Reparations

I wondered when it would come up, and here it is, raising it's ugly head again. Reparations to the victims of 'America's sad past' are what the Dem nominee has endorsed at some convention of minority journalists.

"There's no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we've got some very sad and difficult things to account for," Obama told hundreds of attendees of UNITY '08, a convention of four minority journalism associations.

http://starbulletin.com/2008/07/28/news/story05.html

"I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."

Maybe we should build a gigantic welfare state, institute minority hiring quotas and quotas to govern the numbers of minorities in universities, have judges running school systems in the name of fairness and dismantle the capitalist economic system so we can redistribute income. Whats that? You say we've done all those things? Isn't that part of our 'tragic past'?
If we are stupid enough to install this paragon in the White House we're going to have a tragic future!
Reparations? Let's see...Obama's half white and the other half wasn't from a family which was ever in slavery so he should pay. On the other hand Michelle is pure slave-descended which makes her a 100% beneficiary but the kids, I guess they just break even so the Obama family is pretty much a wash. We're going to need some pretty intensive calculations to make this work. The Reinhardt Heydrich Institute for Racial Classification has created a sliding scale of historical victimization. Points are given for participation by your group in oppression as victims and taken away by participation as oppressors multiplied by the number of years the oppression took place and the intensity of the oppression. Instead of determining the exact amount of complicity-victimhood by expensive and cumbersome genetic tests the amount to be paid out can be determined by a simple test which measures the shape and circumference of your skull. Groundbreaking work on this science, a field of study every bit as conclusive as the work done proving the effects of carbon emissions of Global Temperatures, was started in 1933 but unfortunately lost its funding in 1945 due to political discrimination. The scientists involved in this research were able to put into place 'Operation Reinhardt' to implement some of the important ethnic science lessons learned but again, changes in the political climate forced cancellation.
But we can do better! YES WE CAN! Obama mentions the Hawaiian natives bill that that crackpot Daniel Akaka has been pushing for the last thirty years. This bill would create a special class of people in one of our states and give them rights which trump those of 'non-natives'.
The question is...why is this guy considered a serious candidate for president? Do people have any idea what they're voting for? He is on board for every foaming-at-the-mouth crazy radical notion that has been raised in the fever-swamp of academia for the last forty years. Any one of these loony ideas will cost trillions to implement at a time when we are already on the precipice of bankruptcy, a subject which Obama seems to know little about. How can the press not be reporting this on the front page? Has our nation reached the sad state where the voters are so blind to their own interests that they will put a group of people led by this guy into power? Well, they've already handed the Senate and the House over to people equally stupid.
Yesterday Nancy Pelosi explained that no one was going to drill for oil in her nice clean country and that she was 'saving the planet'. Its nice to have leaders with such modest aims, ones which take our individual needs and problems into account. But she wins in her district by landslide margins. The members of the House vote to keep her Speaker. This is what America wants.
This is how the good times end...

Uncivil Unions

Every time there's a ballot measure here in Cali limiting the power of government or restricting state spending up for a vote there appear out of nowhere thousands of TV ads featuring actors claiming to be firemen, teachers and nurses expressing their OUTRAGE! that the SPECIAL INTERESTS want to hurt California's firevictims/patients/children by proposing this immoral attack on human decency! It turns out that these helpless victims of inhumanity have enough money to saturate the most expensive media markets in the country for months. A wall can't get painted on HGTV without a tearful nurse interrupting to plead, beg, beseech the voters to stop the ravening Special Interests from throwing terminal cancer patients out onto the streets untreated. An episode of 'Modern Marvels' can't play on the History Channel without a manly but oh-so-upset fireman imploring us to make sure that when the orphanage burns down someone will be there to save the helpless little tykes from being parboiled by the flaming insulation. Teachers invade the local news painting a picture of classrooms more densely packed than a Javanese opium den filled with mouth-breathing illiterates thirsting for knowledge.
Where are these guys getting the hundreds of millions that they use to saturate the airwaves with heart-rending sob-stories pushing every liberal cause imaginable? Huey Long had a tradition, when he was governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, called the 'deduct box'. If you were a state employee you had to pony up a part of your salary to a slush fund that Huey and the boys used for whatever nefarious purposes they decided were in the best interests of the people of Louisiana. The Public Employee Unions have their own version of the Deduct Box. You have to be in a union to work at most State jobs and that means you have to pay dues. Because most of the loyal union members just look on the impost as yet another of the endless bites from their checks and have never been to a union meeting or taken any part in any union activity this money is just a slush fund in the hands of the 'activists' who abandoned their hated careers in the stultifying bureaucracy and wormed their way into the arcane depths of the union's inner circles.
These people are without exception leftists of various degrees of fervor. It cant be said that they haven't looked out for their charges, either. They've made it almost impossible to fire any public employee who has not been convicted of a violent felony. They've gotten pay scales that have completely outstripped anything in the private sector for the same work; not to mention that you can be disciplined or even fired in the private sector for bad performance or malfeasance or your company can cut back or even go out of business. They've gone on the air or hired effective lobbyists to hector the members of the legislature to give ever larger budget increases to the metastasizing offices filled with state employees busily doing God Knows What. They fight every budget cut, or , since budgets never seem to actually get cut, they oppose the cuts in the rate of increase that are occasionally suggested by hopeless reactionaries. They push for higher and higher taxes on 'those who can most afford it'. They always support The Democratic Party. Public employee unions like SEIU and The National Education Assn. are mainstays of the Party, both in contributions and volunteers. They sit at the table and expect to be listened to.
Where they have done their best work is in the realm of pensions. Most state employees can retire in their fifties to a pension that would make anyone in the private sector green with envy. This pension is indexed for inflation and in ten years or so, even in a low inflation environment, will equal the take-home pay that the person earned while they were working. The pensions are paid by CALPERS (CALifornia Public Employee Retirement System) which is the largest single investment entity in the world, controlling hundreds of billions of dollars. So far, so good!
But what happens to CALPERS in a high inflation environment? Much of CALPERS' investments are in bonds, which don't adjust for inflation. Inflation makes investments in the stock market much less profitable. The high-tax anti-business environment coming soon at the hands of the Dems and their union allies will make keeping these pension promises impossible. All paper investments are only a reflection of the health of the general economy and that health is declining rapidly. States like California and New York can only staunch the flood of red ink with massive cuts in state spending. The example of Michigan has shown that further increases in tax rates will lead to lower revenues. The power of the unions prevents any real cuts. The system is headed for a crack-up and the special interests who run it are committed to things staying the same as they have always been. They are the ultimate reactionaries. The unions and the receivers of transfer payments, represented by socialist vulture groups like the AARP, have enough muscle to fight any reform or cut proposed by politicians looking a few years down the road or even staring into the maw of state bankruptcy this year. With a new government which appears to be certain to be completely dominated by Democrats on the federal, state and local levels the hope for any change or reform of anything is zero. It will be full speed ahead to an Argentinian meltdown of the economy and the currency. In a poverty-stricken, sterile society these people who 'had it made' will be broke and betrayed. They will deserve it.

