and the facts and relative merits are immaterial. Many campaigns have become Orwellian in their deception. Cap & Trade is one of these. The Chinese and Indians understand this and will have no part of it. If Mr. Hansen’s numbers are correct, we may all die as a result. The G 8 meeting this week only stands the United States up to ridicule for our sophistry.

President Bush began the process of rebuilding and adding to our nuclear infrastructure. It takes 10 years to complete a plant, and there are only a few in the early stages. In most cases ground has not yet been broken or permits obtained. It will be years before we see a single watt of clean cheap power. In the meantime, under the new administration, nuclear power has fallen out of favor. Nary a word has been said.At a time when there is urgency for a number of reasons, our Congress is enacting legislation that is both venal and ineffective. The same hucksters responsible for the mess on Wall Street have another opportunity to cash in.

We have a defining moment ahead of us. Do we use common sense, hard work and ingenuity to find the solutions or do we leave it to the sophists and market speculators? We need a new Manhattan Project. We need a sense of urgency that we can gather around as a country. We are in the midst of the worst recession in decades and Congress is pissing away trillions of dollars on vapor and pork. A clean efficient energy infrastructure and common sense invention will benefit the planet and our economy, leaving a better world for future generations.

The recession isn’t over yet

Here in San Francisco, the signs of the recession are all around us. Attending the SEMI show, the world’s premier venue for the semiconductor industry, the halls are quiet and the outlook gloomy. Semiconductors are the leading indicator for the electronics industry, which is just about anything these days, and this does not bode well for the overall economy.

Walking the streets and visiting restaurants, as one does on these trips, there is a curious lifelesness. Restaurants and small businesses are closed with “for lease” signs, and the activity on the streets seems subdued. The restaurants we have visited seem to be only partially full, and when asked, owners and waiters say business is off considerably.

In California’s Central Valley, farmers have erected “Congress’s Dustbowl” signs to protest the lack of water caused by the damming of the Sacramento River waters to the Valley because of the Federal injunction protecting the Snail Darter, a fish which may or may not be endangered. You can see the dead groves of almonds and fallow fields as you drive up I-5 from Los Angeles. It’s much worse in the foothills of the Sierra, where irrigation makes all the difference.

July is the time when business starts picking up again. The car companies are building new models and orders for tools and materials pick up. Business ramps up until October, when it begins to tail off until the end of the year. This year is different, though. July has been quiet. Volumes are not picking up. There is no buzz in the manufacturing sector.

The deficit numbers look good for the moment, but the reality is that oil imports are way down and while exports of grain and raw materials are up, manufactured goods exports are stagnant. The airlines are hurting, and a couple may not last till the end of the year. This will then hurt Boeing, especially, America’s prime technology exporter. Delays on the 787 are not helping them either. By the way, this export profile more closely resembles America’s role in the mid 19th Century, when our manufacturing industries were immature and natural resources and agriculture were our primary exports.

Management, especially in the manufacturing sector, are like deer in the headlights. Frozen, unsure of what to do next. Conserving cash is the operative mode. This further stalls the economy. Reinvestment in plant & equipment is critical to a modern economy and provides its own spur to productivity.

While Wall Street has been positive recently, the underlying signs are not good. The next big surge in real estate foreclosures will be in the higher end homes in the $600,000 – $1,500,000 range. This is the heart of the economy in some ways. These are the people who had the disposable income. Now, with higher taxes and falling incomes, they are being hit just as the middle class was hit last year.

The Cap & Trade bill will certainly be a brake on the economy. Some say it will cost every household up to $2,000/year. Now, Congress wants to raise taxes to pay for their poorly thought out health care bill.  Has anyone actually read it yet? The president is trying his best to ram this through as fast as he can while he has a majority, but once again, no one is seeing the details. The burden from this bill will even further weigh on the economy as the best medical care system in the world deteriorates. That is a stone cold guarantee, by the way. Fewer and fewer breakthroughs, because managed care will be the order of the day. Look how well the government runs Medicare (bankrupt in 2017) now and you’ll get a peek at health care in the future.

So where are the bright spots? The stimulus money has not even hit in most sectors, and much of what has been spent has gone to the states with the most out of control spending. The only sector growing is the public sector, which does absolutely nothing to spur the economy. The TARP funds disappeared into the accounts of the banks to make their balance sheets look better. Little of this money is being loaned out. If one looks at the facts objectively, so far, over a trillion dollars has been paid out to those who have acted most irresponsibly in our society; reckless banks, reckless states, and reckless borrowers. And the rest of us are still being asked to knuckle down and pay more. The government is about to create a “right to health care” out of thin air which we cannot afford even under the best of circumstances. So where does the money come from? How is this even Constitutional?

The sycophants in the press tell us that the recession is ending. Not from where I sit, and somehow, being in manufacturing and out on the road in the real world, I have the feeling that perhaps the people in the bubble might want to look around and see what is really going on. Whether it’s San Francisco or Michigan, where unemployment is hitting 20%, or Florida, this country is still hurting badly and needs to begin the recovery.

We can turn this thing around. But we have to have the common sense and willpower to work hard and make sacrifices and act for the long term. This is still the greatest country on earth, and we have the resources and talents to learn quickly from from our mistakes and capitalize on that knowledge.

Two Deaths in Afghanistan

Up close against the Pakistani border provinces of North and South Waziristan is Paktika province in Afghanistan. My friends are there now spread across some of the more Godforsaken real estate on the planet. The area is like the foothills of Southern California without the charm and more altitude. Combat Outpost Zerok is one of the more “picturesque” outposts of our military in Afghanistan. There’s a single rough track they call a road that runs miles in from another dirt track. The resupply crews call it “Ambush Alley”. Think about Gunga Din and lose the illusion. Aggregate carboy walls and sandbags and shit burning details, some Conex containers to offer some cover from the elements and very small arms fire, and a couple of generators to run the lights and radios, and you get the idea.  Lots and lots of sandbags and razor wire.

On the 4th of July, like many others, I read of an attack on an outpost somewhere in Afghanistan that killed two American soldiers. The AP reported that the Taliban had launched a coordinated attack first with a suicide truck bomber to try and blow the gates (which failed), and then with coordinated mortar, machine gun, and RPG fire, raking a quiet FOB Zerok. Over 200 Talibi hit pretty much at once from 2 sides with everything they had.

The American paratroopers on the base reacted quickly and their training took over. The machine gunners, infantrymen, and mortarmen all went into action as all hell broke loose. Medics set up an aid station for the casualties, both theirs and ours. Funny how Americans are like that. We’ll rain hell down on our enemies and then go out and police the area and take extraordinary measures to save their lives after we’re done. It’s a Judeo Christian thing.

One of the mortarmen, PFC Aaron Fairbairn, 20, of Aberdeen, WA was hit by shrapnel from a mortar bomb. His team member, PFC  Justin Casillas, 19, of Dunnegan, CA lifted Aaron over his shoulder and ran towards the aid station. They did not make it. Another mortar bomb exploded, and both of them were mortally injured. 7 other soldiers were wounded in the attack. The attack went on for hours with air and Apache support that helped keep the base from being overrun.

Our soldiers devastated the enemy. Dozens were killed, and the bloodstains leading back across the border to the safe haven for the Taliban were many. These were murderous thugs trying to impose the worst sort of degradation on their own people, and their sole goal was to take as many American scalps as possible on our most sacred civic holiday for the glory of Allah and Sheikh Sirajuddin Haqqani.

PFC Casillas was buried yesterday back in the central Valley where he grew up. He always wanted to be a soldier, and he paid the soldier’s price. He was met by his family and friends and the Patriot Guard at the airport, and the Woodland and Dunnegan Fire Departments and CHP provided an escort and honor guard. Yesterday they and other public safety officers did the same again as they laid him to rest. It seems that across the country, mainly in the small towns, we reach out now to the families to honor these kids, and some old men sometimes too, who pay that price. People were lined along the streets in respect as PFC Casillas was taken to his final rest , holding flags and covering their hearts with their palms.

PFC Fairbairn was met with a similar escort when he arrived at the Hoquiam, WA airport out on the coast south of Seattle at the base of the Olympic Peninsula.  He enlisted in early 2008 and this was his first deployment. He will be buried tomorrow.

These young men knew their duty and did it in the face of death to protect all Americans. As we had our barbecues and picnics and parades, and as we ate too much and drank too much, these kids died for our freedoms to say and think and do as we pretty well please. We don’t see this in the suburbs and cities. Death is distant, hermetically sealed off. It’s in the small towns that we see the price of war more clearly.

We must respect the  sacrifice of these young men and so many others who have paid that price and demand more of ourselves in return. It’s called keeping the faith. May God rest their souls and comfort their loved ones and buddies back in Afghanistan.

Fixing California

Just after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected, he hired a woman named Donna Arduin to help sort out California’s budgets and expenses. She had come from Florida and prior to that, Michigan and New York, where she had worked for other  governors in balancing budgets. Her job was to review the budget and then perhaps fix same. The California Performance Review actually only reviewed the states operations and administration, with 1,200 recommendations for streamlining government. It did not tackle the underlying issues, but it was a start. Unfortunately, not a lot of it was implemented because of political and ideological turf battles. Almost all of the consolidation measures recommended were trashed, and the government continued to grow like Godzilla when the poor Japanese government officials found out the hard way he liked being zapped with laser beams. So that didn’t work, and the state added 100,000 employees along with who knows how many local governmental jobs. It seems no one really has a good handle on the whole thing.

Well I have a few, humble ideas that will help.

1. English Only in Schools – ESL has been proven not to work. There is a huge bureaucracy that a – fails in its mission to mainstream students, and b-redirects resources away from fundamental education in the basics.

Start when the children are 5. They are little sponges for knowledge at that age. Classes for basic English can be a part of the curriculum. I believe that class can be called, “English”. This represents billions of dollars in savings. We need to build togetherness, not otherness, and a common language and values are critical to our future as a nation. Studies done in the 1920′s showed that mainstreaming is critical to the successful integration of immigrant communities.

2 – Get rid of 50% of the education bureaucracy – The LAUSD has well over 100 administrators making over $150,000/year with a year round car and driver to boot. What they are administrating I am not sure, as the drop out rate is over 50% in Los Angeles, so cut back by 50% since they are obviously not doing their jobs.

3 – Restore order to the classroom – give the teachers the authority they used to have and cut out the BS. Catholic school teachers regularly have 30-35 students/class. Why? because there is order and a focus on learning. Couple this with more truancy enforcement and parental penalties. Maybe they can pick up street trash like they do on the highways. We’re all for a cleaner California. This will cut more costs.

4 – California has 12% of the country’s population but 31% of it’s welfare cases. We have no fraud investigation. None. Don’t you think there is some connection there? Where is workfare? Are we paying for welfare for illegal immigrants? Sorry, we can’t afford that anymore.

5 – Stop paying for Viagra and other discretionary medicines. We’re broke, get it. We can’t afford to pay for Grandpa to make whoopie, much as we’d like to. Review the whole process.

6 – Get rid of unnecessary litigation. Prop 65 and the ADA are plaintiff’s lawyer’s goldmines. Silicon Valley has been crippled by the plaintiff’s bar. Medical litigation is like winning the lottery. There are legitimate cases, but when a doctor is paying more than half his income in insurance costs, that is crazy. Litigation costs are driving business… you know, the people who provide the real jobs that pay the taxes, out of state. It hasn’t gotten any better, and all the while certain legislators are trying to reopen the Worker’s Comp Pandora’s Box, the single success of the Schwarzenegger administration.

7 – Everybody pays income tax. Right now, the majority does not. That isn’t fair. Not a lot in the lower income brackets, but some. We all buy into the system then.

8 – Bring back manufacturing – the reason manufacturing has left California is the cost of doing business. Regulations, taxes, and legal costs are all way above most any state in the Union. California used to be called the land of opportunity. Let’s make it so again.

9 – Build nuclear power plants – They’re greener than anything else and provide the lowest cost power.  The state is chronically power short. We have to pay market prices for imported power.  Make it cheap and plentiful and business will come and living costs will drop.

10 – Take a page from Sheriff Joe – Prison is prison and Sheriff Arpaio has had some good ideas for cutting costs. Not all, perhaps, but many.  Gavin Newsome, on the other hand, wants to serve only organic food in San Francisco. Take your pick.

11 – Fix the Ag mess. California is the world’s breadbasket and yet we are killing it off. As the world needs more food than ever before, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

12 – Get rid of the junk in the university system. How many departments and course are just plain dumb? Get back to the basics.

These are just a few ideas. If people want to make them left or right that’s something else. To me they’re common sense.

The Pressure Ratchets up on Honduras

The Financial Times reported on the 17th that Hugo Chavez, on a visit to Bolivia, stated that Manuel Zelaya was heading for Honduras, threatening civil war. This week, Zelaya has stated that he is prepared to begin resistance this weekend if talks are not successful. As Chavez has had a massive influx of small arms into Venezuela over the past 3 years, if war occurs, the likelihood is that the arms for Zelaya’s forces will have come from Venezuela. Chavez has also been accused of sending agitators into Honduras. Mr. Chavez, who on July 9 contacted the United States State Department ‘s Undersecretary of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon, to discuss the situation in Honduras, is now accusing the United States government of backing the Honduras “coup”. he recently stated “The cruel and beastly hand of the Yanqui Empire, trying not only to overturn democracy in Honduras, will next come for all of us who are trying, with the people, to implement the processes of democratic change”. In an article in today’s Caracas “El Universal”, it was reported that Chavez stated that “the coup was perpetrated by the U.S. Department of State” and he does not trust “the empire which is behind Obama”. Chavez had only recently accepted the exchange of ambassadors with the U.S. after Chavez had expelled the American ambassador.

In San Jose, Costa Rica, both sides ended discussions on Sunday on finding a solution in talks mediated by  President Oscar Arias, who has already won the 1987 Nobel Prize for his work brokering peace agreements in Central America, after mutual antipathy prevented the principals from even sitting in the same room. Mr. Arias had proposed that Zelaya serve out a term shortened to October and that all parties form a reconciliation government with a general amnesty. The United States supports the idea of a unity government. The Micheletti government accepted a number of these proposals but remains firm in its desire to see Zalaya face some form of justice or stay out of the country. The recent discovery of computers in the presidential palace with data that seems to indicate that the results of the referendum proposed by Zelaya that started the crisis had been falsified in favor of the former president prior to the election has complicated matters further. Both sides are saying that they will continue discussions, possibly as early as tomorrow.

In Tegucigalpa, it was reported that hundreds of Zelaya supporters protested in front of the Congress building. The Honduran government has  petitioned the State Department to send observers  in response to statements by Zelaya’s supporters of heavy civilian deaths in the aftermath of the coup. There have been no reports of political violence as the Army and police have been actively trying to maintain calm. 4,000 protested in Tegucigalpa last Friday, with smaller protests in other cities.

In the meantime, the United States ($16.5 Million in military funding) and European Union (65 Million Euros/all aid) have cut off some aid to the interim government, and organizations including the OAS and United Nations have suspended  programs. Venezuela cut off oil deliveries, while Nicaragua refused access to their air space for Micheletti’s trip to Costa Rica. The U.S. maintains its threat to cut off another $180 million in development aid and loans from the World Bank and Inter American Development Bank have been suspended.   Today, the International Transport Workers Union has called on its membership to boycott Honduran flagged ships.

Mr. Zelaya has ratcheted up the rhetoric, repeatedly accusing the United States of complicity in the coup as well, and has appealed across Latin America for support.  But the reality seems to be that the only sticking point now seems to be Mr. Zelaya’s return.

Sources:  NY Times, AFP, Reuters, Financial Times, Inside Costa Rica, LA Times

UPDATE – The Washington Times reports this morning that video footage from the Central Bank of Honduras shows Enrique Flores Lanza removing the equivalent of US$2.2 Million on June 24, just prior to the circumstances which led to President Zelaya’s deportation. The funds were said to be destined for use by the president in the referendum on presidential term limits that is at the center of the dispute.

A Matter of Justice

The saga of Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley continues to make headlines around the United States as we explore the nature of race relations in the 21st Century. What seems to have been a minor altercation now involves the President of the United States and is being scrutinized under a microscope not for the facts of the matter, but for intentions and reactions. The question seems to be “where do you stand?”.

This is part of our ongoing national dialogue regarding race, ethnicity, and privilege. After 40 years of affirmative action,  we still don’t know quite where we are. There’s a funny song though from the Broadway play Avenue Q called “Everyone’s a little bit Racist”, that I think applies here. Whether we admit it or not, it’s who we are as human beings. We all have biases and rather than deny it must deal with in the context of our own relations with others. What is of much greater concern is that there are those in power who use this tool to divide and conquer us.

The power structure has always been one that tries to perpetuate itself. Whether it is the fact that  Congress does not abide by many of the laws it passes, or that virtually none of the crooks on Wall Street who created the greatest financial meltdown in history have been held accountable for their actions, or the reaction to performance enhancing drugs in sports is “so what?”, we seem to have lost an honest sense of fairness and morality.  The rules simply are not enforced for the powerful, and money buys justice and people just don’t seem to care.

Congress has been acting in a criminal manner for the past several years with no accountability whatsoever. This is bad for all of us, regardless of party. A president who ran on transparency and candor is neither. Let’s look at the record so far:

1 – High Crimes & Misdemeanors

Christopher Dodd (D – Conn) – bank fraud

Kent Conrad ( D- ND) – bank fraud

John Murtha  (D – PA) – widespread corruption & bribery

Barney Frank (D – MA) – refused to enact checks & balances at Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac

Rod Blagojevic (D – IL) – corruption and selling of political offices

Anthony Rezko – (D – IL) – developer close to the president convicted of fraud & corruption

Charles Rangel – (D – NY) – tax fraud, corruption

Peter Visclosky – (D-OH) – campaign fraud

James Moran – (D – VA) – campaign fraud

William Jefferson – ( D – LA) – bribery, corruption

Timothy Geithner ( Sec Treasury) – income tax fraud

Bill Richardson – (D – NM) – under investigation for campaign fraud & corruption

Sam Adams ( D – OR) – Mayor of Portland caught in affair with teenager

Kwame Kilpatrick – (D – MI) – Mayor of Detroit convicted of corruption

2 – Personal Pecadillos

Elliot Spitzer ( D-NY) – prostitution scandal

Ed Rendell (D – PA) – prostitution scandal

Mark Sanford ( R – SC) – marital infidelity

John Ensign ( R – NV) – marital infidelity

Larry Craig – (R-MN) – homosexual encounter at airport

What seems to differentiate these two lists? It seems the Democrats are doing real damage to the Republic and its values, while the Republicans are entranced by the trappings of power. Which is more serious? The Republicans are paying in the court of public opinion, while most of the Democrats have been immune to prosecution to date.

Whatever our background, the reality is that we are much more alike than different. We were raised with similar values. The Ten Commandments covers a lot of ground for a lot of us despite the differences in religion and color.

The country is in bad shape and we need to pull together, not apart. A first step might be to stand up and say “No More”. Don’t let them distract us with shiny objects and tabloid scandals. Look for the real transgressions. The pendulum has gone far to one side when it comes to ethics. They trot out the phrase “judge not lest ye be judged” as they steal trillions of dollars from us and laugh all the way to their offshore banks. It’s time we get involved.

Democrats Blame Insurance Companies, Special Interests, and the Media on Health Care

It is interesting to note the dismay of the Democratic Party leadership over the health care bill going into the August recess today. It seems that the finger pointing has turned into a circular firing squad.

Leftist leaders are blaming the Blue Dog Democrats, the more conservative party members. Many of these members of Congress were recruited as moderates by Rahm Emmanuel to break the Republican hold on the House in 2006, and were specifically chosen for their fiscal and legislative moderation. And yet Maxine Waters was on television yesterday making veiled threats against them by backing more liberal opponents in next year’s primaries if they do not fall in line. Henry Waxman, the congressman from West Hollywood and chair of the Energy & Commerce committee, froze out moderate Democrats and the Republicans when crafting the bill behind closed doors, and then presented a 1,000+ page bill stunning in its complexity. 45 Democratic party moderates wrote Waxman a letter stating ” We don’t want a briefing on the bill after its written. We want to help write it”. Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) said of the bill yesterday  “the members don’t even understand what’s in it”.

The Congressional Budget Office, staffed by Democrats, has issued three reports to date. The first stated that the Senate version of the bill would increase Federal budget costs by $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The second said that any savings engendered would at most be 0.2% of the overall health care budget. The third stated that health care costs will increase significantly as the various provisions of the bill  take effect. And yet the proponents of the bill are still trying to say that it is revenue neutral. When your own accountants disagree, that’s a problem.

In the meantime, as Congress recesses, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are blaming the media for having set an August deadline for passage while the president has been trying to lay blame at the door of the Republicans. So far, most of the damage has been self inflicted. Nancy Pelosi has already called the health insurance companies “Villains” in her attempt to demonize them, while the Democratic House leadership issued a memo yesterday outlining their media strategy for doing the same for the next 2 months, which, in cooperation with the White House, the AARP, and the Unions , will spend tens of millions of dollars. They will introduce a “Hidden Tax Clock” similar to the National Debt Clock, to try and turn the public against the insurance companies.

The president went on national television last week and said about doctors “you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat and the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself “you know I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out”.  This is an insult to the medical profession. This is the rhetoric we can expect for the next 2 months.

So far, it would seem that the bills themselves have been poorly crafted by a very few ideologues with a very specific agenda. Congress has also gotten into the habit of voting on legislation they have not read. Now Reid, Pelosi, Waxman, and Obama are trying to bum rush what is clearly a very poorly crafted bill through Congress to take over another 20% of the economy. Perhaps they should listen rather than dictate policy. Blaming insurance companies, doctors, the Media, and Special Interests is not the answer. How about some common sense and some common cause for a change?

Getting America’s Mojo Back

In a recent Rasmussen poll, 49% of the respondents said they thought America’s best days are behind us.  Wall Street has ripped us off. The government is run like a private piggy bank for insiders, and the economy is cratering. The housing markets are dominated by foreclosures and short sales, and at least here in California, the Ag sector has been crucified by the water spigot being turned off by a Federal judge. And yet  we can work our way out of this if we’re smart.

The Harvard Business Review published an article entitled “Restoring American Competitiveness” in which the central thesis is that U.S. industry has outsourced themselves out of a job. I have been seeing this in the electronics industry for the past 20 years, yelling from the rooftops trying to get someone, anyone, to pay attention without success. The HBR article goes on to point out that we have lost much of the infrastructure and makes a number of recommendations. The president tells us that the key to the future is innovation. So if the smart guys are telling us this it must now be true. So why not take some of the trillions of dollars we are wasting in boondoggles to help revive innovation? Not a whole lot. $100 billion will do.

One of the industries I work in is printed circuits. The United States used to dominate this industry. Companies like Cray Research and Univac and HP and IBM and Motorola all built the best technology in the world. Today, some are history and the others are mainly shells of their former manufacturing selves. And yet the same people who built this stuff are still out there. They didn’t get dumb. They got laid off. Today the American printed circuit industry builds legacy product. Yes there are few companies building prototypes for the next generation Apple or Cisco product, but even these companies will die unless they adapt the news technologies available and innovate quickly.The same holds true across many industries.

I have worked in Asia for 30 years and watched as the Japanese and Taiwanese have moved up the technology curve to a place where today most American printed circuit engineers cannot even understand the complexity of some of the product being built. If you get over there and go to the shows and talk to the engineers, it’s all there to see and available and they’re working on the next generation.  I am very lucky in my friends. Some of them were the engineers who built the factories or introduced the technology or invented the fundamental processes we rely on today, and we talk a lot. We’re frustrated because we see the same things. We see an ocean of opportunity in new technologies and no one in this country with the vision or the the pocketbook to reignite a new industrial revolution. Because it’s there for the taking if you dare. Truly.

American leadership and management have commoditized us to within an inch of our lives. The hardware doesn’t matter. In business, it’s all supposed to be about the software or intellectual property. Well there ain’t much IP in breakfast cereals or beer or whatever the latest video game is. They have misdirected our resources. It’s all about the Id to those people. We are simply numbers or tools to be used or rubes to be fleeced in the latest con game. In manufacturing and technology, we invent the application here and then immediately export it to save a few bucks. In the 1970′s it was oops, we just lost the television industry. In the 1990′s, oops, those darn personal computers are a commodity now.” Leave it to the Taiwanese and the Chinese. They’ll undercut us anyway.” Bull! These were bad management decisions in the interest of short term profit. Intel waves the shiny ball to distract us as they skim the cream, but it is about the hardware just as much as the software, for without it, nothing changes.

Real product innovation in America is at an all time low. One of the reasons the Intels and Ciscos and Apples don’t use North American suppliers anymore is that they feel they are talking to simpletons when they discuss new technology with suppliers here. The suppliers are short handed and not investing for there is no profit. The exchange of ideas is slowly dying on the vine. And our own government has encouraged the flight of manufacturing with inane rules and an uneducated and unfriendly ear.

And yet right now in my industry, there are convergences of technology that are complete game changers. In printed circuits, it is High Density Interconnect (HDI); embedding both active and passive components within the circuit board; Meso -MEMS (micro electro mechanical systems); and organic light emitting diodes (OLED’s). These are enabling technologies and are already entering widespread use. Every GPS system has some of this. So does your WII or your car. It’s in the digital camera you use or your cell phone. In science and medicine, the term “lab on a chip” is entering widespread use. But there are so many more possibilities, and there is no reason not do it here in America. Companies worry about their intellectual property. Why not put the chip inside the circuit board where people can’t get to it? The reverse engineering time would at least be doubled.  A simple concept. If you don’t want to export your industry, it’s one way to prevent it from happening.

Whole new product categories are there for the taking. We still have the best minds in the world. We were just told that manufacturing isn’t cool and that we would all get rich trading tulip futures or make “miyyions” day trading. Well that obviously didn’t work out, so we had better get back to the basics.

Nanotechnology is a similar virgin forest. Biotech is another. We are facing a crisis in our oceans. We’re running out of fish. The Chesapeake Bay is becoming a desert as is a good part of the Gulf of Mexico. And we will keep on abusing these God given resources until we run out. More sensible would be to use some of these technologies to extend our basic resources. Same with oil, coal and gas. We burn it up like crack addicts when we know we will need these finite resources for other things; medicines, plastics, chemical intermediates. We need to make better use of what we have, and we have to make it profitable.

We need to take the money our government has appropriated for pork and payoffs to political favorites and reallocate it to what will pull this country back out of it’s funk. Government cannot give money to other governments (states, cities) and somehow expect this to lift our economy. It doesn’t work that way. We need to revive our applied laboratories and the blue sky stuff. We need to bring back Bell Labs and PARC and the Skunk Works. NASA isn’t sexy these days, but it was one of the single most important drivers in 100 fields for 30 years before we got bored with space flight. Nuclear power can reduce our costs. Our engineers are delivering 300HP cars with 27 MPG now. We can do these things if we put our minds to it. But we have to put the old politics aside and make common sense decisions based on the facts, not passions or greed or BS. “Feel Good” decisions don’t work in hard times.

Too much leisure is a curse and we are paying that price as well. People have forgotten to think for themselves and we’re lazy. Stress clarifies the issues wonderfully and need breeds invention. We are in a time and place where we have the the tools available. We have the option to move forward or to watch our country descend into a second rate has been. If enough of us start thinking like this, we can move the world and have fun and help others in doing so. But it’s not a 9 to 5. It’s a challenge. It will require discipline and hard work.

Archimedes of Syracuse said in the 3rd century BC “Give me a place to stand, and with a lever I will move the whole world”". We have many levers. We just have to use them wisely.

Community Organizers versus Right Wing Zealots

There is a strange phenomenon occurring across America. We are seeing small and not so small outbreaks of grass roots protests against a number of the governments recent decisions and policies. The Tea Party phenomenon seems, especially with the debate on health care to be growing stronger, not weaker.

In the past few days since the Congressional recess, Congressmen/women and Senators have been confronted in their home states across the country at press conferences, town hall meetings and other venues by these protesters who have a grab bag of issues; the stimulus package, government bailouts, TARP, health care, and Cap & Trade. The protests seem to be strongest in the Midwest, but also Long Island and even in Boston recently. Today, here in California, Senator Barbara Boxer and her tool, Chris Matthews, attacked the “Brooks Brothers” protesters as “stooges of the health care industry”. Yesterday, the Democratic National Committee issued a press release stating that “mobs of right wing extremists” are being incited by K street lobbyists and bussed in to the demonstrations.The DNC will be running a series of attack ads to this effect across the country in their efforts to help pass the health care bill in the Fall.

The White House had Linda Douglass, their communications director for the health care initiative  say in a Youtube video that ” if you get an e mail or see something on the web that seems a bit fishy, send it to us at www.whitehouse.gov”. Doesn’t this ring  of Big Brother?  Organized reporting on people is simply un-American.  It goes against our fundamental beliefs as a society. The president was videotaped several years ago stating his absolute support for a single payer health care program, which has been posted on the Drudge Report and other web sites. And yet the same White House talking head protested that this was taken out of context. And yet the statement stands completely on its own. Did the president or didn’t he say it?

Back oh, 4 years ago, Barack Obama’s profession was listed as “community organizer”. He took pride in grass roots level political action.  How could he and his staff object to others doing the same thing he himself was paid (and very well paid) to do? This again is highly dissonant.What is going on here when the president himself is organizing a smear campaign against his opponents?

During the AIG furor 7 months ago, a couple of half busloads of paid community activists were dropped off outside the front porches of some of the AIG executives who were receiving huge bonuses while the government was bailing out their employer. Every major network had reporters and camera crews using tight focus capturing the vilification of these Wall Street capitalists while disguising the paucity of the crowd. Perhaps 20 or 30 paid protesters were on site, but to the average viewer, it looked like hundreds. Just another dirty little secret of the mainstream media. This has been going on for 20 years, whether it be union protests, the Code Pink loons, or a dozen other left wing propaganda machines. They take Alinsky very seriously and have media directors, press officers, and e mail lists targeted at the political class and the media. The medium, after all, is the message and there’s nothing like klieg lights and stunts to get on the 6 o’clock news.

And yet the tea party crowds are very, very different. I know because I attended two of them out of curiosity. On April 15th, a protest was held against TARP and the Stimulus bill. The anger was directed at the waste and unaccountability of the programs and the extraordinary debt in which the government had placed the taxpayers. There were no organizers. Just someone who got a permit and set up a small stage and microphone and people talked. There were 2-3,000 people there, but the press did not cover it and then reported 2-300. I cannot argue with what my own eyes saw, and the people were pretty much a cross section of Orange County. White, Latino, Vietnamese and a wide range of ages. Most were dressed neatly and many carried homemade signs. Is this one of Barbara Boxer’s mob of Brooks Brothers dressed lackies? They looked more like housewives and small businessmen and retirees and college kids to me. On a weekday afternoon on a beautiful day, they chose to try and make their voices heard. I would have to say that is pretty grass roots democracy to me.

The unions can mobilize thousands when they choose to. The May Day rallies in Los Angeles 3 years ago were a good example. Color coordinated t shirts, huge banners, and a whispered prohibition on Mexican flags. “Don’t scare the media”.  Compare this with the tea party advocates. Compare the messages, more importantly. Save Money- Be Responsible versus the tired politics of progressivism. The country is broke and the government is spending money it never has and most likely never will have the way they’re going. Conmmon sense would seem to indicate the time honored values of thrift and hard work rather than ideology.

So once again the forces of polarization will come into play. Accusations of bigotry and racism and class warfare will be hurled at political opponents who in some cases are the same race and even poorer that the ones hurling the epithets. Straw men will be set up to be knocked down on network television. And our country will once again be ill served.

Political Art as Theater

The above  images are meant to illustrate the nature of political art. In the context of the manufactured outrage ofy the LA Weekly and Washington Post regarding the alleged racism of the “Joker” image, I felt that it was useful to compare Shepard Fairey’s own political art to a single fleeting image photographed in Los Angeles this week. Fairey sold thousands of his images for hundreds of dollars per piece while the Joker image seems to have been meant as cutting political protest by an anonymous artist.

There was  no lack of passion over the Bush Administrations policies from 2001-2008. From the inauguration, there was a vocal and very angry opposition. After 9/11, this moderated but again came to the fore @ 2005. In 2006, there was an outcry from the Left Wing to withdraw from Iraq which saw many impassioned pieces by world renowned artists. Botero’s images of Iraqi prisoners and Bush come to mind.

There is a romance on the Left, especially by artists, writers, and musicians with dictators, whether it was Stalin & Lenin in the 1920′s and 30′s or Fidel and Che in the 60′s or Hugo Chavez today. For some reason, based from what I can read and interpret as what they say, rather than what they do, leftists idolize murders and oppressors much more so than  purported right wingers. It seems to me there is a direct connection between the id of the artist and the id of the dictator that is congruent when their political beliefs align. After all, one of the attractions of the bohemian lifestyle is the lack of rules, and which rules have Stalin, Che or Chavez ever followed? The power, when expressed as the will of the people, is an aphrodisiac.

Fairey made his reputation on the streets of Los Angeles with his tongue in cheek “Obey” stickers and posters featuring Andre the Giant. He appropriated the symbology of socialist realism very successfully to caricature modern iconography. He has made millions doing so with his posters, originals, skateboard decks, and other merchandise. He is living the American capitalist dream. His “Hope” image is pure political art Contrast this with his images of Bush. More importantly, contrast it with the image of the “Joker”. From the time of the Romans and Greeks, graffiti has been part and parcel of the political landscape. from the walls of Pompeii and Rome to London broadsheets to the exhortations of Mao Zedong in China, caricature has been integral to the dialog. The political cartoons on the editorial page are a perfect, if you will excuse the pun, illustration. Let it continue without the freight of racism and false offense.

The Democrats versus America

Today, Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Sten Hoyer published an op/ed article attacking the recent tea party protests as unAmerican. This has been the unifying message of the entire Democratic Party leadership since the Senate recessed on Friday. Over the past wek, the tea party activists and all protesters are being called stooges of the insurance companies, Nazis, and “Brooks Brothers”  activists.

At meetings across the country this week, protesters confronting their representatives have been shouted down by some of those legislators and assaulted in one case in St. Louis by union organizers. Accusations of protesters being bussed in have been made, and yet there is not a shred of evidence to this effect.

The White House is just as deeply involved, with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissing the protesters as astroturfers and Linda Douglass, the health care communications czar presenting a non-denial denial of the presidents unequivocal support of single payer health care, one of the roots of the current protests, on video in 2003. The video of the president is clear. Ms. Douglass’ rebuttal is highly opaque. Front page articles and op/ed pieces carry the same untruths.

These protests are not isolated. They are taking place throughout the country, and many Democratic lawmakers are in many cases now in hiding from their own constituents.  What gives?

The first protests I can remember occurred in Fullerton, California to rally against the duplicity of both Democratic and Republican legislators in Sacramento trying to ram through a tax increase rather than applying common sense solutions to the state’s budget crisis. With TARP ($1.7 Trillion), the Stimulus ($900 Billion), the auto bailout ($50 Billion) and now the health care bill, which no one in Congress had even read last week as they were trying to pass something, many citizens tolerance for the incompetence in Washington grew into action.

These are not your typical activists. They are the people you see at church or the grocery store or the VFW. They are the ones who bought into the system. Pay your taxes, go to war, obey the law.

Frank Rich in today’s  New York Times said something interesting. He quoted from last week’s Washington Post, where a Virginia real estate agent said “nothing’s changed for the common guy. I feel like I’ve been punked”. While I differ with Mr. Rich’s conclusions, I believe this is the underlying feeling in our country today. People are sick and tired of a government that has gone off the tracks.

Whether it was in Iraq, where mismanagement was rampant, or the banks and mortgage lenders acting completely irresponsibly, or corporate America outsourcing and offshoring jobs, the majority of Americans voted for change in 2008. And now the change being offered has not really changed anything except to make things worse.

We are not reconstituting our manufacturing base and creating real jobs. The TARP and Stimulus programs are being seen more and more as political payoffs, and with a secretive cabal of leftist legislators and a president who is seen to be talking out of both sides of his mouth, no one trusts them to make the right choices on health care.

The Republicans are no better. There are no solutions being offered on their side either, not that they would be listened to by the majority. But there is also a fundamental loss of the principles of that party today by its leadership. This  angers their constituents.

The CBO reported today that deficit in July was $1.3 trillion, a $181 Billion rise over last year. Between the loss of tax revenues and the recession, there’s no money in the till. Eventually, the dollar will come under assault for the Fed’s inflationary policies and it will get worse. People sense this. They sense that we are in a crisis while Nero fiddles. We need answers and leaders and instead we get grifters, con artists, flim flam men and Nancy the insult dog.

This is the summer of our discontent. This is not manufactured emotion. It is real and it deeply held based upon the fundamental principles of fairness and common sense, and of our Constitution. For our leaders to dismiss and ridicule these people is an insult that will result in a political upheaval in the next elections. For they are not attacking just their political opponents. They are attacking all of us.

Paid Community Organizers vs. Astroturfers

Several blogs in the past 2 days have found a plethora of Craigslist ads for paid advocates and campaign managers for the president’s health care agenda at rates from $9 – $14/hour to $500/week. Some of the locations I found with a brief search were:

California  – sacramento, Berkeley, San Francisco – www.jobsthatmatter.org -  an associate of CalPIRG

Washington  – Washington Community Action Network -

Chicago – www.jobsthatmatter.org – The Fund for the Public Interest

Atlanta – The Fund for the Public Interest

Philadelphia – The Fund for the Public Interest

Philadelphia – PennPirg

These are all Liberal/Left organizations and are all advertising specifically for foot soldiers in the battle to pass the Democratic Party health care agenda. In some cases, they are funded with public monies.

And yet we have Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Hoyer demonizing the insurance companies for doing the same, but with no evidence whatsoever. Go on Craigslist and type in “campaign” under Jobs and see for yourself. I would challenge them to identify similar campaigns among those protesting their policies.

I am no friend of the insurance industry. they make their money by restricting care in many cases and denying options. But overall, the system is not a bad one and our medical care is good. It can be better. It must be better. But until the country has an honest dialog about tort reform and other equally important components to the issue to both make the system more efficient and more responsive, any plan will go nowhere.

In Oregon, if a patient has less than a 5% chance of survival, medical benefits can be denied under the states public insurance option. These are the most vulnerable stakeholders, and there are significant cost constraints. In my own family I have seen the limitations of the National Health Service in the UK. The first time it was in the 1970′s when an uncle had a stroke and lay in an indigents ward undiagnosed for days. The second for a relative with multiple illnesses who was denied care because of her age. She died recently.The Democratic leadership does not like to be reminded of the failures of single payer systems overseas, but this is exactly what so many of the protesters fear.

These are some of the realities we must face. But first, we have to remove the smoke and partisanship and maskirovka* from all sides. This isn’t about politics and it isn’t about the special interests, and the fact is that our resources are more limited than ever before. Our representatives seem to have forgotten this.

* Russian military term meaning the artificial creation of the fog of war. Deception, Misdirection, Disinformation.

Creating Jobs

In an Op/Ed piece entitled “A Scary Reality” Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times points out a disturbing trend; where are the new high paying jobs going to come from? July’s job losses were 247,000, and it must be remembered that first, these jobs are not being replaced, and second, they are the kind of jobs that pay the bills for so many other parts of our society. These are the “first tier” manufacturing, knowledge, and equity jobs that have been lost that create the wealth our economy depends on.

Unemployment among men between 20-24 years old is 35%. We have lost 6.7 million jobs in this recession. The country has the same number of jobs as in 2000, which was not the best of years with the Internet meltdown, and yet there are 12 million unemployed. The casual and partial unemployment rates are in the same category, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. During the Great Depression, some workers went into their jobs regardless every day because they had nowhere else to go. We really don’t want to get to that point. We have it a lot better than that, and there are answers. But we cannot wait for long.

To date, most of the Stimulus money has not been spent. Some is going to balance state budgets, some is going to long term projects, and some is going to maintain employment in the public sector. We have to redirect some of the money budgeted from the Stimulus into creating real jobs that will help our economy grow in the long term. Manufacturing, energy, and natural resources will do this. The fact is that our government has treated manufacturing, once the central pillar of our economy, as a red headed stepchild for far too long. This must change.

Much of our manufacturing sector is on life support and is technologically outdated. We need to upgrade and retool and revive invention so that American manufacturers can compete for their fair share of the global market. Outsourcing and offshoring have left many of America’s largest technology companies nothing more than labels.  Management and leadership pursued higher margins while they let their manufacturing operations to rot on the vine or closed them to save 5 or 10%. This has to change.  We also need to incentivize the customer base to buy American, not with protectionism, but with better quality at competitive prices.

We have replaced quality and development and manufacturing engineers with supply chain managers. Walmart, Sears and others have squeezed every penny from their suppliers both here and abroad, and what we have left are minimum wage jobs and products that fall apart after a couple of years. Those products simply fill our dumps with more waste, much of it hazardous in today’s electronic age. As to the jobs, even some of those will go as demand spirals downwards.

Regarding infrastucture, the high voltage lines cannot carry the KvA of an industrial economy any more, nor do we have the power capacity required to recharge the electric cars we are being promised. If we don’t act quickly, it won’t matter that we have wonderful green cars. We won’t have the juice to keep them running or the ability to move that electricity over long distances. We need cheap, clean energy and to rebuild our power infrastructure and we need to do it now. Nuclear is the answer, but no one seems to be asking the right questions.

As workers and citizens, we must understand that more will be demanded of us. Longer hours, perhaps, but we can also do more by making intelligent decisions instead of the easy ones. No one outperforms the American worker for productivity and creativity.This has been proven in study after study. No one invents like Americans.  Americans do not shirk from challenges. There are new technologies that can guarantee intellectual property so that it cannot be easily copied overseas. We need to adopt these so that we can keep jobs here.

Hard times clarify thinking to the essentials. Our government must rethink its priorities as conditions have changed considerably. Of the trillions spent to date very little has made its way into the economy. The banks are hoarding. The auto companies  received a massive bailout, but then shuttered factories as they received another several billion dollars in the Cash for Clunkers program. None of this will help us rebuild our economy. It only prolongs the stagnation and pain. The Fed’s monetary policy will inevitably be inflationary, making the Dollar worth less. We should prepare now to take advantage of a weak dollar, improve our trade imbalances and work our way out of the recession.

When Does Political Speech Cross Over into the Pathological?

I was deeply disturbed today the watch the President of the United States lie openly not once, but twice today at a Town Hall event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Twice he stated that the American Association of Retired People (AARP) supported his health care bill. This is simply not true.

He then went on to attack primary care doctors and surgeons who might elect to perform amputations on diabetes patients in order to collect $30,000 – $40,000 instead of less expensive treatments. This is similar to his unsubstantiated accusation of doctors performing unnecessary tonsillectomies to garner similar fees 10 days ago during his nationally televised speech on health care. This is the rhetoric of the rabble rouser.

Nancy Pelosi was caught on camera stating that the protesters against health care have been carrying swastikas, implying that they are Nazi zealots, when  she neither had the evidence nor any other information on any such instances. She and her colleagues have also accused the K Street lobbyists and the insurance industry of busing protesters to Town Hall events, all without a shred of evidence.

Add to this the presidents promises of the most transparent administration ever; his promise that lobbyists would not be hired by his administration; and his promise that he would hold his administration to the highest ethical standards. In each case, these have been untruths quickly and publicly proven on the front pages and at the newsdesks of multiple media outlets. We are approaching Nixonian ethical dissonance and we are only 6 months into the new administration.

This is not just politics as usual. This represents something much deeper. This is what Orwell feared. The lie repeated again and again until it became the truth. We are entering Alice’s rabbit hole. We’re not there quite yet  but at the same time, never in our history have we seen such a blatant disregard for the truth. Neither Nixon nor Bush, who was vilified by the Left for his actions, came out with major whoppers that could so easily  disproved. On policy, even the president’s most ardent supporters have become disappointed as he has said one thing and done another.

Politicians are not known for their truthfulness. Facts and platforms become distorted as a candidates steer left and right to win the primary and general elections. But once elected, we expect more of them. Reading back through Adams and Washington and de Toqueville and Lincoln and Roosevelt and Truman, one reasonably concludes a high regard for the American discourse. Of course it has always been rough. There were duels fought and canings on the House floor. We were a pioneer people with massive disagreements over fundamental issues. But today our leaders act like the Roman elite carrying sophistry to a new level.

And yet with the internet, it is so easy to roll the video or read the underlying documents. We can let the principals and politicians speak for themselves. And unfortunately they are doing themselves no credit at all. the electorate is more deeply offended on both right and left. We need arguments based on principle and the facts.

The Mother of all Bureaucracies

A British Member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, recently pointed out that UK’s National Health Service with 1.4 Million employees is the 3rd largest employer in the world behind China’s Red Army and India’s National Railroad. The UK has a population less than 1/3 that of the United States. In addition, more than 50% of those employees are administrative and have nothing to do with health care on a daily basis.

Today, the Department of Health & Human Services has 67,000 employees. The Medicare Administration, a part of HHS, employs  4,100 of that 67,000.  One thing we know for certain is that the government is very good at is creating bureaucracies. The TSA, which did not exist 8 years ago, now has 45,000 screeners  and a $6.8 Billion budget.

Regardless of which plan under consideration is signed into law, the bureaucracy created would dwarf these numbers. We will be looking at the single greatest increase in the federal payroll in our history. The number of administrative staff would increase exponentially with absolutely no effect on the quality or availability of care. If what the president says is true, we would not only have that governmental payroll to deal with, but the existing system as well.

The CBO has already stated that there would be significant cost increases based upon the expansion of treatment. What about the administrative costs? We are thus discussing not only a massive increase in direct spending, but a massive increase in overhead. And  I thought the problem we had  that brought up this whole mess was dealing with runaway costs.

North American Manufacturing – How To Fight Back Against the Odds

I.

In a recent meeting with senior engineers at one of America’s remaining technology companies, one of the managers stated that the North American electronics industry is stuck building legacy product. This company is buying hundreds of millions of dollars of components in Japan and Asia, and feels they can no longer even find the capabilities to manufacture advanced technology at home.

In the Harvard Business Review’s July/August issue, Professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih write in the feature article on “Restoring America’s Competitiveness” that decades of outsourcing has left the United States, in particular, without the means to invent the next generation of high technology products. It is an issue on which I have written for over 15 years, so I have some familiarity with the problems. The West has made the terrible mistake of abandoning applied engineering, and if we are to rebuild our economy, manufacturing must be integral to that recovery.

Tom Bartlett, whom I have known for many years, in a recent New York Times article blamed Chinese currency manipulation as a part of the problem that led to the demise of his manufacturing company in Chicago. This was one cause. Another was a complete disregard for the means of production at the highest levels of American business. Another was the lack of reinvestment when times were good. What Hewlett and Packard and Noyce and Durant and Ford knew in their bones was forgotten by two generations of American managers more interested in personal gain and that of their largest investors. There was no longer a focus on building long term value.

In government, the word “manufacturing” is anathema, and virtually the entire power structure of our country today has no understanding of making things or Research & Development. It’s all magic. FDR certainly knew manufacturing. Kennedy knew it when he battled the steel companies. Johnson was responsible for NASA as Vice President. Today our space program is an orphan. DARPA in the past 20 years has become a short term applied technology organization rather than the blue sky visionaries they once were. Bell Labs, PARC, and other practical (and sometimes blue sky) organizations have simply disappeared as their corporate owners pared costs. In those intervening years, fewer and fewer of our leaders had a real grasp of the process of making things because they had collectively forgotten the fundamentals.

The technology companies have not helped themselves either. They have pulled back and cut costs at every level for the most part. Even industry organizations bear some responsibility. So many of these were originally the vehicles for the development of standards and process guidelines. At one time the entrepreneurs and businessmen who owned the company were directly involved because they needed those standards and technology guidelines. Networking was critical to understand the next big thing, and they needed that information “yesterday”. With the de-emphasis on manufacturing, organization staff became the driving force, and while competent, it takes being on the firing line to understand the intrinsic issues of technology. Manufacturing has atrophied. But we must get that spirit back. The old dictum that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan has been turned on its head. This failure has many fathers. And yet I am an optimist. We can fix this. The United States has been the economic engine of the world for 100 years and we can continue to do so.

II.

Why has Japan succeeded so spectacularly? Fewer and fewer North American engineers and managers from the manufacturing side visit every year and yet Japan has leapt forward in technology, especially in electronics. The Japanese have been disparaged as consumer driven, and yet their technology is some of the most sophisticated in the world. They sell Billions of dollars of product and keep millions employed doing so.

The Japanese approach manufacturing as a master craftsman would have approached making a samurai sword 200 years ago; layer by layer, process by process, honing each step to perfection. They study and study until they absorb the fundamental concepts, refine them, and then execute. Most of the electronics technology was invented in America, but has morphed beyond recognition. Our labs are still the best, but the rush to commercialize has led to losing long term benefits in favor of short term gain as researchers and technologists look for a quick payday. One also sees in Japan much more collective effort on technology. Companies form themselves into associations to create an infrastructure for a particular product type. In many cases the technologies within a given field compete quite aggressively. In the long run, most companies benefit from that next technological/product step to further their competitive advantage. There is much less of this in North America. American companies can simply buy the end products. But what happens then to the fundamental understanding of the way things work?

Why has Taiwan succeed so well? From my observations, there was a massive application of capital coupled with intense government support and a raucous cross pollination of ideas and technology, most of this taking place within a 75 mile radius. Taiwanese manufacturers have move up the chain rapidly to a point where they dominate certain key technologies. The Koreans have their own intense drive to excel, while in China the focus on becoming the world’s factory is the policy of state. The West’s loss has been Asia’s gain.

Der Spiegel reports this week that it is manufacturing that is leading Germany out of the recession. The demand for German machinery overseas, and their advances in integrating information technology with hardware to create demand for whole new product categories such as RoboCoasters for amusement parks, driverless forklift trucks, and robotic self service milking machines for dairy cows. Germany leads the world in making the equipment and materials for many green technologies.

III.

Crisis generates opportunity. It clarifies thinking when there are no options but survival. There are macroeconomic issues where manufacturers must work more aggressively together. Our government has appropriated $800 Billion in Stimulus funds. The American technology base is obsolete. Capital equipment in many cases is 20-30 years old and must be replaced to compete on the global stage. We must retool for the new technology. Our infrastructure must be upgraded, especially if we are to see a transition to electric cars. We need the transformers and transmission lines and power plants to power our economy not in the nebulous future but now. We need nuclear power to reduce costs and greenhouse gases. A portion of the Stimulus funds must be redirected into  both macro and micro manufacturing infrastructure. It is an investment in the future and will pay off handsomely. American manufacturers can work together to achieve these ends for the good of the country.

Next, we must look at technology overseas without condescension and learn from those we originally taught. We must study the new processes and products closely and master them once again. We have thousands of engineers and workers who would like nothing better than to do what they were trained to do. If nothing else, Americans are the most productive workers and most inventive people on the planet. As engineers, we must ubnderstand the new technologies and make them available to our customers. So many times, we have invented and then abandoned key technologies. Now, even the OEM’s don’t understand the possibilities.

Just imagine putting key components and code withing a printed circuit board. Try reverse engineering that. It would give any company at least an additional 6 months to a year or longer in intellectual property protection, and yet many managers do not understand this fundamental advantage. New combinations in the electronics field such as MEMS, Meso-MEMS, embedded components, electro-optical circuit boards, and other technologies will lead to a reinvention and renaissance in products, but first one must understand the possibilities. These possibilities cut across industries and product categories.

IV.

We must reevaluate our relationships with our stakeholders. Our employees and customers are the reason for our success, and this seems to have been forgotten. Today most companies give lip service to partnerships, but the reality on the factory floor or in dealing with customers is very different. Relationships do matter. If we are to survive and grow in hard times, we must rely on teamwork at every level. Ask the elite military units or championship athletes. Success is not achieved in a vacuum.

Today, most companies do little to cross pollinate sales, engineering, and applications. Each of these functions contributes towards long term success. Process development no longer exists at most manufacturing companies and yet the workspace is if anything becoming more complex. Close cooperation with suppliers and customers is critical in ramping up rapidly, and helps the manufacturer to become an indispensable contributor to their customers success, improving volumes and profit margins.

V.

Commoditization is perhaps the cardinal sin in manufacturing today. The global economy has become dependent on the China price. And yet we throw away and return more product for defects than ever before. One of the dirty secrets of the electronics manufacturing industry is the Repair Center, where products that should have been built properly the first time are replaced. These have become significant profit centers in the contract manufacturing industry.Ask Microsoft the cost of the X Box fiasco. More to the point, this represents a terribly inefficient use of resources. manufacturing yield improvements drop directly to the bottom line, and in a world demanding green solutions this is one of the greenest.

The primacy of the accounting and purchasing departments cannot dictate long term corporate decisions on manufacturing and technology. They are integral to any corporation, but must be subsidiary in long term policy considerations. This must be understood throughout the supply chain. Quality and technology do matter.

Today many of the West’s leading names in the technology sector are simply labels, and most of the wounds are self inflicted. The manufacturing sector has been the engine of our economy since the Industrial revolution, and is vital to our future as individuals, as families, as industries, and as nations. We must recognize our mistakes and correct them. There is a window of opportunity open, but it will take all of us to effect change.

De Toqueville wrote in Democracy in America of our country’s unique character of enlightened self interest. He said that Americans voluntarily join into associations to further the interests of the group, and thus their own. We must remember this once again and take it to heart. We are living in times of ferment and fear. It is up to each of us to work across boundaries for the sake of us all.

The Corporate Health Care Sellout

One of the most offensive aspects of the health care debate is how a number of the major corporations in America are angling for their own interests in the face of the greater good.

The pharmaceutical industry have promised $80 Billion in ill defined cuts, while they have also pledged $150 Million in advertising for the president’s agenda. This would seem to be an illegal quid pro quo. Or is it just the Chicago style?

Wal Mart and other large companies have also embraced the single payer option as it relieves them of billions of dollars in health care costs. We are seeing more and more instances of the large corporations getting behind another of the most poorly thought out pieces of legislation in history.

They don’t know what it is, but if they can weasel out from under a major cost of doing business, they’re for it. Of course, senior management will always be able to get the medical care they need regardless of cost. We are once again seeing the “insider” game where they well connected and amoral grab all they can and leave the rest of us to the wolves.

These same multinationals accrue huge benefits in lobbying for contracts and programs while playing one country off against the other to cut costs and responsibility. These same companies are the ones paying their executives obscene bonuses, for what?  Why for cutting costs of course.

This is not an issue of Democrat versus Republican, it is an issue for all of us together. There is no patriotism or motivation for the greater good at most of these companies today, and we must hold them and the grifters in Washington accountable for their actions.

The Etch a Sketch Presidency

Today, we have the spectacle of the White House reversing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius weekend statement  saying that the public option may not be necessary to their plans to reform health care. Saturday, they dropped the idea of end of life care decision making panels despite their denials that the idea ever really existed. He said last week that he does not believe in single payer health insurance, and yet he is caught on video saying the opposite in 2003. What new surprises will tomorrow bring? We are entering an Orwellian level of newspeak.

His statements on employing lobbyists, when we now have more them working in the White House than in any previous administration, are at odds with reality. On transparency, he has somehow made Bush look Teddy Roosevelt.  Obama’s decision making process is as obscure as the Kremlin with “czars” working behind the scenes establishing policy with virtually no input from either the Departments or Congress.

Our president cautioned fiscal responsibility while doubling our national debt in 6 months. He then told us he would reduce pork barrel projects, and yet signed the most corrupt and bloated “Stimulus” bill in history  full of payoffs to his supporters. He stated his concerns for fairness in the auto bailouts, and yet the only beneficiaries seem to be the UAW and Fiat.

In watching Robert Gibbs field the occasional difficult question at press conferences, I am waiting to see whether he eventually has a seizure or if his head will explode first. Despite the softball questions from most reporters, he manages to make absolutely no sense whatsoever while defying logic completely at times. One sees the cameras occasionally pan to show reporters looking at each other and whispering “what the heck did he just say?”.

The left is just as unhappy with the president, feeling that he has abandoned them on too many issues, whether Iraq or gay rights or cap & trade. There is widespread dissatisfaction that the president has “not done enough”. Even Paul Krugman has been highly critical. Too many times, the president seems to have turned over the etch a sketch and erased his previous statements and positions. For an administration that is only 6 months old, this could prove fatal.

From Guantanamo to the PGA

Friday’s Bermuda Sun reports that the Uighers recently released from Guantanamo are having a smashing time in Bermuda. They are integrating into island life well and have joined the local soccer league, where they play for the X Road Warriors. Sounds somehow appropriate.

After 7 years at Guantanamo, freedom is sweet. All four are now working as assistant groundskeepers at the Port Royal golf course, a long  way from their past lives in the arid environs of Western China. Khalil Mamut said “It’s beautiful. It feels like we are working in a garden”.  They play golf on the Wii, and hope to one day try the real game. For now they are still learning the ropes of greenskeeping. Rule #1, “don’t shoot all the golfers”. From being a baker  and a candy maker and a merchant and a teacher in Western China in their past  lives, the transition to Bermuda has been amazing for all of them.  From the confines of prison to the country club set is simply amazing. I wonder if they’ll be allowed to use the swimming pool on Caddy Day?

According to Robert Trent Jones, Port Royal is the best work he’s done outside of the United States. Y.E. Yang, who won $1.3 Million+ by beating Tiger Woods in dramatic fashion for the PGA Championship at Hazeltine Country Club in Chaska, MN yesterday, will play Angel Cabrera, Stuart Cink, and Lucas Glover, the winners of this years other major tournaments. Woods will be sitting this one out, unfortunately.

In a world of conflict and dissonance, the mere fact that these men have been placed on a tropical paradise working to prepare for a major golf tournament is perhaps a sign that not all is so bad after all. Maybe we will see them wearing neon Bermuda shorts or plus 4′s riding the links in style next. It’s a strange world out there and who knows where it may all end up.

Mortgage Crime

There’s a fellow I know here in California whose story I would like to tell you. For the sake of his privacy, I’ll call him Bill.  I am not sorry for him. He made his own bed. But he was also taken advantage of by people who knew better and did it anyway.

Bill is in his late 80′s, a retired actor. Not a famous one, but he invested wisely enough to build his dream house on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean back in the late 60′s, where he lived joyfully for 30 years before his wife passed away. Since then he has been lonely, and as he got older, more vulnerable. Bill made some investments, some of them quite successful and some not so successful.  As he got older, the successful ones, which produced steady but boring returns, were supplanted with riskier projects. Bill enjoyed the attention as the new, important investor. It made him feel good to have skins in the game and go to meetings and appointments.

Bill started running out of money. He lived frugally and owned his home outright, a prime property in a unique location, but his bad investments were draining his wealth away.  So when he got a call several years ago at the height of the real estate market from a major bank regarding refinancing his home, it was too attractive a deal to refuse. He really didn’t have to worry because the bank would take care of all the paperwork and even send someone out to have him sign and notarize the documents. It was a major bank, so he trusted that they knew what they were doing.  That is, after all, why they call them “Bank & Trust” companies. He had the expectation that they would act within the law and in a reasonably ethical manner. Somehow, somewhere along the way, someone neglected to note that all of Bill’s income came from his social security check. He had been living off of his principal for years, selling off bits and pieces as he needed money. The loan was in excess of $2 Million. In making this loan, someone committed  fraud.

Naturally, Bill could not keep up with the payments. He invested most of the money, and then made payments from what principal remained. Last year, he ran out of money. The bank began sending dunning notices and then began foreclosure proceedings. Bill’s back was against the wall, and yet no one from the bank seemed to realize or care that they were dealing with a very elderly client who might not have understood what was happening.

At that point a neighbor stepped in and realized that Bill had less than 30 days before being evicted. They began a short sale process,and got the eviction delayed as they tried to sell the house. The house sold for perhaps $2 Million less than it would have been worth if not sold under duress, and the bank got every single penny of the money it had loaned plus all of the interest they had collected until that point.  The purchaser knew of Bill’s distress, and made private terms with him to purchase some assets so that Bill had at least a grubstake to get himself back on his feet. Bill doesn’t need a lot. Just a little respect and attention, really. He’s living in a trailer now and has his few friends, but his past life is gone.

I know of several other cases similar to Bill’s. People who should  never have qualified for the loans, but yet somehow ended upside down on houses they had lived in most of their lives. Good, hardworking people who never took anything from anyone that they had not earned honestly. But somewhere along the way, the financial industry lost any good sense or even enlightened self interest.  Money was cheap and flowing like a river. Developers were building huge tracts, and as long as prices went up, it held together with chewing gum and baling wire. Gardeners became landscape designers in order to qualify. The thinnest reed of hope became a field of clover on loan applications. And all the while, the banks and mortgage lenders made billions, not millions. Insult was in many cases added to injury, when low income borrowers or minorities found themselves with higher interest rates, sometimes for good reason, but in many cases because the lenders knew their marks and that they could get away with it. Sometimes, it was even family members taking advantage of relatives.

In contrast, last year President Bush loaned the banking industry $700 Billion under TARP to keep them solvent in the face of nonperforming loans. The TALF program  injected another $1 Trillion dollars, while in March the Fed was authorized to purchase up to $750 Billion in mortgage backed securities. Addition measures to improve liquidity total hundreds of billions more. And yet the banks have not loaned this money out as the government originally intended. This money is the lubricant that was supposed to help get us out of the recession. Most of it is sitting in AAA investments such as T Bills and government backed securities to help protect the banks balance sheets. Part of this is to cover loan losses from the mortgage implosion, but the reality is that prices are down nationally approximately 20%, so the banks are making most of their money back. The huge write downs will eventually turn into pure profit as assets are liquidated. The banks will once again report huge profits.

And people like Bill will continue to end up on the street, whether the home was $100,000 or $1,000,000. Companies will continue to lay off employees because they cannot get loans to keep themselves going through the hard times. The recession will continue because the jobless can’t spend and companies can’t invest. And we will all suffer as individuals and as a nation.But the well connected and the banks will do just fine. Senators and Congressmen will get their insider deals. Their contributors for the right price will be allowed to wallow at the public trough. This is the way it works these days.

Months ago there were headlines and outrage and investigations promised, and yet today, there has been no change. No one has gone to jail. Not one person. Congress held a few show hearings and then promptly forgot about the matter. And yet frauds were committed on a massive scale in the billions of dollars. This crisis has brought our country to its knees and there has been no accountability. If you are not more than a little outraged, you should be. When we live in a society where, with all of the laws and and regulations one can imagine, the criminals can still take advantage of the weak and walk free, something is deeply wrong with our morality and our methods. We don’t need more laws, we need to enforce the ones we already have. This is an offense against all of us.

The Banality of Evil – The Health Care debate takes a dangerous turn

This evening the New York Times is reporting that the President and Congressional leaders plan to go it alone on their health care bill. Since this leadership includes Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and we have seen their hysterical response to the growing concerns of many in the electorate with the various bills introduced so far, I am deeply concerned. Despite massive and growing resistance and incontrovertible declines in the popularity of their positions, they plan to take the gloves off and pass something, anything to be able to declare victory. For that is what this is all about now. Better, more widespread health care is not the issue any more. This is the most craven of partisan politics.

In 1962, Hannah Arendt, in writing about Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, tried to understand the phenomenon of  pure evil. Having been a good German who lived under Hitler until her life was threatened, she escaped the Holocaust. These were her people who did this thing.  She was desperately trying to understand how the German people would participate in such horrors. “The Banality of Evil” was her description of the way in which ordinary people accepted the orders of their leaders and committed such crimes. The  defense of “following orders” was disallowed by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, who stated that following illegal orders was not a valid defense provided a moral choice was possible.

So what does this have to do with health care? Please allow me to relate a true story. Today seems to be my day for such if you have read my earlier blog.

I had a relative in England who died less than three months ago. I will relate her story. She was never in the best of health, but contracted tuberculosis a few years ago in her late  50′s. Since treatments are weighted in the National Health Service, it was determined that her care would not have a high priority. Her children were grown and did not need a mother’s care. TB treatment is expensive, and there is a limit in the UK of GBP 45,000 per patient per year excepting extraordinary cases. Someone somewhere sat down at a desk and factored in all of these variables. This treatment was delayed as are many kinds of treatment in the UK. Then 3 years ago, in a weakened state, she contracted cancer. Once again, the actuarial tables were consulted, and she received only limited care. At that point it was only a matter of time. She survived much longer than anyone would have expected. Other illnesses attacked her body. And then, one day, she finally passed on.

There were steps in this process. There were procedures and guidelines. And decisions made to limit treatment. In the United States, she would have had immediate and aggressive treatment for tuberculosis by government order. She probably would have stood a much better chance of surviving much longer with a reasonable quality of life.

The fact is that today, our government is highly constricted in its financial options. We have already indebted ourselves to a point where we can no longer finance that debt. Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which is controlled by the abovementioned leadership, will go bankrupt in 8 years. Social Security is predicted to do the same in the 2030′s. The CBO also has calculated that any of the bills now under consideration would cost as much as $1 trillion. So we have the two largest safety net programs yet undertaken by our government bankrupted by irresponsible government borrowing and poor management, and Congress own accountants predicting runaway costs.  The president cited the Post Office as a comparison in speech to his undefined health care proposal in Portsmouth, NH last week. How can he and our leaders fail to see the analogies? How can they fail to see the potential for collapse and the terrible pain it might cause? This should be one of the most serious discussions of our time and there is no discussion.

The warning signs are all around us. We are faced with a health care system that needs reform. So many issues have been identified in the public debate that serious, measurable reform may now be possible. Ideas are coming from all sides. And yet we are faced with a pigheaded, partisan leadership that is basically preparing to tell the rest of us to go to hell and ram through another highly defective piece of legislation without scrutiny and without debate. The  financial system bailouts and Stimulus Bill and Cap & Trade bill all point clearly towards where this will end up.

The Administration and its supporters have vilified the concerns of many about end of live panels, and yet this is a fact of life in the UK already. Somewhere far removed,  bureaucrats make life and death decisions based on the numbers. With all of its faults, our current system values life much more highly. One of the chief theoreticians they seem to be listening to, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, the White House Chief of Staff’s brother, has openly discussed the “life value” of infants and the elderly, noting that a child is not really self aware until the age of two. This is a very, very dangerous discussion.

One of the fundamental virtues Americans have always held is the value of life. Whether it is in the care for sick infants or the billions spent on AIDS research or the heroic measures in the operating room on an inner city gunshot victim, or on the battlefield where our troops are indoctrinated with “no man left behind”, or our fundamental obligation under Medicare for the care of our elders,  we have almost always managed to do the right thing. We make herculean efforts to do so. There is a preferential option for the weak in our culture that we must never lose that is based upon our humanity and our faith.

Or do we, like Eichmann, simply shirk responsibility by saying we were only following orders?

Obama’s messianic demonization of his opponents

I have been traveling for the past few days, and so have been out of the loop. What I did catch sort of amazed me. Our president, on a conference call on the Health Care bills, lectured some of America’s leading Rabbis on the Bible. He said that “we are God’s partners in matters of life and death”. This betrays a fundamental arrogance and flawed thinking in man’s relationship with God, and yet no one said a word. No one was allowed to, as the teleconference was more of a speech with several questions submitted beforehand. There was no dialog. Moses had spoken from the mountain.

One of the first things we learn as People of the Book is that God is paramount in all matters. He is God, after all. We are but a mote in His eye, according to the Bible. So how a mere mortal who professes the Christian faith make such a terrible mistake? This is not about the president’s rhetoric. It is dogmatic. Our president would be guilty as a Christian of the sins of hubris and vanity if nothing else. Martin Luther King would never have said such a thing, nor would most of our leaders today. If one is to lead a moral crusade, one must first be moral. One must have humility and deep faith. I see neither in the advocacy of the Health Care bills.

He then called for “40 Days” of action, recalling Jesus’ 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. For a deeply flawed health care bill on which the nation is deeply divided? His analogies defy faith. He uses sacred rhetoric for the most base of purposes.

The president and his advisors have demonized their opponents to a degree which we have not seen in 100 years, with the exception perhaps of the hatred of the hard Left of Nixon and Bush. But this time it is our leaders doing the demonization, not bloggers or protesters. I cannot remember in our history when a president has stooped so low. Lincoln loved his opponents as a Christian. Most others who may have despised their opponents kept their mouths shut.

But this is a demonization of Mom and Dad and Uncle Joe. Pelosi has said so. Reid has as well. Somehow this is the Left’s version of a “communist plot” of 50 years ago, but is being propagated by people who should know better. Pelosi calls herself a good Catholic, but supports extreme abortion rights. Reid professes to be a good Mormon. Obama calls himself Christian, but sponsored the most aggressive defense of third trimester abortion in the land when an Illinois state senator. This is the height of hypocrisy. Whether one is a believer or not, the dissonance is jarring. It short circuits logic to an Orwellian degree.

The funny thing is that this time, these people are way out on the perimeter of the political discourse. Secularists will concede a certain logic to our ethical framework, but our president and his allies seem to defy that logic, all in the name of their political agenda. They set up straw men to knock them down, and cannot seen to even get this right. Our country deserves much better.

The New Two Minute Hate

Over the next few weeks, I believe we will see a new phenomenon in America. The President and his allies have amassed a war chest of $250 million to propagandize the most unpopular legislation perhaps in the country’s history.

In the face of logic and the voters, it is their plan to generate enough smoke and cover to enact a health care bill that includes the leeway to eventually enact a single payer system and expand government control. Nancy Pelosi has told us this is her plan, and the President is on record with his unambiguous support dating to 2003. Mr. Obama has now set the stage for the major media and his allies to take a no holds barred initiative against those opposing this legislation.

Across the country in both liberal and conservative districts we have seen a phenomenon that is distinctly American and which occurs only in times of great ferment. In town hall meetings across the country the message has been clear that citizens are opposed in principle to the current health care proposals based upon several key points:

. Cost – With the likely implosion of Medicare and Social Security and a staggering economy, how can we afford trillions more in expenditures at a time when we are almost bankrupt?

. Coverage – restricted care is likely with the fiscal constraints necessary to extend health care coverage.

. Control – Who will control our health care system? Bureaucrats? Physicians? Accountants? Patients?

Credibility – With so many backtracks and lies to date from our leaders, how can one trust what one hears?

While Pelosi and Reid and Obama and their allies blame insurance companies and the Republicans and lies and astroturfers, we are treated to the sight of Trailways buses unloading SEIU members in Portsmouth, NH and stacked crowds at photo opportunities and our representatives turning to their cell phones in order to tune out the opposition. Do we believe our own eyes or Axelrod’s poll tested, Plaintiff’s Bar Big Pharma funded propaganda?

We have learned that the Democratic Party talking points are to get in the faces of their opponents, accuse the Republicans of inciting angry mobs, and demonize the opposition. The President is now using Biblical phrases to cast this as a “Light versus Darkness” issue in which he will deliver us from evil.

At the cost of hundreds of millions, the advertising industry uses incredible tools to craft the most effective message. They in many ways put Goebbels to shame as they have far more modern resources. Be prepared to see any of the President’s opponents, the elderly, small businessmen, libertarians, and Republicans subtly and not so subtly be vilified. The President’s tactical plan is already on record. He has telegraphed his punch.

Our country has a history of raucous political discourse. From the time of Jefferson and Adams to Andrew Jackson to Lincoln to William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold, hyperbole has been writ large on our political landscape.

Except this time there are very few true believers in the President’s plan. The support is at best tepid and must be ginned up with large doses of cash and payoffs and Union and special interest applied outrage. Look for the identical placards with the union made imprint on the corners. Even the AARP is seeing huge pushback this time from its individual members across party lines. This is the Big Guys versus the rest of us.

This time the plan starts with Alinsky’s dictum that success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The ends justify the means as long as you win. The morality of a means depends only on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory. This is called situational ethics by most and was the rationale developed and expounded upon by Lenin, Trotsky, Goebbels, and Mao Zedong. By any means necessary to achieve the goal. This is not the ethical structure historical to America.

Alinsky said “If you push a negative hard and deep enough,it will break through into its counterside”, a variation upon the Soviet’s “Big Lie” theory in repeating the lie until it becomes truth. This is the reality of the coming health care push.

The President will use his opposition’s tactics against them while ridiculing them and demonizing them as best he can. He and his allies have already started the big push. Black will become white. Words and terms will be redefined into Newspeak.

Doubletalk will confuse the issue. Legislation will be defined by what is left out and not what is defined to allow redefinition at a later date. And his supporters will be called upon to vilify their opponents rather than debate them in an objective manner. We will have taken another step towards 1984.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine and the Health Care Debate

One significant question raised in the health care debate is funding for medical research. I would like to illustrate a simple point and ask for comment on the effect of the current health care proposals on medical progress.

Nobel Prize for Medicine 1945 – 2008

By Country

United States 84
United Kingdom 21
Germany 8
France 7
Sweden 7
Australia 6
Switzerland 5.5
Belgium 2
Italy 1.5
Argentina 1
Austria 1
Denmark 1
Portugal 1
South Africa 1
New Zealand 0.5

One of the primary reasons for this disparate result is the availability of funding, whether for governmental, private, or university based research in the United States. It is obvious from these statistics that the American system works better than any other by a margin of 4:1 over the closest nation, the United Kingdom, and by a substantial margin over all other systems combined. Intellectual freedom, capitalism, a willingness to dream great dreams, and a commitment to the greater good all converge to create the circumstances for success.

We are now being asked to modify this system substantially. We do not know the consequences of the proposed health care initiatives, but we must, by all that is good in our world, maintain our commitment to excellence. If there is any chance at all that proposed reforms might be detrimental to the role of research and medical progress, that legislation must, without question, be voted down. For the time will surely come once again when we will need those minds and resources to fight new disease and illnesses. This is perhaps our greatest legacy to future generations.

Obama vs. Cheney – Round Two

ABC reports this evening that the CIA has released redacted copies of the reports requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney regarding enhanced interrogation techniques. They report that the information gleaned did in fact save many American and foreign lives. They also affirm President Bush’s  statements that terrorist attacks were in fact thwarted.

According to these reports, one of the plots revealed by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind who was waterboarded two of the three times the technique was used according to other CIA reports, was to obtain and use anthrax spores and disperse them in heavily populated areas. Another was to commit another 9/11 event by flying hijacked airliners into London’s Heathrow airport. Other information gleaned was extremely valuable in identifying and mapping Al Quaeda’s financial network and hierarchy.

So where now are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Silvestre Reyes and Alcee Hastings and Maxine Waters and Jan Schakowsky and Adam Schiff and Anna Eshoo, who all castigated the CIA for what amounted to a a great big ball of nothing a few months ago? Their dark suspicions and accusations crashed and burned, and now we find that the President’s assertions, when he knew the facts all along, were an outright lie to the American People. So he responds with a witch hunt.

“Plausible Deniability” has re-entered the lexicon once again. As the president leaves town, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, appoints a special prosecutor to investigate “CIA terror tactics”, according to AP. Four former directors of the CIA, as well as current Director, Leon Panetta, have emphatically expressed their objections to such politicization of national security issues.

The President himself has said repeatedly “he wants to look forward not back” and yet Mr. Holder, who works expressly upon the president’s orders, has gone ahead with his inquisition. How can anyone think the president didn’t know of this beforehand and approve?

The issue has been investigated repeatedly and state secrets leaked by leftist members of Congress, and yet now, being criticized  from all sides for many of his policies, the President and his Attorney General decide to pour gasoline on the fire of an already alarmed electorate.

What is very strange indeed is that this President has embraced wholesale the tactics of his predecessor. On rendition, on Guantanamo, and on interrogation tactics, President Obama has simply renamed them and continued with the same policies.

Naturally, AP’s primary headline followed the Obama party line. “Inhumane CIA Terror Tactics Spur Criminal Probe”. We know where they stand on the issue. This will be published worldwide and further damage our country’s reputation.

Mr. Cheney has shown us that the Emperor wears no clothes, and the Emperor reacted with the most base of politically motivated inquisitions to deflect blame. Round two to Mr. Cheney, but it up to us to count the president out on a TKO.

In the presence of heroes

Years ago I began the process of getting touch with my Uncle Harry, who was a paratrooper killed at Anzio in February of 1944. Not in any spooky sense, but to try and remember the life of a  man who joined the Army in early 1941 and who was looked up to by his friends and family as a natural leader and who died in the fog of war too young. After doing some research, I attended a reunion of his unit to try and find someone who may have known him to try to get to know him better. Not much of a thread to connect over 65 years, but something to try and connect with why he did what he did and who he was as a man. I have been through my own experiences  and wanted to find a connection. What I found was something more.

The 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion was a very unusual unit. They were an independent battalion, only 400 men in an Army where the normal combat unit is a regiment of 3-4 Battalions. The 509th did not fit into most battle plans easily, but they gave the commanding general a unit of very tough, capable soldiers who could go anywhere fast to hold an airfield or bridge or town. They were the first unit into combat in North Africa, making our country’s first parachute assault against the Vichy French, and yes, a number of men were killed. They fought again throughout North Africa, including Kasserine Pass, where they held, and a bunch of places now long forgotten. Along the way they gained a reputation as something of a bunch of buccaneers and a little bit raffish. Maybe it had something to do with their first CO, LTC Edson Raff. Through the years, the 509th has been staffed and commanded by some of the finest men in the Army. in Mid 1943  LTC, later General Yarborough, the father of the Special Forces, commanded the unit. More recently, Generals Casey and Petraeus started their careers there. The 509th has always attracted the best.

After North Africa they were rested in Casablanca, which was much less romantic than it sounds. They were held in reserve in Sicily, which for the airborne was a debacle. Hundreds of American and British paratroopers were lost there before they even landed, many shot down by our own antiaircraft fire. At Salerno, they were parachuted behind enemy lines at Avellino to try to relieve the beachhead. Half of them didn’t make it back from that one, captured or killed. Later on, in a town called Venafro, 11 miles east of Cassino, they became mountain troops in a bitter cold, wet November and spent a month in the line with the Rangers. That was all one could ask of any man. Pneumonia, shrapnel, small arms, and hand to hand combat decimated the unit at each of these stops. My uncle, we knew, had been wounded once in North Africa and again at Venafro. He was said to have escaped from the hospital in Naples to get back to his unit for the Anzio landings, where they were the spearhead, the first men on the beach. He was killed by shrapnel a few weeks into the battle. Once again, the 509th was at the tip of the sword.

I met his Company Sgt., George Fontanesi, at one of the reunions. He remembered my uncle as a kid from Brooklyn, but not much more about him. George is 90 now. He also told me that in the 509th, the turnover was so high from wounds and deaths that men came and went at far too fast a pace.  You lost track, and only after the war sometimes found out. He gave me an example. There was a hill in village called Carano at Anzio, where my uncle had died a few days prior to this battle. The 509th were at the very point of the Allied line in front of the entire army, and the Germans were throwing what seemed like their entire army at B/509 trying to drive the Americans into the sea. On that hill was a reduced Company. Whatever was left of what was supposed be 100 men after almost 4 weeks of close combat. Maybe there were 25-30 men left at that point. The other Companies were nearby, but the Germans decided that they wanted that hill and sent a reinforced regiment with tanks and artillery. It is in the history books. B Company took everything the Germans could hit them with and held. In the middle of the night, George told me, they received 18 replacements. In a foxhole with a piece of paper and a flashlight, it was his responsibility to parcel them out to the fighting positions. The next morning, every one of those men was dead. Such was the history of the 509th. George explained it as it was, no varnish. An awful lot of 509′ers never made it home alive. The wounded sometimes came back, but often didn’t. Harry made it back twice before he died. It was that kind of bond they shared.

