Weekend Free-for-All December 5, 2014

Why are the good people of this country still obliged to put up with Al Sharpton anywhere besides behind prison bars?  Here is a racist loudmouth mob-inciter who has worse than the notorious Tawana Brawley hoax on his sheet - he's a "reverend" with a body count.  The dead of Freddie's Fashion Mart and Yankel Rosenbaum were killed by people who this racial arsonist incited to violence.  Perhaps it's impossible to assign legal responsibility to this tax cheat and all-around repugnant character, but moral responsibility covers him thickly and odorously.

Such a man should have been driven from society or locked up by it.  This man is an arsonist with a gas pump and a flamethrower.  It's bad enough the morally degenerates of the Democratic Party bow and scrape to this grotesque figure, but does he have to plague the rest of us?  In better times, such a notorious person would hide from sight.  Now they get their own show on MSNBC. 

Begone, weird Al, and take your criminal record and your venom-spewing with you.

It occurs to me that now that we have the Eric Garner issue in New York City, I wonder if any of the racism-shouters and their allied ax-grinders regret that they spent so much of their credibility on the far less suspicious Darren Wilson/Michael Brown matter.  The only miscarriage of justice that could have come out of the Ferguson (MO) jury would have been an indictment of Officer Wilson.  With the Eric Garner tragedy, the issue is more complicated.  Now, however, people are more likely to see these demonstrations as simply hooliganism extended, and will turn away in disgust.

Once you protest something stupidly, people will assume that every protest you stage is also stupid.



Louisiana has a chance to send Bill Cassidy (R) to the Senate to replace their incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu.  I feel strongly about this, despite my living nowhere near the state.  There is strong evidence that Landrieu had her first two elections stolen for her by the New Orleans Democratic vote-stealing machine.  They did it the classic way - by holding their numbers until the other voting precincts have reported their numbers, and then magically producing just enough votes to elect the Democrat.  If I were the head of a board of elections in some other Louisiana parish, I would hold my results back until New Orleans released theirs.  Better still, I would organize other parishes to do the same.



I loved the Metallica song One until I saw the beginning of their video, in which a young boy asks a man (perhaps his grandfather) "What is democracy?"

The older man responds "I don't know.  I think it has something to do with young men killing each other."

Have you ever read anything so pretentiously stupid in all of your life?



I watched a few documentaries lately.  The first was "Titanic Arrogance", which undertakes to take an overview of the hubristic errors that led to the great ship's demise on its maiden voyage. The producers of the documentary, having only 44 minutes to work with, wisely choose to concentrate on facets of the story usually left uncovered by other documentaries on the subject.  I was particularly startled to find out that the floating city had an outmoded propulsion set-up (I'm no shipbuilder; I don't know the proper word).  Information chestnuts like this kept me watching, but there was an odd surprise in store for me.

When Wyn Craig Wade updated his classic study Titanic: End of a Dream, he mentioned in his introduction that he had received (after publication of the original work) letters from some determined defenders of the master of the Californian, Stanley Lord, claiming that the terrible loss of life that night could in no way be blamed at Lord's door.  Wade called them Lordites, and noted that in the years since publication the wreck had been discovered by Robert Ballard and the Woods Hole sea search team.  The position of the wreck of the Titanic indicates that the Californian was not stopped 19 miles away from the great dying ship, or even 10 miles away as believed by historians who had studied the disaster, but might have been as near as 5 miles away.  Dr. Ballard, one of the most genial of men, said after finding the Titanic that "No one needed to die that night."  Keep in mind that no one was killed by the collision, and the ship has stayed above water for over 2 hours after being wounded.

Incredibly, the producers of Titanic Arrogance made the fantastic claim that the discovery of the wreck had totally exonerated Captain Lord!  He said the position of the wreck proved Lord was correct in his estimate of the distance, when it in fact was a damning refutation of it.  Lord's whole alibi for his actions depend on this inverval between the ships.  If the ship was in fact only 5 miles away, then the crew on the night watch of the Californian would have clearly seen the 8 (8!) distress rockets launched by the crew of the Titanic considerably above the horizon .  It is an accepted fact that the sightings were reported to Captain Lord (who had turned in for the night) and that the Californian took no action until morning.  This also makes damning the fact that Captain Lord didn't have the wireless operator Cyril Evans awakened when the sighting of the distress rockets was reported to him.  If Evans had turned on the wireless set, he would have caught the distress calls of the sinking vessel in time for the Californian to have saved lives.  Sometimes the difference between being a hero in history and being a villain is a single decision.

I give Titanic Arrogance a qualified recommendation.



I couldn't make myself watch "Ghosts of My Lai"; I couldn't help thinking that the script had been written by Billy Ayers and Noam Chomsky and that veterans who appeared in the film were recruited from the phony veterans who testi-lied in John F___ing Kerry's Winter Soldier Show Trials (which historically were as accurate as the show trials during Stalin's Great Terror).  I think the honorable Americans who served the cause of freedom in Vietnam have been slandered enough already without having a fresh coating of slime poured over them.  Avoid this one at all costs, and shame on you, NewsMax TV, for erring by airing this shameful propaganda.



I give my most unqualified endorsement to History Channel's The Men Who Built America.  This is a four-part series telling the stories of financial magnates like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford.  The portraits are balanced and fascinating.  Several of the magnates of our time appear on camera giving their view of their predecessors.  See if you can identify how the filthy legal trick Morgan played on George Westinghouse over Nicola Tesla's patents presaged how the brutal Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would bully men like Oliver North and Elliott Abrams.  Also, you'll find that Hillary Clinton's phony memory loss when testifying was pioneered by John D. Rockefeller in the famous anti-trust case United States vs. Standard Oil.

My only quibble with this fine production (the web page is here) is that the fascinating facts which appear at the bottom of the screen are too small to read from any distance and appear a little too briefly onscreen.  I taped the series, but of course the best option is to buy the dvds.

Watch "The Men Who Built America".  It is entertaining, disturbing and altogether superb.



Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

A Tale of Two Media Conservatives

12/4/2014

Not all conservative media members are rock-ribbed.  The phrase "rock-ribbed Republican" has an old and venerable history.  Like the accursed term RINO, it is over-used.  Ferguson is one of those topics that helps you winnow the RRRs from the squishier sorts.

Leading the RRRs - no surprise here - is the Crab's favorite multimedia conservative, Ann Coulter.  Her column of November 26 is a classic.  She is righteously outraged that there even was a grand jury.  Officer Darren Wilson, a good officer with a clean record, was forced to fire his weapon after a size XXL thug named Michael Brown slammed his cruiser car door shut on him and then tried to grab the officer's gun.  After a sequence of events available in numerous places on the Web, XXL Brown charged at Officer Wilson (with his hand under his waistline, where one might stash a gun), and Wilson fired the shots that killed him.  All of the forensic evidence supported Wilson's narrative of events.  The credible eyewitnesses of the encounter (meaning the ones who weren't provably lying) supported him as well.  Or, as Ann Coulter put it:

 There's nothing to protest! A cop shot a thug who was trying to kill him. The grand jury documents make perfectly clear that Big Mike was entirely responsible for his own death. Can't the peaceful protesters read? 