Help Wanted: Lazy Fairies

In the 1920's John Maynard Keynes, Britain's Chancellor Of The Exchequer and the economist who wrote the instruction book for government tinkering and intervention in the economy, asked the flippant question, "Do you want your economy governed by a bunch of lazy fairies?"referring to the laissez faire Free Market economics of pre WW1 Europe.
After nearly a century of Keysianism (or worse) by the Big Government geniuses in which they have proven that they can screw up anything that they touch like a kind of negative magic we want those lazy fairies back! The British Empire controlled two fifths of the world's surface. Hitler couldn't defeat it in a six-year conflict. But it was brought to its knees after the war by the British electorate who threw the reactionary Churchill and the lazy fairies surrounding him out of office and installed a government so inconceivably stupid that eight years later Britain was deep in poverty and still had wartime rationing while Germany, completely destroyed by Allied bombing and the battles which took place in the ruins at the end of the war was undergoing an 'economic miracle' brought on by the lazy fairy economics imposed by her American conquerors.
In America in the 1920's two of the most egregious lazy fairies (Harding and Coolidge) cut Wilson's overpadded Federal Government, slashed taxes and then proceeded to take a long nap while the economy exploded, hemlines rose almost as fast as the stock market and bathtub gin flowed like water. HL Mencken described Calvin Coolidge as 'old laughing boy' and accused him of turning the White House into a dormitory. But even Coolidge had a Chairman Of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Strong, who was committed to supporting the boom with aggressive monetary expansion. In Coolidge's cabinet, frothing at the lack of government meddling and general sleepiness all around him sat Herbert Hoover; engineer, humanitarian, meddler extrordinaire! A sardonic Coolidge dubbed him with the title of 'Wonder Boy'.
"That man's been suggesting ideas to me for six years, all of them bad!" remarked the taciturn Coolidge in one of his longer sentences. But the canny Coolidge could see a train-wreck coming just around the bend as the speculation in securities ran amok (a problem with lazy fairies, they dont prevent people from being really stupid sometimes). People were buying on margin- 10% down and the balance after you cashed out. Nice if every thing goes up. In 1928 there were plenty of signs that this was going to come a cropper but Strong stepped in with a huge expansion of the money supply to deliver a 'coup of whisky' to the out-of-breath stock market.
And that's the biggest danger of Keynesianism; it works for a while, the larger and larger waves of freshly printed money make it seem like the problems are manageable, until one day the point of diminishing returns is reached and the meltdown occurs.
Which brings us to now. The 'stimulation package' which tossed $200 billion or so off the back of the Federal train for us peasants to spend was dwarfed by the rise in gasoline prices and the decline of house prices. The falling real estate market, retreating from stupid lending policies designed to admit 'minorities' and 'the poor' to the joys of home ownership without bothering with formalities like credit ratings invited a crowd of speculators into a market that 'couldn't go down'. Now additional hundreds of billions are being funneled into the banks to try to stave off the ruin brought on by all those now-worthless loans. Jerks like McLame are calling for Federal regulation of executive salaries to punish all those stupid bank executives for their stupid lending policies, as though creating a precedent like that wouldn't lead in a short time to Federal regulation of ALL salaries in the name of 'fairness'. As the feds move in to bail out the banks and stave off panic they bring along a truckload of new regulations, all as stupid as the ones which caused the crash in the first place. The social fascists in Congress keep proposing price controls on pharmaceuticals, nationalizing health care, Global Warming caps and taxes on carbon emissions and draconian tax increases which will chase every penny of investment offshore in a giant bug-out which will flatten the economy like a tire with a spike in it. The Lazy Fairies must be pulling down fat salaries on some government 'Human Rights Commission' somewhere so they can scheme on more creative ways to legalize getting married to each other and have lost all interest in economics. Apparently even less interested in economics is the front-runner in the presidential foot-race, a guy named Barry, who has yet to utter one single syllable regarding the economy that makes sense. When asked why he wants to sharply and progressively raise taxes in these precarious times he replied that it might be bad for the economy and even decrease revenues but that it was surely 'the right thing to do'. Fairness you see. Lazy fairies aren't fair. Neither is the inevitable result of the policies endorsed by the vast majority of our political and business leaders as they attempt to protect their cushy positions from any rivals; national bankruptcy. We're seeing the beginnings now. Huge cuts are in the works in state governments; the bluer the state the bigger the cuts. New York, California and Michigan are visibly sliding toward the edge. The rest of the country is close behind.
Bring back the fairies!

Berlin! Bombed!

Berlin's been the scene of memorable oratory by many of the world's finest speakers. JFK proudly announced that he was a doughnut in this fair city; and undoubtedly sampled a few tasty German tarts of his own before jetting off into the sunset. Ronald Reagan bellowed, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" to the throaty applause of hundreds of thousands of Germans who were undoubtedly sick of the noisome graffiti smeared on the unsightly concrete by the hippies who were leaching off the fat dole checks handed out by the Bundestate and yearning for a rebirth of the kitschy pastoral scenes that were so popular before the world was plunged into fire and destruction in two world wars and a nuclear showdown. Then there was that guy with the mustache. I forget his name. He had big plans to redecorate the city. One of his projects was the Victory Monument that Obama gave his speech at celebrating victories that never quite came off, a warning about the limits of oratory. Little else survives of this mesmerizing speechmaker's legacy; his redecorating scheme came to an abrupt halt right at the end of the demolition phase of the project. But it left Berliners (the people, not the doughnuts. There was a proposal to rename the city Krispen Kremenstad but anti-capitalist radicals rioted in the streets and put a stop to the notion) with a hankering for tub-thumping oratory.
It seemed they were going to get their wish yesterday. The giant noise of the Obama campaign was coming to town. True, his previous attempts at Gravitas in the Middle East had fallen a bit flat and the Hossanah chorus in the media had come across as overdone and phony but this was it. The Babe was going to go to the plate and whack the ball out of the park! He had a more than friendly crowd; atheists who so reviled and hated Bush that they nightly found themselves on their knees beseeching God to free the world from this eight-year Bushy plague. He was the political equivalent of Michael Jackson; a superstar, black but not too black, with a show that would make the hairs on your arms stand up straight! Women have been known to faint during his speeches. The air crackled with excitement. All the commentators, sensing that something had gone wrong with the Overseas Triumph up to now, were sure that this would be the Defining Moment, the Cover Shot, the oft-used film clip, the international version of 'I Have A Dream!'
But it wasn't. On any level. The crowd was big but far smaller than the million-sized monster predicted by the Adoring Press. The speech was a rambling pastiche of shop-worn cliches with no pacing or timing, no FEELING. It dragged on dully for forty-five minutes or so. The lukewarm applause that was there in the beginning faded and all but died out by the end. The Mighty Babe had struck out!
Obama himself knew it. His heart was never into foreign affairs. His only real stated foreign policy goal was the pathetic hope that 'they'll like us again' after the horrible Bush years. So he tried to connect with that. We're all citizens of the world, Blah, Blah, Blah...forgetting that the Germans are already citizens of a vast multi-national conglomerate of nations and are growing increasingly sick of being tied to a gaggle of struggling economies and of being pushed around by faceless international bureaucrats. So he read through his speech in a cadence that would have made blinding rhetorictitians like Gerald Ford proud and as soon as he uttered his last word the networks cut away. FLOP!
The reason none of this is working politically for Obama is simple, he's not addressing what people are concerned about. The falling value of their house, the rising price of energy, the insecurity of their jobs, state and local governments going bankrupt, banks teetering on the edge of failure; every day people are looking at bleaker and bleaker future prospects and they're terrified. Even a dimwit like McLame has a better feel for what's going on than the lordly Obama and his media entourage. They're essentially even in the polls. None of this foreign stuff has helped Obama one single bit. Possibly it's hurt him to be at the center of such an obviously phony campaign gimmick while real people are looking for something that will give them confidence that they will weather this storm intact.
Will Obama's tin ear and the surprising lack of bite in his speeches since he clinched the nomination continue? Has the world finally noticed that he has nothing to say? His gaffe-prone performance off-script is shockingly inept and his handlers are much less skilled than the Clinton's ones were at shielding their charge from reporters who have done a little fact-checking and have noticed his many discrepancies as he veers to the center. Can this lightweight, flawed candidate go the distance?
Time will tell.