The 509th then fought as the pathfinders for the invasion of Southern France, again the first to fight. They helped liberate Cannes and Nice and the French Riviera and lost more men, and then rested at the end of the year outside of Paris. Like the 506th Regiment (the Band of Brothers), they were called out to fill the lines at The Bulge and took another bad hit at a place called Sadzot in Belgium for Christmas, when a full division bore down on them. A month later, they fought one last time at St. Vith. The orders to disband the 509th and parcel the troopers out had been on the way since before the Bulge, but only reached them on January 27. On the 28th, they pulled out of close contact with the enemy at the bottom of a hill with only 55 men still standing. Officially, the unit was disbanded on March 1, 1945. From the first to fight in the European Theater in Africa to March 1, 1945 over 7,500 men passed through the 509th, the majority wounded at least once or dead.

The 509th appeared and disappeared through the  60′s, almost like a ghost until the 1970′s when it once again was reactivated as a front line unit. The 509th Airborne Combat team was the only airborne unit in Europe, once again the tip of the spear. A separate Pathfinder Company were activated only to again be deactivated along with 1/509. In the 1980′s the 1/509th was again activated, this time it seems for a good while. They are the OPFOR (Opposing Force) who train other Army units in urban and guerilla warfare. These days, most of them are Iraq and Afghanistan vets, some with 3 tours, who do their best to drive much larger forces crazy in order to prepare them for the real thing.

Wearing beards and keffiyahs and kidnapping Colonels, capturing command posts, delaying and ambushing larger units than themselves, and then reviewing the results and both teaching and learning from each encounter are all in a day’s work. It is very demanding work, but it has its charms. One trooper delighted in telling me how they had captured a senior officer and then used his cell phone to call other CO’s, threatening them in pidgin Arabic laced with English curse words. He took special pleasure when he found his own former CO’s number. Some of these soldiers jumped in during the first Iraq invasion. Others came from other line units. Every one of them is smart and creative and committed.

One has to love the sublime logic of the Army.  The 3rd battalion/509th PIR was stood up at Ft. Richardson, AK in 2006 as part of the 25th (Tropic Lightning) Division, based in Hawaii. As part of Spartan Brigade, they went to Iraq, where they distinguished themselves as a part of the Anbar Awakening where generals argued over who would retain their services. One Company, along with a company of Marines, fought a pitched battle with over 2,000 insurgents. I met one of those Marines by chance at a supermarket the day before Thanksgiving last year, and he told me his part of the story. He didn’t have the words to express his admiration, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. It was rough  Eventually, with the cooperation of the local sheikhs, Anbar was pacified and proved General Petraeus’ strategy for the Surge to have been a success. Other Geronimo companies served in Baghdad, Babil, and elsewhere. Anywhere it was hot.

There is a toll for this. Honor in combat does not come necessarily from bravery, but from survival. 21 509′ers gave their lives in Iraq. One squad in Able Company (Able Nation) lost every member but one. He ended up in Afghanistan when 3/509 deployed. He wasn’t going to leave his buddies. I understood why my uncle did what he did back in early 1944, but this brought it all full circle. It’s the same as it’s been since Julius Caesar; squad, company, maniple, century. One for all and all for one.

We had a reunion a few months ago. There were only 6 of the originals able to attend; the rest gone or infirm. We had a lot of guys from the 70′s and 80′s, and 60 active duty 509′ers from Ft. Polk dropped in (literally). A few from 3/509 were there who had been transferred to new postings. The Army is like that, 2 years and you’re in school or halfway across the world in a new post in most cases. But the connection to the 509th remains. West Point has the Long Gray Line, but this is about shared experience and hardship; in training and under fire. I never thought I would get so much out of it. Lessons learned 60 years ago; lessons learned a lot more recently. And a lot of good friends across the age band.

The kids coming back from Central Asia have seen as much as anyone else of war and its pain. Urban combat in Iraq and fighting in the high mountains and valleys for sometimes 3 or 4 1 year tours of duty has its own burden.  And it has its price. Not a lot of people volunteer for this, and that in itself has deep meaning. The young ones are going to need the older ones. 4 months ago, a kid named Justin Casillas was carrying another kid named Aaron Fairbairn who had been wounded, over his shoulder to the aid station at a Godforsaken  place called FOB Zerok when they were both killed. 6 days ago, another young man named Julian Berisford was killed on patrol. This isn’t going away anytime soon.

The bond between the old soldiers and the younger, whatever the unit, is more critical than ever. I see this as a part of the ongoing mission. There’s been talk of the VFW or Legion having issues at some posts with the old guys vs the Vietnam or younger guys, but not in the 509th. The Vietnam era guys especially can relate to the stress and make a contribution. Some of them are doing it already.

Back in 1941-45 or in Afghanistan or Stateside now, it takes a very special man to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. It takes even more to face a determined enemy with a rifle in your hands. Every one of these men, and every veteran deserves the respect of us all. They have earned it the hard way. There is little of the trivial about these men. But there is compassion and brotherhood and all of those noble characteristics we don’t have enough of these days. Heroism is a combination of many things. To me, the greatest of all is keeping on even when the fear in your heart tells you your number is up. Every one of these men, old and young, meet any definition of the word you’d care to use.

So when you’re at the store or work or any of the places you go tomorrow and you look around, remember not just these men, but all of the men and women who have served. When you take the oath, you commit your life to your country. It is one of the great callings, especially in America. Also remember that overseas, the French and British and Canadians and Australians and many other countries remember their veterans tomorrow as well. And give a thought to every one of them around the world.

The United States Ministry of Propaganda

Patrick Courrielche at Big Hollywood wrote an excellent summary of a meeting sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts on August 10th on which he attended the conference call. It was hosted by the following organizations:

National Endowment of the Arts

White House Office of Public Engagement

United We Serve

They held this meeting, which included Rock the Vote and a representative of the hip hop producer Russell Simmons, with 75 leading artists, musicians, writers, taggers, and filmmakers who were urged to help propagandize the American people.  President Obama was putting the call out for service to help push his health care and cap & trade agendas. There was little subtlety in the message. They used Shepard Fairey’s “Change” image and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song as examples.

After 30 years of heated discussion of the apolitical nature of the NEA, the President has clearly stepped over the line.

The NEA has a budget of $155 Million this year, and was formed as an independent agency to fund the arts. There have been a number of controversies over the years about some of the artists supported, including Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography, while brilliant, was also graphically homoerotic at times as well. Andres Serrano, whose “Piss Christ” outraged Christians, was another recipient of NEA grant money. The merits of individual works can be debated  as can the role of government in supporting controversial artists or the arts themselves. I believe there is a strong argument for the promotion of high art myself.

But there is absolutely no place for the government funded and organized politicization of art in this country. This is a hallmark of statist regimes such as Mao’s China, Soviet Russia, and the Fascists. It is pure, distilled propaganda. Today, it is seen in art books or if you happen to visit Castro’s Cuba or North Korea. In Europe, it recalls the memories of World War II. This is not Roosevelt’s FSA or WPA support of great American photgraphers like Dorothea Lange or Ansel Adams, or even Diego Rivera’s murals. This is not Frank Capra or Preston Sturges idealism. This is Chicago style bare knuckles win at all cost pull the plugs out and hope we don’t get caught and screw ‘em as long as we win politics. That it supports two of the most poorly conceived and ill defined pieces of legislation in 50 years on throws more gasoline on the fire.

This not the camel’s nose under the tent. This is the whole herd. The call went out and it was answered. The crime has been committed. We will see, in addition to $150 Million in Big Pharma money, hundreds of millions more from the AARP, who have removed the fig leaf; the SEIU, and even some of the large corporations like GE (who own NBC) who stand to gain if they can slough off hundreds of millions in insurance costs. It is an all out effort to con the American people that has never before been attempted. Josef Goebbels would be proud.

I believe in the arts. It is one of the things that separates us from the animal kingdom. I believe in much of the role in the NEA. But when a corrupt president bends all agencies of government against his opponents, he must be opposed by anyone who believes in free speech and the First Amendment. The President must be held accountable.

Paging Mr. Fitzgerald

Way back oh, 9 months ago or so, we were treated to the conviction of Tony Rezko and subsequent indictment of the Governor of Illinois, Rudy Blagojevich on corruption charges. Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who convicted Lewis “Scooter” Libbey and got a 6 year term for perjury for his defense of  his boss, Vice President Cheney, seems to be hung up on both of these cases now.

That we now know that the leak of Valerie Plame’s status as an undercover CIA agent was the result of conversations between Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage and recently deceased journalist Robert Novak never stopped a witch hunt that included the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for 18 months. How is this just?

We are seeing a pattern of illegality within the Obama Administration that is disturbing. From his appointment of tax cheats indictable on felony charges to Cabinet positions to his use of “czars” outside of the normal chain of command who operate in virtual secrecy, to his recently instigated witch hunt against the CIA in reopening closed cases, we have a President who is at the least not afraid to push the limits of power and may well have broken the law. And Mr. Fitzgerald has been silent for 7 months. Tick, Tick, tick…….

Mr. Rezko was convicted at the height of the election campaign,  and promised to cooperate with further investigations. Mr. Blagojevich was caught on wiretaps in November/December auctioning off Obama’s  seat in the Senate to the highest bidder. Jesse Jackson Jr. was caught on tape negotiating a price for the seat.  Rahm Emmanuel’s name was mentioned more than once. So what gives?

Rezko is on record as having been Obama’s first major contributor even as our now president graduated from law school. The ties are long and deep. Rezko seems to have offered a sweetheart deal to the Obamas to purchase a home that was at the time beyond their means. His conviction on 16 of 24 counts of corruption involving the Chicago machine is a matter of record. He was wired tight into the heart of darkness, and seems to have promised to reveal some of those deep Chicago secrets to an ambitious prosecutor almost a year ago now. What we are left with seems to be a dry well.

So Mr. Fitzgerald, you convicted a Chief of Staff for doing his job protecting his boss and put an innocent reporter behind bars for 18 months and have the Mother of All Political Scandals handed to you on a silver platter, and are silent.

I used to believe in a phrase called “for the good of the country”. Most of the DA’s and prosecutors I’ve met have a hard core streak of justice running right down their spine. They are hard wired to find  evildoers.  My grandfather told me in a letter on my 7th birthday to be a credit to God, to my family, and to my country. These are the kind of men I hope are the backbone of our justice system. Fair, correct, and who believe in our Constitution.

We now have the news that senior officials at the Department of Justice, not the career prosecutors running the case, have closed the investigation of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson in a “pay for play” scandal that forced his withdrawal from consideration as Commerce Secretary in January. Add to this the decision not to prosecute Black Panthers in Philadelphia for intimidation at the polls and Attorney General  Holder’s decision to reopen a closed investigation of the CIA , and a pattern of impropriety seems to be emerging.

So what ever happened to those investigations, Mr. Fitzgerald?  Where are we?  Bueller? Bueller?

California Sneaks Through Higher Income Taxes

These are the last days of summer vacation for most, and most of our ruling class are away on Martha’s Vineyard or in the Hamptons or Malibu soaking up the sun before going back to Washington and Sacramento to stir up more mischief. But the late night drops over the transom have continued like a leaky faucet. Bill Richardson of New Mexico skates on corruption charges as “high level” decision makers in the Attorney general’s office overrule career prosecutors and the Attorney General opens a witch hunt at the CIA over events years ago and probably outside of the statutes of limitations and the NEA is caught organizing Obama propaganda fests.

Here in California the hobgoblins have been busy as well. The LA Times reported today that the California Tax Board, who we really have not heard from in quite a while, has lowered our tax thresholds, bumping most of us into higher tax brackets. They claim it is inflation indexed, but with some of the lowest inflation on record for the past 10 years, it is obviously a subterfuge. The net result to the state treasury is a $140/family tax increase.

So far this year the state has doubled the vehicle tax and also increased income taxes by a quarter point. If you recall, the car tax cut was Arnold’s ticket to Sacramento. Sales taxes, use fees, and all sorts of hidden scams by the state to gin up revenue have all done very little to actually bring in more revenue as the state government has done its best to screw up the world’s 8th largest economy. The state just got $14 Billion+ in “stimulus” money just to help balance its budget, but it’s not enough. So they figure they’ll squeeze a little more.

Here in California we have some of the highest costs in the country now; for housing, for gas, for most of the basics. The same gallon of gas they pay $2.55 for in Texas costs us $3.00 here. Now, a family of 4 earning $100,000/year, which believe it or not is considered middle class, will get hit with a 22% increase in their income taxes, or $715.00, all courtesy of the bureaucrats in Sacramento. So more jobs will leave and the schools will suffer and our quality of life will decline. And still nothing changes. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, as the the French say.

The only public servant on record so far is Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who pointed out that it “takes more money out of the taxpaying productive sectors and scoops it into the government’s coffers at a time when taxpayers are already reeling”.

Funny things happen in the late days of August because they figure no one is paying attention.

The Mary Jo Kopechne Right to Life Bill

This week we are faced with the loss of Senator Edward Kennedy, the Lion of the Left, who has been idolized almost nonstop since his death yesterday morning by the networks and major media. Senator Kennedy had a long and storied career fighting for wider access to opportunity and fairer laws for all. But he also had a troubling personal history.

While nominally Catholic, he was one of the most prominent advocates for abortion rights, and womanized and drank his way through 50 years of privilege. He was also  complicit in the manslaughter of Mary Jo Kopechne, who idolized him and was in the car the night he drove off a bridge and into a channel under suspicious circumstances. This seems to have been forgotten.

This morning, it took all of a few hours for some Democratic Party strategists to begin renaming their health care efforts in honor of Senator Kennedy. Forgive me if I find this to be just a little hypocritical. In an environment of win at all costs when the legislation proposed is so deeply flawed, I must assume that there is opportunism at work.

Loose  wording  has opened up the possibility of an unfavorable reinterpretation of the health care bills under consideration. The Congressional Budget Office has already declared that any legislation will cost trillions more, and leading advocates of the various bills are already calling for a reduction of billions in Medicare benefits. Logic dictates that the quality of care will inevitably suffer.

At the same time, there is overwhelming opposition to late term abortion in this country. We have become barbaric in some ways with less and less respect for human life at its beginning or end. A fetus is viable according to  scientific metrics at 25 weeks. It deserves the simple right to survive. We may disagree about abortion, but objectively, we are taking a viable human life with late term abortions.

Our elders are afraid of “death panels”. The bureaucracy of managed care, whether through public or private options, can encapsulate the banality of evil. We all deserve a fighting chance. And if we are at life’s end, it should be our decision with our families, with the consultation of our physicians, to make that choice. This must be enshrined in any health care bill that passes.

Federal funding for certain controversial procedures such as abortion at a time where the cost of care is skyrocketing and there is such moral dissonance on the issue should also be questioned. If the government wants to limit obesity and smoking, surely we must look at other areas of personal conduct and allow  the choice, but not a publicly funded one.

One thing we know from the history books is that Mary Jo Kopechne was a  moral person, a true believer. She died far too young in a senseless accident late at night on a dark road, abandoned to her fate.  While we remember Senator Kennedy we should also remember Ms. Kopechne  as well.

Change You Can Deceive In! The Left’s Coming Health Care Propaganda Campaign

September 8 the fun and games will begin in earnest. We have been watching Town Hall meetings throughout America with a common theme, concern with the governments actions on spending, health care, and its direction. Congress members have been hearing from their constituents, and will return to Washington in full knowledge of the stakes at risk.

But to the Administration and Congressional leaders, this hardly matters. They are rallying around the still warm memory of Teddy Kennedy and gathering their forces to come out swinging. The ads are being tested with focus groups, The AARP and Big Pharma money is being spent reserving television and radio time. The unions are printing up hundreds of thousands of T shirts and identical posters for mass rallies. Paid organizers are being trained to hold rallies which will of course be aired on the major networks with tight camera angles to ensure the images and sounds we hear will hit exactly the right note. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

The Journo List will have their talking points written up for them and every leader on the Democratic side will have their role, just like a kabuki play. The sympathy mob has their props ready to trot out for the cameras. Obama has enlisted the National Endowment for the Arts to rope in every leftard graffiti artist, musician, writer, and videographer they can spring from jail or rehab to Rock the Vote for their hero.  MoveOn.org and ACORN are funded and ready. This is the Super Bowl and the  Democrats have their Red Zone offense good to go.

They have cowed the AMA and hospital lobby and Big Pharma into supporting their agenda, and there is an ominous air in their dealings with the insurance industry. They are, of course, Public Enemy Number One. They are figuring out who in Congress can be bought and at what price just like they did with the Stimulus bill. Maybe a few more Republicans will take their salt.

In the meantime, ABC and NBC have refused to air opposing ads, and editorial commentary will be scornful in their derision of astroturfers, bitter clingers, the evildoers and guns and religion crowd. You know, the morons, as they think of us. Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich and Paul Krugman have been mainlining Red Bull shooters and are so wired up they may be incoherent, but you see, logic is not the point. It never was. This is the nuclear option.

And basically, the only thing standing against them is the common sense of the American People. The Left figure that if they can manipulate and triangulate and obfuscate enough of us this stinkeroo may squeak by. It has so many loose ends it will unravel in weeks, but by then it will be too late. Common sense doesn’t matter. This is a pure power play.

They will then have health care and the auto industry and banking in the palms of their hands to loot at their leisure. The insiders will get paid off and the rest of us will be the poorer off. The country will be broke beyond redemption, but somehow this won’t matter. It’s all about Teddy, it’s all about the Dream. And it has no basis in reality.

And in 6 months or a year or two, it will all go kaboom and of course it was never their fault. It was someone else’s. It will be ours. Because that’s the way they think.

More Kennedy Nepotism?

It would seem that our oligarchy has once again gone off the deep end. In today’s edition of The Hill, Senators Orrin Hatch and Christopher Dodd call for the selection of Teddy Kennedy’s widow, Vicki as his replacement. As if Massachusetts politics was not bad enough, this is indicative of the Roman mindset prevalent in Washington today.

Over the last month of his life, Kennedy’s primary focus was on overturning  a state law he himself proposed in order to prevent a political opponent, Gov. Mitt Romney, from appointing a replacement should John Kerry have been elected president. Now, you see, this same legislation works against the Democratic Party’s interests as it prevents a supermajority at a time when all indications are that they want to ram through their health care bill at any cost.  It’s a hell of a thing to be thinking of this as you prepare to meet your Creator.

The mention of Mrs. Kennedy’s name was not hers, but rather made by Senator Hatch. In the spirit of bipartisanship Senator Dodd, Teddy’s partner in debauchery for 30 years, seconded the motion. You see, it’s all one big happy utterly irresponsible family in Washington these days. It’s the ultimate in bipartisanship.

Senate and Congressional seats make great Christmas gifts, and it is the gift that keeps on giving as well. Just imagine the take for even a short term. Political favors can be handed out, legislation can be bought and sold, and the speaking fees when you have the word “honorable” prefixing your name are nice. These are not, I believe, Mrs. Kennedy’s thoughts but rather the nature of the position as defined by many in our political class today.

I have nothing against Mrs. Kennedy and only condolences for her family, but we are faced with a truly scary spectacle . We are seeing our democracy under siege. We have Representatives and Senators who, having been caught in bold faced lies, only shout their lies louder. We see many of our representatives not engaging with their constituents, but rather hiding. We see our Administration acting like the Corleone’s in making offers Big Pharma and the banks cannot refuse. And we see our leaders ridiculing us as uninformed rubes and tea baggers.

It is time to seek out the best in our country. The problems are massive. Instead, we are seeing our leaders at their worst. We must take back our democracy. It is not a gift, and it is not a bribe. This is not Rome. Democracy is a responsibility, not a hand out.

Are The Democrats Going to Sell out Afghanistan?

Paul Wellstone in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal is proposing that all is well in Afghanistan and perhaps we can declare victory and start drawing down our troop levels there.  Ironically,  this is just as Generals McChrystal and Petraeus are requesting additional forces.

In the U.K. there has been scandal week after week regarding the governments mismanagement of the Ministry of Defense and the war. Public approval is at a low for the conduct of the war, and yet high for the performance of the military.  The latest rumor is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown may shortly announce the withdrawal of the 9,000 British troops stationed there.

The government of Afghanistan is setting records for corruption and the country is still by far the world’s largest source of  heroin. The poppy fields are there. They fund much of the Taliban’s war effort as well as the nominally loyal war lords who still act like 16th Century brigands. This issue is now part of our mission portfolio, as is nation building. For 7 years, Afghanistan was on the back burner. Now we must succeed.

For the past 6 months, General McChrystal has studied and formulated his plans and is now acting to implement them. It is agreed across the board that the effort will require more troops on the ground, more helicopters, and more close air support as well as building schools and infrastructure and trustworthy public institutions. Afghanistan was the shoestring war until recently. We are finally committing the resources, and on their side of the border the Pakistanis have realized the danger to their own government and begun to act. Progress is being made.

Just as the death toll in Anbar indicated success in Iraq, so does the rise in activity in Afghanistan. Soldiers bleed when they are making a difference. The Taliban is willfully inflicting casualties on civilians to achieve their ends, and the innocent are caught in the crossfire.  It is the price of freedom.

The Taliban are demonstrating their ability to get things done in the territory they control; the old filling potholes route just like Brooklyn pols did 100 years ago. Except the potholes they are figuratively filling are those they caused with their own IED’s. But they are, according to JCS Chief Adm. Mullen forming courts and helping the displaced poor claim stolen lands. Land theft is a problem that goes back centuries in Afghanistan, and the Taliban in the past were just as guilty as anyone else. But now it works to their advantage.

Their brutality is the same as it was when we first got involved, and there is one central question above all others that will decide the war in the end. The Afghan people are asking us “Will you stay with us?”.  Otherwise they will simply make their accomodations with the Taliban and all the lives lost and money spent will be for nothing. They may be uneducated, but they are by no means stupid.

Many experts and the think tanks are questioning the focus and direction at the top here in America. The Administration seems not to know what their end goals are. The mission has been redefined as a “Contingency Operation”.  Obama’s claim of Afghanistan as “the good war”  raises the stakes and he owns this one. What is funny is that Iraq very slowly seems to be sorting itself out on their own. Both wars seem to have fallen off the front pages. Funny how that happened.

Attorney General Eric Holder has complicated matters even further with his investigation of the CIA’s actions. In one fell swoop, he has put politics ahead of policy. The CIA investigated it’s interrogation programs and reported back to the Executive Branch, and now those same reports are being read in a different light, redefining criminality. So you have the generals looking over their shoulders now, the Secretary of Defense looking over his shoulder, and the entire CIA looking over its collective shoulder to see if they are going to be sold out. Sounds like 1973 to me.

You see, we have a leadership in the Democratic party that is hard left. We are seeing the President playing more to the liberal wing of the party than ever before. Then we have Wellstone and Brown ready to drop the other shoe. One can now envision Congress tip-toeing out the door in Afghanistan.

And yet, the new strategy has not even been given a chance yet. We have two of the smartest Generals in modern history, Petraeus and McChrystal, and the chance to actually build something good, and once again our leaders may be ready to blow it all to hell.

If we withdraw, you will see more heroin on the streets of Europe and America and an implacable enemy back in power, funded with those profits. The Taliban are amoral. You will see North and South Waziristan become even more dangerous, and the fears of radicals obtaining weapons of mass destruction will once again be real and tangible.

We let many things go too long in Afghanistan; the corruption, the warlord culture, the drug trade, and the lack of real nation building. We also starved the effort of resources. The Taliban are counting on us tiring of the fight and using this fear to intimidate the population further. After all, it has been our history and theirs.

We must let our people do their jobs as they have proven themselves capable of, and we need to stay the course. Otherwise, every death from 9/11 to date will have been in vain. Every death in vain.

Alternate Realities – Right versus Left versus Islamic Extremism

We have, over the past 7 months seen a complete redefinition and rebranding of the conflict with Islamic extremism. We have also seen the Iraq War fall from the front page almost completely, and the news on Afghanistan has been reduced to a trickle. American casualties in both countries have been under the radar for months, which should be some metric of our success, and our generals have some excellent strategies going forward. But we are going to lose if we do not stop the political gamesmanship at home.

Under Bush, there was a huge outcry of manufactured rage against these conflicts. It has virtually vanished under President Obama. The far left is still very upset and feels betrayed, but the most prominent demonstrators like Cindy Sheehan are almost completely ignored now. In the cities and suburbs, you would hardly know there is a war (or two) on.

Let’s look at the Obama administration’s actions after 7 months in office:

. Withdrawal of troops from Iraq to 50,000 garrisoned outside the cities.

. Renaming the Global War on Terror to Contingency Operations, a meaningless Newspeak term.

. Retaining most Bush era policies and powers while renaming them. Remember, Obama excoriated Bush’s human rights record during the campaign, and is now doing the same thing,      whether you agree or disagree.

. An aggressive use of unmanned drones across the Pakistani border. Sometimes with their approval, often not.

. Dismantling many of the joint agency programs established after 9/11 to improve interagency intelligence gathering and information sharing, and reprioritizing the FBI as the lead agency in terrorist investigations. This is simply a return to Clinton era policies which are now recognized to have failed to keep the nation safe.

Bush was vehemently criticized and accused of being a war criminal by the Left beginning in 2003 with the Iraq invasion. In the aftermath of the most effective terrorist attacks in history against several of the highest profile targets in the United States, the reaction by our government and both friends and foes to the horror was concerted and consensual. It wasn’t just Bush. It was Spain and Britain and France and Russia and even at one point Iran. We seem to have forgotten that the intelligence consensus cited by Colin Powell came from multiple agencies around the world. The Taliban had already been defeated in Afghanistan. The future held additional bombings in London and Madrid. And Al Quaeda was still very very active. If nothing else, it was thought that Saddam was an enabler who had already cost millions of lives with his adventurism.

We won the war, but almost lost the peace. Iraq is still problematic. It is still the Americans they look to to be good faith brokers and keepers of the peace. Now that we are leaving, we are seeing an increase on bombings which could undo all of the progress of the past 3 years in months, leaving us with nothing to show for billions of dollars and thousands of lives lost. And yet we still had the Left declaring the war lost up to election day. This includes noted intellectuals such as CNN’s Peter Bergen, Glenn Greenwald, and most of the New York/East Coast intelligentsia.

And now George Will is said to be preparing to oppose the Afghanistan war just when we have shifted focus to this theater. Shame on him. Somehow, even with Generals Petraeus and McChrystal in charge, we have already lost what we never really won and never tried to win according to this emerging consensus of left and right. To them, it’s time to say the hell with it and go home.

This afternoon, the National Security Advisor, General Jones, had the audacity to claim that “President Obama’s greater success with international relations has meant more terrorists put out of commission”. I say “where”? Pakistan, perhaps, where the government finally realized the danger to itself and acted in its own self interest? The General provided no numbers or examples, but surely after 7 months on the job this is highly optimistic.

Our Attorney General as a member of President Clinton’s administration successfully advocated the release of 11 Puerto Rican FALN terrorists who had in fact committed terrorist acts to assist in Hillary Clinton’s Senate bid in 2000, a blatantly political move. The one of these terrorists was later killed in a shootout with police should weigh on his soul.  After President Obama’s public statements to the contrary, Mr. Holder has now cast CIA officers and interrogators who acted under orders and in good faith as criminals convicted without a trial in the court of public opinion. The fact that the statutes of limitations have almost certainly expired makes the farce all the more political. How can we take these actions as a part of a serious defense of our nations security?

The mantra of “blame Bush” has continued and will probably do so throughout this administration. We have seen a Derridan deconstruction and reassembling of the objective truth.  In Iraq, we didn’t take their oil. We didn’t prop up a fascist dictator. We simply tried to remove an enemy who had already proven himself as such and who had the will and the means to cause infinite suffering. We then helped establish a democratic government and have met with some real success. The Left must recognize this and respect the achievement.  In Afghanistan, we are doing the right thing and yet the professionals are deeply concerned (read last night’s post). The Left and Right must allow the plan to unfold without breathing down the necks of the commanders and diplomats. The enemy is still out there and still hates us whether Democrat or Republican or Independent.

One of the primary rules of war is unity of mission and purpose. The President gives the orders and the military follows them. The orders have been clear and need to remain so. But an administration that does not act realistically is more dangerous to our troops than it is to itself.  This is not about politics at present, and the Right must respect this as well. The people on point are as realistic as it gets, and will state their honest opinions and the options. Listen to the professionals we pay to do the job and let them do it. We lose wars when politics and emotion overrule common sense.

Cash for Clunkers Cars – Unintended Consequences

One of the  issues facing the new owners of cars purchased through the Cash for Clunkers program is that these cars can not yet be registered in their  names, and in some cases  may need to be returned to the dealers. The catch is that the dealers cannot register the cars in the new owners names until they are completely paid for. Since the federal government is so far behind on their paperwork, there is nothing most dealers can do until they receive funds.

Dealers must fill out a 20 page form  for the program, and the rule book is 136 pages. A significant amount of paperwork is being returned for errors, thus clogging the system further. In addition, many dealers and consumers are concerned that someone will be left holding the bag if a deal is not approved. $4,500 is a considerable sum. With the backlog, no one quite knows whether many deals will make it under the wire.

Thus these cars must legally sit in the driveway until the funds and paperwork clear. Most dealerships can get this done in hours with on line registration under normal circumstances, so there is no other excuse.

On top of this, the dealers have only 90 days to strip parts from the cars for resale before being crushed. Since they are not allowed to transfer decommissioned cars to wrecking yards, millions of dollars will be wasted as most dealers are not set up for recycling and salvageable cars will end up as scrap.

And now they want to run healthcare?

Blackouts in Britain – Are we next?

I remember shortly after arriving in the UK back in the 1970′s in a dark and dreary Manchester November being stunned that the power workers union had gone on strike, shutting off the electricity purposely to press for their demands. It was as much about control as it was money. The unions ruled Britain at the time. I was one of the lucky ones. While I had to use candles, the flat I had rented had gas heat that still worked. Hospitals, offices, factories, and homes across the country were faced with temperatures in the 30′s and no way around the problem. Many people died because of the cold and loss of electricity. Eventually, it brought the government down and Margaret Thatcher to power. The lesson I learned most was the folly of man. Once again, Britain seems to be on the verge of another man made disaster in the power sector.

Irwin Stelzer in the Telegraph reports that by 2013, Britain will be in the midst of a power crisis.  The resulting blackouts and brownouts will be the result of not enough clean energy sources and poor planning. According to their treaties, the British government must reduce carbon emissions by 34% by 2020 and 50% by 2050. Mr. Stelzer calls for clean coal research as one answer, as they still have an abundance. This could benefit the United States and China, the two largest industrial economies as well.

Our Congress goes back in session next week, and after the health care bill, the Senate will take up Cap & Trade. There have been many concerns voiced on both sides of the aisle and in the environmental community with a poorly crafted House bill. But the Administration is under pressure to present major legislation at the the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen beginning December 7. This is meant to build on the Kyoto Protocol, and the president needs a big win.  Instead he is faced with an intransigent China, the world’s other largest polluting nation, and a bill that does nothing to actually reduce greenhouse gases. We all suffer from this outcome.

At the same time, our power infrastructure is falling apart. We are relying on outdated coal power generation technology and many nuclear power plants are over 30 years old. The transmission system needs a serious upgrade as well. If demand for electric cars is as predicted, the system will be heavily overloaded and we too will be faced with blackouts.

It takes 10-15 years to build new plants. A number are already moving forward, but not enough to make an impact on any of these issues. Photovoltaic will not provide enough power, but the good news is that it can be localized. The president and policy makers must stand up and get it right this time. The solutions are there, but we need to begin work immediately. the president has the opportunity to change the agenda in a truly meaningful way and steer American industry back on course. But if we blow it, you’d better stock up on candles and propane.

Why is Homeland Security Involved in the H1N1Flu pandemic?

I have been following the news on H1N1 flu for the past year like most people who are addicted to the news. We have seen outbreaks throughout the world, and it seems that H1N1 so far has a somewhat higher mortality rate than most strains of the virus, but not abnormally so. Recently, in an incoming class of 1,300 cadets at the Air Force Academy, 67 were diagnosed with H1N1 on July 14. This is an infection rate of 5.1%. In a typical year, 1 out of 3  inhabitants (33.33%) of the United States is infected with the flu. The typical mortality rate for influenza is 0.7%. According to Wikipedia this morning 301, 894 cases have been reported worldwide, with 3,097 deaths confirmed, for a mortality rate of 1.06%.

In 1918-1920, the Spanish Influenza epidemic saw an estimated 500 million people worldwide infected of a global population of 1.5 Billion, the same 33.33% that tracks with the average flu infection rate. But of these cases, between 50-100 million patients died. The death toll among the healthiest sectors were the highest. This was also a H1N1 variant, which is what has health officials so concerned. It seems the mechanism of this strain produced such a strong reaction from the body’s natural defenses that it weakened the strongest patients most aggressively, most of whom then contracted bacterial pneumonia as a secondary infection and died very quickly. Deaths caused directly by the flu were also high, and it was not a pleasant death. It is estimated that this was the worst plague to strike humanity in history.

At present, the first outbreak has been relatively benign. However, if the virus mutates, there lies the rub. In Mexico, where it was first reported, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of cases went unreported. It is likely that this is the case around the world. This may be no defense at all if the virus mutates again. The CDC tracks mutations every year and lists them and works to develop vaccines for this reason. Influenza  is always around, and it is constantly mutating.

We are seeing government at all levels preparing for the worst. This is their job, to try their best to keep us safe. In 1918 and 1919, the authorities were unprepared and did not take quarantine measures in time until late in the pandemic after the worst damage had been done. Patients infected but not yet showing symptoms spread the disease without even knowing it in public places, increasing the rate of infection of a highly infectious disease. Today, the focus in the news has been on the Department of Homeland Security taking the lead, which to me is odd. The Surgeon General, who, after all is a member of the uniformed services and commands the Public Health Service, yes. The Centers for Disease Control, absolutely.  But to have Homeland Security as the face of the fight against the a pandemics smacks of statism. I don’t disagree with goal, only the means to that goal. Or perhaps the way the press has portrayed it. The effort to sell papers or ad space on the TV news leads many in the news media to sensationalize even the trivial.

So imagine having TSA employees as the face of the new effort. They have already earned a rather oppressive reputation simply by the nature of the job. In some cases employees have exceeded their authority and both threatened and detained law abiding citizens. This is not the image that government needs to project to help contain the flu. The White House meeting yesterday involved agencies across the Federal spectrum and yet the headline from AP focused on Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano. The media must take the blame for this kind of alarmism.

Should the virus mutate into something horrible, we must all be prepared to contain it as best we can.We must be prepared to quarantine ourselves at home, and if necessary in some cases, in hospitals, school or other facilities set up to handle the disease and treatment efficiently. After all, these places will have the medicines, the doctors and nurses, and the tools necessary to cure us. Expect a mess and be prepared for it. The system may become overwhelmed, and we may have to take care of each other.  In the case of SARS, as in the 1918 epidemic, the loss of common sense cost lives and did terrible damage. Above all, proper prior preparation will help us get through this together.

The political atmosphere today is highly charged. Citizens are honestly concerned with government intrusion into their private lives and the direction of our government. The government, the media, and we ourselves must do our best to set aside politics and work together for the common good. We are all responsible. This may all come to nothing, but we must, as the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.

The Banality of Evil – The Liverpool Care Pathway; Patients Sentenced to Death by NHS

Today’s Telegraph includes a very important article germane to our national discussion of health care. Experts in the United Kingdom, including several of the top professors in palliative care, are insisting that recent guidelines known as the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) are in some cases a wrongful sentence of death of patients who might otherwise survive. The very nature of LCP is itself highly controversial.

These guidelines, which include a determination of patient consciousness and the ability to swallow medication, can be misread and if the action is agreed upon by  doctors, intravenous drips and food are removed from the patient. Further, deep (terminal) sedation can then be administered.

With a limited staff in many hospitals, doctors are also at times not as well informed on each patient’s condition in order to be able to determine their true status, and some patients removed from the LCP have gone on to recover.  The administration of deep sedation is especially troubling.  In England, 16.5% of deaths came about after deep sedation, twice the percentages of those in the Netherlands and Belgium.

This is the banality of evil. It is the  codification and bureaucratization of the taking of life by the state. The decision is solely that of the attending physicians, and the process is inherently flawed. It is an Orwellian arrogation of power to the state. This is exactly what so many of those concerned about the current health care debate fear.

Comrade Obama Leading Us To Glorious Future!

Just messin’ witcha Mr. President!

Political Alternate Reality Syndrome (PARS)

It seems these days there are two distinct alternate realities at work among America’s political class these days, neither of which is necessarily connected to objective reality.

E.J. Dionne, in today’s Washington Post attempts to redefine the voter outrage at recent town hall meetings as aberrational behavior by a small minority blown up by a sensation seeking mass media in order to increase ratings.  He goes on to report that a stringer for one of the major networks told Rep. David Price (D-NC) “your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up”. He then concludes that “the only citizens who commanded widespread media coverage last month were the right wingers”.

Let’s start a roster of some of the strange events being reported in both mass and internet media:

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) – “I’m not going to give those people a forum” – 9/2/09
Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN) – “This is my Town Hall meeting” as he has a videographer removed – 9/2/09
Rep. Jan Schakowsky – (D-IL) – insists that 80,000 people in her district who do not have coverage will get it if health care reform passes. – 8/31/09
Rep. Carol Shay Porter (D – NH) – has constituent arrested for disrespect, calls tea party participants tea baggers – 8/29/09
Rep. Steyn Hoyer – (D-MD) – maintains support for “public option” at town meeting – 9/1/09
Sen. Harry Reid – (D-NV) – “Kennedy’s death will help us on health care” – 8/30/09
Sen. Harry Reid – D-NV) – slams media coverage of health care protests – 8/28/09 – Politco
Rep. Rush Holt – (D – ) – “Cap & Trade didn’t go far enough” & “Medicare is solvent” – 8/26/09
Rep Tim Bishop – (D-NY) – has union organizers bused in from outside district who then shout down opponents – 8/28/09
Rep. Betsey Markey – (D- CO) – “There’s going to be some people who have to give up some things” referring to the health care bill – 8/26/09 – The Coloradan
Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) – Holds town hall meeting described as chaotic. – 8/25/09 – Washington Post
Rep. Maxine Waters – (D-CA) – calls health care bill opponents neanderthals at town hall meetings- Fox News – 8/25/09
Howard Dean – Former Dem Party Chairman – “opposition to health care bills is undermining the country” – 8/25/09 – MSNBC

The sources for many of these reports were not the media, but rather guerrilla videographers with cell phones and video cameras blogging to sites such as Youtube and Twitter. The media, seeing this, extended their own coverage, and once the bright lights were turned on, the professional agitating class got involved. But the reality is that the narratives differ considerably depending on the source. The bloggers footage is raw and documentary while in some cases individuals and groups play to the cameras when the evening news shows up.

You get the idea. There is strong opposition to the current health care and other proposals, just as there is strong support. These are some of the facts. What is also a fact is that the approval ratings for both Congress and the president have sunk to new lows in record time. Disapproval of Democratic politicians is at a record high as is disapproval of the president. Not that the republicans are all that popular either. The polls seem to all agree on these points.

The Left is upset, with Paul Krugman, the Daily Kos and their allies saying that the president has not done enough. Bill Moyers denounced Democratic legislators as “spineless” on”Real Time with Bill Maher” last Friday. The Financial Times reports a “seemingly unbridgeable rift between the centrist and progressive wings of the party”. 60 liberal Democratic legislators wrote a letter to the president in mid-August saying they would vote against any bill that excluded the public insurance option.  This discord comes from within the party, not its opponents.

The tea party protests, whether one agrees with them or not, are a new phenomenon to American politics. Never before have we seen Middle America step into the limelight in this way. There is concern throughout the country about Federal spending, the type of spending, nationalization of key industries, and the direction of the government. All of these themes have been quite clear from the beginning, and many cross party lines. These events did not start in a vacuum, but rather were a response to reading and seeing the news every day for weeks and months prior to taking to the streets. Mr. Dionne, you see, has put the cart before the horse. This seems to be typical in Washington and the Blue States today.

Whether Republican or Democrat, the leadership class and media has been out of touch with the ordinary voter for a long time.They parachute in for a sound bite or 30 second video clip and then fly back home. In the meantime, the internet has become a stronger tool than ever before in direct communication. Contradictory opinions to those of the elite are now available instantly, and in many cases, the video and  reporting is directly at odds with with the media’s narrative. Fox News has also established peeeminence with their counterprogramming to the mainstream. Time and Newsweek, formerly the two preeminent news magazines, officially and publicly dropped all pretense of objectivity last year, recasting themselves as opinion journals, and have clearly established their liberal bona fides. In a world with more communication tools and the ability to verify the truth, it seems those who once delivered “just the facts” no longer do so very well.

On the right, the message from the establishment media is muddled as well. George Will has tossed in the towel on Afghanistan even before the McChrystal Plan has been made operational. The backbiting of Sarah Palin during last yea’s campaign was strangely dissonant with the popularity of the candidate among a significant percentage of the population.  You see, if you are not from the same tribe, this is how it works these days. If you do not subscribe to the same groupthink, you are the heathen, the “tea bagger”, the astroturfer.

And yet the one quality recognized to be most lacking in Washington is common sense. The rules are Byzantine and vendettas a way of life. It’s an Alice in Wonderland world of Kabuki in the halls of Congress and then cocktails in Georgetown with the same people you just tried to destroy. Revolving doors ensure the same people think the same things. They have gone to the same schools and through the same programs and every couple of years a new crop shows up who are for the most part quickly indoctrinated in the Washington Way. And they have lost touch with reality.

Most of the country is hurting from this recession and the effects of 60 years of poor policy decisions. Debt is out of control, and both Social Security and Medicare are in a real, objectively determined danger of collapse.  Cities and states across the country are in danger of technical bankruptcy, and we have many crises to deal with at once. Our military policy has become a shambles. Just today it was reported that the Department of Defense is considering a reduction of our primary military projection platform, our aircraft carriers, by 35% (per DefenseTech). This hasn’t made it to the front pages yet, but it will. To the average intelligent observer, big changes are taking place, few of them positive, and still our leaders are living in a bubble.

When studying a new strain of illness or type of conduct, the scientific method teaches us to try and describe it accurately and effectively. The symptoms described in this case are not the result of party politics, but rather of an alternate worldview to that arrived at in a non-objective manner. Sufferers see what they want to see and base their assumptions and decisions not on the facts, but on either emotion or desired outcome. We could call it Lewis Carroll Syndrome, as it is a looking glass world, but instead, I would like to propose that we name it Political Alternate Reality Syndrome, or PARS for short. This description covers a wide range of conditions within an overarching hierarchy and can then be studied more effectively. Universities can establish programs and chairs and apply for grants and hold conferences, or we could all just use a little more common sense.

Breaking down the Democratic Health Care Offensive

He would like you to believe that he’s been on vacation this week, but in reality, the president has been hunkering down with his top advisers planning his health care offensive. The ads are in place, he has two consecutive high profile speeches, and he knows on Wednesday he must make the speech of his life to retrieve any form of the health care bills now in front of Congress.

He also knows that he must now put his political reputation on the line. The Left Wing of the Democratic Party has failed. They may try to brute force a bill through, but the reality is that across the country, apprehension and resistance is so high that passage would be an invitation to electoral suicide in the 2010 elections.

The president knows he has to move closer to the center, and he now knows the whole country is watching every move he makes. He also knows that his liberal supporters are demanding the public option. With his approval rating below 50% he is in danger of becoming ineffective. Moderate Democrats may begin to distance themselves, making it much harder to move his agenda forward.

What we know now is that the unions are ready to roll with both cash and foot soldiers. The paid activists have finished their boot camps and are ready to get the message out.  Over $200 million has been budgeted in advertising Remember, this is a short term blitz.  In comparison Obama’s direct spending in 2008 in the general election was $315 Million. The McCain campaign spent $84 Million. This will be the most expensive single issue campaign in history.

The experts have been given their background briefings so they  are ready to hit the airwaves, and Journo – list will have a list of talking points that is pre-programmed for the next month.

“Harry & Louise” have been re-branded. During the 1993 legislative battle they were against the legislation. This time, with Big Pharma bought and paid for, expect to see them urging it for the good of the children or elderly or whichever other focus group is seen as the key demographic.

The AAAP will do the same, shilling for the bill under a false flag. Big Business may enter the fray as well. NBC (GE) has become the unofficial network of the administration, while CBS is right there with them. ABC seems to at least have a modicum of presenting both sides. Wal – Mart will chip in so they can get out from under health care costs.

Confusion favors the President. He is extremely adept at being all things to all people while achieving his core goals. He will drop a direct reference to the public option, but will attempt to use a back door approach. The Democrats have, over the past 60 years proven incredibly adept at conjuring new meanings out of existing legislation to rationalize and expand programs beyond the original intentions written into law.

We will see the duck and fake and enough misdirection to fool the rubes for the time it takes to get the bill passed. We will see old fashioned arm twisting and even more pork doled out. Rangel and Dodd and the other crooks will get a hall pass  in exchange for their support and campaign committee donations.

Next week is the key. If they do not see their numbers improve significantly after the president’s first speech and the initial ad campaign, they will pivot to a more moderate approach. The past month has been  prologue. Act I begins Wednesday. And remember, once they have their legislation, they will do anything they damn well please. It’s the Chicago Way.

Make Love, Not Capitalism

Just Say No To Socialism

Just Say No To Socialism – II

Carter Squared

As the days grow shorter and our children go back to school and the nation settles back down to business, the unease and anger seen across the country over the summer will be gauged again on September 12, when Tea Parties across the country register their disagreement with the government’s current direction. Whether it is the TARP bailout or the Stimulus or Health care, a growing majority in the country are deeply dissatisfied with our president and his policies. And that majority is our middle class, not the radicals this time.

The Treasury has been printing money at an unprecedented rate since last year, and our debtors are saying “enough!”. This week, the United Nations joined those suggesting an alternate to the dollar as the global reserve currency. The fact is that economists and accountants and businessmen throughout the world know that the dollar is in for a very rough time over the next several years. Here, it will be seen in skyrocketing oil prices, over 50% of our imports, and an even more distended trade deficit. Import prices will skyrocket as we don’t make a lot of the products we need anymore such as computers, cars, and the most basic consumer products. We really won’t be able to take advantage of a lower dollar either because we don’t make a lot any more.

The economists are also predicting a jobless recovery, which to me is not much of a recovery at all. The banks and large corporations will apparently weather the storm, but the rest of us are on our own. Our government is changing the definition of recovery as we watch. The same thing happened under President Carter’s administration, except this time the numbers are much larger and scarier. We used to speak in billions. Now it’s trillions. There is a real danger of hyperinflation. The only tool left to the Fed will be interest rates, and we may see those 18-20% of the late 70′s come back again. What choice will they have to maintain any semblance of credibility of our currency?

So where will the recovery come from if people aren’t working? How will they pay taxes? How will government fund its ambitious programs if it does not have the  revenue? Every one of the president’s programs has a massive price tag, and yet he seems to ignore the costs completely. That’s what happens when an elected official has no real world experience, unfortunately. There is a disconnect between putting dinner on the table, whether at home or as a nation when one has never held a real job. At least Carter had to run a state for several years. And how can the president say with a straight face that there will be no tax increases in the face of such spending? Are we to believe there is a magical plan to generate wealth once again? How will state governments survive in the face of bankruptcy and reduced revenues?

The entitled sector, whether unions or public sector jobs is growing rapidly as the private sector, especially our manufacturing economy, once the engine of growth, shrinks. This is another very unhealthy trend. The president says he held the line with a 0.4% cost of living increase for federal workers when the cost of living has dropped considerably. How does that make sense? How does adding hundreds of thousands of federal employees in the middle of a recession make sense when our economy is shrinking and we can’t pay for them? How does paying those employees significantly more than their private sector counterparts make sense?

Our military is being hollowed out before our very eyes . Vital programs to replace Air Force tankers, cargo aircraft and helicopters are being chopped wholesale even as our military needs simple replacement of these assets as they wear out in two wars across the world. There is serious discussion in the Pentagon of a 9 carrier Navy, down from 14, by 2013. Other major Navy programs are on the chopping block. Our nuclear weapons programs are in utter disarray.We have not updated the technology for 30 years, which is technologically and militarily foolish. Our missile defense systems are being cut as well. After Vietnam, our military was a mess. It can happen again if we are not careful and wise.

We flirted in the 70′s with high gas prices and did so again just last year. Somehow we got through that one, but with a weak dollar it is more likely we will be paying much higher prices in the near future. Remember gas lines? We will have gas this time, but it will just cost $5-$6/gallon. Add on the billions in additional costs associated with the Cap & Trade legislation, and the burden will fall squarely on the working man more than ever before.

Just as in the late 70′s the mood of the nation is pessimistic. The polls tell us that many believe our greatest days are behind us. Ronald Reagan famously said “a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job, and a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job”. We are only 8 months into the new administration and half of the people in the country feel this way already.

In many ways we are living in a more dangerous world than ever before. There is a real likelihood of significant nuclear proliferation. There is a real possibility someone might use those weapons as well, if not on us then on Israel or India or Pakistan. What then? With the United States seemingly descending from superpower status at record speed, it is likely the world will see more wars as countries scramble for resources and advantage. Our Afghanistan policy is drifting out of control as if there is no hand at the helm. Our relationship with Israel is as bad as it has ever been. Our president is apologizing around the world and finding strange bedfellows.

By 1978, our country was deeply divided by our government’s direction. We are once again. At a time when we need to apply all of the quintessential American virtues; thrift, charity, hard work, inventiveness and good will, we are seeing less than ever before. The Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote that overused phrase which is ever so applicable I will use it again…”those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it”.  We have been there and done that, and we are about to do it all over again. We should learn from those lessons rather than repeating the same mistakes once again.

Why We Fight

During World War II, Frank Capra collaborated with our government to help reinforce the message that the war was both just and proper. This series of films, “Why We Fight” were propaganda, but even so, were based on the facts. The first outlined the rise of Fascism and Imperialism, then the near imperial conquests of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and finally Poland. The balance closely followed the expansion of the Nazi and Japanese empires from 1940 onwards. It put a face on why we were sending our best and brightest to risk their lives for people 5,000 miles away. It was the right thing to do, and it was also necessary to the continued existence of our ideals and country.

Today, it seems we are once again faced with the question of  the right thing to do. Will Afghanistan be another Vietnam, where we abandoned the people to their fate, or do we stay the course? In Vietnam, thousands died in the purges and camps, and millions more were abused and degraded. Thousands of them endured the worst sorts of hardships to escape a brutal dictatorship, and today over 500,000 Vietnamese Americans live here because of that clash of ideologies.

After 8 years of war, Iraq has become relatively quiescent and now has a real chance at integrating into the regional and global community as a peaceful, constructive partner. Despite the propaganda to the contrary, our strategy in Iraq has worked so far. It wasn’t easy, but it should be remembered that in any war that it takes two years to change course. The best plans in the world rarely survive first contact with the enemy, and mistakes were inevitably made. We lost some of our best there, but their sacrifice was not in vain.

Afghanistan was by executive decision put on the back burner while we concentrated on Iraq. Through 2008, Generals Petraeus  began to shift focus, and today, Afghanistan is the front line.  On June 15, only 90 days ago, General David McKiernan was relieved of command, primarily because he had repeatedly and forcefully requested additional troops and support to be able to provide better security. The fact is that outside the cities, we have a series of ever smaller bases, culminating in forts way out in the middle of nowhere the French Foreign Legion or Buffalo Soldiers would have been uncomfortable in. We are running a shoestring war there. There are not enough helicopters or transport planes or trucks or any of 1000 other essential tools of combat, and we have not done nearly the job we did in training  the Afghan security forces as we did in Iraq.

Leadership from Washington or London or the Continent is nonexistent. In the UK, there is a civil war between the Army and the Government. It is a dereliction of duty, frankly, by the men who send younger men off to war. They play politics while our men and women out on the line pay the price in blood.

In this country, an unholy cabal of Left & Right is now arguing for a pullout. They cite Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, but somehow conveniently overlook the  Gandharan Empire in the Khyber, which lasted from the 6th Century BC to the 11th Century AD and which traced much of its origins to Alexander himself. From Persian to Indian to Greco – Bactrians it stretched from Kabul to Islamabad and had a polyglot history that is reflected in the Afghani people themselves today. The country is at a confluence of cultures, and while primitive by today’s standards was once a sophisticated crossroads between India, China, and the West.

But as in 1996, the barbarians are once again at the gates. In that yea the Taliban came to power after dividing and conquering the diverse ethnic groups and initiated a reign of terror financed with drug money. You see, this is the recent history of Afghanistan. While family and clan have come first for centuries, the madrassas, the home of the Taliban, have always been a breeding ground for bandits and terrorists. In the 1870′s Robert Warburton, a British political agent, arrived in the Khyber and over 20 years was able to maintain cordial relations between the tribes and the Crown. He was fluent in the languages, and had a real empathy with the people. This is the strategy proposed by our military leaders today. It worked then, and should work again now.

The Afghan people are tired of war. They are destitute, and like any other people see modern technology and opportunities and want to benefit from them. They do not want their children to die of medieval diseases. They want their children to get an education and live a better life than their parents. They want what all of us want. To be left alone and to work and feed their families. But they need security and they need the infrastructure that will help them advance.

We can compare the billions spent in Africa or other parts of the world and say the same thing if we like. What have we accomplished? We did not get involved in Afghanistan because we wanted oil or resources. We did so because 2,974 of us were brutally murdered on 9/11 and the threat originated in that country. It is ideological, you see. The Taliban and their Al Quaeda allies are and will always be our sworn enemies. If they can expand their empire into Pakistan as they have been trying to do, they will acquire nuclear weapons and with their suicide culture we can be assured they will be used. Isn’t this worth fighting for?

Millions of Westerners are addicted to heroin that comes from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. We must root out the warlords and stop this trade as best we can. It is a moral obligation. And lastly, our best and brightest offer the best hope of a peaceful, modern Afghanistan. It won’t take 2 years, or 5, but 10 or even 20. But we have to devote the resources now, and we have to have the will to win. It has never really been about money or motive, it has been about commitment. We need principled, disciplined leadership and we need it right now.

Remembering 9/11

I just got off the phone with a close relative, a cop who was a first responder at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, as we do every September 11. A lot of the cops and firefighters who were there take this day off. The things they saw and the pain they experienced are almost beyond comprehension. The thousands of people running from the smoke and dust and flames, and the empty emergency rooms waiting for ghosts. It was terrifying. That day was seared into all of our minds, but especially those who were there, and at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Across the country, everything stopped. Every single private aircraft in the country was grounded and we were in absolute fear of additional attacks.  I was lucky. I was out of town but able to drive 8 hours home. Many people were stuck for days trying to get home in the aftermath. We huddled around the television, trying to find comprehension of why this happened and why we were chosen as the target of these attacks.

Osama Bin Laden released a videotape that day, coincident with the attacks, laying claim to a great victory for Al Quaeda and his vision of a radical, inhumane Islam. Throughout the world, leaders of almost every state, both our friends and enemies immediately condemned this heinous act of terror and offered assistance and solidarity. We were all New Yorkers or Washingtonians that day. We came together as a people in our grief and anger. We went to war with those who had declared war on us years before that day. We had ignored the first World Trade Center bombing, and the Khobar Towers, and the U.S.S. Cole incident, and the Kenya and Tanzania bombings. All of the evidence always pointed to the same people. there was not the shadow of a doubt of who was responsible.

We launched a war on terror that day. We had lost 2,975 civilians lives  in a premeditated act of terrorism and the perpetrators took immediate credit. And yet 30% of the people in this country today think it was a conspiracy hatched by our own government. This is how insane the discourse has become.

Our new president has fed this madness and completely redefined our efforts against these terrorist enemies. There is no more war on terror. It is now a contingency operation. He is investigating CIA officers who were exonerated 4 years ago for their actions in carrying out necessary interrogations. He has once again made the FBI, who were taken unaware prior to 9/11, and once again made them the lead agency in our efforts against terrorism. He has dismantled the interagency task groups that were created to make sure we were not taken unaware again.  He is re-writing history before our eyes.

At the site of the World Trade Center is a giant hole in the ground, 8 years later. The city and developers and other participants are still bickering over what to do. It is a disgrace and dishonor to the memories of all of those who died that day and who sacrificed their lives afterwards in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. It is a disgrace to the dead of Madrid and London as well, as they too were victims of this battle of ideologies.

In Washington, the Left declared Iraq a loss under Bush despite the incredible progress made, and now those same voices are urging a pullout from Afghanistan. Suddenly that war has become unwinnable. Suddenly “Yes We Can” has become “No We Can’t”. We see a defeatism across our society, blaming capitalism and conservatism and religion. And yet those same virtues have served this country well for 233 years.

John Adams said ” Facts are stubborn things; and whatever our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”. We seem to have forgotten this as a society. There is a distortion today and revisionism that has run rampant. We all saw the same live feeds on that day. We all saw the Bin Laden tapes. We all know the right thing to do, and yet now, for political and monetary gain, the insiders distort the truth and game the system, lying at will and getting away with it. Is this how we will remember 9/11? Revisionism and distortions?

The same people still hate us and have been forced underground. Many plots have been foiled, but if we continue on the current path, we are almost certain to once again face unnecessary death and destruction.  A lot of us said that day, Never Again. And if, God forbid, we are once again attacked, we must hold those who have chosen this path responsible. We know better now, and have no excuses.

Pelosi begins Afghanistan sell out on 9/11

Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger of the New York Times yesterday reported that Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee gave a speech on 9/11 in which he said he is against sending more American troops to Afghanistan until more Afghan security forces can be trained.

On Thursday, the eve of 9/11, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stated that the president would face opposition if he requested additional troops. She was quoted by reporters as stating ” I don’t think there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or in Congress”.

In the Democratic Party, there is a deep divide between the left wing and the center. Unfortunately, we are now seeing clearly that the Left Wing is doing its best undermine the war effort in Afghanistan, as it did in Iraq. But now they are the ones in power. To say such things on the 8th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, of all days, is truly indicatative of the contempt in which they hold their own country.

Political Alternate Reality Syndrome – Media 9/12 Edition

Somehow, somewhere between 700,000 and 1.2 Million middle class Americans protesting against the administration’s policies last Saturday made nary a blip on the radar of the political elite and their media cohorts. The sight of hundreds of thousands of well behaved but very pointed, and scarily normal critics protesting excessive spending, insider dealing, political corruption, and the general direction of our government hardly registered on the people who should have been listening most closely.

If you didn’t catch it on your tv or in your newspaper, it wasn’t just in Washington. It took place  in 100 cities across the country. 5,000 in Los Angeles, another 3,000 in Orange County, CA; Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Indiana; in fact most of the 50 states had their protests as well. But there was almost nothing in the large circulation press. The typical article, when found, stated “thousands” when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even 1 Million+ would have been more appropriate. What gives?

On top of this, today’s Washington Post headline reports on the health care bill(s) that “Opposition Is High But Easing”. Their questions posited the dropping of the public option, and yet David Axelrod of the White House said yesterday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he is not willing to accept that this alternative is dead. The leadership is adamant on this issue, but many in Congress across party lines have stated that they will not accept such legislation. The poll also stated that the supporters of the bills have become more active. And so the dialog begins once again. But once again, we see selective journalism.

In addition, virtually no one has followed up on Nancy Pelosi’s statement on 9/10 that she would not approve more troops in Afghanistan, just as the fight gets serious and we need them the most. Nada, zip in the mainstream media. She dropped this bombshell to a roomful of reporters  on a sacred day in our history and no one said a word. How indicative of the Democrats 9/10 mindset can you get?

There is serious discussion of reducing the Navy’s carrier fleet from 14 battle groups to 9, and nothing in the mainstream media.

The Iranians and North Koreans have embarrassed our administration once again just this weekend, repudiating direct talks after Obama did a 360 on U.S. policy and opened dialog directly, and nothing has been said. Our government torpedoed the 6 party agreement on North Korea, and in response the North Koreans  announced another nuclear test. Isn’t this newsworthy?

Our media is more than asleep at the wheel. They are so far gone that I doubt they can be saved. And our country is much the worse for this. The Pew Center reports today that since they began tracking the public’s assessment of press accuracy in 1985, our trust in the truthfulness of the news is at the lowest level ever, at 29%. Somehow, 30% of respondents in another recent study believed that 9/11 was the fault of the Bush Administration despite the overwhelmingly contrary evidence.

The issues are simple. A vast percentage of those who have lost faith in the stewardship of the facts by the media have done so because there are too many alternative news sources with which to compare stories. They are finding the emperor has no clothes. There are those at the fringes who will believe what their emotions lead them to believe, usually in unsubstantiated screeds. But the rest of us can see the original video or text without media filters and decide for ourselves. Independent reporters with sound integrity are taking on the hard stories. Ordinary citizens are looking for the fire behind the smoke.

The mainstream media was looked upon as reasonably honest brokers   (I hate these qualifications)  until 25 years ago. This consensus has completely broken down.  They have to the  become obsolete and irrelevant, only good for sports and fish wrap. Television has become ever more mindless. At this point they are no longer even propaganda outlets. As they used to say about the two government owned newspapers under the Soviets “There is no Izvestia (News) in Pravda (Truth), or Pravda (Truth) in Izvestia (News). The same now holds true for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and 100 other formerly relevant outlets.

Jim Carroll, R.I.P.

Back in the early 70′s, I went to New York to see the elephant; to experience one of the greatest challenges a 17 year old male could take in a country where a war had just ended and there weren’t a lot of those intense environments where you had to pit your wits against the random brutality of life. I found it in Hell’s Kitchen for a while, and later living all over the city as a student. My education was as much on the streets as it was in a classroom, and I lived a lifetime’s worth of experience in 4 years. At some point later on I discovered “The Basketball Diaries” by Jim Carroll and said wow, that was close.

He wasn’t a role model, but he was very real. The book combined his love of the game with the mean streets long before they became fashionable. He was another one of those guys who could have gone either way, good or bad, and he went pretty spectacularly bad, even though his poetry and writing and music made him famous. He walked the same streets and saw a lot of the same things I had and when his first album came out it was like some of the memories I had taking life. Alphabet City, people I knew in doorways, violence, bad things. It was cathartic.

His work was too raw for a lot people. Far too scarily real. When he wrote of heroin addiction or suicide or murder or hustling in Times Square, he had first hand experience. Like him, I skated too close to the edge at times, but I was one of the lucky ones. It tempered me and made me harder without losing too much. Jim had it all; the look, the voice, the skills, and his demons drove him towards destruction. He had a sometimes Kerouac manic ADD I could relate to at times. He ended up with the Warhol crowd and got his 15 minutes. They were a glorious 15 minutes, though. City Drops Into the Night and People Who Died ended up at full volume whether I was in Europe or California, light years away. He always reminded me of that edge. And for that I am very thankful. I salute you, brother…..

Political Alternate Reality Syndrome – Volume III

You really can’t make this stuff up. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Chair of the House Rules Committee, has come up with her own brand new set of rules for conduct on the floor of the House in response to Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst at the President during last week’s address. This after 8 years of Democratic name calling on the floor of the House, including during at least one of President Bush’s addresses to a joint session of Congress. The censorship and double standard to which the Democratic Party majority holds itself is truly pathetic.

Ms. Slaughter’s own statements are an example of these double standards:

This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process; and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand.
Louise Slaughter

Honesty, integrity, and accountability, the values, which should be the hallmark of this government, have instead been thrown under the bus by an arrogant majority, casualties in a misguided campaign to shield from accountability those who abuse this House.
Louise Slaughter

These were, of course, her comments during the Bush administration. My, how things have changed. Censorship, graft, and corruption are now part and parcel of Congress’ business today. So where does the Honorable Ms. Slaughter stand now? One more example of PARS to me.

TEXT

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Rules Committee Approved “Decorum” Guidelines for House

Washington, DC – The House Rules Committee today provided a summary of approved guidelines for all members to follow during floor debate. The Rules are approved by the entire House and are posted on the committee website. They can be found here:

http://www.rules.house.gov/archives/house_comm_dec.htm

Decorum in the House and in Committees
Under clause 1(a)(1) of Rule XI, the rules of the House are the rules of its committees as far as applicable. Consequently, Members should comport themselves with the rules of decorum and debate in the House and in Committees specifically with regard to references to the President of the United States as stated in Section 370 of the House Rules and Manual.
As stated in Cannon’s Precedents, on January 27, 1909, the House adopted a report in response to improper references in debate to the President. That report read in part as follows:
“It is… the duty of the House to require its Members in speech or debate to preserve that proper restraint which will permit the House to conduct its business in an orderly manner and without unnecessarily and unduly exciting animosity among its Members or antagonism from those other branches of the Government with which the House is correlated.”
As a guide for debate, it is permissible in debate to challenge the President on matters of policy. The difference is one between political criticism and personally offensive criticism. For example, a Member may assert in debate that an incumbent President is not worthy of re-election, but in doing so should not allude to personal misconduct. By extension, a Member may assert in debate that the House should conduct an inquiry, or that a President should not remain in office.
Under section 370 of the House Rules and Manual it has been held that a Member could:
• refer to the government as “something hated, something oppressive.”
• refer to the President as “using legislative or judicial pork.”
• refer to a Presidential message as a “disgrace to the country.”
• refer to unnamed officials as “our half-baked nitwits handling foreign affairs.”
Likewise, it has been held that a member could not:
• call the President a “liar.”
• call the President a “hypocrite.”
• describe the President’s veto of a bill as “cowardly.”
• charge that the President has been “intellectually dishonest.”
• refer to the President as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
• refer to alleged “sexual misconduct on the President’s part.”
However, the Senate rules on decorum and debate do not prohibit personal references to the President. Senate Rule XIX governing decorum and debate is applied only to fellow Senators and “does not extend to the President, the Vice President, or Administration officials and a Senator cannot be called to order under rule XIX for comments or remarks about them…” (Senate Procedure, p. 741). The Senate rules also provide that Jefferson’s Manual is not part of the Senate rules (Ibid, p.754).
By contrast, the rules of the House specifically provide that Jefferson’s Manual does govern the proceedings of the House where applicable (Clause 1 of Rule XXVIII). Section 370 of Jefferson’s Manual states that the rule in Parliament prohibiting Members from “speak{ing} irreverently or seditiously against the King” has been interpreted to prohibit personal references against the President. In addition, Speakers of the House have consistently reiterated, and the House has voted, to support the proposition that it is not in order in debate to engage in personalities toward the President. The Chair enforces this rule of decorum on his own initiative.

Wearing White Hoods & Riding the Countryside?

“White hoods”

This is getting carried away…

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) suggested to CNN that Wilson’s outburst — if left unsanctioned by the House will encourage racists to don “white hoods and ride through the countryside.”

Really?

The craziness on the Left is getting way out of hand. It seems that those who disagree with the President are now Klansmen and women.

Better Than Springer – The Acorn Files Videos

Over the past week, we have been treated to some of the most tantalizing video not produced by a major studio in a long time. Daytime television would kill for this footage. Count ‘em, 4 times now, James O’Keefe, the new bete’ noir of the Left, has caught ACORN employees engaging in some of the most outrageous behavior ever caught on documentary film. It’s better than Springer or Maury Povitch.

In Baltimore, in Washington, in New York, and most recently, in San Bernadino, California, O’Keefe has used the same routine; a hidden camera and flagrantly outrageous acting skills by himself and his co prankster, Hannah Giles as they act the Pimp ‘n Ho strolling into ACORN offices looking for assistance is setting up a bordello using Federal housing funds. Each time, the responses, apparently legitimate, get more outrageous.

The patter is that O’Keefe needs a mortgage to buy the house of ill repute, and that Giles will then import underage girls from Central America to work there. They are clear in their explanations, and in every case the ACORN employees do their best to assist them in either using subterfuges to obtain fraudulent mortgages, suggesting the best locations, and counseling them on ways to avoid being arrested. In San Berdoo, the ACORN employee actually explains how she got away with shooting her ex, which may result in capital felony charges. These people are DUMB.

The conversations are both damning and scathingly hilarious. Instructions in hiding the money in a box behind the house; how to set up the illegal immigrants as quasi-legal residents, money laundering, hookers, and mortgage fraud. This has it all. With the penchant of the cable networks for miniseries, it’s perfect.

And yet nary a word from the mainstream media. Congress is caught in a vise, having funded an obviously corrupt organization to administer housing programs, register new voters, and help take the 2010 Census. But it’s as if there is a void in our national dialog. Congress is now beginning to cut funding and the Republicans are demanding a complete severance of relationships, and yet if you read the New York Times or watch CNN there is no context. It is a disconnect. Congress and the president are caught with one of his closest organizations caught in delicto flagrante and no one seems to want to say why. It’s like reading the Da Vinci Code minus the first 3 chapters. It makes no sense.

But for sheer entertainment value, go to www.biggovernment.com and be prepared to be amazed, shocked, tittilated, amused, and outraged as the trusty reporters do what 60 Minutes used to do so well. Springer’s got nothing on these guys….

Jumping Into The Sewer – The Left and The Race Card

I didn’t want to have to write about this, but there seems at the moment to be a chorus of accusations against the president’s opponents of racism. Only today, former President Carter joined the chorus, and Representatives Mike Honda (D-CA) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), as well as Barbara Lee (D-Berkeley) echoed the sentiment. Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) invoked images of the Ku Klux Klan and white hoods when referring to Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during the president’s address to Congress last week. This is just plain nuts.

The country has the highest unemployment in 30 years; we seem to be adrift at home and abroad, and the perception is that spending and graft are completely out of control.  Theses are objectively demonstrable concerns across race and party, not wild eyed conjecture.

Charles Rangel (D-NY) is playing the race card as he is being investigated for unexplained income and unreported income. This echoes Adam Clayton Powell’s accusation before he was ejected from the House for similar transgressions in 1967. Henry Louis Gates, who should have known better, accused a cop of the same after he had an altercation in his front yard in which a black police officer was also involved. What gives?

In a country which has become ever more a melange of race and creed and ideas, the most charged accusation is racism. Whether it is La Raza in LA or now, especially with our elected leaders, the word carries terrible freight from the past. It evokes lynchings and segregation and economic exploitation. And yet this a part of the history of our country regardless of race.

Whether you are Irish or Italian or Jewish or Black or Latino, those in power have always taken advantage. And yet, at the same time, we have as minorities been able to ascend the economic ladder based upon those ultimate American values; hard work, frugality, sacrifice, and faith. Breaking through economically has meant that we have also broken through socially and culturally. Today, America is the most ployglot society on the planet and the most uniform in its treatment of its citizens. It is also the most generous of societies towards the weak.

I grew up in that generation which condemned racism. When I was 8 years old, I remember Martin Luther King’s address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It hurt me that my uncle, a black man in Brooklyn, might face discrimination. I read Malcolm X and believed deeply in equality. I also knew human nature from an early age.

I knew that in place like Philadelphia and Brooklyn, one ran with their tribe. Whether it was Italian or Bohemian or Black or Irish, there was safety in numbers. I was horrified that in some places down South attitudes had not changed that much from Jim Crow, but at the same time, people, both black and white, were changing this. It was about education and succeeding on one’s merits, not one’s class or race or advantage. That is the American Dream.

And yet here we are, 50 years after Martin Luther King, being dragged back into the gutter. Why? Our schools stink, frankly. Political correctness is rampant in academia and government and corporate America. We are losing our exceptionalism not through our individual efforts, but through being told we are by elites who segregate themselves from the rest of us.

We have an ever increasing oligarchy, not a democracy as Jefferson and Adams and Washington and Franklin and Lincoln envisioned. We have the aristocracy of Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff and George Soros, all of them  buying power and favor as the working man suffers. The worst description of all today is a jobless recovery. The rich have it covered.

And yet, when all of us have our backs against the wall, the Left yells Racism! There is 40% unemployment in California’s Central Valley, and the vast burden falls on the Latino community. In the Midwest, it is manufacturing that is taking the hit; good working and middle class people. In the cities, the financial industry has been devastated. It is the lower and mid level employees who have been hurt, exactly where our minorities have made their best advances. But the public sector and the unions are relatively unscathed. You see, today, if you are on the inside, you’re protected. The fix is in. And if anyone disagrees with you, you can call them a racist and get away with tossing hand grenades.

I had an ex like that. She would accuse me of the basest of crimes and threaten me by calling the cops. I had thick skin, luckily, and ended up battered, but proud that I had maintained my morality and my integrity and decency.

What I found was that we can all think certain things, and in the proper company, we can say things that might seem inappropriate to the thought police. But in the end it is our humanity and love for one another that sees us through. I remember a Broadway song from a few years ago, “Everyone’s a littler bit racist” from a play called Avenue Q. Yes, we can be. It’s fun sometimes to take the Mickey, as the Irish say. But there is also a deep respect among all of us that recognizes virtue and achievement and hard work. That is, after all, what makes us Americans.

And Mr. Carter and the left must recognize this, or they will imperil us all. Crying “wolf” works only once. The politics of divisiveness must be put aside, especially in times like these. There are serious differences of opinion and policy at issue, but racism has nothing at all to do with this.

From Seeking Alpha – Japan to U.S.; “We don’t want to exclude you but…”

Gaming the collapse of the dollar reserve system remains a favorite pastime of forex and commodity traders. Japan’s new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama is talking about an “Asian community.” The Reuters dispatch cited below indicates Japan’s dilemma. Japan doesn’t want to “exclude” the US or the dollar from an Asian community or a new monetary arrangement, but the risk is that the failure of American policy on all fronts will force the rest of the world to do for self. That, as I wrote earlier this week, is why the gold price continues to rise.

TOKYO, Sept 16 (Reuters) – Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said on Wednesday his vision for an Asian community didn’t mean he wanted to diminish the role of the dollar or exclude the influence of the United States from the region.

Hatoyama’s comments may do little to ease market jitters about Japan’s new government and its stance on the dollar after remarks from newly appointed Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii caused the yen to jump to a seven-month high against the greenback.

…

“I think (a community) is the right direction to consider in Asia, in East Asia in particular, over the medium- to long-term,” Hatoyama told reporters after his Democratic Party took control of the government.

…

“That is not aimed at excluding the dollar or the United States. Rather, I envision an Asian-Pacific community beyond that.”

…

The dollar slid to 90.12 yen, the lowest since February, after Fujii said he didn’t think the yen’s recent gains against the dollar were rapid and that a strong yen could benefit Japan. It was later trading around 90.35 yen.

Other Democratic Party lawmakers have also made comments suggesting they would rather let the yen strengthen to benefit households and that Japan should generate more returns from its $1 trillion in currency reserves, the bulk of which are believed to be held in dollars.

Of special interest is the bit about benefiting households by allowing the yen to strengthen. As I’ve argued in the past, an aging population depends increasingly on savings invested in fixed income. Inflation generally represents an intra-generational wealth transfer because it benefits debtors (who tend to be young) at the expense of creditors (who tend to be old). An aging society has a stronger constituency for deflation.

In the past, Japan’s export industries (and their workers) protested vehemently against a rising yen, which of course prices some of Japan’s exports out of the market. As Japan becomes a nation of pensioners and rentiers, the coupon-clippers’ constituency for deflation may prevail.

More broadly, the world in the wake of Obama’s first sallies into the big world brings to mind Robin Williams’ 1970s nightclub act. He’d announce an impression of President Carter addressing the nation on the eve of World War III, and say: “That’s all, good night, yer on yer own.” Even the Israelis are considering alternate arrangements to their longstanding alliance with the United States, not only because the Obama administration seems willing to throw them under the bus, but because the United States has become unberechenbar – incalculable, as former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt used to say of Ronald Reagan.

But Reagan was quite a calculable. No-one knows what Obama has in mind. WIll he surge or scurry out of Afghanistan? Will he brown-nose or bomb the Iranians? Will he placate or plaster the Pakistanis? Will he start a trade war with China or forge a new economic alliance? And what will his economic policy turn out to be?

Speaking of economic policy, it is quite unclear who is running what in Washington. Larry Summers, who wears his ego on his waistline, earned himself a long stay in the doghouse by talking down to the President at a number of late-night sessions. Timothy Geithner’s impression of Stan Laurel continues and persuades no one. For all intents and purposes, Ben Bernanke is running American economic policy, but his board is more split than a Fed board has been since the 1980s. American economic policy is the most incalculable thing of all.

No one wants the United States to disappear from the scene: No one wants to shoulder the burden of being the world’s policeman-cum-mediator, of providing a global reserve currency, of sending aircraft carriers to put the bad guys in their place. An Australian politician with a longstanding interest in foreign policy was seated next to me at a Melbourne dinner a couple of weeks ago, complaining bitterly that Australia would have to start spending huge amounts on defense to replace the lost presence of the US.

No one wants to see the US go, but everyone is busy making alternative arrangements. It reminds me of the end, rather than the beginning, of the Carter administration. It’s going to be a long, long three years.

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Obama as Hamlet – Our dangerous foreign policy

This morning it was reported that Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher has flown to Poland and the Czech Republic to formally notify the governments of both countries of the withdrawal of the United States from its commitment to the “Third Site” anti ballistic missile defense system agreed to by treaty in 2001. There were to be 10 missiles in Poland and a radar installation in the Czech Republic. Enough to shoot down several nuclear tipped ICBM’s, but just that.

This decision by our president represents a major reversal of American foreign policy and a betrayal of our allies from Poland to Georgia.  It also represents a propaganda victory for Vladimir Putin. Putin, if you recall, went toe to toe with President Bush on this issue, raising the threat of “mutual destruction” in his rhetoric to try and stop this deployment. He also threatened to withdraw from the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty at the time, the central pact with post-Soviet Russia. That these missiles were strictly defensive in nature and were a response to potential threats from rogue states did not matter.  It was perceived in Russia as another slap at the Motherland and an excellent excuse for Mr. Putin to fan nationalism, a very old tool of Russian rulers.

Our president’s speech announcing the decision is in line with his misstatements on so many other subjects. This morning he said that somehow with the elimination of these missile defenses with no alternative program that ” Our new missile defense architecture in Europe will provide stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America’s allies”.  He went on to say that this  is “more comprehensive than the previous program; it deploys capabilities that are proven and cost effective, and it sustains and builds upon our commitment to protect the U.S. homeland”. The only problem is that there is no new plan. It’s the old plan pre- 2000, only worse. It has degraded since. These misrepresentations have become a major theme of the current administration. Calling a pig a duck is now national policy.

On top of this is another serious problem. We have seen rebukes from both Iran and North Korea on their nuclear programs in recent days. Israel is ever more vocal about the Iranian threat and is trying to build support for military action. If they do so, we will have a major crisis on our hands once again. The Israelis do not fool around. And yet our government seems to be running by the seat of its pants.

Under President Carter, the United States was perceived as weak and indecisive. This cost us dearly as the Soviet Union and other adversaries sought to gain advantage. Today, we are under even greater strain. Our economy and infrastructure are vulnerable to economic warfare and asymmetric attacks via the internet. In South America, anti – American leftist Caudillism is the leading ideology. Japan is concerned with Chinese hegemony and North Korean nuclear blackmail.  Pakistan/Afghanistan, if we do not get it right, could become a nexus of incredible instability and violence. We must act with resolve and clear intentions. But yet even in Afghanistan, where our president was supposedly resolute, our policies are  now indecisive and unfocused.

Was Undersecretary Tauscher simply sent on an errand?   This would fit if Secretary of State Clinton has in fact been marginalized. The problem is that the news from Washington is of a disorganized and unfocused administration. What are our policies? What is the thought process?  Where are we going and what is our message to the world? Indecisiveness is fatal. Are we faced with a political Hamlet; self involved, distracted, and in the end doomed?

