Dick's Pizza

Civility

2011-09-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

In May of 2010 President Obama spoke at the graduation of the University of Michigan and echoed a theme often proclaimed in his campaign and speeches since his election. He spoke of the ”…basic need to improve the level of civility in our public debate.’ He warned against “demonizing our political opponents or questioning their motives or patriotism.” He continued, “This kind of vilification and over the top rhetoric discourages compromise, undermines democratic deliberation and robs us of a rational and serious debate. It can even send signals that violence is a justifiable response.”

He’s said these kinds of things repeatedly until the word “civility” has become trite. Surprisingly, he does not even make a token effort to rein in his supporters and administration officials who have become increasingly aggressive and uncivil, as his poll numbers have declined.

A classic example comes from Obama’s Labor Day address at a rally in Detroit. Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa introduced him with a fiery speech calling GOP congressional leaders “sons of bitches” and calling for Democrats to “take them out.” Obama took the podium and did not bother to caution Hoffa about the need for civility. Later AFL-CIO President Trumka defended Hoffa and added his own inflammatory comments on his website.

VP, Joe Biden, in his labor day remarks in Cincinnati opined that, “Unions are the only ones keeping the barbarians from the gate.” That’s not the dumbest thing Joe ever said but…

Andre Carlson, one of only two Muslim members of Congress and a leader in the Congressional Black Caucus, said in a vitriolic speech in late August that the Tea Party was intent on “lynching Black Americans”. He advised Black voters to “prepare for war.” Really? Lynching? War?

Maxine Waters, long known for her less than civil remarks weighed in with “The Tea Party can go straight to Hell!” Thanks for sharing, Ms. Waters. (article from the WA Post here.)

OK. We get it. Obama cannot run on his record so he needs someone to blame. His focus group testing has told him that blaming Bush for high unemployment and a dismal economy no longer sells. So he’s decided to attack the Tea Party and conservative Republicans in Congress. His “jobs speech” on Thursday was Exhibit A in this strategy. He said “pass this bill now” dozens of times. Only problem, Mr. President…. There is no bill!! Not a word has been written. There is nothing to vote on. I believe his plan is to play “rope a dope” on this like he did with the debt ceiling debate. IOW, keep changing the terms and backing out of deals until in frustration, little gets accomplished. Then on the campaign trail next summer he can say, “If the damn Republicans had done what I asked them to do, we wouldn’t be in this fix now. It’s not my fault.”

His other strategy is to allow and encourage his hard-core supporters to demonize the Tea Party in hopes of intimidating them into silence and to reduce their influence on less informed voters. This can be a dangerous path. Despite his wise and cautionary words about staying civil in our political debate, his failure to rein in the rhetoric of his supporters can easily get out of hand. Some worrisome examples:

· Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin attempted to make some modest adjustments in public employee benefits in an effort to get control of the state’s budget woes. Unions and leftist stormed the capitol and occupied the building for weeks, vandalizing the place. Democrat lawmakers fled the state to avoid voting and later millions of union dollars from outside the state flowed into recall campaigns against GOP office holders. Money wasted. It did not work.

· This summer roving bands of Black youths attacked whites leaving the Wisconsin State Fair, pulling people from their cars and beating them. The same thing happened at the Iowa State Fair.

· “Flash Mobs” in Philadelphia, Kansas City, Los Angles, Chicago, Cleveland and DC featured Black youths rioting, beating innocent by standers and looting stores. Read about any of this?

· In Longview, WA this past week 500 union members from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union broke into a grain terminal and took the security guards hostage while they rampaged through the facility cutting train brake lines and dumping grain from the boxcars. This despite a restraining order requested by the NLRB because of previous violence and harassment on the part of the union. This is not collective bargaining, its collective mayhem.

Hear about any of this in the mainstream media? Not too bloody likely. Did Obama or his AG, Holder speak out and condemn any of this? No. The preacher of “civility” remained totally silent. Worse, Holder in his refusal to prosecute the Black Panthers in the voter intimidation case in Phillie (Hey, they already pled guilty) has sent a signal to the Black community that lawlessness is OK.

Black unemployment has reached a 27- year high under Obama at 16.7% with Black youth at 41%. That’s a lot of people with plenty of time on their hands and there are many purveyors of hate out there to incite their anger and disappointment.

Consider this: Note: I am NOT predicting this, only saying that the following scenario MAY be possible.

As the 2012 campaign for President proceeds into the late summer and the US economy continues its slide into deep recession with high unemployment, especially in the inner cities, the rhetoric becomes more heated. The “rich” (code for “White”) and the Tea Party (“Racist and White”) are blamed. It becomes increasingly likely that Obama is going to go down to defeat in a landslide election. In the inner cities throughout the US, Blacks riot in rage and frustration. The cities burn and the violence spills out into the predominately white suburbs where frightened citizens break out their hunting rifles in self-defense. Meanwhile, unions fearing their loss of an ally in the White House stage illegal job disruptions and violent confrontations with police.

Obama declares Marshall Law and calls in the troops of the Army’s Northern Command to restore order. He orders the confiscation of all firearms. (Can’t do it? Posse Comitatus is full of loop-holes and they did confiscate all firearms in New Orleans during Katrina.) He postpones the 2012 elections indefinitely. Civil war erupts…. Again.

OK, that’s the doomsday scenario and I’m not saying it will happen. However, Obama could do much to calm things down by reiterating his calls for “civility” and kicking the asses of his own supporters in the media and fellow Democrats when they cross the line.

That he has not shown leadership and done so already worries me.

A Big Melt

2011-08-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

Midwesterners may “cling to their guns and religion” as candidate Obama alleged during the 2008 campaign. But it must also be acknowledged that liberals and the Obama Administration desperately cling to the theory of global warming despite a barrage of evidence suggesting the whole theory is a massive hoax.

As public opinion and concern has swung against them, AGW enthusiasts have become more and more shrill. Exhibit One in this phenomenon is Al Gore’s recent meltdown at the Aspen Institute where he addressed the Networks and Citizenship Panel. Bloated, red faced and with neck veins bulging, Gore delivered the following crude rant.

There’s no longer a shared reality. It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company – bi-partisan company- to use the goddamn word “climate.” Some of the exact same people
– I can go down a list of their names – are involved in this. And what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message, “This climate thing is nonsense.” “Man-made C02 doesn’t trap heat.“ “It may be volcanoes.” Bullshit! “It may be sunspots.” Bullshit! “It’s not getting warmer.” Bullshit!

First of all, other than the obvious irony of having Gore overuse the word “bullshit”, something that has exemplified his whole career, one has to be stunned at his refusal to accept obvious
facts. Dr. Phil Jones who presided over the Climate Research Unit of the U. of E. Anglia, the outfit that got this whole hysterical movement going, admitted in Feb or 2010 that “… there has been no statistically significant warming in the last fifteen years.”

Say what?

He also admitted that he has “lost” all the raw data that produced Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph that got the socialists drooling over the prospect of taking over…. well, everything. Perhaps the dog ate his homework? (See “The New Deniers”, Dec 22, 2009 for specifics on the 3000 emails hacked from the CRU that exposed the fraud.)

In addition, there’s plenty of peer-reviewed science out there that shows C02 does not trap heat much, that volcanoes and the sun do have a great effect on climate. (See “Gaia is Pissed”, April 25,2010 for volcanoes). Also, you can check out the “Climate Audit” site for specifics
on the various studies.

Gore may be melting down because he’s going to have to split with his wife the considerable fortune he’s made being the guru of global warming. Tipper filed for divorce when she returned to their 20,000 sqft home in Nashville to find Al nude on the living room floor fornicating with a polar bear skin rug. OK, I just made that up. Maybe she just got tired of the boring clown or, being a Democrat, maybe he had an intern on the side?

Gore has made a pile of loot since leaving the White House with a net worth of some $2 million. 2008 estimates put the new number at over $100 million. His speaking fees variously estimated at $200,000 per and his many “green” investments have paid off handsomely. He got some $34 million of taxpayer money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange, a carbon trading operation, that promised to make billions if the Democrats came through with Cap and Trade legislation. When that didn’t happen and global warming fears cooled, the company folded. Poor Al is likely sweating his cash flow.

Meanwhile, the radicals at the EPA continue to pile on job killing regulations in their mad war on carbon. Lisa Jackson, EPA head, recently announced a new interpretation of old rules for clean air that would shut down 20% of the US coal generated electrical capacity. Estimated cost? 60,000 jobs and $129 billion. She was supposed to make these kinds of rule changes based on reports from the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee. She decided to go ahead a full two years before the report was due. Her justification? Saving lives.

The National Ambient Air Quality Study came out with a bogus report saying the rule changes would result in X number of “lives saved”. Really? That speculative crap sounds suspiciously like the “jobs saved” nonsense put out to justify the stimulus boondoggle. Donna Nelson, head
of the Public Utilities Commission in Texas, says the new rules will cause rolling blackouts in her state. Most likely many states will suffer the same fate.

This, however, should come as no surprise to anyone who is paying attention. Obama and Biden both promised in the campaign to shut down the coal industry. He happily said that he would bankrupt anyone who tried to build a coal fired electrical generating plant. Well, here ya go.

Unfortunately, it’s not just coal. The anti-carbon true believers in the current administration are now taking on the “fracking” technique that has unlocked vast sources of natural gas. Hydraulic
fracturing, the pumping of liquids and chemicals miles deep into rock deposits, releases natural gas previously unavailable. Despite studies certifying it as environmentally harmless, the
anti-carbonistas want to shut it down. Ironically, natural gas is the alternative to coal. Then too, let’s not forget the poor dune sagebrush lizard of West Texas. Environmentalists want to shut down oil drilling there by listing this useless critter as endangered.

Obama’s team wants to use regulations to achieve goals not wanted by the people of even the politicians. Jackson’s EPA has already promulgated 75 new job killing regulations through mid- 2011 at a cost of $38 billion. Total cost of federal regulation on an annual basis? $1.75 trillion.

When the lights go out in New York City and Washington, DC maybe the voters will demand the abolition of the EPA?

Lost Whistle

2011-07-01T12:47:00.001-07:00

Back when I was a sophomore in high school (right about the end of the Peloponnesian War) I become quite envious of my friend Bill’s ability to whistle. Now I’m not talking about whistling a happy tune or some semi melodious sound. We speak here of a sharp, ear piercing whistle that ricocheted off the surrounding cottages. He did not stick one or two fingers in his mouth to force his lips into shape to achieve this amazing result. He simply jutted out his lower jaw, grimaced and let ‘er rip. I begged him to teach me this seemingly useless trick.

He tried. It seemed one needed to push the lower teeth forward, kind of like the under bite of a bulldog and tighten the upper lip. The tricky part was folding your tongue, sorta like a taco (or maybe a camel toe) and push your tongue against your teeth. Then you just exhaled up from your diaphragm like you would blow a duck call. I walked around for weeks sounding like a winded buffalo but making nary a tweet. Eventually I got the hang of it. In the ensuing years I perfected the technique and developed a piercing whistle that could rattle windows blocks away.

As the years passed this simple skill proved amazingly useful. My kids came to recognize this distinctive sound. I’d stand on the porch and let a few rip and no matter where they were in the neighborhood, they knew it was time to beat feet home for dinner.

I trained my setter to turn around and look whenever I let fly with one sharp whistle. I did this out in a large field when he was a youngster. Dogs like to stay out in front of you so I would whistle and change directions, zigging 45 degrees off our course. At first he’d ignore my whistle and when he finally looked back to see where I was, he’d find himself behind me and going away from him. He’d take off to get back in front of me again whereupon I would whistle and change course again heading 45 degrees in the opposite direction. Eventually he got tired of being hopelessly out of position and figured out that when I whistled I was changing directions. From there it was a simple matter to use hand signals when he looked back to show him where I wanted him to go.

The whistle proved useful in other ways. I could alert friends across the way to get their attention. Stop folks who were driving away with some forgotten item or stop kids and dogs from running out in the traffic. Back in my granite and marble construction days, I could alert guys on the scaffolding to look down and see what I wanted without having to climb up there and beat on their hard hats. Definitely useful.

Over many years I smoked a pipe and then because it was such a messy and fussy habit, switched to cigars. Being an addictive personality I did not just dabble in smoking, I did it constantly. During many of those years we lived in the Midwest with dry conditions much of the year and I had a lot of dry, chapped lips. I had a weak spot on my lip that stayed cracked most of those winter months. A few years ago I noticed a sore developing on my lip in that spot. Eventually I had it biopsied. Not malignant, but the doc recommended taking it off. Well no, I don’t like getting cut so, I procrastinated for a year or so and watched it get bigger. Another test and this time the results were not so cheerful. It had to go.

They couldn’t just gouge it off anymore and had to cut a V shaped chunk out of my lip…. all the way through. It was about half an inch wide at the top and tapered to a point down about an inch and a half. They stitched it back together and Bob’s your uncle. Well, not quite. The process cuts all those tiny nerves in there and pulling it closed sorta stretches things out of shape. While it looks pretty good and I never was vying for movie star looks, it has taken away my whistle. I never realized how much I cherished it until the first time I tried to use it and a breezy “phifffft” came out. Try as I might I could not get a sound out of my once faithful tweeter. I have been working on it in my moments of solitude and have managed to get a few pitiful toots but as soon as I try for volume it deteriorates into a sound not unlike an aggressive fart.