A Man You Can Bank On!

The Obamessiah is doing his victory lap around the world and the media lapdogs are fawning and crawling on their well-stuffed bellies in the throes of political ecstasy! What a genius Our Barry turns out to be! Robert Mugabe, another overrated egotistical politician of African heritage, gets tougher press in Zimbabwe than Obama gets in this country.
Ah yes! An example of a member of our esteemed unbiased press corps trying to braid his nose-hairs with the ones in Obama's butt is David Broder, who in today's Washington Compost writes a paean of hagiographic love to his beloved candidate's miraculous walk across the political waters overseas.
A year ago Obama voted with seven other left-wing critters to cut all funding from Afghanistan and withdraw all the troops, in keeping with his Nutroots terrorist sympathies. On this triumphant trip he says that he has always been for a ten thousand troop increase in our forces there. Magnificent!
If Obama had had his way Saddam or Uday Hussien would still be in power in Iraq. The mass graves would still be filling with corpses, the torture chambers (the REAL ones) at Abu Ghraib would still be going full tilt and the luxury hotels would be filled with leftist congressmen and crackpot Hollywood types running to kiss the hem of Hussien's garment. So what better for Obama's foreign policy credentials than to go to Iraq and claim credit for the victory he opposed with every breath for the last year? What statesmanship!
After opposing the Senate resolution labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization (the same group who are supplying our enemies in Iraq weapons to kill our troops) Obama makes the statement that 'my banking committee' passed a sanctions bill against Iran. "Judge me by my actions!" declared Obama in a statement that caused the hearts of his media lapdogs to flutter. Only one problem with that...The Man Of Hope, The Paragon Of The New Politics, The Change Agent isn't on the banking committee. Of course trivia like that doesnt bother hacks like Broder who in the presence of The Obamessiah regularly foam at the mouth, talk in tongues and write columns like the one linked below.
This foreign trip has been a revelation about The Obamessiah. It shows that he will say anything, no matter how far it strays from the truth, to get elected. It shows the amazing ego that he has. Some of his most egregious misstatements were preceded by the admonition, "if you had bothered to check the facts..." when the most cursory fact-check (something beyond the grasp of alleged 'news' organizations like ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Slimes, The Washington Compost, etc.) shows that this clown is a Clinton-level prevaricator. That is to say he tries to be as dishonest as Clinton and in the same way-- the current lie is spoken with aplomb and outraged assurance that negates all previous contradictory statements-- but one does have to ask if he's talented enough of a liar to get away with it until November.
Another thing that this trip has shown is how bad this clown is when he's off script. When he's lying he's channeling Bill Clinton, when he's stumbling and fumbling and screwing up questions he's channeling Dan Quayle. When one of his Disciples, oh excuse me, when a member of the Esteemed UnBiased Press Corps lobs a softball at Barry he more often than not flubs it. His ignorance is vast and, unlike the Lovable BJ Clinton, he doesn't know how to not answer a question. Maybe his campaign team should sit him down and show him movies of Dwight Eisenhower, who gave incoherent answers on purpose to confuse people and prevent follow ups; "here Barry, try doing THAT!"
Well today is Barry's speech at the Victory Memorial in Berlin. What Victory was that BTW?
The krauts were badly whipped in both world wars, maybe this is a monument to the Franco-Prussian War. They're expecting a million people. Yes, the disarmed Euros want a collapsing socialist America to withdraw its shrinking military (the likely scenario under an Obama Administration) and leave them to 'engage in meaningful negotiations' with the hungry jackals who surround their aging and shrinking populations. But I'll bet the swoon from the press, US and European, will rise to a crescendo like the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; a true 'Ode To Barry'!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obama_lucky_and_good.html

The Dark Night

I went to the theater yesterday and saw 'The Dark Knight'. I'm kind of a film snob and I dont like action-adventure movies very much but this one was great! It was dark, sardonic and fast-paced. the script was intelligent and delivered twists and surprises at every turn. The acting, directing and editing all were superb. The special effects were so good that it really did seem as though you were really seeing something that was there when it wasn't. This isn't to say that the film was realistic; there were many things that you just had to accept as part of the comic-book story so you could just sit back and enjoy the show. Even with that said, the mood of the film was hung with gloom and negativity; the good guys were almost destroyed by their hollow victory.
Later on in the evening I turned on the News. I'm a politics snob as well as a film snob so when the glowing TV box showed me the latest episode in 'The Obamaman' franchise, 'Barry Goes Abroad', I viewed it with the same skepticism that I used with 'Dark Knight' a few hours earlier. The two were similar in so many ways. There was a flawlessly delivered script on the part of our star, the heroic backdrops and the adoring fans were presented with exquisite timing. The entire media seems to have dropped their drawers for this guy like a pack of teenage groupies confronted with their favorite rock star.
But like the other fantasy flick there's a whole lot you have to ignore for this farce to work for you. You have to ignore how wrong Barry and the Dem Gang were all along on Iraq and the War On Terror. The media hype has airbrushed this gigantic Dem faux pas out of any 'analysis' of the current situation but the fact remains for anyone with a memory that goes back more than a month or two; it wasn't Bush who lied for years about the War In Iraq, it was the Democrats and with main star Barry singing the lead in the chorus for the last six months.
Now he's surveying the defeat of the terrorists him and his pals so avidly supported and claiming credit! Luckily for the Dems their fellow anti-Bush liberals in the Taliban have launched an offensive against the NATO forces in Afghanistan, giving Barry the chance to say, "See, if they had only listened to me!" The media sages cluck, yes, an offensive by the Taliban means the dastardly Bush has been defeated. Democrats look on any military activity by the enemy as a defeat for our side, or should I say, for the US side which they oppose. Just as Whiner Chronkite was reduced to sniveling tears of surrender by the Tet Offensive, a suicide charge by the commies which ended in a decisive US victory, the libs have been moaning and complaining that our enemies still exist while they refuse to report US victories, exaggerate or even invent US 'atrocities' and cry over and over again "Where's Osama Bin Laden?" when they know damned well he's across the border in Waziristan in territory belonging to our allies in Pakistan whom we cant risk undermining by violating their border because with a hostile government in Pakistan we would lose overflight access to Afghanistan entirely. But Barry solemnly pronounced that he would raise the number of US troops, forgetting that this is a NATO mission and that the cowardly and stingy Euros are already reneging on their commitments.
Today he flies to Jordan, surrounded by his barmicide gaggle of hosanna-singing liberal media clowns. Will he equal his equally liberal predecessor Jimmy The Jerk and give a full-on, toe curling , tongue-slobbering kiss to the head of Hamas or will he just subtly encourage the bloodthirsty savages who lurk on the outside of the Israeli security wall that Barry and his leftist friends were so adamantly against to feel that the new US regime will cut those nasty, imperialistic Jews loose and sit by wringing their hands as Holocaust II opens in theaters around the world?
All this Middle East stuff is just the prelude, of course. The real victory lap will be among the Euros. They've been so horrified at the anti-PC lapses of the cowboy Bush-lied regime that they yearn for an accomodationist socialist who will destroy the US economy and back down on the use of any armed force for any reason against the misunderstood Third Worlders who surround the aging and shrinking populations of Europe. They eagerly await this reincarnation of the Roman Emperor Honorius, who as part of his policy of peaceful negotiations with the barbarians withdrew all the warmongering Roman legions from Britain, leaving them with a stirring statement of the continuing Roman commitment to British security. The Euros will dance in the streets for the hombre who will free them from militarism and use diplomacy instead of force, just like Honorius. The fact that Britain was soon overrun with barbarians and Rome was sacked by the Visigoths doesn't discredit the tactic of negotiating with the violent, it just enjoins one to be a little more cautious and courteous.
So yes, it will take a slew of media special effects to make this incompetent and surprisingly ignorant leftist seem like a candidate with a solid grasp of foreign affairs and a coherent world view that will allow him to soberly assess America's national interests but if we all just suspend our judgment about this and his equally ruinous domestic policies we can learn to imagine the wonderful new future of change which unstoppably lies before us. Yes We Can!
But like 'The Dark Knight' this happy parade also has the dark and gloomy potential to destroy our way of life with its empty and hollow victory, which looks more and more certain, and usher in a different 'Dark Night' that wont need any special effects, hosanna-singing or media hype; it will be all too real.