Ann is a role model for the Hermit Crab, since she speaks the clear truth without fear.  She defends Joseph McCarthy (as do I), derides the fraud called Darwinism (read her book Godless), reminds her readers that Richard Nixon had in fact won the war in Viet Nam (a victory throw away by the Democrats), and most usefully for this discussion, she authored the invaluable book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.  Anyone who read Mugged was unsurprised by the events that followed Michael Brown's death by misadventure.

To call Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online the anti-Coulter is a bit harsh, but his column of November 27 was in my view harmful, in that he seemed to disavow the riots in Ferguson while nearly endorsing  them across the rest of the country.  By stating that the hostility and distrust of many members of minority communities have legitimate concerns, he nearly endorses all of the steps that followed the incident - steps including rioting, arson, assault, and even murder.

It is my contention that there are in fact few areas left in the United States in which white police bully and abuse blacks because of their skin color.  The days of Bull Connor and his like are over.  For a police chief or sheriff in any state of the union to allow racial bias in their departments would be political suicide, and the end would come quickly.  

In this year 2014, the most dangerous racists holding public office are President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

A short answer for the Amnesty advocate at your Thanksgiving Dinner

A short answer for the Amnesty advocate at your Thanksgiving Dinner

---

I wrote this for a friend for her use last week:

Our parents and grandparents came into the country legally. It only makes sense that immigrants should be screened for contagious diseases (like Ebola) and disabilities that will render them a public charge. It is estimated that 41% of our current illegal alien population is on some form of welfare.) 

Also, we live in dangerous times. Don't the American citizens deserve to know that we aren't letting in violent felons (whose countries would be happy to see the backs of), gang members (MS13), drug runners and drug smugglers, and terrorists? Terrorists are clever, and they will see this weakness and exploit it. In fact they already have. Minnesota has become a seedbed of Somali-born terrorists with US Passports.

It is fatuous to contend that a nation has no right to further its own interests in its immigration policy. Countries are not charitable institutions. Charity is private individuals and private groups helping the unfortunate. Institutions are places we put crazy people like Paul Krugman to keep them from bothering people or (God forbid!) contributing to the formation of immigration policy.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote 

"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." ~Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225 \

he had newspapers like the New York Times in mind.

Illegal Immigration and the Free Market

Well, der Fuhrer has spoken. Heeding the voices of those who did not vote, Barack Obama is going to pursue his agenda by extra-Constitutional means. He's not even as scrupulous as Adolf Hitler was, since Hitler got an Emergency Powers decree through the Reichstag in 1933 before he started ruling Germany by edict. The most imminent threat to the nation (besides Obamaism itself) is B.O.'s threat to sign an executive order “fixing” our immigration policy in much the same way a veterinarian fixes a male dog.

At this point in B.O.'s Presidency, I feel silly pointing out that he has no Constitutional authority to do what he is threatening to do. The legislative power under the Constitution is granted solely to the legislative branch, meaning the Senate and the House of Representatives. The executive is charged with seeing that the laws be “faithfully executed”. All of them; not the ones that the President or Attorney General likes.

The great imposture in this is B.O.'s declaration that he is forced to act because Congress has not. To believe that, you have to believe that every session of Congress is a tabula rasa, with no laws carried over from previous session. Do you see any evidence of that?

Every immigration law passed by Congress and not subsequently repealed is still in effect. Congress has acted – repeatedly. Sometimes wisely, more often recently foolishly and against the will of the people, but they have acted, and it is blatant mendacity to claim otherwise.

That is not to say that the people are not demanding change. They are – it's just that the people are vehemently against the change that President B.O. is threatening. They want illegal immiration stopped at the border; they want the sleazy “catch and release” policy of giving illegal immigrants the freedom to melt into society afer apprehension stopped, and they want someone to stop businesses and individuals form knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.

We are told ad nauseum that the illegals are here “doing jobs Americans just won't do”. What too few people understand is that their presence keeps the market from providing the remedy to the wage imbalance. These jobs are not jobs American citizens won't do; they are currently jobs that Americans won't do for the wages currently offered.

Anyone who know elementary economics knows that a labor glut forces wages down. Conversely, a shortage of labor drives wages up, as employers compete to obtain the labor they need for the work they need to have performed. By constantly importing what will inevitably be cheap labor, the pro open borders/amnesty crowd is preventing the market from functioning.

Imagine there are no illegal immigrants (it's easy if you try). The number of rich people who need their lawns manicured and their pools cleaned will not decline. There will still be tables to be waited, dishes to be bussed and washed, etc. In a labor market not flooded with illegal immigrants, the equation swings toward the worker. If rich liberals like Barbara Streisand and Nancy Pelosi want people trimming their grass, they will have to offer a wage that labor is willing to accept, or they can practice swinging a machete. That's how the free market works!

Minimum wage laws make the situation worse. By attempting to force wages up while illegal immigration forces them down, you encourage “off the books” hiring. Otherwise you find yourself legally bound to provide wages and benefits above what the labor itself is worth. Meanwhile jobs for American citizens evaporate, discouraged people drop out of the labor force, and welfare and disability rolls swell, ballooning the debt.

In the old days, people enering the United States had to confirm that they would not become “a public charge” (a useful phrase we need to revive). Now we find our government (if we can still call it ours) importing welfare cases, criminals, and almost certainly terrorists as well.

We seem to have reached a situation where it is easier for people to take up permanent residency in our country illegally than it is to move here legally. This is unacceptable.

The citizens of this nation are now demanding that the government closes the border first, and they are opposed to amnesty for lawbreakers who entered this country illegally, in effect cutting in front of the good people who have been willing to enter the country legally. They are correct to do so.

Please let's not let arrogance defeat us again, conservatives

I wrote the following before the 2012 election.  What I feared largely came to pass.  When trying to save our country via election, the first goal must be not defeating ourselves.  Some of the below is a bit dated, but most is not.  I would be grateful if you read this if you're considering not voting for your moderate Republican.  Thank you, and let's save America this Tuesday!

Just when I thought the Right was getting its act together, I received a link from Libertarian Tony linking to a ludicrous article claiming that it would in the long run be unfortunate if Mitt Romney wins on Tuesday.  It called Mitt Romney "an empty suit", and it called to mind what I can't stand about some on the right.  Some on the Right seem to be perfectly ignorant of the role of political parties, and are arrogantly prepared to let the country go to hell rather than "compromise their principles".  They claim that they are being "true to their principles", and that they and they alone get to define words like "Republican" and "conservative.  I had hoped that this sort of pretentious foolishness had at least decided to take this election off, since throwing B.O. and his socialist commissars out of power is THE issue of the day.  I guess it's like Count Dracula, though -- nothing seems to kill it permanently.  For people who claim to know history, it's amazing how ignorant they are of the history and purpose of party politics in America.  They also seem to be unable to discern differences in degree when actions superficially seem similar.  It's as if someone is asserting that since murder and parents spanking their children are both acts of violence, and murders are executed, child-spanking parents should be executed, too.  Wearily, like a retired knight, I buckle on the armor of historic knowledge and drawing the sword of logic, I re-enter the fray of conservative/libertarian debate.  Let's try this again...