I suppose there’s a moral in here somewhere. I could be trite and say ‘don’t smoke’ but screw that. Everybody knows that. I guess I’d say that if you do smoke, don’t run around all day with a cigar hanging out of your mouth. You could lose more than your whistle.

Pictures of the Yankee

2011-06-08T11:39:00.000-07:00

Hello! It's your blog "mistress" here! I found some pictures of the Yankee and thought I would share them here.

In 1963, the Yankee ran aground in the Cook Islands, off the coast of Rarotonga. Here is what she looked like within months of that accident.

This photo, while not dated, is clearly some years later.

Here's what she looked like around 1989. This is the most recent photo I could find. Someday I'd like to visit the Cook Islands to see if I could take more pictures, and just experience the beauty and culture of this place.

Superman’s AWOL

2011-04-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

“Waiting for Superman” won best documentary at the recent Sundance Film Festival but did not even get nominated at the Oscars. Surprised? Not me. The left leaning members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science were never going to vote for a documentary that exposed the failures of public education and implicated the teacher’s unions. Forget that! Better just to ignore it. Maybe it will go away.

I recently found “Waiting for Superman” listed on our PPV schedule here in Canada, so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding it in the US. I watched it a couple times and I urge everyone to check it out. In it you will become familiar with terms like “academic sinkholes”, “drop out factories”, “rubber rooms” and “dance of the lemons”.

The movie from director Davis Guggenheim, chronicles the heartbreaking stories of three poor families as they tilt against the long odds of securing a chance for their kids of getting a decent education by entering the lotteries for a handful of slots in charter schools. Many hundreds of families crowded auditoriums hoping their kids will be selected to attend charter schools like Harlem Success Academy. The kids and the parents are well aware that winning one of the coveted spots is their ticket out of poverty. If you can watch this process and not be moved, you have no heart. And, if you are not convinced that something radical needs to be done to the public education system, you have no brain.

Money is NOT the solution. Over $2 trillion has been “invested” in education over the last half century…. 57% of that in the last decade. $77.4 billion has been allocated for the Department of Education (the 3^rd largest Federal agency) for 2012. And, let’s not forget the $100 billion bonus in the “stimulus” package. OK, that’s a union payback by Obama.

So what kind of return are we getting for this “investment”? Not great. While spending has exploded, achievement has been flat and comparisons with other OECD countries slipping. The US now ranks 25^th out of 34 OECD counties in math and 26^th in science. The 2009 Program for Independent Student Assessment placed the US 14^th in reading.

What about graduation rates for public schools when compared to per pupil spending? No correlation. Washington DC has the highest per pupil spending at $17,600 and the lowest graduation rate at 55%. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (de-funded by the prior Democrat Congress and recently re-instated by the new GOP House) spends $7500 per student and graduates 91%. WI, on the other hand, spends $10,791 and graduates 89.6% while New Jersey spends $17,600 to graduate slightly less at 84.6. New York spends $16,794 to push 70.8% through. A bunch of mid-western states all spend around $10,000 per and graduate around 80-85%. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that these “graduates” actually learned anything useful.

Clearly the problem is not that insufficient money is being spent, it’s that so much of it is being wasted in bureaucratic bullshit. According to the GAO, there are 151 K thru 12 child education programs in 20 Federal agencies spending over $55 .6 billion annually.

No Child Left Behind is the 8^th reorganization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 passed as part of LBJ’s “War on Poverty” and was the first Federal meddling in state education. As an example of how DOE laws can cost the states big bucks, NCLB caused state education bureaucracies to double in five years and requires 7 million hours of paperwork. Federal spending on education has tripled since 1970 and the ROI on that investment is zero. Academic achievement nationally continues to be flat.

Of course, the teachers unions come in for a good bit of criticism in “Waiting for Superman” and deservedly so. Like any monopoly, the teachers will go to the barricades and fight to the death to protect theirs. They battle against charter schools, school choice and merit pay relentlessly and pour millions of dollars and boots on the ground support for Democrat candidates in exchange for political support. That’s been a great investment!

Union teachers generally receive tenure after two years and thereafter it is nearly impossible to get rid of, not only a poor or indifferent teacher, but also even criminal ones. New York City famously has their “rubber room”… actually a whole building…. where 550 teachers deemed too ineffective or dangerous to be turned loose on students are housed. They show up each day at the rubber room to read, do cross words or sleep at full pay and benefits. Union rules make it impossible to fire them. It costs the city of NY $30,000,000 per year to carry on this comedy.

Another sadly humorous abuse of this tenure policy is what school administrators call the “dance of the lemons”. Since firing ineffective and problem teachers cannot be reasonably accomplished, at the end of each school year administrators ship off their lemons to another school. In return they receive the dolts from some other school. It’s like the game of Hearts where you pass some crappy cards out of your hand to the guy next to you. Unfortunately, the player on your other side gives you his junk to replace it.

Just to see how determined and powerful the teachers unions actually are, consider this. As mentioned above Washington DC public schools are easily the most expensive and worst in the country. In 2007 Adrian Fenty took over as mayor, promising to reform the school system. He assumed responsibility for the public schools and appointed Michelle Rhee, a Harvard grad and reformer, to run them.

She wasted no time. She closed 23 schools, cut half the admin staff from head quarters and got rid of 75 ineffective teachers while negotiating a new contract with the teachers union. Needless-to-say, the teachers were not happy despite the fact that under Fenty and Rhee reading test scores went up 14% and math scores 17%. The unions wanted revenge.

When the mayoral election came around again the national American Federation of Teachers as well as the local unions poured millions into the campaign backing a primary opponent friendly to the union against Fenty. Fenty had been an early and enthusiastic backer of Obama but when he needed some help in his campaign, Obama remained mute. Under the bus with you, Adrian! Fenty lost and Rhee got canned. Last I heard, all 75 teachers had been rehired and given back pay.

If you have been watching the Democrats bend over and grab their ankles for the teachers unions these last couple of years and watched their behavior in the Wisconsin mess recently, you get an idea how difficult changing anything is going to be. Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone and the guy who coined the term “Waiting for Superman”, grew up and realized that Superman was not coming to save him after all. Superman’s not going to save public education either. Nothing will…. at least nothing anyone is willing to do.

What? You want my suggestion? Simple. Disband the Department of Education saving some $100 billion. Let the states manage their own education bureaucracies and toss all that Federal paperwork. The states should give each student $7500 per year to attend the private school of her choice, saving the state $2500 on each student that opts out of the public schools. Break the monopoly by bringing in competition. It’s the only way.

Note: Next up: The war in Madison.

The Knife

2011-03-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

By Dick Draper

"I wrote this story a very long time ago and discovered it recently when I was looking through some old files. It's so old it was written on a typewriter. (You may remember those things).
It's not much changed from the original."

"Like a lot of stories, this one has some basis in fact. Many years ago when our son, Mike, turned one year old, he received a Buck knife in the mail from a SEAL teammate as a belated baby gift .
The letter with it said pretty much what the one in the story says. Over the years I have continued the practice, sending Buck knives to the young sons of friends. The last one went out about one year ago."

"Let me hear your comments .... good and bad about this tale."
Dick

Nick shifted his weight carefully on the narrow board that served as his seat. He was already restless and a little cold but he had trouble sitting still anytime, let alone on the opening day of his first deer season.

The woods were perceptibly brighter now. He could almost make out the nearest clump of birches directly in front of him. An hour earlier he had left the dirt fire lane following his Uncle Joe into the total blackness of the Minnesota pre-dawn. Uncle Joe had led him unerringly to his tree stand on a small knoll overlooking Hanlon’s Slew, a 100-yard wide depression of swamp grass and brush that appeared to have little, if any, water. The 50-yard strip between his stand and the edge of the slew was a maze of head high buck brush and young birches.

Nick wiggled his toes in his felt-lined Sorrels and flexed his fingers on the 30-30 Marlin cradled in his lap. It seemed an eternity since Joe had wished him good luck and with flashlight bobbing disappeared into the darkness. Nick hadn’t been too keen on locating his stand here. Hanlon’s Slew was named for Jack Hanlon, a crazy Irishman, so he was told, whose stand had stood not ten yards from where Nick now sat. Jack had died… Joe said… 4 years ago and no one had hunted in this location since. Ha, I’m a Polish/Scotsman and Hanlon’s a ghost, quite a pair of hunting buddies, he thought. But, his Dad and uncle Joe had persisted and he did not want to think of him less than brave even if he was only twelve years old.

A flicker of movement to his left snapped him out of his thoughts and started his heart to thumping. Trying to hold his head stationary, he rolled his eyes to the left and held his breath. He caught the movement again and recognized the object of his excitement… a tiny, fluffy “snow bird” that was flitting from branch to branch. He silently watched the bird as it continued the solitary task of examining buds. Since he seemed not to eat any, Nick concluded he must have been looking for the “perfect bud”.

Nick swung his gaze back to the front and realized he could now make out the nearest side of Hanlon’s Slew and therefore the 1998 Minnesota deer season was now officially underway. In the distance a single rifle shot echoed over the forested hills and from further away, a series of four rapidly spaced shots. “He missed,” Nick mumbled.

After a few moments Nick returned to his thoughts. He knew that this was a significant day, not only for him as his first deer hunt, but also for his Dad and uncles. Today he was crossing the threshold of Manhood in the eyes of the men in his family and he realized that they would never treat him in quite the same way. Nick had awaited this day, seemingly forever. The Knife symbolized it all. He leaned back against one of the two stout birches that supported his seat and pressed the Buck knife against his hip, comforted by its presence. The Knife had been his for nearly 12 years but this was the first time he had been allowed to carry it.

It had been given to him by his Uncle Joe as a baby gift and the letter to him said that the knife was to serve as a reminder to his Dad of his responsibilities as a father to, “…. Teach him the ways of the woods and to take care of his gear.” The letter also talked about how the knife as it got moved from drawer to drawer would remind his Dad that, despite business and time pressures, should “remember the simple and important things.” Nick could not say with certainty if the knife had caused his Dad to spend more time with him. But, his father had taken him along on fishing and hunting trips since he was about four or five. Except for deer hunting.

He was lucky, he knew, for many of his friends at school did not get to do many of the things he enjoyed. His uncles had also taught him much. Uncle Dan, his Dad’s brother and the official trout-fishing champion of the family, had taught him all his tricks. Uncle Joe had showed him all his grouse coverlets and how to sit quietly in the hardwoods for squirrels. Joe Dolan wasn’t really family. He and his Dad had been friends for years despite their age difference. He had always been “Uncle Joe” to Nick and he knew that Joe loved him like a son.

It was fully light now and from the bright glow in the east Nick knew the sun would be up soon. It promised to be a glorious November day. With no wind the woods were silent. An occasional shot could be heard but they were distant and certainly not by anyone in Nick’s group.

Nick’s eyes kept returning to a shape on the far side of Hanlon’s Slew. It sure looked like a deer standing in the tall grass! The more he stared at it the more certain he became. Once again, his heart started to thump. Slowly he raised the carbine and pressed his cheek against the polished walnut stock. Scanning the area with his scope he could not locate the deer so using the open sights beneath the scope he lined up the deer and then peered through the scope. His “deer” turned out to be a patch of brush and the trunk of a blown down willow. He reminded himself of Uncle Joe’s advice, “Don’t focus on objects. Just scan with your eyes and look for movement,” and “Listen. Your ears are your best allies.”

The momentary excitement and the morning chill were causing Nick two kinds of discomfort. He desperately wanted to stretch his legs and the pressure in his bladder could no longer be denied. He took one careful look around and rose slowly to his feet, feeling the carpeted platform under his feet and the gentle swaying of the birches that supported his stand. After relieving himself, stretching and treating himself to a cup of steaming coco he resumed his vigil happy that a buck had not appeared during his “break”. He had heard many stories of huge bucks that chose awkward moments to appear.

The sun’s rays slanted through the trees now turning the branches and dead leaves on which the frost had gathered during the night into dazzling patterns of reflected light. The kiss of the sun quickly melted the frost and droplets of moisture gathered on the brush. Nick watched intently as a drop of moisture grew on a twig near his head, distended and fell silently. “Like a tear,” he thought.

There had been a few tears last night and Nick was still a bit mystified at the emotional outpouring. He wondered if it might have something to do with the ancient bottle of brandy that Uncle Joe had produced to toast the hunt and celebrate the little ceremony when his Dad had given him The Knife. Uncle Joe had quickly left the cabin during the ceremony and it was a long time before he returned with the armload of wood he had gone to fetch. Joe’s eyes had been rimmed with red. That had reminded him of something Uncle Joe had once said to his father, “An Irishman cries when he’s happy or sad. A Scotsman only cries when he has to pick up the check.”

The rustling in the leaves off to his right brought him back to the present and his eyes followed his ears to the source of the sound. A lean gray squirrel was digging around among the leaves either looking for something or burying it. What ever he was doing, he made a lot of noise. It sounded like a whole herd of deer!

Nick leaned back and glanced again in the direction of the two small White pines about 40 yards away on his left. His Dad and Uncle Dan had located a “scrape” there when they were constructing his stand yesterday morning. They told him to keep an eye on it, as the buck might be back to see if a doe had left him a calling card in his absence. He was keeping a close watch on that area. He hadn’t heard any shots for some time now and the woods were again silent as the squirrel had moved on.