Holy Carbon, Batman!

The debate on "Global Warming' continues on two levels. On the first level, the scientific level, the trend is pretty clear; there is NO evidence that man-made carbon emissions affect the Global Climate, which is currently cooling. NONE of the assertions made in 'An Inconvenient Truth' can be supported by scientific data. The entire panoply of statements about Global Warming announced as Gospel by the leftists ten years ago have been disproven. Here's an article written by the scientist "who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

This article talks very specifically about how data collected in a systematic, scientific manner failed to find any evidence that Man-made Global Warming has any validity at all.
The article states:

"If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory."

But I'm watching 'Fox News Sunday' as I write this. Every commercial by companies like Dow Chemical and Exxon Mobil looks like they hired a band of Marxist eco-hippies to run their advertising campaign. They're SO GREEN! SO CONCERNED! The Planet is about to shrivel up like a raisin but...DONT PANIC! Big Business and Big Government are going to be working along with Big Media to save the world from the excesses of us gluttonous consumers. It's amazing to compare the scientific argument to the political argument in which the voices of the anti-Greens are almost inaudible. When Barbara Boxer proposed a three-trillion dollar Global Warming tax increase that would have completely sunk the economy within three years there was no national outcry. Babs will win reelection in California in a landslide. If she bothers to run any campaign ads against whatever sacrificial candidate that the Other Global Warming Party runs against her she'll use her attempt to murder our economic system as proof that she is the only Green choice. No matter which of the socialist Weather-Fixing political parties wins the election this November the trend towards government domination of the economy and the absorbing of the giant moribund mega-corporations into planned monopolies who no longer have to fear demanding stockholders or upstart competitors will continue.
Why is this lie taking over the consciousness of our society without any opposition? How have the people who are fanatically eager to impose the failed policy of government economic planning been able to use this climatic fraud to finally turn the foremost Capitalist nation on Earth into a centrally planned 'privately owned government corporation' that will bring the same results that we got from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac? Why are the politicians and even the business titans who dominate our economy so completely ignorant as to the real facts, or if they know them then silent as this travesty plays out? There are voices of opposition in the scientific community against this charlatanism, where is the political and cultural opposition?
Is this it? Do we just hand over our freedom and our prosperity to a claque of rich, arrogant elitists who are using this flumery to dispossess us of our political and economic rights and gain total control of everything? If they can destroy the economy to fix the weather doesn't that imply that they think that they are Gods? You might laugh at that but that's how Utopians think. Solzhenitsyn wrote a book entitled 'We Never Make Mistakes' which talked about that mentality among the Stalinist antescendants of our current crop of geniuses. The Stalinists embraced Lysenko's phony science with the same enthusiasm as The Gorians feel for their self-serving brand of hogwash. If the new 'revealed theory' mandates a reduction in the population of us pollution-causing economic units wont a Green Himmler emerge to set up the industrial capacity to reduce the number of these Pestiferous Plebeians? Being able to Fix The Weather gives you the capacity to make these sorts of God-like decisions and to use a cold-blooded brand of situational ethics to justify the 'necessary steps'.
This is a result of our political system becoming a one-party state, a development that started in the 1960s and came to it's ultimate fruition under the feeble corporatist 'leadership' of George W Bush. Maybe Marx was right; trends in a society are a result of underlying forces beyond the conscious control of mere individuals-- you know, like the weather.

Curse You MegaDoppler!

It was dim and dark this morning. The marine layer had moved onshore during the evening. In Southern California when you wake up and there's a thin layer of clouds between you and the sun you know its going to be a beautiful summer day. Sure, it'll burn off by eleven, just in time to catch me doing the Saturday yard work, but it wont get to that fiery furnace desert heat that makes you go inside, close all the windows and turn on the AC. A beach day! A day to drive up to Angeles Crest or the Santa Monica Mountains and go on a hike. Time to get out the hedge trimmer, the edger, the blower and the lawnmower and try to keep the constantly encroaching plant-life at bay. After that's done you can sit in the garden at the glass picnic table in the shade of the trees and read a nice book while the cats each grab a soft spot and have an afternoon siesta.
But hey! This is an angry blog. I started it so that I could vent my socially unacceptable middle aged angst without offending anyone. My tiny audience has expectations! Shouldn't I be denouncing someone? Well, now that you mention it, what would be more typical for me than to rail against the liberal media? But this time, instead of deriding them for liberal bias or writing scathing lines about how they've replaced most of the actual news with 'fluff' news I'm going to question the expensive technology race that cropped up between the three local network affiliates; the race for Doppler Radar supremacy. When they first started with this Doppler nonsense I tried to figure out whether they all were getting their data from the same Doppler or if they were engaged in some multi-million dollar spending race generated by tiny ups and downs in the ratings.
"Oh my GOD! Channel 4's kicking our ass--it has to be the radar!"
"If we dont get better radar than them our ratings will be lower than the news on...Channel Nine!"
"Get that radar upgraded and do it NOW!"
But they're too cheap to actually spend money. The race was in the graphics departments; who could come up with the most compelling name for the radar that they all shared with The National Weather Service. MegaDoppler 7000 on Channel Seven seemed to have won the war. Does Channel Four escalate to AstroDoppler 40000? Channel Two the would need to raise to OmniDoppler 200000; it could end up like an Argentine inflation report with zeros proliferating into the trillions.
But all this loud, breathless promotion of their hi-tech prowess has one flaw. This is Southern California. Between the middle of April and the beginning of October there usually arent any clouds within a thousand miles except for the stupid marine layer. Even in the rainy season we only get four or five downpours which you can see coming for a week on the satellite photos; They start off Alaska and roll clockwise down until they collide with the West Coast. The Chumash Indians a thousand years ago probably had as accurate idea of what the weather was going to be as we do now. But still the TV stations tease the weather in the beginning of the show ("I'll have the weather for your morning commute coming up later in the broadcast!")
as though we were living in Minnesota or Florida or some other place that has weather all year round that you have to take into account when you're planning your day.
And where do they get those weather dudes? I guess they're supposed to look tan and healthy so they spray on this orange man-tan and then truss them up in ill-fitting suits so they look like the corpse at an open-casket funeral. And the JOY they exude when they tell you that its not going to rain tomorrow as though it just MIGHT rain in July--it did in 1993, it could happen again.
Its better news for them when there are giant brushfires. They have to share that one with the rest of the news crew but they get to say whether the humidity will drop or if the marine layer will move in. Brushfires keep the weather guys relevant in the summer, they probably send their interns out to light them if they don't start spontaneously.
Well, I've got to trim a tree, mow the lawn and leaf-blower the patio. Enjoy your Saturday; if where you are you can look up and see a puffy white cloud tell it I said Hi!