Missing in Action

The president will be on five of the television talk shows on Sunday and on another on Monday night in a full court press for his health care proposals. That we still don’t know precisely what they are is of concern. Only today, he alluded to the inclusion of illegal immigrants through the mechanism of making them legal immigrants. This is sure to stir even greater controversy. He has lost that ability of his during the campaign to be all things to all people.

Ms. Speaker Pelosi is so alarmed with the response of a large percentage of the American electorate to this and other issues that she now sees assassins in the wings, and the use of the word “teabagger” has become part and parcel of the left’s lexicon.  That it has a deep sexual connotation  seems not to matter. There is a smell of desperation in Washington.

In the meantime, back in the real world, our generals and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been begging for weeks behind the scene, and more recently publicly, for additional resources in Afghanistan as the British government wavers in its commitments. The president seems to be AWOL in this discussion. There are multiparty talks scheduled with Iran. The Israelis are telegraphing their intentions should Iran announce a nuclear capacity. The North Koreans have scheduled a nuclear test just as we announced the possibility of direct talks, and there are deep and serious rifts with many of our allies,  including Poland and the Czech Republic after the abandonment of the missile defense program. The Japanese and Chinese are rapidly moving away from the dollar as the reserve currency because they see no firm course at the Fed.

Each of these issues in itself is of deep concern. Together, the confluence of crises could spell disaster.  In all of this, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, seems to be sidelined. But it is not just our international interests that are in turmoil.

At home, there are serious doubts about the economy. Despite rosy predictions unemployment is over 10% in many states and people are worried. Global indicators such as shipping tonnage and air freight utilization are still at historical lows, and the manufacturing sector is still clunking across the bottom of the crater. The financial sector seems to be continuing along the same general path that got us into the mess in the first place, and every day there is a new, divisive pronouncement from the government, whether it be the takeover of student education loans, the union card check issue, or a wide range of other issues.

So when has the president taken the time to actually run the government between engagements? Even his supporters and senior advisers must be getting whiplash by now. The president has had a bully pulpit like few of his predecessors, but seems to have squandered the opportunity. We are now more divided than ever and more confused about the future. And the more we see and hear him, the more questions are raised.  And despite more coverage than any of his predecessors, it appears that every day into this presidency, he is missing – in  – action.

The Obama CIA Vendetta – Act III – 7 Former CIA Directors Turn Up the Heat on Obama & Holder

The London Telegraph reports in tomorrow’s edition that Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet, John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger have joined together to publicly and formally urge President Obama to end the criminal investigation of CIA officers initiated by Attorney General Eric Holder. This represents almost every director, with the exception of current Defense Secretary Robert Gates, since 1987 and crosses the political spectrum. Current Director Leon Panetta is already on record against White House is a measure of the gravity of the issue. They warned that other countries feel they can no longer safely share intelligence or cooperate with the U.S. government on counter terrorist operations. “They simply cannot rely on our promises of secrecy”. In the intelligence world, this is a fatal error.

Admiral Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, has also gone on record in a memo to his staff outlining the successes of the interrogation program under question. That memo was sent the same day in April as the administration released secret Bush Administration legal memos authorizing the use of harsh interrogation methods. This both undercut and embarrassed Holder, the President himself, and Speaker Pelosi, who has been adamant in denying she had been briefed on these methods.

On August 24, former Vice President Cheney was vindicated by the release of previously secret memos in his statements that these interrogation techniques resulted in actionable intelligence that prevented terrorist attacks. We now know those attacks included a 9/11 type attack on Heathrow Airport and the use of weaponized anthrax. In addition, the interrogations provided invaluable intelligence on Al Quaeda’s organizational and financial networks.

This vendetta began with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and AG Holder all trying their best to damage the previous administration as best they could. The President was then drawn into the arena and took the low path, accusing Cheney of lying and blaming Bush. We now have the spectacle of a brawl between the two primary intelligence agencies at a time of global discord. Only today, it was announced in the Times of London that Special Envoy George Mitchell’s efforts to broker 3 way talks with the Israelis and Palestinians have broken down.

In a world with more than enough problems, a political vendetta is the last thing our country needs.

Terra Valentine

Terra Valentine is one of the off the beaten track vineyards in the Napa Valley. On the middle reaches of Spring Mountain, it encompasses some of the old vineyards from the late 1800′s that were overgrown and only found when Fred Aves, the inventor of the original curb sensor (remember those weird vibrating protrusions from the wheel wells of your grandfather’s Pontiac ca 1958?) bought the land and cleared it and planted vines.

Fred was an odd one, very reclusive, but he labored quietly and sold his wine without a lot of fanfare. he also built a wonderfully eclectic winery nestled on a hillside. Think a little Italo/German Gothic, a little Hansel & Gretel, and a little 1970′s flower power, but tastefully done and with a real attention to detail. And it’s all about the wine.

The Wurteles bought the place @ 10 years ago and opened it up a lot more. Their goal has been to make 7,000 -10,000 cases/year of some excellent Cabernets, Sauvignon Blancs, and a little Sangiovese. They have been trending towards Bordeaux style blends as well. It’s all good, and it is all very reasonably priced. Their cabernets, which typically rate 90+, are in the $35-$38 range, well below the median for the valley.

We had a chance to open a bottle of their 1998 Cabernet last night, which prompts this note. We drink Italian, French, and  California wines for the most part and like our reds. The ’98 Terra was as good as it gets in California.

The color was a deep velvety ruby and the wine danced in the glass with wonderful legs and a grace that made it seem alive. It had some of the best qualities of Bordeaux, but the wine was definitely Spring Mountain; rich, elegant, and concentrated.

The first breath was heaven. Cherry and cassis, cedar and black coffee. Tasting it for the first time, we had those same flavors with the slightest hints of apple in the mid range and Creme Brulee’ in the finish. There was a fullness and ripeness that felt just right. Not a lot of tannin, but just enough to keep it interesting.

It was approachable, much like California itself, but elegant…..Am I glad I’ve got more left…..

Left turn on Afghanistan

In an interview broadcast on “Meet the Press” this morning, the president made it ever more clear that he is going to follow the lead of Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and the leftists in Congress on Afghanistan. He stated that he is “skeptical” about whether more troops will make a difference, this despite the entreaties of General McKiernan, who was fired for his temerity; General McChrystal, the theater commander, General Petraeus, the architect of our success in Iraq, and JCS Chair Admiral McMullen. He is telegraphing his plans to go directly against the advice of his military commanders.

Washington today is eerily like the Washington of 1975. Nixon had Watergate. This president is consumed with other things and is now being  shown to be deeply hostile to his military not overtly, but by his policy decisions. Every day seems to bring another bombshell; reversals of defense policy, a civil war with his intelligence services, the degradation of our carrier force, and cancellation of critical programs . Planes are falling out of the sky, and the replacements are either delayed or costs are out of control. While our line personnel do their best out in the field, the effort at home is in chaos.

The think tanks on the right and left, after agreeing the Petraeus/McChrystal team had the best odds of success in  2008 have in record time decided there is no chance and it’s best to cut and run. There never was a chance with this administration, truth be told.

When you have a Congressional leadership steeped in the 1960′s antiwar movement and a neocon conservative bureaucracy many of whom were also part of that same mindset, what chance did we ever have? Petraeus and McChrystal were set up for failure on November 4, the day Obama was elected and the Democrats felt invincible.

Obviously, Obama can only mouth Santayana’s quote about history, for he is once again repeating it. Support for the American military and our policy has always been strong. It has not disappeared as the Left would have us believe. Petraeus’ strategy of clear, hold, and build was developed not only for Iraq, but for a wide range of contingencies including Afghanistan. We knew we would need additional troops in 2008 and planned for such. We knew it would take a decades long presence. Now those plans are being ripped up and we will be left with an even greater mess on our hands than in 2001 after 9/11.

The heroin trade finances the Taliban, and will only flourish in our absence. Our enemies in South America are also poisoning our cities with narcotics.  This seems the preferred method of asymetrical warfare today. Just as in 1973, it drains our treasury and our resolve.

You can’ t build walls around countries such as Afghanistan or Somalia or Yemen, and you can’t ignore them. The last time we tried that our enemies flew 2 planes into the World Trade Center trying to incite a global jihad. That threat hasn’t disappeared. It has only been held in check.

Americans have a very short attention span. We forget the lessons of history.  Our enemies don’t. And our allies don’t forget either. We are on a very dangerous path with no apparent plan. This cannot go on much longer, and the consequences will shape the nation far more than health care legislation.

Fomenting civil war in Honduras?

The Al Jazeera network is reporting that former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya called them this morning from Tegucigalpa, informing them that he is back in the country and under the protection of the Brazilian Embassy. This was later confirmed by the Honduran Embassy to the Organization of American States in Washington. Apparently, our government knew this news as well, but withheld it until confirmed by other sources. Zelaya has called on his supporters to demonstrate in front of the United Nations office to call for his reinstatement.  He has also called for the support of the international community.

Zelaya’s thwarted attempt on July 6 to return dramatically and land at Tegucigalpa airport incited protests in the streets, and two people died that day.  But the country was soon on its way back to normal after a few days of night time curfew. There were no graphic images of jackbooted troops shooting or beating protesters, but rather of uncertainty and an attempt to maintain order more than anything else. If a coup, it was a very curious one since even Zelaya’s allies voted for his ouster. Zelaya has now raised the stakes steeply, with a strong likelihood of violence.  Such a move could lead to civil war, or more likely an invasion by outside forces including Venezuelan and Nicaraguan “freedom fighters” as was rumored immediately after the change of government.

Regardless, it is one of the most blatant cases of Mau Mau’ing in recent years.  Zelaya hopes to foment street demonstrations leading to an overthrow of the current government. If nothing else, he has nerve.

Remember, it was the consensus of the Honduran Senate, the country’s Supreme Court, and the Electoral Court that President Zelaya had, by attempting to hold a referendum to allow him to run for a second term violated the Constitution, precipitating the crisis. That his removal from office has been found to be legal by  internationally recognized constitutional law scholars is irrelevant to the UN, the OAS, and the U.S. government. It is their wish to reimpose his populist Chavista agenda upon the country regardless of the legality of such a move. This is an unprecedented interference in the internal affairs of another country. It is also indicative of one more disturbing step in UN involvement in the internal affairs of its member states.

Depending upon the actions of the Brazilian government in the next few days, it will be determined if they are also co-conspirators in fomenting a coup. Are they simply offering a safe haven or are they offering a pulpit? Such distinctions precipitate wars. And in a time when the United States has been repeatedly castigated by the leftist governments of South America for interference and imperialism, it would seem the shoe is now on the other foot or rather, the US seems to be trying to curry favor with its adversaries.

Zelaya did not act in a vacuum. He has the support of the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and the other members of the Bolivarian axis. But what of Honduras? What of the upcoming election in November? What of an electorate that has strongly expressed its disapproval by a wide margin? What about the laws of an independent nation? How does any of this end well and to the interest of the Honduran people?

The United States government is a party to these events and there is a much greater likelihood there will now be blood on our hands as well should violence occur. Is this our national policy?

CIA Payback on Afghanistan?

The President went on national television yesterday in a record 5 appearances. When asked if he would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan by the interviewers, he said it was irrelevant, as General McChrystal had not yet asked for those troops.

Today, the Washington Post published an article based upon a leaked copy of General McChrystal’s report, which was sent to Defense Secretary Gates and the White House on August 30. perhaps in the Kabuki world of Washington, the President “did not know” about the report, but we all know he knew. We all now know he lied about knowing as well.

On Friday, seven former directors of the CIA publicly petitioned the President to end Attorney General Holder’s criminal investigation of CIA employees. The unanimity and clear, unsparing language of this letter were meant to send a message that the President’s actions are placing the country in great danger. There are other, more damaging ways to send the same message. I believe that message was sent in the form of a leak. There may be more.

How can we continue to believe in the president if he is found to be twisting the truth like a pretzel? More importantly, how can we have faith in our leaders when they intentionally mislead us on the gravest of matters?

The Congressional leadership is a mix of hard left 1960′s activist types and Obama’s agenda is becoming more apparent every day. He may be sincere and have the best of intentions but history tells us that appeasement, and unilateralism never work. It’s a cold, hard world. And once pegged as a liar, his credibility is gone forever.

MoveOn moves into Action on Health Care

I finally got out of the office an hour ago to get some lunch and was stunned to see a group of @ 50-60  protesters in front of the local Christian radio station building. It turns out the building also houses an insurance company, United Health Care. It seems that MoveOn.Org has scheduled today to begin their “Big Insurance: Sick of It” campaign across the country.

In googling the MoveOn site for Southern California protests, it seems there are protests scheduled in Santa Ana, San Diego(95 registered), Pomona (87 registered), Los Angeles (400) and Woodland Hills (210). From what I saw, the protest was polite and well organized. It was described as a protest against corporate control of health care and of rationing by the insurance companies. MoveOn is advertising media coverage and urging participants to tell their stories of problems with health care or positive experiences in countries with universal health care for the cameras.

From what I saw on the signs and listening to the chants and what I read on their web site it, seems that MoveOn’s role in the debate is to demonized the existing system. Stories will be videotaped and posted on YouTube. In New York City, 400 are signed up; Philadelphia 233, Wilmington 16, Washington, D.C. 129. It will be very interesting watching the media coverage of these protests versus the recent 9/12 Tea Party in Washington, where estimates ranged from 75,000 – 750,000. In Los Angeles, 5,000 showed up and others drew thousands across the country.

MoveOn.Org is a well financed, highly organized media savvy organization, while the tea party movement has no well defined leadership except television newsman Glenn Beck, who promoted the Washington event on his show. It will be interesting to see both how the media reports, and how Congress reacts.

United Nations seeks to ban carbonated beverages in war on climate change

In a room not far from today’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, a group of UN administrators and environmental activists met to discuss an international ban on carbonated beverages.  Lasse Thorbrichtsen of the Norwegian Institute of Science reported that the average dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) content as measured using infrared carbonation sensors and applying the Beer-Lambert Law, which compensates for alcohol content as measured by grams per liter is 62.2 grams of CO2/liter of normal lager beer and for carbonated soft drinks such as Pepsi or Coke, is 6 grams of CO2/liter.

A recent report stated that the consumption of soft drinks in North America equals 56 gallons per year per person. Based upon a population of 325 Million, the total consumption/emission of CO2 from soft drink products alone amounts to over 420,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The average consumption of beer in the United States is approximately 22.5 gallons per person, adding another 350,000 – 400,000 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Sparkling mineral waters and carbonated wines such as champagne were not included in the calculations at the request of the French and Italian delegations. Globally, it is estimated at total emissions are in excess of 4 million tons/year.  Haruto Watanabe of the United Nations Mission on Global Warming warned that unless all carbon dioxide emissions were reduced immediately, low lying nations could face catastrophic flooding and reduced tourism.

Industry representatives, who were not invited to the meeting, held their own conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel proposing limitations on carbonation beginning in 2015.  The Alliance for Climate Protection proposed a  market in carbonated beverage offset credits to limit environmental impact. Vending machine manufacturers have also expressed interest in incorporating carbon offset technology into their products. Carl Fleem, director of marketing at Acme Vending Machines of Vidalia, Georgia stated “What’s good for Coca Cola is good for America”, and noted the bottom line profitability of selling air. Further discussions are due to be held at the Copenhagen summit in December.

Obama’s Fast Break to Remake America

It seems these days that we don’t know quite what our president will do next; pull out of Afghanistan, sign cap & trade legislation, remake our health care system, reverse our country’s foreign policy or our nuclear deterrent policy, or remake our financial system.  The criticism is rising from every quarter whether it be Ralph Nader, the Democratic middle, or the Tea Party movement. His own personal popularity and that of his policies has been plummeting after he entered office with the highest support of any recent president. His hyperactive pronouncements in the past week will inevitably accelerate the trend.

If one peruses his schedule with its constant campaigning and television interviews and speeches, one must wonder when the actual work of governing takes place. At the White House, he seems to have delegated responsibility to a cadre of very young, inexperienced staffers and policy czars. Diplomatically, he has isolated his Secretary of State more effectively than the Iran embargo using more  special envoys than a football team. He has layered his own bureaucracy on top of the one that already  exists. It would seem to take a Herculean effort to keep up. And yet he seems to have plenty of time for leisure, playing golf and basketball regularly and holding Wednesday night soiree’s.  So when does the work get done?

His lack of attention to the law and good judgment has been evident from the trail of poorly vetted cabinet choices to his selection of  radicals for senior positions to his use of national agencies such as the NEA to advance his political agenda. He also seems to have a problem with the truth. His statements from the time he was elected to today are often at direct odds, and even on policy issues, he seems to want to tell all of us what we want to hear while pursuing his own agenda. Whether his commitment to the supporting our strategy in Afghanistan to his multiple fibs about both Medicare and the overall health care bill or his habit of dropping bombshells over the transom on Friday nights there is a disturbing lack of conviction except to his very loosely defined message of change.

In that he has been the most transformational president in history. Whether it is in committing our country’s finances to between $5 Trillion and $23 trillion over the next 10 years in TARP and Stimulus funds, or taking over the automotive industry, or pushing for the public option in health care as he did clearly last Sunday, our president is taking over far more of our economy than even the admittedly socialist governments of Europe. That there seems to be little accountability or change in the poor practices that got us into this mess is even more worrisome. There is no plan, it seems to pay for all of this largess and people are worried.

In the interest of doing great things, our president is forgetting that it is in the details that we build long term success. Our president is like a hyperactive teenager tipping over trash cans in his rush to recreate the country in his image. That a majority of the electorate disagrees doesn’t seem to matter. He has at least two years and he and his allies know this. But even some of those allies are becoming deeply worried now. The president has recently allied himself ever more with the Left Wing of the Democratic Party, and the rest of the party is becoming shell-shocked. The premonition of political disaster in 2010 is growing ever stronger.

Somewhere, sometime soon, someone or some event will coalesce the opposition. At the moment it is divided. But one thing unites us as Americans, and that is our Constitution. It provides the basis for a fair and just society, and is being assaulted as never before. Statism is antithetical to being American. We are a nation of dissenters, and the one thing the president seems to be doing is unifying that dissent.

That President Obama had a secret agenda is becoming ever more apparent. That most of the American people disagree with it is also becoming more apparent. Perhaps the next campaign slogan will be “Repeal Obama”.

Cliff’s Story

Cliff is a guy I know. He’s in his 80′s and is a highly skilled woodworker. He grew up in the Dust Bowl during the Depression, and then served his country in World War II. After the war, he came to California and worked in the aerospace industry before setting up his woodworking business. He did well, and bought his house not far from mine for around $15,000 in the early 1960′s. Now the bank owns it. How that came to happen is the story.

After 30 years doing well in his business, Cliff owned his home free and clear. The value appreciated over the years, and 6 years ago it was appraised at over $600,000. Today it’s worth $450,000.  Cliff continued to work, but there hasn’t been as much demand for good millwork for years, so he was content getting the odd job here and there and living off of his social security check of $1,200.00/month.

Several years ago, Cliff got a phone call from a nice lady at the bank. She asked if he had ever considered refinancing his home. She asked him if he wanted to remodel or use the money for some other purpose. Cliff had a grandson who needed college tuition and also wanted to help his own children. She pushed, and they set up an appointment to meet at Cliff’s home. She explained how easy it was to do a “stated income” loan, and that he didn’t even need to fill out the forms, as she could do this for him. His equity in his home was enough, and of course it would continue to appreciate in value.

Cliff got a loan on his home in the amount of  $600,000 without documentation and with only his social security income to show. The bank representative made probably $15,000 on the loan and went away. The loan originator made a nice profit when the loan was securitized and sold off on Wall Street. Cliff paid for his grandson’s education, but was frugal. He didn’t need much and banked the rest. He paid around $3,500/month for several years and had repaid close to $250,000 when he got behind on his mortgage payments. He is a proud man and he said nothing. The home is still worth more than the loan, so the bank knew they would win one way or the other. They began foreclosure proceedings.

Back in the 80′s, when life was about the win-win option, banks triedn to show they were just like real people. They advertised convenience and their reputations for fiscal responsibility with their depositors and customers money. After the savings and loan crisis, regulators tightened up lending practices as well as  deposit ratios and capitalization rules. After a big scare, people began to trust them again. Then came the housing boom in the early 2000′s. The Fed made money available at such a low rate they were begging the country to borrow. Liquidity flowed into the housing market and prices rose.

A lot of people bought too much house for their income with the hope that prices would continue rising. All the while the lending industry was becoming ever more creative in qualifying the unqualified for loans. The fees and commissions were huge, and the people at the top, like Countrywide and Bank of America made hundreds of millions in profit. But they also crossed a line somewhere along the way. They began taking advantage of people they knew could never afford to keep their loans in the long run. The poor, the elderly, and immigrants were prime targets for unscrupulous lenders. If everybody else was doing it, it had to be okay, as one person told me.

Next year, the second wave of adjustable rate mortgages will begin resetting, and with the potential for significant inflation, we may see another wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures. We are not out of the woods yet on the housing crisis.

In the meantime, Cliff has lost his house. Some kid a thousand miles away called him this morning to offer him $1,500 to vacate the premises in a “cash for keys” effort to get him to move out voluntarily.  The wolves are already at the door.  It is in their interests to squeeze an old man for every penny they can, and they are doing so. You see, with no penalties, they can get away with anything they please, even now.

Congress has tried to limit usurious credit card lending rates with only limited success, and still, 2 years after the onset of the mortgage crisis, no one has been indicted for fraud. I would think falsifying loan applications and knowingly making loans that could never be repaid to the elderly would qualify. But, in this brave new world of insider trading and ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, they might be able to get away with it.

One of the things that is uniquely American is our sense of fair play. Over 233 years, we have as a country tried to make sure the playing field is level  and that we look out for the weak. It is a part of our social compact. It is evident in our charity towards others and our laws. And yet over the past couple of decades, we have seen people and corporations and government become harder and harder. Sharp dealing has become the norm. Instead of giving trust when we do business, we have to be ever more wary about the fine print and the weasel words.

Today, the same corporations that were utterly irresponsible and created the crisis Wall Street and who then took trillions of dollars in government bail out money are the same ones putting people like Cliff on the street. How can this be right? How is this just? It is happening quietly all over America. Many of these people come from a time when even asking for a loan was unheard of. Banks were not be trusted, but with marketing and the soft sell, it all sounded too good to be true. They were taken advantage of and they are in many cases too embarrassed to say anything. In their day, bankruptcy was a scarlet letter. Now they quietly move in with family, or into a trailer park or something worse, sometimes all alone. This is an American tragedy that should never have happened, and we must hold those responsible accountable for their actions. We should be ashamed of ourselves if we don’t.

Only A Fool Would Say That

Years ago, Steely Dan did a song with that title. It described the pie in the sky idealism of the liberal left. That was back in the day when Messrs. Fagin and Becker were a bit more coherent. Today, we seem to have the Dan’s imaginary dreamer to the office of President of the United States.

From his desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons to remaking our country in his image, President Obama has taken it upon himself to radically transform not only our own society, but that of the entire world. But there are two very sad truths he must face. We’re broke and with every day that passes fewer and fewer people believe him.

As our president acts to take control of ever greater swathes of our society, he is paying those bills with monopoly money. The presses have been running 24/7 and only today the current year debt issued by the Treasury was announced at $7 trillion. Let’s repeat that together Seven. Trillion. Dollars. That alone is 50% of our GDP offered on the debt market in a single year. It does not include existing debt from past years.

The headline in today’s London Telegraph is that HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, has declared that the Dollar risk/reward ratio is now on a par with that of emerging countries. Our national debt has risen to over 75%  of our Gross Domestic Product. The Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese, who have pegged their currencies to the Dollar can no longer afford to do so. This will result in floating exchange rates and a huge jolt in inflation in this country. The debt and currency crises of the United States and United Kingdom, until last year the two leading economies in the world are at the top of the agenda at the G 20 meeting in Pittsburgh. Suddenly, we are the Sick Old Man of the global economy.

With this realignment, our standard of living will degrade significantly. Those cheap Wal Mart prices will rise and the big screen TV and fancy car will become that much more difficult to afford. The people who have been financing our profligate spending will no longer do so, and this will hit us even harder. We are headed to an age of frugality whether we like it or not.

And all the while the President wants to do more and more to reduce productivity and increase the size of the public sector. At least in the communist countries, the state owned many of the factories. Here, the government only consumes and redistributes. It makes nothing. It creates little.

His dissembling is also catching up with him finally. After a campaign full of broken promises and overwhelming media worship, it turns out that the emperor has no clothes. It’s all been a sham. The majority of us simply no longer believe or believe in him.

And so President Obama is about to learn the facts of life. Living his insulated life in Hawaii and Harvard and Chicago, he might want to consider the lyrics of the song:

“A world become one, of salads and sun, only a fool would say that.

A boy with a plan, a natural man, wearing a white Stetson hat”

Sound familiar? I’d give the song a “9″. I’d give the movie an F.

Why The Obama – Ayers Story is Important

Christopher Anderson has just released a book on Barack and Michelle Obama entitled “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage” in which he claims, based on inside information and interviews, that 1960′s radical Bill Ayers, a neighbor of President Obama when he lived in Chicago, actually co-authored much of the president’s book “Dreams of My Father”.  The book propelled Obama onto the best seller list and the national stage in 2004. Arguably, it was one of the greatest single contributors to his rise to the head of the pack in the Democratic primaries last year. The charisma generated by this and Mr. Obama’s emphasis on hope and change fueled an election that shattered the color barrier.

But what is  disturbing here is that unlike St. Peter, President Obama has denied his relationship with Mr. Ayers more than 3 times. The media looked the other way, and refused to investigate the close ties between an up and coming Senator and an unreformed Marxist radical despite its relevance to the candidate’s intentions.  And yet we know that Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted one of Obama’s first fundraisers and that Ayers also served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the high profile sinecure that led Obama into politics. In addition, we know that over $150 Million in CAC money disappeared into the ratholes of Chicago’s education system on their watch. Most people with any common sense would find Mr. Obama’s denials and the whole affair, really,  just a bit difficult to believe in light of the facts. But the media was in the tank and didn’t do their jobs.

Ghost writers are nothing new. They have helped a lot of people who cannot sit down and bang out a book accomplish great things.   But with all the hoopla on Oprah and in the New York Times Book Review or any of 100 other outlets never was there a hint that anyone other than Obama and his editor were involved in the writing of the book. We Catholics have what we call sins of commission and omission. What is not done can be just as much a sin as our actions. When it is a such a close collaboration with a questionable character it certainly has pressing relevance. Or perhaps that is why nothing was said.

The President has a troubling history of associations. Whether it was Frank Davis, the communist agitator in Hawaii when he was a boy, or Ayers and Dorhn, who were some of the most violent members of the Weather Underground in the 1960′s, or Reverend Jeremiah Wright, one of the most vitriolic of black racists, these are not the companions of a moderate.

More disturbingly, we are seeing a pattern of lies emerge with our President. His campaign promises on many important issues have been meaningless. These could be put aside as political rhetoric. But with the high stakes debates on Afghanistan and health care, he has all too easily been willing to suspend his prior commitments and beliefs, if in fact he ever held them honestly. Even by today’s lax standards, a pattern is emerging.

A man’s reputation is based upon trust, whether it in shaking hands to trade a horse or brokering a deal on the floor of the Senate. Empires are won and lost on trust. Our Constitution is based on it. And the most powerful man in the world needs it more than anything else as a fundamental currency in his dealings foreign or domestic.

The President’s reputation has taken some major hits in the past few weeks. This may be the worst yet. It could be a tipping point. I pray that it is not. We are in the most uncertain of times and we need strong, forthright leadership that binds us together. As the president steers left on every front, we must at least have some confidence that his rise to the top has been nothing more than a series of deceptions from the outset. There are already  questions that have left doubts in many minds. If this is true, this story confirms those doubts. And trust once lost is never regained.

The pointless threat of sanctions against Iran

The big news this morning is that the U.S. and U.K. are preparing to threaten Iran with tougher sanctions after the disclosure of a second uranium processing facility. Like what? A blockade? An embargo? Somehow I don’t think so.

The day before yesterday, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad spoke to the UN denouncing the “Zionist Entity” for the enslavement of the Palestinian people.  A dozen nations walked out of Ahmedinejad’s speech:

Argentina – Australia – Great Britain – Canada – Costa Rica – Denmark – France – Germany – Hungary – Italy – New Zealand – United States

All 190+ other countries there  politely listened to him use the largest stage in the world to denounce his enemies. Russia was there. So was China. And while the German and French delegations walked out, their companies still do billions in business with Iran. The rest of the world either doesn’t think it’s their business or is Iran’s camp to some degree or another.  Where the rubber hits the road, we can depend on the U.N. to do nothing.

The reality is that, as found in Iraq in the 1990′s, sanctions don’t work. There is no way to successfully enforce such sanctions. It is simply too profitable for a few countries and companies to get around them. There is an endemic corruption that was already demonstrated with Saddam Hussein’s; in the U.N., in many governments, and in business. Especially during these hard times the profit is simply too irresistible for the corrupt and too many people we should be able to trust are on the take.

So the Iranians have announced a doubling of their  capacity to manufacture weapons grade uranium. At the same time, the IAEA last week announced that Iran is much closer to building nuclear weapons than previously thought.

Benjamin Netanyahu was pellucid in his assessment of the situation. He said “Shame on you for accommodating a war monger”. He also reiterated his nation’s right of self defense. “Never Again” is not a meaningless phrase in Israel. It is national policy. Last November, Israel attempted to gain President Bush’s approval for a strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. They were rebuffed. They have come back again recently, asking for an international consensus for action against the Iranian government.

Several weeks ago the  Arctic Sea, a freighter that left Russia supposedly bound for Algeria with a load of lumber disappeared for 2 weeks. It mysteriously reappeared off of the Cape Verde Islands several thousand miles away off the coast of West Africa. A Moscow shipping expert later reported that the vessel was actually carrying a cargo of Russia’s latest anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and the Israelis were involved. Netanyahu flew to Moscow recently to discuss the matter with President Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. Nothing was said officially. We do know that the Iranians have been beefing up their missile defenses considerably and they buy Russian.

So we are once again faced with the Iranian government’s defiance of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The Israeli’s are closer than ever to taking military action. And our president proposes sanctions. Mr. Achmedinejad must be terrified. The Iranians have been the most active supporters of insurgent activities in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have done nothing. As the world moves in real time towards a crisis President Obama wants to engage the Iranian government in talks.

The Iranians have been playing both sides against the middle regarding negotiations. One minister says one thing, unofficially, of course, and the Western press reports that talks are on. Another minister denies the possibility the next day. All the while they are buying time to complete their first devices.

It’s not just Israel who are fearful. It is all of their neighbors as well as countries all over the world who are now considering their own nuclear weapons program. Could they show up in South America? The Brazilians have suddenly this week discussed a nuclear weapons program. Against whom would they be used? And if Iran holds onto them, we know that Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region would want them immediately. Think about nuclear proliferation in the most unstable region of the world.

The U.S. nuclear umbrella used to be the deterrent that protected all of our allies. A few days ago, President Obama unilaterally announced a major cut in our stockpiles. He tossed aside the 60 year old strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) that had, while Strangelovian, kept the world safe. You see, the guarantee was that if someone ever used nuclear weapons against ourselves or an ally, they would be utterly destroyed. Now, under the Obama doctrine, perhaps there is a chance of survival and perhaps it might be worth the risk to strike first. In addition, Obama’s heralded speech to the world the other day pretty much said “you’re on your own”.  He sounded almost isolationist.

We have no quarrel with the Iranian people, either. With the recent demonstrations, it has become more obvious that they chafe under the current regime.  Like everywhere else in the world most people just want to be left alone to live in peace.

But we know that sanctions don’t work, and the Russians and Chinese have made their intentions clear. Even if agreements are signed, they will only be honored in the breach. So what then? The West will be once again humiliated in the Middle East, and eventually the Israelis will act anyway.  Zbigniew Brzinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, suggested that the United States shoot down any Israeli planes if they try to attack the Iranian nuclear sites. A bizarre statement indeed. And while we know the Middle East will erupt with anger, the reality is that governments throughout the region would be relieved.

Additionally, the only way the Israelis can knock out the deep, hardened bunkers would be with their own nuclear weapons. Only the United States has the bomb technology to penetrate these sites with conventional explosives. But the Israelis are also not stupid. There are alternatives.

In the meantime, one way or the other, the United States will lose. Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will become the target of jihadis, however misguided, and we must be prepared for the eventuality. Should Israel act, we will need every available soldier in the Army to reinforce both Iraq and Afghanistan, because the violence will go through the roof. And there is still Pakistan and their nukes to deal with.

The real answer is for enough world leaders  to stand together against Iran and together declare a complete cutoff of relations of all kinds, and if necessary, a blockade. And if the Iranians do declare that they have nuclear weapons we must make one simple declaration. Iran will be completely destroyed should they ever be used or even threatened to be used. We can park enough missiles close by so that they will feel the blast before they take their finger off the button. Ronald Reagan drew the line in the sand with the Soviet Union and defeated them without a shot. We must do the same with the current Iranian regime. There is no negotiating with terrorists.

MoveOn mobilizes against America

Well it didn’t take long for MoveOn.org to begin their push for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. They sent an e mail out today to 5 million contacts urging them to contact their representatives to end the war. The protests will be next. After their slander of General Petraeus in 2007, they should have known better, but being far to the Left it never really mattered anyway. It is a reflexive action on their part, what used to be called knee jerk liberalism.

At the same time, Foreign Policy Magazine today reported that Congressman Howard McKeon, the ranking Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee reported that he was told by Defense Secretary Gates in July that the President ordered that Generals Petraeus and McChrystal to “scrub” their reports, as he was disinclined to send more troops. With his recent statements and seeming desire to ignore the urgent requests of his field commanders, I think we already have the President’s answer to that urgent request. In the U.K. one of the top Generals recently resigned in disgust at the government’s prosecution of the war. While there is a will to win at home, there is no will to win at the top.

Osama Bin Laden only today threatened the German government, and the one thing we know is that many European governments have caved in to Al Quaeda threats. Spain after the Madrid bombings is one example. The Taliban can smell victory. This is another reason they are on the warpath. If they can kill enough foreigners they know the West will falter in their commitment. Which is why now is the time to hit them even harder. Let them get a little more confident and show themselves a bit more, and then mow them down. Give them a false sense of security.

5 American soldiers died today in Afghanistan.  It is to be expected when we push back against the enemy, unfortunately. The Taliban and Al Quaeda are being squeezed hard in Pakistan and Afghanistan and our kill ratio is over 50:1.  But at the same time it is obvious they are receiving more foreign aid. Someone has to be paying the $150/week which is the going rate for a Taliban soldier these days, and someone has to be paying for the IED’s. We know the Iranians are involved and that Afghanistan supplies 70% of the world’s heroin. As the IRS did with Al Capone, we have to go after the money

The problem is that I doubt our president has the intestinal fortitude to do so. Despite his assertions that Afghanistan was the just war in last year’s elections, we are finding with this man that America is always wrong. America is the aggressor. His apologies are offending even our allies. MoveOn was emboldened in the same way as the Taliban. Joe Biden and Rahm Emmanuel have both cast doubts on our strategy, and the Left sees their opening. You see, when dealing with vicious animals, you have to expect them to be true to their nature.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog called “Why We Fight”. These people don’t care.  They never did. Everything is America’s fault. They are American, but they are reflexively anti-American. This was the lesson from the 1960′s. It is the same today. There is a segment of our society who will tear us down just as that same mentality exists overseas. They are not our friends. They are not our allies. They never will be. And if our nation is to survive, we cannot stay silent and must act in the country’s best interest.

If we leave Afghanistan any time soon, it will be a disaster. The enemy will tear our troops apart despite our advantages. They will tear our country apart, as is now happening. We are in an existential battle for the future of our country if you haven’t noticed. So if you give a damn, get involved. Otherwise, be prepared to accept the consequences.

William Safire, R.I.P.

One of the great lights of our discourse died today. There was no prequel, only the announcement that William Safire had died in a hospice in Maryland of pancreatic cancer.

To me  for the past several years there was only one last reason left to read the New York Times, and it was Safire. His common sense, his gift for the English language, and his conviction in the common sense of most of us were a beacon in a world driven by emotion, by the volume of rhetoric, and by self interest. He truly believed in the greater good.

I sometimes did not agree with him, but I delighted in his arguments. Logical, well stated, and always a joy to read. Truth be told, he and Buckley and Wolfe have been the best that the OTL (Other Than Left) have had over the past 40 years.

His columns on language in the Times Magazine on Sundays were always illustrative and helped us in a world that has lost touch with our original principles. He was a touchstone who helped us better ourselves. He said something a long time ago that made complete sense. “Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation and is thus the source for civilized delight”.

Safire understood that depth is critical to perception. In todays society we seem to only study surfaces and even then only according to preconceptions. It is the height of dishonesty when the Journo-list dictates media talking points.  Safire lived his life with open eyes and common sense and an incredible perception and joy. His ability to translate this into words was unparalleled. We should all hold ourselves to his standard. The world would be a better place.

Misplaced Presidential Priorities

NBC News is reporting that President Obama will be heading to Copenhagen, Denmark on Thursday, a day after his wife leaves, to be a part of the final presentation of the Chicago bid committee to the International Olympic Committee. This after the G-20 and United Nations General Assembly meetings last week.

At the same time, the urgent request for additional troops in Afghanistan has been circulating since late August; a request that the commanding general stated was the difference between winning and losing. Only in crisis do our generals speak so bluntly and so publicly, and yet the president has consciously decided to put the war on the back burner. He would rather attend another social function than tend to the nation’s urgent business.

Olympic meetings are grand affairs. Dinners with royalty, tycoons, and superstars. 5 star marketing presentations with a little graft thrown in. I have been there and done that. There is a glamor and grandiosity that one sees little of beyond Cannes and high functions of state. The self-importance factor is off the Richter scale. And the prize is a hundred or so billion in spending for the winner’s political allies while the taxpayers pay the bill. Why am I not surprised by his decision?

And 7,000 miles away, American and British and Allied soldiers are fighting and dying in the heat and the dust while the president and his wife take matching 747′s on another boondoggle. The economy is in the tank still, health care legislation is a fiasco, and CBS News reports that Obama and his leading general have had one videoconference since General McChrystal took command in July. The cognitive dissonance is stunning.

The greatest sin in any military enterprise is uncertainty, and yet this now seems to be our national policy. Our president is emboldening our enemies and sowing the seeds of defeat among our friends.

Go to Copenhagen, Mr. President. Have fun. And remember, there is one thing that the American people will never forgive, and that is the senseless deaths and injuries of our military. Their lives are in your hands.

The California Republican Convention

Let me start by saying that I am not a Republican. I have voted that party for a number of years now because it has been the lesser of two evils. The Democrats simply have been too slick and too pro the bad guys and  too two-faced and too anti responsibility for my liking.

I would say that my party is the No Free Lunch Party if anything. Everyone, and I mean everyone, contributes, because then everyone has a stake in the outcome. And the law means that it applies to all of us. And my party means do what you say and say what you mean and you hold the common values because they are the values that have lasted 5,000 years for the most part.

I find the Republicans tend to hold more of those values, but I still can’t bring myself to align myself with them completely. Leaving aside the corporatists, the slick amorality of the “middle” and the unrealistic right, I believe there are some core values that, if stripped down, can help us get back to where we need to be, which is why I found myself at the California Republican Convention this weekend. I like many am deeply concerned that our country has made some very bad mistakes and that if we don’t get involved and fix them, we may lose our democracy as we know it. I went to the desert for answers.

What I found was a melange of people. These are the activists. It is an off year in California politics, so there is a lot of jockeying for volunteers and momentum even now. Most of the candidates attended and all of them were looking to lay the groundwork for success in next year’s elections.

California is in bad straights right now. Of the four pillars of economic growth; manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and natural resources, the richest state in the history of the Union finds itself striking out on all counts. The land of opportunity is slowly killing itself with self inflicted wounds. Taxes are among the highest in the country. A Federal judge has shut off most of the water to the central Valley, causing 35% unemployment up and down the state; the state has the single most manufacturing unfriendly environment in the country, and in the name of environmentalism we have some of the most draconian policies in the country.

When the aircraft industry or Silicon Valley or real estate were booming and people flocked here, it was okay to rip off the taxpayer. But now, there is no one left to rip off as the state’s spending has gone completely out of control.

So, whither the Republicans?

We got there to hear Steve Poizner, one of the candidates for governor focus completely on getting the state back on financial track. This is great, but it is limited. Meg Whitman wants to be governor, well, because she wants to. She spent more capital apologizing for her poor voting record than proposing the kind of bold agenda the state will need to extract itself from the mess. Unfortunately we did not get to see Tom Campbell, but from my reading, his is a more rounded agenda.

On the Senate race side. It would seem there is a real chance of defeating Barbara Boxer this year. Her popularity has plummeted, and she has gone beyond the toleration of many key constituencies in the middle; the elderly and  moderate middle are particularly taken aback. Carly Fiorina was unable to make as she is undergoing the last of her radiation treatments, as I was told. people wished her well, but there is an uncertainty as to her credentials and she has put forth no ideas yet.

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore worked the convention at a breakneck pace. he may have shaken every hand there, but more importantly he offered solutions and ideas that were both practical and had a lot of common sense. If you remember, DeVore resigned his position in the Assembly leadership as that leadership was trying to make backroom deals with the Democratic majority in Sacramento. He was one of the few who stood his ground, and these days that says a lot about a candidate.

One of the highlights was attending the media matters forum. Andrew Breitbart, the  enfant terrible of new media, was passionate in his description of the dereliction of duty by the major media. He methodically tore down the walls of the newsrooms and television studios, exposing leftist, not liberal bias. The outline of case after case of sensationalizing stories reflecting badly on the Republicans while covering up or burying those unfavorable to the democrats is hard to argue with. He described it as a war, and I really cannot disagree when the major networks focus on the methods and finances of the two kids who exposed ACORN rather than on the outrageous conduct of its employees.

Evan Sayet, a comedian, told the crowd how even moderate executives and industry powers have been tyrannized into acquiescence by leftist activists such as Oliver Stone, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn, and Danny Glover. There is a real risk of blackballing by the Left now. Even Jay Leno, who wants to put on the best show he can, is afraid of this juggernaut.

Inga Bark, who has risen from nowhere to one of the leading voices for common sense in the Central Valley described the successes and challenges she sees, and the tremendous opportunity to make inroads with the Latino and other traditional Democratic voting constituencies as their elected leaders have abandoned them. She hasn’t made any friends on the Left, but they now have to listen.

Overall, in meeting with people from all walks of life it’s pretty obvious the California Republicans seem to have gotten the message. Drifting away from core values such as fiscal and personal responsibility only hurt them, and now it would seem they are focused on getting things right.

There is a lot that most of us can agree on. More than that on which we disagree actually. And we are in a crisis. It will take a lot of teamwork to get the state back on track and it will take a majority of fiscal conservatives to make the hard decisions. The state is broke, and that comes first. But even as we see the excesses of liberal leftism, perhaps that will drive the pendulum back to the middle again. The Democrats have controlled the California Legislature for 40 years, and maybe it’s time for a change. I’m still not a Republican, but they’re making a lot more sense these days.

Terrorist Catch & Release

As a fisherman, I have long practiced catch & release. So, apparently does the U.S. government now. The Long War Journal reports that Al Quaeda member  Fahd Saleh Suleiman al Jutayli was captured in Afghanistan in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 and sent to Guantanamo. In May, 2006 he was repatriated to his native Saudi Arabia where he underwent their much vaunted  de-terroristification program.

Apparently he kept in touch with 11 of his buddies from Cuba who had been released and repatriated to Saudi , and they all made a break for Yemen some months ago. I guess the Mariah Carey tapes and good food didn’t help very much. This is in addition to the 65-70 who we know returned to the Al Quaeda fold after release. Mr al-Jutaiyli was killed in a gunfight with Yemeni soldiers the other day.

As President Obama prepares to release another 100 of the hard cases, I think this news is quite relevant. Al Jutayli gave his parole, a concept of honor that goes back hundreds of years, and even after what has been described as a successful detoxification program, went right back to the terrorist fold. How many of his associates have done  the same? There is a reason we locked them up in the first place.

So far, we have identified 70-80 out of a few hundred Guantanamo detainees who have returned to become  suicide bombers, master planners, and foot soldiers who have jumped right back into the fray after release. What in hell is our government thinking?  The recidivism rate exceeds even that of the worst gangs in America, and Attorney General Holder and the President continue on their twisted path. Will it take another 9/11 to change their ways?

There is something seriously wrong with the thought processes of an administration who continue along this path in the face of the statistics. We are now waiting for the other shoe to drop. We know it’s going to happen, but only the date and method are unclear. How many American and Allied lives will be lost the next time? And will we hold those responsible accountable?

Immoral Equivalency

Immoral Equivalency Posted: 30 Sep 2009 04:48 PM PDT Mike Nichols                                Ethan Coen Isabel Huppert                            John Landis Steven Soderburgh                    Deborah Winger Sam Mendes                              Monica Belluci Taylor Hackford                          Wong Kar Wai Salman Rushdie                         Martin Scorsese Bernardo Bertolucci                   David Lynch Have all signed a petition or expressed support for the release of convicted child rapist Roman Polanski. Other sympathizers include Woody Allen, who has his own issues with underage girls; Pedro Almadovar,  and Wim Wenders. I don’t see a lot of bright moral lights there, I’m afraid. I do see the tastemakers and influencers of 2 generations, however. The petition itself refers to the affair as a “case of morals”, as if it was a simple matter, not the drugging and sodomization of a 13 year old girl. You see, in the cinema’, it’s okay to do just about anything you want. Boys, girls, preteens, and probably all sorts of other weirder permutations combined with drugs and booze to numb or enhance the id. The combination of money, ego, and narcissism is toxic. Since the overthrow of the studio system (which kept some of the more debauched excesses in check) in the 1970’s by directors such as Coppola, Spielberg, and George Lucas, the psychosexual and political spectrums have shifted far to the left. When was the last time you heard of a “morals clause” for example? Whether politically or morally, anything goes except for what used to pass as conservative, or modest, or in many cases law abiding conduct. We see it in the choice of scripts that are produced and we  see it in the quality of the work. Whether it is the lowest common denominator blockbuster or the “high concept” film such as Brokeback Mountain, there is a Sartrean nihilism that life is strictly an aesthetic experience with no moral guidelines. That Nietzsche and Sartre are the guiding philosophers of those who can even spell the word in Hollywood is indicative of the support for Polanski. His art outweighs his crime. Existentialism traces from Soren Kierkegaard’s moral struggle with an ossified religious bureaucracy in Denmark. His awakening was that of the early Christian activist against the power of conventional thinking and mediocrity. Kierkegaard said “man’s existence is an experience of sustained becoming. Man can never be Christian but only attempt to become one”. Not too much about nihilism there. In fact, Kierkegaard’s underlying philosophy is a Christianity devoid of cant and ceremony more closely aligned perhaps with the early Church than today’s. These insights were then extrapolated by Nietzsche into a theory of life without a moral component. Evil exists, so therefore there is no God. The world is beyond good and evil.  This philosophy has dominated academia and the arts for the past 50 years. “Judge not lest ye be judged” was turned from a challenge into a demand. And in this lie the seeds of today’s dissonance. America is portrayed by many of these same tastemakers as a land of benighted Christian fanatics with outposts of rational humanist common sense on the coasts, and yet we are finally seeing that shibboleth for what it is. The sophist Emperor has no clothes. The hypocrisy of  self defined “rationalism” is being undermined every day now as we are seeing its full flower whether on the political or socioeconomic stage. We are seeing it for what it is; a false religion of the self. It wasn’t the people who go to church and work hard and pay their taxes who caused the economic collapse; it was the masters of the universe. That same lack of a moral compass translates across today’s oligarchies in business, government, and the arts. Hypocrisy is king, and there is a war between the truth and propaganda. Objective reality is replaced by manipulated images and emotions. There is no depth, only facade. Well, the facade is cracking rapidly now. The crisis has bred a new realism that is allowing us to reexamine our convictions. Polanski’s crime is no less heinous today than in 1977. So let his advocates cry for his freedom so that we can see them for who they are and what they believe in.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

We’re going to lose the Afghanistan war. As in Vietnam the reasons are more political than military. The politicians are taking the easy way out, and along the way will make more decisions that will result in an end state detrimental to the interests of the United States. Today we find in the Wall Street Journal that Defense Secretary Gates is leaning against the request for more troops to defeat the Taliban. This despite the advice of his leading generals and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is the same Secretary Gates, by the way who advised against the surge in 2007 that turned Iraq around.

The physical safety of the populace is critical to success, as is the provision of  basic levels of law and infrastructure. These goals can be achieved. 8 years of international aid projects have already made an impact and the country is better off today than in 2001 in most ways. But taking a subsistence economy into the 21st century doesn’t happen in 8 years. It will take 20 or more. And there must be an Afghan buy-in to the process. Today, with the current administration’s haplessness and dissent, the Taliban are taking advantage of our discord and ordinary Afghans are beginning to hedge their bets. Radios and satellite TV take the words right from Obama’s lips to their ears and Al Jazeera has a global feed.

The Pakistani border is porous and a large portion of our problem is across that border. The training bases and depots are spread across Western Pakistan and ethnically they are much closer to the Afghans than to their countrymen. They are the buffer zone and they know it. Right now, the Taliban’s primary armaments are man portable. They must be humped across 11,000′ mountains or smuggled into the south. But allowing them any freedom of movement in the country will mean the reappearance of the “technicals”, the pick up trucks toting .50 cal machine guns and the intimidation and violence will escalate further. The situation will degrade. Mobility and increased terror go hand in hand, so the concept of cutting off sections of the country as “no go” areas will not in the long run work as provinces fall one by one.

This will embolden the Taliban and somewhere, someone will get hold of heavier weapons and they will be smuggled in similar to the way the North Vietnamese smuggled in artillery onto the mountains overlooking Dien Bien Phu if necessary. They said that couldn’t be done at the time, and the French lost Vietnam as the result. In Afghanistan the concept of laagering in centralized bases and attacking Al Quaeda selectively is fundamentally flawed. It’s a bad idea to allow an army to be surrounded, especially when it’s self imposed. Eventually the Taliban will be able to drop more serious ordnance on American bases as they draw closer, and as they gain every village and province, they will gain strength.

The military effort in Afghanistan has been sold short since day 1. The Northern Alliance took the country with the help of a few B-52′s and Special Forces A teams. Then, Afghanistan was placed on the back burner by Bush in order to concentrate on Iraq, which we almost lost. Now the same men who literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency and who retrieved Iraq from the jaws of defeat are being sold out by our leaders.

American indecision is now offering an escape clause for our allies as well. No one was ever in love with the idea of sending troops into Afghanistan. Now, if they see us cutting out, how can they be expected to do otherwise? Defeat starts with a single moment.  This may be that moment. We won in Iraq because the president had established a direct dialog with his military commander and overrode his advisers in Washington. General Petraeus was able to present his case directly to President Bush, and the president agreed and allowed the strategy to go forward. The result was victory in a war the Democrats, including the current president, had said was already lost. Today, President Obama seems completely removed from the process. It’s as if he is a bystander.  There is a lack of trust in his commanders by this president that his predecessor did not share. This is a Washington war now, as was Vietnam.

Our president has also taken the Clinton strategy to a higher level. In addition to psychologically redefining the War on Terror to “Contingency Operations” he has also reversed virtually every political and defense policy of the previous administration except those which accrue power to his office. With a clear record of recidivism at Guantanamo, he is accelerating the release of the next generation of Jihadi leaders who are now seen as heroes across Islam. Letting terrorists go back to their line of work will both endanger us and our military and breed the cynicism and fatalism that led to the breakdown of our Armed Forces in the 1970′s. Americans don’t like to lose, and yet we are laying the foundations for exactly this outcome with such strategies. What will be the long term effect on our forces if our leaders allow senseless deaths and encumber our commanders with ever more restrictions and changes in their mission? What will be the long term effect on our psyche and that of our military of just quitting and giving up?

And through all of this we are faced with indecision and confusion at the top. Obama never wanted this war or any war for that matter. He seems to wish it would just go away. On 9/11 things changed. Now, the president wants to turn back the clock. We must concentrate on what is essential and important and must act with clarity and purpose. This seems to be lacking, and if allowed to continue, will affect us all tragically.

Our Strange Iranian Policy

As our government and the Iranians dance in Geneva on whether to discuss the elephant in the living room of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, news comes from Iraq that the U.S. military has been releasing Iranian spies and financiers as the Iraqi government arrests same.

Bill Roggio reports that the Iraqi National Emergency Response Brigade, their elite paramilitary police, detained Khalid Masour Ismail, a key Iranian financier of the Hezbollah Brigades, who are trained and armed in Iran before being sent back over the border. The Iranians are neck deep in Iraq now, supporting not only Hezbollah, but other terrorist groups such as Asaib al Haq, or the League of the Righteous. If you go to the terrorist web sites, you can see video of Hezbollah IED and mortar attacks on American troops. So as we release these enemies and the Iranian enablers whom we arrest after a short period, the Iraqis do their best to catch them. It makes no sense whatsoever except if our administration is trying to curry favor with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

These are the murderers of American and Iraqis and there is a growing body of hard evidence that they have the full support of the current Iranian government. We know where the camps are; how the arms are being smuggled, and who the bad guys are. And we release them after we catch them. In return, Ahmedinejad announces additional an expansion of their nuclear program. I had to laugh when listening to NPR the other day as one of their reporters interviewed an “expert” who claimed that half of Iran’s centrifuges were inoperable. This after the 2007 National Intelligence estimate told us there was nothing to worry about as Iran had stopped it’s nuclear weapons program in 2003. It is all very contradictory. Sort of like in Iraq before we invaded.

I would place my money on the Israelis, frankly, when estimating Iranian intentions. They have penetrated the Iranian infrastructure most deeply and have the most at stake. We’ve got bupkis. And after the debacle over Iraq intelligence in 2003, how can we trust our own sources? In Iraq, the British, French, Germans, Americans, and Russians all agreed there were WMD programs. Saddam, it turned out was the only one to know, according to his own testimony, that it was all a sham. Is Ahmedinejad playing a similar game? Or are we being played?

The Iranians are completely contradictory. One diplomat wants to negotiate, but is placed in check by another. It is obvious they are playing for time. We will see what tomorrow and the day after bring, for this is the bumpiest road in the world today.

But in the meantime, our own government is allowing the Iranians a quasi free hand in Iraq, including the opportunity to kill our soldiers. Why? It is Iranian money paying for these militias. It is Iranian explosives killing our troops.They are operating almost in the open. What’s wrong with this picture? Perhaps the nuclear program is taking precedence, as today’s talks seem to indicate, but as the negotiation goes on and tentative deals are announced the Iranians are killing Americans in real time.

Michelle & I Spent $11 Million in Copenhagen and All I got was this Lousy T Shirt

We now know the 2016 Olympics will be held in Rio de Janeiro. This continues the Olympic tradition of coming out parties for the new global players. Whether Melbourne in 1956 or Tokyo in 1964 or Beijing in 2008, this is a long and historic tradition in the Olympic movement. It places the Games back in the Americas as well, as is also a part of the Olympic tradition,  rotating the Games between continents and hemispheres. I wish Rio all the luck in the world, because they are going to need it.

Bidding for the Olympics is the ultimate marketing program. The IOC expects only the cream of the crop, whether it’s presentations, facilities, tchotchkes, or bribes. There is a small industry associated with this and there is a 12-16 year cycle in the process from the formation of a bid committee to the first of 16 days of glory. The stakes are terribly high, and the prize is  an out of control budget ever since Peter Ueberroth showed people how to put on a profitable Games. Seoul, Sydney, Atlanta, Athens, and now London have all struggled with the demands of a 16 day event that requires dedicated facilities for the most obscure of sports in most cases.

So perhaps in these difficult times Chicago should consider itself lucky. American cities are particularly well suited to major events such as the Olympics. We have an incredible infrastructure, and after all, it is NBC’s advertising dollars that pay for most of the direct costs anyway. It’s when they build subways and stadiums that it gets expensive. Beijing’s Birdcage Stadium is already becoming derelict, so unless there is an economically viable application afterwards, even the centerpiece of an Olympic Games can become an albatross.

Our administration is taking this one right on the chin, though. The headlines read “Obama Fails”. The Washington Post is questioning the president’s last minute appeal at the IOC meeting in Copenhagen. Was he too detached? Is his popularity on the wane? Notice the theme? It is all about him to too many people already. The cult of personality has taken a serious hit. David Axelrod is blaming the inner machinations of the IOC as if it was a grudge game and not the difficult decision it always is. To the Chicago crowd, it was all about politics and the backbiting has officially begun. Madrid and Tokyo are terribly disappointed today as well, but this will not reflect on those country’s leaders.

You see, the Olympics are run based upon ideals, sometimes tarnished, of fair play and sportsmanship. I saw the worst of it in 12 years of involvement in the 80′s and 90′s, but there has been reform and some rededication to de Coubertin’s principles. It’s big business, the biggest in sport, but the process of selection is one of nuance and heart as well as cold blooded negotiation. Grace is critical, but somehow I think we may not see too much of this from the Chicago advocates. The American media is already howling. NBC is comparing this loss to that of New York’s in 2005, and the blame was laid at George Bush’s feet for that one. Even in sports, somehow politics intrudes.

It has been reported that the President and First Lady’s trip cost $11 Million. Parachuting in is never a good idea with the IOC. They have seen it all and know when they are being patronized. Tony Blair spent 3 days with them during London’s final bid, and many more hosting IOC members and committees during the qualification process. It is a hard loss for those with some much time and money and emotion invested, but the Olympic spirit is stoic. Gracious in victory and defeat. Let’s hope we see that tradition continue. The Olympics are meant to bring out the best in us. As de Coubertin said, the important thing in life is not to triumph, but compete.

Where are the Adults?

Ann Althouse linked today to Steve Benen’s column in the Washington Monthly which derides the Right for their schadenfreude at the failure of the Chicago Olympic bid and its reflection on the president. The comment section is especially disturbing, with a tone of deep hatred of conservatives. On the Right, we see hardball mockery of the Administration on a daily basis now. And yet how will we solve our deep and fundamental structural problems?

This country is faced with the most serious crisis we have seen since World War II and we are in the process of tearing it apart. Where is common sense? The country is faced with very hard choices and particularly at the top, we see a lack of direction and purpose on many key issues with  a focus on the irrelevant that is deeply disturbing.

There is one fundamental truth that seems to be being willfully ignored. Economically, the house of cards is collapsing. Stimulus bills and TARP programs do no good at all if we do not address the causes of the problems that led us into this mess, and this has not yet been done. Social Security and Medicare are on death watch. The FDIC has run out of money, and the World Bank is almost bankrupt. Our institutions are failing and we argue over trillions more in spending when the cupboard is bare.

There are now deep concerns that General Motors and Chrysler, despite $50 Billion in government investment, may fail anyway. Sales on many models are in some cases 10% of those of 2007. Everyone involved except the unions lost everything they had on the deal, and yet union leadership bragged that their work rules and salaries, at the heart of the problem in the first place, were untouched.

Our cities are no longer the envy of the world. They are rickety while places like Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai and now even Rio catapult into the 21st Century. It has been 8 years since 9/11 and yet there is still a hole in the ground. In contrast, the Empire State Building took 400 days to complete.

The experts predict a jobless recovery, and most indicators in this country seem to indicate that we are bouncing along at the bottom of the trough at best. Overseas, though, most economies seem to be doing better. Many of those economies are de-linking themselves from the  US economy and creating a new world economic structure. America, the champion of globalization, is now seeing itself passed by.

What we have is not a failure of the system, but of leadership. In the interest of corporate profits companies outsourced and offshored. In the interest of competing constituencies, the entitlement programs ballooned out of control. Pandering became the norm and working the system became the practice.

Whether at the Pentagon or Capitol Hill or at the various departments and agencies, shirking became a career decision. The President himself said during the election “it’s above my pay grade”. Corporately, the people who got us into the mess are lolling on a beach at an undisclosed Caribbean location, and we are the most self involved country in the world. To emphasize our narcissism, one of the few economic bright spots seems to be the tattoo industry.

The wake up call is ringing, but if we continue to dither we are lost. We will at best be a second world economy and our standard of living will fall precipitously. We must act now.

Manufacturing is at the center of reconstruction. We cannot do each others taxes or litigate against each other or build each others roads or provide each other banking services without somewhere along the line making a profit. The same holds true with agriculture and natural resources. Housing will recover when people have jobs. Our leadership class does not get these fundamental truths. We need to work smarter and harder. This is economics 101. Congress wants us to reduce our carbon footprint and yet ignores the most sensible solution; nuclear power. Heath care needs reform and there are 10 great ideas that have been proven to work that everyone can agree on once the special interests and politics are put aside. We know how to win in Afghanistan. We achieved stability in Iraq using similar tactics. But it all takes leadership.

Just as important, we need to emphasize ethics. It is  Nietzschean amorality that helped get us into this mess. Emotion rules over logic. The Judeo-Christian ethic has been Alinskyized.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. And until we recognize this blunt fact, we will continue down the path to irrelevance. For this is where we are headed. We need to buck up, conserve resources sensibly, and invest wisely.

We also need to remember that the Great Depression didn’t become Great until 1932, 3 years after the Crash. Poor decisions  have dire consequences whether then or now. It’s gut check time and we must put aside emotion and act rationally, or we will truly be the most contemptible people on earth. The richest and most rational culture in history will have been brought to its knees because its own stupidity.

Paging General Custer

The Telegraph reports today that the White House is furious with General Stanley McChrystal’s blunt and public assessments of the War in Afghanistan. Just as the President re-named it a “contingency operation”, the enemy began to fight back harder than ever. How inconvenient to the President’s narrative.

Speaking before the Institute of Strategic Studies, one of the most respected organizations of its kind, McChrystal said that Vice President Biden’s proposal to pull back from nation building and laager in central locations to go only after Al Quaeda would lead to “Chaos – istan”. Such language is reminiscent of George Patton or Vandergrift at Guadalcanal.  Spare and unsparing.

McChrystal’s request for an additional 20-40,000 troops has been at the Pentagon since August 30 and has been ignored by the president. His report states the situation is dire. The White House has instead made known its disinterest in the opinions of its military commanders and has back burnered the discussion.

All reports of the 25 minute meeting between the General and the President were that it was best described as strained. That it was the first face to face between the two since McChrystal’s arrival in Afghanistan is in itself amazing. There is a disconnect between the President and his military that is shocking.

After the success of the Iraq campaign, it seems the administration is intent on losing Afghanistan at this point. McChrystal, Petraeus, and Admiral Mullen are the men responsible for the lives of their men, and that is the overwhelming duty of an officer.

An anonymous adviser to the president said “to my mind he doesn’t seem ready for this Washington hardball and is just speaking his mind too plainly”. They should be aware that one of the duties of senior officers is to speak truthfully, and McChrystal did so over a month ago to no avail. 10 more U.S. soldiers died today because we have an administration that cannot or will not face the reality on the ground in Central Asia.

Many of our outposts are more akin to the Fort Apache than a modern military base. Fire support is limited and air resources are exceedingly scarce at times. Afghanistan has been run on a shoestring since the outset. American soldiers are being unnecessarily put at risk.

Not only is Gen. McChrystal warning of losing, but the Chief of Staff of the British Army, General Sir David Richards, did exactly the same in the Telegraph yesterday. When your top generals are warning of disaster, it would seem best to listen. Instead, our President is acting like General Custer, tone deaf to the facts before his eyes.

Freedom of Speech and the Freedom to Listen

The political volume in America is rising from what I am reading when I can read it. I am in China at the moment, and for those who don’t understand restrictions on free speech, it’s illuminating. The old Joni Mitchell song comes to mind. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. The internet is even more highly restricted than my last visit a few months ago.

Over here, you see, they have all the trappings of Western society except the underpinnings. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association. You know, that whole democracy thing.

These days, though, in America everybody has rights, but no one has responsibilities. People are yelling at each other louder and louder, and it seems that no one of any importance is listening. Our creditors warn of a worthless dollar, and no one in a position of authority listens. Our generals warn that we will lose in Afghanistan, and no one in authority listens. We are in danger of bankrupting Social Security and Medicare and Amtrak and the Post Office and the World Bank, and no one listens or even discusses the issues. Whether it was Bush or Obama, our leadership has a massive tin ear.

Here in China, they have solved it very simply. Shut up or go to jail. It’s dead serious, and when you see the police in the streets and the SWAT teams smiling warily at the Laowai (foreigner) and the implications of potential violence, you understand what you have lost. Here in China, unemployment is still bad. 50,000,000 new workers enter the economy every year, and economic growth is the only way to absorb the crush. So when the economy even stutters, unrest rears its head. The Chinese government does not fool around when it comes to public security.

And at home we have serious, deep problems that need rapid resolution. The economy is bouncing along the bottom and some of the best economic and business minds are still deeply concerned; There is a growing realization that if we do not get our house in order on the manufacturing side we may become utterly dependent on foreign suppliers; our health care system needs simple reform and yet Congress seems to want to jackhammer through another twisted, corrupt porkfest.

You know, most of us are not really that far apart, believe it not. If you can sit down and have a rational conversation with most people, they will hear you out. It’s when you see the Congressman refusing to just listen at a Town Hall, or the dismissiveness of a Nancy Pelosi towards legitimate dissent or see the arrogance of the Republicans in 2004 that you see the root of the anger. It is in the belittlement of one’s opponents that we see the true face of oppression.

A unique safety valve in China has always been the appeal to heaven. Individuals can if they are not too crazy, appeal to the government. It’s when they appeal too loudly that they disappear. It doesn’t change anything and you risk going to jail for 20 years and losing an organ or two, but as a first step, it is sometimes allowed. We now live in a society that is trying to restrict many of our freedoms in the interest of the state. Whether it is internet laws or surveillance or the Fairness Act, things have become more ominous. Statism is afoot. Seeing it close at hand gives one a different perspective. We need to exercise our free speech now more than ever. The national conversation is vital, and we are at a crossroads. But we must listen more as well.

From Yunnan

Summing It All Up at the Forbidden City

This Pretty Well Sums It All Up These Days – Seen in Beijing on an American Tourist

Talibanistan

In case no one has noticed, the Taliban are taking the war to the enemy on both sides of the border now. As they sit in their madrassas and hideouts watching Al Jazeera and CNN on satellite tv, they can see the impact in Washington, Islamabad and throughout the Muslim world and feel the wind turning in their favor.

The attack on the Pakistani GHQ in Rawalpindi is perhaps one of the most audacious terrorist assaults in recent years. Unlike Bombay, this was a hard target. The attackers were on a one way trip into one of the most heavily defended military headquarters in Asia and succeeded well beyond expectations. The primary goal was to send the message that no one is safe in Pakistan; that the Taliban and their allies are everywhere and will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. When our Secretary of State discuss Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, she should keep this in mind before making rash statements. Never underestimate a jihadi, especially when he’s on a roll.

The attack on FOB Keating on the Northeast Afghan side of the border on October 4, which killed 8 American soldiers, was another unexpected projection of force beyond the normal operating areas of the Taliban. There is a relationship between these attacks. Each was meant to demonstrate to the populace the vulnerability of the established authorities on both sides of the border. This will further inhibit any hearts and minds campaigns undertaken. The Afghan people are already on edge, and now in Pakistan, with a base in Waziristan, the Swat Valley under siege and GHQ violated, the terrorists continues to erode trust in the government’s ability to protect its citizens.

At FOB Keating, the Taliban, spent weeks monitoring resupply schedules, air cover, and watch changes to ensure maximum effect. the attacked was dialed in. This attack also seems from the reports to be similar to the one on COP Zerok in Paktika province, much further south, on July 4, where there was the danger of a small base being overrun. There is a pattern. The FOB Keating assault was, despite it’s ultimate failure, a huge propaganda victory regardless of the Army’s earlier plans to evacuate the base. Perception is reality in the mindspace.

The U.S. Army put these forts close to the Pakistani border to try and limit infiltration. The recent decision to pull back from this strategy and concentrate on urban centers gave the Taliban the motivation they needed to strike hard and strike quickly. They are making it clear that they will own the border zones and project deep into both countries. While U.S. attacks inside Pakistan by unmanned aircraft may or may not achieve the aim of cutting off the head of the Jihadi leadership, the fact is that operationally, the Jihadis have a distributed infrastructure that is fully capable of operating independently in units up to several hundred. We are also now seeing recoilless rifles, a larger weapon, being used as well. The stakes are rising rapidly.

Another reality that is being completely missed by most of the media is that in fact this has been one war for some time. The tribal areas of Pakistan have been the buffer for Punjab and Bengal across the centuries,and it was the mission of the Raj in the 19th Century as it is for the Pakistani Army today to keep the lid on there to protect the population centers. It is my belief that the jihadis now feel the rot is so deep on both sides that they can prevail and create a greater Talibanistan. In today’s New York Post, Ralph Peters argues that we are involved in two civil wars; the first in Pakistan and the other in Afghanistan. I would rather suggest that in the warlordism inherent in the region and desire for a jihadi caliphate, we will see an alliance of the tribes overseen by a mullahcracy headed by Mullah Omar.

On the Afghan side, he was the head of state until 2001. Since then he has also demonstrated an ability both to stay alive for 8 years while our best have been looking for him and to keep the respect of his adherents. Remember, he lost the offensive in 2001, and yet he is still a key player. Then there is  Bin Laden. The Northwest Frontier is not a vacuum, and he is holed up somewhere. To me it seems likely that Al Quaeda is involved at least in coordinating some of the operational aspects of the current offensive. He has demonstrated his expertise at asymmetrical warfare repeatedly. With the recent series of events, there is a logical thread. Terrorism coupled with small unit actions against lower risk targets an at this crucial juncture can create a tipping point.

The Pakistani government has telegraphed their strategy in Waziristan. In response, the Taliban are hitting back 100 – 200 miles east, much closer to Islamabad. Guerrilla warfare dictates melting away when faced with an unfavorable correlation of forces. This is what we may see in the next few weeks.

As the U.S. Army has played whack a mole in Afghanistan, so does the Pakistani Army seem to now be implementing the same strategy. And more to the point, when faced with a common enemy determined on their mutual destruction, our governments cannot seem to coordinate their actions to destroy the enemy. The failure to do so will result in a much larger, more entrenched, more aggressive enemy, and every day coordinated action is delayed they grow stronger. And all the while, our president ponders.

Just my opinion…..

History Repeating

One of the few times I get these days to read uninterrupted is on planes. I bring a stack of books and magazines and work and read my way across the Pacific and Atlantic. It gives me time to focus. One of the books I finished along the way was Bing West and Gen. Ray Smith’s account of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

If you recall, the debate to go to war was vitriolic. Cheri Blair informed us only last week that her husband’s decision on the invasion was “51-49″. The intelligence services were deeply concerned about chemical weapons, and thus the entire invasion force was clothed in MOPP protection suits in fear of the use of mustard or Sarin gas by Saddam. There was a deep concern that the closer we got to Baghdad, the more likely it was he would use these weapons. The mainstream press reported that fedayeen suicide bombers were ready to jump out of alleys and that the Republican Guard could be counted on to resist with fanatic assaults. The intelligence services just didn’t know, and Saddam was doing his best to mask reality. “Baghdad Bob” threatened to crush America in his daily briefings.

On 23, March 2003, 10 days after D Day, General Franks, the commanding officer, called for a pause. A few days earlier, the Allies had taken a number of casualties in Najaf and Nasiriyah. The press had a field day. Reporters questioned whether we could win the war. The Washington Post cited “top Army officers” saying the war might last into the brutal Iraqi summer.

The opponents of the war seized on the delay. Europeans, Muslim leaders and others who had opposed it from the beginning renewed their howls of protest. As West wrote ” Any sign of weakness or hesitation by the American military would be met with glee and would undercut international respect for the United States with long term political, economic, and foreign policy consequences”.

The pause became a “Made in Washington” tempest. In reality, the problem was logistical. The advance was being held up by its success, not the enemy. We had outrun our supply lines.

President Bush called in his advisers, who dissented with the commanders on the ground, fearing that we were losing the initiative and perhaps the war. On television, retired military officers offered wild speculation. Bush then made a command decision; move forward at all possible speed. He listened to the men on the scene. 9 days later, U.S. troops and marines were standing in Saddam’s palaces and Baghdad had fallen with minimal casualties in the overall campaign. And somewhere sometime in 2004 or 2005, the Left caught a case of collective amnesia.

Today, we have the spectacle of the most drawn out policy battle in the middle of a war perhaps in American history.  Lincoln did not act in this manner with McClellan or Burnside or Grant. Roosevelt never agonized in this way over D Day or Okinawa. Truman’s dispute with MacArthur was geopolitical in scope and resulted in a rapid resignation when the two could not agree. And yet, in a war which was put on the back burner for 8 years, it seems the message from Washington is to fight to a draw. And the same press who got the facts wrong in 2003 are doing the same things once again.

In the meantime, the Taliban and Al Quaeda grow stronger and more aggressive. You see, in warfare, the winning side usually has the force of will to win. Ask the North Vietnamese about draws. The Taliban and Al Quaeda are revitalized with the smell of success, and if successful will take the war deeper into Pakistan and eventually the West again.

No, the crux of the problem lies with the puerile anti Americanism of a small coterie of our own politicians. It is the same players who were so vocal on the Iraq invasion, or Grenada, or Panama, or the first Gulf War. The funny thing they forget though is that there is no American hegemony for them to oppose in the first place. There  is no American colonialism, even in Iraq where the oil fields are huge and tempting and the biggest contracts seem to all be going to foreign companies.

Unfortunately, behind the august words and kabuki, it is John Kerry and Joe Biden and Bill Ayers and their allies reliving their protests of 40 years ago with a willing student in the current President. And every day a soldier or airman or marine dies while he dithers, that death lies directly on his shoulders. Another one of the things he’s probably forgotten about the job.

Obama Deals A Joker in Afghanistan

Rahm Emmanuel today stated that the President is more concerned at “whether there’s a credible Afghan partner” than any other factor before making any decision on General McChrystal’s request for additional troops. What a strange linkage. Allied forces went into Afghanistan in 2001 to topple the Taliban, who have been the enemy ever since. Now it seems that the ground rules are changing. That there is no rapid resolution in sight also makes Emmanuel’s statement  curious in light of the urgency of the General’s request.

As the debate see saws between a nation building / hearts & minds program versus counterinsurgency, a joker has been dealt. The Afghan government has been corrupt since its inception and yet this is now the centerpiece of the President’s decision. That he has turned a blind eye towards similar corruption in Iran and in Honduras makes one wonder at the President’s logic.

Afghanistan is a patchwork of peoples, and the August vote was only the second election in Afghan history. The regional strongmen, Abdurrashid Dostum (Uzbek), Mohammed Mohaqiq (Hazara), Mohammed Fahim (Tadjik)  and others acted like true Chicago pols, bargaining for their special interests in exchange for huge blocs of votes. That those interests include vice, drugs, and the odd side deal with the Taliban here and there only proves the analogy. This is and has been Afghan politics since its onset.

The call by the U.S. and U.N. for a run off  has been met by increased resistance from Karzai, who early on seized upon civilian casualties caused by military action  as a club to pressure Western interests. That the polls projected a significant Karzai win seems to have been lost somewhere in the argument. Less that 50% of the population voted in this election, with 12 provinces unable to participate because of Taliban activity. There is no mandate from the people, nor can there be one until there is greater stability. While the Western states have the point, the reality is that they are effectively stuck with Karzai.  It seems our President is more interested in form than substance.

So, being the roughhouse Chicago pols they are, why are the President and Rahm Emmanuel using this excuse? It has been 50 days since General McChrystal’s  request for additional troops landed on the Pentagon doorstep, and military activity across the Pakistani border has ratcheted up. It will inevitably spill over the border as the Taliban regroup.  While the region is heading towards winter, when the fighting winds down because of harsh weather conditions, we are faced with a crisis in Washington of dubious origin.

Legitimacy of a national government is critical to any effort to find a positive end point in Afghanistan, but this situation has been present for at least 5 years. Why this, and why now when the military experts warn us of an immediate crisis? Why the excuses, Mr. President? As your indecision causes dissent and confusion among your own advisers and our allies, the enemy grows stronger.

$785 Billion and All I got was 3,000 Jobs?

There are some scary numbers floating around the internet regarding the jobs created by the President’s Stimulus bill. Some say 3,000 new jobs created. Others have emphasized teaching, police and public sector jobs that have been saved. Any way one looks at it, the President has a big problem. 6 months after the money spigot turned on, the program is by any measure a bust. Even Joe Biden, ever the wit,  half joked about a depression the other day.

The warning signs are everywhere regarding our currency. It seems from what we read the fall of the Dollar and of American economic power are inevitable, and yet Wall Street continues along the same path and our economic policy has not changed an iota. Our president calls for a complete reassessment of the plan in Afghanistan while the most critical issue staring him in the face goes unrecognized.

America needs to reassess many of its key operating assumptions, especially in government spending. As Congress chases after what is clearly a unicorn posing as health care reform, we need to create the meaningful jobs that generate the long term wealth that will provide for our children’s future. As the Stimulus is seen more and more as the pork filled fiasco it is, we need to cut huge swathes of unnecessary spending from it to both exercise prudential oversight and send a strong message to the markets that we are putting our house in order.

As we see more sympathy to Marxism in our government than at any time in our history, we need to reaffirm the principles of the Constitution and of responsible capitalism. It has been an insider’s game for too long, whether on Wall Street or in Washington or in corporate boardrooms. Even today we see the pharmaceutical companies and GE and Walmart and so many others competing not on a level playing field, but to curry favor and tilt the odds.

This isn’t rocket science and it does not require a raft of new laws and show trials. It requires a fundamental recognition that the rules are the rules for all of us. Whether you’re a Congressman or Senator, or Wall Street Titan, or a senior manager at a large corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders, your customers, and your employees, existing law needs to be applied fairly and equitably.

It isn’t much to ask. Let’s just start by cutting say, 50% of the Stimulus money and then using the balance wisely. It isn’t that hard to do. Really.

Obama Declares War on Fox News but is AWOL on Afghanistan

How is it that Obama’s senior staffers went on television Sunday not to discuss the important things, but to declare war on Fox News instead? The country is rudderless on the pressing issues of our time and the President is disengaged.

Afghanistan will now have another election, in November most likely, and we will see a similar low turnout with similarly disputed results. Whether it will confer legitimacy on the victor is speculative. It is a 3rd world country with a 3rd world power structure. The issue is not legitimacy, but rather a systemic requirement for the structures of government; the rule of law and security to start.

Whether Karzai or Abdullah wins or loses and whether the underlying issues will improve rapidly is debatable and is a long term issue, rather than short term. We need answers now to immediate issues. In the meantime, the enemy is on the move and growing stronger. John Kerry’s photo ops do not change the situation on the ground.

Still the president keeps his counsel as the dogs of the left and right snap at each other. When the Secretary of Defense only 2 days ago had to call publicly for the President’s attention we know there is a serious problem. The situation was urgent 60 days ago, and is deteriorating as our government is seen to dither.

The American people, the Afghan people, and our allies deserve the President’s attention on this matter not in a week or a month or at some later date, but right now. Someone has to get his priorities in order, Mr. President. Stop picking fights with little meaning and pay attention to the important things.

L.A. Angels – Ya Gotta Have Heart

One of the things I have noticed about the current Yankees – Angels pennant series is heart. A lot of it, and a lack of it.

Baseball is the ultimate team game. It takes all 9 players, well 10 in the AL, to win. We have seen two incredible extra inning games. The fact of the matter is that neither was necessary. Blown plays extended both games unnecessarily, and heart won each of them.