He started to think again about the events of last night and Uncle Joe’s reaction. He remembered that Joe had a son… ah, Pat wasn’t it? Yes Pat. And he had died when he was about Nick’s age… hit by a car… riding his bike. Yes, that must be it. Uncle Joe must have been thinking about his son, although Nick had never heard Joe mention his name. Nick had overheard his Mom and Dad talking about it once and, even at his young age, figured that the loss of his son had something to do with Uncle Joe’s affection for him. He had never dared question Joe about it and, since no one else mentioned it, guessed it was one of those taboo subjects. He made a mental note to ask his Dad about it the next time they had one of their “talks”. It was about time for another one. He had heard some incredible things about sex at school that he wanted to get clarified.

Nicks’ senses suddenly went on alert. He had heard something he was sure but couldn’t locate the sound, as if it were on the fringes of his consciousness. There, he’d heard it again! The sound seemed to be coming from the other side of Hanlon’s Slew in the direction of Uncle’s Joe’s stand that was about a quarter mile away. While watching intently in that direction he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his left eye and swung his head quickly to the side. “Damn!” he cursed silently for he knew he’d moved too fast. He froze and his eyes picked up the dark shape of a deer moving silently toward the two small pines. The deer had its head down and glided slowly through the brush. Nick could not get a clear view to determine if it was a buck. At about 50 yards distant the deer stepped into an opening, stopped, raised his head and looked directly at Nick. It was a buck! And, Nick was certain; at that range the buck would clearly hear the wild thumping of his heart. Nick was almost overpowered by the urge to snap his rifle to his shoulder and shoot but he knew he would never make it. The buck would be gone before he could get off a shot. He also had been told many times that a deer can look right at you and not see you if… you don’t move. Suddenly the buck looked back over his shoulder in the direction of Uncle Joe’s stand, dropped his head and continued walking toward the two pines. When the buck’s head was momentarily hidden behind some thick brush, Nick slowly raised the 30-30 and thumbed back the hammer. His heart thumped like a drum, his eyes were misting with excitement and the end of the rifle weaved alarmingly. Nick wondered if he could hit the buck if he ever did step from behind the pines. And then the buck came into the open, stood looking at him and was perfectly broadside.

The roar of the carbine as it slammed against his shoulder surprised him, not only because the sound crashed through the silent forest like a sudden clap of thunder, but also because he could not consciously remember aiming or pulling the trigger.

Photographed in his mind forever would be the image of the deer crouching and leaping over the small knoll after his shot.

He knew in his heart that he had missed, confident that his sights had not been on the buck when he shot. “Shot, Hell!” he muttered. “It went off.”

Nick’s hands shook alarmingly so he put the rifle down. He began to get dejected at the thought he’d blown his opportunity. Buck fever. He wondered what kind of ribbing he’d take from his Uncles for blowing his chance? His Dad wouldn’t say much but Uncle Dan would surely let him have it. He realized he wasn’t going to have much time to think about it when he spotted a splash of orange moving through the hardwoods and down the hill toward Hanlon’s Slew. Uncle Joe would be at Nick’s stand in a matter of minutes. Joe walked steadily in that rolling gait of his until he stood directly below Nick. He looked up and whispered, “Well?”

“A b-buck. I missed him,” replied Nick.

“How do you know?” asked Joe simply.

“Well, ah, he ran off.”

“So why don’t we go take a look?” asked Joe. “Hand me your rifle. Is it loaded?”

Nick looked sheepish as he realized he had forgotten to eject the spent cartridge. He was grateful that Joe remained silent as he unloaded the rifle and handed it down. Nick’s heart still thudded and his knees shook as he climbed unsteadily to the ground. “Deer frequently run, even if fatally shot. You know that, Nick,” said Joe. “Where was he standing when you shot?” Nick pointed toward the pines and they both slowly made their way in that direction.

Searching the ground for sign, Joe stopped and pointed. “Here’s his track. See the splayed tracks where he jumped?” exclaimed Joe. Nick was about to tell Joe the direction the deer had gone but Joe was already moving on the trail like a bloodhound. Nick remembered that his Dad had once said that Joe was one of those guys who could track a trout up a rapids. That certainly seemed true because Nick could not imagine what Joe was following over the leaf-covered ground. Every few feet or so Joe would stop and carefully search the area around the tracks. Nick knew he was looking for blood and the failure to find any filled him with dread that he had completely missed the buck. He knew the razzing he would take from his Uncles and the rest of their party would be unmerciful.

After an agonizing 30 yards Joe stopped and said with a touch of excitement, “Here we go!” Nick hurried over and following Joe’s finger saw a single spot of bright crimson gleaming on an oak leaf. Nick’s hopes crashed. One tiny spot in all that distance? Maybe he had just wounded the buck. That would be worse than a clean miss. But Joe was encouraged. “Lung shot, I think.”

They pressed on. The tracks were slanting downhill now toward a small brushy slew. They found another blood spot, then another, then a large gleaming blotch and finally, at the edge of the slew in a small open area they found the buck. To Nick it looked huge with thick solid antlers shining in the morning sunlight.

“Congratulations Nick. That’s a fine six point. Good job!”

Joe relieved Nick of his rifle and moved over to a log where he slipped off his pack and sat down. He pulled his thermos from his pack and fished his pipe from his pocket. It was clear that Joe would only be a consultant in the next phase of the operation. Nick struggled out of his orange coveralls and rolled up his sleeves. He knew he must field dress his own deer… wanted to and still dreaded it. He hoped Uncle Joe would help him.

He reached for his Buck knife and slid it from the stiff leather sheath. The gleaming blade caught the light and momentarily blinded him and the knife seemed warm and alive in his hands. Nick glanced up at Joe and was startled by the anguish on his face. Tears streamed from his deep blue eyes, coursed through the stubble on his ruddy cheeks and dripped off his chin. Nick stood poised, legs apart, with one hand holding the buck’s leg the other gripping The Knife. And then Nick knew, knew with the certainty that comes when finally seeing the obvious. “This is Pat’s knife, isn’t it?”

“No Nick, it’s your knife,” Joe replied evenly. “True, it was Pat’s but as you know, he never lived to use it.”

Nick felt a little angry, a little disappointed and a little afraid. The Knife seemed alien in his hand. He had to fight the impulse to toss it into the leaves. “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Nick.

“Well, I’m not sure exactly. Never found the right time or the right words, I guess. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll tell you the whole story? Maybe then you’ll understand.” Nick plopped down on the leaves and laid The Knife between them.

Joe wiped the tears from his stubble-covered cheeks, thumbed the crumbs of burley into his pipe and relit it before beginning. “When Pat was one year old nearly 25 years ago, a close friend of mine who served with me in the Navy sent Pat The Knife as a baby gift. The letter with it said pretty much the same as the letter I sent you. As you probably remember it went something like this: ‘This baby gift arrives long after most of those that arrived on time are either outgrown or forgotten. This one will wait around for you to become a man. During those years as it gets shuffled from drawer to drawer it will serve as a reminder for your Father to teach you the ways of the woods and what it means to be a man. As the years pass, your Father will be a busy man and this knife will remind him to remember the simple important things. A young man’s first knife is a symbol of maturity and trust. May it serve you well.’

“As you might imagine when Pat was killed in the auto accident shortly before he was to receive it, I was crushed. My wife and I were so overcome with grief that our marriage went on the rocks. I got heavily into the bottle and was well on the way to losing everything. At that time you had your first birthday and I got the idea of passing The Knife on to you. Getting involved in your life and watching you grow into a fine young man….well, it helped me. No, it saved me. Can you understand? I’m sorry I never got around to telling…"

“No” said Nick. It’s OK. It’s an honor and thank you for giving it to me.”

Nick picked up The Knife and with a solemn expression rose and walked to the buck. He lifted the buck’s hind leg over his shoulder exposing the snowy white underbelly and glistening in his hand, The Knife cut for the first time.

Drill Baby Drill?

2011-03-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

(What ever happened to that war cry?)

Note: I am back blogging by popular demand…. Actually one person suggested I climb back on the horse. Seemed sufficient. A lot of stuff going on right now so there are plenty of subjects to write about. Here’s a start.

Oil prices hit $104 per barrel today up from the 80s a few weeks ago. Speculators are nervous about all the protests in the Middle East. A weakening US dollar isn’t helping either. A popular uprising that started in Egypt and Tunisia and has now spread to Libya, Yemen and a number of other ME countries has folks worried that oil supplies may be disrupted. Even Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Algeria, all major oil producers, are potentially lined up for conflict with the same poisonous formula of a Sunni elite historically dominating a Shi’ite majority. A disruption of supply from Saudi Arabia could easily push oil prices beyond $200 per barrel. Naturally, Iran wants to stick its long nose into these conflicts and stir up as much trouble as possible.

Gas prices escalate quickly as oil futures rise and gas is now at around $3.60 nationally and creeping upward. Before the blow up in the ME, analysts were already predicting that gas prices would rise to $4.00 pg this year and hit $5.00 next year as the world-wide recovery gained momentum and demand grew, especially in China and India.

The rule of thumb on gas prices relative to oil prices is, if you divide the oil price per barrel by 30 you get an approximation of what the gas price will be. Steven Chu, Energy Secretary, once opined that he would like to see US gas prices as high as European gas prices. At the time gas in Europe cost $8.00 a gallon. At $250 pb ol’ Stevie would get his wish. His opinion on how US voters would feel about $8 gas has not been reported.

The Obama Administration has done everything they can to make conventional carbon based energy more expensive. They claim they want to “reduce dependence on foreign oil” which to them does not mean drilling for oil on US soil or waters, but expanding use of corn, wind, solar and electric cars. Speaking of the Chevy Volt…. GM quietly released sales figures on the Volt for February. They sold 281 vs. 321 in January. Not to worry, Nissan sold 87 of their electric “Leaf” models. In other words, this electric car thing is really catching on. Yeah, right.

If a $40,000 compact that gets 30 miles on a charge is not enough to move you to buy one to save the planet, how about this? The state of Washington is considering an extra tax on electric cars because (drum roll please)… the electric cars are not paying their “fair share” of the gasoline tax that maintains the highways. That should do the trick.

According to Nick Loris and John Ligon of the Heritage Foundation, Obama’s energy policy cannot possibly succeed. Wind and solar only generate 1% of the electrical need in the US and the ethanol initiatives costs taxpayers $4 billion to produce 2% of the gasoline requirements. Furthermore, turning corn into gas drives up food prices worldwide. Part of the unrest in the Middle East results from rising and painful food price increases. On top of all that, it may even be worse for the environment than regular gasoline.

Since Obama took over he and his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, have been doing everything possible to cut domestic energy supplies. (Stats courtesy of Heritage)

· Salazar cancelled 77 leases for drilling in Utah in his first month in office. It is estimated that 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil exists in this oil shale deposit called the Green River Basin. That’s three times greater than the reserves in Saudi Arabia.

· In April Obama exploited the blow out of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf to shut down all drilling there. They modified a report by a commission of experts from the National Academy of Engineers to make it sound like the commission supported the Administration’s moratorium on drilling. The engineers did not support such a ban and were more than a little pissed that Czar Browner had rewritten their report.

· In June LA Federal Judge Martin Feldman overturned the Obama Admin moratorium on drilling. So the Interior Department simply cancelled that one and issued another essentially identical ban. An annoyed Judge Feldman in February ruled the Obama Administration in contempt of court for ignoring his ruling. Last week the Administration issued the first drilling permit for the Gulf since April. Experts predict that the offshore moratorium will reduce domestic output by 13% this year.

· Secretary Salazar also placed the eastern Gulf and the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific, including Alaska, off limits for any drilling for oil. That puts an estimated 19 billion barrels out of reach.

· Of course, ANWAR can never be exploited under this Administration. That’s another 10 billion barrels.

· Interior also stopped the development of the Keystone XL pipeline. The first two phases of this 4 phase project are complete and pump oil from the rich Alberta oil sands to refineries in Cushing, OK. The next two phases were to pump 500,000 barrels per day to the refineries located on the Texas Gulf coast. Together these two pipelines would reduce dependence on Venezuelan and Middle Eastern oil by 40%. Gee, that seems way too sensible… get a reliable delivery of oil over land instead of by tanker and from a friendly neighbor?

I guess what surprises me is that as we rapidly approach $4/ gallon gas nationally (already achieved in some places), where’s the outcry? Where are the chants of “Drill Baby Drill”? Four dollar gas is supposed to be the tipping point but we seem on a path to blow right through that and hit $5.00 soon. At the moment no one seems to be raising much of a fuss, even as the cost of fuel will soon put a big damper on a slow economic recovery. It may also trigger a dreaded round of inflation. Obama does not seem worried. They are still talking about increasing taxes on oil companies. They must figure the voters don’t give a damn. Do you?

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

2010-11-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

“Jobs, jobs, jobs.” That was the mantra of every politician from both parties in the recent election. With real unemployment in the US at around 16% (at least) and a subject very much on the mind of every rational voter, that was unsurprising. When you think about it though, nearly all of these politicians have never created a job. And, in many cases, never actually had a real one, having spent their whole career in politics or entombed in the vacuum of academia. What do these guys know about creating a job?