LA Times Veers To The Left!

Free market economists trembled this morning as the Los Angeles Times, one of AmeriKKKa's leading underground newspapers made the startling announcement that free markets have failed the American people and that they were looking for alternatives!

(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-losingfaith16-
2008jul16,0,1516735.story)

"Spurred by the continued housing crisis, turmoil in financial markets, spiking oil prices, disappearing jobs and shrinking retirement savings, the nation and its political leaders have begun to sour on the notion that the current market system is the key to a fair, stable and efficient society."

Gee, Peter Gosseln, the writer of the article left out one of the most egregious failing industries in our nation today--dead tree newspapers. The free market has certainly settled their hash for them. There are massive staff cuts at The Times. Whole sections are being cut and a third of the writing and editorial staff is being let go. There are similar massacres occurring at almost every 'dead tree' newspaper as circulations drop and advertisers migrate to the internet and cable TV. The newspapers and the similarly failing 'major' network newscasts look on in dismay as New Media conservative types like Rush Limbaugh land nine-figure contracts.
But with that obvious bias against the free market aside, look at the above excerpt. Everything that the writer talks about is a direct result of excessive government intervention in free markets. Two massive 'government chartered' corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, greatly loosened the criteria for qualifying for a mortgage a few years ago to give 'the poor and disadvantaged' (AKA minorities and people with bad credit) the opportunity to 'share the American dream'. This empowered a cloud of noisome real estate 'flippers', fly-by-night developers, and oily loan sharks to descend on the benighted poor and encourage them to sign on the dotted line and enter real estate nirvana. Meanwhile the Middle Class went on an orgy of home purchases or massive expansions of their old houses based on equity created by trillions of dollars of phony government-backed paper surging into the financial markets through the two bogus government 'independent guarantors'. But like all speculative surges this one reached a point where it became unsustainable and now the ebb-tide is pulling formerly strong financial institutions into the vortex along with the overinflated retirement dreams of the 401k worshipers who are sitting on the balconies of their 3,000 square foot McMansions cursing that damned free market for going down as well as up. The government is stepping in with trillions of dollars in further 'guarantees'; of course with a truckload of new rules and regulations attached. We're seeing the beginning of what might be the effective nationalization of the financial sector. Some free market.
Another bone in the throat of the Muddle Class is the steep rise in energy prices. They sold their 1,200 square foot houses near the city and moved twenty or thirty miles away to a 3,000 square foot McMansion in the satellite suburbs where the schools hadn't been totally destroyed by federal intervention, radical 'educational reform' zealots and rampaging minorities using their victim status to evade any discipline. Taxes were lower and you could jump in the air-conditioned Navigator, get breakfast at the drive-thru window and gab on the cell phone as you cruised slowly in the gridlock stream to your job downtown. Of course you voted for the local Democrat who could be counted on to rein in those filthy polluting oil companies and prevent them from annoying any endangered species with their horrible drilling rigs, pipelines and refineries. These Tribunes Of The People also could be counted on to keep any nuclear power plants from being built within a thousand miles of your house and to demand the closing of coal-fired electrical generators. In foreign policy 'No Blood For Oil' became the watchword. But 'No Blood For Oil' means...no oil. Not expanding production while demand rises all over the world can only lead to one result. We're seeing it now. The LA Times article makes the absurd claim that energy demand has only risen 1% but doesnt give a time-frame for that figure or site a source. Another vague number tossed out by liberals to make their point; $140 a barrel oil has probably suppressed any recent growth in demand but long term overall demand is way up and the trend hasnt stopped. Cringing weak policies in the Gulf have allowed the Iranians to create periodic scares which threaten to close the Straits Of Hormuz and keep the markets in a constant state of price-inflating panic. Yet even now the Democrats resist allowing drilling off the continental shelf and in ANWR. When President Bush lifted the executive order against new drilling (its about time this weak-kneed liberal took some kind of action) the price of a barrel of oil dipped $9 in one day...until it became clear that the Pelosi-Reid leftist enviro-zealots had no intention of following that executive action with legislative action. The Democrats are directly responsible for energy prices because of their environmental fanaticism that blocks any serious energy development at any cost to the stupid electorate who are convinced that these are the Bush policies.
The leftists will do the same to Health Care; introduce some unworkable 'free market reforms' to make everything 'fair' and then when the whole structure collapses under the weight of the unworkable new rules they'll go for nationalization to 'fix' the free market.
This country was made great and wealthy by the Free Market. There has been more freedom of opportunity for anyone willing to exert themselves then there ever has been ever in human history. We are now actively abandoning the underlying premises that created that greatness; this election should confirm in power a radical socialist party and place a totally incompetent dilettante who has spent his life being steeped in radical anti-market theories into power in the White House. The result will be a hyper-inflation that will equal that of any third-world thugocracy, which is what we will become.

The Fish That Ate Los Angeles

SACRAMENTO -- In a decision that could cripple state water deliveries, a judge has ordered the state to halt pumping water out of the delta within 60 days unless it complies with environmental laws that protect endangered fish.

Cities around the Bay Area face the possibility of mandatory water rationing next year as a result of a federal court decision Friday to protect a rare fish found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, state officials and water experts said.

'Environmentalists generally praised the ruling, even though the decision didn’t go as far as they wanted, while Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and water agency representatives claimed the decision would devastate California’s water supplies and the economy..

