WEEK OF MARCH 29, 2009

Climate Change is Real 

Warning! I just looked out the window of my Colorado home, and was unable to see across the street because of the falling and blowing snow! There is no longer any doubt that Global Warming has given way to Global Cooling. Any day now, I expect to be able to look to the west and see an expanding St. Mary’s Glacier moving over the top of Lookout Mountain. 

No, that’s all right. You do not have to award the Nobel Prize to me merely because of this startling observation. Scientific recognition will suffice. It seems pretty easy to come by, nowadays. 

My main concern is about the billions of dollars for Climate Change that are included in the President’s Budget needing to be diverted to purchase parkas with hoods for needy children in America and around the world. Cap and trade could take on a whole new meaning as children swap their government-issued headgear with their friends like they used to swap baseball cards. After all, with major league baseball games cancelled for two or three centuries, or maybe longer because of severe weather, there will be no cards to trade for several generations.  

Even the term “shovel-ready” will take on new meaning as millions of unemployed autoworkers and bank executives find jobs shoveling snow from the driveways and sidewalks of senior citizens. These will be government jobs, of course, because senior citizens’ retirement savings will have been wiped out, making them unable to pay for the snow removal service. Billions more could be funneled to GM and Chrysler to entice them to convert their automobile assembly lines to snow blowers and snowmobiles. 

We can safely predict that the Bering Strait, separating North America from Asia, will freeze over within ten years. Not only will Sarah Palin be able to see Russia, she will be able to walk there. This will present a new problem, in that we will now have to worry about illegal immigrants coming into our country from Russia. And Alaskans will have another worry as well- that of being overrun by polar bears whose numbers have already been increasing significantly. 

It is a bleak and cold future indeed, but I am sure America will make it through. As for me, I will go shovel my sidewalk for the second time today to get the exercise that my doctor says I need. After all, you have to take advantage of every crisis.

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Let’s Call Terrorists “Sensitive Islamic Activists” 

In the total absurdity that is now the Obama presidency, George Orwell's term “Newspeak” from his book 1984 has found a new home. In a recent memo from the White House, the terms “War on Terror” and its longer version “Global War on Terror” are to be replaced by the gobbledy-gook term “Overseas Contingency Operation”. The term “terrorism” is to be replaced by the phrase “man caused disaster". Apparently, these softer, more sensitive terms are meant to convince the jihadists that we are truly sorry for upsetting them to the point that they murdered 3,000 people at the World Trade Center seven and a half years ago. Finally, it seems, we are willing to sit down with them to listen to their legitimate complaints about America’s abhorrent behavior of the last fifty years. Oh, the shame of it all! 

One must wonder if this group of prima donnas that occupy the White House nowadays is not taking its national security policy marching orders from Code Pink activists. Either that, or Jay Leno’s gag writers have a new gig because we now have all of those perpetrators of “man caused disasters” laughing, all the way from Gaza to Damascus and from Tehran to Kabul. I fully expect this bunch of foreign policy amateurs to rename the Israeli Defense Force “Palestine Antagonists” and the Taliban as “The Party for Afghan Unity”. 

While I find this appeal to political correctness somewhat amusing simply because of its amateurism, Jeff Schreiber over at America’s Right takes it more seriously. This morning, Jeff wrote, “… [T]his administration's detente-at-all-costs approach to national security and foreign policy is dangerously rooted in political correctness and places the outward superficial perception of the United States of America ahead of the safety and security of the American people.”   

He goes on to say, “Rest assured -- while the American mainstream press may downplay such a terminological transition over the next day or two, these will be red-letter days in the caves and camps across the Middle East where terrorists are trained to carry out jihad.” 

And downplay it, they did. It was not just the media, however. It was Leftist web sites all over the internet that tried to rescue the Obama Administration from any responsibility for this comedy. 