Then too, for all the talk about a “wave election”, when you get right down to the numbers, 86% of the incumbents got re-elected. In other words, 86% of the idiots who got us into this mess are still there. True, that’s down from the usual 98% but still insufficient to effect real change in policy. I mean, why should the incumbents who got re-elected suddenly change policy? There’s no upside. For them, what they’re doing now is working fine.

To get an idea on how to create jobs it might be useful to look at why and how we lose them. I gave that a try in the recent piece “The Buffaloization of America”. Buffalo and all the other “rust belt” cities lost their manufacturing industries by a series of policies that made it difficult or impossible for companies to compete and make a profit. Aggressive and demanding unions, stifling regulations, predatory lawyers and excessive taxation drove companies to either move to more favorable climates (literally and figuratively) in the south or over seas … or die.

Corporations are not charitable organizations. They have to show a reasonable profit for their activities or their stockholders, many of whom are union retirement funds or the IRAs or 401Ks of average citizens, will demand the head of the CEO. If they can’t make a profit in Buffalo or California on their production of widgets they will simply move to where they can.

Then there is the matter of competition. If your company that manufactures in the US or Canada and is competing with a company making a competitive product manufactured in say, China you are going to be at a serious disadvantage in your cost of goods. The cost of any product is a function of the materials, labor, overhead and profit. The usual suspect in any discussion of “jobs going overseas” is labor. And it’s true as far as it goes. In the past much lower labor costs in Third World manufacturing was mitigated by improved productivity i.e. automation of the process. Of course, the foreign manufacturers eventually got the same sophisticated machinery and caught up.

Union work rules represent a bigger problem than the wage differential. These often conflict and cause work stoppages and productivity declines. Strikes are even more destructive.

Then there are labor laws and the employees and lawyers who game the system. In one of my businesses we had an employee who made a career out of getting fired. She would make everyone around her miserable until she finally got fired. She then sued for “unfair termination” or some such and won a big settlement every time. To my knowledge she has done this at least three times. We were the second company to hire this bit… er, pro. The company that got stung before us could not warn us because they would get sued again for saying something negative about her. Nor could we warn the next company in line. We were instructed by our lawyers to answer when asked for a reference on this crook to only say, “She worked here from X date to X date” and nothing more.

We had another employee at a different company who we fired for stealing from the company. She filed a sexual harassment complaint with the EEOC… not against me, thank God, but against some of our other employees. Of course, the charges were totally bogus. One of them was that she was out drinking one night after work with a bunch of her young fellow employees and someone said something offensive. Imagine that. The leap here is that my company is responsible for the speech of my employees when they are on their own time drinking in a bar? Yep, apparently so. It cost us a lot of money.

And let’s not forget product liability. I once dropped in on a friend that was baby-sitting her grand daughter who was a year old or so. It was a hot day and they had a “swimming pool” set up for the tyke. It had to be less than 4 feet in diameter and maybe 3 or 4 inches deep. Emblazoned on the tube was the following warning: “No Diving!!” Ya think?

If you make something some idiot will figure out a way to injure himself with it and sue you. The annual cost of torts on businesses in the US is something like $300 to $400 billion, depending on which study you prefer to believe. Clearly, that direct cost does not even consider the cost of defensive measures and both add to the cost of producing that widget making it less competitive with the foreign produced product. Congress has been passing these laws for years giving lawyers hunting licenses to sue companies. These lawsuits drive up costs and drive business owners absolutely nuts.

The loss of manufacturing jobs has been going on for years and is not going to be reversed overnight, if ever, in the US and other “developed” countries. However, there are some things that the new US Congress could do immediately that would help the situation in the near term.

1). Ratify the free trade agreements with Columbia, S. Korea and Malaysia that were negotiated during the Bush Administration. The Democrats have been sitting on these agreements for two years as payback to the labor unions that object because… well, they object and the environmentalists object because that’s what they do. The US Chamber of Commerce estimates that the S. Korea agreement alone is second only in importance to NAFTA and could create 345,000 jobs.

2). Extend the tax rates due to expire on January 1^st for everyone. Keep the rates where they are for everyone and forget the class warfare shit. Not increasing capital gains and dividend taxes alone will be beneficial, not to mention eliminating uncertainty.

3). US international corporations are sitting on some $400 billion in cash in their foreign subsidiaries. If they bring it back to the US they get whacked for 35%, so in the past they have been reinvesting that in further foreign expansion. The Democrats want to tax that cash whether they bring it back or not. Instead, I suggest that they offer a limited time window for them to repatriate that money at a very low rate… say 5%. That would encourage a flood of new capital back into the US.

4). They should immediately lift the defacto moratorium on deep water drilling imposed by the Obama Administration. The have ostensibly lifted the ban but in fact have issued no new permits. If they would start issuing permits again they could put a lot of people back to work immediately on the Gulf Coast.

None of the above addresses the long-term reforms that need to be accomplished to really restore an economic boom and create the eight million jobs that have been lost. That would include: serious tort reform; deep sixing Obamacare; reducing the corporate tax rate to 25%; taking a brutally sharp knife to spending and letting oil and coal start again on US soil. None of the long-term reforms can possibly happen until after 2012 and unless a conservative President gets elected along with more, many more, conservatives to Congress.

Major Ebb

2010-11-04T10:24:00.001-07:00

After the tsunami sweeps ashore all that water has to eventually go back where it came from, taking with it all manner of flotsam and the carcasses of critters drowned in the flood. The election tsunami on Tuesday swept away a lot of Democrats with some 60 House seats swinging over to the GOP and with a half dozen or so races still counting chads. (Hennepin County where Minneapolis is located was trying to figure out how they had 880,000 votes to count and only 708,000 registered voters. I wonder if that’s how Al Franken made it to the Senate?) The Republicans also picked up five governorships and five Senate seats with Alaska and Washington as yet undecided.

The wave washed away three Democrat committee chairmen, seven Dems with more than 20 years of experience and most of the freshman representatives that came in two years ago on Obama’s coattails. James Oberstar, MN (18 terms), John Spratt, SC (14 terms) and Ike Skelton, MO (17 terms) were among the notables who now need to go find a real job. Actually, I suppose if you have spent 34 or 36 years in the House of Representatives you likely stole enough that working is no longer a necessity.

In one of the more satisfying purges, Alan Grayson of Florida, perhaps the most obnoxious politician in the US, got his ass handed to him. Good riddance.

Of course, this being US politics where incumbency means almost certain re-election, many Democrats more than worthy of being sent off to new careers, survived. Barney Frank, MA and 30 year veteran of the House prevailed over his first opponent even given a fleeting chance at beating him. Barney, who’s only real job was pumping gas at age 18 and the individual most responsible for the housing crisis, showed that in some liberal enclaves you can get away with almost anything and get re-elected. Pete Stark of CA is another example. He’s a very cranky 78 years old and 18 termer. Viral videos of him insulting his constituents at town hall meetings didn’t hurt him any. He got 72% of the vote. Yes, it is California.

Harry Reid survived. Although most polls showed him tied with Angle or slightly behind, he won easily. Pundits said he “had a good ground game” which means that the labor unions hired a fleet of buses, catered lunches and dragged people to the polls. Boxer thumped Forina and Brown showed Whitman what the California Democrat machine could do when threatened. McMahon in CT also got whacked.

To me the three highly successful businesswomen that entered politics for the first time in this election; Forina, Whitman and McMahon represent the biggest surprise.

All were enormously successful CEOs and rose to the top of male dominated industries. All three are smart, articulate and honest and all dumped millions of their own money into the effort. Yet they all got their asses handed to them. Why?

OK, they chose to run in notoriously liberal states but it’s got to be more than that. Is it possible that powerful women threaten men or is it that women are turned off by these assertive gals? Both? One would think that the feminist groups would be pounding the pavement for these accomplished women. But no, these are conservative, capitalist women not enthusiastic about abortion. The feminists wouldn’t go near them.

Whitman dumped $140 million of her own money in the campaign to try to get the job of Governor of California that, to me, is one of the least desirable jobs on the planet. Maybe she did want to save CA, but I can think of other things to do with $140 million. The “fruits and nuts” elected Jerry Brown. Good luck. If you’ve got any California bonds, this would be a good time to unload them.

So what can we learn from this and what can we expect for the next couple of years? A lot of the political wags say that Obama will now try to pull a Clinton and govern more from the center and find practical solutions with the new Republican majority in the House and new balance of power in the Senate. I’m not so sure about that. He is buggering off on an absurdly expensive trip to India and Indonesia tomorrow without meeting with the new leaders in the House. Not sure if that’s symbolic. Compromise and finding middle ground has never been his style and doesn’t fit his Chicago politics/ Saul Alinsky philosophy. He once said he didn’t mind if he’s a one-term president. Maybe he means it. If he and Harry Reid obstruct GOP efforts to preserve the Bush tax cuts and refuse to cut spending, then he will certainly get his wish. Maybe the Dems will even nominate someone else.

Another interesting thing to watch will be what happens to the Tea Party movement. Will the grass roots movement fade away? Will the enthusiasm die or will it persist? The Tea Party enjoyed some successes in this Tuesday with the election of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. They also experienced some failures, most notably the selection of Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle. Both were elected in the primaries by the Tea Party folks based on their ideological purity and both got hammered in the general election. In both instances there were other Republicans in those states that would have had a better chance. Will the Tea Party folks be a little more pragmatic next time around?

Then there is the Sarah Palin question. What’s she gonna do for the next couple of years? Personally I think that her ego is going to get the best of her better judgment and she will run for President. Mistake. While I personally like her, I don’t think she’s right for the Oval Office. Most polls I’ve seen agree with me on that one.

Well, as the Chinese say, “May you live in interesting times.” No problem there.

Paradigm Shifts and Flying Mud

2010-10-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

Thomas Kuhn defined a paradigm shift in his 1962 book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” as “… when one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” One of the classic examples is the Swiss watch industry. Until the mid ‘70s the Swiss dominated the world market for watches. The Japanese approached the Swiss with a new concept in watches, digital vs. analog devices, in plastic cases and with few moving parts. They were extremely low cost, unrepairable and basically throw away watches. The Swiss demurred. The Japanese returned to Japan and introduced the “Swatch” and many follow on digital models. The Swiss watch industry was nearly wiped out.

Of course, there are countless examples that have occurred throughout history. Makers of buggy whips and manure shovels never thought much of the future of the new noisy, gasoline burning vehicles, much to their surprise and dismay. And, no one can deny that the PC and the Internet have changed the world forever.

With the elections in the US less than two weeks away we are left to ponder whether a paradigm shift in American politics is about to take place. For decades now the US has drifted toward a more socialist/statist government, culminating in the election of Obama and the dominance of the left wing of the Democrat Party in Congress. As the Democrats rushed forward with their agenda of pushing the US further toward a socialist economy with the pork laden stimulus bill, the take over of the auto industry, the unpopular health care law, take over of the student loan business and cap and trade legislation, voters reacted with alarm and anger.

Rick Santelli, CNBC business commentator, is widely given credit for striking the match that ignited the Tea Party Movement. As thousands of Tea Party groups sprang up around the country, many professional politicians of both parties ignored the movement and the liberal mainstream media sneered. Later, as the movement gained momentum, some Democrats, fearing disaster, retired and some complacent, “moderate” Republicans got booted by the Tea Party candidate in the primaries. Entrenched lifetime GOP politicians Lisa Murkowsk of Alaska and Charlie Crist of Florida refused to go quietly and are running against the Tea Party candidates that won the Republican primaries.

Many of these TP candidates are new to politics and come with military experience and business backgrounds and are, thankfully, not lawyers. Some are weak candidates and easy targets. In another surprise, boatloads of money flowed into these campaigns from motivated citizens around the country.

As the polls started to suggest a rout for the Republicans on November 2^nd, the alarmed Democrats and their left wing allies have swung into action. Incumbent Democrats found themselves unable to tout their votes for wildly unpopular legislation and instead have resorted to personal mud slinging attacks on their GOP opponents. Of course, American politics has always been a brutal blood sport but I suspect, that this election will be remembered as one of the nastiest. That’s saying a mouthful.

Those of my vintage may remember the “Daisy” commercial run by Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Goldwater. It featured a little girl in the foreground picking daisies while an atomic blast occurred behind her. The implication being that Goldwater was such a right wing nut job that he would use the bomb if elected. He was not. More recently, you might recall the James Bryd ad run by the NAACP against G. W. Bush suggesting that Bush condoned dragging blacks to death.

The list for this election cycle so far is long and if you are curious you can consult the blog site, The Daily Beast, and their “Hall of Shame”. Two stand out for me:

California is an economic basket case with a $19 billion dollar deficit (probably more since they have pushed some debt into the next fiscal year) and some $50 to $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. The state is hemorrhaging jobs as businesses flee anti-business taxes and regulations. A company in a similar situation would call in a “turnaround CEO” to straighten things out. Enter Meg Whitman, the highly successful former CEO, who grew eBay from startup to mega company. She’s running against Democrat Jerry Brown, a 40-year career politician and former governor, who was dubbed “Governor Moonbeam” (for obvious reasons) by Mike Royko, Chicago’s famous columnist. (RIP)

Whitman, a Republican in a notoriously “blue” state, was doing pretty well against Brown so the Democrats trot out her former maid in the company of Gloria Allred, a publicity hound liberal lawyer. Allred’s claim? Whitman had knowingly hired an illegal alien and worse, mistreated her. It turns out the maid, Nicky Diaz, had been hired through an agency and Diaz had used a phony social security card and drivers license. The poor girl had “only” been paid $23/ hour for cleaning Whitman’s house… pretty good pay for menial labor. The whole thing was a sham to drum up sympathy in the large CA Hispanic community. Of course, there is much more in the way of negative ads against Whitman and now she looks like a long shot. California will likely get Brown II and continue its decline into the toilet.