In watching a good portion of the Angels 162 game season, I have noticed a couple of trends. First, the pitching doesn’t have a lot of heart at times. There is a lack of focus. From one of the top programs in the majors in 2008 to today’s 20th ranked team in the regular season, we have seen what should have been the best battery in the league underperforming. Surprisingly, it was the Angel’s hitting that got them 97 wins this year.

From the team that owned the Yankees for the past several years we have seen more hesitation and sheer brainless play in this series than at any time since last year’s fold against the Red Sox. The hot bats have gone cold, and it’s not as if the Angels haven’t tee’d off on some of the Yankee pitchers in the past. Even Sabathia this year gave up 5 and 6 runs respectively when he faced the Angels twice, lasting only 6 innings in each game.

With a $152 Million payroll, the Yankees are banking on the World Series this year. They are, as always, the best team money can buy. But the Angels all season had that heart that made them champions. Not that they are slouches in the payroll office, but kids like Morales and Aybar and Kendrick and Mathis made the difference and are making the difference now. When Torii Hunter went down in July, Gary Matthews Jr. gelled and the team was on fire. Since Torii’s return, we haven’t seen that fire.

One way or the other, the Angels need to shake it up. They have to dig deep and show some heart instead of making excuses or embarrassing themselves. Mathis has shown both his ability and his heart. Torii has been cold against the Yanks. Rivera isn’t getting it done. This is all or nothing time. They have to leave every ounce of what they are on the field tomorrow night, no excuses. No brain clouds. Cold blooded and ruthless, but with all the heart in the world.

Thug Life – The Democratic Way of Legislation

After strong arming the pharmaceutical industry into contributing $140 Million to their efforts to pass health care “reform” and bribing the AARP and AMA leadership, Senator Patrick Leahy has now threatened to go after the insurance industry after they had the temerity to disagree with the President’s attempts to ram though the bill in its current form. It revolves around the exemption of the industry from antitrust litigation. It is a clear message that the trial lawyers, along with the Justice Department, will be set loose if the industry does not fall into line.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 23-9 today to repeal the exemption, which dates to 1945. Not that I am a friend of the insurance industry, but somewhere, not so long ago, our President promised to be a uniter, not a divider and a president for all Americans. I guess we can throw that canard into the hopper. I thought we had laws about threats by Presidents and Senators against their enemies.

In addition, AP reports that the $250 Billion bribe promised doctors, along with the rescission of the pending cut in Medicare payments to same was sidetracked in the Senate because it looked a bit too much like a bribe. The fact is that Medicare has been rooking the medical profession for years. Less than $40/office visit is nuts, but that is the going rate which was scheduled to be cut to the mid $30 range. Despite these cuts Medicare still covers Viagra and mobility walkers and 100 other boondoggles written in to benefit specific vendors and interests. This administration has been all about paying off their supporters and stomping the opposition. Pelosi and Reid even now are weaseling, and when that doesn’t work, brute forcing their way around the rules of their respective houses to abrogate the rights of the minority and the checks and balances built in over 200+ years.

Our government is now being run as a thug-o-cracy. Get on their wrong side and they will, as Kruschev threatened Kennedy so long ago, “bury” you. This has nothing to do with sensible legislation that benefits the 15% of Americans who are uninsured and improves care and reduces costs for the rest of us. It is about control and then maintaining that control. As they accuse their opponents of fascism and scare tactics, they are using open threats against the opposition. A year ago, the press would have been howling at full pitch. Today we see where they stand. Mostly silent.

The Senate Health Care bill has been released, but has not been put on line. It is almost 1,500 pages, and the early reports are that it’s a mess. Speaker Pelosi and her associates have yet to move anything out of committee, and with her track record, it is likely it will be a midnight drop the night before the vote. Is this any way to run the world’s greatest democracy?

In the past 10 months we have seen unprecedented irresponsibility at work in Washington. Threats to Fox News. Threats to the banks. Threats to the Chrysler and GM bondholders. Threats to the British to keep secrets on intelligence matters. Threats to the CIA. And the list goes on. This is surely the least mature administration we have seen in a long time, especially when considering it’s theme of “blame Bush” even today.

And all the while, we seem to have the least transparent, most questionable administration on matters of ethics in the past 60 years. It all fits the pattern. Buy off those you can, and threaten those you can’t buy off. The power of the State is terrible to behold, and if it was any administration but this one, there would have been investigations and front page broadsides and lawsuits long ago. This is not about politics. It is about democracy itself. Are we going to conduct ourselves as we have done for the past 233 years or do we subject ourselves to Thug Life?

Who, exactly, are the wingnuts?

In reading this afternoon’s Washington Post update on Press Secretary Gibb’s response to former VP Cheney’s criticism of the President’s policies regarding Afghanistan and the CIA I was struck with the vitriol in the comments section.

The words idiot, fascist, chickenhawk, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, wingnut, Fux news, brain dead, war criminal, coward, ghoul, racist and “Darth Vader” are all used to describe the former Vice President. The Post is supposed to be one of the papers of record in this country, and yet at least in this comments section, it sounds more as if their readership are immature 16 year olds. The foul mouthed cretinism seems to be a theme in the liberal blogs as well. The ad hominem attacks on their political opponents are relentless and use the most vile and hyperbolic language. Is Tourette’s Syndrome more common on the Left than the Right?

Listen to Limbaugh occasionally, it is not difficult to recognize some of his Foghorn Leghorn bombast for exactly what it is; cartoon level entertainment for the masses. The “masses” pretty recognize it as such as well. That he and Fox News pretty much represent the only dissenting opinions in what is otherwise a megalithic media and yet are the objects of such vitriol is a disturbing dissonance in the national discussion. If measured only by the number of publications and media outlets the right would seem to be outnumbered more than the Texans at the Alamo or Custer at Little Big Horn. And I thought America was about fairness. Silly me.

That the president himself has lowered himself into the fray and has attempted to marginalize one of his few media opponents indicates a thinness of skin and intolerance that should be a warning light to all of us. That he first sent his minions onto the morning talk shows to lay the groundwork speaks of a well defined plan of action. That there have been repeated attempts to control and shape the message, including illegally using the National Endowment for the Arts to propagandize his image and policies and the Journo-List to flood the media with the Administration’s message speaks of an Orwellian program to shape public opinion and redefine the truth. Maybe the Nobel has gone to his head already.

That the President then invited perhaps the most biased of his media sycophants into a special “members only” question and answer period only heightens the feeling of leftist bias in the media. Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, E.J. Dionne, Gwen Ifill, Eugene Robinson, Bob Herbert, Gloria Borger, Jerry Seib, and Ron Brownstein have basically shredded any credibility they had left among the vast majority of us. All of them were known as vociferous supporters of the president before. Now they have heightened the comparisons to Stalin’s or Hitler’s pet media during their regimes. At a time when the press has lost most of its credibility, this only confirm many people’s opinions.

It is the leadership of the Left who encourage their followers to scream and rant. It is their followers who accuse their opponents of fascism and teabagging.  I just don’t see the same vitriol from the Right. There is deep and honest criticism, but there is also much more of that main street American decency. Perhaps this is what the president fears most. That, 10 months into his administration, he has lost the respect of the majority American people. Is it any wonder?

Afghanistan Held Hostage – Day 54

The community activists holed up in the White House have still not issued their demands for action on Afghanistan after 54 days, holding the entire world in suspense. On Capitol Hill, legislators from both parties have expressed their deep concerns about the impasse. Commentators and newspapers around the world are stunned at the mysterious tactics. In the meantime, the leader of the activists, Barack Obama, was visited on Tuesday by J. Lo, Marc Anthony, and Sheila E. to express Latino musical solidarity.

Seriously, General McChrystal’s urgent request for additional troops landed on the Pentagon doorstep on August 30 and sat there for almost a month as the White House tried to bury it. They were buying time as part of a strategy that even the most seasoned military, diplomatic, and political operatives don’t quite understand. This request was then formally submitted @ September 22nd, after it had been leaked to the Washington Post. Otherwise, it would probably have been shelved indefinitely as delay now seems to be the President’s strategy. But delay to what end?

We have seen the spectacle of the commanding General publicly and forcefully requesting that his report be formally addressed weeks ago, and then being summoned to Air Force One for a 15 minute meeting on the ground in Copenhagen as an afterthought to the President’s appeal for the Chicago Olympic Games.  This week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates again renewed his call for a Presidential decision.

Senator John Kerry, known for his international experience, delivered the message the other day to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan that there will be a runoff election in Afghanistan in November, which is now only days away, and which sort of clashes with the whole American noninterference in the affairs of other countries concept the President has fostered so well in Honduras, Iran, Great Britain, and Iraq. Consistency and logic seem to be in short supply these days in Washington.

The President did hear from Mr. Kerry yesterday and videoconferenced with Ambassador Eikenberry. Perhaps one of these days, we will get a decision. With the shortness of time and record of violence surrounding Afghan elections, it would seem time to get the lead out and try to stabilize the country, at least so that they can have a reasonable facsimile of  the election the President so desires.

Obama as Major Major

In the novel Catch 22, one of the more absurd characters is Major Major, who is promoted from the rank of PFC through the ranks until he is well beyond the Peter Principle’s point of incompetency. The explanation is an IBM machine somewhere back at Headquarters saw his last name and had a sense of humor. He has another interesting characteristic, which is his complete and total aversion to responsibility. He is a phantom on the air base depicted in the book, climbing out of rear windows and the backs of tents to avoid any contact with his superiors, subordinates, or any other human. He signs the names of others to orders  so that he can never be traced and held accountable.

This evening, our President announced that he would not attend the global climate summit in Copenhagen, but would rather speak out on the subject when awarded the Nobel Prize. The lack of progress on the Cap & Trade bill has him going to Copenhagen basically with empty hands for his fellow envirocrats. There have been no bold policies,  but rather the overturning of specific Bush Administration policies such as on shale oil exploration and offshore drilling. These did absolutely nothing for the environment, but were endorsed by Greenpeace and the NRDC. He wants to raise CAFE standards but that is years off. Solar is also years off and is now passe’, while any discussion of nuclear energy in this administration is verboten. As Al Gore and Ban Ki Moon warn of imminent apocalypse, the president has voted “present”.

The same holds true with Afghanistan. Maybe if he waits long enough and ducks out the back door it will go away. He has blamed his predecessors policies daily on a wide range of other issues for the past 10 months, even when his ownership is clear.

We are seeing the phenomenon spread to New York as well, where both Carter Graydon at Conde Nast and Bill Keller at the New York Times called in sick the day that layoff notices were sent out and exit interviews conducted. Congress is already well on the way to Major Major status as it takes a forensic pathologist to figure out whose fingerprints are on the especially egregious pieces of legislation.

The “leadership” class in this country has done its best to duck responsibility for far too long. Whether corporate, political, or economic, we know who the responsible parties are. We simply need to hold them accountable.

The Truth Comes Out regarding the “Public Option”

So finally the rats are out of the woodwork. After 5 months of prevarication, we see Speaker Pelosi, the President, and Majority Leader Reid all coalescing around what they originally denied three times, which is the Public Option for our national health care system. All the smoke generated by committee meetings behind closed doors and the Gang of 6 and the various factions now comes down to this. The waltzing of Olympia Snowe and the Blue Dog Democrats has been revealed as a subterfuge.

For you see, National Health Care has been the objective of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party for the past 60 years. It gives them control of another 20% of the economy with the payoffs and pork and perks to keep them in power indefinitely. That our government has shown a colossal incompetence in managing any program they have undertaken in the past 60 years matters not. Remember, these are the same people who have run even NASA, our crown jewel of technology, into the ground.

Medicare is by all measurable standards going to be bankrupt in 2017 (or sooner under the current economic conditions), and then the pins start falling rapidly with Social Security slated to go belly up in the early 2030′s. Remember, these dates will be accelerated the longer our economy remains structurally unsound.

The CBO put a $1 Trillion price tag over the next 10 years on Speaker Pelosi’s grandiose takeover. That we don’t have the money just does not compute. They have no fundamental understanding of markets and finance. As the global warning lights on the U.S. economy turn from orange to red, they are ignoring the signs of collapse as they juggle budgets and take more and more of their spending “off the books” to provide the fiction of a revenue neutral annual budget. That they have already doubled the country’s debt in 10 months matters not as well.

Their attempted bribery of the doctors has fallen through, and they have threatened the Chamber of Commerce and Insurance industry for their temerity in opposing this nonsense. Speaker Pelosi is acting more like the Queen of Hearts than an American leader. “Off with their Heads!” will eventually be spouted by this buffoon and blamed immediately by her supporters on right-wing teabagging Nazi’s.

In August & September, millions of Americans who had never taken to the streets made their opinions absolutely clear. Somewhere between 250,000 – 1,200,000 marched on Washington alone on September 12, and the National Park Service ran for cover in estimating the number. It just shows how politicized even the simplest matters have become. These protests were then repeated nationally. The media for their part have ignored one of the most fundamental shifts in the American body politic in 75 years.

Since then, we have seen this administration’s poll numbers plummet to an unprecedented depth. Pelosi and Reid are actually less popular that Mahmoud Achmedinejad in most of the country and yet they still continue with their folly. The President continues to blame Bush for just about everything as he plays dodgeball with responsibility.

All of the purported savings and economies of scale and removal of the profit motive will all fall by the wayside as the special interests rip this carcass to shreds. This country seems to have developed a predilection for self-inflicted wounds that will eventually strangle us for good. Both the Constitution and common sense are under siege. We can be afraid, or we can speak out. Which is it?

Reconciliation

The religious community in the United Kingdom is undergoing a shock to the system that has tremendous implications for religion in America, and the story is being virtually ignored in this country. In an amazing development, it has been reported that conservative clerics in the Church of England have been meeting for 3 years with the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to discuss union with Rome. The dissension within the Anglican communion has finally become too much for many.

That there are more practicing Muslims in London than Anglicans is a truly strange turn of events. That the Anglicans have been in what to all practical purposes has been a schism over the issues of gay ordination and marriage and the ordination of women for close to 10 years has been a fault line in matters of faith that simply could not be reconciled.

The Pope sees an overriding need to reconcile all Christians in the face of rising antichristianity masquerading as secularism. He writes of vast areas of the world where faith is dying like a flame with no fuel. People see a world of incredible wealth but with no direction and a culture that flies in the face of logic. Yeat’s poem, the Second Coming comes to mind at times.

“Turing and turning in the widening gyre,

the falcon cannot hear the falconer

things fall apart, the center cannot hold

mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

the blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned

the best lack all conviction while the worst

are full of passionate intensity.”

5,000 years of wisdom and common belief  is being overthrown by ennui and greed with no ethical or moral replacement offered or expected. Is it any wonder there is a yearning for faith and logic?

So, as the corrupt hierarchy of the Church stood on the brink at the beginning of the Renaissance, we stand as human beings on another brink today.

The word catholic means universal. It goes back to the ancient Greek katholikos, or according to the whole. In this, the fundamental beliefs of Christianity are even today at the core identical.the same. Yes, there are matters of faith, but there is no matter of faith. Belief in God is or it is not, as is the belief in a Christian God.

To me it becomes more evident the more I learn. As the Hubble telescope sees more deeply into the origins of the Universe and CERN and Livermore probe more deeply into the origins and structure of matter and the geneticists find our more and more how only seemingly minor differences in genetic composition define us as human, the miracle of creation is becoming clearer than ever as we see a  perfection and symmetry that is simply impossible without a being so far beyond our understanding that it is incomprehensible as Isaiah mentioned @ 700BC.

The Catholic Church has several rites; Latin, Byzantine, Syriac, Chaldean, Maronite, Alexandrian, and Armenian. Most of us are Latin, the most recognizable rite. Notre Dame Catholics are Latin. Jesuits are Latin. Latin America is Latin. In the Latin Rite, priests are celibate. In the Eastern Rites  there is a difference between monastic priests, who are usually celibate, and non-monastic priests, who have been allowed to marry for centuries. Most bishops are chosen from the monastic priesthood.

The situation with the Anglicans is different as many bishops are married. This will be allowed under the current formula, but what develops next will be discussed between the Vatican and the Anglicans. The funny thing in reading of all of this is that many of those Anglicans who would be affected are “more Catholic than the Pope”. They celebrate Mass in the traditional way. They have trained choirs who sing the traditional songs, and they are overall, more conservative than their Catholic brethren in the UK.

The African and Asian Anglican churches have been outspoken in their opposition to this development, preferring to find their own way forward. For the past 20 years the schism within the Anglican Church has been deep, and the various diocese have been more and more in open warfare between conservatives and liberals. In the United States, many parishes and a few diocese have elected to align themselves with the more conservative African episcopates. This is a flash point which has not yet been resolved.

Whatever the result, there will be dissention. Even the Roman Catholic bishops tasked to work on ecumenical affairs were stunned with this announcement and many are not happy. The fault lines run deep between the liberals and conservatives in both churches. However, in matters of faith, they are constrained by the infallibility of the Pope. It is his job to make the hard decisions, and this surely is one of those.

For American Christians, there is a fundamental change in the landscape. The Catholic Church, if the union translates here, will become more conservative in many ways. At the same time, the influx of Episcopalians would help to strengthen the missions of charity, real social justice, and morality so lacking in our society today. In a world of deep uncertainty and amorality, the Eternal is a strong beacon for all of us regardless of rite.

Losing Iraq

As of today, there are less  than 125,000 American troops in Iraq, most of them on bases outside of the cities where they have become garrison troops. Our government has committed to a reduction to 50,000 troops by August 2010. In the meantime, Iraq is once again experiencing a significant rise in violence. Many of the gains seen during the Surge are being lost.

Suicide bombings are rising, with 130 killed in Baghdad yesterday, and Bill Roggio reported a few days ago that another Iranian Qods force agent was captured in Basra smuggling weapons to terrorists. IED rings are becoming more active again. The Iraqi government has been especially active in rounding up insurgents in the south.

One of the overarching issues today in  Iraq is corruption. Blogger Devil Dawg at Abu Muqawama points out one of the central issues in his entry of the 23rd. In it he describes a ride along mission with the Iraqi Army to distribute food. The problem is that a lot of the food, even when American advisers do accompany the Iraqi troops, never gets to the intended recipients. In this case, the Iraqis snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as they were seen to be loading their own vehicles with food and the crowd turned against them. Any hearts and minds program must begin with accountability and a lack of graft or it will be lost. The trust of the people is critical.

In the north, the Kurdish government has established working oil fields since 2004 that generate much of the country’s wealth. In the South, production is still hampered by theft and decrepitude. Production contracts have been a source of contention, with several of them going to Chinese companies, who are wise in the ways of the third world.  Just across the Shatt al Ahrab in Iran, they cannot even produce their much of own gasoline because the system itself is so corrupt. 40% is imported, fueling more corruption. Much of Ahmedinejad’s reputation was originally founded on his anticorruption efforts, so we can see even that it is an issue that transcend borders.

So Iraq, with a still nascent government is faced with  gross opportunities for graft through Western aid programs and its own oil wealth while the only arbitrators generally looked upon as honest brokers, the Americans, are no longer living alongside their counterparts, which was a major part of the success of the Surge. It is much more difficult to steal if someone is looking over your shoulder. We have always tolerated high levels of graft in Iraq in the interest of national determination, but in a culture of corruption it will be an almost insurmountable task to gain trust on multiple fronts; sectarian, economic, and ethnic. Removing the policeman allows the crooks to flourish.

But this is now American policy. Iraqification, if you will. And as we are finding in Afghanistan now, sometimes the people, wanting simple justice, will even subject themselves to tyrants such as the Taliban rather than crooks. Iranian subversion, foreign suicide bombers, and the ever present danger of sectarian violence mean that Iraq has a long way to go. But in a simple analogy to Vietnam in 1972, the U.S. government only wants out now, whatever the cost. There is no will to see it through even though success there might fundamentally change the long-term power equation in the Middle East for the positive. There is no strategy any more except withdrawal.

American leaders have short-term vision. We knew in 2006/2007 what would be required and started the job admirably. Now it is becoming a dog’s breakfast. That 4,000 American lives have been lost to date in that country trying to do the right thing only makes it all the more bitter to lose.

Afghanistan Held Hostage – Day 58

This afternoon, after American military leaders spent 3 days war gaming the various options in Afghanistan, the President attending a photo op with American sailors in Jacksonville, FL prior to a political fundraiser, once again said he would not be rushed into a decision. He stated “If it is necessary, we will back you to the hilt”. There is nothing like conditional support from one’s Commander in Chief.

Senator John Kerry (D – Winter Warrior Project), who has become Obama’s most vocal supporter and now one of his senior policy advisers on all things military, stated that the plans advanced by the American military are too ambitious. Kerry now wants a modest increase in troop levels, and sees no need for nation building. Thus, the counterinsurgency plan that the Obama administration themselves implemented 7 months ago has been tossed aside. Kerry called the McChrystal plan, “too far, too fast”. He also singled out the State Department for criticism in its lack of oxfords on the ground. There’s nothing like Washington kabuki in the middle of a war zone.

In other news 14 Americans died in combat related helicopter accidents today. The President expressed his condolences to their families during his remarks in Jacksonville.

Presidential Disgrace on Afghanistan

Thursday morning at 4:00am the President was photographed at Dover AFB saluting the caskets of 18 Americans killed two days before in Afghanistan as they made the final journey home. He made sure to have reporters report and photographers photograph, and the New York Times reported that ” the images and sentiment of the President’s 5 hour trip were intended by the White House to convey to the nation that Mr. Obama was not making his Afghanistan decision lightly or in haste”.  The Times wrote in an editorial entitled “The Commander’s Duty Done” that “Mr. Obama erased George W. Bush’s shameful attempts to hide the pain of war from Americans and to shield himself from to the thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan”. Once again, it’s all Bush’s fault. It is the constant mantra of this Administration.

Mr. Obama has been under intense criticism for his conduct of war policy in Afghanistan. 63 days after an urgent request for additional troops by the commanding general in Afghanistan landed at the Pentagon and was endorsed all the way up the line, the President has asked for the following in the past few weeks:

. A province by province assessment of the military situation.

. War games on the various strategies proposed

. At least two complete reviews of the various strategies proposed by the Department of Defense

. At least three separate reviews of the troop level options.

After his own hand-picked experts gave him their professional opinions in August, he has prevaricated and delayed for over 60 days now. He has met at the White House for a total of 18 hours with his combined advisers. He met perfunctorily with General McChrystal for 20 minutes on Air Force One 5 weeks ago when he just happened to be in Copenhagen on Olympic business.  He has sent John Kerry to Kabul to inform President Karzai that he would hold a runoff election, which has turned into an utter fiasco as Abdullah Abdullah, his opponent, has threatened to boycott said election.

The Afghan economy has been disrupted with the uncertainty and Afghans themselves are directly feeling the effect of our President’s lack of support. According to the Washington Post’s Sunday edition,  foreign aid and investment have ground to a halt ever since the end of August, when this affair first reached boiling point. The Taliban have disrupted incoming shipments from Pakistan since that government began its offensive in South Waziristan and supplies once plentiful on store shelves in Kabul are now scarce. All thanks to our government’s indecision. The entire Afghan people with the exception of the Taliban have been put on “hold” until the President gives the word. How is this conduct in any way responsible?

His key advisers are now Joe Biden and John Kerry who together were two of the loudest voices against President Bush in Iraq. What other policy would one expect of two of the biggest antiwar activists and morons in Washington? In an interview on Friday morning on NBC, SecState Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan “is not an open ended, never-ending commitment”. “The Hill” reported 2 weeks ago that the President was waiting until after next Tuesday’s elections to announce his decision. Connect the dots. It’s easy, really.

With the recent attempt by the administration to turn the National Endowment for the Arts into a Ministry of Propaganda, it is clear that our leader values image over substance and the political over all else. The Dover AFB visit, which would have been commendable otherwise, has thus turned into a simple photo-op and degraded one of the most sacred of duties. The deaths of our young men should never be politicized, but the current president’s supporters have certainly done so, and under his orchestration. Those facts drip onto the tarmac every day as we find that his special relationship with his sycophants has been fostered since the day he was elected.

On the Pakistani side of the border all we know for certain is that the violence has been dialed up. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have done their best to make headlines and disrupt the election. And all the while our president plays the same old Washington game of being seen to do one thing while doing the opposite and seeking to blame anyone but himself along the way.

One thing is certain. There is no spin left on this one. The facts are in the public arena. And the American people are unforgiving of leaders who lie so publicly as our own kith and kin die in vain.

 

FDIC Seizes 9 More Banks – Remain Calm! All is Well!

The following banks were seized by the FDIC yesterday afternoon:

San Diego National Bank – California

California National Bank – California

Pacific National Bank – California

Park National Bank – Illinois

Citizen’s National Bank – Texas

North Houston Bank – Texas

Madisonville State Bank – Illinois

Community Bank of Lemont – Illinois

BankUSA – Phoenix, AZ

All were subsidiaries of FBOP Corporation of Oak Park, IL, and all were absorbed by U.S. Bancorp of Minneapolis. The banks had assets of over $19.4 Billion. Ironically, Park National Bank received $50 Million at a ceremony in downtown Chicago with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner yesterday morning as regulators prepared to seize the assets. It was reported that several Illinois Congressmen and Senator Roland Burris had tried to intervene with the FDIC to delay the seizure. There’s nothing like a Chicago bank failure.

To date, the FDIC has seized 114 banks this year and is borrowing against future revenue to pay for today’s failures. The government tells us the country had a 3.4% growth rate in the 3rd quarter primarily because of  programs including Cash for Clunkers and the Stimulus bill. Job losses are stable, but new jobs are not appearing.

We’re in the best of hands…..really…..

 

 

 

 

 

John Kerry’s pointless trip to Afghanistan

Much has been made recently  in the mainstream media of John Kerry’s ascension to senior adviser to President Obama on matters of war. He was feted as he left for Afghanistan to demand new elections, an endeavor in which he succeeded. he was feted again when he returned home.  Pity the Afghans don’t see things in the same light.

The elections scheduled for November 7 will probably now not occur, as Abdullah Abdullah, President Karzai’s opponent, has withdrawn from the campaign and expressed his willingness to work with Karzai after attempting to strong-arm him into firing senior election officials 1 week prior to the election. The Afghans themselves as well as many international observers are breathing sighs of relief as the threat from the Taliban may now be reduced and the guaranteed general mayhem of a Central Asian election will be avoided. The one thing Afghanistan needs most right now is stability. The country has virtually ground to a halt since the uncertainty began in late August and needs desperately to restart its economy.

And what of Mr. Kerry’s, and by extension, Mr. Obama’s strategy? According to insiders, this was a key metric in the President’s decision-making process on sending additional troops. Was it all just a waste of time? It would seem so. Once again, the President has come down hard on an ally and been left looking foolish.

The Banality of Evil – Part III

There are many reports that the House Democratic leadership will try to ram through the health care bill this week. Behind closed doors, a small group of legislators and their assistants wrote a 1,900+ page bill which they released last Thursday, attempting to allow a minimum of time for consideration and review. New nuggets of information are still coming out about it.

There will be a public option. The camel’s nose will be squarely under the tent, and we will see government’s takeover of the health care industry grow over the years now that a framework will have been put in place. Remember, the Democrats are especially good at being given an inch and taking a foot, or spleen, in this case.

There is already a funding option for abortions, but we can expect this to sooner or later be expanded as civil rights groups and bureaucrats exploit loopholes and the law. This would  under President Obama include 3rd trimester abortions, as one of the few bill he co-sponsored when an Illinois legislator mandated this procedure into law. What do you think? Pelosi, Waters, Stark, Waxman, Hoyer and the rest are far to the left of the mainstream on this one and its their big chance to ram it through. No one will be paying attention at 1:00am.

There are plans for a Health Choices Commissioner who will decide on coverage, along with 110 other new boards and regulators. There’s nothing like even more bureaucracy on top of the existing bureaucracy.  The Health Choices Czar will decide what even the private insurers left will cover. Nope, no more choice of programs and benefits.

Coverage of illegal immigrants is still up in the air, but again, knowing the way things in Washington work, this will, if not in the first iteration of the bill, only come later.

Medicare will be gutted, partially to pay for the bill, but even then, the CBO’s first pass estimate, complete in 2 days after the bill was released, is saying it will increase the national debt by $1.2 Trillion over the first 10 years. We all know how accurate those numbers are. The elderly, well, this time they will be the ones losing out.

We simply cannot increase coverage to all without huge costs and some harsh decisions on cutbacks. It doesn’t work that way. Certain procedures and treatments will be limited, and somewhere, someone will have to make life ending decisions. Under this bill, there really is no accountability so the finger pointing game will take place locally as some far off bureaucrat mandates the lesser option into law. Even in the UK, there is some level of accountability. Not with this bill.

So you see, we have small politicians looking out for their specials interests who will not themselves be covered by any of this. The rest of us are left without options and herded into an ever degrading system as the money runs out. Then they will tax us ever more for the privilege.

It is the Washington game of theft and hidden agendas, saying one thing while doing another, and therein lies the banality of evil. For people will die too soon as a result. The elderly and the weak, most at risk, have the most to lose. And the Democratic leadership, who tell us they are looking out for the little guy, owns this debacle. They will buy off as many as they can and threaten the rest, because this is really their one shot at this mess.

The Administration’s Foreign Policy Scorecard

Russia’s veiled threat against Poland yesterday was not very veiled, as their army wargamed a nuclear and conventional attack against that country.

North Korea is still ranting against the United States, announcing additional nuclear warheads and demanding direct talks while Kim Jong Il seems to have sent a celebrity impersonator to meet Bill Clinton.

The Ayatollah Khameini has condemned the nuclear deal offered by the United Nations as the Iranian government sends out utterly bizarre mixed signals.

The Secretary of State seems to have personally set back the Israeli/Palestinian peace process by herself over the weekend.

John Kerry’s demand of Hamid Karzai for new elections in Afghanistan blew up in the Administration’s face when Abdullah Abdullah cut a deal with Karzai and the elections were cancelled.

Above referenced Secretary of State tried to engage the Pakistani people and government with virtually no signs of anything accomplished except more scolding

The Honduras “deal” according to the BBC this afternoon, is like an “elephant balancing on a wire”, as each side is interpreting the agreement as they see fit.

Our allies around the world are hedging their bets as they find the American economy to be tottering on the brink and our dollar devaluing.

In Afghanistan, the White House says it may be weeks before the President addresses the urgent situation as laid out by his own Secretary of Defense and military leaders.

It will be a year tomorrow since the election. Hope & Change, Hope & Change.

 

Speaking of corruption, Mr. President, How’s that investigation into your campaign finances coming along?

We have today the spectacle of leaks and counterleaks on Afghanistan and threats by President Obama’s administration against Karzai to clean up the Afghan government, or else.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill the Democrats are trying to pass what is arguably the most corrupt and deceptive bill in the history of our country. It has become ever clearer that it’s all about power and the leftist agenda, and the corruption and pork are flowing freely to the tune of billions.

In the meantime, the president’s campaign was let completely off the hook by the Federal Election Commission for having raised $750 Million, much of it completely unaccounted for. While half a dozen corruption and racketeering laws may apply, the issue is radioactive to law enforcement and the legal profession. During the campaign last year, donors with names including Saddam Hussein (who clearly exceeded individual contribution limits) , Mickey Mouse, Adolph Hitler and Betty Boop all contributed on-line to the tune of millions. Many more millions simply rolled in with zero accountability. Nope, nothing to investigate there.

You see, under the current FEC rules, once Obama went private, there was no accountability to the FEC. Now that paragon of rectitude Eric Holder (Friend of Marc Rich & Bill) is Attorney General he’s far too busy investigating CIA interrogators and Sheriff Joe Arpaio and trying to explain away how a Muslim screaming “Allahu Akhbar!” as he fires his pistols into a crowd of 300 soldiers is not a terrorist.

And while Wall Street traipses along doing the same old dance with the help of their enablers,and Rangel and Dodd walk free, and Al Gore makes his first billion, remember;  if you’re a friend of Obama, it’s okay.

The truth to this crowd is a very malleable thing and Justice is just another bureaucracy to use to their political advantage. So as they lecture President Karzai and the Pakistanis and everyone else, let’s be clear about the facts. Whether it was TARP or the Stimulus or Health Care, or fraud on the campaign trail, things have gotten much more crooked than they were a year ago.

Krugman Faces His Anzio

Paul “Absurdo the Wonder Clown” Krugman today makes the comparison between Obama’s loss of face in Tuesday’s elections and the bloody assault on the Anzio beachhead in January 1944. Apparently, the President’s economic policy isn’t enough, and we need to spend more. This from a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Anzio was an attempt to break a stalemate in the Italian campaign. Thousands of Allied soldiers had been killed in the attempt to take mountain range after mountain range as the German Army dug in on the high ground. Anzio was to be the key to Rome. Instead, the Germans rushed in every available soldier to try and drive the Americans back to the sea. It was an undermanned invasion from the beginning and the risk of failure was high. It turned into one of the hottest beachheads of the war. In 2 days, the Germans had 40,000 troops on the line to the Allies 38,000. General Lucas, the commanding officer on the Allied side, was relieved of command for a lack of aggression, which is Krugman’s point in the analogy, but the truth was that a rush from the beach would have led to the piecemeal destruction of the entire army. It is still a controversial call.

Mr. Krugman, acolyte of Keynes that he is, figure that if some government spending is good, more is better. Except that trillions upon trillions have already been spent; under the Auto Bailout, TARP’s I and II, and then the Stimulus Bill. This does not include defense and other government spending which are at record highs, nor the extension of unemployment benefits nor 100 other programs.

That we simply do not have the money and our creditors are at the door does not register with Mr. Krugman, and even to a Keynsian, the bill comes due one day. That there are signs the economy is slowly reviving also doesn’t seem to register. Nor does the truth that the vast bulk of the Stimulus money has not yet hit the economy. He wants more.

So with our system awash in dollars and the presses running overtime and interest at all time lows Mr. Krugman’s answer is to use the Weimar Option. There are a number of famous photos of Germans paying for a bag of groceries with wheelbarrows full of Marks back in the late 1920′s. Mr. Krugman’s analogy really should be “it’s the economy, stupid!”, because our government has mismanaged itself into a mess.

Perhaps Mr. Krugman should look at the way our manufacturing base has hollowed out and how to stabilize and revitalize the creation of real wealth through the four pillars; manufacturing, construction, natural resources, and agriculture. Even Keynes would have understood this. And all the while inside the bubble they play the blame game.

Dances with Pundits

Today, Jake Tapper of ABC reports, the President lunched with:

Mike Allen – Politico

David Brooks – New York Times

Chris Cillizza – Washington ost

Gail Collins  – New York Times

Howard Fineman – Newsweek

David Gergen – Media Whore

Mara Liasson – NPR

Josh Marshall – Talking Points Blog

John Meacham – Newsweek

Cynthia Tucker – Atlanta Journal Constitution

Andrew Rosenthal – New York Times

With his Journo List and the use of the National Endowment for the Arts for propaganda purposes, we have never seen a president waging all out propaganda warfare in this country. To Obama, Obama is the Message. As we see Paul Krugman advocate Weimar monetary policy, it would seem that much of the punditocracy have lost all critical perspective, and perhaps some of their common sense as well.

The President has used these lunches and dinners to communicate his message, which is then interpreted the pundits. No one discussed the religious aspect of yesterday’s massacre, I’m sure, just as no one questioned the foreign policy fiascos that are racking up like frequent flyer miles as the president’s strategies on Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Honduras, and Central Europe go awry. No one, I am sure, brought up the monstrosity of the Health Care bill before the house tonight.

No, these are party line affairs meant to co-opt his friends and neutralize or win his opponents. The hard questions go unanswered as they build up day by day. The announced unemployment rate is 10.2%. The structural rate including those who have given up on their searches for jobs is closer to 14% or 15%. In parts of the country unemployment is above the levels of the Great Depression.

As the President and his staff have, in an unprecedented manner, waged war against Limbaugh and Fox News, everyone had a nice lunch and oh so interesting conversation. Thomas Jefferson said ” were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter”. He also said “the force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed”.  Obama’s co-option of the message is unprecedented, and if anyone should be wary, it is these very pundits.

 

 

 

Acting Presidential

This morning former President George W. Bush visited the people wounded in the Ft. Hood Massacre at Darnall Medical Center on base. The current President is on his way to Camp David for the rest of the weekend.

After the President Obama’s  performance the other day in barely recognizing the severity and horror of the crime, and his odd plea not to jump to conclusions, we are coming to know more and more the content of his character, and it is of deep concern.

His detachment has become a common thread among his critics. There is an abnormal distance and a disturbing dissonance in his actions and reactions that should have us all worried.  Whether it was his inappropriate comments on the Cambridge Police/Gates case or his demonization of his opponents or his inappropriate gifts to foreign heads of state or his dismissal of allies and friends or his sudden trip to Copenhagen amidst pressing affairs at home, there is a breathtaking lack of depth and common sense.

Hillary may have been prescient with her “3:00 AM” ad during the campaign after all.

Contrast our current President with his predecessors. The phrase “acting Presidential” comes immediately to mind, and too many times now, the current occupant of the office has not.

Another friend lost

I got an e mail this morning that my friends had lost another man on the line in Afghanistan. Spc. Julian Berisford, a man from  West Virginia, was killed by  RPG and small arms fire on Wednesday. C Co. 3/509 at FOB Salerno has been out on the line since February, and have been doing their jobs every day in close contact with fundamentalists at war with moderation. He was 25 and had seen the elephant and was okay with it.

I didn’t know Julian, but I ended up on his MySpace page. He was a typical 509er; brash and self assured; a good man and competent. I got a big kick out of some of his posts. He was someone I would have liked to have known and a man we can all be proud of. He had a daughter just about to celebrate her first birthday. It hurts a lot of people that he is gone now.

Down in San Antonio at Brooks Army Medical Center, they have Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who turns out to have been a whacked out fundamentalist, on life support at a cost of probably $30,000/day. Major Hasan walked into the health services building at Ft. Hood and cold bloodedly murdered 13 infidels and wounded another 32 and they caught him in the act. Now he will get a fair and proper trial and probably use the insanity defense.

The President says don’t jump to conclusions and the media call Hasan the “alleged” shooter. He was caught in the act and shot 4 times by a cop. It makes me sick.  There is something seriously wrong with our society when a hero like Julian is ignored and our President and our media act like craven cretins.

Forgive me if I’m a little bitter tonight.

November 9, 1989 – The Fall of the Wall

All the news about the 20th anniversary of the fall of Die Mauer, as the Germans called it had me thinking about where I was that day.

I had lived in Germany in the late 1970′s working both as a technician and with a side job. The job took me all over Europe, which I loved. I would occasionally have to go into East Germany or Czechoslovakia, and saw what communism was all about. It wasn’t pretty and it  was evil and huge armies stood on each side of the German border waiting for Armageddon and sometimes the Cold War wasn’t so cold. There is a small army of anonymous dead on both sides.

Later, after I came home, my job would take me back to Germany, sometimes several times a year, but always every other November to Messe Muenchen for a massive electronics trade show. I’m a factory junkie, so I would always visit suppliers and customers before and after the show.

Since I had spent time in the East, the protests in Leipzig and Dresden that began in early Fall were stunning. The GDR simply did not allow freedom of expression. But Poland had already seen a loss of control by the state as President Reagan, the Pope and Margaret Thatcher had both overtly and covertly supported Solidarity, and then Gorbachev enacted Glasnost. The Poles were never the best of communists, and nationalism was strong but suppressed in the East Bloc.They were the first to fall away, even before Glasnost.

East Germany was more communist than Stalin, they used to say. The Stasi were everywhere and the country was Orwellian in its dedication to communism with a German face. So when the demonstrations broke out and nothing happened there was some slight hope for greater freedom there as well. What happened next stunned the world.

As the rest of Eastern Europe began to liberalize, the East German people began to leave. Thousands were escaping to the West via Hungary, and that border was closed. Others went to Prague. The border with the West was the most heavily armed and patrolled real estate on the planet at the time and so was no outlet. Huge fences and razor wire and machine guns. Passing through the check points was scary for the Westerners who did so, and there was very little traffic the other way except Westerners going home.

The pressure within East Germany had risen, but no one expected the protests. First a few thousand and then more. Honecker was losing control. In mid October, Gorbachev visited Honecker who had had issued shoot to kill orders, which were never carried out. Gorbachev actually had to pressure Honecker into allowing some reform. The old Cold Warrior wouldn’t change though, and was replaced by Egon Krenz, nothing more than an apparatchik in the right place at the right time.

3 Weeks before November 9th, he took over. The protests kept on growing and there was a sense of change, but even then no hint of what would happen. The protests continued until the government called a special session of the Politburo, where things started to go to hell and 2/3 of the members resigned on the 7th. It was anyone’s guess what would happen next.

The radio in Europe generally sucks. When driving I would usually flip the dial every few minutes trying to find something, anything, to listen to.  Germany is a funny place. A very high population density, but on certain autobahns on a weekday morning there’s not much traffic. I had a big Benz on the morning of the 9th and was probably cruising at 110 and the highway to Boeblingen, near Stuttgart, was empty. I had to be at Hewlett Packard by 11 for an engineering meeting, and then IBM afterwards.

It was probably 10:00 or so when I dialed in Westdeutsche Rundfunk or another channel and heard an announcement that Krenz was speaking to the Politburo. I had a feeling it was very important, as did the radio network obviously. It wasn’t an especially long speech, maybe 15 minutes, but I had to pull over because I began to cry for a moment. I could not believe my ears. Krenz announced that he was opening the border effective as soon as possible. German is not my native language, so I had to listen to the announcer confirm what I had just heard.

To someone who had seen the Cold War up close and knew  the implications of a hot war in Germany, I was simply stunned. I realized, “It’s over and we’re still alive”. There were times when it was close. The Army kept the ammunition close at hand and the trip wire units were always ready to go. The Air Force planes that you saw on the rare clear day were sometimes armed and there were planes sitting on runways across Europe armed and crewed and ready. One phone call could set it all off. Large numbers of civilians and military would die very quickly and in the worst possible manners. And it was over. East Germany was the last possible pillar of aggression, and one man had made the decision to turn his back on the past.

I walked into HP half an hour later, and told everyone I met what I had just heard. No one believed me. I got to IBM later in the afternoon and got the same reaction. I got to the airport that night and the Avis desk clerk knew nothing. By the time I got to the terminal, I was seriously thinking of flying to Berlin to watch what happened next, but I had business in London the next day and got on the plane. It was eerie, even spooky.  The Germans I met simply could not comprehend what Krenz had just done. It was impossible, unbelievable.

By the time I got to my hotel and turned on the television sometime around 10:00pm, the scenes from Berlin were on CNN and BBC. Massive crowds of West Berliners and Easterners were tearing the wall down with their hands or a hammer or even heavy construction equipment. It was a spontaneous and joyous and riotous and somewhat (or maybe a lot) drunken celebration of freedom and repatriation. Family members on each side sought each other out, East German soldiers and border guards joined in and everyone was yelling or crying or both. The Russians quietly stayed in their Kasernes.

We must never, ever forget. The world got lucky that day. Great and good things do come out of nowhere sometimes.

Stimulus II – Why it is a Bad Idea

Several notable voices on the Left, including Nancy Pelosi, Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich have called for a second, massive, stimulus program to create jobs quickly in order to reduce the jobless rate. Unfortunately, none of them have an understanding of the real world economy. After Krugman’s rant last week, Reich joined the chorus.

I read the same message from Krugman the other day. He compared Obama’s jobs crisis to the battle of Anzio, on which I happen to be well versed (see post: Krugman faces his Anzio). He was wrong as are Pelosi and Reich. A new Stimulus will only seal the demise of the American Dream.  The Treasury has flooded an already flooded world with more dollars and debt than at any time in history in the past year and our economy is on the brink of tremendous long term damage. You see, our trading partners have had enough and are ready to pull the plug on our currency, after which the whole shooting match falls apart.

Point 1 – Read the Financial Times or WSJ, or Telegraph or the London Times or Le Monde or FAZ or China Daily. All the signs have been there for over a year. A feature article in the Atlantic over a year ago clearly expressed the intent of China’s central bankers. We have had ample and fair warning about letting our economy run out of control and our currency devalue further. They are buying gold and moving out of the Dollar.

Point 2 – 70% of the Stimulus Bill money has not yet hit the system. When it does it will place further inflationary pressure on the economy at a time when it may have already recovered.

Point 3 – There is a commercial real estate crisis on the horizon next year and in 2011 that may equal the severity of the home mortgage crisis. The reset on variable rate mortgages will also hit next year. Imagine the supercharging effect of inflation on that alone.

Point 4 – The fundamental bases for the creation of wealth; agriculture, manufacturing, natural resources and construction, are all under assault by the existing and proposed regulatory environment. The North American manufacturing base, including automotive is already in critical condition. It cannot stand much further strain. The last major American industry, automotive, is a shambles that was completely self-inflicted. Manufacturing in the high technology sector; aircraft, biomedical, electronics, etc has already been outsourced to a dangerous degree.

Point 5 – there are now signs that the recession is easing as the economy has begun recovery. The economic horse was out of the barn 6 months ago. Stimulus now will be felt in a year. The snake has not even begun to digest the cash infusions of the past year.

Point 6 – The taxation necessary to pay for the massive spending, both of the last 9 years and what is proposed will kill the economy.

We are in manufacturing and have watched as the incompetence and malfeasance of our government and corporate management created a perfect economic storm. We saw the meltdown coming 18 months before it hit. It’s not rocket science.

I spend my time in some of the largest factories in the country on the floor with senior engineers and plant managers as well as corporate management. Our materials business is a gauge of economic activity, as the customers we serve span the entire spectrum where electronics are used. I spend 8-10 weeks/year in factories in Asia and Europe and see with my own eyes the leading edges of trends because it takes months for the raw materials to be processed and make it to the end user. Leave well enough alone. The prescription Pelosi, Reich, and Krugman are offering will lead to hyperinflation on a Weimar scale.

In Germany, the Mittelstand is the heart of the economy. Small and medium sized businesses. We are right in the heart of the American Mittelstand, and our government has declared war on both common sense and best practices. It will be the small and mid sized companies who drive the economy. Most of the large conglomerates are simply transactional these days. They are run by accountants, lawyers and marketers and actually make nothing. Case in point; HP. They went from one of the most brilliant technical and economic wonders of the world to a reseller of other peoples goods. Their key profit center is copier & printer cartridges. Once their suppliers realize the emperor has no clothes, they will go direct, as Vizio has done in televisions and as Sony did to RCA 30 years ago. The same holds true across corporate America. The Chinese own us in more ways than one. And it will be the Mittelstand that turns that around as well. The conglomerate model is slowly falling apart in many fields.

It seems that at the top everyone forgot producing tangible products is at the heart of any economy. Beef does not come from supermarkets, and real wealth does not originate in derivatives. Once the trust in the currency is gone, so is the economy.

Structurally, the United States economy cannot withstand current spending, much less what is proposed with Health Care and the proposed Stimulus II. Since these people say they have the breadth of experience, what happens when Medicare blows up in 2017? Social Security in 2035? Will the government simply nationalize the pension funds as the Argentines did?

As a lawyer, Reich must have read the Federalist papers and the fundamental documents surrounding the Constitution. As Speaker of the House, Pelosi better have, and as an economist, Krugman should know better. They are all intelligent people. In that context, how can we be adhering to the Constitution in any sense with this kind of economic madness? That document is what makes us Americans. Opportunity, not entitlement. And yet all of this spending will in the end kill the Constitution. The Founding Fathers’ intentions were pellucid. Limited government and a strict separation of powers. FDR’s safety net has become a spider’s web.

The Fierce Moral Urgency of Afghanistan

So the President wants to ram through his Health Care agenda,  along with Cap & Trade, the two most flawed bills since the Roosevelt Administration, before Christmas. He has had the time to go to Copenhagen and play golf and basketball. He has war gamed and met and kibbitzed with everyone he can as well. Perhaps by then he will have made a decision on sending troops to Afghanistan. I just don’t get it.

After a unanimous message from his generals, his Chairman of the JCS, and his Secretary of Defense on the need to act quickly, first he sends John Kerry on an utterly fruitless quest to impose new elections on the Afghans, and then at the very last minute delays his decision once again based upon a single adviser. With all due respect to General (Ret.) Eikenberry, our Ambassador there, shouldn’t he have spoken out sooner? Or is this simply another subterfuge.

Our President has managed to confuse his military; his advisers, and the American people, not to mention our allies, with what can only be described as one of the most byzantine decision making processes in history. As terror hits home and the Taliban and Al Quaeda gain confidence, the President seems to have once again deferred a crucial decision indefinitely.

The facts are on the table. They have been since the original plan was put forward in March. Nothing has changed since General McChrystal’s report landed on a desk at the Pentagon on August 30. We know pretty much every single data point there is to know and there are no game changers. We know the Afghan government is what it is.  It is time to decide, one way or the other. On a day as sacred as this, the President is under the greatest of moral obligations to do so.

Obama’s “New Orientation” to Asia

Trying to decipher our president’s pronouncements is becoming an exercise akin to the Kremlinology of old. “What the heck did he mean by that?” is becoming an ever more popular phrase.

His description of himself as the first Pacific President flies in the face of almost every president back to Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize, by the way was for brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, a very nasty affair in which 150,000 plus lost their lives. If ever there was a Pacific President, it could be he. His relative was also a Pacific President, but one forced into war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Truman took a stand against communism in Korea in 1950. Eisenhower helped form ASEAN as a buffer against communism in Southeast Asia, and every president since has been ever more deeply involved. Nixon opened the door with China. What greater breakthrough in foreign relations could Obama hope for than this? And what, exactly, has President Obama done to earn his self-appointed title? Nothing, thus far.

He is the first president to go to Asia as an apologist. For what I am not certain. Liberating much of Asia in World War II? Fighting communism? Helping open the doors to free trade and to lift the economies of South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia? What is he sorry for this time?

Or was he referring to prostituting our currency and our economy? Is this the new orientation of which he speaks?  Never before have so few slighted so many so readily.

Chairman O Leads Us into the Glorious Socialist Future

President Obama & Afghanistan – This Week’s Excuse

It is now being reported that the cost of the war in Afghanistan is the reason the president has delayed his decision. Two months ago the excuse was re-gaming the war to find the best outcome. Three weeks ago it was the Afghan elections, and now this.

Rest assured, our president knows exactly what the cost to support the war is and has known it since his first budget meetings on entering office. He knows better than any of us that virtually every war material must be imported either over land through Pakistan or by air. This has been a part of our strategic and tactical operations planning from the very beginning.

The Russians, as soon as Obama became president, demanded that the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan, vital to both the infrastructure and close air support of the Afghanistan War, be closed down. It was simple power politics. Without that base or an alternative, the war would have been in real danger of failing. In June, The United States signed a new, more expensive agreement to be allowed to continue using the base. Manas is a major transshipment point for material and vital for air support.

Transshipment across Pakistan from the port of Karachi is the other major artery. Corruption, theft, and sabotage by the Taliban, Al Quaeda, and their sympathizers add to the cost.   Iraq, on the other hand, had POL (Petroleum, Oil, Lubricants) both in country and from Kuwait. Much was made of the $400/gallon cost of supplying fuel to remote bases, but remember, this is an extreme example.

But all of this is known and was factored into every plan and decision from the outset. It is a key part of the war plan, after all. There is nothing new except the President’s incredible intransigence in making a decision for which he will be held accountable. Our allies have been begging for his decision. Our generals have been waiting since late August. There are no more excuses left. But whatever the decision at this point, our president will have earned a deserved reputation for indecisiveness and prevarication.

Dear Leader Carries The Scrolls Down The Mountain

Aren’t Firearms Illegal in Chicago?

Chicago has had a law on the books since 1982 banning the sale of handguns, and yet some of the highest levels of gun crime in the United States. Illinois even forces gun owners, even if it’s a shotgun on a farm, to register. Chicago is the firearms murder capital of the United States. Yesterday, in a city that has banned handguns for 27 years, Michael Scott, president of the School Board and one of Chicago’s leading citizens, was found lying on top of a .380 cal pistol, a single bullet wound to the head. The verdict: suicide. Chicago observes the law in its breach, even, or perhaps especially at the top.

Compare the homicide rates for 2006:

Dallas                      212 Murders     8.94/100,000 inhabitants

Houston                453 Murders     11.9/100,000 inhabitants

Los Angeles     1,012 Murders   10.09/100,000 inhabitants

Chicago                 467 Murders    16.38/100,000 inhabitants

Washington, DC  169 Murders    29.13/100,000 inhabitants

(FBI UCR statistics)

75% of those Chicago murders were committed with firearms. The national average is 66%. Texas has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the United States, while Los Angeles is awash in firearms. Washington, on the other hand, preceded Chicago with its own ban in 1975. The odds of getting killed by small arms fire in Chicago were greater than of getting shot in Iraq  in 2006 (iCasualties.org/DoD).

And yet, even after the Supreme Court overturned the Washington gun ban, Chicago still has its ban in place. We live in a very strange country these days. One that seems to make less sense every day.

Pretzel Logic in Afghanistan

An article today by AP illustrates the pretzel logic of many reporters and analysts on Afghanistan, as well as the White House’s dereliction of duty. In the article by Amir Shah and Heidi Vogt on rocket attacks on French forces in Tagab, they state that an increased military presence will attract more violence. This is true for a short period of time, as was found as recently as during the Surge in Iraq in 2006. But in the long run almost every case in history tells us pacification and stability operations do succeed.  Short term pain leads to long term gain. It is not a hard concept to understand and yet the media mythologizes uncivilized barbarians with AK-47′s as unbeatable in a land where they have murdered far more of their peaceful countrymen than the enemy since 2001.

Bases must be built or expanded. Check points must be set up and manned. Provincial Construction (there is little reconstruction when it never existed in the first place) Teams need to have missions defined and be tasked and funded and equipped. All of this takes long lead times. And yet we are allowing the argument to be redefined with elliptical logic more suited to college bull sessions than serious discussion of the war effort. And every day without a clear direction, the war drags on pointlessly. We have the best equipped and most professional military in the world, but at the top and in the media, they see what can only be called incompetence and a defeatist mentality.

Why this is now being debated when the experts are virtually unanimous on what is required is simply a mystery. It has now been 80 days with no sign of a decision by our President since General McChrystal’s urgent request arrived at the Pentagon. It is as if the Commander in Chief either doesn’t care or wants us to lose. Maybe he can apologize to our military and the Afghan people next.

Playing With Hand Grenades – Eric Holder and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try the Guantanamo 5 in New York has been bipartisan and vehement. It is only in the far reaches of the Upper East and West Sides and Greenwich Village that we hear of the whispers of the wisdom of the decision.

Former prosecutors are united; the governor has slammed the President publicly, and anyone with a grain of common sense realizes that these cases are fraught with danger from the methods used to apprehend the perpetrators to their interrogation to the years of delay in charging and indicting them. The discovery process will demand the release of top-secret evidence and the compromise of intelligence sources and special relationships.

Mr. Holder has also now offered these terrorists the largest soapbox on the planet with the most loopy media in the world west of Teheran and Pyongyang as their megaphone. Everyone from Jon Stewart to Keith Olbermann to Good Morning America will run this nonstop and taint everything associated with what should be one of the most somber and grave events in our country’s legal history.

These cases are, according to existing federal law, minefields of massive proportions and every two bit leftist defense lawyer on the planet will try to gain the spotlight outdoing each other with stunts and press conferences. It will make the Chicago 7 trial in 1968 look like a Benedictine monastery at lunchtime. It will also further the cause of terrorism, as every eye in the Middle East will tune into the daily feed of martyrdom on every channel.

Monsters of this nature can only be tried under the highest standards of justice in an almost pristine environment. Miranda rights really do not apply at this level of horror.  Nuremburg and the Tokyo war crimes trials set the standards, but those rules were agreed upon by some of the finest legal minds of the 20th Century from multiple legal backgrounds under extraordinary circumstances. Those rules do not apply in the Southern District of New York. Miranda does.

Attorney General Holder and his boss have pulled the pin on a hand grenade with this one and are playing hot potato.

 

 

The Ft. Hood Massacre – “Let’s not jump to conclusions”

This is what President Obama said on November 5, the day after the Ft. Hood Massacre perpetrated by Major Nidal Malik Hasan an American born  Muslim of Palestinian descent,  that left 13 dead and 32 wounded.

After the first few days, the news began to filter out that he had long before pulling the trigger well over 100 times espoused extremist Jihadi views. A year before, Hasan had  turned what was supposed to have been a one hour medical lecture into a harangue against Western moral values and the United States government in particular. This was apparently not reported because other officers present were concerned that the Army might view such actions as discriminatory. At a meeting of his peers, military psychiatrists and psychologists, his behavior was called “paranoid”, “belligerent” and “schizoid”.

Last week it was reported that Hasan had repeated e-mail correspondence with a radical Al Quaeda affiliated imam of a very disturbing nature. Today ABC reports that he wrote to Al Quaeda recruiter imam Anwar Al Awlaki that “I can’t wait to join you in the afterlife” and “share non-alcoholic wine”. The questions he was asking were clearly those of someone first considering, and then preparing, to undertake Jihad. Two FBI offices monitoring the e mails deemed the exchanges innocent. When a teenager says these kinds of things in a Yahoo chatroom, alarms go off around the country, but in this case it was business as usual. So who was responsible? Who is accountable?

It is believed al Awlaki is now hiding in Yemen, a major center of Al Quaeda activity. In the meantime, as the evidence of perhaps even a direct Al Quaeda connection mounts, it is interesting to recall our President’s words. As his Attorney General makes perhaps one of the most controversial decisions in the history of American criminal and military justice, the questions about judgment or a lack thereof continue to mount.

It’s the Esoteric Financial Instruments, Stupid!

Remember when Bill Clinton pilloried George H.W. Bush in 1992 with the phrase, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”? Yesterday saw Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner being grilled by various and sundry congresspeople for his involvement in the various bail outs and the lack of accountability therefor. It is somewhat odd that the flak was coming from both sides of the aisle. Both liberals and conservatives, and I believe the vast majority of the American people are upset with the irresponsible manner with which the crisis has been handled.

In the New York Times, Brooks and Krugman are dueling over Geithner’s performance and credibility in handling the AIG crisis, in which the government made AIG whole at 100 cents on the dollar on some of the most obscure and risky financial instruments ever issued. And this, really, is the heart of the matter, and no one is talking about it even now. You see, the trigger for the crisis was a financial market that had no idea of the risks it had taken nor of the final bill. Securities had been derivatized and swapped and hived and shaved and plucked to a point where no one knew who owned what anymore, and AIG was on the hook for a very large chunk of the mess through its reinsurance business.

It all looked good on paper, and of course the rocket scientists and economists out of the top schools who created these instruments were among the finest minds in the world, but the underlying assumptions betrayed both a complete lack of understanding of risk/reward and a groupthink that they could pass the buck indefinitely as everyone grew as rich as Croesus.  AIG and the others had no clue, even though they employed a lot of the same rocket scientists, as to what they were actually insuring and what their exposure was.

Wall Street has owned Washington for a very long time, and does not like regulation of any type. The theory was that the markets would determine values and that it was the ultimate level playing field. The reality is that money is made by gaming the system. A quarter point snooker on a bond issue means a multi million dollar bonus at the end of the year, and with all of the Rube Goldberg financial instruments being peddled to the Saudis and Europeans and your local bank, it was the worlds biggest gravy train if you worked at Lehman’s or Goldman Sachs. Just stay ahead of the power curve and everything’s going to be okay.

So when people in Congress and at the SEC said “wait a minute, do you guys really know what you’re doing”, the campaign donations flowed and the SEC and common sense were muzzled.  Even after the debacle of LTCC a number of years ago, when hedging in derivatives almost brought the market down in a prelude to the current mess, nothing was done. Even today, after one meltdown and faced with more trials in the marketplace, not one iota of common sense is evident in analyzing and fixing the problem. The reality on the ground is that no one would buy EEE Savings Bonds right now unless guaranteed with grandma’s gold under the mattress, but instead of working to actually fix the system, they hold inquiries and allow the same bunch of crooks to continue gaming the system, but now with a few trillion of the taxpayer’s dollars on the table.

It really isn’t that difficult. If it looks like a derivative and walks like a derivative or quacks like a derivative, it needs to be thoroughly analyzed by someone without chips in the game before it is allowed to be traded. Due diligence is a part of the process and always will be, but the reality is that these markets are so complex now that someone, somewhere, has to be smart enough and sane enough to give these tools a long hard look before the lunatics in the trading rooms get their hands on them. And they need the authority to do so.

Just as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were allowed to run unfettered, it was perfectly legal political corruption that got in the way. Even now, no one is really following the money trail. Perhaps some Harvard professor will eventually write a history of the causes and effects of this crisis. In the meantime, it really only takes applied common sense. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

 

 

Why We Fight – November 2009

Thursday, November 19, 2009 KABUL: Afghan authorities said Wednesday that local security forces backed by Nato   troops killed more than three-dozen militants in a series of military operations across Afghanistan.Twenty-three Taliban militants were killed in an operation by Afghan and Western troops in Paktika province late Tuesday, Hamidullah Zhwak, a provincial spokesman, said in a statement. Nato warplanes pounded insurgent positions in support of ground forces in Paktika’s Barmal district, the spokesman added. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) could not immediately comment but was checking the reported airstrikes. About 16 other insurgents were killed in separate operations, involving Afghan and international forces, in several provinces mainly in the south where the insurgency is most intense, the defence ministry said. Dozens of insurgents were captured during those operations on Tuesday and Wednesday, the ministry said in a statement. Officials said that Afghan security forces, backed by ISAF and a separate US-led coalition, have intensified operations against rebels. US President Barack Obama is expected to decide shortly whether to order up to 40,000 extra US soldiers to Afghanistan in an effort to turn around the war against the Taliban. According to the www.icasualties.org website, 472 coalition soldiers including 290 Americans have died since the beginning of the year. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The article above appeared in The News of Karachi yesterday and has been reported elsewhere. No ISAF soldiers or Afghan Army were killed, and many Taliban were taken prisoner. In contrast, the Washington Post published an article by Peter Slevin entitled “A Town Divided” using the people of a small Minnesota town to question why we are in Afghanistan.   Yesterday’s headlines were of another suicide bombing by the Taliban in Peshawar that killed 19.There have been multiple suicide bombings in the Khyber region as Pakistani forces attack the Taliban in southern Waziristan. Almost all of the casualties have been civilians. The roadside bombs we read about in Afghanistan are taking a much higher toll on the civilian population than on the supposed intended targets, the military. When the Taliban enter a disputed village, the first thing that goes is the school and any infrastructure built by the West.   We seem to have forgotten that we are fighting cowards who use the border as a shield and attack women and children.   We seem to have forgotten that we are at war not with a people, but rather an ideology of hatred. The Taliban and Al Quaeda are much more proficient at killing innocent civilians than they are in combat with an armed enemy. They violate the teachings of the Koran as they invoke Jihad in the name of false prophets.   We seem to have forgotten that this is the same ideology that crashed 2 jets into the Twin Towers and anotherinto the Pentagon and another into the ground in Shanksville, PA. That these are the same people who inflicted murder and terror in Bali and Tanzania and Kenya and London and Madrid and who rammed an explosives laden boat into the USS Cole.   We seem to have forgotten that unlike us, they are patient and hold grudges like no one else and the fire of jihad burns white-hot enough to send thousands of them out to inflict murder as suicide bombers or even turn against their own as at Ft. Hood.   We seem to have forgotten that Afghanistan was put on the back burner as we focused on Iraq.   We seem to have forgotten that we put our best people on the job and they came up with a rational and achievable plan in March, which now seems to have been discarded.   Our leaders are fighting their battles in Washington not based upon the national interests of our country, but on their own political predispositions. New issues seem to be fabricated every day the President delays his decision, almost all of them by the Left.   Straw men are erected and the media pile on as if these shibboleths were Gospel because it fits their view of America as tainted. The old ’60′sradicalism still lives, and is in power now.   But it’s not us hegemonizing the world. We have not made Iraq or Saudi Arabia or KuwaitAmerican colonies. We leave when we are asked to. It is not KBR or Chevron getting the huge oil contracts in Iraq or the mining concessions in Afghanistan.   Our wars were undertaken in self-defense and to prevent radical extremism from killing ever more innocent people.   We are inflicting our will upon the enemy, and the casualty reports substantiate this. But we went in underfunded and undermanned and underequipped, and everyone at the top knew this. And when the general in charge made his best assessment and did his job and requested the resources necessary to win, Washington dithered.   This afternoon an old friend called from Plymouth, MA, where this nation began. He told me that he had met half a dozen Airborne soldiers who were there to present the Colors at the America’s Thanksgiving Hometown Parade tomorrow morning. They were also there for the funeral of SPC. Ben Sherman, who died in Afghanistan on the 10th while serving with the 82nd Airborne. Duty, honor and country are not abstract concepts to these men.   America hardly knows it is at war today. There are no sacrifices except when a telegram arrives some far off place once removed from the lives of most of us. Most of us go about our daily lives without bother and believe what we are told. But the reality is that it is a cold, hard world out there. People are out of work, and our young men and women are being put to the test every day. So perhaps we can remember this.   Perhaps we can remember as Thanksgiving approaches that we have so much to be thankful for. That there has not been another 9/11. That peace in Iraq is becoming a reality and that peace in Afghanistan,while more difficult, is also achievable.   For in the end, we are fighting for what is right and what is good. We are  at war with something evil and destructive and worthy of our blood and money to eradicate or put in a cage as criminals and terrorists deserve.   The contrast between the founding principles of our country and the ideology of extremism we are fighting could not be more stark. For all of these reasons we fight.

How the Democrats plan to permanently take over our government

We are today seeing a battle the soul of the United States. With Cap & Trade, the takeovers of the banking and automotive industries, and now health care, we are seeing an attempt to permanently transform our country from one based upon equality of opportunity into one based on equality of outcome. Obama and the Democrats are at war with American exceptionalism itself. If they succeed, the United States will have written its own epitaph.

This is not Democrat versus Republican, but rather a hard Left attempt to achieve control of the economy and political structure of the country for the next 70 years. The goal is to accrue enough power to itself and its allies as quickly as possible to achieve this before the people catch on. Consider the Peronist model or that of Mexico from 1927-1997 when the PRI controlled the state.  Pseudo populism is always good for the insiders. And consider the corruption that has already taken place in the space of just 10 months in this country. Expect more of the same.

As we speak, the Administration is unleveling the playing field in union-management relations and towards coercion of workers into unionization. Rather than legislate card check, they are using the National Mediation Board, an obscure federal agency, to change the voting rules on union certification to allow a majority of those who vote, rather than all employees, to provide certification. The SEIU are the most influential group in the country based upon White House visitor logs. While the members may disagree with the politics of their leaders, they have no choice. This is ensured. Democracy in most unions in this country has been a fiction. It is about control and has some of the aspects of the Bolsheviks, who held the reins of power tight while outwardly professing the equality of all. Some pigs are more equal than others though, as Orwell pointed out.

After watching Obama and his parallel government of czars and Pelosi and Reid’s backroom maneuvering shred the Constitution, can there be any doubt as to how they will play the game? Many of the most important decisions on national policy are no longer seeing debate in Congress, but are being decided behind closed doors by Henry Waxman, Jan Schakowsky and other leftists perfectly willing to sacrifice the Constitution. After all, in their world, the United States is the problem, not the solution. Obama learned from Clinton what happens when you announce your intentions. If you can’t achieve the goal constitutionally, use any means necessary to achieve the goal including stealth, litigation, and the illegal.  We are seeing Alinsky squared and the corruption of power.

The centerpiece legislation of the Left is the nationalization of health care, and every single Democrat voting for bill seems to be willing to sacrifice their short term majority to achieve government control of another 20% of the economy. In addition, by forcing uninsured citizens to pay punitive fines and by including the coverage of illegal immigrants, they will have partially funded another handout to a constituency for whom they will then provide a path to legal residence, ensuring another huge voting bloc.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, transparency in our government is at an all time low. Every promise the president has made; on employing lobbyists, on open meetings, and on conflict of interest has been broken. He has employed more shysters than Rutherford B. Hayes. The czars in the White House have no accountability except to the president, which I believe is clearly unconstitutional. Foreign policy is another example, where the Secretary of State has been neutered. No one else knows what is going on across the government because that’s the way the President wants it.

Normally, the Media would act as a check on these ambitions, but they are at the least fellow travelers and at the worst unindicted co-conspirators these days. After all, they all went to the same schools and have the same philosophy of “big brother knows best”. Even as several major climate change propagandists are exposed as frauds of immense proportions, it is the political agenda of control behind this power grab that is the real issue. “Never waste a crisis” as Rahm Emmanuel says.

By fostering fear and entitlement, the Democrats foster dependence on their party as the ones passing out the largesse. It is as old as bread and circuses. While our country is decidedly moderate/conservative, with the rejection of George Bush, they have claimed a mandate for change that was never mandated. I am afraid one would have to go back to the 1917 Revolution to find an equally transforming series of events.

The tragedy is that the Constitution is very clear on the nature of our government. It was written to guarantee liberty and provide a  framework  for a just society. It was a minimalist document, which has been ignored by the Left because it thwarts their agenda. It does not allow for new entitlements and rights that seem to appear out of thin air. All major decisions were to be decided by Constitutional Amendments, a very high bar set high specifically because of the deceptions and hidden agendas of politicians.

The Constitution was argued over vehemently when it was first proposed and once adopted, those whose arguments did not prevail contented themselves with decision of the majority. But today’s reality is that most of the Left’s proposed legislation is  being implemented not by constitutional means but procedural. And if successful, they will have gutted the Constitution.

John Adams said ” A Constitution of Government once changed from freedom can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever”.  Is this the path for our country? A government of entitlements but with ever more limited freedom?

What do Carly Fiorina and Barack Obama have in common?

Today, President Obama announced a new national science fair for young inventors. He wants to show kids how “cool” science is and give them the same treatment as sports stars when they win a championship. A noble goal, but one that doesn’t get the point. Obama decries the lag in science scores, but ignores the more important reality, a culture of innovation. As a lawyer and politician, he just doesn’t get it.

Someone else who didn’t get it and lost her job because of it is Carly Fiorina, now running for the Senate seat occupied by Barbara Boxer of California. Ms. Fiorina came out of the marketing and sales group at ATT/Lucent. When she began at AT&T, it was one of the country’s crown jewels of technology and included Bell Labs.  Cutting edge innovation in microcircuitry and telecommunications took place there every day. It was exciting and amazing. Over the years since it was started by Thomas Edison, Bell Labs invented radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell,  and the UNIX operating system and 100 other basic technologies. There was no specific brief on where they could go, and a lot of the “pure” research that was done ended up paying huge dividends.

With outsourcing and offshoring, the MBA’s, including Ms. Fiorina, decided that the scientists and engineers and lab techs were too expensive and that emphasis should be placed on applied research. Thus began the downsizing and dismantlement of much of Bell Labs. Today it is a shadow of it’s former self.

Ms. Fiorina led the spinoff of Lucent from AT&T to “enhance shareholder value”. From there she leapt to Hewlett Packard, where she again cut back on the R&D side. Agilent, the scientific instrument business, was spun off in 1999 and she was the center of it. She then proceeded to purchase Compaq Computer, a commodity computer manufacturer to go with what was left of HP. All of these bad decisions have been reflected in the price per share of these companies for years afterwards. HP had effectively lost its soul. From the days of Bill & Dave using Stanford as their minor league system and creating the ultimate engineering culture, it went to Ms. Fiorina’s infamous  “does anybody have a good idea for a new product?” memo.

What neither Mr. Obama nor Ms. Fiorina understand is that invention and science spring from a certain culture. Tinkerers, designers, machinists, basement chemists, slide rule jockeys, and geeks are all a part of this. But management has quite successfully outsourced most of this to a point where even leading technologists no longer have a fundamental understanding of the means of production, which is essential to invention and manufacturing. Today, we have some of the smartest people in the world working in the labs with almost no understanding of how biotech and nanotech and all sorts of other tech translates into the real world.

There is a certain joy in making something faster or watching a chemical reaction or putting things together in new ways. But you have to have the ability to translate those ideas into reality effectively. and this we have lost.

We don’t have the factory floors to prowl or the conference rooms to BS in or the processing lines out back to see “what if”. Even DARPA is a closed loop devoted to “applications” oriented research instead of the blue sky “let’s fund this crazy idea for $1,000,000, Dick” organization it was 20 or 30 years ago.  Management and government thought of maximizing shareholder value and COTS (Commercial, off the shelf) instead of optimizing manufacturing, and the cross-pollination of ideas that creates breakthroughs. The bureaucrats and MBA’s are firmly in charge now.

Now, when a lot of the infrastructure is gone, the President wants to encourage invention once again. It’s a noble cause, but the horse is to a good degree out of the barn. Ms. Fiorina wants to be a Senator well, just because she wants to. Kids can’t even access a proper lab these days because of liability issues and the fact that chemicals and electricity and making things can be “so dangerous”. Gouges and scrapes and burns used to be badges of honor in the manufacturing/engineering class. Now they are causes for lawsuits.

American exceptionalism was defined by the opportunity to fail or make it big. Opportunity of outcome doesn’t work in science and technology. There were over 100,000 people on the Apollo program who were dedicated and failure truly was not an option. With  millions of parts on a Saturn rocket, 99.99% reliability still meant that hundreds could fail, any of which could lead to disaster. The miracle was that we got any rockets off the ground and that we had so few failures. Instead, as a counterpoint, today we are presented with a climate research scandal in which results may have been tainted and data faked. The deterioration of the scientific culture itself is an issue.

MBA’s and lawyers are probably the least qualified to address these issues. Both Ms. Fiorina and Mr. Obama are of the type who think that steaks come from the supermarket rather than cows. This is not getting out there and addressing our country’s desperate need to regain our mojo. The old guys are still out there. Technology has not changed so that we are irrevocably behind, but we must act now. As the government blows trillions of dollars propping up decrepit companies and paying off political allies, our country must once again focus on what made us great. On so many levels, the clock is ticking. We should really be taking those billions and investing in manufacturing and technology rather than things like cash for clunkers and make work highway projects.

On Health Care – Let me get this straight?

1 – There is already a crushing federal debt?

2 – There is a punitive tax of $30-60  Billion on the uninsured, mainly younger people, under the health care bill but none on illegal immigrants?

3 – They will cut Medicare benefits by hundreds of billions of dollars?

5 – The government bought off the AARP on this?

6 – The “death panels” really are death panels?

7 – Mammograms and other common lifesaving diagnostic procedures will be restricted?

8 – The President said there would be no “public option” but it’s there it is in the bill and he said he supports it?

9 – They’re having to bribe Senators and Congressmen with hundreds of billions of our dollars so that they’ll hold their noses and vote yes?

10 – The bill is loaded with so many gimmicks and loopholes that the real cost may be 3-4x what they say it is?

And why are we even having this discussion? How is this a good thing?

Terrorists Have More Rights than 9/11 Victims

We have seen a 180 degree turn in our government’s policies in the Global War on Terror. Consider:

1 – Attorney General Holder is holding an investigation (read witch hunt) of the CIA agents responsible for the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind. This after a prior investigation found no wrongdoing in their waterboarding of Mr. Mohammed. Remember, not only was Mohammed responsible for 9/11 but he also personally beheaded Daniel Pearl and has confessed to involvement in most of Al Quaeda’s terrorist attacks since the 1990′s. He is also e responsible for every traveler removing their shoes when passing through security at airports, as he was failed shoe bomber Richard Reid’s controller. This alone should condemn him.

2 – Attorney General Holder, with the approval of President Obama, has also removed the case of Mohammed and 4 other members of Al Quaeda from the Department of Defense, where they were charged and were to tried by a military tribunal, and moved it to the Federal Court in New York. The case is already assuming all the trappings of a circus, making it that much harder to try in court. Rather than applying the laws of war, the defendants will be tried as simple criminals under laws and rules of evidence much different from those applying to war crimes.

3 – Today, it was reported that 3 Navy SEALs are to face criminal charges related to mistreatment of one of Iraq’s most notorious terrorists in his apprehension. The terrorist in question was at the heart of the Anbar Insurgency, which cost thousands of Iraqi and American lives. Under the politically correct new rules, broken noses and bruises are to be treated as felonies while mass murder and terrorism are tried by the Marquess of Queensberry.

And what about the rights of the 3,000 dead at the World Trade Center and in Shanksville, PA and at the Pentagon? Or of the 4,000 American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or of the dead in Bali< where Mohammed was also involved?

The game is being played according to the rules of Chicago foundation boardrooms and back alley Washington dealmakers now. We are expected to believe the same man who greased the Marc Rich pardon and a neophyte with a Swiss cheese record are both capable and qualified to confront one of the great evils of our time. Unfortunately, more and more of us are finding them terribly lacking in both good judgement and competence.

Pakistani newspaper reports U.S. negotiating with the Taliban

The Daily Times in Pakistan has reported that the United States has entered into secret negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. These negotiations are apparently being brokered by Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. It is said Mullah Omar has designated his shadow Foreign Minister Agha Muhtisam to meet with U.S. envoys sometime on or after November 30.

U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke stated in the German news magazine Der Spiegel yesterday that “The majority of the Taliban do not support Mullah Omar’s extreme views and that there is room for them to rejoin the social and political fabric of Afghanistan if they renounce Al Quaeda”.  An interesting comment if he is already in fact in contact with the good Mullah.

President Obama has now set a date for his announcement of a decision on troop reinforcements in Afghanistan. It has been rumored that he might announce his decision on Monday or shortly thereafter. The date? November 30.

Fast and loose with the science for $400, Alex!

I got a nasty comment on one of my posts the other day by a Kevin P Ward, who is apparently the director of something called the Aspen Science Center. You can read the post for yourself as it is distasteful. So like most people, I wanted to know why he said what he said and looked him up on the internet.

The goals of the center seem noble; educating both children and adults on the sciences. Having been a technologist  for 30 years I believe this is one of the most important responsibilities in our nation today. The Science Center have had some pretty good speakers who appear to be experts on their subjects. I also found that Mr. Ward gained some notoriety during the 2008 election when he called for a science debate between the presidential candidates. He was quoted in the Aspen Times as saying President Bush “has legitimized scientific ignorance in the public arena” in emphasizing the importance of his own vision of science.

Accusing the president of dismissing global warming as “just another theory”, Ward said ” So’s gravity. I invite him to walk off the roof of a 3 story building”.  Last I looked, it was called Newton’s Law of Gravity. Whatever the eventual truth, AGW is still only a theory. Mr Ward was both wrong and condescending. And there, you see lies the rub. Too many people in the earth sciences either have either forgotten the the importance of  accuracy and fact or simply don’t care. They are also often very rude to those who differ with their theory.

Forty years ago, my father, a rocket scientist, served as acting director of ARPA (now DARPA). Even then, he was deeply concerned with the new field known as earth sciences. He pointed out that even in the mid to late 1960′s, some of the instrumentation available was so sensitive that in many cases the presence of certain elements and compounds was statistically meaningless. X parts per million or even parts per billion can have very little meaning in most cases. He would liken detection levels of some equipment to finding a grain of sand in a dumptruck.

The determinant, he said was the application. The same principles and technology that can, as an example, sniff plastic explosives and nuclear materials and the carbon in a core sample can be misapplied and the data manipulated either inaccurately or improperly. The tool must be used properly and the facts verified. And as Disraeli once raged  “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. The misuse and misapplication of the data has been a common issue at the Environmental Protection Agency and here in California for many years. When making decisions on science, the data must be sacrosanct. The problem seems to be far too common when it comes to earth sciences. The cost/benefit discussion, as well as a number of more fundamental issues, have in many cases been lost in the statistics.