The story was first reported yesterday at the Washington Post in an article entitled The End of the Global War on Terror. The report cited a memo issued to the Pentagon from the Office of Management and Budget, in which a Pentagon briefer was told, “This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use "Overseas Contingency Operation.” Various websites were quick to jump on the report to deny any White House involvement, claiming that the memo was actually an e-mail sent by a “mid-level civil servant”. Other sites argued that no one had ever seen the e-mail. It sounded very reminiscent of Obama’s plea of innocence regarding the news of the huge bonuses that were paid out by AIG. This tactic is described as “plausible deniability”.  If, on the other hand, these denials were true, one can only wonder if there is any communication whatsoever going on within the Executive Branch of government today. Both explanations provide serious cause for concern.

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There is no “freedom” in EFCA 

Political paybacks are nothing new in Washington. The primary reason that organizations make campaign contributions is because they expect to get favorable treatment in return for their generosity. Seldom is it a matter of political principle; more often that not, it is simple greed in the format of, “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” 

Yet no example of this political backscratching is more onerous or odiferous than the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which is expected to soon be approved by a very partisan vote in Congress and signed by a very willing president as a generous reward to labor unions that have provided such generous support to Democrats over the years. 

There is not the slightest redeeming feature about this legislation. At a time when the government should be focusing on reviving the economy, EFCA is yet another example of an Administration that, despite all of the hot air that it produces, does not really want the economy to be revived.  

EFCA promotes anything but “free choice”. By outlawing the use of secret ballots by workers in voting for or against union representation, it violates one of the most fundamental American values. In their defense of this absurd legislation, labor union hacks claim that it will prevent businesses from applying pressure to workers when unions try to take over. In fact, we will now have union goons watching over the voting to identify anyone who does not go along with the program.  

The union-induced high production costs that have made America’s big three automakers uncompetitive in the marketplace will now spread across the country to businesses large and small. We can only hope that somewhere, sometime, this law, if it is passed, will be challenged in the courts and struck down as being unconstitutional. Until then, we will be taking one giant step closer to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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Follow-up: (Wednesday morning, March 25) Several internet sites are reporting today that Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has voiced his opposition to EFCA, giving Republicans in the Senate the necessary 41 votes to block passage of the Bill. What remains to be seen is whether he or his two RINO cohorts from the Great State of Maine can be sweet-talked into once again abandoning their party as they did with the President's Stimulus Bill.
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Where do you fit in? 

To average Americans, going about our busy day, our main worries are about keeping a job, being able to pay the rent or make mortgage payments, confidence that our children are safe and getting a good education, those car repairs that we have been putting off, and myriads of other things that to some may seem small, but to us they are not small at all. Very few of us seem to have either the time or the energy to worry about those types of things that we occasionally hear about that supposedly pose a threat to our freedoms and liberty. To some of us, freedom and liberty seem like remote abstractions and beyond our control. To many others, the threats do not even exist. After all, we usually do not hear or read about them in the media or, if we do, they are presented as just nothing more than part of the political squabbling that goes on every day in Washington.  

There are, of course, some people, albeit a surprisingly small when you consider the entire population, that to varying degrees do possess a serious interest in what is going on in America outside of their own routine concerns or the daily drivel of Hollywood. We find them at all points of the political spectrum, from far left progressives and Marxists all the way over to anarchists on the extreme far right. I strongly suspect, however, and I do not have the data to prove it, that if you were to plot this entire group on a chart, the curve would resemble a double-humped camel more than it would a standard distribution curve. It might look something like this:

At the Far Left and the Far Right of the curve, you have the malcontented ne’er-do-wells who are really more interested in grossing people out than they are about political issues. If they required a name, I would call them the Ward Churchill’s of America. Their mantras call for either the dictatorship of the proletariat or near-total anarchy, depending on which extreme they occupy. They make the news but, in reality, they are irrelevant.  