Without question the prize for the most offensive and despicable ad came from Florida Democrat Congressman Allen Grayson. His ad against his opponent, Dan Webster, called him “Taliban Dan” and selectively edited his statements to make it look like he was saying something he never said. Should we be surprised? Not. Grayson is the same guy who stood up in front of the House and declared that the Republican plan for health care was to let old people die. If there is any justice in this world the liberal bomb thrower Grayson will be sent packing.

Once the voting starts and the counting begins the mud slinging will end and the corruption will begin. If history is any guide, we can expect lots of “irregularities” in this phase of the struggle. Remember the governor’s election in Washington State between Rossi and Gregoire? (The first one.) Rossi won on the original count and the recount but the King County (Seattle) election officials kept digging for votes, finding some in a closet and some in a car trunk and voila, Gregoire, the Democrat, finally won [in a hand-recount, no less]. Whew! The Democrat lawyers pulled the same stunt recently in Minnesota putting clown Al Franken in the Senate. And, let us not forget the vote counting fiasco in Florida in the Bush/Gore Presidential election of 2000. The Democrats have lawyers standing by to fly to any close election to contest every vote. They do. You could look this up. The dirty tricks have already started. In Illinois some counties failed to send out their military ballots on time as required by law. They say these votes may now not arrive on time to be counted. The military votes traditionally favor the Republicans. Coincidence? Hardly.

While I still have doubts that the GOP will win enough senate seats to take control there, it seems more than likely that the personal attacks will not sway enough voters to prevent the take over of the House by the Republicans. However, they will be on a short leash. If they betray the Tea Party they will incur their wrath in two years. A paradigm shift is coming and those that fail to recognize it are going to be swept away.

The Buffaloisation of America

2010-09-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Note: Sometime back I decided to stop writing this blog. I figured only a handful of people were reading it and I was unlikely to change any minds. I figured that I would be able to devote writing time to finishing my languishing novel and a couple of short stories that needed some work. Fact is I did not work on the novel or short stories. I did a lot of reading and little writing. Then I chanced to hear from friend I have not communicated with much in recent years. He reported that he enjoyed several of my blog pieces, a surprise because I did not think he even knew the blog existed. Long story short: I decided to give it a couple more tries. If you actually read this, let me know so I can be assured that I am not talking to myself.

The news out the other day: The US census reported that the poverty rate in the US hit the highest level in history. 3.7 million Americans joined the ranks of the poor in 2009. Unsurprisingly, single parents head 70% of poor families. Marriage, it turns out, is the number one weapon against poverty. If fathers married the mothers of their children, 2/3 would be lifted out of poverty. However, welfare discourages this solution by virtue of the welfare rules. In 1964 when LBJ launched his “War on Poverty” 6.8% of births were to single moms. Now it’s 40%. For Hispanics it’s 50% and for blacks it is now 70%. BTW, the US spends one trillion dollars annually fighting a losing battle against poverty.

Of course, with a nasty recession going on and some 15 million Americans out of work, you should expect poverty to be on the increase. But, this has been going on for a long, long time.

You may well ask what has this got to do with Buffalo. Patience. I’m getting there. I returned to my hometown of Buffalo after many years of absence and was amazed that it had not changed all that much. The biggest difference was that all the major factories were shuttered, stores boarded up and the place reminded me of Warsaw right after the Soviet Union fell apart… run down and desolate. I later learned that 50% of Buffalo’s population had fled since I left high school in 1959. I stayed downtown in the Hyatt situated in a four square block of renovated buildings filled with shops and restaurants. As I ventured out after dinner for a little cigar stroll, one of the several private security guys I ran into to warned me not to venture out past the “green zone”. On the same trip I drove by the waterfront where the once mighty Bethlehem Steel plant still stands, although now silent and empty, like a neutron bomb had gone off. All along the waterfront other industrial buildings all stood empty, silent monuments to failure.

I guess Detroit is worse but all across the “rust belt” of the NE and Midwest the story is pretty much the same. Industry has fled to more welcome climates, some to the south and many to overseas. “Greed” say my liberal friends. Really? I think not. Corporations have an obligation to their stockholders to make a profit and if high taxes, stifling regulations and intransigent unions prevent a business from making a profit, they will relocate and move to a more favorable environment. California is experiencing this outward migration of industry now as the granite headed Democrats that control things in Sacramento pile on taxes and regulations.

Now comes the Obama Administration with its collection of egghead academics with zero business experience and anti-business Marxists to finish the job on American industry. The policies already inflicted on business so far are breathtaking. From the auto bailout/takeover, financial regulation, increased taxes to the drilling moratorium and the new health care mess, businesses in the US are pulling in their horns and trying to ride out the storm. Obama and the Democrats seem determined to turn all of the US into Buffalo.

Americans are scared and rightly so. The rise of the Tea Party movement reflects this fear and represents a grass roots ground swell that has caught entrenched Democrats and complacent Republicans by surprise. Many are still in denial.

Reality for many will set in on November 2^nd. Most pundits believe that the Republicans will take over the House and some believe the Senate too. I suspect that the Senate will wind up evenly divided insuring gridlock and an inability to overcome an Obama veto. It will be a long time before Obama is voted out of office and he replaces Carter as the most clueless president in history. He can still do a lot of damage even with a Republican Congress.

The US was once the industrial giant of the World. No more. Go into any store and look for something made in the US. Good luck. The good paying jobs for middle class Americans in factories across the US are gone as a result of decades of stifling government actions. And, they are not coming back unless some serious changes are made. Here are a few recommendations, made with the understanding that few, if any, will be adopted.

First, the brakes must be put on the trial lawyers and the rules that give hunting licenses to them. Every corporation has hundreds of frivolous lawsuits going at any one time costing them millions to fight.
Second, the US levies the highest corporate tax in the industrialized world. Capital gains taxes should be cut to zero.
Unions are way too powerful, especially under this administration that curries political favor from them.
Regulations need to be cut at all levels of government.
And, the death grip that the teacher’s unions have on education needs to be broken. For all the money that’s thrown at education the end product only gets worse. It’s time to try something different.

The above is just a partial list but you get the idea. The loss of good paying industrial middle class jobs falls hardest on the poor and poorly educated. From there many social problems arise from the poverty inflicted on the lower classes. When people see no way out of poverty, crime, drugs, unwanted births and chronic welfare dependency result. If we do not reindustrialize America the whole country will be like Buffalo… or Detroit. Heaven forbid.

Don’t forget to vote.

Tax Suicide

2010-08-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

After spending money like Michael Jackson, (deficit this year at $1.5 trillion) Obama and his Democrat pals are suddenly concerned about the “cost” to the government if they do not raise taxes at the end of the year. The so called “Bush tax cuts” enacted in 2001 and 2003 got past the Democrats at the time by having an expiration date and that time runs out on December 31^st of this year. If Congress does nothing, taxes on everyone will go up… a bunch. The taxpayers in the bottom groups and the elderly will take a huge hit. You can figure out how much you will get nailed by going to the American Tax Foundation website and entering your numbers into their “tax calculator”.

First of all, I have a real problem with this “cost to the government” characterization of NOT RAISING TAXES. Chris Wallace raised this Democrat talking point last week on “Fox News Sunday”. I came out of my chair and slopped my coffee on myself. “What?!” I shouted at the TV. It’s absurd. If the government allows you to keep more of your hard earned money by NOT raising taxes, it’s a gift or a “cost” to the government? This assumes that all your money belongs to the government.

Second, this Administration has already raised taxes this year on corporations, tobacco and small businesses. And, let’s not forget the $500 billion in tax increases contained in ObamaCare. Despite Obama’s repeated promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $200,000, the above taxes already hit the lower and middle classes. If Congress does not act, these folks will be stunned by how much their taxes increase next year. The American Tax Foundation estimates that a married couple with two children earning $45,000 per year will pay $3000 more in taxes in 2011.

Other little changes that will whack the middle class and retirees include:

The child credit will drop to $500 from $1000 per child.
“Marriage Penalty” will return (CBO est. in ’96=$1400).
Small business will no longer be able to expense equipment purchases.
Retirees who rely on dividends and capital gains will see the rates go from 15% to a max of 39.5% on the former and from 15% to 20% on the latter.
The Alternative Minimum Tax will hit about 20 million more taxpayers.
Death taxes will go from 0% this year to 55% next with a reduced limit of $1 million for an estate. One million is not a lot these days for a farm or small business and the heirs will have to sell the farm at fire sale prices to pay the taxman.

My concern is that Congress has a lot on its plate right now (the SALT treaty with Russia and the Kagen confirmation among others) and not many weeks before they all head home to try and get re-elected. They just may not get an agreement to keep the taxes where they are and, BING, like the time running out on your parking meter, everyone gets a whopping tax increase on Jan 1^st.

The White House has floated the idea of keeping rates where they are for all but the “rich”, those making $200,000 as individuals or $250,000 as a couple. This plays to Obama’s pledge and the Democrat demonization of the rich. Ample historical evidence exists to prove that raising taxes on this group is a lousy idea, especially as the US tries to struggle out of a deep recession.

Art Laffer’s excellent article in the WSJ (“Soak-The-Rich-Catch-22”, Aug 2, 2010) cites some interesting statistics. Since 1978 across the board rate cuts have resulted in the top 1% of taxpayers increasing their share of taxes from 1.5% of GDP in ’78 to 3.3% of GDP in 2007 (last available figures). Receipts from the bottom 95% fell over the same period from 5.4% to 3.2%. IOW, the rich paid a larger share with tax reductions. Conversely, increases in rates on the top 1% of taxpayers under Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter resulted in a reduced share of taxes for top earners from 1.9% to 1.5%.

The CBO estimates on how much money will be raised by increased taxes are consistently wrong. That’s because they use a “static” analysis that excludes any consideration of people’s behavior. Nice recent example: Sen. John Kerry’s $7 million yacht. He had it built in NZ rather than one of the many great shipyards on the East Coast. Then he docked it in RI to avoid the $500,000 tax and $70,000 annual registration in his home state of MA. The wealthy are much more able to manage their affairs to reduce their taxes. Like Charlie Rangle, for instance.

High rates on the wealthy results in less employment, output, sales, profits and capital gains and all that means lower tax receipts. This has been demonstrated time and again with the capital gains tax. When the rate is reduced, receipts go up, and down when rates are raised. Charles Gibson posed this historical observation to Obama in an enlightening interview on ABC during the campaign. BHO was stumped by the question of why he would raise rates if receipts would clearly go down. After stumbling around he finally came up with “It’s a question of fairness.” Fair to whom? The 80% of Americans who own stock?

A number of Democrats realize a tax increase on anybody at this time is a dumb idea. Even Christina Romer, White House Economic Advisor to Obama has broken ranks from the party line and wrote in the June issue of The American Economic Review, “Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces output by nearly 3%. The effect is highly significant.”

Obama, Pelosi and Reid would be well advised to listen to her and one of their former Democrat Presidents who said:

“Tax reduction thus sets off a process that can bring gains for everyone, gains won by marshalling resources that would otherwise stand idle- workers without jobs and farm and factory capacity without markets. Yet many taxpayers seemed prepared to deny the nation the fruits of tax reduction because they question the financial soundness of reducing taxes when the federal budget is already in deficit. Let me make clear why in today’s economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarged the federal deficit- why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.”

John F. Kennedy

Economic Report of the President

1963

President Hoover raised the top tax rate to 63%. Roosevelt raised it again to 79% plus increasing corporate and other taxes.

The economy went into a double dip depression. Why, if taxes are raised now, do we think that this time it will be different?

LAST RETRIEVE

2010-08-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

with guest author, Mark Cudney

British Columbia and its lakes Minnie, Stoney and Corbett. The Douglas Lake Ranch and “world class fly fishing.” Where the deer and the free range cattle roam beyond the quintessential ranch gate that greeted us after driving miles of gravel road through a mountainous grassy landscape. We came from Whistler over the pass where there was snow on the peaks the first day of June and a mud slide blocking the road. There were five in our party: Dick Draper and I in one truck; Rob Pomroy, his young retriever Hurley, and John Alexander in another. Both trucks and the boat that Rob was towing were packed full of camping and fly fishing gear for our week long stay at the yurt on Minnie Lake.

This was the last leg of my journey which began driving the dirt road from my rural home in Western New York to a stop over at my son’s home near Buffalo. He and his family then drove me to Toronto, Ontario where I caught a non-stop to Vancouver and a rendezvous with Dick, John and Rob. It was a journey begun, oddly enough, by my vicarious sharing of a poignant moment with two men and a dog. A few degrees of separation with common ties to Western New York figured into my role in the event, as the artist commissioned to recapture that moment in paint. The dog was an aging Labrador Retriever called “Sedge” and Rob was his owner. The event took place while hunting ducks near Vancouver. It was a threesome that morning¾Rob and Sedge and Dick¾waiting in their blind for that special mallard to come within range. Sedge was in the twilight of his days; Rob and Dick’s purpose was to allow him an opportunity, one last time, to retrieve a fallen duck. The moment happened and what resulted so moved Dick that he contacted me the next day and I agreed to begin work on the painting paying homage to Rob and Sedge. (View the painting and read Dick’s full account of the event at www.MarkCudney.com under “Sedge’s Last Retrieve”).