Political Parties are Formed to Enable People with Similar Interests to Obtain Their Common Goals

The fact is that we are all members of minorities in our political beliefs.  I believe and identify myself as a Reaganite conservative, my sisters identify themselves as moderates in that they have some views that are conservative and some which are liberal, my friend Libertarian Tony calls himself a libertarian conservative.  Since none of these sets of principles represent the views of even 20% of the electorate, what are we to do.  If we refuse the possibility of co-operating with those who do not agree with us on everything, we will obtain nothing! 

For lessons in this, we can consider the history of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party was born when the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act forced slavery and the expansion thereof into the territories became the most prominent issue before the American people.  It split the parties of the time.  The most immediate victims of this party-splitting were the Whigs, who essentially split into the two wings they had managed to hold more or less together before 1852, the anti-slavery ("Conscience Whigs") and the pro-slavery ("Cotton Whigs").  When Kansas-Nebraska and "Bleeding Kansas" forced Americans to choose between competing visions -- a future of slavery expansion South, West, and perhaps even North (the Dred Scott decision would add that dimension to the dilemma in early 1857), or a future of free soil and free men, the Whigs discovered that they did not have any common principles strong enough to hold their party together under the strains of the time.

The new Republican Party formed itself with surprising speed from the fragments of the Whig Party, but it had a rival.  The American Party, founded on prejudice against foreigners and Catholics, sprouted like the weeds among the wheat in the Biblical parable.  This party had a brief period of frightening success, winning elections in several states and running Millard Fillmore as their Presidential candidate in 1856.  Viewed from the perspective of today, one sees similarities with the Nazi movement in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.  However, like Dolly the Sheep, the American Party (derisively dubbed the "Know-Nothing Party" by Horace Greeley because its members were instructed to reply "I know nothing" to any inquiries regarding its operations or membership) was born with genetic defects that prevented it from enduring.  It survives in memory today as an oddity, along with such short-lived "anti-" parties as the Anti-Masonic Party and the "Dixiecrats".

There were those who believed that the Republican Party had no better chance of survival than the Know-Nothings.  The anti-slavery Whigs had had among them supporters of low-tariffs and high-tariffs (known at the time as protectionists), adherents of many faiths, including mainline Protestants, Catholics (largely Irish), pacifist Quakers, puritanical New Englanders, and anti-slavery, anti-clergy European immigrants (largely refugees of the failed European revolutions of the late 1840s).  Even the anti-slavery opinions had some splits between the immediate uncompensated abolitionists, the compensated abolitionists (who preferred payments to those deprived of their "property"), the gradual abolition through territorial restrictionists, the colonizers (who wanted to free the slaves and establish them in their own country in Africa -- Liberia), and so on.  As the late scholar William Lee Miller described it, the Republican Party at its birth "was one of the great sausages of American politics". 

However, the Republicans had two great advantages over their K-N rivals.  One was that they had a positive program -- free men, free labor, free soil.  The other was that they had canny political leaders in their ranks -- men like Thurlow Weed of New York (forgotten today, he was one of the great political organizers of the 19th century), Andrew Curtain of Pennsylvania, John A. Andrew and Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, John Sherman of Ohio, and a lanky, recently-returned-to-politics lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.  (Of all of the unforeseen consequences of Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act, perhaps the most important was that it pulled Lincoln back into politics.)  These men realized that if their fledgling party was to survive, they would have to pull together as a team to battle the established Democrats, who in fact were beginning to show some fissures in their own facade.  They understood what political parties are formed to do.  Many of our right-wing fellows do not.

The leaders who chose to concentrate on what united them and to set aside what might divide them paid off handsomely in just their second Presidential election, as Abraham Lincoln (himself a compromise choice as nominee) was elected the 16th President of  the United States.  He only received 38% of the popular vote (somewhat misleading, as Lincoln ballots were not even offered in several southern states), but the other 62% were split between three candidates.  The Democrats had suffered a fatal split at their conventions (they convened two of them in 1860) between the traditional Democrats headed by Stephen Douglas of Illinois (who proclaimed that it did not matter to him whether slavery was voted up or down),  and the radical pro-slavery Democrats led by men like Jefferson Davis and William L. Yancey (for whom nothing but slavery endorsement and extension would serve).  The former group nominated their obvious leader, Stephen Douglas, while the latter nominated Kentuckian Vice President John Breckenridge.  The fourth party called themselves the Constitutional Union Party, and they nominated dignified elders John Bell and Edward Everett.  They were running in an election marked more by passion than dignity, however, and they finished third in the Electoral College and fourth in the popular vote.  With the opposition fragmented, Lincoln won an easy majority in the EC, with 180 votes against 123 for his three rivals.

Put simply, the Republican Party stayed united and won.  The Democrats fragmented and lost.

Fast-forward to 1912.  This time it was the Republicans who split suicidally between the regular Republican nominee and incumbent President William Howard Taft and the mercurial, charismatic former President, Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt.  The factional split allowed Democrat nominee Woodrow Wilson to win the election with just 41.8% of the vote. Many students of history (including this one) trace the growth of leviathan big government (and the consequent shrinking of personal liberty) to the election of Wilson. Republican failure to unite behind one candidate made this disaster possible. United we stand...

Now we can look at another in which lack of unity cost the Republican Party dearly, the election of 1964. The conservatives took advantage of the failure of the liberal wing of the party to unite behind one candidate to nominate their chosen favorite, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. In a display of suicidal poor sportsmanship, the liberal conventioneers tried to deprive Goldwater of the nomination by uniting (belatedly) behind Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania. Failing in this, they actually booed Goldwater when he came to the stage to accept the nomination. It's not really credible to argue that this disharmony cost Goldwater the presidency. As Richard Nixon realized, after the trauma of the Kennedy assassination, the American people were not going to reject the man they saw as Kennedy's legatee, Lyndon Johnson. However, it almost certainly cost them seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Given that they were already in the minority in both houses, this was a setback they could ill afford. Interestingly, the aftermath of the 1964 Republican debacle proved the political party-building skills of former Vice President Richard Nixon, who worked tirelessly to repair the rift between the wings of the party and was largely responsible for the Republican recovery in the mid-term elections of 1966. Nixon, who emerged blameless for the 1964 split (having worked tirelessly for Goldwater's candidacy that year), criss-crossed the country throughout the 1966 campaign season working for Republican candidates regardless of faction. The Republicans made a remarkable recovery in 1966, picking up 47 House seats in the House and 3 seats in the Senate. It also gave Nixon the title of chief uniter of the Republican ranks, and put him on the inside track to the 1968 nomination (and eventually the Presidency).