And now we find perhaps the greatest scandal of all is based upon scientists playing fast and loose with the facts. I do not know the truth of anthropogenic global warming, but at the very least that the data has been corrupted, and one of the fundamental principles of scientific research has been violated. That they may have then manipulated and falsified that data is cause for the most serious of criminal charges.

Make no mistake about it. Trillions of dollars are at stake. The Cap & Trade bill in this country has already been damned by some of the leading climatologists as ineffectual. This is as much about money and power as it is about the environment.  In 2 weeks representatives of most every country on the planet will meet in Copenhagen on Global Warming, and the countrywith the most at stake is the United States. And now the data on which all of the decisions will be based has been irrevocably tainted.

A couple of years ago I read Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. I was amazed that virtually everything in it was anecdotal. The charts and graphs were subjective. In a book on an issue of science, it did not present a clear, logical case. This has been a running theme in the global warming debate. The science is rickety, fast and loose. The worms are squirming out of the can.

We rely on scientists to do their jobs scientifically. Unfortunately, it seems we are dealing with educated morons such as Mr. Ward. I believe Alex Trebek would agree this is the ultimate game of Jeopardy.

Jerry Brown’s mounting ethics problems

Jerry Brown is the political butterfly of California. From the California Secretary of State to two terms as Governor to Mayor of Oakland to his current job as the state’s Attorney General, he is the definition of career politician. He is also one of the people most responsible for the current state of the state. If you’ve held almost every major office in state government over 35 years either you somewhere along the line earn this responsibility or end up being labeled a hack or both.

Mr. Brown is once again running for Governor at a time when the state is in the midst of its deepest crisis in history. Between the man-made drought in the Valley, our bankrupt finances, the collapse of the economy, and our dysfunctional legislature we need vision and clarity and honesty more than ever before.

Mr. Brown brings a lot of baggage with him, but his recent conduct as AG must be considered as some of his most egregious. In reading his press releases, it is the typical liberal litany of lawsuits against oil companies, banks and corporations. But there’s not a lot of real substance to any of this. Filing lawsuits is not winning them, nor have we seen any great initiatives.

Where there is substance is in his selective application of the law. Recently, one of his aides illegally recorded a conversation between a San Francisco reporter and a justice department official, and then tried to get the reporter fired. Her article on Brown’s questionable influence on the wording of an upcoming ballot initiative that benefited a political donor might be damaging to his hopes in 2010. The aide in question was fired but the questionable quid pro quo was never followed up on. The investigation into the wiretap was also dropped by Brown’s office.

More recently, we have the spectacle of ACORN’s San Diego office  dumping potentially incriminating documents as a private investigator filmed them. The investigator salvaged the documents, which are now under review by Breitbart.com and some of which have been also released to an passionately disinterested press. This is the ACORN office where an employee offered to assist two undercover reporters playing a pimp and prostitute in setting up a 501c charitable foundation to evade taxes. He also offered to assist by importing underage prostitutes from Tijuana.

In Fontana, California, another ACORN employee was caught on camera by the same reporters offering advice on tax evasion as well as suggesting locations for the proposed brothel. As far as I know, California does  have several statutes that would apply.

An employee of ACORN’s  South Central Los Angeles office was filmed offering to do research on international child sex slavery for the reporters and encouraging them in their business plan.

Brown has chosen so far to ignore the problem. Child slavery? Corruption? Conspiracy to evade state income taxes? I thought this is why we have Attorneys General.

Lastly, right in his back yard, Sacramento Mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson has been caught in a coverup. In this case, Johnson’s charter school, St. Hope, took federal grant money and used it inappropriately. Most was paid back, but then it was discovered that he may have had inappropriate contact with young volunteers, who were then paid off for their silence. His fiance’, Michelle Rhee, has been accused of being a “fixer” in the case. Didn’t we used to take cover ups seriously? The Americorps Inspector General, Gerald Walpin, was fired in this case, but the Obama administration chose to shoot the messenger and try to sweep it all under the rug.

Where do we draw the line on improper conduct, Mr. Brown? Illegal wiretapping? child sex slavery and large scale criminal fraud?  Cover ups?

One of the most serious complaints these days is selective enforcement of the law. Unfortunately, it seems to have become a hallmark of Mr. Brown’s tenure as Attorney General. He was able to insert himself into the Anna Nicole Smith case easily enough. Why not actually do the job of an Attorney General?   And knowing all of this, do we really want him as our Governor again?

Why NATO needs to send more troops

President Obama goes on the TV on Tuesday evening to announce his strategy on Afghanistan after 3 months of speculation and delay. It is expected he will announce a compromise solution and request additional troops from our allies.

NATO has been a part of the effort since 2001, but has been a junior partner. It is time they stepped up their effort, not for our benefit, but for their own. Afghanistan has become a toxic cocktail of narco-terrorism and Europe is bearing the brunt. Heroin is at all time lows in price and the availability is extraordinary. A whole new generation is becoming addicted and is paying the price, and it all comes from Afghanistan. Every single day, the money from the heroin trade finances the militias killing British and American troops in Helmand Province.

Both sides of the Afghans are involved. It is simply the biggest money machine to appear there in the past 100 years. Some in government are involved, but on the other side, the Taliban are involved up to their eyeballs. Every year more acreage goes under the sway of the opium poppy, and the Taliban act as both the agents and protectors of the drug lords. How does this reconcile with Islam and the concept of Jihad?

When  British troops valiantly repel Taliban offensives as they have done so repeatedly in recent months, it is often the result of a big drug deal. The attacks sometimes are diversionary. Someone is moving 1,000 or 2,000 Kgs of pure H into Pakistan and then to the coast for transshipment to Montenegro or Bari or another port where the authorities have been bought and the chance of detection is low. Once on the European mainland, the price quintuples.

The heroin trade then helps finance the terrorist cells of Al Quaeda and their affiliates in Spain and Britain and France as they handle the distribution end as well. Vertical integration ensures the profits stay within the Ummah.

The profits at home finance RPG’s and ammo and the $100/month for the average Taliban fighter they pay. But the reality is that the evil nexus of narcotics and terrorism kills our soldiers just as dead as they kill the junkies in the back allies of Hamburg and the Banlieus of Paris and the hard streets of the Midlands. All of this in some twisted name of Wahabbism.

Just as cocaine has financed civil war in South America, we are seeing the narcoterrorists replicate those results in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s not about freedom or religion. It’s about money,and a very few at the top enslave the rest for their profit.  It doesn’t get much more evil.

So as we see the Spaniards and Greeks and Dutch and Irish struggle with coming up with a few thousand more troops, think about the social cost. Narcotics are the largest illegal transfer of wealth in history. And all of that money is being put into destabilizing the governments that now seek to limit their involvement.

The statistics all bear this out. It is simply a matter of calculating the math. For every Euro spent in pacifying Helmand and other heroin producing provinces in Afghanistan, these countries will see $3-4 in benefits at home. It would seem a rather simple equation.

“The dog ate my homework” – Climategate gets much worse

The London Times today reports that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia discarded the raw data that went back 150 years  on which their climate models have been based. Now, there is no easy way to reconstruct the basic research on anthropogenic global warming. There may be no way to confirm the results and conclusions upon which the U.N. and every major government in the world have based many trillions of dollars in planning.

Gordon Brown has said nothing, Barack Obama has said nothing, Angela Merkel has said nothing. When asked the other day about the scandal, Carol Browner, the Director of the White House Office on Energy and Climate Change Policy, another of Obama’s czars, was dismissive. If you scan the New York Times or Washington Post or ABC News or the Chicago Tribune or AP or Reuters, there is nary a word even after this latest news. Greenpeace is headlining “12 Days to Save the Climate”. No editorials. No opinion pieces. No discussion of what may be the largest scandal of the century. No one seems to have bothered to call Al Gore up and asked his opinion. There is a studied lack of curiosity.

So if the underlying data was destroyed in the 1980′s, does that mean that no one is able to confirm the methodology and conclusions reached by the CRU?  Did someone confirm the data before it was destroyed? If not, this would go against everything science stands for if true. Replication of the experiment and confirmation of the results is always, always required. Peer review means nothing if no one reviewed the complete file and correlated the data. The data at that point is simply fish wrap.

Half the disaster movies of the past 20 years have a brilliant but misunderstood scientist  rushing to the White House to warn the president of impending disaster.  This time, when potentially damning e mails are released wholesale and the underlying data has conveniently disappeared and it’s on the front pages of the Times and Telegraph, two of the most respected newspapers in the world, it’s as if the information has disappeared into a wormhole in officialdom and the American media.

There have been no cries for confirmation. There have been no statements from government saying “This is a serious matter and we will investigate it fully”. Nothing from the Obama Administration or the Government in the UK. Instead, we are led to believe that they will traipse off to Copenhagen without a care and burden society with additional trillions in debt on what is perhaps deeply flawed evidence.

What happened to the grown ups? The guys with the pocket protectors and slide rules? Climategate is becoming an insult to science. It will damage the environmental movement for decades if not fully addressed. The problem is that Earth Science is one of the newest of sciences.  Trying to understand something so vast and complex is truly daunting. But from the outset, it has not been held to the expectations of other scientific disciplines. Research has often ruled by the heart, not the mind. And now one its central tenets has fallen under a cloud of suspicion.

Our planet has a number of pressing problems that must be dealt with on a global scale. There is no margin for error. The climate scandal could do irreparable damage to the credibility of scientists and governments throughout the world.  This scandal can only be dealt with through a full and fair accounting. Politicization is not the answer, but without a thorough analysis and investigation, Copenhagen is nothing more than a sick joke.

How’s that Middle East policy working out, Mr. President?

This morning, Iran dropped another bomb in their standoff with the West when they announced another 10 nuclear uranium enrichment sites. At the same time, members of their parliament are calling for their withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, pushing the nuclear envelope even further. In addition, the mullahs have taken over much of the education establishment and in a show of raw power the government  seized the Nobel Prize medal of Shirin Ebadi. Ms. Ebadi, a human rights lawyer, was awarded the Peace Prize in 2003 as one of the few outspoken critics of rights abuses in that country. The descent into Islamofascism continues. Mahmoud Achmedinejad, in the meantime, is being feted in countries such as Brazil and Venezuela.

It seems that in Israel and Palestine, it really can’t get much worse without the bullets flying. The Israelis continue to expand the settlements within their interpretation of the Oslo Agreements while the Palestinian government withers away into irrelevance. Both sides rejected Hillary Clinton’s intrusion a couple of weeks ago as she acted very undiplomatically. Special Envoy George Mitchell has also been politely told to pound sand.

In Afghanistan, the warlords and the Taliban are arming and reprovisioning  to face an ever more feckless ISAF as the president prepares to face the nation and explain why it has taken 95 days to come up with a new policy to replace the policy that was agreed to in March. The 2010 fighting season promises to be brutal.

And oh yeah, there’s Iraq. Is there a czar for Iraq, or have we forgotten about it entirely? In Iraq, the government is once again at war with itself as the factions battle for advantage. Bombings in Baghdad are increasing and the Kurds in the north are doing their best to set up a de-facto Kurdistan. The tremendous framework for peace and reconciliation established by Petraeus & Co. is in real danger of falling apart.

We are disengaged in the U.A.E., where Dubai World is threatening to default on $60 Billion in debt. In Saudi Arabia, the cancer of Wahabbism continues to be the second largest export. Pakistan is at war with itself. Luckily the Uzbeks, the Tadjik’s, the Armenians, the Kazakh’s, the Khyrgiz and the Turkmens are reasonably quiet. Syria has emerged as a critical player and yet we have done nothing.

One of the primary messages of the Obama Administration from the outset was engagement with the Islamic world. His speech in Cairo was supposed to be a milestone in U.S. – Middle Eastern relations. Instead, events seem to be spiraling out of control. Israel has clearly telegraphed their intentions if Iran continues along the nuclear path, and despite the lives lost and the cost, all of our efforts in Central Asia could be blown to pieces.

I do not want to be labeled as an anti-Obama agitator. But the reality is that our government’s policies are out of control. Measured diplomacy has been replaced with rhetoric and smoke. In the most complex and mine laden arena in the world, our policy is a disaster.

Is Al Gore the Bernie Madoff of climate change?

The Climategate scandal has the world in an uproar as the believers battle the skeptics on the existence and effect of anthropomorphic global warming. You see, the data is all based on the IPCC and now some of the people who generated that data were found to have massaged information and then destroyed some of the underlying data.  We simply do not know now how serious this breach of scientific ethics is yet. What is more bothersome is the completely dismissive attitude of the key players.

Climatology and meteorology are two of the most difficult of sciences. The number of factors affecting macro and microclimates is almost infinite, and the database requirements are massive. One of the things bothering me is that before we can even deliver an accurate weather report in Boston or New York or Johannesburg, scientists are staking their careers on the differential outcome of CO2 that measures in the hundredths of a percentage. If a meteorologist cannot accurately predict what is right outside his window, how can we play such a high stakes game with trillions upon trillions of dollars and the future of the planet at stake?

And we now find that some of the most active and noted proponents of anthropogenic global warming are also some of those most active in benefiting financially from the adoption of the proposed limits. One can make the argument of doing good by doing well, but when you find that much of the research has been funded by people such as Jeremy Grantham, who started the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Mr. Gore, the subject’s greatest polemicist and that they have the chance to reap billions in profits while gaining political control, one must ask very serious questions.

Some of the facts we know to be true are:

1 – In the 1970′s a number of climatologists warned of the dire consequences of global cooling.

2 – Solar activity is at a historic low and the planet has experienced cooler overall temperatures for at least 10 years.

3 – The Cap & Trade bill now before Congress does nothing to actually reduce carbon emissions for at least 20 years.

4 – There is now a question of the relative benefits of reducing the hole in the ozone layer, which will apparently trap more carbon. 10 years ago, the cry was over the hole in the ozone    layer.

5 – Patrick Birley, the CEO of the European Climate Exchange, which trades carbon credits to the tune of $126 Billion/year, admits that this exchange and the one in Chicago have not actually reduced carbon emissions by a single kg since 2001. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and others are apparently making a killing because it is such an esoteric market. Remember the Wall Street debacle? Is this the new tulip mania? Cui bono?

6 – Cost/benefit studies of the implementation of various green technologies have been very flimsy.

In other words, there is a tremendous amount of information we don’t know while there are unacceptable conflicts of interest.

What we do know for certain is that the current structure of what is proposed is a Ponzi scheme of unprecedented proportions.

The climate is changing around the planet. There is enough evidence of droughts in Australia and change elsewhere that there is reason to be concerned. But the first politicians to blow up at the CRU scandal were, oddly, the Australians. If you’ve ever spent time on the Eastern Seaboard of China, where the sun is a small, blood-red ball through the murk on a cloudless day, you know how bad the pollution problems are. We have pollution problems to deal with on all 7 continents but we must prioritize them and get the science right first.

The urgency to do something immediately strikes me as a bum’s rush to get legislation through before all the facts are known. With the money at stake and the questions raised, we must ask the hard questions and gain a better consensus before proceeding further.

The Day Obama Lost the War

The Guardian has reported that President Obama’s plan is to  add 30,000 troops over 6 months and then begin withdrawing all troops in 2011 with the last ones leaving in 2013. There’s nothing quite like telegraphing your intentions to a patient and cunning enemy. This is Vietnamization cubed.

1 – The one thing the Afghan people need above all else is to know that we are with them for the future. 4 years is not enough to provide long term stability.Any expectation to the contrary is a pipe dream. We will immediately lose what little trust and cooperation we have had as they see the writing on the wall.

2 – The Taliban have built a more vicious and successful narcostate than anyone in history, and it will take years to root out. They are now self financing through a 70% market share in the heroin business. This business both corrupts the West (Think of the Opium trade in the 1800′s and what it did to China) and funds external terrorism and jihad.

3 – The Afghans in the villages and cities must see justice done. Corruption on both sides is endemic and must be rooted out brutally to both destroy the narcotics trade and the historical feud driven culture that made the country so violent in the first place. This would  provide the legitimacy to the government so desired by the Western states. But to do this will require incredible force of will and commitment, which our president has now telegraphed we do not have.

4 – Security of the people must be another priority. 30,000 troops simply are not enough to geographically provide this.

5 – Real economic opportunity must be fostered and subsidized until the Afghan economy can stand on its own.

The strategy as reported in the Guardian, the Telegraph, and other outlets mixes the worst of Johnson and Nixon. The Taliban can simply lay low for a few years and then drive to Kabul after they have built up their forces and strength. They now have a target date. Opium production can be moved accordingly.

By losing the people, our troops will be even more exposed, causing significantly increased casualties. Fatalism will set in, and we will see an increasing loss of key personnel as we near the date of withdrawal. Who wants to be the last man killed in a pointless war? And make no mistake, Obama has made the war pointless now.

The Telegraph reports that Obama wants a major onslaught in Helmand, the center of the heroin trade, in January and yet even there, fighting conditions are miserable and the enemy is in hiding at that time of year. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tells us the president wants to deliver a “quick punch”. Once again, telegraphing intentions and also the president’s need for a photo op. By the time we get to Marjeh, one of the centers of the trade, the enemy will be long gone.

The president is, it seems this time, long on specifics and short on an overarching strategy. Exactly the reverse of  every successful major military campaign since Lincoln.

Towards a state run media apparatus

The economic decline of the mainstream media is well documented. Newspapers such as the New York Times, L.A. Times, USA Today, and magazines such as Time and Newsweek have been struggling for the past 10 years with declining circulation and advertising revenues. Visual media such as network television are also under assault, while Hollywood struggles with anything beyond mindless blockbusters. These can collectively be labeled the Mainstream Media, and the thread running through them is a significantly left of center liberalism. During the last election, all pretenses of objectivity were thrown aside as Palin was torn to pieces and Obama given a big wet sloppy kiss.

On the other side, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal have been doing very well both in readership/viewership and financially. It would seem that the laws of supply and demand are working when considering the current political landscape of the country.

Some time ago I wrote to the managing editor of the LA Times and pointed out that they had alienated perhaps half of their potential audience with their politics, and that perhaps this might be one reason their numbers were declining. Upsetting 50% of your potential market is bad business. Once the politics strayed off of the editorial pages, it seems that was the time when circulation began its harsh decline. Instead the media critics have chosen the internet as their target. It is my belief that they are in denial of the root cause of the problem.

Today, Congressman Henry Waxman was quoted saying that “Government needs to help shape U.S. Media”. He and other lawmakers are now looking into options to financially assist  failing media outlets, including allowing foundations to own and operate media outlets as well as public funding options. Free Press, a liberal public interest group, said that news gathering is a public service, not a commodity.

There is a groupthink and intellectual laziness today that has never existed before in this country. There is the highest likelihood that these wounds are entirely self-inflicted. We now have Congress considering both a bail out and government involvement. These proposals  are antithetical to the concept of a free press and to our core principles as Americans.

As journalists such as Patrick Courrielche and Andrew Breitbart have been exposing corruption and criminal activity on a never before seen scale the mainstream media have remained silent. As an anonymous leaker singlehandedly undermined the corruption at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, there has been a deafening silence from the mainstream media outlets. You see, these stories do not fit their left-wing narrative. Journalism is not about the story anymore, you see, but rather the politics of the press and the message.

But in the past 10 months we have seen the administration attempt to use the National Endowment for the Arts to promote their political agenda and the White House Journo-List provide talking points for opinion makers and the President himself cultivating leading columnists such as EJ Dionne, Josh Marshall, Tom Friedman, and Paul Krugman. At the same time, there has been a low grade counterinsurgency against Fox News. Now we have Congressman Waxman suggesting a media bailout. How convenient. This is how they will control the message. Ask Jeffrey Immelt at GE.

This offensive is as insidious as it is anti-American. Most presidents have had mixed relations with the media, and government money was rarely used for partisan purposes. Yet now we clearly have overt bias in the media and a sophisticated apparatus seeking to control the message with their own spin at every opportunity.

McLuhan wrote that “politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he will ever be”. My father told me to watch what people do, not what they say.

We have here a politician with the most finely honed image in American history saying one thing while doing another, and influencing the message using the tools of co-option, misdirection, and now bribery.

As Jefferson said “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost”. This is what is at stake in this discussion. “Barack Hussein Obama…mmm…mmm…..mmmm…” and  the video of Hollywood celebrities say “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama” shown to schoolchildren are worthy of Josef Goebbels. Now comes another step towards a state run, officially politicized media.

In 1787 after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked by another delegate “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy”. The answer was “A Republic, if you can keep it”. If nothing else, think about it.

The beginning of the end for name brand electronics, and why we should be very, very afraid

Foxconn on Monday announced that they will open up to 10,000 retail stores in China. If you are in the electronics manufacturing arena, they are known as one of the most aggressive and fastest growing electronics manufacturing service (EMS) providers in the world.

They are manufacturers of  iPhones and SONY flat screen televisions and an alphabet soup of computers for virtually every major brand. Side by side in the same buildings and sites across China, production lines will build for Nokia on one side and their competitors on the other. Their warehouses have a selection on most electronics better than Costco. They and their competitor are the infrastructure that the big name brands rely on for manufacturing and logistics. Taken together, Foxconn is manufacturing >20% of all notebook computers on the planet. Now they are taking the next step. Who needs the middleman? They are brutally cost driven.

35 years ago, RCA, based in Indianapolis, was looking to improve profit margins and remain competitive. Instead of building their many of their own televisions, they began outsourcing to a subcontractor, SONY. A few years later, SONY didn’t need the RCA name any more and went direct. This has been repeated again and again in manufacturing. Now, even the Japanese electronics giants are no longer immune.

Over the past 20 years, we have watched as so many of the great American and European, and even Japanese manufacturers, have outsourced the manufacturing process and become nothing more than brand names. With this, they improved short term margins, but lost touch with their roots in technology and new product development. Today, there is a greater gap between the systems designer and the manufacturing floor than at any time in history.

When the American economy is so dependent upon the creation of highly skill/highly paid knowledge workers, the designers have lost touch with the enabling technologies and manufacturing processes. We can use a computer or cell phone, but we don’t know how it works. It is modern Luddism.

Now, we are seeing what could be the final stage in the process. It will take years to happen, but if Foxconn and other EMS suppliers have the manufacturing expertise and economies of scale, why would they need OEM’s such as Dell or Apple or Hewlett Packard? In the boardrooms of corporate America, the reality is next quarter or next year. Current management will be gone by then anyway. Most of the executives who made those outsourcing decisions are long retired now. Wall Street and government and corporate America don’t like manufacturing, so it’s not on the radar. Foxconn will start in China, and then others will follow. Eventually it will end up here simply because the profit margins are much higher.

So what then? Where will the innovation come from? OEM (HP/Apple/Motorola, etc) went to ODM (ASUS/Quanta/Foxconn) went to EMS, and along the way the R&D labs like XEROX’s PARC and Motorola’s Schaumburg and HP’s Palo Alto and Bell Labs became at best shadows of their former selves. The Japanese have taken the lead on the micro level, leaving very little in the value equation except to the component manufacturers.

The safe haven, the value added previously enjoyed by the OEM and the retailer, will now be under relentless pressure as one after another newly vertically integrated challenger increases market share. It is creative destruction at an elemental level. It also has tremendous implications for technology, national defense, and our economy. As the Chinese curse goes, we are living in interesting times.

Tom Hayden’s bumper sticker and the Bearded Spock universe

Tom Hayden, an icon of the Left and Jane Fonda’s former husband, wrote today in The Nation that he utterly disillusioned with the president’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. He has announced to the world that he is immediately and forthwith removing the bumper sticker he put on his car during the election. It’s sort of like the Pope saying that sin is bad, I guess. After all, Hayden made his reputation as one of the most prominent leaders of the antiwar movement in the 60′s. I guess bumper sticker removal substitutes for marches on Washington under the new rules. It echoes the U.N.’s declaration during the Bosnia crisis that they would just have to pass a stronger resolution if the Serbians didn’t stop their predations. Is it just me, or is the world going mad?

The President has been condemned on all sides  for his vacillation and for his logically inconsistent Afghan decision. The growing Climategate scandal is being swept under the rug by our government. The Health Care bill is a complete mess. The Cap & Trade Bill will do nothing to address CO2 emissions. Our government is more interested in protecting the rights of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Maj. Nidal Hasan than they are with combatting terrorism. Congress seems to find one more reason to spend every day it is in session. A number of states are on the verge of bankruptcy and unemployment is at 17+%. We got problems right here in River City and our leadership is fiddling away. All of this sounds like the evil Bearded Spock Universe anyway you look at it.

Look at any of the polls now. A growing majority of the people of the United States feel the country is on the wrong track. And yet, when Joe the Plumber or your Aunt Mary the bookkeeper peacefully protest the policies of the government, supposedly moderate people like EJ Dionne decry the lack of civility as his colleagues far and wide call them teabaggers. For the record, teabagging is a term referring to an explicit sexual act which originated in the gay community. It can be considered obscene under any standard you wish to choose, and yet it is in common use on the Left these days. Chris Matthews referred to West Point last night as “the enemy camp” when reporting on Obama’s choice of venue. And is the right being impolite?

There is a growing derangement and shrillness on the Left. So much of what we are seeing just doesn’t make sense and yet the locomotive is accelerating towards the cliff.  Even after being rocked on our heels by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we are seeing a complete lack of logic and common sense. We are by no means out of the woods yet, and the conduct of our leadership seems increasingly schizophrenic.

Yep, evil Bearded Spock Universe. But this time, it’s not on TV.

World Class Hypocrisy

This evening, I was in a nice restaurant and noticed one of the most prominent televangelists in America walking in. If you have cable TV, he is instantly recognizable. He drove up in a Rolls Royce with blacked out windows and had two armed bodyguards. Funny thing for a man of the cloth. You see, his empire is in the many hundreds of millions of dollars, and if a reasonable intelligent individual watched him in action, they would call BS after 3-4 minutes of watching his oily informercials for Jesus.

Another Elmer Gantry finally broke his silence tonight. Al Gore doubled down on his anthropomorphic global warming sermon and said that we have to act yesterday to prevent a global catastrophe. His visual aid,  for the event, presented by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was a map of San Francisco in 2030 showing the entire coastline inundated and the city under 30′ of water. Some  are not too unhappy about that prospect. I would miss the surf at Mavericks, though. Mr. Gore said nothing about the Climategate controversy or his massive bet on carbon futures, the big money pot at the end of his particular rainbow. Mr. Gore, you see, only takes select questions from trained monkeys these days.

On the other side of the country Larry King was on television arguing with Michael Moore, who I must say has at least a consistency of conviction on the Afghanistan war. Mr. Moore pointed out the intellectual flaws in Mr. Obama’s rationalization of the Afghanistan surge while Mr. King was an unabashed cheerleader. Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, and others on the Left have all been contorting themselves like a game of Twister gone wrong today as they try to justify the President’s pretzel logic. At the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus wants to stick up the Congress for more aid for their pet projects, including mortgage forgiveness in inner cities, pork, and a laundry list amounting to hundreds of billions for their campaign donors.

I really am not sure if I loathe the preacher or the politicians or the gandy dancers more these days.

It’s time for a Constitutional challenge

Many are aware of the Democratic Party’s propensity to litigate, not legislate when stalled or rejected in Congress. With the trial lawyers so closely associated with the Democrats, venue shopping and finding just the right judges and appellate venues were the approved method of legislating when faced with roadblocks such as Republican majorities.

Now, even when faced with opposition within their own party and the inability to move forward with their agenda in a Congress with a huge majority, the Administration has shown it’s willingness to use any means necessary to achieve its ends.

Today with the declaration of carbon dioxide, one of the most abundant gases on Earth and vital to life itself, as a danger to the plane, it will henceforth be subject to draconian regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency.Yes, they are regulating the air we breathe. This without review; without hearings, and without the due process required by law  They are thumbing their noses at the law.

The original intentions of the writers of the Constitution are absolutely clear, as are their fears for its future. A selection of quotations:

“Whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthorative, void, and of no force” – Jefferson

“Our peculiar security is the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank piece of paper by construction” – Jefferson

“Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of government”  – James Madison

“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread.” – Jefferson

The Constitution is clear. Freedom of opportunity,  not freedom of outcome. Limited government. And protection from dangers of a too powerful government.

Today we have a government that has taken over the auto industry by fiat (not the car company). They have nationalized a significant portion of the financial services industry. They propose creating a massive new bureaucracy with Cap & Trade. They propose to engineer a complete takeover of the health care industry. And today, they declared CO2 a health hazard with no discussion and with no clear agenda except to exert as much control as possible as quickly as possible. We are living under a regime that does not respect our fundamental rights and liberties.

The Constitution was written purposely to set a high bar for any expansion of government. Our Founders and every successive generation until the 1930′s respected this, and change did not come easily. Now, we are faced with the exact sort of tyranny Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and Washington warned us about. Government has become predominant in American society not through the expressed wishes of the many, but through manipulation by the few.

It is time to challenge the Administration’s actions on Constitutional grounds. Let them defend their actions according to the standards set for doing so by the law of the land. Not to do so is simply to allow our Constitution, as Jefferson said, to become “a blank piece of paper” upon which anything can be written.

Harry Reid’s Newspeak

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Newspeak was the language of Big Brother. Black was white, good was evil, and lies were the Truth. Apparently, Mr. Reid never read the book.

Today, he compared opponents of his Health Care monstrosity to the opponents of Emancipation during the Civil War and to the opponents of women’s voting rights in 1920 and the opponents of civil rights legislation during the 1960′s. Unfortunately, his analogy doesn’t quite work.

You see, in his effort to smear the Republicans, what he didn’t realize was that it was a Republican who freed the slaves and Republicans who fought for that freedom. It was mainly Republicans who fought for the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote, and it was the Republicans who joined with Lyndon Johnson in defiance of his own party to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Three for three Harry.

You see, in the world of today’s Democratic Party, the truth doesn’t really matter . Whether it is President Obama promising transparency or Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi redefining the truth, it’s all BS.

National Geographic – Sun Oddly Quiet – Hints at next Little Ice Age?

Sun Oddly Quiet — Hints at Next “Little Ice Age”?

Anne Minard
for National Geographic News

May 4, 2009

A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth’s climate might respond.

The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.

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The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum.

During that time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid. Glaciers in the Alps engulfed whole villages, and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695.

But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.

“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,” said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. (Get the facts about global warming.)

He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.

Even if the current solar lull is the beginning of a prolonged quiet, the scientists say, the star’s effects on climate will pale in contrast with the influence of human-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).

“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.”

Even so, Lockwood added, small variations in the sun’s brightness are more powerful than changes in greenhouse gas contributions. For example, a 50 percent variation in solar brightness would mean the end of life on Earth.

China 1839 and Afghanistan 2009 – Destabilization through narcoterrorism

In the 1700′s Great Britain was faced with a problem. Tea had become the national drink, and the only source at the time was China. The Chinese government, who controlled all external trade, would only accept silver in payment. England did not have many silver mines in their Empire  and thus ran a huge trade deficit that threatened their economy in very short order.

Starting in the 1750′s the British began exploring the export of opium to China as one option to balance trade. This was a commodity in high demand in China, but was also prohibited under penalty of death. The rewards far outweighed the risks, however, and the trade began to grow rapidly. The British East India Company, a quasi governmental agency, monopolized the production of opium, while the United States smuggled Turkish opium in the 1820′s in much smaller volumes. Opium became the most profitable business in the world.

In 1838, the Chinese government destroyed 20,000 chests (1,300 tons) of British opium that had been seized in Guangdong, which began the First Opium War, which the British won in 1840. This led to the cession of Hong Kong and the mad grab for huge swathes of China by other Western Powers. The Chinese were forced to legalize opium after the Second Opium War in 1858. Consumption grew to 6,500 tons of imported and 35,000 tons of domestic opium per year in the 1880′s. 27% of the adult male population of the country  became addicted. The effects of opium on the country were devastating and led to the Revolution in 1910.  Millions upon millions died over those years because of destabilization. Only after 1949 with the Communist victory was the opium trade eradicated.

So what does this have to do with Afghanistan? In 2007, Helmand Province alone produced more than $525 Million in heroin according to UN numbers. The DEA estimates the Taliban earn 70% of their income from the heroin trade. Opium income throughout the country in 2003 was estimated to be $4.8 Billion, and total production throughout the country was estimated at 8,200 tons of opium in 2007.The trend is accelerating.

Do the math. The Taliban pay their average soldier $300/month. Ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer and the most popular explosive, is cheap. AK-47′s and RPG’s are inexpensive as well. You get the idea. Add to this funding and more sophisticated weaponry like machine guns, recoilless rifles, and explosives coming from outside sources and you can see.  It is Discount Jihad, sapping the West of both its men and its treasure.

More to the point, almost all of the heroin is smuggled by good Muslims in Pakistan and the Gulf to the West, where it corrupts our culture. War by other means.

Warfare today is asymmetrical. The alliance of Iran, Venezuela, FARC, Bolivia, and Cuba is exporting billions of dollars of heroin and cocaine and marijuana into North America and Europe, while on the other side of the world the same is happening in Afghanistan. I don’t think it is a coincidence. The confluence of narcotics and radicalism has been proven time again in recent years.

The Muslim radicals say that the West is the Great Satan and is utterly corrupt. They are only helping us along in our collapse. And “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a very old proverb in that part of the world. And according to their version of Islam, narcotics trafficking is Halal, or permitted.

As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. It seems someone has been studying their history.

Commercial Real Estate & ARM’s – the Other Shoe is Dropping

I was in Asia this week, where opinion is turning against Obama. In China, there seems to be bafflement at his fiscal policies and the wastefulness of the American people. It is a strange sight to be driving in Beijing or Hangzhou or Qinhuangdao and see columns of massive office buildings where only a few lights are on in the evening, or to be holding a meeting in a conference room of a major corporation where everyone is wearing heavy jackets when the weather outside is barely above freezing. The Chinese are nothing if not frugal, and they turn the heat down or the lights out to save every RMB they can. We used to be that way in this country. Waste not, want not was our byword.

Later in the week I read online that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, when asked in Time magazine about his personal finances, noted that he had only recently refinanced his Adjustable Rate Mortgage to a 5% 30 year fixed mortgage. He said “we had an adjustable rate mortgage and it exploded”. Well, in 2010 and 2011, ARM resets are going to hit the fan again and could force millions more homeowners into short sales and foreclosures. This isn’t my opinion, it is in the numbers for anyone who cares to look.

In addition, the effects of the popping of the commercial real estate bubble will begin to be felt strongly in 2010 as owners who bought at the peak of the market are faced with historically low occupancy rates.   Cruise the business parks and you will see hundreds of “Available” signs.  Go to the mall and it is self-evident. At the high end, developers and REIT’s are simply walking away from their investments in overpriced investments because it is cheaper to do so. This has already begun with Donald Trump and Dubai World’s $60 Billion default. Morgan Stanley just walked away from 5 buildings they bought in San Francisco for approximately$1.25 Billion that have lost 50% of their value since. We have become a nation ready to simply walk away from our responsibilities. “Strategic Default” is now a part of the Wall Street lexicon, and the Wall Street Journal is worried that the average American family will follow suit.

And why not? It has been encouraged by our government. GM, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, CITI, and so many others have. Why not the rest of us? The printing presses are burning out the bearings they’re running so fast. The streets of Las Vegas and Riverside and Palm Beach County are strewn with “For Sale” in front of homes that the owners were clearly unable to pay for in the long term, and our government continues to foster irresponsible fiscal conduct.

Unfortunately, it’s a game of musical chairs, and it is exactly those who pay their bills on time and pay a little extra to get the balance down who are financing this profligacy  in Washington, on Wall Street, and down any street in the suburbs these days. It has become an economy and a government of cronies and insiders and welshers. I have every sympathy for those who have worked hard and lost their jobs and find themselves against the wall. I have none for the scammers big and small. And until we effect a sea change in our economic habits, our economy will be at the greatest risk in its history.

Of course, under the current administration we have bread and circuses, so I don’t expect much until people begin to wake up and speak out. Buying off the rubes has a long and unsavory history, and those countries that do so inevitably fail. We are in a clear and present danger of blowing the great American experiment in democracy. It is time for more people to wake up and smell the coffee.

Defacement – Etymology thereof- Bamiyan and Islam

I have been doing some research lately on the Greco-Roman Buddhist culture of Gandhara, an ancient culture that arose 2300 years ago shortly after the conquest of Afghanistan and Pakistan by Alexander the Great, and the full measure of the word “defacement” hit me square between the eyes.

You see, in reading the historical literature and viewing the artworks, Bamiyan was one of the apogees of human artistic expression and religious ecstasy. The carved 150′  statues of the Buddha there date back at least 1,700 years and are masterworks, and the cliffs are peppered with hermitages and monasteries that lasted for centuries in the Buddhist faith. The walls were covered with religious sculpture and paintings that are yet being discovered. In the Gandharan Empire, one sees a unique melding of East and West with the most some of the most beautiful and expressive artwork in history. Oh that a written record survived.

With the advent of Islam in the 12th-14th Centuries, everything changed. In Afghanistan and Peshawar, there was no Islamic flourishing. Instead, there began the culture of defacement. Illiterate mullahs enforced the literal meaning of the Koran, and used hammer and chisel to remove the blasphemous images from living stone. Now we have no record of the meaning and context of a little known civilization that existed at the nexus of East and West.

So when you come upon the term, remember the context.

The Grifters – Our Senate at work.

“Grifter – A person who swindles by means of deception or fraud”

Pork barrel politics has a long and mixed history. Fighting for Federal dollars has long been a part of the process. But lately, it’s gotten completely out of hand. Senator Ben Nelson’s (D- Neb) decision to support one of the most flawed bills in our history in exchange for hundreds of millions in Medicaid support exclusively for the citizens of Nebraska, along with Senator Dodd’s $100 Million grift and Senator Mary Landrieu’s $100 Million price tag will in the end foist trillions of dollars in debt on every taxpayer in the country.  These have to be the most expensive votes in the history of graft. Then there is $300 Million for California Medicaid payments, $10 Billion for the Unions in a reinsurance program, Vermont & Massachusetts’ payoffs for their underfunded state programs that haven’t worked out very well; a $7 Billion tax payoff for Blue Cross/Blue Shield and other “nonprofit” health insurers, the Big Pharma payoff, Bernie Sander’s (Socialist – VT) $10 Billion free clinic fund, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as Yul Brynner said in The King and I.

Nelson sold his lifelong anti-abortion stance down the river, while Dodd makes no bones about a simple grab because the grabbing was good. He would have voted for the bill regardless. Landrieu simply exhibited pure hypocrisy after posturing for months about the cost of the bill.

The latest version of the bill was released only 3 days ago and is 2,000 pages. The Congressional Budget Office graded it as revenue neutral, and yet there are so many gimmicks and gimcrackeries no one knows the real cost. How can the CBO have fully analyzed the bill in 3 days? As their previous scores were, even with the accounting tricks, clear about the hit on the federal budget, it seems now someone has told them to toe the party line.

None of the common sense cost solutions are in this bill. No limits on outrageous malpractice awards. No increased competitiveness. No efficiencies of scale or service. On the one hand it’s a money grab, and on the other it’s a power grab. Plain and simple.

By sleight of hand and in the middle of the night we are losing even more of our freedom and government will expand even further. And we will have unprincipled grifters like Nelson, Landrieu, and the rest to thank for it.

White House Gate Crasher Story Refuses to Die

The Washington Post had an extensive, 5 page article link today of the infamous  White House gate crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahis  dinner date with the Obamas and Indian PM Singh on November 24. Some interesting new facts have come out.

. White House Social Secretary Desiree’ Rogers is still more inaccessible than Osama Bin Laden

. The White considers the case closed while the House Committee investigating the security breach does not.

. There is an extensive and revealing trail of telephone conversations between Michelle S. Jones, the DoD connection, The Sahalis, and their lawyer on the day of the dinner regarding a possible forthcoming invitation, including the provision of their Social Security and Passport numbers for ID at the White House gate.

. The first uniformed Secret Service officer, at the first White House checkpoint with the checklist apparently made a check mark on that list after the presentation of their passports and let them pass.

. 50 yards further, on the White House steps, another team of uniformed Secret Service officers had another checklist, and again the Salehis presented their passports and were allowed to pass after an apparent checkmark the list.

After this, they passed through the metal detector and were through security and on their way to the Bigtime.

The Post article makes it seem as if there was a lapse by the uniformed Secret Service officers and yet these are highly trained police officers whose sole job is the protection of the President, his family, and the White House. Just like Secret Service agents, they are there to guard the president with their lives.

Where the trail seems to get murky is not with the officers, who may well have been doing their jobs, but with the coverup by the White House. Those check lists do not seem to have been produced. In addition, the White House photographer who took the official photos of the Salehis with the President and others usually works from a check list himself so he can keep track and send them out afterwards.

The Salehis and their lawyer still insist they have done nothing wrong. As Washington socialites they seem par for the course. Maureen Dowd said of the brouhaha “even the outrage over these fakers is fake.”…   “yet Washington has always been a town of poseurs,arrivistes, fame seekers, and camera hogs”. And if anyone knows this, Dowd does.

Coupled with Walpin-gate, the Air Force One flyby stonewalling, the President’s Potemkin village of “czars”, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy around the president’s personal history, there is an incredible lack of transparency in a White House that promised candor and openness.

A Lack of Gravitas

This morning, the President of the United States prank called the radio show of Democratic Party Chairman Tim Kaine, identifying himself as “Barry from D.C.”. This is only the latest in an ever lengthening list of gaffes and miscues by Mr. Obama. Unfortunately, there is now a strong case to be made for a complete lack of gravitas, and rather ineptness, in our president.

Consider his tone-deaf Nobel speech, where he rather than discussing peace, discussed war. His snubbing of the Norwegian king and people also raised hackles.  Or his hectoring of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in Copenhagen last week, where he forced his way into a private meeting.  Or his personal snubbing of allies such as Gordon Brown during the Prime Minister’s visit early in the administration. On a separate occasion, he sent a strong message to the British people with his return of the Churchill bust that had resided in the White House for many years. The president also chose not to attend the ceremony in November commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, but did make the time to fly to Copenhagen for Chicago’s Olympic bid. His comments on the Gates case in Cambridge set off a firestorm of protest and set back race relations.

We are seeing a pattern of conduct that has become disturbing. We have a record dating to the beginning of the administration of immaturity and a lack of gravitas. As America faces its most difficult times, we have a president who acts closer to a college sophomore that the most powerful man in the world. He is out of synch with his electorate and has become increasingly unpopular for both his policies and his personal actions. The currently fashionable phrase is “inappropriate behavior”.

We expect our presidents to be, well, presidential. We have seen more of Mr. Obama in his first year in press conferences, photo ops, speeches, and other events than any of his predecessors. Unfortunately, I don’t believe this overexposure has helped him or the American people. The constant use of the first person and condemnation of his predecessor is unseemly. It is as if he lives in an echo chamber with no one there to counsel restraint.

As we head into 2010, which promises to offer even greater challenges in war, in our economy, and in our political culture, perhaps Mr. Obama might want to tone it down and start acting a bit more like a real leader.

How is the Auto bailout working out?

Fiat announced today that they will be investing $11 Billion to capitalize on its “investment” in Chrysler…..by boosting production in Italy. Chrysler figures into the plan by introducing 5 new models in 2011, one for Fiat and for Lancia, yup Lancia, who used to be known for idiosyncratic sports cars. Perhaps they’ll revive the Lancia Stratos rally car with the Dodge Stratus body. Hey, it’s Italy and you never know what they might come up with.

In the meantime, Chrysler, the other parts of which are owned by the UAW (67%)  and the government (9.85%), and the government of Canada (2.4%). In other words, the shareholders and bondholders got bupkis in a government engineered takeover of incredibly mismanaged proportions. The law was trampled in the process.

So how is it working out in this country?

2007 unit sales                                                                   2,076,650 vehicles

2008 unit sales                                                                    1,453,122 vehicles

2009 unit sales (through November)                            844,879 vehicles

So 30+% drops for the past 2 years. The dealer networks are a mess, and there simply is no confidence in the company any more. Of course, Chrysler has spent a fortune on hybrid and electric vehicle technology, all of which Fiat has access to, but so far these technologies have been a money pit. 2010 will be the make or break year one way or the other.

Over at GM, management is in turmoil. The company is owned by the U.S. government, who invested $57.6 Billion of TARP money with a small equity interest by the Canadian government. The CEO and CFO have abruptly left the company. Saturn, hailed as a newer and better car company, shipped their last car in October. Plymouth is gone. Opel/Vauxhall is a mess after management seesawed on selling the operation. Saab is going. GM is a soap opera, not a car company right now.

2007 sales                                                                                3,866,620 vehicles

2008 sales                                                                                2,980,688 vehicles

2009 sales (through November)                                    1,875,981 vehicles

It’s not looking very good over at GM either, I’m afraid.

The automotive sector is the last major core of commercial manufacturing in America. It dwarfs most everything else and is the heart of our industrial economy. Now it is being run by Ron Bloom, whose resume includes both investment banking and a long stint with the UAW, one of the root causes of the problem in the first place. The working members of the UAW, remember, bragged that they gave almost nothing back, while their own retirees and white-collar retirees took it on the chin and lost most of the benefits they had. Another insider job.

The car business is a funny one. Chrysler invented the minivan in the early 80′s and it saved the company. Iacocca introduced the Mustang in 1964 and it became the icon of Detroit. Today, low-cost me too products like Kia and Hyundai are making inroads while at the high-end BMW, Mercedes and Audi dominate. Somewhere in the mess in the middle Chrysler, Ford, GM, and even Toyota are all taking a massive hit. While they tout electric and hybrid products, this will not excite the American public. We are a nation in love with chrome and horsepower and luxury and speed.

2010 is going to be another tough year for the auto industry, and through the pull through effect, the economy. I don’t feel very comfortable with the job that has been done so far by our government controlled automotive sector.

Tiny Tim’s crutches in the corner – A political/moral analogy

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is the epitome of Victorian evil.  His selfishness, greed and lack of charity lead to a loss of soul. Marley’s Ghost appears to him to warn him of the consequences of his actions on Christmas Eve, and he is then visited by the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

We are again being visited by Marley’s Ghost in Washington and on Wall Street. In the Senate, leadership is working behind closed doors again and wants to vote on what just about everyone in the country agrees is an abomination of a Health Care bill. Whether it’s Danny Glover or Howard Dean or the doctors or the insurance companies, it doesn’t seem to matter. They all agree it’s terrible and will do little to nothing to improve health care in America. The impetus is purely political and is to get the bill through at all costs and damn the consequences.

On Wall Street it is simply business as usual as we get fleeced one way or the other. Our economy is still a shambles, and there are more storm clouds in the form of the commercial real estate mess, impending government defaults at home and abroad, and mortgage resets. More people are out of work today than at any time since the Great Depression and the government’s solutions are not working out very well.

We are also at war in a place where the outcome is in doubt. Our troops are strong, but it may be our will to win that is not. As many of them sit cold and in danger and far from loved ones, we as a nation dither.

Doubt is our watchword.  Of our politicians. Of our leaders. Of our institutions. Faith has been broken and “faith” is under assault.

The ghost of Christmas past has already visited us. We know what we have lost. The Ghost of Christmas Present is upon us. More of us see the future is much dimmer than the past than the other way around. We see Tiny Tim’s crutches in the corner, but no Tiny Tim.

At last in Dickens’ book, in the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Future, Scrooge sees his own grave overgrown with weeds and untended, with the implications to his immortal soul clearly spelled out before him. This prompts him to see the error of his ways and become a new man.

We have a choice now. We have seen the errors of our ways and the trend is spiraling downwards. We have seen more corporate misconduct than ever before. We have seen more personal irresponsibility than ever before. So do we avert our eyes as we lose not just our souls but our futures, or do we repent and change our ways? Do we build a better future or fatalistically accept our fates? Dickens gave his character a choice. We have that choice as well.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim’s crutches are still standing in the corner, but Tiny Tim has been healed. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or presents a stark contrast. The hedonistic, self involved life or one of ethical duty and responsibility. Both books were, oddly, published in 1843. Both books had the same message. One path or the other, with our collective future at state. Which do we choose? The old Scrooge or the new?

As Tiny Tim said, “God bless us one and all”.

Merry Christmas.

Our dangerously disingenuous President

A terrorist tried to blow up a plane yesterday, and the day before, “Yemeni” forces stuck a high level Al Quaeda meeting being held at the hideout of Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s spiritual mentor, Anwar Al-Awlaki and killed 30 terrorist leaders. But we no longer have a War on Terror. It’s funny, because Terror sure seems to have a war on us. Our president is either oblivious or has his own agenda.

The president’s dithering for three months on the plan forward in Afghanistan surely has not helped, nor has his unsuccessful policy of engaging the Pakistani government in its own self preservation. Over there, they are making war on one set of Taliban while granting sanctuary to the Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura and Afghani narcoterrorists such as Haqqani and Hekmatyr. The Pakistani combination of denial, delusion and paranoia is truly disturbing, but seems par for the course in extremist Islam. Our enemies see this disarray and take heart in it.

Some of that same denial and delusion is now being exhibited by our own government. There is no more War on Terror but rather a campaign against common sense and the American people. All the while, the president has spent more time on the golf course than at church, if you haven’t noticed, both of which are trumped by his time in front of the teleprompter either outright campaigning or in turn lecturing us.

His staff is fundamentally reshaping our democracy with government power grabs at the EPA, on health care and in corporate America with ever growing dissent from a broad swathe of the governed, and he chooses to ignore these disagreements on matters of principle while becoming ever more petulant. His tin ear is amazing. Even Richard Daley, the ultimate machine Democrat has warned him of his veer leftwards. He is being seen more and more as an American Evo Morales, destroying our checks and balances in his quest for more power.

The other noticeable trend is his lack of fingerprints on the evidence. His is the single most closed administration in the past 50 years, and we see only the end product. Whether on Capitol Hill or at the White House or the various agencies, almost everything is done behind closed doors and the results presented as a fait accompli.

As we go into 2010, the president’s poll numbers are tanking worse than any of his predecessors, which is hard to believe after George Bush.  A bunch of left-wing radicals are doing their best to reshape our democracy.  What we now know  is that every day we are losing our freedoms and rights and our opportunities to excel. We are losing what it is to be American.

Homeland Security?

We missed a terrible Christmas tragedy by the skin of our teeth the other day. Only the actions of a single Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa, saved the passengers and crew from annihilation. For this he should get a medal and all expense paid trip around the USA.

The TSA, the FBI, the coordinated anti-terror cadres of the airlines and overseas security services failed utterly in identifying and detecting the bomber. The bomber’s conduct was, in fact, a textbook case of the terrorist profile. Flying into Schipol Airport from a 3rd World country with a heavily propagandized Muslim population, Nigeria. Accompanied by  a stranger who looked strange; buying his ticket with cash, and then having visa problems at the counter which were only resolved with the intervention of a supervisor and the mysterious stranger. At the least he should have been taken aside and frisked. Instead he was allowed to board.

The Department of Homeland Security jumped into action by enacting the following measures to assault the dignity of grandmothers, veterans, people with metal plates in their bodies and the general public:

. No more than one bag on board

. increased frisking

. No standing, bathroom breaks, opening overhead compartments or blanket usage in the last hour of all flights

. no more in flight locators on the personal display at each seat.

Janet Napolitano had the gall to state on three network interview shows this morning that nothing was amiss and the system worked as planned. Either she is delusional or a liar. The horse is so far out of the barn on this one it’s in the next county.

The system broke down, Ms. Napolitano. Your multi-billion dollar politically correct  farce was shown for the sham that it is. The TSA is inefficient and mainly good for relieving innocent civilians of their water bottles, cigarette lighters, and pocket knives rather than finding and preventing terrorists from carrying out their plans. It is an embarrassment to law enforcement.

Eric Holder also garners his share of blame, for it is he who has been dismantling the joint agency projects and committees that shared information across jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies. This was one of the central recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, and these structures are now being torn apart.

Once again, it is about image and power, not law enforcement. It’s about hundreds of thousands of new Federal employees and control of that budget with lip service to catching the bad guys. Public safety has given way to CIA investigations, sham trials, PR and just plain BS.

The new Bin Laden?

On November 5, Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire upon and assassinated 13 American soldiers on base at Ft. Hood, TX while wounding another 30. On December 25, the underpants bomber attempted to detonate a device that would have blown a large hole in the fuselage of Northwest Flight 253 from Schipol, The Netherlands. Both of these terrorists had been in contact with imam Anwar Al -Awlaki, an American born self-declared member of Al Quaeda who has now threatened our country with many more similar bombing attempts.

Al-Awlaki has been under surveillance by the FBI since the 1990′s and was an imam at two of the three mosques in this country (Falls Church, VA and San Diego) where the 9/11 bombers worshiped before their genocides. He was  noted specifically as the  spiritual adviser to 2 of the 9/11 bombers at the time and has been suspected of direct knowledge beforehand. This would make him an accessory to and prosecutable for those murders.  He is also noted for targeting young U.S. and U.K. based Muslims with his radical preaching and outreach programs. He is Al Quaeda’s recruiter #1.

In his early days in San Diego, he was not only arrested for soliciting prostitutes, but also for his involvement pre 9/11 in the Charitable Society for Social Welfare, who funneled their proceeds to Hamas and Al Quaeda among others. Members of the anti – terrorist task force in San Diego were outraged when arrest warrants issued for him in 2002 were canceled based upon on a presumed lack of evidence.

Al-Awlaki skipped out of the US in 2002 and was banned from entry in to the UK in 2006 because of his inflammatory sermons.  He was imprisoned for a 18 months in 2006/2007 by the Yemeni government for his Al Quaeda links, but was released in because he had supposedly recanted his allegiance. He has been linked to terrorist attacks within Yemen since.  Al Quaeda has been aggressively targeting any government official suspected of cooperating with or aiding the West.

Al-Awlaki’s father is an adviser to the president of Yemen and professor at Sanaa University, and he mas many friends and sympathetic family members in country.

On December 24, Yemeni forces with American and Saudi “assistance” attacked an Al-Awlaki family owned compound in Yemen’s Shabwa back country, where an Al Quaeda meeting was taking place and killed over 30 terrorists. Shabwa and Mareb provinces, 600Km from Sanaa, are the nexus of Al Quaeda in Yemen. There are believed to be up to 1,200 militants from Yemen and Saudi Arabia now in Yemen along with training camps for “foreign fighters” as well. It is said that Anwar Al-Awlaki and the high ranking members escaped the attack just beforehand. Tipped off, perhaps?

The back country of Yemen is some of the harshest terrain on Earth. From the 1950′s to 1960′s, the British Army fought an ultimately unsuccessful war against guerrillas in South Yemen and Aden. North Yemen, bordering Saudi Arabia, is more backward than Afghanistan. Both before and after unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 there have been close associations both officially and privately by  members of  government with radical rebel movements in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Somalia.

Yemen is one of the most conservative and radical of Islamic states. Thus, Anwar Al-Awlaki is uniquely situated to take advantage of family, government, and extremist connections, and has from all of the evidence been able to do so successfully. With the U.S. government’s recent focus on Yemen, it seems they are now waking up to the danger.

The Al Quaeda camps in Yemen involve all of those elements that defined the organization in Afghanistan before the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban. Training camps, foreign fighters, suicide bombing instruction, finance, and  a government that either passively or actively, depending on the individuals involved, protects them.

Al- Awlaki is at the heart of this. He made his bones not once, but in three major terrorist attacks; 9/11, The Ft. Hood massacre, and now, the Christmas bombing. He is a hero to terrorists ranging from the Ft. Dix plotters to the 7/7/2005  London suicide bombers, who killed 56 and injured over 700. His bona fides as the most dangerous terrorist in the world have become ever more clear.

For the time being he can also be much more effective than Bin Laden as he has much more room to operate. He has now sworn revenge upon his enemies and shown his true Al Quaeda colors.  There are rumors of up to 25 British and American born suicide bombing trainees in his camps.

Our government made the mistake of not treating Bin Laden as the monster he was in the 1990′s. Will we make the same mistake again with an even more dangerous opponent? Perhaps the raid got Al-Awlaki, but the reports are that we didn’t. He has to be at the top of our list.

The Democrats Alice in Wonderland War on Terror

On Sunday, it was Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano declaring “the system worked” on national television. The national gorge rose at that one, and Obama was forced into making a strong statement that the system failed.

Today, the Democratic Congressional Committee is spouting that “Obama is more aggressive than Bush was against Al Quaeda”.  We are experiencing  Orwell’s worst nightmare of Big Brother and Newspeak.

Consider the following:

. one of the first actions by the Obama Administration was to redefine the War on Terror as “Contingency Operations”.

. Attorney General Holder’s dismantling of the combined antiterrorist intelligence function and lack of support for the Patriot Act which allows same.

. Attorney General Holder’s decision to reopen a closed investigation into the CIA’s waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the primary 9/11 plotter.

. The planned relocation of known terrorists from an ultra high security prison at Guantanamo, where they have the option of escaping into the ocean or minefields, to the middle of  Illinois.

. The plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan under civil rules versus trial for war crimes under a military tribunal at Guantanamo.

. The 90 day dither of our country’s policies in Afghanistan.

. The refusal to define the Ft. Hood massacre as a terrorist act.

. The complete breakdown of the security system that allowed the 12/25 bomber onto the plane.

. The refusal to define imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, who has figured in 9/11, the 7/7/05 London bombings, the Ft. Hood massacre, the Ft. Dix conspiracy, and the Christmas underpants bombing as public enemy #1.

This is not a shift in policy to make our system more just and lawful. It is a willful and wrong agenda that intentionally weakens our country and our allies.

Semantics, propaganda, and politics have replaced reality and common sense under this administration, especially when it comes to national defense. The truth is being rejiggered before our very eyes as the Administration and its supporters bend it like a pretzel. Defense was once common ground in this country. Both Democrats and Republicans could agree on threats and responses. Today we have lost this entirely as we see the Administration blame its predecessors over and over and over again after one inept move after the other in the most crass and venal manner possible.

The problem is, you see, that people’s lives have been directly affected. Malik Hasan Nidal was recognized as a religious zealot and nut case long before he murdered 13 fellow soldiers, but orders were orders and no one spoke out about their suspicions. To do so would have cost careers. Al Quaeda saw an opening with the new administration and a lack of gravitas, and has acted accordingly. The Taliban can smell victory and have stepped up their war on us. Their narcotics flood Europe and fund their empire on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistani border.

And our government, on the other hand, has decided to not just hide its head in the sand, but willfully and knowingly redefine our terms of existence under their new world order; downwards towards lower standards, using false assumptions and ignoring the facts at hand. They agree with the Bush Administrations policies on control and secrecy where convenient while labeling veterans, housewives, and protesters as potential terrorists. The TSA has done little to protect us, but it surely does intimidate us. Homeland Security can mean a lot of things, and there is an antidemocratic, nanny state strain within the left wing of the Democratic Party that should worry us.

We know full well what we have on our hands now. The question is whether they are simply incompetent or willfully dragging us towards destruction.

G 5 Liberals

Back in the 1960′s a strange new species called the “limousine liberal” emerged from the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the far reaches of Beverly Hills and San Francisco. These creatures were from the upper strata of American society; the heirs to fortunes, a few self-made tycoons, actors, musicians, writers, etc who sympathized with  Marxist ideology and the the student radicals trying to create a new society.

Thus you had the heirs to the great industrial dynasties such as Rockefellers, Mellons, Gettys and Pews mingling at cocktail parties with communist revolutionaries, Black Panthers, and anarchists, writing huge checks and pledging solidarity with the masses trudging the sidewalks 30 floors below their 5th Avenue or Central Park West  living rooms. Tom Wolfe about it  in “Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers”. In their guilt and lack of introspection, they would not only support those who would destroy them, but would do so enthusiastically.

Today, the children of these same strange creatures, along with the nouveau riche and the crony capitalists have graduated from the limousine to the Grumman G 5 private jet. At $45 – 70 Million, depending on how they are is equipped, these planes offer the ultimate in privacy and comfort and ability to avoid the hoi polloi. The ramps at Copenhagen were jammed with G – 3′s and 4′s and 5′s, and a few private 737′s and 767′s. A lot of those same planes are now in Palm Beach or Hawaii escaping from it all. They will then migrate to Davos at the end of January for the World Economic Forum, where the occupants will gather socialize and discuss Important Topics and ski and condemn the great unwashed who just don’t understand.

Bruce Springsteen has a G V (the proper terminology), or maybe it’s just a G IV. Al Gore uses them all the time. Ban Ki Moon has regular access, as does Nancy Pelosi (the military C-37 version she demanded). You see, in this way, they never have to come into contact with the real, the immediate. They pass through private terminals with little or no screening and compliant Customs and Immigration agents removed from the tribulations of the rest of us. It is easy to become disengaged.

Springsteen and Sting and Bono all have their causes and their manufactured street cred. Al Gore tells us the sky is falling and cashes in for millions if not billions. The Pews and the Gettys and the Gates’s and the Buffets with all of their show of concern lived removed, sterile lives behind gates and walls. They read the same liberal newspapers and magazines and have an amazing homogeneity of opinion right out of the pages of the New York Times or Newsweek or Vanity Fair. The reality is that there is a thin veneer of pseudoculture and pseudointellectualism. The hypocrisy is thus even more stunning.

Their espousal of liberal causes is akin to the medieval purchase of indulgences. Somehow it relieves many of them of the requirement to think. Many have assistants who do that for them. These individuals are thus well thought of by other members of the tribe and are then free to continue on their flight paths to the next summit or film festival or shopping mecca.

A blog I read regularly called “Just One Minute” linked to another called “Instapundit” who in turn linked to an article in “Wired” magazine this morning on how the brain handles cognitive dissonance. One of the central precepts of the article was that people want affirmation, not information. I would disagree and also expand on the discussion. While this does apply within the tribe, it is compounded in modern times by the ascension of the Id.

The old rules and proprieties no longer apply, especially to the elite. Sartre posited the aesthetic in his existential writings; that living the “good” life was enough in a world without gods. His influence on postwar philosophy and society cannot be underestimated. But even there, many of his followers only took away a small part of the message. Following Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”. which fought the existential battle between hedonism and ethical duty and responsibility, Sartre offered what seemed to the shallow elite an alternative lite after two world wars, Darwin, and a loss of faith in institutions.

The response was the growth of secular religion of ecology or technology; saving the world in its various forms, and the messianic preaching thereof. In a culture of manufactured celebrity, it is no wonder that these G 5 liberals have an influence well beyond their abilities. Money doesn’t make one smart, nor does fame make one an expert. We live in the age of educated idiots and the most sophisticated media manipulation tools in history. We are becoming Orwell’s nightmare.

Conscience cannot be assuaged by false confessions nor the soul healed by following false prophets. In the age of the ephemeral, the G 5 Liberals in the end only espouse self-indulgence and self-pity.

The propaganda machine at work- Napolitano’s apologists

This morning it was Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and the editorial page of the Washington Post defending Janet Napolitano and Obama’s approach to the War on Terror (oops..contingency operations). The other day it was David Broder’s suck up piece on Napolitano in the Post. We are now seeing the Journo-List in full flower. The talking points have been disseminated from a corner office at the White House and the liberal propaganda machine has jumped into action.

Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune attacks Dick Cheney for his outspoken criticism of the president on matters relating to intelligence and security. Andrew Sullivan once again attacks Cheney in the Daily Dish.  The Democratic Congressional Committee has spouted that Obama is much tougher on terrorists than Bush ever was. It is so obvious it’s pitiful.

And all the while the facts are at odds with the narrative. The president himself condemned the systemic breakdown and yet now the propagandists are trying to re-write history. This is most troubling as it is part and parcel of a pattern of deceit that stretches back before the election.

We can expect to see more of this drivel, but it seems the American public is wising up. With newspaper circulation diving faster than a Hellfire missile on a fleeing Taliban and the President’s approval ratings at historic lows, people are no longer buying the slant. As the president talks a moderate game and has swung left, and the fig leaves have fallen away to expose the hacks for what they are, the statist, controlling mentalities of the left have come into sharp definition and the rest of us are resisting. Mistrust of government is at an all time high.

So perhaps there’s hope in an Army of Davids, as Glenn Reynolds terms it, to both expose the lies and hypocrisy and effect real, positive change. One can hope.

More Security Failures

The Times of London reports that the six Yemeni enemy combatants released on last month to Yemeni custody have, as expected by many, returned immediately to the Al Quaeda fold. They have joined another half-dozen Guantanamo graduates who were already there. The recidivism rate among these terrorists is approaching 75%. Some have been identified as suicide bombers in Iraq; others as high level Al Quaeda planners.And our government still plans to close Guantanamo.The links from point A to point B to point C are clear and yet there is a childish wilfulness at the top.

MI 5 warned us about the underpants bomber a year ago. His father was interviewed by the CIA 6 months ago. He paid cash for his ticket to Detroit and had no luggage. No alarms were raised. Instead, we will endure even more indignities as we travel while the bureaucrats devise new tortures for the global traveler.

Major General Michael Flynn, the head of our military intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan, today called the collective U.S. intelligence effort “clueless”, “disengaged”, and “out of touch” on basic issues of infrastructure, social organization, political economy, and other key aspects of the issues affecting our Afghan efforts.

With the murder of 8 CIA agents by a Jordanian double agent run by Al Quaeda, apparently, we have seriously underestimated our enemies. There seems to have been no counterintelligence function operational that would have warned us of this highly suspect potential threat.

Narcotics provide 80% of both the Taliban’s and Al Quaeda’s funding. The poppy fields in many cases are right under our noses, and there is no coordinated effort to cut off the supply of 80% of the world’s heroin from fields patrolled daily by American and Allied forces. This is how screwed up we are.

The litany seems to get worse every day, and every day we lose more people and more materiel in a cause in which we are our own worst enemies. The incompetence is simply stunning. When will it end?

“The System Worked” – Episode 2 – The right to keep and bear honey.

The Bakersfield airport was closed today by a bomb scare caused by a TSA manned baggage scanner identifying two Gatorade bottles filled with honey as first, TNT and then upon a second scan, as acetone peroxide, a completely different class of explosive. When they opened the containers, the TSA operators apparently fell ill.

Francisco Ramirez, a gardener from Milwaukee visiting family in the Central Valley and owner of the now contraband honey, was cooperating fully with the police and Federal investigation. Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood was quoted as saying “why in this day and age would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles? That in itself is an alarm.”. Youngblood then went on to say “The system worked the way it was supposed to”. Well, perhaps Mr. Ramirez should have used Ball jars instead. Maybe then the obviously mistaken baggage scanner would not have identified the material as something other than what it was.

Does anyone else find it odd that the county sheriff is laying blame on the passenger and their obviously homemade food product and not on the equipment and process of identification? They obviously got it wrong. How would they have reacted to an aged Gouda or a really pungent Limburger? Or strangely shaped or smelling sausages? Or any of the 100 other oddball things people bring home ? “Call Security! He’s got Grandma’s Preserves in his luggage!”. While the department of Agriculture does protect us from illegally imported Italian sausages, within this country we still have the right to keep and bear honey.

For the record, honey is a combination of glucose, fructose, enzymes, minerals, vitamins and amino acids, along with some water content. TNT (Trinitrotoluene) is toluene, a benzene based solvent nitrated with nitric and sulfuric acids. Acetone peroxide is derived from hydrogen peroxide reacted with acetone, another solvent with a significantly different chemical composition. You get the idea. Either the settings were off or a trace material in the honey set the alarms off. My bet is on the former. From that point the system overreacted completely. One of these days, someone is going to get hurt because of this.

The reality is that the system once again did not work as it should have. In an age of hypersensitivity, there was a flaw in the process. But as bureaucracies do, the first reaction was to place blame elsewhere.

Britain’s Met Office Director Fried by BBC Reporter

Watch now !

A utterly scathing interview of the director of the UK Met Office (Weather Service), who happens to be at the center of the Climategate scandal. The sheer bloodymindedness is astounding, while the interviewer, in his Scottish way, rips into their record in predicting short, medium and long term trends.

Al Gore remains silent. The Grumman G-5 celebujets that were in Copenhagen are now prepping for the Davos Economic Forum, another gathering of windbags while the Northern Hemisphere suffers under some of the coldest weather in 50 years. The irony is truly ironic, as the Hollywood crowd might say.

The Most Transparent and Open Administration Ever

and yes, that is a teleprompter.

White House Fingerpointing – Chapter Eleventy Four

The New York Times notes today that White House aides are upset with delays at the Pentagon in deploying the 30,000 troops authorized for the Afghanistan build-up. The moment the President made his announcement, it was “action now!”. Apparently this week Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Biden, and others expressed their dissatisfaction with General McChrystal, the general receiving the troops, rather than with the logistic train or those responsible for the deployment, one of whom after 90 days of dithering told us the other day that “the buck stops with me”.

It takes a while to deploy troops except under the most urgent of circumstances. The 82nd Airborne in Georgia is often designated as “America’s Rapid Reaction Force” and airlifted into Saudi Arabia in a matter of days in 1991 when the Iraqis were at the Saudi border threatening the world’s largest oilfields. That was about 8-10,000 paratroopers, who are always ready to go where they’re sent.The First Gulf War was also a very different kind of war than what we are fighting now.

Today, with the current structure of the Army, elements of the 82nd are spread over God’s green acre on various assignments. We now work at the Brigade level; a smaller combined operations unit of 3-5,000 soldiers that is more flexible but requires a different management structure. Under the old structure it may have been easier to deploy more troops more rapidly, but now we must manage 3 times the number of units.  The Marines have a more holistic approach with the Marine Expeditionary Unit, but we don’t have enough of them, either. The Air Force supply train is perhaps the most extensive per unit of projected power.  And more levels of management usually means more headaches.

To illustrate the human price of these decisions, take the example of the 1-17th Infantry, who were training for the Iraq theater when the president called for his draw down there in mid year 2009. Suddenly, the 1-17th Infantry, who had trained for almost a year for by practicing  urban warfare and taking Arabic classes, found themselves in the dense fields and orchards of Helmand in Afghanistan on very short notice where those skills were meaningless. They have lost over 20 killed in action in 6 months as a result, one of the highest casualties rates in the war to date. That is the price of a poorly thought out executive level policy. Lessons are taught in blood. Soldiers get killed unnecessarily.

Now, Generals and Undersecretaries are scrambling to carry out the President’s orders. It is the Colonels running the brigades who are really under pressure. Shortened training cycles, in-drafts of new and perhaps inexperienced troopers; logistical nightmares such as accelerating delivery of equipment. These are part of the price of delay. A 90 day delay.

Added to this is the difficulty of supporting the Afghanistan effort. Airlift capacity is limited, and heavy supplies must come in via the port of Karachi in Pakistan and run a gauntlet of graft, Taliban sabotage, and from 500-800 miles of difficult roadway to reach forward bases. The smoking gun was the $100/gallon gas reported in the press last year. Multiply the support requirements for 30,000 additional troops by that factor to get an idea of the cost and complexity of the logistics involved.

Politicians are the masters of passing the buck, and we are seeing it once again. Whether it’s the “blame Bush” mantra or in this case blaming the military, the current administration simply points the finger and hopes that by repeating the same words over and over people will believe them. Fortunately, many people are wising up.

Things Fall Apart – California closer to the brink

The local newspaper has an article today on the State of California auctioning off our county fairgrounds to raise revenues to stave off bankruptcy. These fairgrounds were at one time a part of the Santa Ana Army Air Station, which trained many thousands of novice pilots during World War II. For some reason, the land was deeded by the War Department to the state in the 1940′s instead of  the county,  and now we are seeing the state auction off our patrimony in order to balance an out of control budget for which there is no resolution in sight.

A few weeks ago,  the closure of the NUMMI automobile plant in Fremont next month was announced. This was the last automobile manufacturing plant in a state that is the largest single market in the world. California used to have 14 car plants and a vibrant automotive industry.

Last week it was Northrop Grumman moving its headquarters and 300 employees from Los Angeles to Washington, DC to be closer to the money spigot. With the planned closure of the Boeing plant in Long Beach where they manufacture the C-17, the once massive aircraft industry will have also exited the state.

60%+ of all “Hollywood” movies are now filmed out-of-state because of taxes, union work rules, and the high cost of doing business. We have exported our electronics manufacturing, our heavy industrial base, and light manufacturing to other states and other countries because of government policy. The state is not just killing jobs, it is the Freddy Krueger of job destruction.

Then we have a federal judge, at the behest of the environmentalists, dictating the cutoff of Sacramento River delta water to the Central Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, in order to save the Delta Smelt. There was no action plan to mitigate the damage, only a court order. Now unemployment in the Valley is hovering around 40% and we have a man-made dust bowl in creation.

The common thread? Government intrusion and incompetence. California has become one of the most expensive and difficult places in the country to do business while spending itself into one of the biggest holes in history. As state revenues exploded when times were good, the state government added jobs at an unprecedented rate. The majority of those jobs were created in vast, self-propagating bureaucracies that have little to do with the real job of delivering government services. Our education system is one of the lowest rated in the country. The pension bomb is ticking, and our governor has gone hat in hand to the Federal government for $6.2 Billion to get us out of this years’ crisis. What to do about next year’s $14 Billion shortfall isn’t even on the radar screen yet.

Higher taxes were supposed to generate more revenue. They didn’t. The Lottery was supposed to cover improvements otherwise unaffordable in the education system. Instead, the Legislature simply reduced the budget by the amount the lottery raised. Highway funds raised from gasoline taxes were diverted into the general fund by fiat. And now the government is not only trying to sell off legacy assets, but even our state capitol. Some Golden State.

Our governor is now trying to sell us on “green jobs” except that these too are transitory and for the most part low wage. We can’t build conventional power plants, much less nuclear, any more because of regulatory roadblocks. The only industries growing these days are litigation, public advocacy and government bureaucracy. With the ACORN scandals in the state and the clear conflict of interest behind the advocacy of unions from the CTA to the SEIU to the prison guards it has become pretty obvious that these too are massive scams perpetrated on the people of California in the interests of greed and power, not the greater good.

The hospitals serving minority communities are failing. Social services delivered to those most in need are being cut back. And yet more and more layers of bureaucracy have arisen. The number and lunacy of laws in the state signed into effect every year is mind-boggling. California is the nanny state writ large. Perhaps we can burn the statute books when we run out of fuel, but of course that would be subject to the air quality management regulations. With new unfunded federal mandates such as the pending health care bill, the state truly is on the brink.

We still have the resources. We still have the people. We still have the work ethic. What we do not have is any sense whatsoever within our leadership. This is a man made disaster, not a natural one, and if we are to climb out of the recession, we simply have to do better.

Dodge Ball on Responsibility

Barack Obama had just taken the oath of office and met privately with George Bush at the White House for one last time before meeting the public. Bush presented him with three envelopes and said, “open these if you run up against any problems you think you can’t solve”.

A few months later, the new president was faced with a terrible problem on the TARP program. The public was deeply upset and there were Tea Party protests all over the country howling for his head. With no answers in sight, he took out the first envelope and read the message “Blame your predecessor” it read. Sure enough, Obama blamed Bush, and at least part of the brouhaha went away.

A few months after this, the president came under tremendous pressure for his management of national security. He didn’t know what to do, so he opened the second envelope, which read “reorganize”. Sure enough, he held a press conference and announced a complete reorganization of the national security apparatus, and the press was mollified for the time being.

I think enough of you have caught on to where the joke is going, but what is scary is that this has been the history of not only the Obama administration, but of public life in this country for the past several years. I think I can trace it back to when Charles Barkley, after one of his stunts several years ago announced in so many words that “I ain’t no role model for your kids”. The press accepted this and moved along. Except that he was a role model, for better or worse.

We are standing  in the rubble of the greatest financial meltdown in our country’s history as measured in gross dollars, and yet no one has taken responsibility. Just the other day, Ben Bernanke, head of the Fed said in so many words that it wasn’t his responsibility. The litany out of the White House has been emphatic that it was Bush’s fault, so I guess they bear none of the blame either, despite the revolving door nature of national politics. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have both stated that they had no responsibility whatsoever in relaxing the lending requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac loans, one of the primary constituents of the crisis. Nope, none of them want to bear any of the responsibility.

Wall Street hit the exits long ago dragging carpetbags out the back door filled with billions of dollars. No responsibility there. And across the country now, there is a growing phenomenon of borrowers who, as they have seen their home values drop, have opted to engage in short sales and stick the banks with the loss. Others simply walked away from their debts.

And this leaves an ever smaller number of us paying our taxes and mortgages and following the rules and holding the bag.

Way back when, people like Frank Capra and John Wayne and Tom Mix both walked the walk and talked the talk. They made movies, the very definition of fiction, and yet told truths and held to certain values. It’s where an awful lot of us began to form our world views. The Boy Scout way was taken seriously.

“On my honor, I will do my best,

to do my duty to God and to my country and to obey the Scout Law,

to help other people at all times,

to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight”

These days the scouts are played for saps. And that pretty much says it all about where we are.

The Federal Code is over 40 volumes thick and is growing exponentially. In 2009, the State of California, going bankrupt all the while, passed over 1,000 new laws, none of which addressed the underlying financial issues facing the state. Congress passes laws regulating everyone except themselves. It seems that the media and political classes would rather focus on anything but the responsibility issue. To them, none of us is responsible and we are all responsible. It’s all just semantics.

We used to have a lot fewer laws but a lot more responsibility. We need to get back to that. Instead of lawyering up, we need to come out from behind the shield and the smoke, and if we break it, we own it. As a manager, I have told my people more than once that it’s ok to make a mistake, but learn from it and don’t do it a second time. There used to be common sense and forgiveness and a desire to excel. It has been replaced by a desire to avoid responsibility.

In its simplicity, it is not much to ask, so why not? If we are ever to recover from the mess we’re in, we have to take that first step.

Crony Capitalism

There has been a lot of smearing of capitalism lately. From Barney Frank to the President himself to Nancy Pelosi to Harry Reid, capitalism is under assault. But look behind the closed doors, and what we see is a perversion of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

Today, we find that Treasury Secretary Geithner (ex Goldman Sachs) was not a dispassionate regulator, but rather ensured that AIG paid back key investors such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank at 100 cents on the dollar as the company went down in flames. Hank Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, pressured Bank of America into buying Merrill Lynch around the same time. B of A later got $20 Billion in TARP funding. It is ridiculousy easy to connect the dots as the documentation trickles out under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. These people seem not to even care that there is a paper trail.

Last night, Martha Coakley, the embattled Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts, hosted a fundraiser in Washington attended by all the major pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Your dollars for prescriptions and insurance premiums are now going to help secure the 60th vote on possibly the worst bill in our nation’s history all because it has become an insider’s game where the deals are done in back rooms.

The insurance companies and Big Pharma have struck their sweetheart deals already and want to make sure the Democrats pay up. The Unions have been meeting today with Nancy Pelosi regarding the tax on “Cadillac” insurance benefits. Ben Nelson has a $100 Million earmark tucked into the Health Care bill  for Nebraska. The stench is overwhelming. The hell with good legislation or the will of the people. What our legislators  say in public these days has absolutely no bearing on the facts anymore.

The takeovers of GM and Chrysler benefited the Administration’s political allies at the UAW while shafting the shareholders, bondholders, retirees, and white collar employees. This is the way it works these days. Chicago Style, Pelosi Style, whatever you want to call it, it is unethical, dishonest and illegalt at its core.

Cap & Trade is the ultimate insider’s game. It does absolutely nothing to improve the environment even according to its authors, but the potential for legal graft is in the trillions of dollars so you know where the smart money is going.

The Stimulus Bill has so much fig leaf graft in it that it exceeds the worst of past generations by an order of magnitude, and it only seems to get worse.