Dick and I had not met but we had been corresponding via email, sharing a mutual interest in creative writing, fly fishing, and the out-of-doors experience in general. Our degrees of separation were founded in Dick’s friendship with my cousin Jim, going back to their days of being roommates at Cornell and in the fact that Dick had grown up near Hamburg, New York not very far from my boyhood home. Jim had sent Dick a gift of a print I had produced along with some of my writing samples and so, our correspondence began.

Once the painting was finished and received by Dick in Whistler, BC, he then arranged for me to join him, Rob and John at Minnie Lake. “We’ll send you your round trip tickets. All you need to do is get to Toronto and WestJet Airlines. Rob and I will see to the rest,” Dick told me in words to that affect. Now, I’m known among my family and friends as one who avoids travel as much as possible, that it takes some prodding to get me “off the hill.” Especially during the prime spring time fly fishing season on my home water. But this time I was easily persuaded. When the words “British Columbia, fly fishing for rainbow trout and camping in a yurt on the Douglas Lake Ranch” were used to convince me, the phrase "no-brainer" came to mind. So I set to the task of making a gear list and happily shopping, during the months beforehand, for those items necessary for my trek to BC.

Journal Entry: Arrived at the ranch around one p.m. Chilly. Intermittent rain. Unloaded gear at the yurt and went fishing. I learned quickly that with these guys, there’s no dawdling when you could be fishing. I was still absorbing the scenery¾the vast stretches of open range surrounding the yurt¾and trying to organize my gear. With haste, we readied the trolling motor powered boats as it began to rain. I joined Rob and Hurley while Dick and John manned one of the ranch’s skiffs. We were hardly underway when, trolling a sinking line, Rob had a fish on. ‘Already?’ I thought. ‘Wow! This looks good!’ It leapt forty feet or so in front of the boat and Hurley, inspired to retrieve, leapt off the bow. He swam toward the splashes while Rob did his best to maneuver the boat and control his line. Thanks to Rob’s angling and boating skills, a meeting of fly line, dog and trout was avoided. Rather than try to heft him over the gunwales, Rob made Hurley swim alongside the boat to shore where he was able to come aboard unassisted. We then set off again and trolled sections of the lake with Hurley on watch in the bow. Thereafter, he maintained his cool and stayed in the boat, although he needed to inspect every fish brought to net. All of them that day caught by Rob, I might add.

J.E.: I thought it odd to troll with a fly rod and found it awkward to cast, when it was necessary, a sink tip line sitting in a boat with a dog. Lots of fish jumping. I was having trouble finding my rhythm and felt clumsy. This was a whole new world of fly fishing, having spent my time wading the streams of New York and Pennsylvania dry fly fishing for brown trout with an attitude. I hadn’t fished, trolling from a boat, since my childhood. Rob was getting hits left and right and netted a few of those rainbow trout while Hurley and I sat in the bow, waiting for one with my name on it. After all, trout were jumping wherever you looked! Undiscouraged¾rather enjoying the catching and releasing by Rob, the leaping trout and just being there in British Columbia¾I remained ready for that first fish. Hurley, on the other hand, eventually became bored with the inaction up front, dismissed me with an air of disdain and went aft to be near Rob and further close encounters with fighting fish.

J.E.: Not off to a great start. Got my line entangled in the prop. Struck too quickly at trout hitting the fly. Unfortunately the former was to become repeated “burr-under-the-saddle” moments for me over the next couple of days, during the time we spent trolling. Rob actually had to disassemble the prop at one point to untangle my line. Now, Rob is an exceptional young man, an exuberant fisherman, a lover of dogs and the outdoors. Easy to know. You couldn’t ask for a better fishing guide and companion. He wanted me to do well. Throughout his experience with me in the boat, he exhibited the patience of a saint. However, there came a time when I believe that he may have wished me overboard and swimming to shore, so that he and Hurley could fish unencumbered. Maybe it was the latest prop incident or my missed strikes. May have been the time I managed to coax a trout close to the boat only to break it off before the net. More than likely it was the time, when using one of his favorite “hot” flies, I mis-played a beautiful rainbow and it broke off under the boat, taking that fly with it. No, it must have been the morning we were fishing Corbett Lake, near Merritt, BC.

It was our second to last day of the trip after we had left the Douglas Lake Ranch to drive to a cabin on Corbett Lake. There was the promise of some dry fly fishing to be had during afternoon hatches, not to mention some hot chironomid fishing. I was looking forward to not trolling. The pair-ups in the boats remained the same. I think Dick was happy to leave me to Rob since he too had experienced one of my prop mishaps the one time we fished together: a windy day on Minnie Lake with whitecaps, when we also lost motor power and had to row back to the yurt.

Rob and I had anchored near shore first thing in the morning and were setting-up our chironomid rigs. It was a nice morning and we were both looking forward to catching some trout. But when I went to cast, the fly I was holding and didn’t let go of became deeply embedded into my index finger. I looked at my finger in disbelief then glanced over at Rob who was involved with his rig and hadn’t noticed what I’d done. I took my hemostat and tried to work the hook free. It wasn’t working. The last thing I wanted to do was to spoil Rob’s day. I tried to think of a way to keep on fishing. I kept on trying to work the hook through the other side of my finger to cut-off the barb and make it easier to extract. Yep, shoulda pinched the barb down beforehand, but it was too late now. No good; most of the hook was buried and I was “wimping-out” at the pain. I thought I might be able to wrap a couple of bandages over the protrusion near the hook eye and worry about it later. In the end, I showed it to Rob and was surprised he kept his cool. My respect for his tolerance for this ugly American grew even stronger. Dick and John were nearby so we motored over to their boat where Dick assessed the situation, offered to try and extract the hook then decided it best not to. Long story short, John offered to drive me to the Merritt Medical Center so that Dick and Rob could continue to fish. We exchanged boats and headed to Merritt.

J.E.: A painless extraction and last chance to catch a trout from Corbett Lake. Redemption on a dry fly. The doctor on duty at the Emergency Room in the small, one story center informed me that what with my inadequate insurance, I was looking at a $900 bill for hospital services. I thought then that a half bottle of scotch and a pliers back at the cabin looked like the way to go. Reading the discouragement evident in my body language he added, “There is another option. If you’re agreeable I can take care of this in a minute out in the parking lot, off the books, but,” and he spoke directly to the nurse receptionist holding my admittance form, “mum’s the word.” I agreed. She ripped up the form. Once outside and standing near his car where it appeared not to be a doctor tending to a patient¾we could have been friends comparing fishing gear, the Doc his forceps and me the lure¾he numbed the finger, yanked the fly out, handed me two bandages and said, “The rest is up to you.” And, no charge! Giddy with gratitude, my finger dripping blood, I about kneeled down and kissed his shoes. He saved the day. John and I were able to get back to the lake and in the boat for the rest of the afternoon.

The next morning, our last before heading back to Whistler, found Rob and I and Hurley together again. I can only surmise that Rob was on a mission to better my luck. Hurley may have been looking forward to my next mishap or he may have gained an air of empathy towards me since he stayed near me in the bow. But up until then, I half expected to be relegated to a lodge boat by myself with a pair of oars during the time we had left. It turned out to be the most exciting few hours of fishing for me since the day on Stoney Lake when we all caught countless rainbows on chironomids, dragonfly nymphs and trolling. This morning on Corbett, we anchored in the shallows at the end of the lake and fished midges below a strike indicator. The water was looking-glass clear; a loon appeared underwater near the boat chasing a trout. There were so many fish rising and jumping in the cove it was dreamlike. Rob assisted me in gauging leader length and fly size and we both caught a bunch during the chironomid hatch. Then a mayfly hatch began and we switched to dry flies. Rob caught two or three before I had re-rigged my rod. I selected an Eastern dry fly pattern I had in my box and tied it on. Time was getting short. We needed to get back soon and hit the road. The rises had let up and Rob was preparing to lift anchor and I began to reel in and call it a day. I was happy with the action we had and the fact that Mr. Murphy (of Murphy’s Law) wasn’t with me this day. There was a rise form just then and I thought I’d try one more cast. I managed an accurate presentation and the trout hit the fly. With the hook set, I had another trout on, but this one was more special than the rest, taken on a March Brown dry fly from my own fly box. This was the fishing I was used to: sight casting to rising trout. It jumped and ran and dove and then jumped again near the boat. Twice it took a run below the boat and twice I led it out. It finally relented and came to the net. I believe that Rob was just as happy or even moreso than I was. Of the many trout I did catch there in the lakes of British Columbia, this was the one I’ll remember most vividly.

J.E.: The good outweighed the bad: The weather was uncooperative much of the time with wind, rain and a cold night or two requiring a wood fire. Most of the time, unsheltered Minnie was choppy due to the wind and we opted to fish nearby Stoney Lake. Even so, it was comfortable there in the yurt what with a wooden floor, wood stove, bunk beds and small kitchen area. Even a heated outdoor shower. Following a day of fishing, there were steaks and other food prepared over an outside fire. In the mornings, a hearty breakfast. One evening as a late dinner was being prepared, a storm blew in with wind, rain and hail. When it had passed, the clouds opened and a vivid double rainbow arced across the full extent of the sky. We all paused in what we were doing, awestruck. I thought it apropos to end the day that way: a rainbow above the water with all those rainbows beneath the surface. It was as if all the vivid colorations of the trout inhabiting the lake were drawn up into the very sky.

There were numerous occasions such as that which made the small misfortunes seem insignificant. There were the evenings at the campfire when the coyotes sang; the call of loons; the sight of eagles; the beauty of the rainbow trout and so many to be seen rising and jumping. Hearing of Dick’s and John’s many catches including the special trout of theirs that tail danced on top of the water. There was the unforgettable scenery of the open and rolling range land around the lake with mountains as a backdrop. Simply breathing in the high mountain air. The morning I walked up the draw behind the yurt and saw two mule deer. The friendly people of Merritt and the Lodge at Corbett, the generous Doc, my new friend John Alexander. My more than generous hosts, Dick and Rob, who arranged for me to join them. Finally, that “last retrieve” I made on the trout on a dry fly. It wasn’t as poignant as the retrieve that Rob’s old dog Sedge made on their last hunt together and which proved to be the catalyst for the events that led to my being there in BC, but it was an act that seemed to make the whole of the experience come full circle. Sedge got to do it one more time and so did I.

Left to right: Rob Pomroy, Hurley, Dick Draper, John Alexander, Mark Cudney

Come On A My House

2010-07-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

Come on a my house, I’m gonna give you candy.

Come on a my house, my house, I’m gonna give you a plum and apricot-a too, eh.

Come on a my house, my house a come on.

Come on a my house, my house. I’m gone give a you

Figs and dates and grapes and cakes eh.

Come on a my house, my house a come on.

Come on a my house, my house. I’m gonna give you

Candy.

Come on a my house, my house. I’m gonna give you

Everything.

This was Rosemary Clooney’s big hit in 1951. Now I recognize that people who did not grow up in the wonderful ‘50s would not know Rosemary Clooney from George. And, of course, no one is going to recall this as high art a hundred years from now any more than the tortured, off key whining of Justin Bieber will be remembered as great moments in musical history.

Rosie’s song crawled to the surface of my swampy brain the other day like a fetid methane bubble as I listed to Obama’s speech on immigration. Obie called for “comprehensive immigration reform” to be passed this year to stop the flood of illegals flowing across the southern border. “Comprehensive”, of course, is the code word for amnesty and comes right off the talking points memo that all Democrats and liberals use whenever the subject gets mentioned.

Obama knows there is not a farts chance in a hurricane of passing an immigration bill this year but he hopes bringing it up will curry favor with Hispanic voters and help stem the tide running against the Democrats in the fall elections.

You don’t have to be a congenital cynic like me to see through the lack of serious effort to contain the flow of illegals. (They halted construction of the fence and are going to sic the Justice Department on Arizona for trying to enforce the law.) Like the half-hearted attempts to clean up the oil in the Gulf, the Obama Team plans to use the “crisis” to further their own anti-fossil fuel and amnesty agendas.

Rosemary’s song popped into my head in the midst of a thought experiment. Suppose you owned a large tract of farmland with orchards, fields, gardens and a huge house. To your immediate south lived a large community of exceedingly poor and uneducated people. Word gets around that if they manage to get across the simple fence surrounding your property that you will make only token efforts to kick them out and will give them free food, medical care and educate their children. They hear that if they have a baby on your side of the fence that the child will immediately become a member of your family and that the parents will be permitted to remain on your farm forever. They discover that they will be paid for working in your orchards and fields and allowed to send money back to their relatives to the south. How long would it take before your farm is over run with your destitute neighbors? And, how long before you went broke trying to pay for it all?

This is precisely what the US is doing with the Mexican and South American neighbors and as long as these financial and social incentives exist, they will keep coming…. Fence or no fence.