(I pause here to mention that if you want to annoy a Democrat (and who doesn't?), remind them that Richard Nixon received more popular votes in his five nationwide elections than Franklin Roosevelt did in his. Few people remember that Franklin Roosevelt was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920, when Democrat James Cox was summarily flattened by perhaps the most unjustly maligned President in American history, Warren G. Harding.)

Forward to 1976 and the beginning of the Reagan Republican Revolution. After Reagan, former successful two-term Governor of California (remind Democrats of that, too), lost by a whisker at the 1976 Republican Convention, he accepted nominee Gerald Ford's characteristically gracious offer to address the convention. After making a speech urging Republicans to unify behind their nominees, he then went to work campaigning for Ford and Robert Dole. Just two years after Watergate, the Republicans came close to holding onto the White House. Reagan's efforts at party unification would be rewarded in1980, when he would attain the nomination, the Presidency , and then greatness, in that order. After Ronald Reagan won the nomination, let us remember, he immediately started the work of uniting the party behind his candidacy by choosing moderate Republican George Bush as his running mate. The moderate Republicans and the soon-to-be-called Reagan Republicans pulled together, and the party ticket won going away, to the great benefit of the country. United we stand...

Now let us look at 2008, when John McCain, moderate Senator from Arizona (full circle!) took advantage of fragmented conservative opposition to win the Republican nomination, despite conservative 11^th hour efforts to unite behind former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. (Had you forgotten that little fact about the 2008 primary campaign?) Despite McCain's Reaganesque gesture of choosing conservative darling Sarah Palin, conservative Governor of Alaska, many conservative/libertarian Republicans sulked Achilles-like in their tents, allowing an undistinguished junior Senator from (eventually) Illinois named Barack Hussein Obama to cruise to an easy, largely media-driven victory. Admittedly the McCain campaign was at times amazingly incompetent, but a united party might have won another couple of Senate races, and maybe even more seats won in the House. I believe that the conservative/libertarian sit-down strike of 2008 gave us Obamacare less than two years later.

“...divided we fall.”

Now we have lockstep supporters of an incredibly unpopular and power-abusing President trying desperately to run away from their voting records and incredibly, some conservatives and libertarian Republicans once again want to form a circular firing squad. This is literally insane. For any would-be Republican Achilles who wants to sit out this election, I propose a challenge. It has two parts:

Go to the positions page of whatever moderate Republican wants your vote this time around. See how much you disagree with. I'll bet it's less than you think.

Now check out the issues page of your Democrat candidate.  See how much of that you agree with. Compare the scores.

There is only one way to save our country on Tuesday. That is to elect as many Republicans as humanly possible to every office we can vote on. The more Republicans we elect, the more conservatives we will have, since the conservative office-holding Democrat has been extinct for years now. I think the last moderate Democratic Senator was John Breaux of Louisiana, and he retired. A year or two ago, I received a scorecard from the eminently respectable Heritage Foundation, the premier conservative think tank in the country. It rated every Senator and Representative by the percentage of conservative votes they cast in roll call votes. I discovered that the median Republican rating was 74% conservative. The median Democrat rating was 14%. No difference between the parties?  (This has changed a point or two since 2012.  The Republicans graded slightly more conservative, the Democrats more liberal.)

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and the Bible (alternately), in your hands, my dissatisfied fellow conservatives, and not in ours, is the momentous issue of socialist defeat or ascendency. Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. Will freedom be betrayed because of a stiff-necked generation of its friends? We will indeed nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of Earth.

As the great RR advised us years ago, this is indeed “a time for choosing”.

Barack Obama's Heroic Escalator Ride to his Level of Incompetence

July 20, 2014

Many observers have reacted with surprise at Barack Obama's shallow, morally vacant public reaction to the downing of that Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine. He spent a mere thirty eight seconds on the atrocity, before going right back to his perpetual campaign mode. As my wife acidly observed, it's the only thing he's good at, apart from wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on himself and his amazingly shameless family.

Many people, even some on the Left, have drawn parallels to President Reagan's exemplary reaction to the downing of KAL 007 by a Soviet fighter jet in 1983. These parallels have not benefited Obama, as President Reagan spoke directly to the American people on live television, not through administration mouthpieces, and he used the language of moral clarity. The destruction of the jet and the hundreds of lives aboard it was a moral atrocity, and President Reagan called it just that. He even played some of the intercepted communications between the Soviet fighter pilot and his commanders, which showed that the pilot had been close enough to identify the plane, which had accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace, as a civilian plane. President Obama, in an instructive contrast, spoke as a man who is asked to comment on an article of which he has read only the headline. His demeanor and lack of grasp reminded many that this is a President who skips his security briefings. I can't help thinking that this is a life-long pattern for him. I wish we could get his college records released to the public. I'd like to see those attendance records...

I wasn't a bit surprised by B.O.'s demeanor, because I detected a creepy other-worldliness about this man years ago. I really think that he sees other people as a different, lower species for which he has no fellow feeling. I'm not interested in what state or country he was born in (nothing was ever going to come of that anyway) – I want to know what planet he was born on.

Increasingly he surrounds himself with Valerie Jarrett-like sycophants who praise him, reassure him of his brilliance, and do everything but fan him with palm fronds.

He does not learn, for he believes he does not need to. He believes that if his ideas don't work at first, it's all right – reality will correct itself eventually. I'm betting he still thinks Cash for Clunkers, that willful destruction of the only cars many of the poor can afford, was a good and successful idea.

He is done a disservice by the Love Canal Media, which defends him even when he attacks and spies on them.

He does not feel himself bound by the Constitution, because that was written before he was born, so what good can it be?

In many ways, Barack Obama is a George McClellan-like figure. He is a man who attained too much success too easily, and was never steeled by the necessity of coping with failure. His progress through Columbia and Harvard was greased (I am convinced) by that spoiler of character, Affirmative Action. His teaching post at the University of Chicago was a narrow-focus, cream-puff Affirmative Action hiring, given to him because the law faculty had few or no black members. (That's still better that the University of Chicago Hospital's promotion of Michelle Obama, which was simply a bribe.)

 Barack Obama is a man who demands credit for climbing mountains throughout his life, when what he was actually doing was standing on an escalator.

Hillary's Mansion Tour

From Accuracy in Media:

The Washington Post entered the fray by noting that “some Democrats fear” Clinton has an “imperial image that could be damaging in 2016 ^[16].” The Post notes the disconnect between Hillary’s words and her appearance. “When Hillary Rodham Clinton said [in June] that she was once ‘dead broke,’ it was during an interview in which she led ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer through her $5 million Washington home, appointed like an ambassador’s mansion,” wrote Philip Rucker. “Mahogany antiques, vibrant paintings and Oriental rugs fill the rooms.”