Today, Port Au Price lies in rubble. We have a war in Afghanistan and are winding down in Iraq. Unemployment is 10%+ nationally and 20%+ in some areas. We have the residential real estate bubble we are recovering from and a commercial bubble to deal with this year and yet the graft seems to know no bounds. And while we face these challenges, the Congressional leadership (what an oxymoron) and Administration are acting like carrion birds and carjackers in their greed and duplicity.

Adam Smith is rolling over in his grave. So are Adams and Franklin and Washington. Ideas and ideals meant something until recently. The great Middle Class and Main Street were the heart of our democracy. Now it is corporate lobbyists, union leaders, and insiders dividing up the spoils and leaving us to pay the tab. This isn’t capitalism. It is the worst cronyism and crookery the world has seen, all done with a fig leaf of legality. It makes Bernie Madoff look like Mother Teresa. Enough is enough.

California’s Tire Nazi’s and the loss of common sense

The local AM talk radio ranters were at it this evening again, this time pointing out that the Southern California Air Quality Management District (AQMD for short) is about the implement fines for inadequate air pressure in our car’s tires. The plan is to make your local garage informers, and if you are found to have inadequate air pressure, to fine you up to $1,000. How very droll. In addition, Uncle Arnold wants to start a massive traffic camera/speeding ticket program to raise additional revenues. No subterfuge about that one. It’s a pure money grab.

Remember, this is being done as in the name of the Legislature’s and Governor’s grandiose anthropogenic global warming reduction program passed 3 years ago with all sorts of cool green ideas that don’t work or which are being sabotaged by the likes of Dianne Feinstein and the Save the Turtles (well, actually tortoises) Foundation.

And all the while, 20-30% of all pollution in the Los Angeles Basin blows across the Pacific from China these days. Unfortunately, the AQMD can’t get anyone to rat out the Chinese or the Chinese to pay the fines. I’m sure they would if they could but they can’t.

At the same time, a bill to legalize marijuana is wending its way through the state legislature. It’s not so much that smoking reefer is a medical necessity or it has suddenly become okay, but rather that they can tax the hell out of it. The same holds true for the Casino Indians deal to contribute a few million to the state coffers in exchange for enough additional slot machines to keep every grandmother in America pulling the handle until they meet Obama’s health care system head on.

All the while, there has been no discussion by anyone in a position of authority of the reckless growth in both size and cost of the public sector bureaucracy. When times were good, our state and local governments were adding 50-75,00 jobs per year, and this went on for years. These same jobs far outpay the private sector today. Public servants have now become public masters.

All of this points to a complete lack of common sense. They want to try and get your mechanic to drop a dime on you and have inanimate machines to ticket you and nowhere a human to hold accountable. It is simply Orwellian. Pelosi, Boxer, Schwarzenegger, Feinstein, Darrell Steinberg, Dean Florez, Karen Bass, and the rest of the Nanny Nazi’s would rather foster vice and repress civil rights than deal with the irresponsibility that got us into the mess in the first place.

Haitian Earthquake Scorecard – 1-14-10

Australian: A$10,000,000

Japan: $5,000,000

Sweden:  $800,000

UPS: $1,000,000

USA: $100,000,000 (public)

Spain: E3,000,000

Netherlands: E2,000,000

Canada: $5,000,000 + up to CDN $100 Million in funds matching individual donations

Mexico: Rescue Teams

International Red Cross: 40 Tons of Food

Venezuela: Rescue Teams

Medecins Sans Frontieres: Field Hospital

European Commission: E3,000,000

Cuba: 375 Doctors & Paramedics

Germany: E1,500,000 + rescue teams

Loewe’s: $1,000,000

UK: $10 Million

Ireland: $5 Million (Digicel-Haiti’s largest cell cervice)

France: Rescue Teams

Islamic Relief USA/Church of the Latter Day Saints: $1,000,000+

Saudi Arabia:

South Korea: $1,000,000

China:  $1,000,000

Jolie-Pitt Foundation: $1,000,000

Italy: E 1,000,000

Denmark: $1,900,000

Brazil: $10,000,000

Russia: Airmobile Hospital & Rescue Teams

Chile: 2 Planeloads of Aid, Naval Vessel

South Africa: Rescue Teams & Doctors

9,000 U.N. Peacekeepers on the Ground

5,500 U.S. Marines & Soldiers by Monday.

US & Canadian Warships, Transports, & Hospital ships.

With so many bodies still unburied, the country will enter the epidemic phase within the next 48 hours. In addition, water supplies have been badly damaged and water purification systems are urgently needed. Reconstruction will take years.

A question of intelligence

The latest campaign coming out of the Washington/New York punditocracy is the “we are winning the war against Al Quaeda” propaganda.  In opinion pieces in the New York Times and in sending representatives out on the airwaves, the message has been that on homeland security, “the system worked”. But one part of it struck a false note and I have to question the entire message because of this. Because some of the statements made about Al Quaeda just didn’t make sense.

Since the 1990′s, we have known that Al Quaeda is a distributed network. there is no central node. Osama Bin Laden has been simply a rallying cry and a symbol rather than an operational leader ever since he escaped from Afghanistan dressed in women’s clothing in late 2001. Rather, Al Quaeda is a franchise with no fees. Islamic radicals can simply join up by saying they are Al Quaeda. There are no decoder rings or secret handshakes. The funding is almost always homegrown and the highest level of connection for many of them is usually e mails or the regularly monitored bulletin boards or chat sites. Occasionally, an operative will slip in or out of a country unnoticed. Al Quaeda is both low and high tech in this manner, which makes them such a difficult enemy to fight.

So why the huge rush to bomb them in Pakistan as our intelligence across the border is called worthless by the chief military intelligence officer in Afghanistan? Our knowledge of the enemy and of even our Afghan allies is seriously lacking by all accounts, and these responses almost seem like poorly coordinated payback. And if this knowledge sucks in Afghanistan, it sucks worse across the border in Pakistan.

In Yemen, we have connected enough dots to put Anwar Al Awlaki within the interlocking rings of 9/11, The London Bombings, The Ft. Hood Massacre, the Underpants Bomber and several other major terrorist incidents. This guy is bad news any way you look at it and yet does not seem to be a priority. He walks free and yet he is the central switchboard of Al Quaeda.  Every plot the man has been involved in has, from either a casualty or terror aspect, succeeded. The dissonance is truly disturbing.

So what gives? Billions spent on our intelligence networks and little to show. We can look right through your clothes, but we can’t find the terrorists. Back in the 1970′s, the primary tool of intelligence, spies on the ground, was excised from most of the intelligence world. In the counterintelligence function, our military and agencies have been regularly penetrated by the Chinese, the Israelis, and who knows who else. These foreign agents have usually been agents on the ground in places they should never have had access to or been able to recruit American turncoats. Spycraft 101. Their human intelligence seems to work. We, on the other hand, seem to have fallen too much in love with technology.

Today, 95% of our intelligence apparatus sits behind desks either gathering data electronically or analyzing said data. They are overwhelmed with the massive reams of data and cannot connect the dots or solve the puzzles or whatever other analogy they want to use.

On the other side, an Al Quaeda double agent not only walked into a secure CIA facility located on an already secure American military base in Afghanistan; he also had a farewell video done with one of the top Al Quaeda operatives in Pakistan taunting the CIA beforehand and the was not frisked until he was within the kill zone taking out some of our most experienced people. The system is not working. We can watch from 30,000′ but have no eyes and ears on the ground where we need them nor  agents with the fieldcraft necessary to figure out who is friend and foe. In a world where “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, relationships and human intelligence are paramount.

After 16 years fighting the same enemy, we seem not to have learned some primary lessons. The Army has learned to engage the population, but our intelligence services have not. We have stopped a number of plots but the enemy is once again winning the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the Ummah, the Muslim world.

Maybe heads shouldn’t roll in Washington for these breakdowns and for the legal left turn that will give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a soapbox and enemy combatants the legal rights of American citizens under the civil code. But it seems to me there has been a fundamental and flawed policy on human intelligence and even the basics of information coördination that has clearly broken down.

The UN Meme

Listening to the radio this afternoon driving up to LA, I was somewhat surprised to hear several of the key personnel leading the Haitian relief effort refer repeatedly to UN leadership. It was all about the UN.

But looking deeper, I have found that first, there are hardley any UN personnel on the ground in Haiti and second, that the real leadership is being exercised by the United States. The Haitian government has functionally collapsed, while the international effort to date is piecemeal to put it concisely. The UN is deferring decision making to the Haitian government. People are now rioting and dying as field hospitals staffed by foreign doctors and nurses are evacuated because they cannot achieve a basic level of security.

One thing we know with the United Nations is that the decision making process there is incredibly convoluted. This is the nature of a consensus driven organization. But people are dying and need succor now. Someone has to take charge and make things happen.

The situation is on a knife edge and will spin out of control quickly if action is not taken. Does the UN want that on its collective conscience?

The Protocols of the Elders of Scion – Questioning the numbers on green technology

Somewhere back 150 years ago or so, a pernicious lie was propagated by the Czar’s secret police alleging secret rituals and a plot to control the world by the Jews called the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Today we are faced with a suite of environmental myths I call the Protocols of the Elders of Scion.  The former has rattled around since the times of the pogroms; in Nazi Germany, in  modern Russia, and most recently in the Arab World. Despite the best efforts of historians and reams of supporting data proving its falsehood, it is a meme that has a perverse attraction to those who want to believe.  Today, we have a similar meme regarding the environment.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of environmental issues that must be tackled. But look at the reality.  The data supporting anthropogenic climate change seems to be falling apart at the seams. The recent Climategate scandal was step one. At the very least the data was massaged and a conspiracy of climate scientists have been indicted in the press for misrepresenting the consensus.

Then, another of the pillars of the IPCC climate change data, that concerning the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers, has been shown to be inaccurate as well. More data falsification.

Third, it seems that the natural replenishment of the ozone layer caused by the reduction in the use of chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFC’s) seems to have also influenced the CO2 levels under suspicion. One climatic event influencing another? Who woulda thunk? This was never calculated into the equation by the climatologists warning of AGW.

And all the while from sea to shining sea, the people who are supposed to know better have remained stonily silent. Al Gore, the Bernie Madoff of Climate Change with his Carbon Offset Credit scam, is now pictured on the sides of milk cartons. He’s simply disappeared. The EPA, who unilaterally decided that CO2 now needs to be regulated, is silent. Congress, at least, has been tip toeing away from the stinkeroo of the Cap & Trade Bill like a kid caught with their collective hands in the cookie jar.

You see, all the while, with all the talk of solar power and wind power and other alternative energy sources, we are faced with the reality that they are actually not much better for the environment, and perhaps much worse, than simple conservation methods. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that energy in equals energy out less loss factors. There is no such thing as perfect equilibrium and thus loss across transmission, through motors, through batteries, etc can reduce the efficiency of electrical transmission by a significant amount. It is estimated that with the current electrical transmission system in the United States, we lose as much as 20% in transmission  from power plants to consumers.

So, when we look at, for example , solar panels at a 15% efficiency, this is assuming that the sun is at close to peak output in the middle of the day with no clouds in the sky. Anything less than that reduces the effective amount of solar energy converted. Solar panels are not cheap. The cost/watt is @ $1.35-1.50. The mono and polycrystalline type modules also consume large amounts of precious metals such as silver, removing it from the economy. Thus, the return on investment, even under optimum conditions is 20-30 years even when calculating government subsidies such as feed in tariffs into the numbers.

Wind power is much worse. The reliability numbers of existing wind farms such as in Palm Springs and Altamont are poor. The only real economic benefit seems to be the tax write offs and accounting games played with subsidies by wealthy owners and the large corporations moving in to take advantage.

Now, we are looking at electric cars. Great idea, but again, what is the efficiency? We are told that it will take 2 hours to charge the batteries for a 140HP motor from 110 Volt mains power. This charge is expected to power the automobile for @ 120 miles. A typical 140HP gasoline motor might use 4 gallons of gas to do the same job.

Now, it takes 1-2 hours for the battery for my camera to charge and about the same for my cell phone to charge. How can we power a car for 120 miles on a similar charge? It doesn’t seem to add up. This would be a miraculous improvement in efficiency. I get the feeling that somehow, we’re once again being conned.

This is not to say that these technologies are bad ideas, but the smoke and mirrors and distortions have to stop. The Green Lobby has a history of fiddling with the facts. We have seen it far too many times now. We must be absolutely dispassionate and ensure extensive and proper peer review. Otherwise, we will be faced with another very destructive myth; one promoted by another set of power hungry, amoral zealots.

More Media Hypocrisy – The ACORN Saga Continues

This afternoon it was revealed that, James O’Keefe, he of the sensational ACORN film expose’s, was arrested on Monday for an alleged attempt to interfere with the phones in Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s offices in New Orleans.  It is a lede story on every network and in almost every major newspaper in the country. We don’t know the details, but we do know that the FBI jumped on the case immediately and that O’Keefe and 3 other men have been charged with “willful and malicious interference with a telephone system owned and operated by the United States of America”. The Feds moved a hell of a lot faster in this case than they did with the Underpants Bomber, if you didn’t notice. The charges sound serious, but then, I’m sure the FBI is on the job 24/7 cracking down on urban terrorism.

Contrast the coverage of this case with that of the series of ACORN videos released by Mr. O’Keefe last Fall. ACORN was the kind of case reporters used to salivate over. Sex, prostitution, crime, graft. Reality programming is one of the biggest phenomenons on television these days, and this one had it all, and it had more episodes than Entourage.  But our “free” press said nothing… for weeks in some cases. Not the New York Times. Not the Washington Post. Not the Los Angeles Times. Not the Chicago Tribune. Not ABC, NBC, or CBS. Nope, initially, only Fox and the “right-wing” on-line media covered the story, and only after repeated, timed releases by Breitbart.com of one outrage after another filmed at ACORN offices around the country did Republican legislators give it such a high profile that the media grudgingly began to cover it. In many papers it only made the second or third page.

To top it off, since then, we have seen a number of the ACORN miscreants actually have the chutzpah to press charges against Mr. O’Keefe and his associate for alleged intrusions into their privacy. Is this a great country or what? You can get caught on film offering to cheat the public and facilitate child prostitution and you can then both sue and press criminal charges. Back when people had their heads on straight, the grafters would have been put in the public stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables for such outrages. But today our society has no shame.

There have been no comments from Mr. O’Keefe or his associates yet on this case, and his prior investigative reporting had elements of great risk. We do not know the whole story.   It will all come out over the next few weeks. But you can bet that if it does not play the way the media wants it to, the story will fade quicker than Al Gore’s carbon offset billions.

We have a  mass media that purports  to do objective reporting, but is really is in the bag for a particular political philosophy.The coverage we are seeing is the result. Faux front page outrage. Payback, to put it bluntly.

I’m sure glad we don’t live in Russia or China or North Korea or one of those other countries where the media acts as a propaganda outlet.

The State of Our Foreign Policy

With the President giving his State of the Union Address this evening, he has telegraphed a focus on domestic policy and jobs. His agenda overseas has been apologetic, but militarily has continued with most of the Bush era policies. Overall, the challenges he faced when inaugurated are still there and growing. Since it is believed he will speak more to domestic than foreign issues, I thought it would be interesting to see where we stand internationally.

1 – Iraq – We won, or at least we’re on our way out. Violence had dropped until recently, when the execution of Chemical Ali may have sparked suicide bombings that killed hundreds. The Iranians are still interfering there, but Al Quaeda is on the run and Iraqi insurgents seem to be reasonably quiescent. In the north Kurdistan is still quasi-independent with no resolution in sight.

2 – Afghanistan – after 90 days of twisting and turning, the surge is now on. Winter is the quiet time in Afghanistan war, but with Spring around the corner, we can expect it to get much worse before it gets better. The interlocking poison of warlords and Taliban, vendetta and politics, with the heroin business paying for the guns and bullets of our enemies will go on until someone finds a way to shut down the money flow. It has been a money pit with little to show, and our dilly dallying has not instilled confidence in our allies.

3 – Haiti – a friend of mine who used to be a U.S. military commander down there in the 1990′s  pointed out that narcotics are a huge issue in the failed Haitian state. He also pointed out that the government basically fled to Miami after the earthquake. There is no real government to reconstitute, and once again, no one is taking to lead in recovery and reconstruction. This is a terrible failure of leadership, notably ours.

4 – Honduras – Free and fair elections were held, just as promised, and a new democratically elected government has been seated. After marginalizing the Honduran government, the United States very slowly began to pull back from the global consensus when they realized that perhaps the Hondurans knew their own constitution a bit better than we did and that Hugo Chavez was no friend of democracy.

5 – Iran – Quo Vadis? The Iranians have played the West for the fools we have been, but there seems to be little that can functionally be done. After all the hemming and hawing, the germans just signed an $8 Billion natural gas deal with the Iranians as news of further repression by the Achmedinejad government hit the front pages. So much for unity and coöperation. The Chinese and Russians will continue to thwart real sanctions until the day Iran announces the Bomb. What will we do then? Protest some more?

6 – China – basically, we are a laughing stock now. They own us financially, and our government has gone completely silent on human rights as the Chinese remind us not to bite the hand that feeds us. We have lost our moral and economic authority as an immature China rises to global preeminence. China is grasping for mineral and natural resources worldwide with no care for human rights, the environment, or anything but narrow parochial interests. In the meantime, seeing our weakness, the Taiwanese and eventually other nations in the region are beginning to make their own accommodations.

7 – North Korea -  Bill Clinton meets Kim Jong Il’s body double and not a thing has changed except for the deeper suffering of the North Korean people.  They are still playing chicken with the South, but our government is strictly on the sidelines these days.

8 – Russia – Obama’s decision to unilaterally cancel the ballistic missile defense system and reduce our nuclear stockpiles has done exactly nothing to forward American interests with Russia. Russia continues to retreat into authoritarianism with no economic or political reform. It is just one more corrupt dictatorship, but one flush with cash they are spending to intimidate their neighbors and rebuild their military.

9 – South Asia – The Indians have revamped their war planning to take into account a possible 2 front conflict with China and Pakistan. Pakistan is an unholy mess. While pursuing “Taliban” in the tribal areas, both Al Quaeda and the Quetta Shura (Mullah Omar) are protected by the Pakistani government in their efforts to destabilize Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyr has been untouched as his drug empire expands and he plots against the Afghan government and their Western Allies. The Indians, still reeling from the Mumbai massacre in late 2008, are one incident away from military action against Pakistan and the central Pakistani government is a shambles. while our country has made progress with India, this is offset with deteriorating relationships with China and Pakistan because of same. “Can’t we all just get along” just doesn’t work over there.

10 – Africa has fallen off the radar screen. This with a president who is a first generation African American. As the Chinese expand their influence by buying up governments and resources, the people continue to suffer.

11 – South America – Anti Americanism in South America is at an all time high. Counted against the recent victory of a conservative, market oriented candidate in Chile are socialist, authoritarian governments in a growing number of countries. The Honduran dilemma clarified positions definitively. Brazil, who have a socialist government, were the prime facilitators of Manuel Zelaya, the authoritarian president of Honduras who precipitated the crisis. In the cases of Venezuela, it may be best to just leave well enough alone. Chavez is doing more damage to himself than anyone else could possibly do. The only problem is that he has distributed hundreds of thousands of AK-47′s to his supporters and undermined all of the country’s institutions. That is the socialist/communist virus for you. Chavez falls, and you will see Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay topple eventually. Their governments have basically been bought and paid for. Our own influence is almost nonexistent except in Colombia, where Uribe would like a 3rd term but is not allowed to run.

12 – North America – Canada has steered a pretty successful path through this mess, perhaps by being so moderately Canadian about it all and having a lot more common sense than we give them credit for. Their economy is in better shape and overall, they seem to be doing much better than our angst ridden body politic. Mexico is still a mess, with the political class fearful of instability from the continuing narcowars.

13 – Japan – is slowly going to hell in a handbasket. With an aging population, a government that defines themselves almost strictly by not being Liberal Democrats, and the highest debt/equity ratio of any government in the world, Japan seems to be trying to fight its way out of a paper bag. In the meantime, we just don’t seem to be paying much attention as little bits and pieces of our common foreign policies begin to fly off.

14 – Europe – After all of the hemming and hawing, and the president’s apology tour, nothing much has changed in our relationships with Europe. They certainly don’t take him or our country as seriously any more, but at the same time they have done little to step up onto the global stage. Haiti is a clear example. Donations from America are an order of magnitude greater, and the United States has done its best to act as a responsible power. Internally, economic problems in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the East will play out over the next year, and the Euro may be put under severe pressure. The British government is suddenly under pressure in Northern Ireland, threatening to undo all of the work of national reconciliation there. Britain, our closest ally, itself is deeply divided with myriad problems. We did help things along with a series of missteps and antagonistic actions.

Obama’s thrust at the outset was to “reform” American foreign policy. The reality was that he blamed Bush and kept many of the same policies. The deterioration in our nation’s global footprint has been significant, but is also a deterioration in perception which can be rectified. But first we must put our own house in order economically and in our national policies. The push back by the electorate to many of the Administration’s policies as seen in recent elections is one sign that a more moderate course should be charted.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, capitalism itself has come under fire. The president’s comments on regulating the banking industry have shaken global markets and caused uncertainty at a time when stability is paramount. Reform must be tightly focused and err towards common sense, simple solutions to ensure that some of the runaway practices of of hedge funds, reinsurance, derivatives, and other poorly understood financial systems are both better understood and moderated. This can only be done with consensus.

We are caught in a global system of rocks and shoals as never before, and have only weathered the first stages. American exceptionalism has been an underpinning of our foreign policy since our country’s foundation. Our administration no longer believes in this, and yet, once again coming back to Haiti, it is on display for all to see. We must re embrace this, and then act as our forefathers did; with restraint, with moderation, and without fear or favor.

Another issue that will define us going forward is the problem of narcotics. Whether it is narcostate within Colombia, the violence and instability in Mexico, the collapse of the Haitian government, or the intermix of drugs and violence in Afghanistan/Pakistan, it has become obvious that without a solution, we will continue to see lives lost and billions spent in a futile battle.

I would have to give this administration, like the last one, no better than a “C” in foreign policy.

A pathetic decision on Space Exploration

Last night, the president was supposed to announce a cutback in funding to NASA and our space programs as a part of his kabuki cost cutting efforts. Instead, the Orlando Sentinel now reports that this news will be a footnote in the Federal budget request to be submitted on Monday. That’s the kind of president we have.

With the Space Shuttles at the end of their functional lives and the Ares replacement at stake, the decision will kill the American manned space flight program after 50 years of incredible success. That this is being done by a president who did his best to assume the mantle of John F. Kennedy and promised “Hope & Change” is pathetically ironic.

Last year, I was able to visit the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, and was stunned at some of the work they have been doing. This isn’t American expansionism or flag waving. This is the future of the human race we are talking about. Mineral and water deposits in outer space will complement our diminishing resources here on earth and allow us to one day reach the stars. The International Space Station and Hubble telescope serviced by the manned space program are vital to human progress and our understanding of the Universe.

NASA is already preparing missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that will expand scientific knowledge exponentially. In almost every single project to date, NASA have not just exceeded expectations, but blown right through them into new and unknown territory. The Hubble telescope, the Mars Rover, Galileo and other projects have more than paid for themselves both in the new technologies developed but in the basic scientific discoveries upon which the future will be built. But what helps get it all funded and a big part of the success is the manned space program. It is integral to the process.

Economically, many of our advances in microelectronics, biochemistry, miniaturization, optics, and 100 other disciplines would be much the poorer without the manned space program. These programs are one of the reasons the United States has led in so many fields for so many years.

Now, our myopic president is prepared to toss it all aside. As a technologist, this is perhaps the deepest cut of all. I have watched as our government has devalued research & development, manufacturing and our industrial base at an ever accelerating pace for the past 20 years. Now, symbolically, a man who is a functional Luddite and who has no understanding of technology or the wonders of science will seal our scientific demise.

During the State of the Union Address last night, the President promised to double American exports in 5 years. I am curious how that can be done. Between the multinational corporations outsourcing American manufacturing and the wind down not only of the manned space program, but of research and development in general in both the academic and commercial economies, where will the products come from to achieve this worthy goal?

America’s economic health and our national identity have depended upon innovation for 200 years. From the cotton gin to the steamboat to the telegraph and telephone to the microcircuit, these are the technologies that have created our wealth and raised our standard of living to the highest in the world. Advances in agronomy  helped make our country the world’s larder. One thing America has always had going for it has been our science and technology.

The revolution in microelectronics that made the cell phone and the personal computer viable began in Houston and San Jose and Huntsville with the space program’s requirement for lighter, ultrareliable systems we could shoot into space. When the Soviet Union stunned the world with Sputnik in 1957, its only capability was to send a weak radio signal back to prove its existence.

The real revolution began when Eisenhower and then Kennedy made manned space flight a national crusade. We had to somehow maintain life in the most hostile of environments and then feed our astronauts and allow them to phone home and actually do some science up there. One of the primary missions of the moon landings was to determine what the moon was made of. This required enormous strides in technology.

All of these requirements spurred the development of things like freeze drying, instrumentation that can detect the infinitesimally small, and radios that were ultra efficient; all of which then spurred development in other areas such as medicine, wireless communications, and computing. The supercomputing that is now at the outer edges of scientific research began with the space program with the result that today  a notebook computer has more processing power than all the systems that drove the Gemini rocket and capsule. One can argue that our modern consumer electronics infrastructure  would never have happened as quickly or as efficiently without the advances first seen in the Apollo program.

Space has fascinated man from time immemorial. Aristotle and Archimedes stared at the same sky we do and wondered the same thoughts. What is out there? Are we alone? Now we are faced with more pressing issues. Earth sciences are particularly dependent upon the ability to observe our planet and the solar system from space. Satellites break down and need to be fixed. The Space Shuttle has done yeoman’s work in first repairing the Hubble Telescope and then upgrading it to enable it to look farther and farther ‘out there”. Eventually, we are going to have to do something with all the space junk floating around as well. Someone is going to have to figure that one out and come up with a solution. Yes, we may need space sanitation engineers one day.

This decision is what comes of having bureaucrats and lawyers and MBA’s too heavily involved in key manufacturing and research decisions. They simply do not have the skill set necessary to make sound judgments. They can also be more easily hoodwinked by scientific flim flam artists. Rocket scientists want to see the data and drill down and make their own determinations. To them “failure is not an option” is not a trite phrase. It is their way of life.

As he offers up false hopes in green technology based upon flawed or biased science and economics, our president is taking one of the truly great scientific achievements of the past 200 years; reaching out to the universe, and tossing it into the gutter like one of his cigarette butts.

Every time I think it can’t get much worse, it does. This is not leadership. This is not hope. It is the kind of change that topples civilizations.

Taking the President at his word on nuclear energy

On Friday, the President met with Republican Congressmen and expressed his desire to wok together for the good of the country. One of the areas for cooperation he mentioned expressly was in nuclear energy. It’s clean, it’s cheap, and it helps reduce our carbon footprint more than any other form of energy. It has also been anathema to the “environmental” lobby for the past 30 years.

My friend Rick Ballard did a little homework and found this list of 2nd reactor projects that have been stalled, in several cases, for up to 35 years. Most of the sites are currently operational and proven.

If the President is serious about his offer, why not start with these projects. It takes a decade to finish a plant, and we need this power now, especially when considering mass production of electric cars and other new burdens on the grid. And while he’s at it, the President may also want to fund some serious upgrades to that same grid. It is slowly falling apart.

New power plants will pay excellent wages and provide real, measurable improvements in employment across the country. Not only that, they will generate positive cash flow 60-90 days after the moment they are turned on.

Here’s a list of places we could start. This is real stimulus and will help us build the future.

	Glossary

Home > Nuclear > Status of Potential New Commercial Nuclear Reactors in the United States
Status of Potential New Commercial Nuclear Reactors in the United States
Release Date: February 19, 2009 Next Release Date: May 2010	(entire report also available in printer-friendly format)
Introduction: In July 2007, the first application in over three decades was filed to build and operate a commercial nuclear reactor. By the end of the year, a total of 5 combined license (COL) applications were on file with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In 2008, the number of COL applications doubled. Media attention, the filing of several early site permit (ESP) applications with the NRC, and provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 favorable to nuclear generation have been cited as indicators of a �nuclear renaissance� in the United States. But the clearest indicator of the depth and scope of such a renaissance will be the number and capacity of new reactors going on line. Submitting an application does not ensure a reactor will be built (or even started). But the significant number of applications, and the significant expense involved in gathering required data for each may presage future commitments by the industry to increase capacity. Table 1 of this feature lists projects in which the applicant has met all of the following criteria: 1) publicly notified the NRC of interest in applying for a COL; 2) issued one or more press releases or initiated a pre-application meeting at the NRC; 3) selected a specific site for the reactor; and 4) selected a specific reactor design for the project. Projects which do not meet these criteria are excluded. There is no assurance that any of these plants will ultimately be built or operate commercially. The Energy Information Administration�s (EIA) latest reference case projection for U.S. nuclear capacity additions is provided in the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), which projects a net increase of approximately 12 gigawatts of nuclear capacity coming on line through 2030. Including the 17 COL applications already filed, a total of 20 projects formerly met these criteria as of December 31, 2008. The license application review for Victoria County, Texas, however, has been suspended, thereby reducing the number of COL applications since the previous EIA report to 16. Further, NRC no longer anticipates an application for the Bruneau, Idaho, project: thus reducing the overall total to 18 projects. One of the 18, Tennessee Valley Authority�s (TVA) Watts Bar 2, has already received a construction permit. The permit was issued on 23 January 1973, several decades prior to the NRC�s streamlining of the licensing process. If the reactor goes on line, it will be the last U.S. reactor for which the construction permit and license were applied for separately. Excluded from the table is a proposed second unit at Exelon�s Clinton plant in Illinois. An Early Site Permit (ESP) for unit 2 was approved by the NRC, but the company has not yet indicated whether it will pursue a COL. Many of the firms that are considering nuclear construction are bound by State requirements that they be �prudent investors.’ Therefore, COL filings often include a goal to �keep the nuclear option open” rather than a full commitment. Quite possibly, final commitment for some projects will only be announced shortly before actual construction begins. Since the last release of this report in October 2008, an application to build an EPR reactor at Bell Bend, Pennsylvania, was submitted to the NRC. Also, since the last update of this feature, three applicants have announced that they are reconsidering their selection of reactor(s). Table 1. License Applications for Commercial Nuclear Reactors in the United States Status as of December 31, 2008 Site Sponsoring Firms Reactor Design1 No. of Units Capacity MW(e) Application Submitted Application Status Bell Bend, PA Pennsylvania Power and Light EPR 1 1,600 10/20/2008 Under Review Bellefonte, AL NuStart; Energy, TVA AP 1000 2 2,234 10/30/2007 Under Review Callaway, MO Ameren UE, UniStar Nuclear, LLC EPR 1 1,600 7/24/2008 Under Review Calvert Cliffs, MD UniStar, Nuclear, LLC, Constellation EPR 1 1,600 7/13/2007 Under Review Comanche Peak, TX Energy Future Holdings [Luminant] US-APWR 2 3,400 9/19/2008 Under Review Fermi, MI Detroit Edison Company ESBWR 1 1,520 9/13/2008 Under Review Grand Gulf, MS NuStart Energy, Entergy ESBWR 1 1,520 2/27/2008 Under Review Levy County, FL Progress Energy AP 1000 2 2,234 7/30/2008 Under Review Nine Mile Point, NY UniStar Nuclear, Constellation EPR 1 1,600 9/30/2008 Under Review North Anna, VA Dominion ESBWR 1 1,520 11/27/2007* Under Review River Bend, LA Entergy ESBWR 1 1,520 9/30/2008 Under Review Shearon Harris, NC Progress Energy AP 1000 2 2,234 2/19/2008 Under Review South Texas Project , TX NRG Energy, South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company ABWR 2 2,700 9/20/2007 Under Review Turkey Point, FL Florida Power & Light AP 1000 2 2,234 Anticipated Na Virgil C. Summer, SC Scana [South Carolina Electric and Gas], Santee Cooper AP 1000 2 2,234 3/31/2008 Under Review* Vogtle, GA Southern Company [Georgia Power], Oglethorpe Power, Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, City of Dalton AP 1000 2 2,234 3/31/2008 Under Review Watts Bar, TN 2 TVA PWR 1 1,167 Anticipated Na William States Lee III,, SC Duke Energy AP 1000 2 2,234 12/13/2007 Under Review 1 ABWR, Advanced Boiling Water Reactor; AP 1000, Advanced Passive 1000 reactor; EPR, European Power Reactor (only the acronym is used for the U.S. version); ESBWR, is interpreted as either European Simplified Boiling Reactor or, for U.S. version, Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, and US-APWR, U.S. Advanced Pressurized Water Reactor 2 Watts Bar was issued a construction Permit on 23 January 1973. * An Early Site Permit (ESP) has also been filed.  ESPs were approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for Grand Gulf (on 4/5/2007) and North Anna (on 11/27/2007).  Vogtle is under review. Na= non-applicable. Potential Reactor Sites Following are more details concerning each of the projects appearing in Table 1. To navigate this page use arrow Bell Bend1, Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania Power and Light [PPL]) The COL Application was submitted to NRC On 20 October 2008. In June 2007, PPL publicly announced a plan to construct a new reactor at a property adjacent to the site of its present two-unit Susquehanna plant.� �At the time PPL announced that any project would most likely involve other participants.� Subsequent announcements indicate the involvement of UniStar Nuclear in the project and the selection of AREVA NP�s EPR design.� PPL plans to apply for a COL by the end of 2008. Bellefonte, Alabama (NuStart Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority)�� The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 30 October 2007.� The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the multi-utility consortium NuStart Energy submitted an application for a COL at TVA�s Bellefonte site near Hollywood, Alabama.� TVA�s evaluation of the project indicates a desire to meet base load power needs in its service territory. The Bellefonte COL application could serve as a reference COL application for other Advanced Passive (AP) 1000 reactor design applications by other firms.�In 2006, TVA cancelled construction of two pressurized water reactors (PWR), Bellefonte 1 and 2. Unit 1 was 88 percent completed and Unit 2 was over 50 percent complete when construction was terminated. The COL application is for building Bellefonte 3 and Bellefonte 4, two AP 1000 reactors at this site. �If TVA opts to complete Watts Bar 2 first, that decision could delay this project. Callaway, Missouri (Ameren UE, UniStar2 Nuclear, LLC*) The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 24 July 2008. Ameren UE�s interest in licensing a new reactor at its single-unit Callaway plant was first indicated in late 2005 through filings with Missouri utility regulators. Formal announcement of the project came in April 2007, when Ameren announced selection of the EPR design in cooperation with UniStar Nuclear. The Callaway site was of strong interest long before the public announcement in July 2007. Ameren also announced that it has ordered long lead-time components for the potential new reactor through AREVA NP. Calvert Cliffs, Maryland (UniStar3 Nuclear, LLC, Constellation) �� The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 13 July 2007.� UniStar Nuclear Energy, LLC, announced on 27 October 2005 that it would file COL applications with the NRC for several nuclear power plants including Calvert Cliffs, Maryland. Calvert County granted tax concessions for the first potential new reactor at Calvert Cliffs in August 2006. UniStar ordered forgings and other long lead-time reactor components for the Calvert Cliffs reactor in 2006 and 2007. Formal site selection of Calvert Cliffs for the first UniStar reactor site was not announced until April 2007. The French utility, Electricite de France (EdF), has now joined UniStar Nuclear in project aspects related to reactor operation. Only one reactor is being considered for Calvert Cliffs in the short term. The reactor design would be AREVA NP’s EPR reactor. The environmental component of the Calvert Cliffs COL was filed on 13 July 2007. In January 2008, UniStar announced that a final decision would be made �in the next 12-18 months on whether to proceed with a third reactor�� Part 2 of UniStar�s application for Calvert Cliffs was received by the NRC in March 2008 and is undergoing review. . Comanche Peak, Texas (Energy Future Holdings [Luminant]) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on 19 September 2008. Although TXU Corporation initially announced that it might build at as many as three sites, it subsequently announced that plans were limited to construction of two reactors at Comanche Peak, southwest of Fort Worth, Texas. TXU favored the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries 1,700 MWe US-APWR design for this site. The Comanche Peak COL application could serve as a reference COL for any future US-APWR COL filings. TXU was acquired by a private investor group on 10 October 2007, and re-named Energy Future Holdings, with the generating component changing its name to Luminant. The new owners intend to proceed with the Comanche Peak nuclear licensing though not the other unnamed sites. (Enrico) Fermi, Michigan (Detroit Edison Company) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on September 13, 2008. The Fermi site has one fully licensed reactor currently in service, Fermi 2. Fermi 1, the world�s first experimental liquid-metal-cooled, fast breeder reactor was shut down in 1972 and is now in Safe Storage. Fermi 3, the subject of Detroit Edison�s latest application, is an ESBWR. The acronym is defined as Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor in the United States, and European Simplified Boiling Water Reactor overseas. Even the name of the reactor might cause confusion. This is the second application for a license for Fermi 3. The original Fermi 3 would have been identical to Fermi 2, but the application was cancelled in 1974. Grand Gulf, Mississippi (NuStart Energy, Entergy) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on 27 February 2008. NRC review suspended at request of applicant. Entergy filed for an ESP in October 2003 for an ESBWR design reactor at its Grand Gulf site. The Grand Gulf site is owned by Entergy, which operates a single existing reactor there. The permit was issued during April 2007. NuStart Energy, a multi-utility consortium, announced on 22 September 2005 that it would assist in the preparation of the Grand Gulf COL. It was originally planned for the Grand Gulf COL to serve, along with Dominion�s North Anna application, as the reference COL for subsequent ESBWR applications to the NRC. Entergy, however, has experienced difficulties in its negotiations with Hitachi and has requested the NRC to halt its review while the reactor choice is being reconsidered. Levy County, Florida (Progress Energy) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on 30 July 2008. Progress Energy�s intention to seek a COL for new reactors in its Florida marketing area was announced in August 2005, when Progress also announced plans to investigate expanding its Shearon Harris site in North Carolina.� Although the Levy site is about 10 miles northeast of the Crystal River 3 nuclear plant, there are no reactors currently located here.� �In May 2007, two Westinghouse AP 1000 units were announced.� Subsequently, initial clearance for the project has been obtained from Levy County officials.� On 5 June 2008, the NRC held a public meeting on the Levy application.4 If construction is approved, the work would begin in 2016 or later.� � Nine Mile Point, New York (UniStar Nuclear, Constellation) On September 30, 2008, UniStar filed a COL Application with the NRC. UniStar Nuclear (A joint venture of Constellation and AREVA NP, formed by Electricite de France (EDF)) announced on 27 October 2005 its intent to file a COL with the NRC for several nuclear power plants. Sites under consideration included Constellation’s existing nuclear power site at Nine Mile Point, New York. According to an EDF communiqu� de presse, a COL application has been filed but a final decision on whether to proceed with construction upon approval has not been made. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Public Service Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be invited to participate in reviewing the project. As of this posting, the application was not yet available for on-line review by the public. North Anna, Virginia (Dominion) The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 27 November 2007.� Dominion Power�s Early Site Permit (ESP) application for the North Anna Station was approved on 20 November 2007.� Seven days after approval of the ESP, the company submitted a COL for one General Electric-Hitachi ESBWR reactor at the site.� Dominion shares COL development information related to the ESBWR design with Entergy and NuStart Energy, which are licensing the same design at Grand Gulf. Entergy has recently delayed filing a COL application for Grand Gulf, leaving the North Anna application as the reference filing for subsequent ESBWR applications with the NRC.� Dominion announced on 1 May 2007 that it had signed contracts with GE for �long-lead nuclear components� for the North Anna plant. River Bend, Louisiana (Entergy) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on 30 September 2008. Entergy announced on 22 September 2005 that it would seek a COL for a new reactor at River Bend, Louisiana. The reactor design selected is General Electric-Hitachi�s ESBWR. According to Gary J. Taylor, Entergy CEO, this design has fewer pipes, valves, cables, and motors then older models reactors.5 � Entergy has ordered long lead-time components for one of its two potential new reactor sites, either Grand Gulf or River Bend. Entergy, however, has experienced difficulties in its negotiations with Hitachi and has requested the NRC to halt its review while the reactor choice is being reconsidered. Shearon Harris, North Carolina (Progress Energy) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on 19 February 2008. Progress Energy informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in August 2005 that it intended to submit a COL application for two reactors in its North and South Carolina service area. Plans were based on anticipated base load electricity demand growth in the region. Selection of the Harris site was announced on 23 January 2006. The reactor design will be Westinghouse�s AP 1000. The site is already the location of one Progress-operated reactor and had originally been designed for as many as four reactors. According to Progress, commercial operations would begin no earlier than 2018. Progress will have to obtain a certificate of public convenience from the North Carolina Utilities Commission to build on the site. South Texas Project, Texas (NRG Energy, South Texas Project) The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 20 September 2007. NRG Energy submitted a COL application for two new reactors at the existing, two-unit South Texas Project site on the Texas coast, south of Houston. The ABWR design of General Electric-Hitachi was chosen. However, agreements for building the reactor were subsequently signed with Toshiba, which also owns international rights to the ABWR design. In contrast to the reactors selected for other potential reactor sites, ABWR units have been built and operated elsewhere in the world. NRG targets construction to begin as early as 2009 under limited work authorizations (LWA) from the NRC. The first South Texas unit is targeted for completion in 2014. NRG is 44 percent owner of the two existing South Texas reactors. The two other owners, CPS Energy (40 percent) and Austin Energy (16 percent), have been offered shares in the new project. Turkey Point, Florida (Florida Power & Light) As of 31 December 2008, the project has not yet filed a COL application. Two AP 1000 reactors are contemplated for the existing Turkey Point Nuclear Plant in Florida. On 19 March 2008, Florida�s Public Service Commission approved the planned expansion at Turkey Point but the utility anticipates many discussions with State and Federal agencies will precede the final decision on whether to build any new reactors. 6 � Florida Power & Light (FPL) notified the NRC that it plans to file a COL application in 2009. Virgil C. Summer, South Carolina (Scana [South Carolina Electric and Gas], Santee Cooper) The COL application was submitted to the NRC on 31 March 2008. South Carolina Electric & Gas Company (a unit of Scana) and South Carolina State-owned electric and water utility, Santee Cooper, notified the NRC in December 2005 that they intended to apply for a COL for two new reactors to be built in South Carolina. The firms announced on 10 February 2006 that they had selected the Summer site for potential new nuclear construction. Announced plans would involve two Westinghouse AP 1000 reactors. The goal is for any new reactors to be completed in time to meet anticipated base load electricity demand growth by the mid-2010s. Scana owns 66.7 percent of the existing Summer reactor and Santee Cooper the remainder. On 31 March 2008, South Carolina Electric and Gas Company (SCE&G) and Santee Cooper filed a COL application for two new reactors at this location. Several months later, on 27 May 2008, Westinghouse Electric Company announced7 an engineering, procurement, and construction contract to provide two AP 1000 reactors to SCE&G for this site.  According to Westinghouse, commercial operation is expected to begin in 2016. Vogtle, Georgia (Southern Company [Georgia Power], Oglethorpe Power, Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, City of Dalton) The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 31 March 2008. Southern Nuclear Operating Company announced on 27 January 2006 that it had selected Westinghouse�s AP 1000 design for its plan to expand the Vogtle plant, and anticipated applying for a COL during March 2008. The sponsors filed for an ESP during August 2006, with the goal of meeting anticipated increased base load power needs in the Georgia electricity market. Southern anticipates that one of the reactors could be completed as early as 2016. Among the permits that the plant would require would be a certificate of need issued by the Georgia Public Service Commission. The Georgia Public Service Commission on 20 June 2006 allowed some planning and licensing costs at Vogtle to be charged to utility customers. The existing reactors at Vogtle are co-owned by Oglethorpe Power, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and the City of Dalton, Georgia. These organizations are involved in potential construction plans at the site. Watts Bar 2, Tennessee (Tennessee Valley Authority) The construction permit was issued on 23 January 1973.� The last newly-built commercial reactor to go on line in the United States was Watts Bar 1 in 1996.  The construction permits for units 1 and 2 were issued in January 1973.  Thirty-six other reactors received construction permits after the Watts Bar reactors.  All but four of these entered commercial service prior to Watts Bar 1 (two units in Washington and Bellefonte 1 and 2 in Alabama were cancelled).  In September 1985, the NRC requested TVA furnish information on plans to address concerns about extensive deficiencies in operating and construction at Watts Bar and other facilities.8 TVA resolved the concerns about unit 1, but TVA concluded that electricity demand would not be sufficient to merit completion of a second reactor.  Since then, however, demand estimates have trended upwards and nuclear power has become more competitive in the marketplace.  It is estimated that work is up to 80 percent complete on this unit.  TVA concludes, however, that finishing the work will take about 5 years and cost about $2.5 billion.9 The TVA Board voted unanimously on 1 August 2007 in favor of completing the work.  The reactor may become the first new U.S. reactor completed in the 21st century. William States Lee III, South Carolina (Duke Energy) The COL Application was submitted to NRC on 13 December 2007. There are no commercial reactors presently operating at the site. Duke is interested in new construction here to meet growing base load power demand in nearby market areas. On 4 March 2005, Duke became the first public utility to notify the NRC of intention to apply for a COL. By October 2005, the AP 1000 reactor was selected by Duke, but negotiations with the site owner, Southern Company, continued for about 5 months. Duke and Southern concluded negotiations in March 2006, as Duke took possession of the Cherokee County site, near Gaffney, South Carolina. Southern initially approached this as a joint venture in which it would have the option to own 45 percent (roughly 500 megawatts) of the reactor�s capacity. In June 2006, Duke announced that the plant would be named the William States Lee III Nuclear Power Plant. Southern agreed to relinquish its interests in the plant in May 2007. Duke has indicated that the earliest possible completion date would be in 2016. 1 Bell Bend: �Because of its close proximity to the Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant, the Bell site was previously referred to in this feature as the Susquehanna site.� Although PPL is both the licensee for the Susquehanna plant and the sponsor of the Bell Bend project, the Bell site is adjacent to rather than on the Susquehanna site.� The Bell Bend site was originally known as Berwick.� 2 UniStar was formed as a holding company under a joint venture by Constellation Energy and Electricitie de France (EDF).�� The joint venture followed a Memorandum of Understanding announced in June 2006 for the two parent companies to work together on developing EPR-type power plants in the United States.� According to a UniStar news release dated 20 July 2007, the company was formed to �develop, own, and operate new U.S. and Canadian nuclear projects.� 4 NRC memo, on-line http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/index.cfm, 14 May 2008 5 �Twp Entergy Nuclear Sites to Apply for Construction and Operating Licenses, Entergy Press Release, 22 September 2005. 6 �Westinghouse, SCE&G in Agreement for Two AP 1000 Nuclear Plants,� PRNewswire, 27 May 2008. 7 Exelon Nuclear Texas Holdings, LLC’s- COLA for Two-unit nuclear Plant will be sugmitted by or one 1 Sept, 2008, by Bob Meyer, submitted by NUCBIZ, on-line http:///www.nucpros.com/, Professional Reactor Operator Society, 24 June 2008. 8 �Watts Bar Unit 2 Reactivation,� Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on-line: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/plant-specific-items/watts-bar.html, 16 November 2006. 9 �Watts Bar 2 is now Job 1,� Knoxville News Sentinel, 2 August 2007, Knoxville, TN. Contact: John Moens Phone: 202-586-1509 Email: John Moens

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O”Keefe Prosecutor Steps Down over Misconduct – Washington Post, NBC, NYT Stay Silent!

I t seems that the Federal prosecutor handing the James O’Keefe (he of ACORN expose’ fame) case in New Orleans has recused himself because he kept Mr. O’Keefe on ice for 24 hours while every major newspaper in the country tarred and feathered him as best they could. Welcome to the new American paradigm of justice.

Trial by media has been around for a while, but now individuals are being specifically targeted for their political beliefs. Mr. O’Keefe did the country a service by revealing corruption at  an ostensible community services organization. In the process he made a lot of enemies on the Left, including, it seems, every major newspaper and television network.

Let’s just see if they run this story. My guess is that the Ministry of Propaganda takes a rain check. Per Fox News:

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Updated February 01, 2010

U.S. Attorney Steps Down From O’Keefe Case

FOXNews.com

James O’Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was “framed” by the media and the U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday.

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AP

Jan. 26: James O’Keefe walks out of the St. Bernard Parish jail in Chalmette, La. (AP).

The same day the man who first published James O’Keefe’s explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to his defense Monday, claiming the conservative filmmaker “sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney” while the prosecutor made his case to the media, the U.S. attorney involved stepped down.

O’Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was “framed” by the media and the U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday.

Hours later, Jim Letten, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, recused himself from the case.

The Department of Justice announced the change in a news release Monday night, but did not say why Letten wanted off the case.

Click here to read the affidavit.

“James O’Keefe sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney, while the U.S. attorney leaked the information about his arrest, helping the media frame it as ‘Watergate Junior,’” Breitbart said.

O’Keefe declined to talk about Breitbart’s allegations on Fox News Monday night, adding he was cooperating with the U.S. attorney’s office and he was pleased with the way the U.S. attorney was handling the case.

He said details of his arrest may be brought up at another time, but not now because it is an ongoing investigation.

“The panty bomber on Christmas was given — you know, this guy’s from Al Qaeda, and he’s not even an American citizen, and he’s given access to an attorney right away. I believe that this was a concerted effort, this is just my opinion, to allow for the media to frame the issue to put James O’Keefe in a very bad position.”

Breitbart said he though the U.S. attorney’s effort was part of a payback scheme against O’Keefe, who posed as a pimp and prostitute with another citizen journalist to enter ACORN offices around the country and get advice on how to apply for federal housing grants for a brothel.

“It’s tied to the Justice Department. And we’ve been very aggressive in asking (Attorney General) Eric Holder to investigate what’s seen on these ACORN tapes and he’s ignored it,” Breitbart said of the media ploy.

Jan Maselli Mann, the first assistant U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, declined to talk about specifics of the case, but said there were are no ulterior motives with their case.

“We don’t try cases in the press,” Mann told FoxNews.com. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office is motivated by nothing more than what we believe is to mandate and enforce the existing laws that were put in place to ensure the safety and security of federal buildings.”

Mann took over the case Monday.

Federal authorities allege that two of the men posed as telephone workers wearing hard hats, tool belts and fluorescent vests when they walked into Landrieu’s office in a federal building in New Orleans a week ago. The other two are accused of helping to organize the plan.

O’Keefe and the other three, one of whom is the son of a federal prosecutor, have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony. There is no allegation of wiretapping mentioned in the FBI affidavit.

O’Keefe has defended himself in the wake of his arrest on accusations that he and three others went to Landrieu’s office to investigate reports from constituents that they were unable to get through to the Democratic senator by phone. He said he did not try to wiretap or bug Landrieu’s phones as has been widely reported in the media.

“On reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building. The sole intent of our investigation was to determine whether or not Sen. Landrieu was purposely trying to avoid constituents who were calling to register their views to her as their senator,” he said in a written statement after his release from custody.

O’Keefe allegedly was using a camera on his cell phone in the reception area of Landrieu’s office to record two of the other men, who told staff members they needed to check the senator’s phone system — specifically the phone closet, where the system’s wires are kept.

Breitbart said he does not believe the wiretapping charge is true.

The Profli-Gate Scandal

Today the President tried to deflect attention from his proposed new spending initiatives by saying that federal spending from 2000-2009 has been profligate. I agree, but then I am a fiscal conservative.

But then came 2008, with the massive TARP I program (much of which will be repaid); the Obama “Stimulus/Pork” package at $870 Billion, and TARP II at another $1.7 Trillion. This in addition to runaway spending in the Federal sector on everything from our wars to Homeland Security to entitlement spending. The federal payroll is now at a record 2.15 Million employees and times are tough for the rest of us.

The President’s proposed budget for 2010 – 2011 has a $1.6 Trillion deficit, and he is proposing another $600 Billion Jobs (read: Pork) bill. And we have almost nothing to show for any of this spending. To cover it with a fig leaf, the president has proposed to remove funding for NASA’s manned space program, one of the country’s greatest technology achievements and a source of national greatness, and a few other symbolic cuts amounting to a few billion dollars. His promises to remove pork from the budget have become meaningless.

In addition, he was  willing to foist a bankrupt and utterly corrupt Health Care bill on the country until the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts made it virtually impossible.

So from this day forward, I shall call this the “Profli – Gate” Scandal. It doesn’t just involve the White House and the various Departments, but Congress, K Street, and most of the entitlement seeking community. It is an ecumenical Scandal. There is plenty of blame to go around.

The President lectured us in New Hampshire today, telling us “when times are tough, we tighten our belts”. After the nightmare budgets he has proposed, this is the height of hypocrisy. This is “do as I say, not as I do” to the 10th power.

As Americans across the country have tightened their belts, we have  Senator Jim Clyburn (D-SC) telling us we have to spend our way out of the recession. The logical dissonance is deafening.   It’s like an alcoholic counseling abstinence.

Reporters should investigate. Courageous congressmen should hold hearings. Editorialists should editorialize. We have the most irresponsible pack of economic hooligans and grifters in our country’s history driving the bus off the cliff.

Wasting a technology resource – Old Guys

I have spent the past week at a solar power show in San Francisco. It’s flashy, it’s green and it’s new, and an awful lot of it is not made in America. You see, it is another technology with a long history here, but the most successful commercialization to date has been overseas. This may change with new technologies, but the United States is again behind the power curve.

If you’ve attended enough technology trade shows over the years, you may have met the old guys (and a few girls). The slide ruler crowd has been around for a long time, and in most cases simply retired at the ends of their careers. More often recently, they have been forcibly retired because they are the senior ones, the ones who cost too much.

In addition, we have seen both corporate America and government reduce funding for R&D and even applications engineering to criminally negligent levels in the drive to cut costs and overhead.

So these old guys, who in many cases literally “wrote the book” come back to the trade shows and conferences; to see old friends, see what’s new, and perhaps find a new job or someone to bounce ideas off. You see, they never really stopped thinking. And lawn bowling and bridge or golf usually don’t make one’s day the way diving into technology problems does and are not in the composition of a lot of these people. Some become consultants. Most don’t have the gift of gab, and if very lucky, have a skill others might find useful. Most, however, find themselves at liberty with not much to do.

And yet today we need these old guys more than ever. Somewhere 20 years ago or so someone gave the keys to America’s technology infrastructure to a bunch of 16 year olds with MBA’s and law degrees and a penchant for champagne and crystal meth, and they have driven our economy off a cliff.

When they cut back at Bell Labs and IBM and Motorola and DuPont and Monsanto and 100 other technology companies, they forgot how to invent new stuff. It takes time and money and the ability to allow some guy or bunch of guys to putter in a lab for years to invent Post It’s or personal computers or nylon or the guts of the next iPod. Eventually it pays off, but the operative word is eventually. Today’s management is looking for instant results and instant payoff.

A whole generation of engineers and researchers has been cast up on shore as companies outsourced and entitlement programs were eaten away by government entitlement programs.

And yet even now they are thinking up new materials and processes and efficiencies. These are in many cases our best and brightest. Whether it’s the old guy at Home Depot with a couple of fingertips missing or a research chemist scribbling now on a yellow legal pad, we need these men and women to help get us back on our economic feet. Without manufacturing and technology and invention, we are lost. And we are wasting one of our most valuable resources.

The Great Winter of 2010 – God has a sense of irony

Washington is once again beset by Father Winter. As I write, another storm that is expected to drop 18″+ of snow is beginning to fall. The cute little snowflakes of early winter have now becoming deadly. Frosty the Snowman has turned into Snowzilla. From Nantucket to North Carolina to Nebraska we are seeing a winter unlike any in 100 years. Vancouver, on the other hand, is snowless as the Olympics are about to open.

Climategate broke in late November, if you recall. Since then, one data source after another after another has been impeached. The IPCC climate nazis have been found to be using  inaccurate sources of information from extremist groups such as Greenpeace; falsifying data such as the elevation of The Netherlands, and using a student’s inaccurate measurements of the Himalayan glaciers to prove global warming. NASA and the NOAA in this country simply omitted the readings from thousands of weather stations from their comprehensive reports back in the 1970′s, slanting the data. All of these  indicators reinforced their theories to the point of a global consensus of those who were supposed to know better. And yet the politicians and intelligentsia are repeating this same mantra over and over in the face of the facts.

They have put Al Gore’s picture on milk cartons in several states as he seems to have disappeared and there are a lot of people looking for him to do some ‘splaining about “An Inconvenient Truth” . In Washington, the NOAA was supposed to announce a new Climate Service Office as a clearinghouse for global warming information. It’s been delayed because of snow.

As the Obamas react to the heart of the storm hitting tomorrow by rescheduling their weekly soiree’ (this week’s entertainment: Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan, Natalie Cole, Seal, Johnny Cougar (now John Cougar Mellenkamp), etc.) for this evening,  the White House is beginning to sound more and more like the inverse of Nero’s reaction to the burning of Rome. Washington’s limited fleet of snowplows has been breaking down since the last snowfall and is about to go kablooie and the man with the power to fix it is bopping out as I write.

The climate is changing. It does it every day. But the data is now telling us to perhaps reconsider some of our findings. I do believe God has just cried “B.S.!” on the whole lot of them.

The Greek Dilemma

Greece owes 53 Billion Euros on its sovereign debt this year that it can’t pay. That doesn’t include next year’s overdraft, or the year after. In contrast, California is around $14 Billion short so far this year. But the debt problems don’t end there. In Europe, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy are in the same boat, while in America we have New Jersey, Michigan, New York, and Ohio functionally insolvent in addition to California. The total debt owed this year by these government entities is north of $500 Billion. Why that’s just a drop in Obama’s bucket you might say, but remember, the United States has already tapped out the credit markets. An awful lot of that TARP money is parked in U.S. treasuries and demand from elsewhere is very limited at the moment.

The Chinese seem to be pulling out of anything other than American sovereign debt to hedge their bets, and there are some over there urging them to divest even this because of our offer to sell arms to Taiwan. Where would they go instead? Japan? They are a fiscal basket case.  Indonesia? Switzerland? Brazil? The debt markets are running into a very unusual situation. There’s nowhere to park money safely right now, and the world is in a deflationary environment. This would accelerate with a collapse in the Chinese real estate bubble, which is becoming ever more likely. Chinese bank debt is another ticking bomb their government is trying to paper over. At the same time, demand for money is at an all time high and inflation is being kept in check only through artificially low interest rates.

So where does Greece fit into this? Right now, the Germans, the holders of the bulk of Greek government debt, have met with the other 27 EU countries and strung together a bunch of maybes and whatifs to support Greece contingent upon  reducing their deficit from 12.7% of GDP (the highest in Europe) to 3% by 2012. The Greek public sector unions, one of the problems in the first place, are planning a general strike. The Germans do not want to call on the IMF because that would imply weakness in the Euro and further devalue the currency. At the same time, the hedge funds are prowling, looking to turn any weakness into an advantage. The odds of it getting nasty are high.

German banks have taken a massive hit with the global financial crisis we have been going through and hold significant amounts of Eastern European debt as well. Even Germany is at risk in such an environment.

If Greece goes down, the probability of Portugal and other countries defaulting increases exponentially.  Call it the AIG syndrome. This would set off a sell off in the Euro and affect the European economy for years. The drive to preserve (forget about increasing) wealth would drive money to the safest havens, further constricting economic activity. China would feel the brunt as well. In late 2007, China lost millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of factories shuttered. The same would happen again as markets shrank. No one is immune except perhaps the 3rd World, who have nothing to begin with.

The uncertainty would affect  North America as well, increasing the difficulty of financing debt,  leading to further deficits. If 6 of the largest economies in North America can’t pay their bills now and will not make the hard decisions to reduce deficits, what happens when there are no one lends them any money any more? Sooner or later the Sheriff shows up to foreclose.

The world has been running on Other People’s Money for the past 60 years. Some governments, companies and individuals have acted responsibly. Most have not. There was a reason people hid gold under the mattress, if you recall, and that reason was a distrust of institutions, whether banks or governments.

The sensible solution is a drawn out pullback from the profligate spending practices of government that got us into this mess in the first place. It has to be done globally, and there will have to be a lot of coöperation between countries in both the public and private sectors. This used to be called the “helping hand” philosophy. Because if they don’t, the fissures will erupt into fault lines and we will see everyone running for the exits at once and devil take the hindmost. There has to be much more gravitas and common sense than has been seen so far.

As our own government considers an $80 Billion “Jobs” bill with almost no money to help actually create jobs, it is just more evidence they still don’t get it. Fiscally, government is the problem, not the solution. Even if the Greek government confiscated all the wealth in the country, it would still fall apart. This can be said on a global basis.

I hope I’m wrong;  that somehow we will muddle through or there will be an epiphany of common sense. But the odds just don’t seem to be there.

The American Manned Space Program – Why cancellation is a Very Bad Idea

There has been much criticism of the president’s cancellation of the Constellation manned space flight program, but there has also been significant support for the decision, much by proponents of commercial space flight and critics both within and outside of NASA. It is said NASA has become sclerotic and bureaucratic and can no longer effectively do the job. It has been proposed that commercial companies can somehow take up the slack. How soon we forget the risks and rewards of manned space flight, and why government must take the lead.

My father was a noted rocket scientist. He had a wide range of experience in the field, having been a leader on many  projects over the years.  Not a lot of rocket scientists came out of Brooklyn, but he was proud of it and kept the Brooklyn attitude of skepticism and panache. He was who he was and gave it to you straight.

When you’re a 10 year old boy and your dad has one of the coolest jobs in the world you glom onto every bit of information you can find. Our entire nation was like this in the 60′s, with LIFE magazine and National Geographic documenting the manned space program every step of the way. But there was something that didn’t get talked about a lot. The risks.

Since my father had witnessed a few rockets falling out of the sky, he knew the dangers first hand. Manned space flight is the hairiest job there is. My father said that the wonder of it was not that we made it into space and have had an incredible run of successes, but that we didn’t lose more astronauts along the way. In the early days, it was projected that we would lose more astronauts than we would put into space. As it stands, we lost Apollo 1, the Challenger, and the Columbia and every one of their crews. And after each disaster and the funerals, the engineers and technicians and scientists went back and analyzed every single factor for months until they found the root cause. Billions of dollars were spent on improving technology and reliability to make manned space flight safer. Billions the private sector would never invest.

In the 1920′s it was the United States Army that flew the mail. Why? Because it was too dangerous to do so commercially at the time. Once the technology was improved to a point where commercial companies could implement it safely, the airlines began to exploit the opportunity. But without the pioneering and resource allocation of government, commercial aviation would never have taken off the ground. The same holds true for space.

The Shuttle fleet is being grounded, and it was only 7 years ago that the Columbia exploded over Texas. We have many challenges ahead of us, and rocket science isn’t cheap. In the meantime, India, China, and Russia have all accelerated their space programs. There has been very little discussion about Mankind in any of these programs. With the exception of the Russians, whose cooperation has self interest at  heart, these programs are purely nationalistic and results oriented.

Look at the countries with active manned programs and ask yourself if you are comfortable with their intentions. Space is both the new frontier and a potential battlefield. Manned space flight is part and parcel of this equation. We can launch all the satellites we want, but in battle he who controls the high ground wins.  The kumbaya of the International Space Station will achieve instant irrelevance if there is not a balance of power. It is in our national self interest to have manned lift capability.

From the inception of science fiction, writers have been intrigued by the scientific and economic potential of space. Our moon is the nearest destination, and we still have no clues  to the part it will play in our future. Are there resources? Is there great knowledge yet to learn there? We just don’t know. The last lunar landing was Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972. Since then, the following projects have been focused on learning how to survive for extended periods in space, and we have to a great extent been stuck at this phase since.

The Mars Rover project indicates there may be water on that planet. The Cassini project indicates there are huge methane lakes on the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn. Methane is a hydrocarbon normally produced through the reduction of organic matter on our planet. What does this mean? Where did Titan’s methane come from? How did it get there? How was it created? What are the implications for the existence of carbon based life forms in space? These are not only secrets of the universe, but also indicators of  what may be the key to our future survival as a species and planet.

And sooner or later man must go out there and find out. Robots and rovers only tell us so much. We will need to expose ourselves to the dangers of exploration of the harshest and most dangerous environment we have yet known. And we, as Americans, have pioneered this effort in good faith. While competing with the Russians in the 60′s, we also extended the hand of friendship and cooperation. No other country has the resources and skills to explore so far out there and yet we have freely offered these in the interests of humanity. Who else has done so? Who else would? It is another part of what makes us American.

America is under fire from all sides right now. Our basic values are under assault. Our economy and manufacturing base are weakened. Capitalism has been reviled around the world including in our own nation’s capital. Manned space exploration requires a constant and focused application of the most advanced science and technology. It demands our best. And the fruit of this labor is invention. This is what has keep our economy at the forefront. We lose this, and to a great extent, we lose everything eventually. We are now outsourcing space flight to the Russians.

When a civilization tilts too far to one side, we sometimes forget the underlying fundamentals. The reasons for a manned space flight program are the same as for nuclear energy and clean technology. It is in our best interests in the long run. Economically, strategically, scientifically, and philosophically. From a cost performance basis it is one of the best investments we can make.

Man has dreamt of the stars for thousands of years. In this, religion and science are intertwined whether we like it or not. Cancellation of our manned space program is a giant step backwards, for once done, it will be most difficult to restart. Retreats start from a single step backwards.

The Taliban Opium Connection

U.S., British, and Afghan forces are staging in the Afghan city of Lashkar Gah for the encirclement of Marjah and have moved in to Marjah to sporadic resistance so far. Helmand Province, of which Lakshar Gah is the capital, is larger than West Virginia.

From the upper valleys of Helmand down to the outskirts of Lakshar Gah the opium poppy is the crop of choice. The poppy is easily grown and offers the highest return to the farmer, even under the crushing debt imposed by the feudal sharecropping system imposed by the warlords. 40-50% of the world’s total output of heroin originates here.

Marjah is just one town. Opium is a way of life there now. Even in 2002, the exposure to the poppy was limited in the area.  Then came the Taliban and the warlords. For you see it is intertwined. The grease of the opium trade corrupts everyone involved. The provincial governor is involved. The local khans are involved. And the Taliban have acted as the nexus of the trade. The Taliban exerts a tax on the growers, another tax on the refiners, and then another tax on the traffickers. They then provide security for shipments into Pakistan and Iran at a price as well. it is their most important source of funds. Opium and heroin permeate the southern Afghan economy from the highlands of Helmand to the Baluchi badlands.

While Osama bin Laden was reliant upon his own wealth and donations from the Oil States, the Taliban, including Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, and the Haqqani network are in it up to their eyeballs. It is said Mullah Omar has a private stash of more than 4,000 kilos of heroin intermediate. This is what funds the Taliban. Local commanders use opium money to buy the ammonium nitrate that kills British and American soldiers in the form of IED’s and the services of jihadis. Jihad pays well in Afghanistan for a very specific reason.

And until we understand this fundamental truth and act accordingly, we will continue to take excessive casualties. The farmers must make a reasonable living, but they must have alternatives. Until we figure this out we will not win hearts and minds. At the same time we must starve the Taliban economically. It is amazing how this can constrict operations.

We are in an asymmetric battle in Afghanistan. The old rules do not apply. While General McChrystal applies a hearts and minds campaign, we must at the same time offer profitable and legal means of income to those who desperately need it while choking off the funding for the enemies of conciliation and stability.

The Greek Scam

John Mauldin at Seeking Alpha has an excellent piece up on the Greek financial crisis entitled “Sovereign Default: stuck between dire and disastrous”. Today, the Greek Finance Minister,  George Papaconstantinou, set the crash in motion by refusing to agree to  the fiscal cuts necessary to move any agreement with other EU countries forward just prior to this week’s meeting with other European finance ministers.  He also compared their economy to the Titanic. Not the best of analogies.

Already in Greece, the reaction to just the threat of cuts has fired nationalism and self interest. The public sector unions have been protesting nonstop and the situation is threatening to careen out of control. There is no will at any level in the country to reign in the excesses and corruption which have gotten them into the current mess. The wealthy are moving funds out of the country as fast as they can.  So far, the government has only offered fig leaves, trying to delay a plan into March or April. One way or the other, it is likely the current government will fall as the situation degrades. The choices, as Mauldin points out, are dire or disastrous.

But it gets worse. The Greek government knowingly and aggressively went to Wall Street years ago with a cooked set of books to borrow even more. Working with Goldman Sachs and other firms, they then issued derivatives that were kept off the books by the government . The full extent of the mess is still not known. We do know they fractionated off customs duties and airport fees and lottery income. So far the total government debt is up to somewhere north of 265 Billion Euros with an immediate need to refinance 64 Billion this year. What they are now doing is rolling over the interest on the debt. Greece, to put it bluntly, is using payday loans to keep disaster from the door while they cover their ears and eyes to try and ignore the problem. Bernie Madoff ‘s got nothing on this scam.

In addition to this, Dubai World has floated a tentative offer to pay back their debt ($60 Billion+) at 60 cents on the dollar, sticking their investors for up to $25 Billion. The Chinese government is also rumored to be considering allowing the RMB Yuan to float more freely in order to brake the economic bubble in that country.  This would increase costs of Chinese goods in export markets which, coupled with inflationary pressures to devalue currencies such as the Euro might set off a stagflation.

The fireworks will begin this week as hedge funds and traders digest the news and act. While many Asian investors are celebrating the Year of the Tiger, their money never sleeps, either. One way or the other, someone will start running for the exits and the stampede will begin. Spain is deeply concerned that there will be a run on their debt, while Portugal is trying to negotiate with Angola and Brazil to bail them out. It’s a wacky world out there when Portugal is going to their former colonies, who don’t exactly have much in the way of funds either. Right now, the global debt crisis is like  Wile E. Coyote trying to tiptoe away from the box of Acme explosives tied to his tail. Somewhere out there, the Roadrunner is about to light the match.

Stimulus Fiction

The President was on TV again yesterday touting the success of the $862 Billion ( up from $787 Billion) Stimulus (aka Porkulus) Bill. Apparently 2,000,000+ new jobs have been magically created, and yet unemployment in the United States stands at 10%, 1.5 points above where it stood when the bill was signed into law a year ago.

USA Today yesterday published a partial accounting of the spending to date, singling out Education, Energy, Transportation, and Safety Net spending as critical metrics. Of the $386.5 Billion allocated to these sectors, $145.9 Billion has been spent so far. The largest component of this by far ($103.9 Billion) was the safety net spending, which comprises primarily of extended unemployment insurance benefits. How this creates jobs is a mystery.

That leaves $240 Billion in remaining available funds in these sectors, and another $475 Billion unaccounted for. Remember, when the bill was being written, every knuckleheaded pet project in the country was being funded and much of the spending, especially on infrastructure, was projected to be spent over periods as long as 10 years. And somehow, 2,000,000 jobs have already been created. Why we’ll just have to be importing labor next year at this rate.

In my neighborhood there is a toll road, California 73, that I drive every day. It was built only a few years ago and is a corrupt boondoggle. There is some kind of grading that takes place every now and then, and every so often one will see a couple of trucks sitting on the side of the road idle, but there is very little work going on. But what we do see every day is the big Stimulus sign indicating our tax dollars at work. On a new, privately owned highway.

And yet we are seeing some early signs of hope. The manufacturing sector is recovering despite, not because of government intervention. In the Fall of 2008 manufacturing activity halted. It shut down as I have never before seen as if someone hit a switch not only here but around the world. Managers were confronted with a complete melt down as the Wall Street crisis unfolded. No one knew which way to jump. Manufacturing was at its lowest level since the end of World War II. It had to eventually revive simply to replace essential commodities and products as they wear out.

The automotive industry is operating at approximately 50% of 2007 peak production. The recent Christmas holidays were down approximately 18% from an already terrible 2008.  And yet factory shipments are rising again, and we are seeing small signs of growth here and there. It is highly doubtful that any of this has to do with government stimulus programs.

I can cite one specific example of the Stimulus Bill on which I can comment from direct experience. Our company is involved in green technology at the manufacturing level. The magical government money spigot that is supposed to usher in widespread solar power has still not been turned on, and a number of start ups dependent on either commercial credit, which does not exist, or government money to provide seed capital are in danger of dying on the vine. The other unspoken truth is that most of the jobs created will be minimum wage manufacturing. Most of the popular green technologies require what we in the industry call “screwdriver” jobs. Repetitive, simple work that will last as long as the boom lasts and then  quickly be gone.

So if we are at close to record unemployment and the jobs outlook is bleak and homelessness is at record highs, where are all of the jobs these days? I know of only one place. The public sector.

In most states and especially at the Federal level, employment is still growing. In spite of all of the logical indicators, it seems the legislators in their state houses and our Administration in Washington still don’t get it. Government jobs now pay significantly better than the private sector and contribute not one dime to GNP or a reduction on the deficit. Their effect is precisely the opposite. The monster is growing like a cancer cell splitting and splitting again until it consumes the host.

Yesterday, the governor of California was on the radio proposing that benefits to legal, not illegal immigrants be cut. The numbers are a few million out of a multibillion dollar deficit, but not one word about the fraud and waste and bureaucracy that is smothering the state. Instead, he picked a weak target and ignored the elephants in the room. This is how out of touch our ruling class has become.

It is a weird alternate reality when our president and his vice president openly stand in front of the country and lie in the face of the facts. They simply ignore their own numbers and continue blithely down the rabbit hole. People are slack jawed at the sheer incompetence of government and can’t figure out whether our leaders are criminal or just simply insane.

We seem to have spent most of our money to date on clunkers  of every description.

Operation Clown & a Pony

We were informed yesterday that Operation Iraqi Freedom has been renamed Operation New Dawn. American forces are scheduled to be withdrawn in August, and the Iraqis will have full responsibility for keeping the public order and their own defense. Sectarian violence still rears its head, and the Iraqi state is dysfunctional, but real progress has been made. Kurdistan is still a huge issue as is power sharing between Shias and Sunnis, but in the interest of getting out of Dodge, it’s the Iraqis problem now.

What was amazing was Vice President Clueless Joe  Biden’s comment the other day that Iraq would be President Obama’s greatest victory. Ignoring the Anbar Awakening and General Petraeus’ surge, somehow now two of the war’s most vocal opponents are claiming the prize of victory. It’s all just a part of the propaganda machine that this administration has become. We went from one of the most inarticulate administrations in modern times to one consumed by the message rather than substance.

We are actually now seeing some success in Afghanistan. In a culture of vendetta, General McChrystal has basically taken the air component out of the fight in order to reduce civilian casualties and try to win hearts and minds. Afghans affected by air strikes were taking up arms, and it hoped now that  we can reduce the potential for Taliban recruitment by using soft power instead. The jury is out on the experiment, but it is an effort to change the game and perhaps make progress in a country where a significant minority are doing their best to pull them back into the 16th Century.

Marjah is now a slog, but we knew that going in. The Taliban never really held their ground and faded into the woodwork, as smart guerillas faced with overwhelmingly superior firepower should. They are now using effective sniper fire to do their best to make life difficult for our Marines, soldiers and allies. And their snipers are good.

It will be interesting to see if the strategy will gain support from the populace or whether we will be faced with whack a mole and the Taliban pop up elsewhere. There is still the issue of the opium trade to deal with. While our forces are in Lashkar Gah and Marjah, Helmand is the size of West Virginia and riven with poppy fields, labs, and bazaars where the primary medium of exchange is raw opium. 40 -50% of the world’s heroin originates there. 15,000 – 20,000 troops simply does not make a big footprint in such a large area.

On the other side of the border we may be seeing our greatest progress, with three major Quetta Shura Taliban leaders captured in the past 2 weeks. One of them seems to have accidently been captured in a sweep for smaller fish, but now the Pakistani Army has seen a promised $12 Billion assistance program from the United States, and found Allah. Perhaps they are also now seeing an existential threat from the fanatics and are acting both as allies and in their own self interest. Hekmatyr and Haqqani have not yet been taken down, but the potential exists that the safe havens will become less safe. Pakistan is a riddle wrapped in graft and double dealing.

This is the straight word, not spin. How it is presented by our government is another story. It’s a shame we have to think this way and not simply as American citizens.

California – Closer to the Edge

Another article appeared today, this in the San Francisco Chronicle, basically asking “Is California bankrupt?”.  It’s funny, because one would want to believe our government actually cared, but by the way in which they are handling the crisis, it is perfectly obvious they don’t. It is the fiscal equivalent of an ostrich with its head in the sand.

California owes $8.8 Billion in debt due by June 1. The first tranche is in early March for @ $2 Billion. The problem is that revenue is at a historic low in the state and businesses and taxpayers are fleeing. Revenues are shrinking and with the high taxes and dumb policies of our state government, will continue to do so.

Greece is tottering on the edge with several other countries right behind them. This is all real time immediate. Next week, 1 month real time. In addition to California, Ohio, New York, Michigan, and New Jersey are in the same dire financial condition. Why would anyone with a shred of sanity think to lend money to a spendthrift with little or no chance of repayment? And if one goes they could all go. That’s how crises work. Banks don’t lend to people who have no hope of paying the debt back. It’s called risk management. The Federal government is already in way over its head, and he Chinese are divesting themselves of most U.S. debt. There are very few other potential lenders these days.

If enough of these governments go on the fritz with the global economy just climbing out of the worst recession in the past 70 years, the world economy will take a massive hit.

At the same time, with our state government in denial, they have done virtually nothing to fix the underlying financial problems; unfunded public pension mandates, an out of control bureaucracy, and a payroll structure that far exceeds the private sector in many departments. They are starving the cities rightfully due their share of state collected tax revenues while raiding supposedly off limits income sources like the lottery and gasoline tax revenues to fictitiously close the gap. These just end up on the other side of the balance sheet as additional debt as we move along on our merry way to hell. California is the Greece of the United States when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility.

Our legislature is frozen in place. Even the state’s controller, John Chiang is in denial. He repeats his mantra that states technically cannot be bankrupt and he is technically right. He tells us that it is virtually impossible for the state to miss a payment, and he is right. But the fact is that when the state can no longer pay its bills and people refuse to accept its IOU’s, the jig is up. Whether technically bankrupt or not, the state is done for financially. What then? No one really knows, because no state has ever really gone there before. Another first for the Great State of California.

Obama’s Health Care Plan – The Charge of the Light Brigade

The president has formally stated his health care plan and he seems driven to steer the much maligned Senate version of the bill, with a number of the worst options of the House bill right over the falls. We at least know what the President is actually for  for the first time. He owns this one lock, stock, and barrel. There is no more wiggle room.

That it will probably destroy the Democratic Party in the next election doesn’t seem to matter. Opposition to the bill is at 56%, much of it from generally Democratic leaning constituencies such as the elderly and the young.

The bill is poorly crafted and contains hundreds of loopholes. The back room deals with Big Pharma and companies such as Wal Mart still remain. The large corporations will once again benefit from crony capitalism while the workers and retirees get screwed. Those working in small companies will bear a larger burden of their costs.

The worst part of it is what it will do to our health system. Rationing is virtually a certainty as is a decline in the quality of care. We are taking the best medical system in the world and turning it into a completely unworkable mess. Ask the Premier of Newfoundland, who just had heart surgery in Miami, for his opinion.

Few of the key problems with our current system are actually addressed and more will be created as the President adds an additional $800 Billion burden to an already overextended and corrupt mess. As the Chinese ease their way out of U.S. investments, they will start running for the doors as they see us do our best to bankrupt ourselves.

In the face of common sense, public opinion, statistics, and his own Treasury, the President stands like Lord Lucan, the clueless leader of the British cavalry at the battle of Balaclava. President Obama is ordering his troops into the teeth of intense opposition both within their own party and externally. The political firestorm has not yet begun, but Obama’s meeting with the Republicans on Thursday will probably be the first shot fired.