In the middle, you have the easy-going, self-obsessed “moderates” whose interest in national issues is limited to about two weeks every four years. What they know about the issues is limited to what they hear in presidential debates, see on CNN, or read in People magazine. They vote for candidates based on whose name is most often mentioned around the water cooler or who looks best on television. These are the people who score in the low 30’s on the ISI Civics Literacy Test, and who proudly wear the label of “Independent” when they register to vote, if they register to vote at all. That ensures that they don’t have to think. They are easily attracted to catchy campaign words such as “hope” and “change”, because these words are so generic that they can ascribe to them whatever outcomes they wish. 

The majority of people who take an interest in national issue, especially political issues, fall into one of two categories: Left-of-Center or Right-of Center. These people make up the humps of the camel, and are themselves further broken down into “moderate-liberals”, “liberals”, or “progressives” on the left, and “moderate-conservatives”, “conservatives”, and “libertarian”. The relative heights of these camel-humps, if they represent numbers, fluctuates from election to election. The goal of any political campaign is to squeeze as many people as possible into the party’s “hump”, then hope for good weather on Election Day. 

So far, I have only described the horizontal aspects of the “two-hump chart”. There is a vertical aspect as well, and it is the main point of this article. Hopefully, more conservatives than liberals will be reading it, because the last thing that I want to accomplish is to help those over there on the left. 

Although there was no attempt to draw the chart to scale nor is it based on actual numbers, it does show that there are far more people who may be interested in political issues and even steadfastly cling to one side or the other, than there are those who I will refer to as “activists” here. The latter group actually participates in activities that can bring about a difference in the direction of our country. I have found that the majority of people who express moderate or strong feelings about liberalism or conservatism would rather sit around and talk about it than getting out and doing something about it. They are the non-activist group. In the world of politics, these people equate to what the media refers to as “armchair generals”, those past and present military people who are full of  opinions and ideas about a war but actually do nothing to carry them out. These political cheerleaders “talk-the-talk”, but they do not “walk-the-walk”. They might even go to party meetings, join politically oriented organizations, or just meet socially to vent their opinions. Very often, their excuse is that they do not have enough time to get actively involved; to attend rallies, to spend a Saturday afternoon ringing doorbells for a candidate, or even doing something quick and simple like writing letters to the local newspaper. The fact that they have time for their social events belies their excuses for not getting actively involved.

I do not mean to belittle the non-activists. To their great credit, they at least take interest in governmental activities that so greatly affect our lives.  Those on the conservative side, especially, have now replaced those on the left in being deeply concerned about the direction that our country is taking. To many of them, the words “hope” and “change” mean “doom” and “gloom.”  They reflect the thoughts expressed by Canadian financial journalist Terence Corcoran who, as an outsider looking into America, wrote at
FP Comment,

However, the often-expressed concerns among conservatives are much more than just financial or legislative. To many, the basic American system is being threatened from all sides. Externally, the forces of Islamic Jihad strive to bring about our demise, while our new government naively seeks accommodation with it. Internally, Socialism with all of its inherent weaknesses and faults is knocking at our door. Out of control government spending threatens the financial well-being of our children and grandchildren. The new Administration wants to make shambles of our Constitution, while it runs hither and yon pouring gasoline instead of water on myriads of fires, then starts new ones in an attempt to solve all of the nation’s and the world’s problems at once. 

We cannot save our country by sitting around “talking the talk” about its problems and letting someone else go out to “walk the walk”. You need not be a gifted speaker or writer to help swell the crowds at the upcoming Tax Day Tea Party in your local community. You do not have to be an engineer to help stuff envelopes at your local party headquarters or an athlete to pass out flyers in your neighborhood. You might miss your favorite television show if you spend an evening placing telephone calls for a candidate, but at least you would be doing something worthwhile. Or, you could just sit around with your friends complaining about the sad state of affairs that prevail in your country. It is all up to you. 

Here is what Thomas Paine, one of our founding fathers, would have said.

(Produced by and featuring Bob Basso)  

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