Has anyone compared the items shown during the interview to an inventory of White House furnishings circa January 2000?  http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=004bOT

Independence Day

Happy Birthday, United States of America!  Of course, to some of us, this looks like a birthday party for a badly ill patient in the hospital, or perhaps a party for an unjustly imprisoned man.  We're glad he's still with us, but he's been a lot healthier.  We'd better pray for him harder than ever.


The vomitous Sundance Network has chosen the 4th of July to show the venomously anti-America  movie Born on the Fourth of July.  I assume that the Sundance Channel is a tumor grown from the Sundance Film festival, founded by commie-cuddler and Che Guevara idolater .Robert Redford.  I wouldn't be surprised if this channel shows the movie every 4th of July, and follows it up with some movies by Oliver Stone.  I never watch the Sundance Channel; I happened to see the listing while menu-surfing on Dish Network.

I will be observing my own Independence Day tradition.  I shall visit and tend the grave of Col. Patrick O'Rorke, Rochester, NY's Gettysburg hero.  Having graduated first in his West Point class in 1861, just after the "shooting war" had started at Fort Sumter.  While commanding the 140th NY Volunteers at Gettysburg, O'Rorke responded with perhaps Union-saving alacrity to Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren's desperate search for troop to hold the vital but undefended Little Round Top, the anchor of the Union position on the high ground on Cemetery Ridge.  Sadly, graduating first in your West Point class doesn't make you immune to bullets, and Col. O'Rorke was killed on Little Round Top, just south of Gettysburg, PA, on July 2nd, 1863.  One hundred fifty one years and two days ago.  He did not live to see the Union victory that he had done so much to save, or even his 27th birthday.  He never heard of the Union's great victory at Vicksburg, which made the defeat of the rebels inevitable.  (One of the reasons the Union's Army of the Potomac had such difficulty finding generals to match Lee and his subordinates was that so many of their most promising officers were killed as they were working their way up the ranks.  See Philip_Kearny, Isaac_Stevens, and Edward_E._Cross.)

Gettysburg is my favorite spot on earth, so I'd like to be honoring Col. O'Rorke on Little Round Top itself (there's a monument to the Colonel and his regiment there), but Holy_Sepulchre_Cemetery, where our hero is buried with his mother, his father, and Col. George Ryan, O'Rorke's successor as commander of the 140th, who was killed at Spottsylvania Court House in May 1864 will do nicely.

God bless our country, our soldiers of all branches of service, and everyone who made this country what it has been and still can be again, if we want it to be -- a government "... of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Burt Prelutsky on Lanny Davis and the Benghazi Special Committee:

Lanny Davis, lifelong consigliore of the Clintons, has announced he is putting together a “truth squad” whose job it will be to spin whatever facts the committee comes up with, the better to ensure Hillary’s coronation in 2016.

For history buffs like me, seeing Lanny Davis heading a "truth squad" is rather like reading of Reinhard Heydrich's time as Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.  The truth is likely to suffer the same fate at Davis's hands as the patriotic Czechs did at Heydrich's.

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The Crab cannot help being disappointed at the news that traitorous soldier Bradley Manning will be given a sex change operation courtesy of the American taxpayers,  (Nobody asked me, either).  Once the surgery has been completed (if it hasn't been already), Manning will never get that kick where he deserves to be kicked -- they'll be gone.

My only solace will be that he will win a further filthy distinction.  It isn't everyone who gets to be a disgrace to all mankind and to all womenkind.

My letter to the lying leftist Congresscritter Louise Slaughter re the Keystone Pipeline

I recently wrote to Louise Slaughter-the-Unborn re the Keystone Pipeline.  (I support it, of course, since I want what's best for our country.)  Of course, I expected little good to come from writing to her, since I've long known that her body has outlived her brain by many years now.  I guess I just wanted an excuse to write back and practice my restrained anger writing.  Since Louise never fails to disappoint, my opportunity is not long in coming.  Here is the response I received from her office:

Dear David and Carol,

Thank you for contacting me to support the Keystone XL pipeline. I appreciate hearing from you on this important matter.

While I am sensitive to your concerns, I strongly oppose the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The events in Mayflower, Arkansas in March 2013 where ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline spilled 5,000 gallons of tar sands oil into the surrounding community, as well as the pipeline spill in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in July 2010, have demonstrated the increased threats posed by tar sands oil. The Kalamazoo River spill, which occurred after a pipeline carrying tar sands from Canada ruptured, resulted in the largest on-land oil spill, and one of the costliest oil spills, in U.S. history.

Oil mined from tar sands is not only more toxic than normal crude oil, the extraction process is more energy intensive and emits significantly more greenhouse gases than traditional oil extraction. The more acidic and corrosive consistency of the type of tar sands oil being piped into the United States makes oil spills more likely. Furthermore, the pipeline would be constructed through the heart of America’s breadbasket where a majority of our nation’s food supply is grown and harvested. The presence of a pipeline would pose an unnecessary risk to the region and our food supply.

I also believe we must be more vigilant in our oversight of the oil drilling industry, particularly after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the worst in U.S. history, killed 11 workers and released 170 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico that continue to pose risks to the local communities and environment.

Because the Keystone XL pipeline would cross the Canadian-U.S. border, construction of the pipeline requires a Presidential Permit from the State Department; therefore Congress does not have jurisdiction over its approval.

Preventing damage to the environment and protecting public health should be our primary concern. While we may disagree on this matter, I deeply appreciate the time you took to share your views and will certainly keep them in mind.

I always appreciate hearing from my constituents about the issues that matter to them. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future. If you are interested in receiving my e-newsletter - the “Louise Line” - to update you about my work on your behalf in Washington, or for other information, please visit my website at www.louise.house.gov.



My response to her response follows:

I'd like to thank you for your email regarding the Keystone Pipeline, but I can't.  I never thank people for lying to me.  The Keystone project is not dangerous to the environment.  The EPA agrees, having okayed the project half a dozen times.  No method of transporting oil or any other product is 100.00% safe, and pipelines are safer than barge, rail, or truck transport.  Your comment about the nation's heartland is silly, as oil is as necessary there as anywhere else in the country.

 

Whether we get our oil from Canada, Saudi Arabia, or our own offshore or inshore production, it still need to be transported to our refineries and then to the customers.  It is better to get our oil from our own resources or from a friendly nation like Canada.  It is inexcusable to continue to get our oil from perhaps the most unstable region in the world, a region which is strongly suspected of using our own oil money to subsidize terrorism against ourselves and our allies.

 

I wish just once you would represent your constituents instead of your leftist lobbyist friends.  Better still, retire.  "In the name of God, go!"

 

The Hermit Crab

I strongly suggest writing to your misrepresentatives whenever they fail to put the people and the country first.  Will they listen?  In the case of most Democrats (and some Republicans), probably not.  It's a great way to practice your invective and blow off steam, though.  Just make sure your tax returns are in order...