The plan was released yesterday, giving the Republicans time to freeze, personalize, and polarize the President’s message before their meeting. It seems there is no compromise possible, so why bother?  What he was thinking when he proposed the meeting and then put lipstick on this pig of a bill lies beyond the comprehension of mere mortals such as myself. It makes no sense to walk into a room full of one’s opponents having drawn a line in the sand already. Anything said is mere formality at that point. This is sheer incompetence, arrogance, or both.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was one of the greatest military blunders in history. Poor intelligence and miscommunication led to disaster. This time though, the President and his allies are walking into the valley of political death in full knowledge of the consequences. If given his way, the deaths will become real and immediate as our health care system falls apart.

Selling out our closest ally; Obama & the Falklands

The State Department said today about the dispute between Argentina and The United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands;

“We are aware not only of the current situation but also the history, but our position remains one of neutrality. The US recognizes the de facto UK administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party.”

It would seem that our administration has been doing its best to not only offend, but undermine our country’s closest ally at every turn.

In Afghanistan the only large nation shoulder to shoulder with us now is the UK. Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, and Germany have all set withdrawal dates, but the British are still with us in one of the most important fights of the new century. Make no mistake. If Afghanistan goes, we will see Islamic extremism once again on the rise.

Consider the political situation in South America at present. Hugo Chavez has done his best to export his brand of socialism across  Latin America. In Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, the leftist siren song and the cult of the caudillo are once again on the rise. With this comes a very strong anti-American component.

The political fiasco in Honduras caused by our government’s emotional attachment to the Left in the face of our own national interests, never mind the Honduran Constitution, embarrassed us and aligned our interests with those of  our opponents. Honduras followed the rule of law. It was our government who were mistaken.

In Argentina, the proximate cause of the current dispute is a desperate effort by the government to divert attention from an economic meltdown. The Argentine government has grown more desperate as their economic options have dwindled. Most recently, the seizure of all private pension funds by the government was simply a $30 Billion bank job. An attempt recently to take over the agricultural sector led to nationwide strikes and more damage to the economy. Waving the flag and shouting out “Las Malvinas” is the worst sort of jingoism. Now with potentially billions in oil revenues at stake the sharks are circling.

The Falklands have a mixed history since their discovery by the Spaniards in the 1500′s. The French, Spaniards, British, and Argentines all have laid claim. In the 1700′s, Spain and Britain had settlements on separate islands. In 1828, not long after independence (1820), Argentine businessmen hired an American privateer to claim the Falklands for themselves. The United States actually destroyed the Argentine colony in 1830 because of mistreatment of American sealers. The British moved back in formally in 1833 and have been there ever since, using the islands as a coaling station and having established sheep stations. Today it is a backwater.

In 1982, the Argentine junta, led by Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri was faced with an economic crisis similar to today’s and saw the Falklands as easy pickings. The Argentines invaded and took over. The United Nations quickly condemned the takeover and recognized the UK’s  use of Article 51 of the UN Charter, the self defense clause. The fault lines were clear, with most Spanish speaking countries supporting Argentina and most of the rest of the world supporting the UK. The United States was technically neutral, but materially assisted the UK. The bond between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the historical bonds between both countries, were strong.

Today, those bonds are being shredded by the incompetence and puerile “anti-ism” of the current administration. From the snub issued with the return of  the Winston Churchill bust that once resided in the Oval Office shortly after Obama’s inauguration, to the choice of an iPod loaded with the President’s speeches as a gift to the Queen when they met, the policy seems to be that of a 12 year old rather than of the president of the UK’s closest ally.

While the President has courted Chavez and Lula da Silva, he has gotten nothing in return. Their anti-Americanism has a long history and will not change. Argentina has always had a history of fiscal and political recklessness. Nothing has changed this time except both through the United Nations resolution and force of arms, the UK  retained its sovereignty over the Falklands and established a clear claim under international law.

If  Obama were to consider Churchill’s dictum that “nations have interests, not friends”, how does our neutrality benefit us? How would an Argentine takeover of the Falklands affect American interests? It must also be remembered that the Argentine government invaded the Falklands because they thought the British would not defend them. This was the same rationale used by Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. In both cases the United States remained noncommittal. Our mixed message can and have resulted in unnecessary wars.

With British troops fighting and dying next to ours and with our nations closely joined culturally, economically, and politically, our government’s actions fly in the face of common sense. Chavez and his allies may well decide to actively assist the Argentines. What then? Bland statements of neutrality serve no ones interests, and an infatuation with statists has never furthered either the cause of peace or our national interests.

Liberalism and its conceits – Kanazawa’s flaw

(CNN) — Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Interesting conclusion. What the author has not identified is the trend towards secular religion among those he identifies as liberal and atheist that has occurred over the past 150 years. Whether National Socialism, Communism, Environmentalism, Socialism or Atheism, a lot of supposedly smart people have decided to substitute one God for another. We have gone from an age of intelligent skepticism to one of false idols in a generation. Why? Let’s go back in time and establish the philosophical underpinnings.

The essence of existentialism was distilled by Kierkegaard as Either/Or, the existence of the hedonistic versus purposeful, ethical life. His concept of a “superman” was one of transcendence of the contradictions of humanity towards a more perfect union with God. This baseline was then interpreted by Nietzsche as the Ubermensch, who replaces God with a transcendent, new evolved man devoid of the crutch of religion.

Nietzsche was in direct conflict with the Aristotelean ethics at the basis of Western culture for 2,300 years. He did this in the mid 19th Century style of the bomb thrower with inflammatory treatises such as The Antichrist, Also Sprach Zarathustra, and The Gay Science. With his Campaign against Morality he placed himself in direct conflict not only the mores of the time but with the fundamental underpinnings of modern science and philosophy.

Synthesized with the emergence of Rousseau’s philosophy of the Natural Man, a new hybrid based upon the aesthetic that offered liberation from morality and logic was created. This was then, with the horrors of the First and Second World Wars as a background, refined by Sartre and Camus into modern existentialism, where  Sartre stated the aesthetic ideal as the goal and Camus posited the absurd and random as the primary movers. Derrida and Foucault then followed with deconstructionism and neoanarchism respectively. Upon these pillars is modern philosophy based.

And yet in the sciences, humanity is making incredible strides based upon that same Aristotelean logic discarded by Nietzsche. Looking at the screen of an electron microscope or at the images from the Hubble Telescope, there is a structure and order and syllogism that point directly towards the existence of a system far more complex than our simple understanding. This does not indicate there are no gods, but rather the existence of something or someone so far more powerful than can even be imagined.

Darwin, used as the shield and sword of modern science and logic,but simply observed that evolution is a part of our system as well. While this is in conflict with the literalism of Biblical teaching it must still be recognized by Christians that while dictated by God, the Bible was written by man.

One of the few ways to make sense of the universe is through evolution. If understood as a historical process and an erratic progression with wrong turns, dead ends, and the occasional breakthrough, then faith, logic, and evolution are not mutually exclusive. To date, the arguments against the existence of God by the “smarter” people identified by Kanazawa boil down to variations on “show Him to me”.  Skepticism is natural, but when faced with logical and convincing data outlining an alternative, one must concede the possibility. The principle of Occam’s razor does not exist in many of the modern liberal arguments. Those making them are in fact as simplistic as their simplistic opponents.

Progressivism has at its roots the same Judeo-Christian ethic that informs  conservatism; the good. However, as defined, it is simply the  advocacy of change or reform without a defined endpoint. Adam Smith, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and the founders of the United States posited their philosophies on the invisible hand. Logic,  a rigid application of guiding principles, and rigid standards of personal responsibility all contributed to progress and a more perfect society.

Progressivism/socialism arose as a reaction to injustices  in Europe and North America based upon class exploitation. The split between Christian social democracy and communism was specifically that caused by religion. But under the assault of their own liberal interpretation of socialism and existentialist amorality the philosophical foundations of progressivism were lost. One cannot logically reconcile Nietzsche and his acolytes with the greater good. If the  underpinnings of liberal philosophy are logically unsound, then what follows must also become suspect.

The wealth of modern society has allowed for unprecedented luxury and indulgence. At the same time as the requirements of focus  within ever more esoteric specialties and sciences demand the most of our best, the questions that were more widely discussed have become the province of aesthetes and noncritical thinkers. Style now counts for more than substance.

As we see many of the “smart decisions” in economics, business, politics, science, and philosophy collide with the facts, we must question whether liberalism as it is now defined is not in fact simply a trope. Liberalism as it is now practiced is both illogical and illiberal.  While Mr. Kanazawa’s central thesis may have some validity when looked at superficially, the truth is that if the underlying assumptions do not account for logical variables, then the overall conclusion must be challenged. Sloppy science is sloppy whether at the University of East Anglia or LSE.

Hello I must Be Going – A Health Care Legislative Update

Last week, just prior to the Health Care Summit, the president posted his “final” word on the proposed legislation. It was basically the Senate bill with a few of the House versions more egregious programs tacked on. This was the party line until this afternoon. Now we hear that he will instead offer a stripped down version this week. The polling numbers really sucked over the weekend and now it’s a free for all.

The Summit failed to sway anyone, and the president’s poll numbers dropped. Over the weekend, Nancy Pelosi stated that “The health care bill can be bipartisan even though the vote may not be bipartisan.” She said this on CNN and the  peanut gallery is still howling with laughter.

A number of leading Democratic senators have come out against using the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill, and with the opposition of various factions in the House to each others nonnegotiable demands, the whole thing is turning into a Marx Brothers movie with guns. Meanwhile, Charlie Rangel is hiding in the closet hoping no one knocks on the door.

The Republicans, who actually made a little sense at the summit, are on the sidelines almost as confused as everyone else except they’re avoided stepping in the dog poop. They have been very clearly told they are irrelevant, so now the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

On the funny pages also known as Op/Ed, Paul Krugman has taken leave of his senses and is now drooling in the corner after a nervous breakdown while E.J. Dionne is restating the party line faster than Pravda during Glasnost. His latest on the subject  is that the reconciliation mess staring Congress in the eye is actually a great big fuzzy bunny because the Senate already passed a bill and all the House has to do is agree. Al Hunt is urging the president to go gangster on Congress and strong arm them the Chicago way into doing his bidding.

Pretzel logic is the order of the day. It would actually be funny if we didn’t have so many other pressing matters.

Obama’s UK Sellout – Part II

I am not sure if our president is either a simpleton or simply an ideologue, but his action in sending Hillary Clinton to Argentine today seems to have crossed a major diplomatic line. The Secretary of State met with Argentina’s leftist president, Cristina Kirchner and at the press conference held afterwards called for talks between the UK and Argentina over the status of the Falkland Islands. Argentina is jubilant at this diplomatic victory that came out of nowhere. From my seat in the bleachers, it seems the only thing our government has accomplished in foreign relations is sucking up to two bit grifters while deeply offending our allies.

Argentina was not on her itinerary as of 2 days ago, but the Argentine government had been lobbying hard for a meeting. What was supposed to be a 10 minute meet & greet has exploded into a major international incident. The Argentines have taken this as a major shift in U.S. foreign policy, where we had remained resolutely silent but aided Britain in the past. One must wonder what grudge Mr. Obama has against the UK.

This is clearly a grab for the goodies by Argentina, who have mismanaged their economy into the ground time and again and are desperate for revenue from anywhere they can get it. Most recently, Ms. Kirchner seized the assets of all private pension funds in order to stave off bankruptcy, but $30 Billion doesn’t get you that far any more. Their last default was in 2001. It’s the second most popular sport after soccer in that country.

As the Dutch and Canadians pack up to leave Afghanistan, we are running out of allies there. We are in  a major economic crisis and are by no means out of the woods yet. Every single indicator is to work more closely with our allies. The law is on the side of the British. With the British engaged in a real war shoulder to shoulder with our troops on the other side of the world the Argentines might be emboldened to take military action once again. Remember, Hugo Chavez is one of her biggest supporters.

And for a potential trillion dollar payoff, might does make right. Our president has now destabilized the southern hemisphere. Chavez and Castro couldn’t be happier. The Yanqui imperialist has been seen to be loco, for this sends no message of a strong, calming force in the region but rather the opposite.

Whether it is Vladimir Putin upping the stakes in the nuclear showdown after Obama has killed off our atomic deterrent or the Iranians snookering us on their own nuclear program or the Chinese government quietly calling the shots as they leverage our debt against us, it has become ever more obvious that this administration is a disaster on foreign policy.

So now the president has put our alliance with our closest ally on the line. For what reason? The American people have a right to know.

Sat Phones for Chile – Hillary Clinton’s Very Odd Trip to South America

The day after causing a diplomatic crisis with the United Kingdom, Hillary Clinton was in Chile meeting with President Michelle Bachelet. Chile is only now finding out the true extent of the damage from Friday’s 8.8 earthquake, and it is incredible.

Chile is an unusual country by any measure. It is over 2,700 miles long and on average 110 miles wide. There is one major highway down the length of most of the country. To get to much of Patagonia, you have to go through Argentina. Now, that highway has massive craters and rifts that will take months if not years to fix. The infrastructure that the movement of aid is dependent upon has been critically disrupted. Whole towns have been washed away in a series of tidal waves. Cities and towns are cut off and the only access to much of the coast is helicopters.

And our Secretary of State in answer to this crisis brought with her as a sign of the United States commitment  and friendship 25  satellite phones. Does this seem just a little bit odd? I think I could have done better running down to the local Best Buy.

Chile has not asked for much. They are a resource rich and proud country that is the envy of much of South America. The rule of law prevails and the trains run on time. But under the circumstances and with such devastation, even the wealthiest of countries can use a helping hand. Heavy lift capacity, water purification, spare parts, and heavy equipment don’t grow on trees and are needed fast. People are sleeping in the open and need shelter and food. Rebuilding will take decades, but there are immediate areas where we can help.

With a diplomatic debacle in Argentina the day before, Ms. Clinton and her boss have gambled on a no win scenario where we have damaged our relationship with our closest ally. The paucity of her gesture to Chile is stunning in comparison. Argentina is a resource rich country that has been mismanaged its economy into the ground repeatedly for over 100 years. The country only became an ally a few months before the end of World War II when the Allied victory was inevitable and then became a haven afterward for Nazi war criminals under the Peron dictatorship. The Peronists still rule there. Chile has only ever asked for free trade.

How can we rationalize these contradictory responses? It doesn’t make sense. There is a cognitive dissonance between the current administration and common sense, it would seem. We are rewarding grifters and ignoring the people who follow the rules and work hard once again. But then, that theme also seems to be running through this administration.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors – The president’s path to health care

Tonight the president is meeting with 10 of the Democratic Congressmen and women who have opposed his health care bill in an effort to either buy them off or twist their arms in order to gain crucial support. The brother of Congressman Scott Matheson was nominated to a Federal judgeship this afternoon. It is an amazing act of political graft.The real crime is that he is using a technique, reconciliation, that even he has been quoted as saying is illegal, in order to pass his legislation. The man who wrote the legislation, Robert Byrd, has said exactly the same thing. It could not be any clearer.

The president has been using every trick in the book, including ones we don’t know about, to try to achieve his aim of taking over the country’s health care system. He bought off the pharmaceutical companies. Many insurance companies are now selling the rope by which he will hang them to him in the interest of short term profits. He bought off the leaderships of AMA  and AARP with shiny objects despite a $300 Billion/year hit to Medicaid which directly and negatively affects their memberships. And his accounting numbers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, are false despite his calling Lamar Alexander, the man who disputed these numbers the other day, a liar on national television.

But it just doesn’t matter. For this is the Super Bowl and World Cup and World Series and Olympics rolled into one for the left wing of the Democratic Party. Once the camel’s nose is under the tent they can the use incrementalism and executive orders and the bureaucracy to shape their policy. This is a long range plan for establishing the party as a permanent ruling party as they dole out jobs and benefits.

Our country is now run under crony capitalism. If you’re in, you win. On Wall Street, in corporate America, in State and Federal politics, and in the unions it’s an insiders game. If you’re close to the action, the benefits are real and substantial. But if you’re a working stiff, you’re out of luck. Ask a Chrysler retiree who first took it on the chin when the government took away their pensions and who is now facing a loss of medicare benefits for their opinion.

The last time the level of corruption was even mentionable in the same sentence was when Benjamin Harrison was president, and back then, the government had not elbowed its way into a controlling position on Wall Street and in our largest industries. The hell of it is that this is being done in the name of the little guy. The leadership class has become a ruling class drunk on its own power.

To the Democratic left in this country, the Constitution is an obstacle to be overcome. Woodrow Wilson started this trend and it continues to this day. And yet the founders of our country and our Constitution were explicit. The arguments in the Federalist Papers and correspondence between them and the Constitution itself are explicit. They argued about the ways and means to enact major legislation. The Equal Rights Amendment is in limbo today for exactly that reason. It did not meet the test of passage by a majority of the 50 state legislatures. Health care affects all of us and is even more important, and yet the president wants to use parlor tricks and bribery to ram it through.

For if he achieves this, he will have gutted our civil rights. We will no longer have the right to choose except as the government dictates. And therein lies the rub.

The term “high crimes and misdemeanors” was first used in England in 1386 to impeach the Chancellor for lying to Parliament when he failed to pay a ransom for the city of Ghent as he had promised. It was next used in the conviction of one of his descendants for obstructing justice, cronyism, and corruption. It has been repeatedly used to prosecute negligence, abuse of power, and violations of the public trust at the highest levels. The most controversial use of the term was in the impeachment of Bill Clinton not because of his adultery, but rather for his perjury before a grand jury. If one reads the history of the term, William Jefferson Clinton has nothing on the current occupant of the White House.

This isn’t simply about health care. It is about the basic conduct of our government. 52% of the public adamantly oppose the president’s proposal. His policies on many issues are highly unpopular not only on the right but the left as well. He is taking away much of what it means to be an American; those inalienable rights bestowed upon not by a ruler, but by God. For what he is doing is ripping up the Constitution with his actions. He knows it. We know it. And he doesn’t care. Legally, the grounds will exist for impeachment. And it doesn’t look as if his supporters are going to do very well in the next election. Something he may want to consider.

There is an anger and a fear for our future abroad in the land that has not existed since December 7, 1941. This is existential fear. And this fear is rational. Our government’s spending and irresponsibility and poor policy have put us into a very difficult position which will take years to resolve. During such times it would behoove all of us to act with courage and conviction. But what we are seeing instead is a craven act of political self interest and lust for power. One that we and our children will be paying for as long as the Republic remains. If ever there were high crimes and misdemeanors, these actions fit the bill.

Goodwin Liu and Invented Rights

I just read of the nomination of Goodwin Liu to the 9th Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco. This is the “fruits and nuts” Court, as Mark Twain would have said. It’s the one that has had more cases overturned by the Supreme Court than any other in the country and typically takes the most progressive view of the law and the Constitution of any of the Appeals Courts. You never know what zany new interpretation of the Constitution they’ll come up with.

Professor Liu comes from Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley, which is situated in the middle of San Francisco, basically Ground Zero for liberal lunacy. The term Ground Zero has been used three times, really. Twice at the end of World War II when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and on 9/11. It should not be used lightly.

But Professor Liu has some rather odd beliefs. According to Wikipedia he is a nationally recognized left wing activist.  He argues that welfare rights reflect the “contingent character of our collective judgments rather that the tidy logic of a comprehensive moral theory”. He clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and his views are, according to all of his supporters “ambitiously progressive”. In other words, the ends justify the means and the law means what we say it it means. New rights are conjured up out of thin air in such an environment.

Dr. Liu has taken a noble stand on the right to a good education. As we see our schools fall apart in the blue states, perhaps his decisions would emphasize excellence of opportunity rather than outcome. Frankly, the deck is stacked against a good education in most large urban school districts. Bureaucracy, cronyism, and incompetence are the enemies.

But when I read one of his key papers, “Improving Title I Equity Funding Across,States, Districts and Schools” there is no discussion of how the money is spent. Equity is important, but wisdom is more important. As the former chair of a parochial school finance committee which consistently outperformed the public schools in our area, we found long ago it is not about how much money is spent but how it is spent. California spends over $8,000/year per public school student but has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country.  The parochial schools spend half as much with double the graduation rate.

On the 2nd Amendment, he argued with Hillary Clinton that in seven instances in the past 10 years, the Supreme Court”s interpretation of that amendment is wrong. Virtually every time the Court upheld the 2nd amendment, he argued against the majority. As we see Chicago’s gun free zone laws being challenged in the Supreme Court, this should give one pause. After all Washington D.C. and Chicago have the highest gun crime rates in the country despite having been gun free zones since the 1970′s. Where is the logic there in Mr. Liu’s opinions?

The Constitution is a funny thing. It was conceived of by some of the most brilliant minds in history and may be the document closest to political perfection yet conceived. And yet it contained certain flaws. The whole 3/5th’s thing really bothers me still. And yet at the time there was a certain logic. It was the world as it was but even then Washington and Jefferson, slave owners both, knew that the central evil of slavery was wrong and was a time bomb for future generations. But it would be for those later generations to resolve. That is why the bar for the amendment process was set as it was, a 2/3 majority of all of the states.

One of the central tenets of progressivism is to short circuit this process. Progressivism is centered on using subterfuge and the legal process and litigation by any means necessary to forward the agenda. The ends justify the means. But the Constitution is a pesky thing. There are established procedures for enacting change and the they get in the way of the agenda.

By all accounts, Professor Liu is a brilliant and skilled attorney and a decent and just man. But if he does not understand and agree with the central tenets of the Constitution, he should not be confirmed.

It’s all Greek to me

You have to love some of the commentary coming out of Europe about the Greek financial crisis. German politicians have been especially vocal, urging the Greeks to sell off islands and artworks and the Acropolis, and just today reminding them about the highly subsidized nonexistent olive groves Greek farmers ding the EU for E 3,000,000/year. The invisible groves of Thessalonia and Illylria are famous throughout Europe for the quality of their low calorie olives.

The Greek government has responded by yelling at everyone else in the EU at the top of their lungs in Greek. When asked by the rest of Europe why they should be bailed out for their drunken spending spree, they said “because”.

The government is threatening to cut by 30% the Greek equivalent of “elevenses” the extra meal Hobbits share, in the form of paychecks for the 13th and 14th months of the year. Other Europeans don’t get this, apparently. The Greeks also retire at 61 but make up for it by not working very hard. The Greek finance ministry was packed to the gills by phantom government and union workers striking because of a threatened 10% pay cut. And no, I’m not making any of this up.

The rest of Europe is very upset with the Greeks and have threatened them with a resolution. Failure to conform to the EU imposed deficit goal of 8% of GDP by 2012 will result in a strongly worded resolution.

The Greeks were able to refinance E10 Billion in debt this week, a critical metric, but Moody’s has basically put them on notice that they either execute the cost cutting plan advanced by PM Papandreaou or have their ratings cut, which will cost them further billions they don’t have. This means the strikers will be going ape for some time as the cuts kick in. 35% of the work force is self-employed and basically pay no taxes. Only 40,000 households in a country of 11 million pay the maximum tax rate, which kicks in at 75,000 Euros.

German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, Greece’s’ ATM machine, has called for the banning of credit default swaps on Wall Street hoping to rein in the hedge fund wolves. As Wall Street  basically owns Washington these days, good luck with that one Madame Prime Minister. These sharks are lawyered up and have paid off the White House janitors they’re so wired in.

The immediate crisis has passed, but now the legislation making the cuts must go before the Greek Parliament. This is when it will hit the fan. The third most popular sport in Greece behind soccer and spending the rest of Europe’s money is protesting. They have the Olympic record. But this time, the government really, really means it and between the amazingly youthful pensioners and taxi drivers and university students and phantom government workers it’s going to get very messy. You may want to plan your holidays elsewhere. They say Beirut is lovely at this time of year.

A tipping point?

A strange thing happened yesterday. The family is out of town, so I did more chores than normal. Running around town I got to talk to a lot of people. There is a disquiet and anger out there that is very unsettling.

The town I live in is not your normal American town. It is a wealthy beach community on the California coast. We are just south of La La Land. But even here, people are seeing the American Dream disappearing before their eyes and a political class that is driving the bus off the cliff whether in Sacramento or Washington.

My neighbor and his father have a small business that has provided a good income for 40 years. It is on the edge, like a lot of others. The butcher is distraught over the absolute mess our government is in. The guy over at the liquor store is concerned about the fundamental deterioration of our Constitutional principles. Since when does the guy at the liquor store care about Constitutional law?

The feeling out there, and engendered by the current administration in particular, is that our politicians are killing American exceptionalism. That exceptionalism happens to be tied directly to the American Dream. You don’t mess with the American Dream. It’s as if the President himself told us he put the dog down and is throwing us out on the street as he goes back inside to eat Wagyu steak.

At the same time, the insiders have dropped even the pretence of the rule of law and basic decency. On Wall Street there have been zero consequences for the sheer criminality and incompetence that almost brought down the financial system. Things are right back to normal, with the investment bankers dressing up the same CDS’s and fractionated debt offerings that got us into the mess in the first place in bright new clothes to sell off to the rubes. The reckless practices have been toned down into browns and grays instead of the flamboyant colors of Angelo Mozillo and Bernie Madoff but they still go on unchanged.

At GM, which led the American automobile industry off the cliff, the shareholders, retirees, and bondholders took it on the chin for $77 Billion while the government committed another $50 in funding and took a 50% equity position in the company. Your GM warranty is now guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Chrysler is a now a division of Fiat courtesy of our government.

The government now owns the mortgage industry through Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac. They grabbed the student loan industry because it was a piece of cake. They want to take over health care as well, in the process cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. But the reality is that it’s a shell game and people are seeing it for what it is. An unprecedented takeover of the American economy by politicians and bureaucrats and their corrupt cronies.

And then there was the little fib the President told us about our national debt that was exposed yesterday. Instead of his $8.6 Trillion number, it’s really $9.8 Trillion over the next 10 years according to the CBO. Social Security and Medicare are running out of money fast, and yet the politicians still play shell games as they are bribed by the key players.The word staggering doesn’t do this crisis justice.

The funny thing about a capitalist system is that it is predicated on a level playing field. It isn’t anymore, and that is at the heart of the matter.

No one quite knows what’s going on because you can’t  trust the media any more. We know where Fox News is coming from, but the rest of them are so at odds with reality they don’t even realize their bias anymore. The result of the partisanship is a lack of trust in our institutions.

People are looking for someone, anyone to man up. To say “okay, we’re in trouble, but if we all work together, we can do this thing. It’s going to take pain and sacrifice and it will be the hardest thing we ever do, but the alternative is destruction.” But instead we have happy news and Gameboy and tattoo parlors to anesthetize the masses.

St. Paul wrote “When I was a child, I spoke as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly”. It is time to put away childish things. We are close to the tipping point where anger turns to action.

The American people are pretty smart when they want to be. There is an election coming in November, but if Greece goes or California goes into default, all bets are off. We’ve never been much of a country of marches, but the Tea Parties showed a different side of Middle America. When Grandma and Grandpa and small businessmen and housewives take to the streets, they mean it. These are not the spoiled college kids with nothing better to do. They’re too busy keeping our country together. And if you have lost them, you have lost the mandate of the people. I believe that we are much closer to that point that the elite think.

What’s another $5 trillion in debt?

On Friday, Congressman Barney Frank upset the financial markets by saying that the United States Government does not stand behind the debt incurred by Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac, which now stands at $5 trillion. The banking community obviously freaked, since Mr. Frank and Senator Dodd were the con men who launched the reckless lending practices that begat much of the problem.

What is more disturbing is that these obligations are off the Federal books. With $15.5 Trillion in existing debt, inclusion of the now recognized debt makes $19.5 trillion overall. Remember, the President’s current spending programs will add another $1.1 Trillion per year to our debt for the next 10 years according to the CBO. This does not count Medicare’s looming $trillion/year default nor the lurking default of Social Security. Off the books spending is an art form in Washington. I’m going to throw a wild ass guess (WAG) out there that we are really, really screwed. Who knows exactly what else is out there right now. Washington plays in a much larger pool than does Athens, and look what is happening there with their two sets of books.

Mortgage delinquencies are growing,  and every time that happens, the $5 Trillion number increases. Twenty percent of subprime mortgages are defaulting, with 9% of the overall market in default. In 2007, mortgage originations were $1.2 Trillion to offer some scale of the issue. The subprime market is dead today, so the hemorrhaging will eventually stop, but for the next 3-5 years those numbers are going to grow.

It has been said elsewhere that if Washington was held to the same standards as American corporations, Congress and the President would have gone to jail long ago for fraud and embezzlement. The borrowing from gasoline & highway taxes, cigarette taxes and Social Security and other sequestered accounts was a license to steal and no one has a complete set of books. Where would one start?

We certainly can’t easily pay off the debt we have. What makes one think that we can pay off the even larger debts the administration plans to incur under the health care bill, carbon reduction, and other unfunded mandates?

Democratic Infighting – Blue on Blue Casualties

It is very strange to watch the circular firing squad that has become the Democratic Party these days. As the country faces greater challenges than at any time since the Cold War, the party in control of all of the levers of power is managing to screw up virtually every major decision they have taken. Every now and then someone yells out “Blame Bush!” or “It’s the Rethuglicans fault!” but the reality is that we are seeing something more akin to the infighting of the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks.

Today it is the Progressive Caucus versus the Congressional Black Caucus versus the Latino Caucus versus the Blue Dogs, as best I can tell. The President still has not revealed his secret health care plan, promised last Thursday, but has gone on the road to drum up public support for said secret plan. An administration and Congress that promised transparency and glasnost has delivered the exact opposite. As a matter of fact, they could pass a law dictating that we all dress in yellow tutus on Fridays if they wanted to, but can’t seem to even tell us what they are proposing, much less advocate it.

Last week it was the 24 hour reign of Fortney “Pete” Stark as Ways & Means Chairman, but everyone realized very quickly that putting a fire breathing leftist into one of the most powerful jobs in Congress might not be the best of ideas. This week, Dennis Kucinich and Progressive Caucus will try to force a vote on withdrawal from Afghanistan not because there is a hope in hell of passage, but to polish their leftist credentials. These are the same folks who would have abandoned Iraq in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Our foreign policy seems to have fallen off the turnip truck. Hillary Clinton spent last week running around Latin America embarrassing the hell out of herself and her country, but that’s okay. That way she is out of the president’s hair. If he gives her enough crazy assed missions, she will never be able to run for his office with any credibility ever again.  Having Lula da Silva openly defy the United States on Iran was only the topper to a very bad week. Hugo Chavez’s cheap shot calling her “Blondoleeza” didn’t help either. We now have about as much credibility in South America on foreign policy as Paraguay. And you’d better not call Chavez a dictator either or noted libertarian Sean Penn will have you arrested with Oliver Stone filming it all.

The new immigration policy initiative seems to be “let ‘em all in”, which is going to go over like Sheriff Bart in Rock Ridge in the border states. And all the while the financial mess deepens. This stems from a perspective on economics and monetary policy half Wall Street investment banker and half Harvard undergrad BS session (well, maybe they’re the same thing after all).

The DoD is woozy with program cuts, many deserved, but without a clear direction. We can’t seem to even get a clear answer on “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Political correctness has led to repeated failures of the system, including the Ft. Hood massacre. Maybe it’s just gotten too big to manage, but it doesn’t help to be being pulled in four directions. NASA is purposeless to the greatest extent in its history.

There have been no real voices of moderation in this Congress nor in the administration. While the President seems in so many ways to be continuing with Bush’s policies his cries of  “It’s Bush’s fault” have become tiring and he offers no clear alternative. We have a dog’s breakfast of national priorities right now.

One of Lenin’s prime tools was misdirection and obfuscation. By tying the Mensheviks and socialists up in knots, he was able to seize power and create the Soviet Union. I’m not saying it is that bad in America today, but there is some of that misdirection involved along with an incredible degree of incompetence. There is a simply Russian state of distrust between the key players, and we are descending into the factionalism more often seen in Italy or Iraq. We deserve much better.

The Toyota Problem and why the electronics may be at fault

A guy in my industry (electronics interconnection) is insisting the rapid acceleration problem on Toyota automobiles is being caused by a ghost in the machine. If true, it could become another major environmental issue.

One of the issues under consideration in the Toyota controversy is “Lead-free” electronics.   Lead is used in the form of solder, which attaches components, among other things.

Several years ago the European Union put out a document called RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances). It was developed by bureaucrats in Brussels with minimal input from global industry and is very Eurocentric. It reflects the politically powerful influence of the Green movement, much of which is not based upon hard science and engineering data.

One of the leading products to be removed from commerce in Europe by the RoHS rules was Lead. Lead containing solder is a small part of the overall usage of  the element in society. The history and data on the Tin/Lead alloy used in electronics goes back 100 years. From a technical, environmental, and economic perspective these alloys are the optimum solution.

The replacements for lead in electronics are a range of alloys such as 96% Tin + Silver + Copper, and other variations which can include Bismuth, Cobalt, Cadmium, and other metals. The problem lies in the high tin content in these alloys. The reason lead was used in the first place was that over time and different conditions, Tin can grow whiskers which are often invisible and completely random. When tin whiskers bridge the leads on electronic components, short circuits result. Tin/lead is a very forgiving material as well, and can “fix” design and manufacturing problems where the lead free alloys will not.

The banning of Lead has been a subject of controversy within the electronics interconnect industry and our technical community, where a number of the world’s leading experts have been raising alarms for years.

Unless subject to a highly acidic environment,  Tin/Lead alloys used in electrical and electronic devices are inert in dumps. The fear driving the ban was ground water contamination, and yet the probability such an occurrence was very low and well within the norms of modern society.

Because the EU represents such a large consumer market and because every major corporation wants to be seen as “Green”, the pressure to move towards Lead free electronics has been considerable. Hitachi or Fujitsu did a study several years ago on what happened with a “Green Product” label in their marketing of notebook computers. . Sales of products with the label jumped 20% in weeks. This got a lot of people in management very excited and of course, we all want to do what is best for our environment. However, when marketing and image trump engineering, the consequences can be serious.

When the switch was made a few years ago, there was insufficient testing of the impact of the new materials on electrical and mechanical performance of the interconnect. Even now, the Department of Defense is scrambling to determine whether lead free materials will deliver the reliability required for military applications. It is a fact that the long term reliability of lead free electronics is less than that of lead containing alloys.

The mechanical integrity and modulus of expansion (flexibility) of high tin content alloys is much lower than that of those containing lead, so cracking can occur as well as whiskers. This was one of the issues found when Microsoft recalled millions of X Boxes, It cost the company $4 Billion to fix and replace X Boxes where a design flaw related to the coefficient of thermal expansion of the Lead free materials used was found. Taken together, cracking and whiskers introduce the potential for significant defects that had not existed before.

Where it becomes scary is in the Toyota problem, or potentially, in the Airbus A-380. Lives are at risk. Airplanes take off and land, with the shock distributed throughout the systems on board. Originally, the Airbus A-380 was billed as the world’s first “lead free” aircraft. I am not sure if this went through. I do know that as a technologist directly involved in the issue that I am not comfortable flying in an A-380 until these issues are resolved by engineers, not bureaucrats or politicians.

There are exemptions to the lead free rules, but in the interest of going green, most organizations, including the military and NASA, are doing their best to phase out lead containing alloys as fast as they can. The automotive companies also were resistant, but now they have implemented a lot of lead free electronics as well. The Japanese are in the lead on this. Hopefully, Toyota did not use lead free alloys in the acceleration control module which is at the center of the controversy.

If you’ll excuse the pun, this is all very under the hood, but may be specifically linked to the Toyota acceleration problems. Most accelerators are no longer controlled by mechanical linkage, but by electronics. Wires go to circuit boards which process the data and voila’. Same is true on an Airbus. In aviation they call it fly by wire.

The second issue is software. Software is arcane and most of it filled with bugs and patches. This is why certain new car models are best not considered until the second or 3rd year of production. It can take that long to iron out all of those bugs. The automakers have gotten very good, but then a third factor kicks in. One of the potential contributing factors posed by one engineer was that the test software and monitoring software either in the manufacturing quality control process or engine data acquisition process simply did not test for such types of failure. Automotive electronics run on a 12 volt circuit. As more features such as computers, DVD players, GPS’s and other devices demand more juice, voltage instabilities can arise that can cause re-boots of the software of affected systems.This gives some idea of the difficulty of diagnosing the problem.

The last factor under consideration is electromagnetic shielding. This protects certain components on the circuit board from stray radiation that, if at the wrong frequency and power, can interfere with a signal. The source could be a cell phone, an electronic car key itself, or an external source. This is not as likely as some of the other potential causes, but in combination one or more of the above, could be a contributing factor.

These are some of the most difficult defects to catch as they are typically non-recurring. Mercedes and BMW had these issues when they introduced their centrally controlled  automotive electronics systems. There was so much data moving at very high rates that a single variation in voltage lasting milliseconds could cause a system failure.

I’m hoping the guys in our industry are wrong in some ways, but right in others. The electronics content in many cars now exceeds the value of any other component. It is one of the more logical places to start the search for many problems, including the acceleration problem on Toyotas.

It could be  foot displacement. It might be the foot pedal itself. But there may be a deeper and more fundamental problem.

What we do know is that certain modifications were made to the design and manufacturing process that could have, at a fundamental level, had serious consequences. The engineers involved are concerned. And the only thing that will protect us from the law of unintended consequences is that the scientific and engineering data is incontrovertible.

Very Scary Stuff on Health Care

“What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,”  Congressman Bart Stupak  (source: National Review Online)

Think about this statement for a moment. Does it really all boil down to money for some of the Democratic Party leadership? We do know that some of this is the continuation of the same discarded principles of eugenics espoused by the statists 100 years ago. It’s not about the freedoms protected by the Constitution or what is best for the country, it is to them, about the allocation of the resources of the state towards their own personal aims and social theories.

Eugenics had currency around the turn of the 20th Century among progressives in this country and Europe. At the time, there were great unwashed masses of sickly, uneducated ghetto dwellers and rural folk who simply were not quite up to the standards of the elite. It was felt that by limiting reproductive rights and using selective breeding, a new superman could arise; one worthy of the progress of the 19th and 20th Centuries. My own ancestors were a part of that great unwashed mass. My own mother knew the term “NINA”, No Irish Need Apply.

This “progress” was founded in the philosophy of Nietzsche and evolutionary theories of Darwin. Eugenics found a willing audience in class conscious England. The Fabian socialists such as George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb were proponents, and found a friendly ear in Winston Churchill. In this country, the presidents of Harvard, Bowdoin, Wharton, and Stanford all supported the concept. All in the name of progress.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a vocal supporter. And that’s where the whole scary part comes in. Genetics, you see is a funny thing. It is the roulette wheel of existence. Susceptibility to cancer, insanity, disease, and addiction are all influenced by genetics, as are our more noble characteristics. Nature versus nurture, when you get down to it, is a mix of both.

But now there are people who want to dictate the outcome to others. They want to ban smoking and obesity and allow abortion on demand, all in the interest of the greater good. It’s not so much the nanny state as it is a kinder, gentler naziism. For it was the Nazis who were the most prominent proponents of eugenics with their culture of a Master Race and over 450,000 forced sterilizations. And do you know who they took their lead from? America.

Back in the 1910′s and 20′s, there were numerous programs in the United States, some of them forced sterilization; others, such as the Immigration Act of 1924 nationally popular barriers erected to keep undesirables out. The anti-miscegenation laws were part and parcel of the movement.

And it never really went away. One home for it today is in the Left Wing of the Democratic Party. The other is in the extreme Right Wing. And yet if you look across our country today we are a nation of mutts, a title of which we should be proud. 60 years ago a Jew marrying a Catholic was a scandal. Now our own president is a prime example of what we can accomplish not as a particular race, but as Americans. Slowly and fitfully and painfully, race has been put aside.

But in the meantime, the urge to tell others what is best for them is rife. Whether it is a nationally dictated health care program or control over the education sector or simply in craven self-interest, there is a strong segment in our society who feel it is their duty and right to tell the rest of us what to do. They are perfectly comfortable with coercion.

de Toqueville, back in the 1830′s, discussed the American propensity for enlightened self-interest. It is at the foundation of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Founders of our country knew exactly what they wanted to say and expressed it in one of the most amazing documents in history. The progressive movement of which the eugenists are part has always felt the Constitution to be an impediment.

Now, as the health care bill is argued behind closed doors, comments like Mt. Stupak’s are coming out. Rationing is a real and obvious fear, for how can we do better for more with less? It’s not logical. But more and more in places like New York and California we see government coercing citizens on freedoms such as cigarette smoking and eating fatty foods and even salt. The new bill is an open door to exactly that kind of coercion.

A lot of us are big, dumb, fat and happy. But that is why we have a Constitution. We have the freedom to be. There is also enlightened self interest. 50 years ago very few people jogged or cycled seriously. Far more people smoked than do today. These gains were made for the most part without coercion.

But now, with over 2,000 pages of mysterious gobbledegook, we are being asked to take it all on faith from that same Left Wing who were and are so in love with things like eugenics. It’s not about the right to choose to some of these people. It’s about selective breeding with all of the overtones. It’s a control thing.

Liberal Bias – Tom Hank’s Foolishness

Sitting in a hotel room not far from the location of the old North Railway Station in Shanghai, The utter stupidity of Tom Hank’s recent statements about the Pacific War really hits home.

China is a funny place these days, and for the moment I have a clear connection without censorship, but it is that censorship that puts things into perspective. Dictators and autocrats like to control the message. If the Japanese had had their way back in 1941, things would be a lot different today.

You see, World War II really started in 1932, a few miles from here. The Japanese had already defeated China in 1910 and taken Korea and the Spratley Islands, They had pushed hard into China. In Shanghai, over 100,000 Japanese ran huge factories exploiting cheap Chinese labor under hellish conditions. Of course the English and French and Americans were here as well, but it was the Japanese who were the dominant community in manufacturing.

It was the age of Tojo and Bushido and Emperor worship and the Japanese were on the move. They had taken over the Germ an colonies and concessions in Asia after World War I, expanding their Empire outwards.

Here in Shanghai an incident occurred in 1932 that set off the Asian War. Japan had seized Manchuria at the end of 1931 on a pretext, and the Chinese had instituted a very effective boycott of anything Japanese.  A group of highly nationalistic Japanese Buddhist monks from the Nichiren sect had been sent into the International Concession to create an incident to allow for greater Japanese incursions. Their nationalistic chanting drew a crowd of Chinese, who became unruly and threw rocks and refuse. One monk was killed, and the Japanese immediately sent a punitive mission to punish the Chinese.

At the North Station in Chipei, the 19th Route Army of Chiang Kai Shek, commanded by General Tsai Ting Kai had been ordered to withdraw to avoid giving the Japanese a pretext.  But General Tsai held his ground in the face of the Japanese aggression. The Japanese Marines and Navy pounded the station and its surroundings with artillery, naval gunfire, and bombers for 2 weeks, killing 10,000  with many thousands more wounded. Eventually the Chinese Army withdrew. It was the first time anyone had seen modern urban warfare.

In 1937, the Japanese officially invaded, wreaking more destruction that even the worst predations of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. During the Rape of Nanking in 1937, the Japanese killed approximately 300,000 civilians in an orgy of blood. Babies and women were used for bayonet practice when they ran out of bullets. The Japanese were simply the most savage conquerors in history.

All of this was reported in the Western press. The International Settlement in Shanghai was protected ground, so reporters and photographers had a safe haven there as neutrals in the war. Theirs were the perceptions that shaped Western opinion. The photograph of a baby sitting on the ground, wailing in the middle of the carnage taken at Nanking was on every front page in the Western world. This is what Mr. Hanks and his liberal friends don’t understand.

Ask the English who were brutalized in Malaya, or the Dutch civilians who were sent to the concentration camps with a 30-40% survival rate, or the Christian Brothers who survived when their colleagues were bayoneted and beheaded in Hong Kong. Ask any American or Allied POW who survived.  Ask the Filipinos and Americans who survived the Bataan Death March or almost anyone who lived under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. There is a reason that there is still raw anger against Japan in many Asian countries.

Mr. Hanks, you are sadly mistaken. There were strong reasons for the hatred and anger. Pearl Harbor caught the United States completely unaware, and America’s history with Asian immigrants was already problematic. But contrast the reaction at home to our Japanese and our Chinese immigrants. This was not racism, but rather fear and anger at a specific enemy. There was also, by the way, some animosity directed at German Americans at times as well. When you consider the Bund and the America First movement, is it any wonder?

The willingness to generalize and demonize by the left in this country is shameful. As my ex used to say, it is the pot calling the kettle black. Back in 1941, America was a different place. We were provincial and rural, but we were also Americans. One of the key differences between ourselves and other countries is the willingness to recognize our mistakes and make amends. The propaganda of war always calls out the worst stereotypes, but these stereotypes are usually well earned.

The fanaticism and ruthlessness of the Japanese military was self evident. The Left argues against the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as racist. The fact is that it was the cold calculus of war.

The Japanese were training old men and children and women to sacrifice themselves with suicide bombs and pikes and machetes to resist an invasion. On Okinawa, whole families jumped to their deaths to escape capture. The concept of the kamikaze was the flower of honor in Japanese eyes.

The estimate for an invasion of Japan was 1,000,000 – 1,500,000 Allied dead, with another 3,000,000 wounded. The estimates of Japanese casualties were 4,000,000 dead. Even after Hiroshima, the warlords refused to even reply to our demands for surrender. War is, in fact, hell.

So when you go back to Malibu and talk with your friends, and maybe even talk with some of the few remaining vets who were there, Mr. Hanks, put it into perspective. They were the Greatest Generation because, when they came home, they forgave and forgot and put away their enmity. They reached out to build a new world despite the horrors and atrocities.

In Thanks to Our British Brothers

The Times today ran an article on the almost 150 awards for gallantry awarded to British troops for action in Helmand Province in Afghanistan this summer. The British do not award these medals lightly. The ratio versus those awarded to U.S. troops is far lower. Sort of stingy. And in the British Forces, a lot of the awards are posthumous. Something about England expects every man to do his duty. Some Companies experienced 30% casualties over the summer. So when they award a posthumous DSO to the Colonel of a Regiment, you can bet he was leading from the front.

The British got a tough assignment. Helmand is where very bad things happen more than anywhere else in the country. IED’s, part time snipers, and ambushes are a part of every single day. Just as our Marines moved into Marjah, the British were alongside our kids with the Army backstopping the operation. It is a team effort.

I mean no offense to our own troops, who are just as brave, but you don’t see much on the British in the American press. There are 9,500 British troops there versus 65,000 Americans. Theirs is the second largest contingent and just as much if not more than ours they are at the sharp end of the stick.

Back home, their generals have come out publicly against their government for underequipping their troops. Just as it would be here, it is a shocking indictment. Their generals, like ours, are supposed to use channels, but it simply is not on, as they might say. People are dying because there are not enough properly equipped armored vehicles or airlift. This is where our medevacs have proven vital.

If you talk to some of the Americans who have been there, there is no one better to have at your side. It’s been that way for a long time. Since 1917. As the politicians do their best to muddle things up, remember, the alliance goes a lot deeper than that. It is an alliance of blood and common ideals.

Profiles in Cowardice – The Democrats and Health Care

What is happening on Capitol Hill today should disgust every American. In an effort to avoid actually voting on the health care bill (whatever it may be as we still haven’t seen it) and being held to account, the Democrats in the House are trying to use a tactic called “Deem & Pass” so no actual vote on the bill takes place. The one thing they do not want is accountability. They don’t want to leave any fingerprints. They think this will offer some sort of fig leaf come the November elections.

As a part of this, they are trying to add a number of amendments to both buy off certain Members and please various factions. But it now seems the House Rules Committee is grappling with a major conflict, as it seems what they are trying to do is illegal according to current House rules as well as those of the Senate. The whole process is decaying into an Orwellian nightmare of doublespeak and a Stalinist putsch at the same time. Madison, Washington, Lincoln, TR, Kennedy and most every deceased member of Congress must be rolling in their graves at the sheer despicability of these actions. FDR might have tried it, though but even he would have drawn the line at hiding the vote.

At the same time, the entire nation has yet to see this stinkeroo of a bill. This is the fault not only of Congress, but the President as well. It is their hope to have passed the bill without anyone outside of the cabal having read it.  They have bought off just about anyone they can and yet they still can’t quite get the last holdouts to stomach the sheer corruption of it all. This is perhaps the single most cowardly act in the history of our government.

You see, socialized health care has been the goal of the left wing of the Democratic Party since the 1960′s. This was Teddy Kennedy’s baby from the day he was elected to the Senate in 1962. But at the time there was no way he could come out and say so. It was far too radical an idea in the United States then, just as it is now.Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden told ABC reporter Jake Tapper that ” This has been tough since day one. It’s been tough for 40 years”. He was simply confirming what has been discussed behind closed doors for so long.

They are trying to ram it through by any means necessary, legal or not. It will be the law because they say it’s the law. And they then expect to be able to buy off the special interests enough to retain power forevermore. There goes 233 years of constitutional democracy. It is as corrupt as any banana republic and the beacon of democracy will have been put out. We will have become a dictatorship of the Democratic Party. It really is that simple sometimes.

John F. Kennedy wrote “Profiles in Courage” in 1955. It won a Pulitzer Prize as a biography of 8 Senators who stood by their convictions in the face of the most severe criticism. It included Sam Houston, who voted against Texas’ secession from the Union. It included Daniel Webster, who fought to preserve the Union, as did Thomas Hart Benton. These were men of conviction and faith in the Constitution. In the whole of the legislative bloc voting in favor of this monstrosity of a bill (whatever it is), there not a single individual with that kind of conviction. Not one. Where is Diogenes when you really need him? Where is that honest man?

Today we have the worst sort of grifters and crooks fighting not for great principles, but power and access to unlimited funding and patronage. As they have taken control of the automobile industry and the financial sector, so will they now control the most personal decisions of our country’s citizens. You can count the names of the people with such power on one hand. Think about that. And think about the sheer cowardice of those trying to grab that power and what that success will mean for the future of our country.

Our Subprime Economy

Last summer, I went looking for a new barbecue. Not such a big deal, or so I thought. The Weber was 10 years old and the manifold was gone and it was about time. I went to Bar-B-Cues R Us or some such place, which was an amazing new phenomenon at the time; a store that sold nothing but barbecues, tongs, sauces, cleaners and all of the other regalia of America’s favorite food. But I came home empty handed.

I looked and I looked, and saw grills from $100 to $1,000, but nothing that could quite replace the old-fashioned made in Illinois $199.95 3 burner I had sitting in the back yard. I feel the same way about our economy these days. It all seems to be made in China. Commercially, industrially, ethically, fundamentally.

America exported its manufacturing in search of higher profits, but at the same time the new guys don’t quite get quality, fit and finish. From contaminated drywall  to melamine tainted milk to the general shoddiness of so many products on the shelves these days we have seen a massive hit to what used to be the American standard of quality and reliability. These indicators point towards an intellectual phase shift that transcends all aspects of our economic life today.

Corporately, the same weasels who brought us outsourcing and offshoring now have perhaps the lowest level of ethics and business conduct in memory. Handshake deals and contracts used to be enough for many of us. Now contracts are simply the preparation for what the military used to call rat fornication, to be polite. Turd polishing has become a new art form as the marketing set try to put the best face on inferior products to what we had even 10 years ago. The $39 DVD player at WalMart has a price on the economy. Planned obsolescence is now measured in weeks. The environmental movement is a sham because it does not address this fundamental fact of modern life. We can plan all the green programs we want, but the old maxim of thrift has been thrown out of the window. My 1971 Mercedes is a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly than any Prius just by the fact that it still on the road. A worker’s set of tools used to last a lifetime. These days management wants a 6-9 month return on investment.

Our financial markets are run by crooks and grifters just as corrupt as any in the world (well, maybe not Zimbabwe or Haiti). In some ways, the Chinese central bank has more integrity than our own. It’s not just us, of course. Europe is just as bad. Ask the Germans how that whole Greek thing is working out. When you keep on printing money when you know you don’t have anything supporting it, that’s crooked. Under recent administrations, and especially the current one “The full faith and credit of the United States” has become a bad joke.

The collective walkaway from debt by consumers is unprecedented and now we are told that those of us who still have jobs are going to get hit even harder with both current taxes and the new health care money grab. The greatest fear in all of this is a reduction in the quality of care. Another subprime indicator.

40 years ago, Robert Downey Sr. made a movie called Putney Swope. A black comedy, it opened with the scene  a corporate board meeting where the Chairman suddenly collapses and dies. Slowly, the human vultures around the table begin stripping the body of any possession of worth. That is our Congress today. That is big business today. Grab it while you can is the operative philosophy.

The FDIC and Fed used to step in and close bankrupt banks.  Who will do the same job for a bankrupt economy? As the Left derides the Tea Party movement, perhaps they should ponder this.

The Leftist Takeover of the United States Government – Be Very Afraid

Yesterday and today, the maimstream (yes, that’s correct) media has been full of articles crowing over the Democratic Party’s victory on the health care bill along with alarmist stories of rocks thrown through windows and threats against courageous congressmen and senators who voted for the bill. Some of the articles even tout the rising popularity of the bill in the face of the opinion polls. We are seeing an unprecedented propaganda campaign by the party in power and their allies to sell this swill.

The fact is that this has been the most rancorous and divisive legislation of the past 50 years, and that it was rammed through using every ounce of squeeze and coercion and bribery available to the President of the United States and his Speaker of the House. Now the Left is openly discussing single payer care as their next step in nationalization of 1/3 of the economy as the camel’s nose is now firmly under the tent.

Next on the agenda is restoring the right to vote to felons. A bill is in the House to do so. Who do you think this will benefit? Right after that, the President wants to introduce an immigration reform bill. Who do you think that will benefit?

What we are seeing now is a naked power grab by the Left. They are shredding the intent and letter of the Constitution in order to ensure a new Socialist state. This is surely not what the Founders intended, nor every succeeding generation until this one. This is the culmination of 60′s radicalism.

At the same time, the institutions of stability have been under assault for the past 40 years, and we are seeing a concerted effort to discredit religion, responsibility, hard work, and thrift. Unemployment benefits are now at 2 years for some. Sloth is encouraged in union contracts. Faith based giving is under assault, and the government is printing money to pay off deadbeats mortgages with no consequences to anyone for their sheer irresponsibility.

What ever happened to the ethic that made our country great? The cardinal virtues have been replaced by bread and circuses. This is how societies die, and one of the inherent goals of the 1960′s Left was to “stick it to the man”. Well, they are doing so.

So we can either sit back and let it happen, or we can become active and work hard to turn the mess around. Which is it?

More trouble on foreign policy

This afternoon, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was told firmly by Canadian Prime Minister Harper that despite her entreaties, Canada’s military committment in Afghanistan would end in 2011. The other day, the British announced the same thing. Soon enough, it will be us and Guatemala against the Taliban the way things are going.

Three days ago, the “special relationship” with Great Britain was declared dead by one of their parliamentary committees. Our relationship with Israel is in tatters and the bloom is off the rose in our relations with Europe despite the Apologize 2009″ tour.  Notice a pattern?

Today, the president once again hit back at his opponents, taunting his opponents to “go for it” in their efforts to repeal the Health Care/Student Loan Takeover bill. This from the man who promised bipartisanship and a new transparency to the legislative process. It would seem his strategy is to baffle his opponents with bullshit while policy is enacted behind closed doors.

The situation with China continues to sour while global action is stymied in financial reform efforts by inaction and corruption in Washington. Chinese officials have taken to stiffing U.S. ambassador Huntsman to show their displeasure.

Ms. Clinton threw more gasoline on the fire with her disastrous South American excursion a few weeks ago, where Brazil chose Iranian over American interests, and Argentine corrupocrat Christina Kirchner scored a cheap shot at the UK courtesy of our government.

Further to Iran, it does not seem our efforts could be more fruitless. The Iranians are accelerating their announcements, whether true or not, on the progress of their nuclear program in the face of a tattered consensus. This is probably the single most dangerous issue in global security at present. Across the border in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai is charting an independent course in courting China and Iran. Not much of this is making the American media these days. Page 3 stuff, and quickly forgotten at best by the mainstream press.

But if taken as a trend, it makes Jimmy Carter look like FDR. No one is quite sure what our policies are any more and fewer and fewer nations trust us. We have become an unreliable ally as we have become an international scold. We are being tuned out. The message has been cheapened and it would seem the State Department is either running rogue or has a hidden agenda. With our President’s record to date, it could well be the latter.

Moving America Forward

It seems there is not much that many Americans agree upon these days, but I think this can be a good starting point.

1. Personal responsibility.

2. Everyone pays taxes.

3. We are a nation of faith. Deal with  it.

4. Equal enforcement of the law for all.

5. A Helping Hand but No Free Lunch

6. Energy Independence.

7. Free, but reciprocal trade policy.

8. Space is the New Frontier. Treat it as such.

9. Manufacturing is America’s core competency. Recognize it. Promote it.

10. Restore faith in our institutions.

11. Narco terrorism and corruption are two of the greatest dangers to world peace and a terrible drain on our country. These must be prioritized.

12. Decouple management compensation from quarterly results.

Obama on Health Care – “We had to burn down the village in order to save it”

Yesterday, in a little commented aside to Harry Smith on The Early Show, presumably after they shot hoops, the President told Mr. Smith with all due seriousness that his $1.3 Trillion health care bill was necessary because “‘this country was going to go bankrupt”. I’m not making this up. AP reported it. It is reminiscent of the old Vietnam saying that “we had to burn down the village in order to save it”.

When coverage is to be expanded by 30,000,000 and the CBO numbers were jiggered worse than Bernie Madoff’s, the President’s comment flies in the face of reason. 17 states are suing the Federal government because they will bear a significant portion of the cost. These costs were figured into the CBO’s numbers. This is the largest ever in a series of unfunded federal mandates that may finally have broken the back of the financial relationship between the states and the federal government. Regardless, with the financial condition of most states in precarious condition, there is no way this fiscal fantasy can be realized.

Another supposed savings to be achieved with the bill was the reduction of Medicare fraud by somewhere north of $60 Billion/year. This begs the question first of why there is so much fraud in an existing program? Second, how did it get that way? Third, what makes the president think he can count on such massive savings and how does he propose recovering this money ? Somehow, I doubt he has the answers to any of these questions. My guess is that it is all BS.

At the same time, other lawsuits are being prepared challenging the constitutionality of the government’s intention to coerce individuals into purchasing health insurance, another key provision. This provision was also critical to the bill’s CBO rating. In other words, when taking the factors underlying the President’s assumptions it is clear they are built on quicksand.

The one thing everyone can agree upon is that the bill is a dog’s breakfast which we are still trying to figure out. 70% of the country flat out doesn’t believe the President of the United States any more.

Unfortunately, we have an Orwellian press and propaganda machine who keep on trying to put lipstick on the pig. They are too busy trying to gin up scandals for the Republicans to look out for the best interests of the country, including their own. They must not even read their own news stories, because every day they more nonsensical and contradictory. Malreported stories of Tea Parties and right wing militias have blown up in their faces like an April Fool’s cigar this week alone. The absurdity is worthy of Mencken , George S. Kaufman, or Benchley. It’s a shame it has real world consequences.

The destruction of NASA

The most recent issue of Aviation Week (3/28 – 4/5) contains a curious article that should gain much more attention. It seems there is now a tug of war between Congress and the president that has gone unreported in the mainstream media.

Two months ago, there was an outcry when the President announced the cancellation of the Constellation manned space program. The only problem is that Congress is, quietly, dead set against it. It seems NASA’s lawyers are now walking a thin line trying to serve two masters.

The White House has ordered a shift to commercial human flights, while Congress has ensured funding of Constellation through this year at least and are using a microscope to ensure that NASA continues on track. For 2011, Congress is seemingly unanimous in inserting funding for the project.

Two companies, Space Exploration Technologies (Falcon 9) and Orbital Sciences (Taurus II) are preparing commercial rockets to deliver cargo to the space station. The Administration is hoping these can be configured for manned space flight.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden testified to Congress the he hopes to “lease” commercial human rated vehicles that astronauts can pilot to the Space Station. He also said  “We are too reliant on old systems”. NASA is now in shambles as the conflicting agendas take their toll. Delivery of any vehicle is now likely to be delayed even further. Crews can’t train, and engineers can’t design until the fundamentals are in place.

This systemic confusion is now affecting all U.S. space programs.  Projects such as Future Imagery Architecture, the Space Based Infrared System, and the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System, all begun in the late 1990′s, are in jeopardy because of delays in the development of delivery systems.  We are facing a complete SNAFU in space with no clear plan forward.

Bolden testified that the issue had not yet reached the “top” levels. How this is possible is anyone’s guess. It seems once again our leadership is asleep at the wheel. The indicators are all there that the wheels are coming off, and we have a President who has exacerbated the situation even further.

Congress is adamant that the existing projects move forward, but the Administration is doing its best to tie NASA and our other rocket programs into knots. This is criminal incompetence and it will take years to repair the damage. To quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

How Obama is going to get a lot of people killed

Yesterday, the White House announced a new, obscure policy on the use of nuclear weapons. This was done unilaterally without any similar commitment from the world’s other nuclear powers. What it has done has been to upset the global apple cart that governed the use of nuclear weapons for the past 60 years.

The nuclear deterrent, for that is what it is, is based upon the assured destruction of our enemy. The general theory behind it is that if an enemy hits us, we will level that enemy 3 times over. At the same time, our policy also protected our vastly outnumbered forces in Western Europe during the Cold War. Even today, theoretically speaking, our forces are outnumbered 10:1 by those of China. There is no chance of survival from a nuclear strike for the aggressor. It truly is God’s terrible swift sword. And it has kept the peace for 60 years.

This is part of what has cowed North Korea and the Soviet Union from going nuclear. The same holds true for India and Pakistan. Their leaders know there will only be a smoking pile of rubble left if they decide to use nuclear weapons. This is as it should be. It is the deterrent factor.

Kahn also pointed out that there are survivors to even nuclear war, and his theories, and that based upon this, the United States had to be willing to go nuclear or it was nothing but a bluff no one would believe. Mr. Obama has now delivered that eventuality.

Our president has taken 60 years of theory and practice and thrown them out the window. Warfare is a series of escalations and mistakes. Herman Kahn, back in the 1950′s, studied the game theory of nuclear war and outlined the necessity to convince any opponent that, no matter how skillful and overwhelming the attack, the United States would still destroy them.

This policy was upheld by Republican and Democrat from Eisenhower through Kennedy through Nixon and Carter and Reagan and Clinton. Across ideologies and changing circumstances. Now, a president with little to no experience in either foreign affairs nor anything by community organizing has put the global security structure into play.

Every nation will now scramble to take advantage of the new paradigm, for this is what nations do. Instability will result, and allies will have come to realize that the United States has become unreliable. Our nuclear umbrella no longer protects even ourselves. So they will have to react as well.

What Obama has done is to virtually guarantee a massive attack somewhere within the next generation. Millions could die, for this is the entry point for nuclear casualties. Someone somewhere will now think it worth the risk, that we will not retaliate forcefully and that will be enough. I hope Mr. Obama understands this reality and is ready to bear the consequences.

LA Opera’s Gotterdammerung – A Fable for our Times

“What demons lie hidden here?”

So says Brunnhilde in Act III.

Let me start by saying I grew up with rock & roll, jazz, and even some classical thrown in, but Wagner was definitely not my thing. Too Nazi, too stereotypical, too old-fashioned, too Wagner. But after yesterday’s performance of Gotterdammerung and last year’s Ring operas, one has to say that Wagner has entered the 21st Century stronger and more relevant than ever.

Achim Freyer’s staging is nothing short of magnificent. The set design combines elements from De Chirico, Fernand Leger, Fritz Lang, Edvard Munch, Dan Flavin and Superman, and amazingly, it all works.

This version of Gotterdammerung fits the times perfectly. Against a real world backdrop of global financial and political disarray and an atmosphere of unrest and uncertainty, the surrealism and juxtaposition of characters, music, and staging crafts a wondrous event. 5 1/4 (including  two 20 minute intermissions) hours seems compressed into nothing, and the mind keeps going back to specific scenes. “What was that?” and “that was incredible” were recurring comments.

The eyeball of Wotan, multicolored and forbidding off in a corner signifying his influence; the Tarnhelm hovering over the stage both as mask and commentary on the duplicity below;  the Greek chorus, indistinguishable from one another in black robes and anonymous Munchian masks, witnesses to betrayal and murder.  Evil lawn gnomes and misshappen chupacabras add a Jungian nightmare quality to the death of Siegfried. These moments of amazement were not isolated, but ran throughout the opera like  a trail of gasoline lit until it inevitably explodes at the  conclusion as Valhalla burns like Berlin in April 1945.

The singing on Sunday was superb. Eric Halfvarson, in addition to having the right name for the role, did an incredible job as the evil dwarf  Hagen. Malevolent and expansive, scheming and brilliantly sung. John Treleaven as Siegfried, portrayed with integrity and emotion a surreal cartoon hero in red and blue Hulk muscles, caught in a web of his own foolishness and the lust and greed of others. But it was Linda Watson as Brunnhilde who cemented the production. Her presence defined by Freyer is heroic and melded Wagner’s vision with her voice an evocation of  the role. Her despair when realizing her betrayal by Siegfried was all the more beautifully heartbreaking. The role is her own, and as the focus of Act III, in the end it rode on her skill and ability. She did an incredible job in all ways.

Brian Gale’s lighting design was incredible. From the Dan Flavinesque high impact fluorescents to the light swords of the chorus, rarely if ever has the lighting been so integral and so effective in a production. The finale is a defining moment in modern theater.

All throughout, the orchestra was simply magnificent.  Conlon basically pitched a perfect game. There are no other words.

I know this all sounds like art/music critic BS, but the reality is that it impressed me that much. This may go down as one of the greatest productions of any opera at any time. The folly of man and the gods is a story for our time.

Hitler’s Children – The Left’s latest threat to democracy

I got an e mail this afternoon from a fellow named Josh Marshall, who runs a web site called Talking Points Memo entitled “Outcrazying the Crazy” urging liberals to crash Tea Party demonstrations scheduled around the country for April 15. This is not a college prank. This is not responsible political dissent or disagreement. It is an attempt to discredit their opponents, who actually significantly outnumber them, by any means necessary.

This is in addition to the Obama Administration’s use of the National Endowment for the Arts as a new propaganda ministry, and a callous and unapologetic program to control the press which is sympathetic to them and silence those who are opposed. It is of a whole with the Administrations efforts to misdirect and mislead the American People on their agenda.

We have a President today whose premeditated lies about transparency and openness are clear for all to see. We have an Administration who have proven that they will use any means available, from recess appointments to executive orders to Congressional bribery on a Roman scale to further the most leftist agenda in American history. They have done so by twisting the law and the Constitution into pretzels. Their own statements as recently as the last election contradict their actions. They out and out lied to all of us.

Now their aim is to discredit their opposition; primarily mainstream citizens genuinely concerned with spending, government overreach, and a distant and contemptuous ruling class, by infiltration, subversion and disruption of the peaceable assemblies guaranteed by the Constitution.

This is not American. It is not even Soviet. It is fascist.

Consider the President’s contempt for the press. Just this morning Dana Millbank of the Washington Post was outraged with the President’s manipulation of media at his Nuclear Summit. Millbank describes the streets of Washington, D.C. in tones that remind me of William Shirers descriptions of Berlin in the 1930′s. He compares the President, with whom he sympathizes, with the Soviet oligarchy in his Goebbels like control of the message.

Now we have the modern Brownshirts in action. Agents provocateur will infiltrate Tea Party demonstrations with knowledge of the tight focus shot, mau mau’ing and will fight for camera time as the addiction of the media to the dramatic and their own sympathetic predispositions draw them like moths to a flame.

There is no meeting halfway on this. This is a direct assault on our values. This is the result of what has been taught in the universities and the romantic infatuation of the Left with Che and Chavez and Castro. This is more akin to the streets of Caracas or, more recently, Bangkok.

There is too much coincidence now. There are too many disturbing trends for this to be seen as anything but an attempted takeover of our democracy on a fundamental level. Somewhere, someone, is pulling levers and manipulating public opinion with malice aforethought. It is a slow motion coup. Someone should be keeping a good watch on the Reichstag.

James Cameron gives us a precious moment

James Cameron boogeying down with the Amazonian Arara tribe (courtesy: New York Times)

This photo should grace every statement by liberal entertainment activists every time they utter something completely stupid. Today we also have the news that Sting took $2 Million to do a private concert for the daughter of Uzbek tyrant Islam Karimov, Gulnara, who has been identified as a major figure in child labor abuse in her country. Add to that the boycott of Kitty Kelly’s salacious bio of Oprah Winfrey by virtually every major mainstream outlet and one get’s an idea of what is really going on. I wonder what Sean Penn and Danny Glover and Ed Begley were up to today?

A soldier I know just priced out a cross country trip on a G III to Las Vegas, just for *** and giggles, at $28,000 round trip. This is the kind of loot these clowns spend to travel hither and yon from photo op to photo op. That the American people have not yet figured that these people are worthless, self involved, idiotic windbags indulging their neuroses is disappointing.

Rosie O’Donnell spouts the most vicious verbal diarrhea while Whoopie Goldberg is in denial about 9/11. This is Hollywood and the music biz and the arts in a nutshell. Knee jerk leftism.

The fact is that “intellectual property” is with a few exceptions, neither these days. The arts have become a derivative mockery of themselves. In music, film, and letters, it has become a simple ripoff of plot and melody with a few F bombs thrown in. Shepard Fairey is defending himself in court and losing badly for ripping off an AP photo and then denying he ripped it off. This is what passes for art these days.

Ghetto culture dominates style and the airwaves, and what really is it? Jazz and soul and gospel and had meaning. Today we get Snoop (no disrespect) and a bunch of morons with bad ink.

Perhaps maybe we want to reevaluate where we are at artistically. Charles Barkley said years ago ” I am no role model” and he was right. Neither are Sting or Penn or Cameron or most of the morons polishing turds as art and deep thought these days.

Jerry Brown’s Billions – How he is screwing California on the health care bill

California Attorney General Jerry Brown is once again set to screw the taxpayers of California. 19 states have now joined in suing the Federal government regarding the constitutionality of the recent health care bill. In addition to unfunded mandates, the dictates of the legislation raise serious questions of the powers of the federal government to dictate policies reserved to the states.

The aspect of the bill most troubling to Californians should be the cost it imposes on the states. The insurance pool for very high risk patients begins on July 1. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote to the states a month ago asking that they opt in to the high risk pool. Many states have already responded in the negative. The federal government has put aside just $5 Billion to fund this pool. This amount would not even cover California’s costs per year. This, by the way, is directly related to the Nebraska sellout and Louisiana purchase and the other grifts that bought the votes of several Democratic Senators. The bill is tilted even further against high cost states such as California.

California Attorney General Brown has refused to join in the overarching litigation, while the state government has not yet responded to Secretary Sebelius’ request. I think we know the answer to that as perhaps our most incompetent legislature and governor have their heads deeply embedded in the sand. The health care bill has been examined and found to be the greatest unfunded mandate ever imposed by the federal government. It will cost California billions that we clearly do not have.

National response to the bill has fallen almost completely on political fault lines. The Democrats are refusing to even investigate the issue, while most of the participants in the lawsuits are Republican. Wouldn’t it be nice if our representatives simply looked out for the interests of their constituents instead of their own personal gain?

Mr. Brown has never held a real job. He has been continually running for office for the past 40 years. There are serious questions about his ethical conduct as Attorney General. He let ACORN run rampant even when illegal activities were documented, while he also allowed staffers to threaten and illegally record telephone conversations with reporters investigating his office. As AG, he has also refused to investigate allegations against fellow Democrat Kevin Johnson, the Mayor of Sacramento, who has been under fire for both inappropriate conduct with underage girls and his administration of his charitable foundation. Justice in California clearly has a political taint it has not had in the past.

Now, when the state is faced with a $15-20 Billion/year shortfall, he is failing again to act in the interest of his constituents. His selective interpretation of the law will drive California further over the edge. He does have unindicted co-conspirators in both the Governor’s Mansion and State House. But that is no excuse. It is incumbent upon California’s leading law enforcement officer to do his job. Once again, the people of California will be scourged with Mr. Brown’s incompetence and leftist politics.

Getting it right about NASA – What Obama fails to understand

The nation is almost past a critical juncture in its technology future. We are forgetting how to design and build advanced technology and losing the infrastructure to do so. Today, the President is at the Kennedy Space Center to deliver a pep talk to NASA, once a national treasure of engineering and scientific expertise.  He is not there the chart a bold new path, but to feel their pain as he guts the manned space program.

There is in parallel a growing trend of support for commercial space flight. A lack of clarity;  a desire for cutting “unnecessary” programs at the federal level, and a failure of leadership have made NASA an easy target. But the facts are in the way.

High space flight is the most difficult, dangerous, and complex science and engineering in history. It is the bleeding edge. We can do a lot of things, but sending men deep into space takes repeated and consistent perfection. We have learned that lesson the hard way and paid in blood. By trying to extend the useful lifetime of our Space Shuttles beyond 20 years, we found the breaking point when Columbia crashed. The Constellation program is over budget for the good reason that we are trying to build something with an order of magnitude of complexity greater than the Apollo/Gemini/Mercury programs. Non scientists seem to forget this. It is the plague that has defined the past 20 years of American technology, manufacturing and engineering. I call it the short term syndrome.

Government is the only player that can fund and provide the broad stroke goals for such a massive enterprise as space exploration. But government is also highly bureaucratic and lethargic. This has infected NASA as well. Sclerotic institutionalism has no place at the leading edge. This is the key point that should be made. But when leadership does not understand the issues; organizational, visionary, and technical, and cannot see the forest for the trees, this is where we end up.

Today, Fortune magazine announced that WalMart, the sales and marketing arm of China Inc. is the most profitable company in the world. The reason is that outsourcing and offshoring have become like heroin to the leadership class. It is a quick and dirty way to inflate profits and cut inflation at the expense of the long term health of our country. Supply chain managers, accountants, and MBA’s whose only skill is streamlining now dominate American business. Wall Street is a corrupt insider game. Congress is dominated by lawyers with little real world experience.

America’s manufacturing and technology infrastructure is lagging further behind than ever in our history. The “factory of the world” has become a shadow of it’s former self, and yet technology is at the center of a modern economy.

Space is the New Frontier, and it is in space that we will find the resources and scientific advances that will serve both our country and our world in the next century. We are faced with competing interests from India, China, and Russia who want nothing more than to advance their own national interests in space. It has been the United States who held the standard for mankind. President Obama, in his lack of comprehesion of technology, business, and science, is pounding one more nail in the coffin today.

Lake Forest – Irvine Tea Party- April 15, 2010

I was able to attend the Lake Forest – Irvine Tea Party this afternoon to document any right wing hate speech or true American counter protestors. The crowd of @ 500-600 assembled in an orderly fashion in the parking lot of the local Nissan dealer after their permit to assemble at the Laguna Hills Mall was suspended by mall management. It seems the office drones were terrified of having their parking lot stigmatized by association with known agitators.

The crowd was overwhelmingly composed of dangerous middle class radicals between the ages of 21 – 80. Numerous participants wearing sports jackets, work attire, suits and ties were noted, a sure sign of hard core activists. Others wore more casual clothing some suspiciously like that worn by retirees and housewives. Many protesters pumped home made signs with right wing slogans such as “Free the Constitution”, “Stop the Spending Madness”, “I think, therefore I am conservative”, and “Czar you serious, Uncle Scam?”. The latter was the only sign noted with a misspelling. This reporter believes it was some sort of secret code.

Radical speakers such as Bill Hunt, Chuck DeVore, Chrystopher Smith and Tony Katz incited the crowd with statements such as “We the People”, “Reduce deficit spending!”, and “Stop socialism!”. The crowd roared with the vitriol of an enraged gardening club, applauding  repeatedly.

News crews from the local affiliates of CBS and ABC, subbing in for Homeland Security filmed the crowd in order to identify potential troublemakers. This reporter documented as many oof the offensive signs and speakers as possible before being overwhelmed by the sheer normality of the situation.

Packing the California Citizen’s Redistricting Commission

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund will host a workshop on Saturday, March 13 at Montebello High School Library (2100 W. Cleveland Ave Montebello, CA 90640) from 10 am to 12 noon. Presentation topics include: overview of the supplemental application, qualification criteria, and discussion of letters of recommendation.  Additionally, a member of the Bureau of State Audits and NALEO staff will be available to answer your questions about the selection process in general.

NALEO Educational Fund will be in the following Southern California areas for the month of March: Pomona/San Bernardino, Downtown Los Angeles and San Diego/National City area. For more information or to register for events please contact Astrid Garcia at agarcia@naleo.org or visit www.latinosdrawthelines.org/events

The NALEO Educational Fund is the leading nonprofit organization that facilitates full Latino participation in the American political process, from citizenship to public service.

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The above is a copy of an e mail sent to every California citizen who has applied for and passed the first pass application for appointment to California’s Citizen Redistricting Commission, the first effort at combating the gerrymandering of California’s legislative districts in 50 years. It illustrates the lengths to which the entrenched political interests are trying to influence the process will go.

California’s gerrymandering is legendary. It virtually guarantees incumbent party domination in every district in the state. It has entrenched the Democratic Party in power for the past 40 years. Once they were elected, they wanted to make sure they stayed elected. You know, sort of like communist Russia. The response by the citizenry was the ballot initiative process, which the politicians, mainly Democrat, now bewail for all of the state’s problems. Common sense died when the socialists, I mean Democrats took power. The pity is that the state Republican Party leadership has been happy to go along to preserve their minority status.

The Citizen’s Redistricting Commission was created by Proposition 11 in November 2008 to relieve the situation. It passed despite a massive effort by the Democratic Party to fight it. It is supposed to be  completely nonpartisan effort to redraw the state Senate, Assembly, and Board of Equalization (tax) districts along sensible lines. It is supposed to be scrupulously fair. 14 Members, 5 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 4 of neither party will have the responsibility of drawing new legislative districts. It is those 4 seats at the heart of the matter. Every special interest group in the state is drooling, but the community organizers are ahead of the curve.

Now, as the Claremont Institute reports, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, the Central Coast Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), the Greenlining Institute, and all sorts of other liberal activist and Democratic leaning organizations are teaching applicants how to get in under the radar. It’s sort of like the freaks back in the 60′s getting straight jobs to in order to crash the system. After 40 years in power they want to cement that power for another 10 years.

Put out the joint, cut your hair, act straight, say “yes sir, and no ma’am”, remove the “Che” button and roll down your sleeves to hide the tats. Sure the straights will fall for it. They did last time.

$1429.00 for All Star Tickets!

I am a California Angels fan. This year, I was really looking forward to the All Star Game, which is being held on July 13 in Anaheim. My buddy Alan who I share season tickets with just called me up because he just got the order form from the box office. It was so outrageous I had to laugh.

Our seats are out in left field, as I have been accused of many times, down on the field level. Back in the days before journeyman baseball players made more than the gross national product of the Dominican Republic, they would have been $10-$15 seats for a regular season game. Now, with the Angels in the cellar with a collective brain cloud, they are $30/each. For the All Star Extravaganza, the team wants $1429.00 for the pair.

Why it’s the experience of a lifetime, one might say. But wait, there’s more. For that price you get the following:

4 seats to the All Star Fan Fest, a chance to sell you more stuff you really don’t need.

2 seats, at a buck and a quarter each, to Saturday’s Work Out Day (practice). If some people say watching baseball is like watching paint dry, then what is watching paint practice drying like?