You don’t have to be an American citizen to receive food stamps, Medicaid or welfare or even SSI (Supplemental Security Income). And, if you are deemed to be a PRUCOL alien, someone the INS decides not to remove because “it might cause undue hardship”, you are entitled to social assistance without going through the not altogether difficult process of acquiring a fraudulent Social Security Card.

The National Research Council estimates the cost of supporting illegal immigrants at $345 billion per year. Border states are already going broke supporting illegals. In 2004 California spent $10.5 billion on providing health care, education, incarceration and welfare to illegals. An estimated 15% of the school population is comprised of children of illegal aliens who are not only accommodated with free education but also, free meals and special teachers to teach in their language.

In case you missed it, California is seriously broke.

Obama, in his speech, and everyone else who pontificates on this subject, admits there are some 11 to 12 million illegals living in the US. All agree that it is impossible to send them back. Too costly, they say. Really? Why not let them go back of their own accord? During our current recession many illegals have chosen to go home because of the lack of jobs. Many politicians say that cracking down on employers who hire illegal aliens is the answer. Sure, that would help but, what about this? No more free lunch. No more welfare, free medical care or education. No more “anchor babies”. If you sneak across the border to give birth, little Jose is NOT a US citizen and entitled to all the benefits thereof. Without all the free stuff a lot of illegals would be heading home and the financial pressure on the Border States relieved. Natch, the chances of this happening are about the same as me beating Tiger. IOW, less than nil.

A lot of people display the thinking of Speaker Pelosi who said, “We have an estimated 12 million illegal aliens in our country who need our help along with unemployed minorities. Stock market profits taxes could go a long way to guarantee these people the standard of living they would like to have as Americans.” It’s hard to know where to begin with this insane statement. Let’s try. First of all, illegals are not Americans and, while I do not doubt they would enjoy a better standard of living (who wouldn’t) it remains unclear why real working and tax paying Americans should fund the improvement in life style of illegal aliens.

In addition to the bleeding heart liberals who want open borders and obligate the American taxpayer to support anyone who wants to come to the US, you have the cynical politicians who love illegal immigration. Obama and his leftist cohorts believe that their path to continued power lies with getting more and more voters on the government dole. They regard these people as reliable Democrat voters by convincing them that only the Democrats will insure continued largess from the public coffers.

If they can grant amnesty to 12 million illegals….. Well, I guess you can figure that out.

Flunking Out

2010-06-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

I have often puzzled over the gulf that exists between liberals and conservatives on how they look at the issues of the day. This is never more evident than when I visit my liberal friends and in-laws who frequently treat me with the bemused tolerance one would expect for a dimwitted and slightly addled child. To maintain peace and harmony I chew on my tongue and try not to let any political comments pass my lips.

One of my theories on how liberals and conservatives can arrive at such divergent conclusions from the same set of facts supposes that we are not, in fact, using the same facts. This theory surmises that liberals read the NYT, the Daily Kos and The Huffington Post and listen to NPR, MSNBC and CBS News. Conservatives, on the other hand, read the WSJ, Bloomberg, Townhall.com and listen to Fox News. In other words, we libs and cons may NOT be operating from the same set of facts or, at least, the emphasis or interpretation of those facts.

An older theory of mine postulated that people adopted a stance early in life… either left or right and simply stuck with it. This firmly held conviction thereafter colored whatever information they received. This tied in with another theory of mine that I call “tribalism”. I postulated that people in their early years decide to which “tribe” they belong: Hippy, punk rocker, preppie, biker, geek, etc. From there onward they adopt the dress, speech, mannerisms, life style and attitudes of that tribe. Therefore, if you decide that you are an educated, hip, urbane person concerned with the environment and socially conscious, you join the liberal tribe and accept anything “liberal” and reject as downright stupid, if not corrupt, anything labeled as “conservative”. (Note to my liberal friends: Don’t get hostile here. I am just trying to figure this shit out.)

I was never all that convinced that either of those two theories sufficiently answered my questions.

Now comes a new theory to further confuse me. Daniel Klein recently published a piece in the WSJ entitled “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader”. Mr. Klein is a professor of economics at George Mason and together with Zeljka Burturovic, a Zogby researcher, conducted a December 2008 survey of 4,835 American adults. The survey asked them eight questions about basic economics. They also asked them about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative and libertarian. The researchers here were looking for incorrect answers, and only, as Professor Klein said, “A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.” The possible responses to the questions were: 1. strongly agree 2. somewhat agree 3. somewhat disagree 4. strongly disagree and 5. not sure. “Not sures” were not counted as incorrect. I will list the questions below and the correct answers at the end of this piece so you can, like, figure out if you are, like, a liberal or like, a conservative. No, like, cheating by going to, like, the end of the article.

Pick one of the above highlighted answers to the following questions:

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.

2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.

3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.

4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.

5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.

6. Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited.

7. Free trade leads to unemployment.

8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.

So, how did the self-identified ideological groups fare in this simple economics test? Remember, we are scoring incorrect answers here.

Very conservative: 1.30 wrong

Conservative: 1.67 wrong

Libertarian: 1.38 wrong

Moderate: 3.67 wrong

Liberal: 4.69 wrong

Progressive/very liberal: 5.26 wrong

When asked about party affiliation, those responding as Democrats averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Those responding as Republicans got 1.61 incorrect.

You can read Klein’s original article (link) to get the specific scores on the individual questions and his explanations of the correct answers.

A lot of brain cells can be destroyed trying to figure out why the most liberal among us did so poorly on a simple economics test compared to the most conservative citizens. I won’t attempt that here. Suffice it to say that the “progressive/very liberal” wing of the Democrat Party has been in charge of things for some time now and this simple test helps explain the unenlightened economic policies now coming out of Washington.

Wrong answers to questions: 1. Somewhat disagree, strongly disagree. 2. Disagree. 3. Disagree. 4. Disagree. 5. Agree. 6. Agree. 7. Agree. 8. Disagree.

Score Card

2010-06-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

In February of 2009 I posted a piece entitled “Prognostications” in which I made a number of predictions about what Obama and the Democrat controlled Congress would do now that they had complete control. As I was driving back from our annual fly fishing expedition to central BC the other day I thought about that list and concluded it was time to see how I faired in my predictions. Hereafter, the list and the score thus far into the “Hopie-Changie” era.

· The Stimulus Package: Originally at some $870 billion, winding up with some add-ons at around $1 trillion, has failed miserably to prod the US out of recession. The “neo-Keynesians” that populate the Obama economic brain trust assured us that if this thing were not rammed through Congress immediately that unemployment would go above 8%. Well, it’s been hovering around 10% for many months and only that low because the millions of workers who are no longer even bothering to look for work are no longer counted in that calculation. 325,000 people dropped out of the “lookers” category last month. Congress recently passed an extension of unemployment compensation to 99 weeks, assuring that the unenthusiastic and disinterested will remain on the sidelines. The recession continues. The deficit? Greece here we come. According to the Heritage Foundation the US is poised to have the deficit exceed the GDP in the near future. Score: YES.

· Card Check Legislation: They made some feeble attempts at this but backed off to concentrate on the health care bill. Obama did reward the unions big time by giving them big chunks of GM and Chrysler stock when the two auto giants went tits up. Score one NO.

· Give More Money to the Auto Companies: The US government now own most of GM and the bondholders at Chrysler (these are the secured creditors in a bankruptcy) got stiffed. GM paid back part of the money, but that money came from previously borrowed government funds. So, you can’t really say they paid off the loan. They still owe some $40 billion. Score: YES

· Pass the Fairness Doctrine: They did not really have the courage to tackle this one and totally piss off the millions of listeners of conservative talk radio. Instead they dispatched Mark Lloyd, the Diversity Czar for the FCC to see if he can “back door” the thing through regulations. Score: NO.

· Restrict drilling for oil and gas: At the time of posting “Prognostications” Salazar had already cancelled leases and set aside huge swathes of the west where no drilling was allowed. Now, with the oil disaster in the Gulf every-thing is shut down. The irony is that if the regs had not forced the oil companies to drill in such deep water (a mile down) and instead were allowed to drill on land or in shallow water, this thing would have been fixed already. Score: YES

· Not allow the construction of nuclear power plants: Obama says they want to build them but they shut down the Yucca Mountain repository where they were to store the waste signaling their real intentions. Score: YES

· Enact cap and trade: It has already passed the House and is currently introduced in the Senate. Debate has been stalled with the intrusion of other matters like voting themselves a raise and fine-tuning their special medical program. Some GOP Senators will vote aye. Score: YES

· Toss money at solar and wind power: Money for these industries was included in the stimulus bill and much more to come with the cap and trade legislation. Score: YES

· Abandon missile defense and reduce US nuclear arms: Obama cut funding for missile defense programs, refused to provide funding to upgrade the US’s aging nuclear arsenal, cancelled the missile defense shield for Europe and made a lopsided deal with Russia to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. Score: Big YES

· Enact restrictions on gun ownership: Hillary is trying to work something through a UN agreement. Score: NO

· Appoint “living constitution” fans to Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed and Elana Kagan has been nominated and awaiting confirmation in the Senate. She’s sure to be approved. Score: YES

· Squelch school choice: The Congress withdrew funding for the charter school program in Washington, DC, thus ending a successful program and signaling the Adminis-tration’s aversion to charter schools. Of course, the Dems are much beholding to the teacher’s unions and they hate charter schools. Obama has created a program called “Race to the top” providing certain states with substantial funding. Some states are refusing to participate as the money comes with the Feds getting too involved in local schools. BTW, the June 5^th edition of the WSJ has a great piece about Madeleine Sacker, an independent filmmaker, who has created a documentary called “The Lottery”. It’s about the thousands of Harlem kids and their parents who show up for a lottery to try and secure the few slots open at Harlem Success Academy. Surprise! The teacher’s union paid Acorn $500,000 to pretend to be parental protesters. Score: YES

· Abandon tort reform: Of course. Don’t be silly. Score: YES

· Attempt to make illegals citizens: They are trying to push “comprehensive” immigration reform, but not yet. Score: NO

· Put the government in charge of health care: You know all about that one. Score YES

Somehow I neglected to put tax increases in the Feb ’09 post. It did, however, appear in previous posts. Here’s a list of the tax increases the Democrats have enacted so far.

· $500 billion included in the Health Care bill.

· Double taxation on corporations doing business overseas.

· When the Bush tax cuts expire taxes on upper incomes will increase from 35% to 39.6%. Dividends will be taxed at 39.6% instead of 15%. The capital gains tax will increase from 15% to 20%. The inheritance tax will increase from 0% this year to 55%.

Congress is currently working on a bill to raise taxes by $43 billion on corporations and another bill to tax S-Corps (small businesses taxed as individuals). While the details of this one are as yet unclear, it appears to apply to independent operators like architects, accountants and the service industries. It sounds like it will hit them at about 15%. So much for the talk about helping small business and not taxing the little guy.

Another thing I did not anticipate is Obama’s muddled and wrong-headed foreign policy. He has offended and insulted the US’s allies, especially Israel, Poland and the UK while trying to suck up to the Muslim world. This has only confused our allies and emboldened our enemies. The combination of an isolated Israel and an aggressive Iran and Syria only make the likelihood of war in the Middle East more certain than not. He’s pushing Israel into a corner. Watch the price of oil when that one tees up.

As a new prediction (at least to blog readers) I feel the sum of Obama’s economic policies insure a double dip and protracted recession. You cannot crowd out capital with an annual deficit of $1.5 trillion dollars, raise taxes on individuals and corporations, driving jobs and businesses offshore, raise the price of energy with cap and trade taxes and expect a growing economy. They’ve got a lot of Harvard folks in the Administration, but they will need to get glass eyes installed in their navels if they expect to see where they are going.

Gaia Is Pissed

2010-04-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

April 14^th on the run up to Earth Day, Mother Gaia or maybe Mother Nature decided to show us who is boss by blowing the top off Iceland’s unpronounceable Mt. Eyjafjallajokull. It took the glacier sitting on top with it and sent a plume of volcanic gas and ash 5 to 7 miles high. As this cloud drifted over Western Europe, 100,000 flights got cancelled during a week causing massive disruption. (Note: I found several spellings for this volcano and one explanation. “Eyja = island, fjall = mountain and “joekull = glacier. Hereafter I will just call it Eyja)

Eyja last erupted in 1821 and that event lasted a year or two depending on which account you believe. It also erupted in 920 and 1612 and on each occasion within six months the adjacent Mt. Katla, the “witch volcano”, followed suit. Katla, topped by the Myrdalsjoekull glacier is reputed to be ten times larger than Eyja and last erupted in 1918. We can easily imagine what kind of mess would result if Katla decides to blow.

Iceland is home to hundreds of volcanoes and they go off whenever Mother Nature decides to give us a lesson in humility.

In 1783 Iceland’s huge Laki volcano erupted and the cloud of ash blanketed the globe causing massive crop failures and famine worldwide during a “year without summer” and an exceptionally harsh winter. This is climate change you can believe in.

History provides other examples of volcanoes dropping temperatures. Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, for example, is said to have dropped global temperatures by 1 degree F. Mt. Tambora in Indonesia went off in 1815 killing tens of thousands in the initial blast. More importantly, it caused what has been called “volcanic winter” and resulted in the worst famine in the 19^th century in North American as well as Europe. Clearly, we have much more to fear from global cooling than global warming. Warming alarmists worry global temperatures will rise by a couple of degrees by the turn of the next century, while one of these angry mountains can change temperatures in a few seconds. And we can’t do a damn thing about it. Nor can we do anything about some unnamed and unseen asteroid presently hurtling through space aimed at Kansas. If you want to worry about climate change, give that one some thought. Can’t happen? Well, it’s happened before.