Discordant thoughts

If Congress authorizes B.O.'s billion-dollar climate change crapola fund, the Redcoats should be invited back to finish doing to Washington DC what they started in 1814.



If B.O. really cares about the drought-stricken California farmers, he would tell the EPA to screw the Delta Smelt (some of them are libertine Democrats and would try it) and give the farmers their irrigation back.  Just like in Ethiopia, there's nothing like liberal policies to turn a farmer's paradise into a smoking desert.  Your speeches won't help, Prez.  Manure they already have.



Repeat after me, Tea Partiers:

John Boehner is not the enemy; he is an obstacle that can be moved.  Barack Obama is the enemy, Harry Reid is the enemy, Nancy Pelosi is an enemy, Eric Holder is the enemy.  We must make the Republicans allies or we will lose the future presently. 

Moderate Republicans can be persuaded; Ronald Reagan did it.  Nothing he did cannot be repeated if we learn from him.  Persuasion works better than abuse.  Abusing and demeaning Boehner while he was co-operating with us during the "shut-down" was a mistake.  No-one will shake hands and become our allies while we are throwing bricks at them. 

Nothing the moderates in the GOP want to do is nearly as stupid as carbon dioxide sequestration in air-tight containers in the soil, keeping the carbon dioxide from the plants that need it to grow.  The Republican moderates do not wish to take over the health industry completely.  They do not wish to destroy the coal industry and cripple American energy production.  They do not want to destroy the California farming industry to protect a worthless five-inch fish.  They do not want to force-feed student insufficient lunches that "taste like vomit".  It is Democrats that want to do that.

Paul Ryan can be repaired.  Harry Reid cannot.

Why I don't use the term "gay"

I've been twittering (?) for 6-8 weeks now.  It's often fun, it gives you a chance to correspond with the rich and/or famous (Charlie Daniels is a very nice man), and sometimes sadly it's an interesting cross-section of Internet humanity.  Recently I had an experience that reminded me of why I refuse to call homosexuals "gay".

I saw an exchange of tweets between +KillerBunnyFooFoo (one of my favorites) and a self-professed homosexual man.  Unsurprisingly, if you know our Bunny, they had a disagreement.  Instead of meeting her on the intellectual fields of battle, he made it clear that he wanted to call her ... the 4 letter c-word that is not in the vocabulary of decent people.  Bunny responded that homosexual men have often called her that illogical, unspeakable word.  Being in a cheerful humor that night, I chipped in with my doubts that a homosexual man would not recognize one of the items he had referred to if he saw one.  (Actually, the fact that he called Bunny one is proof positive that he knows not of what he speaks.)  Looking back, I should have taken the clod's handle off of my response.  Another mistake, I guess.

Most people, when they have been called out for being obnoxious, will back out of trouble with as much good grace as they can muster.  Not our zero, though.  He wrote "Your picture is a good start."

Now, the picture I use for my Twitter account is of one of my heroes, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, the hero of the Second Polish Republic.  In fact, it is this photo:



... and boy genius called this picture a good start at understanding what one of "those" looks like. 

That's too often the case with outspoken homosexuals.  They are reflexively and venomously hostile to anyone and everyone who declines to celebrate their sexual disorientation.  I would refuse to use the term "gay" anyway, because it is a smoke-screen meant to deceive instead of an accuracy meant to describe.  However, my resolution is made far easier by the nasty, brutish way that certain homosexuals allow their reflexive hate overwhelm their desire to be persuasive or even logical. 

Theories abound as to why homosexuals are so hostile to everyone who doesn't condone their behavior.  My personal theory is that deep down, instinctively and without any regard for their protestations to the contrary, they know that there is something deeply wrong with them, no matter what the culture tells them. 

If they wantto be treated with compassion (and most of us do), they could try being civil.  That might help.

Thoughts on Burt Prelutsky's February 5 blog posting

One reason I read every Burt Prelutsky blog posting is that he writes so many things that are fun to respond to.  Not that I disagree -- far from it.  You want to add detail and answer Burt's questions for him.  It's like when I correspond with my friend Tony the Libertarian.  It's about 15% debate and 85% sharing of information.  (When we get together in person it's debate, information, and beer.)

For example, Burt wrote:

"Recently, Robert Gates garnered a great deal of attention for writing a book in which he took Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, to task. Once you got past the totally insincere compliments he apparently felt obliged to pay the first two, he basically made a case that none of them was to be trusted. Inasmuch as I had already come to that conclusion without his prompting, my question is why he didn t resign when he first discovered the truth about them."

The answer is that Robert Gates is old Beltway Bob, the man who just wants to be important among the government elites.  He would run a department for any President - George Bush or Barack Obama, George Washington or Bill Clinton, George Patton or George McClellan.  I always imagine him standing on a Washington DC street corner holding a sign "Will run government department for stature".

Then there was

" In the case of  (NJ Governor Chris) Christie, it shouldn t have taken the bridge scandal to open the eyes of those morons who decided he should be our answer to Hillary in 2016. It s one thing for a guy who comes off like a thug to be the governor of New Jersey, and quite another to have his rump perched in the Oval Office."

I hope that Christie learned the lesson of the media laser beam focussed on him these last few weeks.  When a Republican like Christie or John McCain spends too much time in the media spotlight, it's not because the media loves them for themselves, or because they're a "new kind of Republican".  It's because the media is using them to divide and damage the GOP.  When given an opportunity to destroy their "favorite Republican", however, the searchlight is intensified into a laser beam, and the basking becomes the burning.

Burt finished with this:

"Speaking of schools, the Civil Rights office in the Department of Education thinks it s because of racism that black and Hispanic students are suspended or kicked out of schools for disciplinary infractions far more often than white kids.

Just curious, but has it occurred to these bureaucratic pinheads that the lack of discipline might somehow be the result of illegitimacy rates that show that 72.3% of black kids are being raised by unmarried women, 53.3% of Hispanic kids and only 29.1% of white kids?

I grant that 29.1% is nothing to brag about. That is until you compare it to what s going on in the minority communities, where the overwhelming majority of males have gone AWOL, leaving it up to all those terrible white bigots to support their women and children.

But I expect it s too much to ask that people who are being paid to spot civil rights infractions ever bother looking into the actual source of the problem. After all, as the schools, the media and left-wing politicians keep insisting, members of minority groups must never be held responsible for their problems.

Besides, it s so much easier and a lot more fun to simply holler Racism! in a crowded theater."

To this I just shout "Amen!!"

To Fox News:  Put this man on the air!  The world has seen enogh of Karl Rove!

To everyone else:  Subscribe to Burt Prelutsky's newsletter.  It's a good source of information and a great source of fun, and don't we need THAT in Obamamerica?