So here we are. Policies that will 'devastate California's water supply and economy' have been put in place not by our crackpot Kennedy in-law of a Governator or the band of glassy-eyed hippies and Mexican radicals we like to call our 'legislature (they have a 'Global Warming' plan that will devastate California's economy but it doesn't start to bite for a couple of years), but by a Federal Judge who has decided to stop pumping water on behalf of the fish. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the 'rare fish' arent considered state employees and therefore eligible for the phat pensions which also will 'devastate California's economy' as more and more of our devoted public servants retire and strap on the feed bag. With all three branches of government working day and night on various overlapping plans to 'devastate California's economy' its amazing that the economy hasn't beaten the fish at their own game and gone extinct itself. Do these idiots who are suing to shut off California's water supply, causing water rationing in the cities and a rapid decline in agriculture (California's leading industry), think that there is an endless supply of taxpayer money somewhere and that they can continue to degrade the economy forever by applying their crackpot utopian 'rulings' and bureaucratic 'guidelines' any time they feel like it? There is a critical mass where things go into meltdown and we are very close to it now. The lying agencies which supply water to Los Angeles are blaming the coming water rationing on a drought that supposedly took place this rainy season. Normal rains for Los Angeles are 14" per year. This year we got...14". When liberal policies fail liberals just make up a lie and repeat it over and over so people who arent paying attention just absorb it through media osmosis. The Dept of Water and Power would never announce water rationing on behalf of a few dozen fish, rightly suspecting that people would be outraged at their lives being turned upside down by something so trivial and stupid. Global Warming is a prime example of this type of chicanery. Global temperatures have declined slightly in the last ten years. The oceans have not risen one tenth of a centimeter and a five year comprehensive study of ocean temperatures has shown a slight decline. If there were data supporting Global Warming dont you think they would be shouting it from the rooftops? The silence is deafening. Meanwhile an endless stream of commercials and messages that just take it for granted that Global Warming is happening flood the airwaves, with their smug, sanctimonious preaching about how us little minnows have to accommodate the draconian new measures taken so the sky doesnt fall and conk our widdle haids. But it doesn't matter. Global Warming could be completely discredited but the attack on our economy and on our freedom wouldn't stop. As this fish business shows any pretext to cause chaos and hardship is seized upon with enthusiasm by the fanatics. Their goal is a planned economy with them in charge-- Marxism.
They pay lip-service to Democracy at the moment, until they've registered enough mental defectives, phantom voters, homeless drunks and illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes and control any elections. They'll pretend to be in favor of free speech while at the same time they'll institute 'Fairness Doctrine' policies which will effectively silence any opposition. Most decisions will be made by anonymous, unelected, unaccountable judges and bureaucrats who will gain almost unlimited power; they're close to having it now. The state-run medical system will become a nightmare for the truly sick (those who arent members of the elite class of course) and an instrument of repression as the troublemakers are cured of their anti-social hallucinations in maximum security facilities designed for that purpose. So as you watch your lawn and the plants in your garden die and limit yourself to one shower a week, as you stand in what used to be the produce section of your supermarket scratching your unwashed head and wondering where the lettuce and the tomatoes have disappeared to, just think of the fish... they're more important than your stupid little life.

Where's Warren?

It used to be that we lived in a country with two political parties. One time, one political party, they were called 'The Democrats', elected a leader who vastly increased the national debt, ran large deficits, engaged in disastrous 'peace' negotiations and expanded government enormously; involving it in areas that it had never been involved in before. Of course, when you read that last sentence the obvious name popped into your minds; Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was an arrogant elitist who was his own worst enemy. After he had alienated the Senate into refusing to ratify the Treaty Of Versailles he went on a whistle-stop campaign to gain public support for his position, which caused him to have a stroke. He served the rest of his term as a vegetable, unable to speak coherently for more than a few minutes at a time; a typical Democratic president in every way. But in those simple times we had what was known as a 'Two-Party System'. Woodrow Wilson's successor was from a different political party, one which had a starkly different governing philosophy. Warren Harding ran on the slogan 'A Return To Normalcy'. People who were mad at the Democrats elected Harding. As soon as he got into office he slashed every government department by 40%. He dumped all of Wilson's highfalutin Princeton college-professor ideas and replaced them with down-to-earth common sense policies that favored business, encouraged free trade and disentangled our country from the Byzantine politics of Europe. He cut taxes. The sharp recession that had occurred at the end of Wilson's term was turned into an eight-year boom by Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge.
Now its nearly a century later. We still have 'elections' where people go cast their votes but we dont have 'choices'. All the candidates for any office share the same educational background, come from the same sector of society and basically promote the interests of a vast and expanding universe of bureaucrats and wards of the state. In one 'budget showdown' in the mid 1990s the 'Conservative' Speaker Of The House advocated a 7.2% increase in the Medicare budget while the 'Liberal' President wanted 7.6%. The President was quoted talking about the conservatives 'taking a meat-ax to the budget'. That particular President was notorious for saying things that weren't true but this was a whopper even for him. It was almost as ludicrous as applying the label 'conservative' to the people who wanted to increase this enormous monster of a program by 7.2% in a year when inflation was 2.5%.
Now we are in an election campaign. The incumbent president, supposedly from the 'conservative' party has so gutted that party of any allegiance to the principles which came naturally to guys like Harding and Coolidge that he could only be described as 'Wilsonian.'
He has vastly increased the national debt, ran large deficits, engaged in disastrous 'peace' negotiations and expanded government enormously; involving it in areas that it had never been involved in before.
The two candidates who are 'fighting' to succeed him are nearly identical. Both talk of huge tax increases. Both vie for new ways for the government to intervene to solve everyone's problems... i.e.- take control of everyone's lives. They both talk of effectively nationalizing the economy; either indirectly through regulations designed to control the weather (!) or directly through price controls (pharmaceuticals, banking, stocks) or outright nationalization (health care). Both promise long rounds of meaningless negotiations with our sworn enemies with no other purpose than to be negotiating with someone.
But there's one little problem. Wilson's misrule was supported by a vibrant free economy with low tax rates. The economy today is a very different story. Half or more of the GNP already goes to pay for state, local and federal expenditures; investment is at a standstill and capital will flee like debutantes from a mouse as soon as any of the policies advocated by the Big Government Party candidates, McLame and Obamarama are enacted. So many people have been promised so much largess from the state that the current economy couldn't be expected to support the load, let alone a moribund economy mired in socialism.
You'd think there would be a coherent opposition to these idiots who are so blindly leading us to Depression and misery. There isn't. The Big Government Party will sweep this election with few exceptions. Only a few Cassandras and fringe lunatics are in opposition and they are too feeble even to present a threat to the status quo. The only threat to the status quo is the status quo itself. The policies that are being pursued with the nearly unanimous support of the electorate will lead to misery and disaster.
Maybe out of the ruins a two-party system will be reborn.

You Can Call It 'Independence'

Well we all just have celebrated another Fourth Of July holiday. Its a festive day, one in which guys dressed in eighteenth century get-ups try to sell us mattresses and used cars at Amazing Discounts! to show how patriotic they are. But what is the holiday really about? Is this blood-stained, imperialist, capitalist legacy really something we should be bragging about or should we hang our heads in shame? What obligation do we have to admire and laud fifty-eight slaveowning capitalists as they started a bloody war against a government which clearly had the best interests of the people at heart.
Why did these troublemakers rise up against their legally instituted rulers? They were rich guys who didnt want to pay their fair share of taxes, thats why! They upholstered their selfish greed with a lot of guff about 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' and 'natural rights' but the bottom line was all about cash, dinero, rubles. We can look back and laugh at the tax rates these guys went to war over too. If some politician today proposed that a government run on such an insanely low percentage of the GNP as the self-centered Colonials paid they would be strapped into a straight-jacket and shipped off to a looney bin. We're happy to devote fifty or sixty percent of our earnings to federal, state and local taxes; how else would we know what kind of light bulbs to use and who would fund the Lawrence Welk Museum in Kansas if not us enlightened taxpayers? The money for a 'Bridge To Nowhere' has to come from Somewhere, doesnt it? We like high taxes so much that we're about to elect people who have been protesting the current 'low' tax rates for the last six years and are blaming all our economic woes on them.
When you look at those redneck Founding Fathers, clinging to their God and their guns like the militia-style lunatics that they were you have to think about the brutal and reactionary past which led them to their assault on proper authority. These fascists admired 'The Pilgrims', a pack of land-grabbing, sexually hung-up homophobes whose motto was 'He who does not work, shall not eat'. What a naked statement of genocidal intent against the poor! In these more enlightened times we know better; he who does not work should apply for Food Stamps and turn his absentee ballot over to the Democrats, is a much better adage, one that furthers the march towards Justice.
Does that 'Declaration' include anything about the Right to Free Health Care? How about justice for Gay people who want to exchange marriage vows? The right to low-priced gasoline? They left those rights for progressive judges to discover two centuries later in our 'Living Constitution'.
Another thing that these maniacs were against was an economy that was very wisely regulated by proper authorities who were far enough from the scene to see the big picture and who had a healthy contempt for capitalism and profits. Green policies which discouraged polluting local industries and prevented virgin, pristine wilderness from being destroyed and turned over to agri-business were fought at every turn by these 'pioneers', whose ignorance and cultural insensitivity to our Native American's traditions of tribal war and kidnapping wives and children were responded to with ethnic cleansing campaigns on the part of the 'settlers'. And what about 'The Boston Tea Party', where tons of tea owned by a legally chartered government monopoly were destroyed by vandals who wanted to implement anti-worker, anti- union 'Free Trade' policies of the sort pushed by the radical instigator Adam Smith.
The only bright spot in this picture is how much we've grown as a nation. We love tax rates that are higher than the ones paid by serfs in the Middle Ages. We live our lives in accordance to government guidelines and regulations designed to fix the weather, we understand that the well-being of the collective is more important than some mythical 'natural rights' which accrue to the individual for no good reason. We've knocked off all that Supreme Being crap and have a healthy regard for the Rights Of The Victims; those who through no fault of their own havent gotten their slice of the American Dream, whether it be because of racism, bad luck or lack of documents showing that they are in this country legally. A New Age is about to dawn! Change is just around the corner! Yes We Can!