2 seats, at $250.00 each, to Sunday’s home run derby.$250/each to watch a bunch of goof offs goof off at the Home Run Derby? How about they use grenades instead of baseballs in honor of our troops? $250 is about what an E-1 on patrol in Afghanistan makes per week after taxes. Keep it in mind, Papi.

2 seats, at $300/each to the “Red Carpet Show” aka All Star Game.

It sounds like a strip club, frankly, and is priced about the same.

If there is one pointless game in any sport, it is baseball’s All Star Game. TV viewership has been in a tailspin, and the players treat it with about as much respect as Jesse James has for Sandra Bullock.

Once upon a time, one could look up to a ballplayer and even the young ones ran around like kids looking for autographs at The Game. Now you’ll wonder  if  Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez are in the VIP room at some strip club near LAX ogling the tats at 4:00am. Either that or which new cocktail someone is using to beat the drug tests. Say it ain’t so, Joe….but that is today’s baseball reality.

For this they want $1429.00. Why for $1429.00 I can fly my honey and I to Napa, book a room at one of the best hotels, and live like a king for a weekend. For $1429.00 my buddy and I can fly to New York and catch a 3 game Yankees series if we buy the tickets on E Bay. For $1429.00 we could fly to London. In England, even. For $1429.00 you can rent a Corvette for 5 days and drive to Albuquerque and back, catch an Isotopes (my favorite minor leaguers) game, stop off at the Plaza Cafe’ in Santa Fe for the best breakfast on the planet, and be back and still have $400 or $500 left over. You get the idea. For $1429.00, you can pay your mortgage. For $1429.00, you can build a home in Port au Prince.

Back when they had the strike, Major League Baseball lost me for several years. Field, Row 2, Infield season tickets for 15 years and I blew it off. I figured if they were going to disrespect the game, why should I respect them? Now, with 12.5% unemployment in California and pointless interleague play, the corporate weasels will swoop in on their G V’s, party like it’s 1999, and Orange County Airport will look like Heathrow for a couple of days (well, maybe not with all the ash and soot).

After 2 years of one of the roughest recessions in modern history, they still don’t get it. Times have changed. People are sick and tired of the gravy trainers. The growing inequity in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans. It is between the insiders and the outsiders. It is a shysters game. And $1429.00 for two field tickets out in left field for a meaningless swinefest pretty well sums it up.

P.S. Did I mention the tickets cost $1429.00?

Questioning Goodwin Liu

“Judge Alito’s record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse … where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man,” Liu wrote. “I humbly submit that this is not the America we know. Nor is it the America we aspire to be.”

So testified Goodwin Liu during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. This is the same Goodwin Liu who failed to provide hundreds of pages of his writings prior to this weeks Senate hearings on his appointment to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals until reminded by Senate staffers they had not yet received them . Mr. Liu seems to be doing his best to stonewall the Judiciary Committee by delaying many of his most controversial documents until as late as Tuesday.

Goodwin Liu is noted for his meteoric ascent in the legal profession. He graduated from Yale with his J.D. in 1998 and is 40 years old. That is a very young age for any judge, much less one on the appellate bench. His views, while perhaps moderate in San Francisco, reflect a strong liberal bias, including active opposition to Proposition 8, the California initiative establishing marriage as between a man and a woman; positive welfare rights, and a clearly stated support of some form of reparations for slavery, the new liberal trope. these views are fine for a normal citizen, but perhaps too progressive for even the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s most liberal and most overturned court.

Intemperate remarks such as those about Justice Alito do nothing to support any conception of moderation, for that is what we require of our judges. We simply ask that they apply the law, not make it. Mr. Liu’s legacy of writings and recordings instead make it  clear that the bench to him is a vehicle for his views on social justice and that those who disagree with him are tarred with the brush of racism.

The Ministry of Propaganda & the Goldman Sachs case

The SEC filed civil charges against Goldman Sachs yesterday in a highly complex case, just as the President urged the same morning for a bipartisan effort in Congress to pass his Wall Street reforms. Coincidence? Not likely. The President is the least bipartisan in 40 years, but he needs a few Republican fig leaves on this one to cover his rear.

The case in question involves the alleged nondisclosure of a conflict of interest at Goldman in a complex hedge deal. I won’t go into more detail, but I do know that between compliance departments and Chinese Walls, any reputable Wall Street firm would have vetted any deal three ways from Sunday before signing off. Not only is it the law, but it is for self protection against exactly such accusations and associated litigation.

Over at the SEC, on the other hand, they let Lehman Brothers play 3 card monte and didn’t catch on until it set off the greatest financial crisis since 1929. Lehman was double booking assets, misstating values, and any number of outright criminal violations, and still no lawsuits or indictments. At Lehmans, there were more smoking guns than at the St. Valentines Day massacre. The Goldman case is thus all the more obscure and curious.

Bringing us thus to the question, cui bono? The mainstream press has been quick to indict Goldman Sachs. The news shook the stock market yesterday with a 125 point drop. The President simply has to sit back and let the press and the plaintiff’s bar do all the work now. He has given an air of legitimacy to even the outrageous claims.

Don’t get me wrong. Goldman are the biggest and most efficient school of sharks in the ocean. They would rob their own mothers, and have in the past. But today we have seen over and again that the Obama Administration is the most manipulative in American history. From health care to cap & trade to using the National Endowment of the Arts as their personal propaganda ministry to treating the Washington press corpse as their  trained seals, they have shown they will use any means necessary to achieve their aims.

The media have had the facts laid out for them like the instructions for Monopoly, but have remained silent. Chris Dodd has a $1 Million+ house in Roundstone, Ireland that he paid somewhere @ $300K to one of his banking buddies for, and yet not one reporter has flown to Shannon and driven the 100 miles up the coast (and it’s a lovely drive) to have a look for themselves. Barney Frank’s hands are covered in the blood red ink of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and he still has the chutzpah to go on O’Reilly and yap like an angry Pomeranian. Because he knows the fix is in.

The media are the unindicted co conspirators on this one, and the White House is at the center of the conspiracy. Anyone who falls foul of their agenda is vilified; the insurance companies; the major corporations who had to adjust earnings when the health care bill was passed, and were called to Capitol Hill by Henry Waxman; the attacks on the Tea Party first as a bunch of uneducated right wing hicks and then as upper middle class coupon clippers. Which is it, Mr. President? The media pivot and pirouette better than the Joffrey Ballet and he rewrites the facts.

Because the buck does stop in the Oval Office. Nixon had Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Obama has Rahm and Gibbs and czars and outreach offices. Obama has gone to the length of actively seducing the opinion makers and then playing them like puppets for access and favor. Taken all together, it is a highly unpleasant and disturbing trend.

Goldman Sachs may well be guilty, but the evidence looks pretty darn flimsy. With targets such as Countrywide and Washington Mutual and DiTech so inviting, isn’t it just a tad curious that the administration decides to go after an obscure transaction on the day the President is mau mau’ing Congress? Welcome to Newspeak.

Stroke of the Pen. Law of the Land. Kinda Cool.

So said Paul Begala, Democratic Party activist, in 1998, and so governs Barack Obama. From classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant to trying to re-write the law in every state in the country on same sex hospital rights, our current President seems to have forgotten about the separation of powers established by the Constitution.

From attempting to intimidate the Supreme Court during the State of the Union Address to running roughshod over Congress’ own rules in passing health care legislation, our president is thumbing his nose at the law of the land. Not at all surprising for a Chicago community organizer /adjunct instructor at the University of Chicago law school. That’s sort of like being the third catcher on the Cubs.

Our president has scheduled a Mau Mau of Wall Street this week, after the SEC delivered a well-timed complaint against Goldman Sachs. The Great Uniter has been practicing the politics of division ever since he was elected. He is hoping to con a couple of Republicans into voting for his dog’s breakfast Wall Street reform bill while Chris Dodd and Barney Frank sit there with straight faces after they personally torched  several trillion in pension fund assets and receiving the standard commission in unmarked 20′s and 50′s.

Welcome to the new oligarchy. Gang tackling the 10th Amendment. Executive orders that subvert the law and common sense. Propaganda and media manipulation. Insider deals. It didn’t start with Obama, but it has been a slippery slide down the primrose path. GWB had his own agenda as well, but somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the subversion of the law. Congress and the judiciary have an obligation to the Constitution, not a particular administration. There is a lot of leeway built-in there, but when one party basically tries to ram through an anti-Constitutional agenda, everyone should speak out for the good of the country. Funny thought, that. For. The. Good. Of. The. Country.

Who did Obama offend today?

A brief list of allies, citizens, organizations, and others unnecessarily offended by the comments or actions of the President of the United States

Poland – twice. First with the missile defense sellout. Again when Obama played golf the other day instead of acting in a respectful manner when he could not attend the state funerals for Kaczinski and his wife.

Czech Republic – see above item 1.

The United Kingdom – began with return of Churchill bust. Continued with White House gift shop toys for Gordon Brown’s kids. Continued further with iPod with Obama’s speeches for the Queen. Continued further with sell out of UK on Falkland Islands.

Israel – Where do we start?

Gays & the Military – “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy blows up on both sides. Military ignores while Obama ignores gay protests.

Hu Jintao – Obama breaks into private meeting in Copenhagen. Extreme loss of of face.

Honduras – Sold out Honduran government in the Zelaya crisis. Capped it with threat last week to stick to Obama narrative “or else”.

Tea Party Participants – The President has repeatedly publicly  denigrated and offended those who dissent with his policies. This has never occurred in the office of the president before.

Las Vegas – calling a city out twice in one year must be some kind of record.

Norway – When awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, Obama neglected to participate in a number of the traditional events surrounding the awards dinner in Oslo. This was written up extensively in the Norwegian press.

The Handicapped – On Jay Leno last year, the President offended the handicapped when he compared his bowling score to that of a Special Olympian. Then again, he does throws like a girl.

As my mother tried to drill into me: Tact – to speak or act without offense. Unfortunately, the uniter and healer has fallen a bit flat in this critical presidential skill. Perhaps it is his youth. Perhaps it is simply his personality. perhaps it is the Chicago way or that of a community organizer. Regardless, it is unseemly in the President of the United States.

The Left’s curious pivot on the Tea Party

E.J. Dionne, one of the more reliable tell tales of the Journo-List, today explains to us that the Tea Party is nothing new, just the “Populism of the Privileged”. Last Thursday the New York Times released what to them was a stunning revelation that the average Tea Party protester was more educated and better off than the national average.

Prior to this, the meme was that the President’s opponents were all “bitterly clinging to guns and religion” as he told a select group of wealthy San Francisco leftists during the primaries. The propaganda machine in this country would do the old Soviet apparatchiks proud. Within a few days they have redefined their enemy with nary a thought to cloud their minds.

The arrogance and stupidity is truly amazing. We had the President lying bald faced about taxes, mocking the Tea Party movement last week at a Miami fundraiser. I’m sure he’ll have more bon mots at the Barbara Boxer fundraiser in Los Angeles this evening. Robert Gibbs has become a laughingstock for his fact challenged, clueless pugnaciousness. And one can almost read the morning Journo-List e mail of the day. “Everybody pivot 180!”.

It would be pitiful if it wasn’t so serious. As the old Soviet era joke goes, “What is more useful, newspapers or television”?

Answer:  Newspapers, of course, you can’t wrap fish in a television.

U.S.: Iran Strike “off the table”

AP – Singapore

Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flourney ruled out military force, which would include a naval blockade, against Iran in the near term, saying it was “off the table”. Combined with Secretary Robert Gates secret memo to National Security Adviser James Jones that the country lacks a credible plan for the Iran threat, I am sure Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khameni figure they can stall for another 2 years as our government flounders. Israel may not wait so long.

The introduction of SCUD missiles into Hezbollah’s inventory through Syria has added urgency to the Iran crisis. The Iranians can now launch just as easily through their proxies as Beirut as from Western Iran with almost no notice to Israeli population centers such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Haifa. It wouldn’t even have to be a real bomb. Dirty bombs would do. This is the equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis for Israel. And remember, Israel has been there before in 1991 when Saddam launched his SCUDs and Bush Sr. had do do all he could to keep the Israelis from retaliating.

Now, with U.S. – Israeli relations at an all time low there are fewer reasons for cooperation with a much more serious threat at hand. Israel’s enemies see the new American posture as an opportunity to tighten the noose, not negotiate. This was learned through the Intifada, when the Palestinians stepped up rocket attacks as Israel was condemned for their response. In the Middle East, you see, it really is an eye for an eye.

Secretary of State Clinton exacerbated the situation during her visit several weeks ago, while the Washington meeting between President Obama and Shimon Peres was buried in the deep freeze. It dropped from the headlines in 24 hours, just as the president wished. Now the Israelis are weighing their options, none of which are good.

In the meantime, the White House seems to have no plan whatsoever in place except continuing negotiations. Since the President also trashed 60 years of defense strategy by refusing to consider using nuclear weapons, what then happens if Iran escalates? That threat, which had been explicit, did more to cause dictators to pause than any other measure. Now it’s gone.

The apocalyptic Shiite vision fits neatly with that of Armageddon. This is the mindset we are dealing with. Peace through strength is not just a motto, it is the reality of the Middle East. I am afraid our government is sending exactly the wrong message.

More on Health Care – We Are So Screwed

We didn’t have to wait long for the cost of Obamacare to be seen in the United States economy. It is earnings season now, and it looks like many major American companies are showing us the true cost of the Health care bill. The latest is Lockheed Martin. In reporting its quarterly results today, Lockheed reported reduced earnings of $96 Million, almost all of it due to restating its health care costs according to the standard accounting practices with which Congressman Waxman is at war. Projected on an annual basis, this is $384 Million per year, much less than AT&T’s $1 Billion/year reduction in profits.

If one considers the entire Fortune 500, the cost of the Health Care Bill to corporate America will be will be more than $250 Billion/year with no improvement in the quality of health care. This will eventually show up in reduced employment and salaries, higher product costs, and inflation. This does not include the $1,000/person health care fine that begins to kick in in 2014, and reaches its maximum (right!) in 2016, the year Obama hopes to be leaving office.

30 Million people are currently uninsured. Most of them will not have to pay the fine according to the White House, so real revenue will only be approximately $4 Billion by the estimates of the Joint Committee on Taxation . Do the math. Averaged out, is $133/year in insurance premiums per individual. Imagine what kind of coverage that will buy in 4 years. No offense, but that kind of money buys you the Zimbabwe package.

The medical community is outraged and is already bracing for a reduction in applications to medical and nursing schools. Doctors and nurses simply will not be able to afford to pay back their loans. And every day, more bad news is coming out. Remember, no one who voted on the bill except a very few ever read the damned thing and surely, no one considered the implications.

So, Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi and President Obama and every one of you who voted for this monstrosity, tell me how this ends? This isn’t even Socialism. It’s sheer stupidity.

Detroit as a metaphor for America

Yesterday, the Ministry of Propaganda (AP wing) posted an article lauding the new urban farming plan for Detroit, Michigan. You see, it has gotten so bad in Detroit that entire city blocks are now deserted. A few months ago at the height of the financial crisis, a 2,000 square foot house in good condition in a middle class neighborhood could not find a taker at $1. One dollar.

Now, some urban planners are suggesting and the state, city and federal governments are listening, that these blocks and many more be razed and converted into urban farmland. Where children once played in the parks and the streets will  be converted to a new “green” urban/rural model where farmer’s markets and small dairy herds will offer the freshest produce to the inhabitants of what is left of Detroit.

Notwithstanding the incredible cost of demolition and lead paint and asbestos removal and landfilling huge tracts of empty basements, the plan will also leave the most populated neighborhoods untouched; i.e. the ‘hood. Now Fifty Cent and Marshall and their posses can low ride out and do crop identification classes for the little homies.

That we are at this point is indicative of the state of the nation. 70 years of self entitlement and social programs and mismanagement have led us here. This disaster had many fathers.  There is plenty of blame to go around. Detroit was the factory of the world and now it has become a husk. More wealth was created here than almost anywhere else on earth. The union movement in Detroit enabled the American Dream for the working man and then took it away. Management got fat and happy and incompetent here first. Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids cost managed and supply chained the automobile industry into a death spiral here. The union contracts were so larded up that it was laughable. You could attach a left rear tire but not the others. Touch a broom and it was a workplace violation.

Labor-management relations were completely adversarial. The union leaders would stalk the weakest manufacturer and then enforce the most onerous contract, which they could then force on the other two of the Big Three. Thus we saw Studebaker and American Motors and Packard and most likely Chrysler next fade into history. On the management side, quality was a joke and groupthink dominated. We did not adapt and innovate or examine best practices used by the competition or in some years even offer a saleable product.

Indicative of the state of the nation’s leadership today is the thinking behind Urban Ruralization. For the first time, our government wants to foster a policy that makes a lesser use of the available resources. Think about it. There is  a back to nature romanticism to this that hearkens back to Jean Jacques Rousseau. There is a Gaia tinged environmentalism that posits that new technologies will create an urban oasis.

The reality is far more concrete. Detroit arose because of its location. From the iron mines of the northern Minnesota to the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Detroit was the nexus at which all came together. They had the ideas and the technology and the resources to build the largest industry in the world. The production line was invented there and the world changed. It got smaller. And when war came, Detroit became the arsenal of Democracy. Detroit is a national treasure.

Urban planners and politicians and lawyers and people who have never either worked the land or built anything more than an Ikea bookcase now want to write it all off. They want solar energy where its efficiency is poorest and mythological “green” jobs and to return the workforce to the farm. Might I remind them that the trend of history has almost always favored urbanization? Farm jobs can in no way be considered green jobs under the definitions applied at Harvard. The logic frankly flies in the face of history.

People killed Detroit, or rather their dumb ideas did. Taxes and regulations helped kill manufacturing. Inattention to the means of production and creation of wealth helped hurry the process. Greed was the final nail in the coffin. If ever there was a place they killed the goose that laid the golden egg it was in Detroit.

Now we are left with a city the local FBI agent in charge calls the most target rich environment in the nation because of corruption. The city lost its title as America’s murder capital as much because out outmigration as any other factor. Now the dogs are fighting over the carcass and the politicians are befuddled as to what to do.

Some 26 year old with euroglasses with zero experience in Washington is now a czar for urban planning and calling the shots, while a 30 year old czar with no experience holds the auto industry in the palm of his hand. GM tries to play 3 card monty on the nation with a $6.5 Billion “loan repayment” and Washington snores. We’re in the best of hands.

There is an innate common sense in many Americans. This was the foundation for the Tea Party movement. That common sense is out there still, but we are running out of time. To paraphrase the poem, “First they came for Detroit…….”

The Left’s insanity on Arizona’s immigration law

Last night, I listened to the Democratic mayor of Phoenix, Arizona give an incoherent interview on the news regarding his opposition to Arizona’s new law empowering Arizona law enforcement officers to actually enforce certain Federal laws which the Federal government refuses to enforce. If that isn’t clear, I can use smaller words. And if this situation isn’t completely insane, I’m not sure what is.

Left wing politicians and activists, including the President of the United States are screaming at the top of their lungs because Arizona wants to enforce the law of the land. Think about how morally bankrupt that is.

Now that the Left holds the reins of power in Washington, they have stopped all major activity to police our southern border. The fence project has been de-funded and stopped. The federal government has cut back on the number of Border Patrolmen assigned to actually, you know, patrol. The Department of Homeland Security has even stopped the electronic border monitoring project, which has wasted a billion dollars so far. The irony of it is that the chief enforcement officer is Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona. She may want to think about buying a retirement home elsewhere after she’s done in Washington.

Here in California, we have a Motor Voter law. Anyone who registers for a driver’s license is registered to vote. You don’t need proof of citizenship for a driver’s license. In addition, it is illegal to ask for proof of citizenship when voting, even a driver’s license. These were core legislative goals of the California Democratic Party. What does that tell you?

The Democratic Party has always been the party of immigrants. From the Irish to the Italians to the Jews to Latinos, the social justice platforms of the Democrats has always been the great attractor. The exception was the party’s institutionalized racism up until the 1970′s. Senator Robert Byrd was the last remaining exemplar, and even he has changed in the intervening years.

Frankly, the Republicans seem to have forgotten some of the basic truths of the American credo sometime in the late 1800′s. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the election of Rutherford B. Hayes signalled the sellout of some of the Republican ideals of equality. That was when the plutocrats and robber barons took over.

Today, we are faced with a 180 degree turn. The Democrats now represent the robber barons while the conservative Tea Party movement preaches the Constitution and fundamental equality. Equal enforcement of the law is a central tenet of this philosophy.

We are faced with a civil war on the Mexican side of the border. There are daily gun battles. There is a multi billion dollar narcotics industry that transits this border that is corrupting our own law enforcement and stealing our national wealth while it condemns millions to addiction. There have been regular and significant incursions, not by the immigrant looking for work, but by Hummers with mounted machine guns driven by men dressed as Mexican soldiers. Kidnapping by Mexican gangs has become a serious problem in the Phoenix area and elsewhere. We are seeing Mexico’s crime wave spill over the border. What part of “out of control” don’t you understand Mr. President?

I work in Santa Ana, which has one of the largest Latino communities in the country. Most are here legally and are U.S. citizens, but there is also a large illegal alien population. Many of them are the people who watch our children or cut our lawns or do the day labor most legal aliens and most citizens simply won’t do. The vast majority of them are peaceful, law-abiding, decent people. But the fact is that they are here illegally. They jumped the line just as surely as if someone cuts in front of you at the supermarket or the movies. This is the perspective of those wanting to legally immigrate.

There are also those gaming the system with anchor babies and wanting assistance. The truth is that we simply cannot afford this any more. We’re broke.

In Sacramento, the state legislature is dominated by the Left. It is one reason the state has become ungovernable. We are not seeing the problem that Arizona is because there is a pretty good wall extending from the Pacific Ocean a hundred miles. Even with this, last year over 50 immigrants died out in the desert and the ravines of California from exposure. A fence would have helped prevent those deaths. Now, California legislators and “professional Latinos” are among those screaming the loudest about how unfair the Arizona law is. California simply pushed its problem eastward. Now the Left can afford to scream the loudest.

One of the core principles of the Tea Party, as I read it, is fairness. In taxation, in spending, in the enforcement of the law. Liberal legislation and the convoluted legal system have created thousands of loopholes exploited by the cronies of those in power. Part of the Democratic Party platform that does not get discussed in public is to stay in power by any means necessary. It’s not about equality. It’s not about oppression. It’s about controlling the graft and favors doled out and rigging the game to do it on a permanent basis. This is antithetical to our democratic (small d) system.

There is a dialectical contradiction in the platform of the Left that is directly at odds with the Constitution of the United States. The words equality and freedom have been twisted into pretzels. The politics of victimization dominates. By personalizing politics, they have instead made the Constitution and through it all of us the victims. They are turning 800 years of the quest for justice into a parody, inventing new rights and forms of justice to suit their political agenda. If this isn’t insane, I am no longer sure of the definition.

All the money in the world – The Debt Crisis

We are seeing a unique phenomenon in Europe this week. It is simply the culmination of too much borrowing for too long. Greece is the leader, then Portugal, then Spain, then everyone.

Greece needs 120 Million Euros over the next 3 years, and the people who have it; the Germans, French, and  Dutch, don’t want to throw good money after bad. The Greeks, you see, really don’t want to cut spending very seriously, which is adding gasoline to the fire.  They haven’t yet made the huge cuts in their budgets necessary to meet the EU’s revised demands, and are now paying over 10% on long term debt and 15% on 2 Year bonds which is unsustainable. Portugal and Spain are more responsible, but are now caught at the edge of the whirlpool.

Portugal’s outstanding public debt is 85% of 2010 GDP (US$227.8 BillionGDP/2009), while private sector debt is 150% of GDP. Spain’s sovereign debt is expected to peak at 74% of GDP ($1.46 trillion GDP/2009) in 2012. Ireland is at 110% of GDP ($175 BillionGDP/2009). Then come Italy, Belgium and the UK. With their own debt bomb and uncertainty over the upcoming election, the British economy could be very vulnerable.

The Telegraph this morning described the debt crisis as spreading like the Ebola virus, and that is the problem. For it is not just a debt crisis but one of confidence.

Here in the United States sovereign debt is close to $19 Trillion and we are in the same boat. The only difference is that money that had been invested in European debt is now seeking the safest assets. The reality is that our currency is the least ugly option. It is the pig that looks best with some lipstick. Japanese sovereign debt is at 200% of GDP with no sign of reduction and they have no clue on how to figure that one out yet.

The problem comes if and when it snowballs. The smart money already knows these facts and the operation of markets. These are the companies and individuals socking away hard assets. They may be worth a lot less in a year, but they are tangible. The $64 Dollar question is what happens if markets freeze up as happened only 18 months ago. This time it’s worse. The Lehman crisis was oh, $60 Billion or so. Greece alone blows that number away in the irresponsibility sweepstakes. Right now, the fiscal toolbox is pretty empty. Will our Treasury simply run the presses 25 hours/day instead of 24?

As it stands, American economists themselves have a reasonable consensus that the last Stimulus Bill in this country did very little to actually stimulate the economy. Cash for Clunkers was about it. Much of the rest was spent in either retaining government employees (fire, police, and teachers in many cases) or extending unemployment benefits. The business economists, at least, agree that the economy recovered on its own as usually happens. The creation of wealth is the solution, but if the global economy hits the skids again, all bets are off. And almost all of the governments involved in this crisis, including ours, do not get this absolutely fundamental fact. Economies, and by extension governments, are built upon the profitable economic activities of their citizens.

The “Western” economies are balanced on a pyramid of debt which has spread like a rot to local and regional government as well. Whether it is California or Harrisburg or Kyoto Prefecture or Seville, local governments are in the same bind, especially if tax revenues fall. This does not include the massive pension obligations on the books as well. We have an aging population in the developed world that is beginning to retire just as this crisis is unfolding.

If Greece defaults, the debt will be restructured and the creditors will take a haircut. The question is how much at that point. But if other economies follow, it will get much worse. At that point, the capital markets will be sucked dry. If you think credit is hard to get now, just wait. The funny thing is that even my daughter is a better credit risk than most governments. She doesn’t have the ability to print money like they do.

The result, at best, will be a major economic downturn in Europe. This is unavoidable. How bad it becomes is the only question. The piggy bank will be broken open and every penny available will be needed to stop the hemorrhaging. This liquidity crisis will then affect the United States, China, and the rest of the world. There really is no escaping. Most of the factories in China will slow almost immediately as happened in 2008, but this time even more will fail. While priming the economy as best they can, one of the few options for the Chinese government will be stimulating domestic consumption. But if unemployment rises, this too may be for naught. All of the trillion dollars in China’s national reserves will have to be used to keep their economy going. That is, if those dollars worth anything at that point.

“Full faith and credit” is a funny thing. Either it is there or it isn’t. Government, globally, has acted irresponsibly. Every time a Greece or a United States went off balance sheet, it attacked the integrity of the global monetary system. It was sort of like the California housing crisis. As long as prices kept rising, the borrower could get away with it, but once the market turned, it got very painful. This will now happen on a massive scale.

At a time when the world is fractured, it will take strong principled leadership, common sense and vision. Where will that come from? It is in as short a supply as I have ever seen right now. Upon such events do empires fall.

Will Tim Geithner be indicted?

Yesterday, TARP  Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky (acronym: SIGTARP), a former career prosecutor in the Southern District of New York office of the U.S.  Attorney General,was interviewed by Bloomberg reporter Richard Teitelbaum.

Barofsky, who was known as a hard-nosed, fearless specialist in drug and corruption cases when he was in New York, is persona non grata at the Treasury Department, his current employer. He has been repeatedly stonewalled in his efforts to carry out his job of rooting out waste and fraud.   He is meticulous in building his cases, whether they be against  narcoterrorists or money laundering rings or major mortgage frauds. He was deemed the right man for the job by the professionals and President Bush. He is a Democrat.

He has been highly critical of both the current and former Treasury Secretaries for their lack of transparency and candor with the public during the banking crisis.

In April, Secretary Geithner tried to rein him in by trying to assert his authority. However, he was rebuffed by the Justice Department. Since then, Treasury has sought to exclude several programs using billions of dollars in TARP funds from IG oversight. The Department has refused to provide documents, even those under subpoena. These decisions can only be taken at the highest levels.

There are numerous questionable transactions that involve billions more dollars under investigation. Remember, TARP is a $700 Billion program and we are talking about Wall Street, insurance companies, and a very unhealthy relationship with Washington that predates the crisis by 20 years. It is a witches brew.

In the case of the AIG scandal, the New York Fed, then headed by Geithner, paid creditors 100 cents on the dollar against $62 Billion in bad derivative investments; the infamous CDO’s, the same type of derivatives which are at the heart of the SEC’s Goldman Sachs investigation. Remember, the betting at the time was that these investments were almost worthless. Geithner at the very least cost the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars by not seeking a discount. He has never explained this decision.

In the Bloomberg interview, when asked about charges against the New York Fed, Barofsky said ” We’re either going to have criminal or civil charges against individuals or we’re going to have a report”. Remember, this is an ongoing investigation and normally, a prosecutor or Inspector General would say virtually nothing about conclusions until the final report was sealed or an indictment handed down. This is a 155mm warning shot across the bow of Secretary Geithner.

For throughout the crisis, Mr. Geithner was at the center. As he has already been proven before Congress to be ethically challenged in the matter of his own taxes, the evidence would now seem to indicate there is smoke from a much larger fire. The question is whether it meets the test of a felony or felonies. Grand theft charges in most states usually kick in at $1,000. What kind of charges are filed for extravagantly, incredibly, outrageously grand theft?

And all of this is under the radar screen of the mainstream media. The Treasury, and Congress especially have not been held accountable for their part in the country’s current financial predicament. Instead, the demagogues of the Left have tried to shift focus to the usual suspects. Class warfare while receiving hundreds of millions from those same bankers is the most rank of hypocrisies.

The SIGTARP office is growing rapidly as it undertakes more investigations. This was the original fear; that the banks, financial institutions and even our government acted corruptly.This fear has been justified in spades, as they used to say.

Crime of the Century – Wall Street & Washington

I just finished Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short”. I like his stuff. While he has a counterculture sensibility, he understands the inner workings of Wall Street like few others.

Wall Street is the ultimate shark pool. Even the big sharks get eaten, as Bear Stearns and Lehman and others found out recently. But Wall Street was perverted, and has been so for some time. Most of it is internal, but there was a nice big dollop of DC scumdugery involved as well. And so far, every single culprit…every g damned one of them, is walking.

The biggest ripoff in history, and not a single one of the big fish has been held accountable. Trillions of dollars in wealth disappeared but everyone kept their bonuses and the ones in DC have been running wild spending even more of the people’s money in every irresponsible way imaginable. And if you don’t think $19 Trillion in debt is a national calamity, I don’t know what is.

You see, the first part, the real estate crisis, started in Washington when the liberals and some good hearted Republicans decided back in the mid 70′s that redlining was a bad thing. Banks were no longer allowed to raise rates in neighborhoods in  decline where the ability of the borrower to repay loans might not be as good as in better neighborhoods. It was the simple actuarial truth but that never got in the way of a good government program . That was back when banks were responsible. Remember that?

That used to be where community redevelopment came in. The Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 changed that. Now, all communities had to be treated the same, regardless of risk levels. Credit quality as a qualifier was de-emphasized. All of a sudden, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were to begin lending money to sub-prime customers, securitizing those loans, and selling them off on the bond market. Surely nothing could go wrong with that, as all of the loans still required financial statements and proof of income.

Later on, in the mid 1990′s, the door was opened a little wider by Bill Clinton when with his “National Home Ownership Strategy” he reduced the down payments necessary and allowed 95-110% financing. He wanted to help the little guy, you see. The door to stated income and fraud was opened a little wider.

After this, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd defied all reason and common sense in 2000 and 2001 to oppose any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, who were already losing billions of dollars per year of taxpayer money on loans that had no chance of being repaid. Just this week, they are back at the trough for another $19 Billion.

Then came phase 2, Easy Money. The internet economy was booming with inflated stock values. Dogfood.com and WebViagra.com made millions of internets dollars until the bubble popped. We had  Y2K then that collapse to convince Alan Greenspan to keep the money spigot jammed wide open. The country was awash in so much money that no one knows quite where it all ended up, but a few people had an idea.

That’s when Washington Mutual and Indy Mac and Countrywide and Ditech began to offer Zero Down and 5 year no interest loans. Stated income was enough, and suddenly the gardener making $15,000/year was transformed into a landscape architect, and as long as prices went up and you flipped the property fast enough, the Ponzi scheme sort of worked. But none of these people had any ability to actually pay their mortgages. None whatsoever.

Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, the quants, the math geniuses usually just out of school were creating new derivatives, hiving off tranches of interest payments based upon risk levels that had absolutely no basis in reality. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s had no idea either, and rated everything AAA.

All the while the bond salesmen were making billions selling this debt off all over the world to pension funds and banks and Uncle Walid in Kuwait. The inverted pyramid kept on growing and growing, all of it this time based upon the American homeowner and the promise of free money.

Over at the corporate ranch, after hundreds of billions of dollars disappeared in the Internet bubble, management was faced with declining profits with which to service the high interest debt incurred for stupid acquisitions. Ego was king and it was a game of “mine is bigger than yours”.  Synergy, in most cases turned out to be a myth.

From the 90′s onwards, corporate management became unanswerable to shareholders, employees, or even customers. They lined their pockets with massive bonuses, in many cases, simply because they could. When performance based, quarterly profits at all costs became the modus operandi. Outsourcing and offshoring became king in the race to maintain a place in the Hamptons and on the A list. Now, with R&D cut back and many industries shipped off to China, the manufacturing sector, one of the pillars of a modern economy, is in tatters. HP, Apple, and Motorola are all really just names for other people’s products now. Potemkin companies.

Back in Washington, the White House tried to reform Fannie Mae, but Washington as a whole had no understanding of the lunacy occurring in Lower Manhattan. When point blank asked if the SEC could regulate derivatives, SEC Chairman Chris Cox basically punted. And the SEC staff missed Bernie Madoff and the CDS meltdown and CDO’s and everything else. AEG was found to be parking funds in falsified accounts to maintain liquidity requirements, and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

And still, none of the big fish have gone to jail. Harry Reid has the nerve to demagogue the republicans and Wall Street as he holds a fundraiser in Brooklyn with Chuck Schumer with those same Wall Street bankers the same day he is castigating them. That is how crooked this game is.

In the military, they call it dereliction of duty. Our government is great at kabuki, but when it comes down to simply enforcing the laws on the books, it has become a corporatist culture.

Corporatism was a construct of the Italian Fascist era. The government was in corrupt league with big business to suppress the unions and fundamental human rights and promote their own interests. Today, the American version is exponentially worse. It is all a sham, because it is an insider’s game. Everyone plays their role and they have looted the American economy.  The payoff was letting a lot of the little guys off the hook on their mortgages. We are now living in a corruptocracy.

But, unfortunately, the bill has come due. Greece is only phase one. The money spigot has been cut off whether they even realize it or not. There simply is no longer enough available credit globally to sustain the charade. Portugal, Spain, the United States and Japan are all in the same boat. Perhaps when it cuts deep, we can fess up to the problem.

We don’t need more laws. We just need to enforce the ones we have. To the oligarchy, the law is for the little guy and not for them. That, and maybe some ethics would help. Unfortunately, the only way to achieve that goal is the hard way. And these days, America, the land where anything goes, doesn’t want to go there.

233 years ago the Constitution laid it all out. Now between the crooks and the progressives, they are using it for toilet paper.

Tony Bourdain’s got nothing on me

Last night was one of the reasons I love China. One of our suppliers invited us to dinner with several other customers, which occasioned a traditional Chinese banquet. Last night’s edition could have been entitled Critterfest.

Beyond what most Americans are used to, China offers a plethora of interesting and exciting foods. And sometimes one asks oneself “why?”. The operative phrases in China is “if it moves, eat it”, and”even if it doesn’t move, eat it anyway”.

We started out with a lovely terrine du spine, of what creature I wasn’t certain. In China, you see, it is often better not to ask and just roll with it. Then came the duck’s gristle and naughty bits and the tree ears (fungus), which by the way is delicious. It went on like this for a while. The sweetbread stew, once one navigated the identity of certain sweetbreads, was excellent. I’m just not for much spleen. All the while, my dinner companion, Mr. Yu, told me “don’t wirry, it pig”. Literally everything but the oink goes into that one.

At some point, I said to myself to paraphrase what George C. Scott said during the movie Patton, “General Tzo, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”.

Then came some kind of marrow soup. “Very healthy”, my companion told me. That is usually the tip off that it’s most likely an endangered species. Mmmmm, lemur!

One of the final and most elaborate dishes to top off the evening was Sea Slug soup. The little suckers are so slippery that even the Chinese use forks to eat them. As I contemplated crossing that line, I thought to myself “who the hell fishes for these things, and how do they catch them?”. I was left to imagining a fisherman off in the South China Sea or perhaps Bangladesh lowering a trap with the most vile bait imaginable, and then have to wait 3 weeks while the little bastards oozed their way in. Either that or hand grenades.

Actually, they were sort of like very slippery versions of those rubber hacky balls the kids play with, you know, the ones with the tentacle like appendages. The sauce was amazing. Dinner then became much more mundane, with whole Garupa (steamed scrod, basically. Try finding scrod in the IGFA record book), followed by melon and cantaloupe and other fruits.

Of course everyone around me was “kanbei’ing” to their hearts content. Now it’s French wine (sort of) instead of Mao Tai, but the effect is eventually the same. Chinese banquet rooms usually have couches and a resting area. This is where they deposit the insensate. Just prop ‘em up and stick them in a corner until we’re ready to go home and drape ‘em over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry. As Sinatra and Crosby sang in High Society, “What a swell party it was…..”

Is anyone surprised Newsweek is going under?

I read yesterday that the death spiral at Newsweek magazine is continuing. Is it really any wonder? Don’t they get it?

A number of years ago, the major media in this country lost their objectivity. They slanted stories to suit their political bias and even spiked stories  if they were in any way inimical to their political affiliation. They lost credibility, and in the process, offended 50% of their potential audience, for this is pretty much how the country is split politically.

But even then they managed to offend anyone who seeks fair, objective news and informed opinion. Because when you get caught in a lie, as for example, Dan Rather did in 2000 with the George W. Bush National Guard papers scandal, you sow the seeds of doubt about anything you say thereafter. It is the little boy who cried wolf writ large. No one believes you then except the true believers. That Rather then compounded his offense with a hugely expensive and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to repurchase his credibility through litigation only shoes the extent to which the media, including Newsweek, have been corrupted.

The John Edwards scandal pounded a few more nails in the coffin. If their logic is that America loves a good scandal, it was handed to them on a silver platter and they did nothing. Edwards was their champion. Never mind that his wife had cancer and his chief of staff came up with one of the all time whoppers trying to cover it up.

Time lost me @ 20 years ago. Between the thin reporting, the fluff, and the political agenda, I switched to Newsweek. Newsweek did a better job of simply being a weekly news magazine, which is what most people seem to want. But 2000 marked a turning point. The election brought out the long knives. The majority of the press was already in the bag for Gore, but when the recount crisis erupted, it became a propaganda war. At a time like never before encountered in our democracy when we needed calm voices, the media threw gasoline on the fire and did their best to de – legitimize the victor.

Newsweek dropped all pretense of being objective a couple of years ago and became an “opinion journal”, whatever that is. They were able to cut expensive foreign bureaus and shoe leather reporters and simply wing it. I guess that didn’t work out too well.

There is a real demand for good reporting out there. With the internet, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times and other outlets have built successful web-based models. Der Spiegel, the Telegraph and other outlets have far more influence than before because they have enough good content and enough credibility to attract serious readers.

But as long as you try to blow smoke at your readership and then pretend to be serious (not even objective) it is a death sentence. My advice to CNN and CBS and Newsweek and all of the other media outlets struggling is don’t blame the internet; blame the fact that you have offended the sensibilities of 50% of your potential audience.

War Season in Afghanistan

AP reports that now the poppy crop is in in southern Afghanistan, it is time for the Taliban to go back to the business of war. The Talibi (religious students) have taken their 10 or 20% tax, and will be seeing more income in tolls and taxes on the traffickers moving either raw opium or heroin over the border into Pakistan and Afghanistan for transshipment to the streets of Duesseldorf and Detroit. Along the way, the narcotics will transit perhaps Dubai and almost certainly Turkey,

The AP report values the crop at $200 Million based upon UN numbers, but the 2006 number from the UN, when crops were more limited, was $600 Million. This is export value, not street value. It is estimated that the Taliban and Haqqanis and their allies divvy up at least 1/3 of this value. That and tolls on convoys, many of them carrying ISAF supplies and donations from rich Wahhabists in the Gulf pretty well covers the Taliban’s budget while the top leaders get rich on both sides.

Loretta Napoleoni in her book Modern Jihad researched a number on insurgencies around the world and found that it takes approximately $75 Million/year to keep 10,000 low tech fighters in the field. That means the Taliban can buy rice and beans and RPG’s for @ 30,000 – 40,000 active duty insurgents and still have plenty left over for the villas and little boys back in Pakistan. And don’t forget the other side is just as corrupt. Over there everyone is playing against the middle, which is us.

So now our troops ar preparing to take Kandahar. Insurgents are supposedly flocking in, as they were supposed to in Marjah. In Marjah, for the most part, the insurgents simply melted away.  Will be another Marjah or a Fallujah or something different? In Fallujah, the Marines and Army lost over 150 killed and 1,500 wounded in 2004 in the nastiest house to house fighting since Hue.

The Taliban in this case can simply melt into the woodwork since our rules of engagement are now very restrictive. There are rumors of bitterness and contempt in the lower ranks, not only at the Afghans, but at leadership for selling them out. Progress with the Afghan government on nation building or even reining in corruption is almost nonexistent on a long term basis.

And the British and Canadians and Dutch are out of there next year. Our own president has placed a 2011 deadline on combat operations. And there is no way in hell we will see the kind of results he has demanded out of General McChrystal. The new strategy is “don’t bother me”; with the details, with strategy, with problems. The operative mantra is “I don’t want to hear it”.

So read the tea leaves carefully over the next few weeks. The spin will be unbelievable. While Kandahar is our focal point, it is doubtful the Taliban will cooperate.

The Gulf Oil Crisis and a brain dead government

It is tolerable curious that James Cameron is offering more to help solve the Gulf oil crisis than the United States Government.  Mr. Cameron offered the use of his research submarines, to help BP, who are already using a dozen remotely operated vehicles to repair the leak in the manifold system. Mr. Cameron, by the way, has been one of the major forces in deep water exploration, having funded Dr. Robert Ballard’s research projects on the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks for many years. He should be applauded for this as well as his directing talents.

The leak was estimated until today at 5,000 barrels per day.This estimate has now come under fire by leading experts around the world. The formula used by U.S. government scientists in Seattle specifically excludes crude oil. This is a major screw up if found to be true.

The Exxon Valdez in 1989 spilled an estimated 250,000 barrels. Since the explosion on April 20, the rig has been leaking 5,000 barrels per day.  At 23 days and counting, that is 115,000 barrels so far and BP is saying they will need another 10 days to complete the operation under the best scenario.

In the meantime, the media in this country are strangely silent on the lack of response by our government. After the Exxon Valdez, we learned the cost of a major oil spill. Unless it is rapidly contained, the damage becomes exponential. BP is doing as much as they can it seems. They have dropped and injected thousands of tons of dispersants into the well and onto the slick. This will allow the oil to degrade over time, but as the word indicates, it will spread over a much larger area.

So, after watching one of the greatest environmental disasters in history in 1989, what have we learned? Apparently not a damned thing. The U.S. government has been very effective in hauling executives up to Capitol Hill to explain themselves, and the Coast Guard is doing a good job monitoring the situation, but virtually everything else has been left to BP.

The President went down to Louisiana to speechify. The Interior Secretary went down to Louisiana to speechify. Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano went down to Louisiana to speechify. Louisiana has had enough speechifying, I think.

The president announced today that he wants $129 Million in emergency funding from the “Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund”; $100 Million for the Coast Guard and another $29 Million for additional inspections, enforcement, and studies. Gee, more studies. There are $1.6 Billion tax dollars paid by the oil industry sitting in this fund. And not one damned penny has been spent on research or building anything that would actually mitigate oil spills.

In a country with a massive offshore oil industry and that has more oil and petroleum product tankers moving through our waters than almost anywhere else, nothing has been done to effectively deal with something as concrete and simple as a spill. No giant sheets of Bounty. No oil squeegees. No way to vacuum up the mess. We are simply letting it poison some of the most productive fishing grounds in the world and then pollute thousands of miles of coastline for the next 20 years. The spill is half the size of the Exxon Valdez still, so why not build a giant vacuum cleaner tanker or two to suck up the mess and home port them where they can move into action quickly?

What this tells us is that a nation that is chasing after  expensive alternative energy technologies still can’t properly manage the technology of remediation of one of its vital sources that has been around for 150 years. We have an Energy Department with a multi billion dollar budget. We have an Interior Department with a multi billion dollar budget. We even have a freaking trust fund. And all they can do is flood the Coast Guard with money and do more studies. If you haven’t noticed, their ships are all white and I really doubt they’re going to get them dirty.

So the massive action promised by the President basically boils down to nothing. I am sure he can use this as a teaching moment on alternative energy, though.

We have seen how this movie turns out, and now we are seeing that once again our government is brain dead. And these are the people who want to run our health care?

Nobody Read The Arizona Law

It would be a clown comedy in Washington if it wasn’t so ominous these days. The latest is that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, has not read the controversial Arizona bill which allows local police to enforce Federal immigration law. The person in charge of enforcement didn’t read the law, but has publicly condemned it three times.

Pssst, neither did Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States. Neither did Antonio Villarraigosa (nee Tony Villar), the mayor of Los Angeles, when he led the effort by that city to boycott the State of Arizona for it’s “racist”policies. Don’t you think this is all quite odd?

We’re not sure the President, who also condemned the legislation, read it either because he is hidden behind so many layers of flackery these days that we are getting nothing but bad PR and the approved message.  He even wants his own broadcasts now just like Hugo Chavez so he doesn’t have to deal with pesky reporters any more.

So the top federal officials responsible for the mess in the first place have no idea what is really in the bill. This is not some twisted right wing fantasy but their own statements that damn them. That they don’t even bother to obfuscate shows how contemptuous they are of the facts.

This is a very disturbing trend for American democracy. That the head of state and his senior advisors react to the real crisis of illegal immigration in this manner, and that it is the most knee jerk of reactions betrays a level of incompetence and ideological dogmatism that is fearful to behold. That their supporters are increasingly using the language of dictatorship, as Woody Allen did yesterday, indicates a level of polarization never before seen in this country.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal” is the basis for our civil society. Today, it is the insiders versus the outsiders. The Declaration of Independence is itself under assault. Animal Farm’s “some pigs are more equal than others” is today’s reality. Orwell’s 1984 is now a technical reality. And the leaders of our government are, de facto, dishonest and duplicitous. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Reinventing Government – In England???

Today’s Telegraph has perhaps one of the most amazing news stories of the year. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democratic Deputy Prime Minister wants to begin tearing up many of the bad laws enacted over the past 20 years, and is going to the British public to ask their advice. According to the Telegraph:

“The public will be asked what laws they want ripped up, in far-reaching reforms designed to put back “faith in politics”, the Deputy Prime Minister will say. The reordering of power will sweep away Labour legislation and new criminal offences deemed to have eroded personal freedom.   It will involve the end of the controversial ID cards scheme, the scrapping of universal DNA databases – in which the records of thousands of innocent people have been stored – and restrictions placed on internet records. The use of CCTV cameras will also be reviewed”.

It is a 180 degree turn away from the nanny state and politically correct policies of the past.

In contrast, our Federal Government  is under fire for overreaching it’s authority and even the Constitution. Our top law enforcement officials cannot be bothered to even read the law by their own admissions. Their drive towards Big Brother policies; whether with the TSA, or damaging Miranda rights, or surveilling and snooping, or regulating the internet is in fundamental conflict with our democratic principles. We have sacrificed common sense to political correctness. As someone said to me facetiously the other day, “Of course it’s racial profiling! They’re all Mexicans!”. And if it walks like an Islamic radical and quacks like an Islamic radical and smells like an Islamic radical, I believe it is safe to state so and act with compassion and common sense. That is the American way.

The world is getting curiouser and curiouser, and options are running out. For far too long, public policy has been driven by fantasies and pipe dreams. Governments have stopped dealing in the facts and have tried to spin the narrative. At some point, and that point seems to be right now, the jig is up. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. I believe Mr. Clegg is onto something.

Obama’s New World Order

If you haven’t noticed lately, our President has turned American foreign policy fundamentally on its ear. Today, at West Point’s graduation ceremony, he spoke of his “new international order”.  In naming his new strategy, he is simply formalizing the damage he has already done to the security of our country since his inauguration.

His Israel policy is a shambles. Afghanistan shows no signs of progress. Iraq is veering out of control. Wahhabism is more popular than ever before. In a game of chess, Russia and China aided and abetted our enemies in Iran and North Korea as they have become increasingly more violent in the past 16 months.

Europe is on the brink of financial disaster and becoming ever more alienated from us. Japan is like a deer in the headlights with a government with a 25% approval rating that has veered farther than ever before away from our common foreign policies of the past 60 years. We are planning to pull out of Okinawa, ceding Southeast Asia to China.

Our southern border is out of control, and Mr. Obama has the audacity this week to criticize a law he hadn’t even read. The light of democracy is going out in South America. Venezuela is sinking deeper and deeper into a socialist morass. Democracy in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay has been corrupted, while we made the wrong bet in Honduras. Brazil is now allying itself with Iran and an increasingly disturbing Islamist regime in Turkey.

Our federal deficit will exceed 10% of GNP for the next 3 years at least, putting our economy in its greatest peril in history. Economic security is just as important as physical security, after all.

The President speaks of global warming and climate change, and yet the worst ecological disaster of the century is taking place as I write and all that has been done by our government has been monitoring the situation and forming a commission to lay blame. As he speaks of Copenhagen and global cooperation on our environment, he is ignored by China and India. Instead of offering opportunities and options, he has been embracing the negative. Doing it better has been replaced with the bureaucratic “no”.

How does any of this enhance the security and the future of the United States?

Mr. Obama spoke to a class today that is going to war. The military in which they will serve  is very different from that after 9/11. It is becoming disillusioned. Many of our best have served 3, 4 or 5 combat tours now and are burned out on a mission with poor focus and highly restricted rules of engagement. In the quest for hearts and minds, we are winning neither. Cynicism has become a way of life. Afghanistan, as a military friend put it to me yesterday, is “a stubborn, amoral culture unwilling to thirst for anything better”. And as we lose casualties to death and wounds and PTSD and spend billions on an ever more questionable war, our Department of Defense is initiating the largest cuts in its history. As the world gets more dangerous, we  are flying 60 year old aircraft.

We have constructed a security apparatus worthy of Orwell and yet we are no safer than on September 10, 2001. Islamic terror simply disappeared from the government dictionary but we are being watched closer than ever before on our own soil. We know where the threats and the narcotics and the illegal aliens come from, but “racial profiling” is prohibited. Our government no longer trusts us to act with common sense. I guess that’s okay, because according to the polls, we as a people no longer trust our government either. And if we don’t trust our government, why should anyone else?

Take a look around you. Our country has changed. Hope for the future has been replaced with fear. Corporatism is running rampant, and the rich and powerful have perverted the law. Almost every day, the President of the United States in some way, shape or form insults and degrades those with whom he disagrees politically. At a time when we all need to agree on simple principles and pull together, we have become bitterly divided by the very man who promised “Hope & Change”. We’ve seen the change. Where is the hope?

I don’t want to write these words. I would prefer to discuss art or books or 100 other things. There are solutions out there. There are broad areas where we can find agreement both at home and abroad. But we have been polarized just as Alinsky taught Mr. Obama so well. We need to move on from these clearly failed policies. We need to turn off the television and focus on the important things. We must take back our country for common sense and fair play and hard work and faith. The new world order Mr. Obama proposes is in no one’s interest except those who would do us harm.

More Administration doublespeak on NASA’s manned space program

Aviation Week reported in its latest issue that Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, and James Lovell, three of America’s most expert astronauts, were on Capitol Hill recently to call BS on the Obama Administrations plans to cancel America’s manned space flight program.

They testified before Congress, under oath, that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a conference call, that it might become necessary for the government to bail out commercial crew launch providers to support the International Space Station.Today and for the next several years at the least, none of these companies is capable of launching a bottle rocket while the Russians are raking us over the coals to rent their heavy lift. In other words, according to Bolden’s logic, failure is an option and we will be faced with yet another bail out.

At the same time they criticized the decision to continue the Orion module program as a “lifeboat” for the Space Station as redundant, as there are already Soyuz craft available for this application.

Bolden is also proposing a number of Enabling Technology Development & Demonstration (ETTD) projects, including hydrocarbon based heavy lift vehicles, electric propulsion, precision landing systems, and telerobotics. If we haven’t figured out  telerobotics and precision landing by now, I don’t think we ever will. We have the capability to hit a 1′ diameter target on Mars and repair a Mars Rover from Pasadena and we are to believe that somehow these projects will advance our space program? Remember, most of the shuttle was designed in the 60′s and 70′s. We’ve come a long way since. What Mr. Bolden is really saying is bureaucratese for make work projects. Simply, the President doesn’t believe in the space program and would rather spend the money on his social welfare agenda.

It is very odd to watch as China scarfs up resources all around the world and takes the lead in technologies such as solar power as our government dithers. One of the gifts that America’s leadership always had was the “vision thing” as George Bush pere’ used to say. These days it seems as if this has been lost. We are simply cannibalizing our culture.

If Al Gore’s prognostications are true, then we had better figure out how to adapt to the new dynamic very quickly. If oil is running out we had better find replacements. The space program is one of the components in these quests. The Chinese, Russians, and Indians are all ramping up while we are ramping down. They get it. That is where the resources of the future will come from. Not in 10 years or 50 years, but maybe in 100. The United States is rationalizing and prevaricating its way to a backwater in a 180 degree shift from the principles that made this country great.

When the NASA administrator sits in an open teleconference and tells the participants that the commercial space programs are already in trouble, that is as bad as it gets.

Al Qaida in Gaza?

Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper is reporting that Al Quaeda is now beginning operations in the Gaza Strip and Sinai via Yemen. Apparently, Al Quaeda (there’s that Al Awlaki connection again) is training Hamas fighters in Yemen and also funding independent operations of their own.

What is really interesting is that the source for this information is the Shiite rebels in North Yemen, who are doing their best to distance themselves from Al Quaeda. One Sami al-Mutairi (aka Abdallah al-Hajj), a Kuwaiti, is said to be the leader of this new Al Quaeda effort to focus jihad back on Israel. It sounds logical. al-Mutairi, who was convicted of murdering an American in Kuwait several years ago, seems to want to establish AQ cells in Gaza independent of Hamas, the better to incite major terrorist incidents it must be presumed.

The war between Israel and Hamas has certain rules, but by acting independently, AQ can really torch the cease-fire. As their goal is a global jihad against the West, what better place to start it? The kindling is already in place and soaked with gasoline.

It should be obvious even to our new Director of National Intelligence, John Brennan, that Yemen is now the nexus of terrorism. There is strong support among the people for radical Islam. It is the base ofAnwar al-Awlaki,  who has been linked to almost every significant international terrorist incident since 1998. It is where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber was trained. It is where the USS Cole suicide attack took place. Do you need more clues, Mr. Brennan? Do we want to call this another contingency to operate on just yet? Or what is this week’s new name?

Now we are faced with the first evidence that Al Quaeda wants to be the catalyst for the paramount conflict in the Middle East. They are nothing if not media savvy. They are nothing if not apocalyptic. This is their Super Bowl. And none of this has made it to the European or American media yet…..Will it?

More Reckless Democrat Spending – $37 Billion Defense Bill Larded up by $62 billion (so far)

“House Democrats would add $50 billion in domestic spending to war legislation”

The Hill.com

It seems the Democrats in Washington just can’t help themselves. It doesn’t matter what the bill is they lard it up with pork.  There is $37 Billion in the bill that is actually allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rest boils down as follows:

$23 Billion to the states – teacher salaries

$1.2 Billion to the states – police

$500 Million to the states – firefighters

$5.67 Billion  – Pell Grants

$9 Billion – renewable energy loans

$13.4 Billion – compensation for Vietnam War era Agent Orange victims (this is beyond current medical costs)

$9 Billion – nuclear energy

And the list goes on. And on.

Funny, my addition comes to over $60 Billion in additional spending. Even The Hill can’t get it right, it seems.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), the head of the Progressive caucus, still wants the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan and is leading a charge from the Left. We know how that will end up.

Appropriations Chairman David Obey did drop $80 Million for the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, so that may enough of a fig leaf for Speaker Pelosi and her backers to get the looney Left back on board.

This does not include the back door, special interest deals just yet either. K Street is living large and the crony capitalism and corporatism just gets worse.

The kabuki continues and the Federal government continues to spend us into the ground with money they don’t have. Not a dime for efficiency and cutting back waste. No root cause solutions.  Business as usual. Nothing to see here. Move along……

The California Department of Bottles & Cans

Sacramento, CA

In a dramatic announcement today, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and State Assembly Speaker John A. Perez announced a dramatic new initiative to close the states dramatic  $14 Billion  budget gap. In announcing the State’s new Department of Bottles & Cans (to be called CALCANS), the Governor, with Attorney General Jerry Brown at his side,declared that the state would exercise  eminent domain over all empty containers in California, effective June 1. Legislation has also been drafted to criminalize possession of more than 12 empty containers within a 30 day period.

The Governor stated that this is “a rare moment when we can all come together and work towards solving the state’s deep fiscal problems together”.

Speaker Perez added that the state would immediately employ approximately 7,800 specially trained Bottle  Reclamation Agents (BRA’s) funded by federal grant programs for green jobs. To address the additional funding requirements of the program, the deposit on 12 ounce bottles is being raised to $3.00/each and on larger containers to $5.00, effective July 1. Specially designated recycling modules designed by Santa Monica resident and world renowned squiggle designer Frank Gehry, measuring 12′ x 18′, painted bright orange and  costing $12,714.50/each will be deployed around the state to assist in the compulsory collection program. A fleet of  electric heavy lift vehicles will transport the 3 ton (unloaded) modules to specially designated sorting centers in Tulare, Calexico, and Fresno. Tyson Foods has been contracted to staff these centers.

ACLU attorney Blanche Stumblebun stated afterwards that the new programs infringe on the rights of minorities including skid row residents, 12 year olds, and strange old Vietnamese men to make a living and she would be filing suit citing unspecified damages immediately.

In other news, Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona noted a steep rise in building permits in towns along the California state line.

The James O’Keefe Saga – Olbermann’s head explodes

James O’Keefe and his associates today pled guilty to “entering real property belonging to the United States under false pretenses”. They have been sentenced to 2 years probation with 75 hours of community service and $1,500 fines each for their attempt to check and see if Senator Mary “Louisiana Purchase” Landrieu’s phones were working, which she claimed were not at the time. If you recall,  her office was being inundated with calls from angry constituents regarding the Obamacare bill. Mr. O’Keefe it seems, was simply trying to do a line check, as the professionals at AT&T call it. That it would have been embarrassing to the Senator is unfortunate, but Mr. O’Keefe also knew this is the price one pays for challenging the powerful.

Contrast this with some of the loony actions we are seeing around the country this week. Apparently, Washington, DC police officers escorted an angry mob of SEIU activists to the home of a Bank of America executive across state lines into Maryland, where they trespassed on the lawn and acted threateningly. Up in Alaska, a writer, Joe McGuinness, has rented the home next door to former Governor Sarah Palin while he performs a hit job on her. I’m not sure if they have a paparazzi law in Alaska, but they may want to consider the option.

It seems these days, our media and the Left really don’t understand the concept of boundaries. They are highly aggressive in maintaining their own rights, litigating at the drop of a hat, but then are ultra sensitive to even the slightest confrontation from the other side. We used to call this thin skinned. It is a part of the “do as I say, not as I do” culture they have created. When caught in their own webs of lies and deceit, the answer is “Don’t look behind the curtain”, as the Wizard of Oz put it. Ask the New York Times about its regular scandals.

Our highest elected and law enforcement officials cannot even be bothered reading the Arizona law with which they so disagree and condemn a state for wanting the federal government to enforce its own laws. Now we see the DC police playing an active role in a mau mau. Tea Party activists are somehow seditious while union goons are free to scare the daylights out of people in their own houses.  These are parts of a whole.  This is today’s Democratic Party line, Chicago style.

The judge in the O’Keefe case, U.S. Magistrate Daniel Knowles III, suggested from the bench that O’Keefe and his associates learn “where to draw the line” as journalists. It is a crying shame that it is such a one way street. Keith “We’re all Hispanic Arizonans now” Olbermann’s head will explode with the injustice of the sentence shortly after 8:00pm Eastern this evening, I’m sure.

Winter in America – 1975 – 2010

Maybe a few of you remember a song from 1975 by Gil Scott Heron and Brian Jackson called “Winter in America”. It is considered a very early hip hop classic. They had it down cold with what was going on in America at the time. The rivers were sewers; the inner cities were ruins from the recent riots; we were pulling out of Vietnam with our tails between our legs. Saigon fell as we turned away, and we had the legacy of the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King still fresh in our minds. Narcotics had flooded the country and we had lost our moral compass. New York was out of control and going bankrupt and Nixon climbed into a helicopter one step ahead of the law. “Winter in America” captured this moment at the right time in history. “All of the healers have been killed, or sent away”, Gil sang. “Democracy was ragtime on the corner”.

By 1980, America was at a nadir. Jimmy Carter had polarized and hammered us  as had the oil crises and the Soviet threat. I remember hearing of the Afghanistan invasion and the Grenada putsch and Nicaragua and the Communist revolution there and saying to myself  “Will we survive?”.  America was in a bad place.

Reagan came out from the sidelines and offered hope. A lot of people hated him, but his optimism was contagious. He opened up the possibilities again.

And for 20 years things changed for the better. We had the fall of the Soviet Empire and the rise of the internet and the linked-in age and technology raised all boats. There was incredible progress on so many levels. Hope against cancer. A rise in the standard of living for virtually all of us.

Then came the Y2K bubble and Internet bubble and then the rest of the double oughts. Then we were hit by 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Since then, it’s been downhill again. After coming together for a brief moment in our grief and resolve, the greed and the self-interested politics and the secret agendas set in and we are now at a divide as wide as almost any in our history. A whole segment of our society has decided that the moral and ethical structure which held western culture together for 2,700 years has nothing to do with today’s legal and ethical needs and has been doing its best to toss it aside as best they can, replacing it with relativism, deconstructionism, and narrow self-interest.

Our foreign policy has fallen apart. We are weakened through our own inept actions. The United States is viewed by our enemies and rivals as a paper tiger. We have offended our allies and given comfort to our enemies.

A number of commentators have voiced their fear that the United States is in a situation similar to that after the Vietnam War, and there are a number of demonstrable analogies; the rise of anti- Israel sentiment; the economic turmoil; the energy crisis. Today, as the United States pulls out of Iraq and does its best to extract itself from Afghanistan, the same voices of anti-Americanism, many of them within our own country and  government,  are once again loud.

The response to the Gulf oil slick has been muddled.  Our Federal government, with a Department of the Interior and a Department of Energy and even an Environmental Protection Agency  is not just inept, but a part of the problem. The Left on the other hand has used it as an excuse to shut down drilling inshore, offshore, in Alaska, and even onshore in shale deposits. The Sierra Club has achieved it’s Trifecta, but has offered no alternatives.

A bill so byzantine and frightening that it is opposed by 65% of the population threatens the world’s best health care system. This was done not to reform the system, but for control of 20% of our economy. The interference in the automobile industry and financial industry may have permanently damaged the capitalist system. What is left is a crony/corporatist culture of insiders. In one of the greatest scams in history, no one has been held accountable for the greatest financial crisis of our times. We know who is responsible, but most of them are still in positions of power. As part of this our government has in the space of 18 months burdened us with more debt than all of its predecessors combined.

Culturally, we are at a nadir as well. Life is devalued and degraded, especially if one reviews literature, film or music. If it’s not thug life, it’s tattooed morons at the beach. The WSJ wrote the other day that 2010 may be the worst year for cinema in the past forty years. Creativity has been replaced with the derivative. Back in 1974 it was again similar. Pomp rock and self indulgence dominated and the heroes of the 1960′s had either sold out or were strung out or both. The next year, new wave and punk and hip hop came out of nowhere and blasted music into a new era. It’s normally not the things you expect that launch revolutions. It’s the outliers. Somewhere, enough people say “enough” to the conventional wisdom.

Perhaps we are reaching that point once again.

For the first time in our history, we are hearing our own leaders criticize us both our failings and our beliefs. They are criticizing the law of the land and our Constitution and our faith. They are openly and unabashedly anti-American and they are corrupt. Corporate America sold out to China for executive bonuses. Wall Street sold its soul  for M&A fees and derivatives. Our cultural leaders speak gibberish and our politicians sold their souls for power. And for this terrible performance they have paid themselves at obscene levels. No wealth was created or lives improved or prosperity gained. It was all a shell game equaling Bernie Madoff’s in the level of criminality.

The future security and prosperity of our Republic and of ourselves as individuals are in the greatest peril in our country’s history. Our moral foundations are under assault.

But there is hope. In the late 70′s the Soviet Empire was on a roll. Ten years later it collapsed. From 1980 to 2001, the United States created more wealth than at any time in its history. We still, even now, have the potential for far more; to do far greater things.

Crisis creates clarity. The important things stand out in sharp relief. Our budget deficit, a casino mentality on Wall Street, the shambles of our education system, and the amorality of our leadership class can all be readily agreed upon.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he took office as U.N. Ambassador in 1975, noted that the U.N.’s committee on democracy consisted of 16 police states, 4 democracies, and four countries somewhere in the middle. To Moynihan, words had meaning and context. In perhaps his greatest speech at the U.N., after the Communist and Non-Aligned bloc dominated by Cuba and the Organization of African Unity (chaired by Idi Amin at the time) had just passed Resolution 194 equating Zionism with racism, Moynihan said ” If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words. But there are those of us who have not forsaken those older words, still so new to much of the world. Not forsaken them now, not here, not anywhere, not ever.”

We are back in a similar place. As the people who created many of our problems devalued words and purposely misconstrued them, we must return to first things, remember the true meanings of words such as liberty, democracy, and justice. We must remember that with these comes responsibility as well. The problems are not just with Left and Right, but rather with a culture that bears too close a resemblance to that during the decline of Rome; sybaritic and self involved.

Just as Washington has contempt for the rest of us, there is a contempt for Washington building into a slow boil. And as Scott Heron also wrote on that same album, the revolution will not be televised. There is a reason that most of the wisdom of the past has withstood the test of the centuries. It is empirically true. Much as some might like to deny it for their own reasons, it is grounded in trial and error and history. It can be improved with new facts, but those facts have to withstand the same challenges as came before and using the tools available to us today.

Our history is simply a prelude, but at this particular time we have a mortal choice. Do we believe those who would destroy us, or once again reach for the stars?

Thug Life – Watching the NBA

I love basketball. From listening to stories of my father playing intramural ball with Al Maguire to playing intramural in high school to playing on the playgrounds of New York and going up to the Garden for a college double-header it’s been a joy. But lately, I have been deeply disturbed by the direction the game has taken, and last night, I lost a lot of respect for the players, the referees, the coaches, and the NBA itself.

In the first quarter of the Celtics – Magic game, Kevin Garnett made a move that in watching thousands of games I had never seen before. Kevin Garnett took his elbow and rammed it down on Dwight Howards forearm as hard as he could. Not once. Twice. It looked as if he was intentionally trying to break it. The ref was looking right at him as he did it. Doc Rivers saw it. Stan Van Gundy saw it. And the only outcome was a standard run of the mill foul.

Frankly, the Boston PD should have pulled Garnett off the floor for assault with intent to commit bodily harm. At the least he should have been T’d up and hit with a flagrant 2 and taken off the floor. But the referees are “letting them play”. This kind of garbage is damaging the integrity of the game.

Until he got to the Celtics, I always respected Garnett. But then something changed. He got nasty. And then this season he became just plain vicious. Watching him even during the regular season you could see the anger and intent to intimidate whoever he was guarding. You’d see the elbows and hip checks when the refs weren’t looking and even the raking fingernails when going up for a loose ball. If you sit down low, you see how rough the game can be. If you know what to look for it’s all a part of the game. Nash’s black eyes and Amaree’s cuts and Pau’s shiner were a part of the high stakes playoffs where the rules are loose. But Garnett takes it to a new level.

We are seeing an NBA similar to that in the mid-70′s when it was at a nadir. The marketing machine is at full blast, and it is a good one, so the numbers don’t reflect the rot. But down deep, the game is suffering. There is no defense on a lot of teams. You don’t get the big bucks for stops. There’s not much discipline on the floor, either. Coaches don’t have the level of control in the NBA necessary to enforce the discipline that helps teams achieve greatness. As a part time Clippers fan, believe me, I know.

Off the court, it has become Police Weekly. This week it’s Zach Randolph playing banker to dope dealers in Indianapolis. Earlier in the season, it was Gilbert Arenas pulling on a teammate. The NBA must have a special team to try to cover up the worst of it. Otherwise it’s a kabuki of warnings and suspensions, mainly of the second level and lower players. The stars have so much shielding and so many layers of security they are immune. Perhaps if strip clubs and tattoo parlors weren’t the most popular hangouts, there might be some progress. When you give in to your base instincts all the time, you become debased.

And that is where the NBA is today. It is a debased product. Forget about fixed games, it’s the whole shooting match. At one time it was the most exciting sport on the planet. Now it is athletic flummery. And as long as they put up with thug life, the rot will continue.

Fiorina vs Boxer? – What is worst about American politics

The LA Times released a poll showing Carly Fiorina pulling away from Chuck DeVore and John Campbell in the California Republican Primary. Her nomination would be a tragedy for the state and for the nation. For then, we would be left with a choice between two of the symbols of what is so wrong with America.

From what I have read, Ms. Fiorina wants to be a senator simply because it’s a nice idea. She has never participated in the national discussion in the past, but was rather a symbol of much of what is wrong with corporate America. She was at the heart of outsourcing and offshoring when she was at Lucent and Hewlett Packard, two of the trends which are now hitting our prosperity so hard.

Lucent, now absorbed into French giant Alcatel (now called Alcatel Lucent), never really recovered from Ms. Fiorina’s decisions. Bell Labs, one of the shining jewels of America’s technology portfolio was downsized into insignificance on her watch and with her direct involvement.

At Hewlett Packard, Ms. Fiorina came in to finalize the spinoff of their technology gem, Agilent.  Her other coup was purchasing Compaq just as their competition were moving personal computer manufacturing offshore. This decision almost proved fatal to HP. Her Board of Directors thought so too and she was eventually canned. Not long before her exit, she sent out the “Anybody got any ideas?” memo. In addition to Hewlett and Packard spinning in their graves, do we really want someone like this as our senator in times like these?

On the other hand, we have Barbara Boxer, perhaps the single greatest disgrace to the State of California since, well, Jerry Brown. Not only is she one of the most leftist individuals ever to have occupied the office of Senator, she is personally one of the nastiest and most ill-informed, to put it politely. With an almost identical liberal record, Dianne Feinstein is far more highly regarded simply because she is polite. And Boxer did it all with someone else’s money; her husbands. And she has taken advantage of her high position to enrich herself and her family even further.

So what we have in California is two oligarchs with no real competence trying to buy the office. Hundreds of millions of dollars will have been spent if Fiorina wins the nomination, and for what? So that California can continue its death spiral?

California leads the nation in many ways. We have led it into bankruptcy by squandering our incredibly rich resources. We have led it with the Paris Hilton/TMZ cult of amoral celebrity. We have led it with a level of self involvement and selfishness never before seen in the history of humanity.

But sort of like a death-bed confession, there is still hope for some salvation. There is a week until the election, and both Campbell and DeVore offer more palatable alternatives.  At the very least, they are engaged. Fiorina can’t seem to bother to show up much of the time.

Our country is at a critical juncture. We are in a fight for the soul of our country. The Constitution is under assault. Can’t we do better than Boxer vs Fiorina?

The Failure of Government in the Gulf Oil Crisis

I will say it again. Our government has failed miserably in addressing the Deepwater Horizon crisis. We have a Department of the Interior, a Department of Energy, an Environmental Protection Agency, and all sorts of specialist offices distributed throughout the government related to the oil industry. We even have a Coast Guard. There is also an “Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund” with $1.6 Billion that was supposed to prepare for and pay for a response to this type of crisis.  Not one of these agencies or mechanisms has lived up to their names or their implied  or explicit responsibilities. Most have proven worse than useless. All the President’s horses and all the President’s men can’t put the Deepwater Horizon together again.

In addition, we now have Congressional hearings and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Just what one would expect from an inept government with no clue on how to respond.

The oil business, especially offshore production, is one of the most dangerous in the world. That we have been doing this for the past 100 years with a tremendous environmental and safety record is a tribute to good engineering and management. However, blowouts, spills, and other hazards are inevitable. Singly, the oil companies do not have the resources to contain and control major spills and disasters. We learned this from the Exxon Valdez, The Ixtoc spill in 1979, and the disaster in Kuwait when the Iraqi Army torched hundreds of rigs in 1991. To minimize the damage, massive resources and complex solutions are required.

If you subscribe to the adage that “Government which governs least, governs best”, then the role of government might be to set the table for industry to respond. If you believe that government should take a more proactive role, then perhaps our Departments of the Interior and Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency should actually act as the focal points for crisis management as their names describe.

It seems not a dime has been spent on the rapid and efficient control and containment of oil spills even though it is an inherent risk in offshore drilling, pumping, and transportation. We now have the spectacle of a president disengaged with the  most serious man-made environmental crisis in history.

The depth and breadth of government involvement in research and development is massive. Whether in basic research, the military, in energy or medicine or the biosciences, a huge percentage of the work done in this country is funded by our tax dollars. Would it not  behoove the President to issue an executive order that the  science and technology community take some time to prioritize a solution? Between MIT and  Cal Tech and Harvard and the mining schools and thousands of other resources there must be some ideas. We used to have a “Can do” attitude as well. What happened? We are in danger of killing the Gulf of Mexico, one of our greatest resources and the cost will be in the many billions of dollars for decades to come. Isn’t this worth an all out effort?

That same government now controls Wall Street,the auto industry, and health care. Think about those implications.

Is the light of democracy going out in America?

“Groups want FCC to police hate speech on talk radio, cable news networks”

This was today’s headline on the website of Washington political newspaper “The Hill”. It is just one more data point in an accelerating trend towards fascism in America.The Left wants to quash all dissent.

The article describes the efforts of thirty liberal activist groups who have petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to police talk radio and cable television for what they are describing as “hate speech”. These groups include:

NATIONAL HISPANIC MEDIA COALITION (“NHMC”), BENTON FOUNDATION, CENTER FOR MEDIA JUSTICE, CENTER FOR RURAL STRATEGIES, CENTER ON LATINO AND LATINA RIGHTS AND EQUALITY OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK SCHOOL OF LAW, COMMON CAUSE, ESPERANZA PEACE AND JUSTICE CENTER, FREE PRESS, HISPANIC / LATINO, ANTI-DEFAMATION COALITION SF, INDUSTRY EARS, JOINT CENTER FOR POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES, LA ASAMBLEA DE DERECHOS CIVILES, LEAGUE OF RURAL VOTERS, LEAGUE OF UNITED LATIN AMERICAN CITIZENS (“LULAC”), MAIN STREET PROJECT, MEDIA ACTION GRASSROOTS NETWORK (“MAG-NET”), MEDIA ALLIANCE, MEDIA JUSTICE LEAGUE, MEDIA LITERACY PROJECT, MEDIA MOBILIZING PROJECT, MOUNTAIN AREA INFORMATION NETWORK, NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR MEDIA ARTS AND CULTURE, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LATINO INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS (“NALIP”), NOSOTROS, OFFICE OF COMMUNICATION, UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST, INC., PEOPLES PRODUCTION HOUSE, PRAXIS PROJECT, PROMETHEUS RADIO PROJECT, RAINBOW PUSH COALITION, RECLAIM THE MEDIA, TRANSMISSION PROJECT, UNITED STATES HISPANIC LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE

The Hill article goes on to say:

“The groups also charge that syndicated radio and cable television programs “masquerading as news” use hate as a profit model.

“As traditional media have become less diverse and less competitive, they have also grown less responsible and less responsive to the communities that they are supposed to serve,” the organizations wrote to the FCC. “In this same atmosphere hate speech thrives, as hate has developed as a profit-model for syndicated radio and cable television program masquerading as ‘news.’”

This is a highly disturbing new development, as it is cleary an effort to silence opponents of the Left’s political agenda. There is a trend towards the concept of dictatorship in much of the Left today. If a majority of the population disagrees, they want to move their plans forward regardless of the law.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has expressed his preference in many ways for the current Chinese model of government, a dictatorship. Director Woody Allen recently stated his desire for President Obama to be given dictatorial powers the better to implement his political agenda. Oliver Stone and Sean Penn and a large part of Hollywood idolize Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as he runs his country into the ground.

The actions and words of these people are antithetical to virtually every clause of the Constitution. There is a profoundly anti-Americanness that has become dominant in our government and its supporters since the advent of the current administration. They do not want to tolerate dissent.

The leftist bias of the major media outlets is beyond question at this point. During the election, many major newspapers and magazines including The New York and Los Angeles Times, Time magazine , Newsweek (who dropped the pretense of being a news magazine), and hundreds of other periodicals openly advocated the election of Senator Barack Obama. The coverage on television was overwhelmingly favorable. The only exceptions to this were publications such as the Wall Street Journal, talk radio, and Fox News.

Once elected, Mr. Obama then almost immediately set up an unprecedented systems of Czars and unaccountable officials within the White House with no oversight by Congress or the Judicial branch. He set up a propaganda machine like never seen before in this country and attempted to use the National Endowment for the Arts as a one of his vehicles for delivering his message. He then co-opted many of the opinion makers by selectively engaging them in a charm offensive.  He has been virtually inaccessible to the press except when delivering his own carefully scripted and staged photo ops. There is something inherently un-democratic in such a systematic attempt to control the message.

At the same time, there is something murky about his past. In an age when we frankly know too much about most celebrities and demand a full accounting of our presidential candidates, the President has stonewalled on his birth certificate, his college records, much of his personal history, and his previous work history. We know more today about Millard Fillmore than we do about Mr. Obama. This is an unconscionable breakdown in the media’s responsibility to factually report the news.

The President has implemented the most radical agenda in American history within the space of 16 months. It has moved so rapidly that his opponents and even his supporters are reeling. He has created a climate of fear and his administrations use of bullying tactics in both the political and regulatory arenas with virtually no accountability is highly disturbing. He has personalized his differences with his political opponents using demonization and invective. Recall his use of the word “teabaggers” as just one example.

At the same time he has ignored Federal law and overturned precedent in cases ranging from the infamous “waterboarding” investigation to immigration enforcement and criminal prosecution of terrorists. Whether it was the investigation of  Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio or the Department of Justice’s new investigation of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, he has shown a willingness to use the full power of the Federal government in breaking it’s own statute law. And he didn’t bother to even read the Arizona bill before doing so.

Fully 60% of the nation is opposed to many of the administration’s programs based not upon hate speech or racism, but on principles such as fiscal responsibility, quality of government programs, or our fundamental equality under the law. And yet we see another case of demonization. Our president is demonizing the American people and he is demonizing our Constitution.

People across the country now go to bed at night in fear of what tomorrow holds. What external or internal threat they will wake up to? We seem to lurch from crisis to crisis just as the President’s intellectu