Simple Truths for Complex Times

Just a few points and reminders:

Making law by executive order is unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.  the states and the people are under no obligation to obey illegal laws, whether they be imposed by the power-mad President B.O. or by power-mad regulators.  Encourage your state and local governments to decline to obey illegal enactments like the EPA's anti-scientific CO2 standards.

There is nothing in the Constitution that allows one federal judge the power to nullify the votes of millions of citizens who have expressed themselves by ballot and referendum.  When a federal judge attempts to overrule a state law on anything - ANYTHING - that is not spelled out in the Constitution as a federal judicial power, the states should (politely, if possible; otherwise if necessary) tell the black-robed buttinski "Thanks for your opinion, but since you're not in our chain of command, we shall go forward as our citizens have determined to."

As Alan Caruba never tires of reminding us, carbon dioxide (usually deceptively referred to as carbon) is not a pollutant.  It is, in fact, the second most important gas to life on Earth.  It's plant oxygen.  Anyone who tells you by any communications medium that CO2 is a danger to the planet is a charlatan or a simpleton, and should be treated accordingly.

On a less serious subject, isn't it high time the NFL dropped its silly Roman-numeraling of the Super Bowls?  If they refuse, I think we should petition to have the next game played in Iowa and dubbed Super Bowl EIEIO.

The already infamous New Jersey lane closures on the George Washington Bridge going into Manhattan was scarcely the worst example of political retribution in the last five years.  I remember the wildfires in Texas which threatened to burn down a large area of wooded land and make homeless many, many more people than were inconvenienced on the GW Bridge.  (Also, you might consider which would upset you more -- getting stuck in a traffic jam or having your home burn down.)  It became plain that the reason that B.O. refused to designate the wildfire areas as disaster areas was because Texas's Republican governor, Rick Perry, had criticised and challenged (albeit briefly) the great Bolshevik Barry.  Knowing what we now know of the petty vindictiveness of the current President, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that B.O. let the homes burn to punish Texans for clinging to their guns, religion, and governor.

The notorious Hillary Rodham Clinton once scandalously said to General David Petraeus that accepting his testimony on the "Surge" in Iraq (which succeeded brilliantly) required "a willing suspension of disbelief".  Accepting Hillary Clinton's testimony on any subject requires "a willing suspension of disbelief."

Questions for the Prominent for a Friday

For Attorney General Eric Holder:

How long did it take you to find a white defendant to prosecute for a "hate crime" -- the knockout game?

How many black defendants did you pass on prosecuting while you were searching for a white man to prosecute?

Did you remember to make sure the defendent you settled on isn't a homosexual?



For the editorial board at the New York Times (a former newspaper):

Now that you have created the term "white Hispanic" for George Zimmerman, how much longer will it take you to call some conservative black like Deneen Borrelli or Herman Cain a "black Caucasian"?



For any spokeman for the National  Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration:

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they rounded up and massacred government leaders, military officers, college professors, and other potential leaders.  Then they declared that they would have to run Poland, since the Poles had no leaders capable of running a government.  Didn't you do something similar when you stopped counting the coldest temperature reading stations between one publicized calculation of global temperature and the next, so that you could falsely claim that the temperature had gone up "according to your readings"?



For the Love Canal Media:

Hundreds of people died of Fast and Furious.  Four Americans were killed in Bengazi.  How many died in the George Washington Bridge traffic jam?

Chris Christie, Bob Gates, and my solution for carbon dioxide

Dammit, Chris Christie, you gave the media exactly what they wanted! You've given them something to cover other than Obama scandals, incompetence, and cronyism. Can you be surprised that you are under so many spotlights that you can't even distinguish any one of them individually? To think that some people thought this bumptious blimp could beat out Hillary in the Presidential race! Of course, even if your governorship made George Washington look like Bill Clinton, they would still make a scandal up to use against you. (Do you remember Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and Joe Septic?) At least we can try to bust frauds.

(If you want to imagine something truly appalling, imagine an actual footrace between Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie.)

Now that I've done yelling at CC (for the moment), a warning for the rest of you. B e ready for the Love Canal Media to stretch this bridge fiasco as long as they can, with endless breathless updates and "exclusives". The LCM wants to keep their gaze (and hopefully, in their eyes, yours, too) on the figure of Chris Christie (pun intended) until they catch another Republican doing or saying something they can make a scandal out of. As the media pirates yell, "Prepare to be bored!"



Few sights amuse more than the consternation of the Left when they are wounded by the turncoats they prepared to join their crew. They are shocked that Robert "Beltway Bob" Gates would dare to criticise their Mickey Mouse Club foreign and military policies. Turnabout, I call it. How do you suppose we Republicans felt when Gates consented to stay on as Secretary of Defense. You kept him because he was pliable, and would change teams to stay in office. Why are you surprised when he leaves the ship and tells the reading public (that which remains) and the media of the brainlessness of the captain and his officers. Bob Gates may be fond of the military, but he's more fond of Bob Gates, and it's only Bob to make more money and TV time for himself.

Be the President Republican or Democrat, George W or Barry O, a tiger is a tiger, a jackel is a jackel, and a Gates is a Gates.



If coal industry executives are, shall we say, reluctant to trust Democrats and environmentalists, one can hardly blame them. The "war on coal" goes back longer than you may realize.

First the coal power plant owners were ordered to either retrofit their plants to use clean coal or install costly "stack scrubbers" in their smokestacks. They complied.

Then they were told that they had to install stack scrubbers into the smokestacks of the plants that had converted to clean coal. There were protests, but "no mercy, no quarter" - they had to do it or face business-killing fines. Again they complied. The real pollutants that made "smog" a word in the dictionary virtually disappeared from our air.

So naturally, the enviros and their Democrat wage-slaves declared the second most important gas for life on earth a pollutant, so that they could continue their torture-murder of a great American industry. Their theories are wildly, transparently false, but that never stops a dedicated power-hungry lefty.

Personally, I think that if every member of radical environmental groups like the Sierra Club would just stop exhaling, it would do more good for the planet than the shutting down of every coal-fired plant in America.

I know I'd breathe easier.

Surrounded by Lispers in ADA America

I am beset by lispers on the airwaves.  One of the local sponsors of my favorite local conservative radio show, The Bill Nojay Show on my favorite New York talk radio channel, WYSL, has a lisper read their online ad.  It irritates me so much I don't even remember whose ad it is.

What's worse, the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops website has a lisper recording the psalms I get with my daily Bible readings.  Hearing the psalms spoken as if the reader just finished having dental work done is exasperating!  I don't listen to my Bible readings in the morning to start the day irritated.  But irritated I am.

I blame the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The Act was sold to us as a law that would prevent unfair discrimination against the disabled, which was preventing them from obtaining jobs they were capable of performing.  Sounded nice to most, although some of us knew where this would end up.
As we all know, hand a trial lawyer in or out of government a chopstick, and he'll turn it into your suppository.