An Impressive War Record

I sure wish I had gone to college instead of running off to be a wandering hippie! I guess its too late to regret the mistakes of our troubled youth but when complicated stuff comes up in the news sometimes I get confused. For instance, if keeping the misunderstood 'militants' who were arbitrarily seized for no reason by the Evil Bush Regime and kept in air-conditioned luxury in Club Gitmo is a horrendous torture-scene that disgraces our nation before the world than how come the same people who have been sniveling for years for these paragons to get 'their rights' are saying that John McCain being held in a dungeon for five years and brutally tortured without any restraint is no big deal? Hell, anybody can go through five years of torture, cant they? Except Muslims, of course, we all know how wrong that is.
The problem with McCain and also with the poor wretches who have had the misfortune of falling into the hands of Al-Qaida in Iraq and been tortured and mutilated before they were decapitated is that they were on the wrong side of the issue than the truly patriotic lefties.
And what a wonderful record of service to our nation the Left Wing has had! Lets trip down memory lane and review the noble stance taken by the left for the last century.

The Russian Revolution-- While Lenin and the gang were causing mass starvation with their economic policies during the Russian Civil War which followed WW1 the left loudly yelled for an end to foriegn intervention and against any aid to the White armies. Lincoln Stephens visited Moscow at the height of the bloodbath and pronounced, "I've seen the future and it works!"

The War Against The Kulaks-- Lenin had backed off from the worst excesses of 'War Communism' but in the early 1930s Stalin reinstated them with a vengeance...to the applause of the New York Times whose correspondent commented about the millions of deaths and tens of millions led off to slavery in death camps, "You cant make an omelet without breaking eggs!" Roosevelt sent an Ambassador, Joseph Davies, who was paid off in artwork and cash and who denied anything untoward was happening. George Bernard Shaw, Will Rogers and a host of other prominent artists and thinkers sang Stalin's praises.

The Spanish Civil War-- Support was strong in the American Left for the 'Loyalists' who were executing priests and nuns and confiscating private property. The bloody purge of the non-Stalinist loyalists in Barcelona was ignored and commies like Picasso and Hemingway covered up the vile nature of the loyalist side with glowing works of art. If the loyalists had won Spain would be like Bulgaria today.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact-- The true founding of The Peace Movement dates from August 26, 1939 when the anti-facists became loud advocates of PEACE! The left in this country became loud opponents of any aid to beleaguered Britain and were so influential with FDR that he sent an Ambassador to the UK (Joseph Kennedy) who was a notorious Anglophobe and who was sent home in disgrace for his pro-Hitler remarks during the Blitz. Any Jews who couldnt swallow the alliance between Stalin and Hitler were dumped from the ranks of the faithful and never allowed back.

WW2-- The Peace Movement turned into a ferocious War Movement on June 22, 1941- the day Hitler attacked his ally Stalin. They advocated giving Stalin free the equipment we were charging the Brits for under Lend-Lease. They vilified Chaing Kai Chek in China who was fighting the Japanese and the Communists and praised Mao and the Communists who were collaborating with the Japanese and fighting Chaing. As the war in Europe drew to a close FDR, under the tuteledge of 'advisors' like Alger Hiss (a Soviet agent prominent in photos taken with FDR at Yalta) was encouraged to think of British colonialism as a greater threat than Soviet Communism. The agreements reached at Yalta turned half of Europe over to Stalin. Stalinist toadies in the British government 'repatriated' millions of slave laborers who had been transported the to the West by the Nazis and who were terrified of returning to their Socialist Motherland over to Stalin's NKVD for arrest and disposal.

The Cold War-- During the Cold War the left enthusiastically supported every Communist rebel, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega and Patrice Lamumba are examples, and opposed US policy at every turn. "They're just like us!" became the cry. Dunces like Henry Wallace led movements against the strong policies of Truman. Many of the leaders of the left at this time were later found to be in the pay or under the influence of the Soviet Union when Yeltsin opened the KGB files in the nineties.

Viet Nam-- I was a member of The Peace Movement. We smugly yelled the lies of the moment and slogans from the Red Book and self-righteously marched against a war we knew in our hearts was just US Imperialism oppressing a poor nation which just wanted to cast off its chains. The media overcovered botches like My Lai, where a platoon of US soldiers went crazy and killed a hundred or so Viet civilians and never reported atrocities like Hue, where the VC entered the city during the Tet offensive with lists of those to be executed. More than 2000 were slaughtered and dumped into a mass grave. Similar actions happened all over the country to deafening silence. The American media, led by the Sniveler-in-chief Whiner Cronkite announced that the Tet Offensive was a major communist victory, even though they had been pounded into the ground and lost well over half their army within two weeks. When Nixon 'Vietnamized' the war, withdrawing US troops and finally lifted the restraints against bombing Haiphong and mining the harbor the Paris Peace Treaty was signed. Once Nixon was deposed by the left the North Vietnamese Army crossed the border and enslaved Indochina to the joy and Hosannahs of the American Left who yelled ,"Peace At Last!"
"Its the kind of peace I wouldnt wish on my worst enemy," said Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As the wave of tiny boats crossed the South China Sea fleeing from Peace At Last and even the Washington Post could no longer lie about the bloodbath cooked up by the Sorbonne graduates running Cambodia the left sneered and turned its back on Indochina and left it to its misery.

Africa-- After Vietnam regime after regime in Africa fell to Marxist governments. Countries like Guinea and Equatorial Guinea lost a third of their populations as people fled or were murdered. In Ethiopia a man-made famine in Tigre and Gondar provinces by the Marxist regime was responded to in the West by a 'We Are The World' campaign, which raised a billion dollars and handed it over to the Marxists who had perpetrated the massacre in the first place.
Carter's UN Ambassador Andrew Young called the poison-gas using Cuban and Russian troops in the Horn Of Africa 'a stabilizing influence'.

Afghanistan-- Jimmy Carter, a left-wing president announced that he had gotten over his 'inordinate fear of communism' just as the Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. The weak and sympathetic Carter responded by having the US boycott the Olympics in Moscow that year.
Later, when Reagan began aiding the Mujaheddin rebels the left, mainly in Congress, opposed him at every turn.