So it proved with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  From the prevention of unnecessary discrimination against the handicapped (yes, I will use the old word), the focus soon became the enrichment of trial lawyers.  (This happens to most laws.)  Gradually employers realized that they were likely to be hauled into court anytime you turn down anyone with a handicap, no matter what it is, and no matter how relevant that handicap is to the job duties.  Do you remember the blind firefighter?

So we are beset with lispers on the radio and barely coherent telemarketers.  Do you see why I invoke Shakespeare and intone "I trust not fair terms and a villain's mind"?

Libertarians and Tea Partiers flunk their Civil War era homework

Well, okay, my claim is a bit overblown, but the TPers and the Libertarians do have the common Young American weakness of shoddy research.  I'll give three quick examples here:

Libertarians often claim that President Abraham Lincoln was the real father of big government during his time in office, because the size of government and taxes expanded during those years.  Now, let me think.  There was something unique about Abraham Lincoln's Presidency.  Hey, I remember...

HE WAS PRESIDENT DURING A CIVIL WAR!!

This means, for those who can connect two dots, that the precedents Honest Abe set are valid IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR!  (The government post-bellum was back down to its pre-war size only seven years after the shooting stopped.  Ask your favorite small-government Lincoln basher is they knew that.)

Libertarians also love to claim that Abraham Lincoln violated the Constitution by suspending the Writ of Habeus Corpus in 1861.  I haven't the time for an extended treatment of the issue, so I'll give you the bullet points version:

The Constitution dictates that the Writ will not be suspended EXCEPT IN CASE OF REBELLION.  As Professor Harry Jaffa points out, if an attempt to separate 11 states from the Union by force of arms isn't rebellion, what would be?

Congress was in recess when Lincoln found it necessary to suspend the writ.  He called the Congress back early in a special session, and then asked them to rule up-or-down on his actions during the crisis, including his action of suspension of the Writ.  They approved.

A-ha, say the libertarians and neo-Confederates, but the states had reserved the right of secession from the Union when they ratified the Constitution!  They were exercising their legal right!

Wrong again.  Claremont Institute Fellow Thomas Kranawitter reviewed the records of the various ratification conventions in every state, including the ratification statements, the proposed amendments (sucessful and failed), and the records of the debates, and he made a startling (to some) discovery.

Not one state reserved a right of secession in their ratification statement.  Not even one.  In fact, only one convention, Delaware's, even proposed an amendment reserving that fancied right.  It was defeated.

You have to do your homework, people.

Andrew Cuomo Steps on Faces of New Yorkers to Reach for the Presidency

Since becoming New York's Governor, Andrew Cuomo, son of former NY governor Mario Cuomo, has done much to prove Dr Johnson's old definition of second marriage (A triumph of hope over experience.)  Prince Andrew has taken many actions which seemingly have defied rational analysis, from ramming homosexual marriage through the legislature to ramming the immensely unpopular (and comically misnamed) gun-rights-destroying SAFE Act through the same legislature, without even allowing them to read it first. 

He has single-handedly prevented New York from reviving its flagging economy by preventing hydro-fracking for natural gas (New York is figuratively floating on a sea of it). 

He's promoting youth unemployment with his determination to raise New York's minimum wage to $9.00/hour, even higher than the job-killing federal rate of $8.00. 

He hurried to the front of the line to establish a ObamaDon'tCare exchange when B.O.Care when passed, just as he would hurry to pass the first 2nd Amendment slashing laws after Newtown. 

His new trick is to crow about his business tax-free zones in New York, forgetting to mention that those zones are little more than the campuses of the state university system.  He also spends state tax dollars on television campaigns telling of all the wonderful things Governor Corleone has done for the state, every message riddled with lies.  I recently read that Andy is now going to use tax dollars to put his name on every Thruway rest stop and all of the other state facilities across the Vampire State.  By now New Yorkers are suspecting that their governor is insane.

Not insane.  Just insanely ambitious.

You see, Andy ben Mario wants to be President, which Daddy never got to be.  Now, Andrew has a nice big campaign war chest for a governor, but it's not big enough for a presidential candidate.  He also is assuming (safely, in the opinion of most) that Hitlery Clinton will be contending for the nomination that she feels was stolen from her in 2008.  Now, Andy knows that a lot of big-bucks liberal individuals will be only too eager to fund her run for the prize.  He's a creep, but he's not stupid.  He has hit on a strategy.

Look at that list of "incomprehensible" actions again.  Every one of his actions, unpopular with the people he is sworn to serve, have one thing in common.  Every one of them is very pleasing to big-bucks leftist interest groups who are willing to put their money where there interest lies, meaning they will support candidates who have pleased them in the past.  He wants all of them to be pleased with him, so that they can help him close the campaign funding gap with the dreaded Hildabeast.  Then he can take her on in an even match.

The Real Deniers

Those of us who realize that global warming is a global hoax of monumental and disastrous proportions tend to react with fury when accused by the likes of Al Gore and Bob Beckel of being "deniers".  Here's why:

If you want to make yourself aware of how many liars and haters there are,and how alive anti-Semitism still is, comment on a Holocaust video on YouTube.  The Holocaust is the most lavishly documented crime in world history, and yet some idiot named Gary Freeman claims that there is not one document (not ONE) that proves it.  He and another idiot calling himself St George's Flag claimed that there were more Jews in Europe at the end of the war than at the beginning.  The former claimed that there were only 5 million Jews in Europe at the start of the war.  That's interesting, because at the Wannsee Conference where the Nazi hierarchy planned the co-ordinated actions necessary to implement the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Reinhard Heydrich's presentation put the number of Jews in Europe at 11 million.

It is also worth mentioning that Rudolf Hoess testified that during his tenure at Auschwitz, at least 1.1 million people, mainly Jews, were "exterminated" there.  (His testimony at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg claimed that the toll was 2.5 million.)  There was actually little need for the prosecution to cross-examine Commandant Hoess, as he testified so freely in his role as defense witness that he left very little to inquire about save for small details.

It is also worth noting that in his sworn testimony, SS Security Service chief Otto Ohlendorf testified that during his time at the head of Einsatzgruppe D, his command killed 90,000 people, mainly Jews and communists.  Presumably Freeman and "Flag" assert that he hallucinated his actions during that time?

It is grimly amusing to me that many of the Nazi participants in the Holocaust were more honest at their trials than the Holocaust deniers are about those years today.

It's tempting to just write off people like Freeman and Flag as idiots (and they are), but idiots in large numbers can be deadly.  Every genocidal crime in human history bears ghastly testimony to that.

Idiots can also have advanced degrees, as possessed by a surprising number of Nazi upper-level functionaries.  Hans Frank, Albert Speer, Hjalmar Schacht, Josef Mengele, Ohlendorf himself -- these were not ill-educated men.  The possession of an advanced degree tells nothing of a person's character.

These are points to ponder for everyone.  In the meantime, boys, zip your jackets -- your swastikas are showing.