Central America-- Gorbachev's gambit to impose communist governments in Central America was met with tears of joy in the American Left. Gangs of beaded and sandal-wearing hippies went down to help the Sandanistas in Nicaragua help defeat the hated Reagan. The press and the Congress went insane when they found out that Reagan had violated the provisions of an appropriations bill which forbade aid to the Contra forces opposing the Cubans and their puppets and ginned up a Watergate like show trial entitled 'Iran-Contra' where they were going to tear down the Reagan Administration like they had done with Nixon. They were stopped in their tracks by the testimony of Oliver North, who proudly and effectively made the case that it was in our national interest to defend ourselves from Communist aggression in Central America.

The Middle East-- as the Palestinian cause became more trendy and unabashedly Marxist the left abandoned its brief liking of Israel and moved increasingly towards sympathy with Al Fatah. Loonies like Vanessa Redgrave were filmed dancing with gangs of AK-47 toting terrorists. Nutballs like Louis Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson and the lovely Rev Wright of Chicago toured the Middle East smooching the sandals of Qaddaffi and Hafez Al Assad. terrorism was explained as a natural response by the oppressed to their oppressors. Israel was chided at every turn to stop responding to attacks and to return territory seized in the Six Day War to its sworn enemies without preconditions. When Sharon built a security fence (which stopped the endless terror attacks) the howls from the left were deafening.

The Gulf War-- Ever since Carter had encouraged Saddam Hussien to attack Iran, touching off a bloody eight-year-long war, the left had been ignoring Iraq's use of Soviet-supplied chemical weapons. When Reagan was forced to use the US Navy to prevent an Iranian victory the left instantly crowed that Saddam was somehow a US puppet. A year later, when Saddam attacked a US ally, Kuwait, the left chanted 'No Blood For Oil' and opposed going to war to reverse the conquest. In a 'TV time for oil' deal the vote of a key Senator, Algore, was purchased by the Bush I administration and Saddam was pushed back into Iraq. The Saudis and the peaceniks stepped in to prevent the weakling Bush from moving in for the kill, leaving Saddam's Baghdad a pleasant stopover for politicians like Jim McDermott and weirdos like Sean Penn.

The War On Terror-- Before and since the attack on 9/11 the left has opposed every action, leaked every secret they could get their hands on and has developed a love and affection for a group of renegade Muslims who are considered far too extreme by regular Muslims. Politicians like Jack Murtha have loudly accused our troops of murder before any investigation took place and these charges have been picked up by the terrorist media. The fraternity pranks of a few renegade guards at Abu Graib were reported in the left-wing press for over a year while our own troops' torture and mutilation by Al Qaida were ignored. When our forces finally began to triumph we have heard from loathsome creeps like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean that it was all a lie, of course we're losing! Terrorists and officials of governments who sponsor and support terrorism are invited to speak on university campuses to fulsome applause while conservative speakers are ejected from the podiums by violent mobs. The Democratic nominee has announced that in the future terrorist attacks will be met with subpoenas and indictments. He proudly pointed to the first World Trade Center bombing, where the main instigator, Khalid Sheik Muhammad was left untouched to plan a redo.

So you see, the left has a century-long war record it can be proud of! It has opposed reactionary US policy at every turn and sometimes succeeded. So when someone tries to tell you that some colonialist like McCain, who could have been working for the Progressive Forces but instead sat in his cell helping the Imperialists, should be proud of his war record you can laugh and say, "The PEOPLE know best!"

The Chicken Sees

Once there was a holy man in India who summoned two of his followers and gave them each a live chicken.
"Take the chicken somewhere where no one can see and kill it," he told them.
The first man went behind a fence and killed his chicken. The second man returned two days later with his chicken.
"Why have you not killed the chicken?" asked the guru.
"Everywhere I go, the chicken sees." Was the reply.
Our nation has reached a similar dichotomy between thinking and not thinking. Like the first man most politicians, and the electorate for the most part, just automatically respond to every problem with an unthinking response; the government will fix it. Thats the way its been since Herbert Hoover tried to intervene in a financial panic. His 'fixes' made things much worse and caused the election of a truly destructive president, FDR, who turned Hoover's blunders into permanent institutions, thus ensuring that a sharp economic downturn would become a very severe decade-long Depression and that the 'fixes' he imposed would become the prototypes for a metastasizing cancer of government 'solutions' into the next century.
Since then nearly every politician has responded to real and fake crises by unthinkingly adding on to the overlarded structure of the state without considering the ultimate effect these actions would have on the whole society. Every time some interest group has made a fuss the avatars of Big Government have gone behind the fence and killed the chicken. But is that the path of wisdom?
Now we're moving into a crisis that is a result of giving in to our unthinking responses. We've wrecked sector after sector of our society by the government sticking its nose in where it doesnt belong and taking away the ability of people to affect the way things are done in their lives. But remember-- the Chicken Sees! You cant continue to dismantle our tradition of individual achievement, respect for property rights and political freedom and still have the powerful, wealthy society which was the result of that flowering of freedom and the empowerment of the individual. The Chicken-killers are eying the health care industry as their next target, ignoring the almost universal failure of government health care wherever it has been tried. It always leads to poor care and national bankruptcy. The schools have already been destroyed by over-Federalization. Agriculture and energy have been crippled or distorted by bloated subsidies and draconian regulations. Liberal unions and government ecology bureaucrats are dealing a death-blow to the domestic auto companies. The government has become stocked with parasites who just dream of 'putting in their time' and retiring in their fifties on a nice fat indexed-for-inflation pension, and maybe a double-dip into Social security while they're at it. As the private sector comes apart from the hammer blows of taxation, overregulation and skyrocketing commodity prices the bureaucrats breed like rabbits in their air conditioned offices, secure in the knowledge that the supply of goodies in Big Brother's trick bag is endless.
But The Chicken Sees!
Giant pension funds like CALPERS (the California Public Employees Retirement System) will be overwhelmed by hyperinflation, which will destroy the real value of their paper holdings, and a wave of early retirements caused by a crushing budget deficit in the state. One day the happy recipients of taxpayer largess are going to go to their mailboxes and find that their fat pension check has been replaced with a notice that the state that they thought was as solid as the rock of Gibraltar is suspending payments. They will have seen it happen already to pensioners of the Big Three automakers, people who worked for the airlines and members of the Steel unions but MY GOD! the state cant run out of money, can it? Why is that annoying chicken staring at me?
So here we are. The wave of hyperinflation that had been in the distance is drawing closer and assuming the proportions of a tsunami. The broken educational system has ensured that the general population has no historical memory of either economic depression or inflation; the memories of the horrible Carter years, which were mild compared to what's coming, have been tossed down the Memory Hole by the embarrassed liberals who cant have their track record honestly discussed. Even the Boomers, who were alive then and old enough to remember have only a foggy recollection of how bad things got, how close we came to the precipice.
The situation will achieve critical mass in 2010. Whoever is president will have a Congress run by two of the most moronic idiots ever to surface in leadership positions in human history; Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. These hapless chicken-pluckers will go behind the fence and kill the Bush Tax Cuts. They will impose the Cap and Trade Global Warming scheme that Barbara Boxer was pushing this year and they will begin pushing destructive price controls on the pharmaceutical industry. There will be a massive capital flight and a flight from the dollar. Ponzi schemes like Social security, indexed to megainflation, will suck everything down with them.
I'm putting some chicken coops up in my backyard. At least I'll have someone to talk to.