One Muslim cleric seems to have found an explanation. Mr. Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi said in a recent statement that “women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society” cause earthquakes. Since earthquakes precede and seemingly trigger volcanic eruptions, it is safe to conclude that mini-skirts and skimpy tops cause volcanoes to erupt. This theory will be put to the test on Monday. Jen McCreight, a Purdue student, has organized a “Boobquake” event with 40,000 followers so far. They will be simultaneously exposing and shaking their boobs in an effort to induce an earthquake. If Katla chooses that day to explode, burkas may replace the bare midriff look overnight. God forbid.

Meanwhile, Harry Reid, a man not to be humbled by Mother Nature, plans to introduce the Cap and Trade legislation in the Senate on April 26^th. This notwithstanding the revelations of the “ClimateGate” scandal or the confession by Phil Jones, the former head of the Climate Research Unit and main author of the UN’s IPCC report, that “there has been no statistically significant warming in the past fifteen years.” 'Why worry about facts?' say the Democrats. Let’s ram this job busting, economy-destroying piece of legislation through instead while we still have our jobs in the Senate. Makes sense. Might as well take over as much of the US economy as possible before the voters toss them out.

Done Deal

2010-03-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

So, the Democrats, after 14 months of contentious internal wrangling, finally managed to pass their mammoth overhaul of the US health care system. Since the Republicans in the prohibitive minority, could never do anything to stop it, the problem always was to convince enough Democrats to vote for this socialist wet dream.

Making laws has often been compared to making sausage… a messy business. But, the ugly process of cramming this unpopular law through congress makes the production of links and patties positively clean and efficient by comparison. 'Sleazy' is a word that comes immediately to mind. 'Arrogant' is another.

To get it through the Senate where Democrats held a veto proof majority before the historic election of Republican Scott Brown to occupy the “Kennedy Seat”, special deals were struck with Senators to secure their votes. Mary Landrieu of LA sold her vote for the $300 million “Louisiana Purchase", and Ben Nelson sold out for the “Cornhusker Kickback” for a similar amount. Much less discussed were: “carve outs” for Mutual of Omaha and other insurers in Nebraska; $100 million for Chris Dodd (a hospital in CT) and Tom Harkin got a hospital in Iowa. Democrats in Florida, North Dakota, Montana, Vermont and Michigan all got exemptions for their states from the substantial cuts to Medicare Advantage, a popular program with seniors.

Perhaps the most predictable of the breaks was that for the UAW. They got an exemption from the new tax on “Cadillac” health insurance plans. And why not? In the 2006 and 2008 election cycles the UAW gave $1.5 billion of their members dues to Democrat candidates. After giving them 50% of GM, the Democrats continue to pay them back.

To force the Senate bill through the House, Nancy Pelosi and the White House had to pull out all the stops. We don’t know all the strong-arm tactics employed to convince wavering Democrats to vote for the Senate bill that many members admitted they hated. Their constituents were telling them in no uncertain terms that a “yes” vote would insure their defeat this fall. Kim Strassel (WSJ, 3/19) wrote about the plight of Jason Altmire of PA. His story may be similar to other reluctant Dems. She likened his situation to a man being forced to walk the plank with his choice being facing the cutlasses of angry pirates behind him or sharks circling below. The sharks, of course, were the voters and the pirates organizations like MoveOn.org and SEIU who were already running negative ads against him in his district and promising to sabotage his election campaign in the fall by withholding money and running primary challengers against him. On the other hand, a “yes” vote pretty much assured he’d get his ass handed to him in the fall and have to go find a real job.

Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a no vote last time, got a nice ride on Air Force One, some face time with Obama, and Denny’s wife got a job working for Michelle. Jim Matheson was convinced to vote yes when his brother suddenly got appointed to a lifetime position as a Federal judge.

Surely the most cynical of the purchased “yeses” were that of Reps. Cardoza and Costa of CA. Their districts have been devastated by the decision to shut off the water to the San Joaquin Valley to protect the two inch Delta Smelt. Environmental groups had sued and a Federal judge decreed that the endangered minnow required shutting off irrigation to 1,000,000 acres of farm land, throwing 40,000 farmers and their workers into bankruptcy or onto the streets. Turning the “bread basket of America” into a dust bowl and ruining the economy of the region was not enough to sway the Obama Administration from their love of the Delta smelt. But, getting two more votes for ObamaCare? Screw the minnow! The water has been turned on.

To get the health care bill passed into law the Democrat controlled House had to pass the Senate version without changes. With any changes it would have to go back to the Senate where the election of Scott Brown had eliminated the veto proof majority. But, many Dem House members hated a number of provisions in the Senate bill, particularly language that provided for public funding of abortions. Bart Stupak (D, MI) led a group of Democrats strongly opposed this provision and threatened to provide enough votes to defeat the bill. After serious arm twisting failed to sway him, President Obama stepped in and offered Bart political cover by promising an Executive Order prohibiting public dollars for abortion. While everyone agreed that it was “not worth the paper it’s printed on”, Stupak and his small group figured it a sufficient fig leaf to vote yes for the bill.

The House decided to use “reconciliation”, a parliamentary gimmick that would require only 51 votes in the Senate, to “fix” the objectionable bits of the original Senate bill.

At the same time the Congressional Budget Office released the analysis of the bill’s impact based on a bogus collection of assumptions, double counting, Medicare cuts and tax increases. The CBO came back with the wildly implausible projection that the deficit would be slightly reduced by the bill. This flimsy piece of political cover, coupled with the Stupak cave produced sufficient Democrats to pass the bill with zero Republican votes.

Done Deal!! Pop the corks on the champagne, let the party begin! Obama gloated and continued his speechifying touting the bill even after he signed it. As the Congress packed their bags and their hangovers to head home and face their constituents, the details of what’s in this 2600 page monster started to get analyzed and its impacts calculated. Dozens of major corporations now estimate that the bill will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. (AT&T says it will be a cool $1 billion). This is only the beginning of the reality check. Those disparaged prognosticators who pegged the cost of the bill at close to $2.5 trillion will certainly be vindicated. There is no doubt that this take over of the health care system will be a killer of jobs and a massive increase to the deficit at a time when the US economy can afford neither.

As I have said before, this legislation has never been about improving health care or containing costs. On 3/20 the WSJ reprinted a 1996 piece by the late Milton Friedman. In it, the brilliant economist explains that the rapid rise in the cost of medical care has been the result of policies that separate the receiver of care from the entity that pays for it. Most people receive medical insurance from their employer (either management or union) or from Medicare and Medicaid. Since someone else is paying, there is little incentive for the users to concern themselves with cost and that encourages the overuse of services. With users unconcerned about cost, providers face no competitive pressures to reduce them. And, since the employer provided insurance is tax deductible to the company and tax free to the employee, this distortion of the market has grown over the years.

Medical Savings Accounts were created to let market forces do their magic in a small segment of the health care universe. People could set aside some tax-free savings in a HSAs to pay for routine medical expenses and purchase high deductible insurance in case of something really serious. When spending their own money, people become much more judicious. ObamaCare will eliminate this common sense approach using the gentle persuasion of the IRS.

The unchecked predations of the trial lawyers who attack health care providers for crimes real or imagined has also added greatly the rapid inflation in health care costs. This not only drives up costs directly but also results in a tremendous amount of “defensive medicine” where doctors and hospitals add tests and procedures in anticipation of lawsuits.

ObamaCare does nothing to address these factors that increase costs. In fact, it makes them worse. Provisions in the bill actually make it easier for tort lawyers to sue doctors and hospitals. Pushing more people into Medicaid will not reduce costs and it certainly won’t improve quality. Besides, debt heavy states can ill afford to have these costs fobbed off on them.

So it’s a done deal…. Against the wishes of a vast majority of the American public. The new taxes start immediately but the “benefits” won’t show up until 2014. In the meantime, we will get to find out what it really means and hire the 16,000 new IRS agents to track down and jail the scofflaws who refuse to buy health insurance. (String them up!) It is difficult not to believe that the whole purpose here is to drive private insurance and health care delivery out of business. Perhaps the Left believes that health care nirvana arrives when the US has a government run system like Canada or Great Britain. I can assure you after living in Canada for the last 15 years, that Americans are going to hate it.

Hawaiian Strolls

2010-03-27T22:10:00.000-07:00

One of my pleasures here on Maui this winter has been a morning stroll down the beach. Rain, shine or howling trade winds I spend a happy hour, winding up at a small grocery to purchase my daily fix of the “Wall Street Journal”. I am hardly alone on these jaunts and, over the course of many weeks, have come to some conclusive observations.

1) Women’s swim suits have become considerably smaller since my life guarding days at Hamburg Town Park on Lake Erie in the late ‘50s. On the other hand, men’s suits have become significantly larger. I have been wondering if this is some previously undiscovered “Law of the Conservation of Fabric”? Men’s suits now extend to the knee and often beyond. As an added piece of coverage you often see guys wearing long sleeved tops. How can you swim wearing all that stuff? Women’s suits do not have much further to go… unless they adopt the French approach and forgo the top altogether or reduce to the Brazilian thong. Obviously, as a human ethologist I take no position on the current state of swim wear design or where the future may lead us. (I took a course in ethology in college and pulled some stomach muscles laughing at my professor, a chunky, bespeckled guy, dressed in a twig embedded sports jacket, string tie and moccasins. He was doing his imitation of the mating dance of the male prairie chicken and didn’t seem to notice when I fell out of my chair.)

I have always chosen to swim in a Speedo and although I have three with me, I am reluctant to take them out of the drawer. I did an ocean swim in one when we first arrived and as I trudged back to my towel, I felt conspicuous, as if the spectators were saying, “Funny, he doesn’t look European.” Back in the room I checked my profile and decided that at 68 maybe it was time to make some concessions to fashion and go with the sea anchor suit instead of the Speedo.

2) On my jaunts I encounter an amazing number of SUV-like strollers and people lugging incredibly young babies. Often the Humvee strollers are loaded with baby gear and the tyke slung in a carrier hanging about Mom or Dad’s neck. In mid-morning it can be pretty hot here and I wonder about these tiny persons wrapped in blankets with a cover over the stroller. It’s probably 100 degrees in there and frying the little nipper’s brain. The larger question: why take a vacation with a newborn? Even more curious is the couple vacationing with not only the newborn but also two other kids under the age of four. How much fun can that be in a hotel room? And, what will the kids remember of this trip to a tropical paradise? We would never have considered such an expedition when our kids were small. Of course, at that time we could not really afford the kids, much less a vacation to Hawaii.

3) A great number of my fellow amblers cannot seem to part with their electronic pacifiers. Cell phones, of course, either stuck in their face or holstered at the hip ready for a quick draw. You never know when you need to Google something. I passed a young woman going in the opposite direction yesterday. She was shouting into her phone. (Apparently you need to shout to be heard when talking to someone on the mainland.) Having both reversed course, we passed again 20 minutes later. She was still bleating into the phone like a motivational speaker on speed. “Same call?” I wondered.

Speed walkers and joggers all have iPod buds stuck in their ears and wear glazed, determined expressions. It must be some sort of requirement these days to have music blasting in your ears when you exercise. Perhaps it dulls the pain? Occasionally they toss me a dirty glance as they motor through the exhaust fumes of my cigar. I nod and smile in return. “Aloha.”

(Another reason not to wear an iPod while jogging--read this article. -ed.)

I am quite confident my electronically connected compatriots on the foot paths don’t notice the brilliant and varying hues of the ocean: where the coral meets the white sand or where it turns indigo at the drop off. They surely didn’t notice that the waves plunge here where the gradient is steep or break and roll further on where it’s shallow. Most likely they missed the two whales blowing and splashing just beyond that moored sailboat and I know they missed that the old gentleman pushing his wife in the wheelchair was singly softly to her. I doubt they heard the two male cardinals arguing over disputed territory in the kakui trees just beyond the Marriott. Sad really. They might as well be exercising on their treadmill in the basement.

John Adams, it is said, walked every day. He lived to be 90 years old. He died on July 4^th in 1826, the exact same day as his friend/rival, Thomas Jefferson. Apparently Jefferson’s only exercise was pleasuring female slaves. Right there I’ve got a lot to think about on a morning stroll down the beach.

Sedge’s Last Retrieve

2010-03-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

The Story Behind the Painting

Note: I have received reminders from two of my three faithful readers that no new posts have been added to my blog in some time. True. Once again this year, we are hiding out in Hawaii escaping the gray and wet of the Pacific NW and for some reason when in Hawaii I find it difficult to sit down and write. I can’t even get enthusiastic about writing about the wrangling of the Democrats as they try to pass a health care bill nobody wants.

We learned last week that “The Conservator”, the quarterly magazine of Ducks Unlimited Canada, has published the painting “Sedge’s Last Retrieve” and my accompanying story. A few days later we learned that “The Retriever News”, a US based magazine aimed at sporting retrievers, will also publish the painting and story in their April edition. Hey, other than indignant letters to the editor, it’s the first thing (and likely the last) I ever had published. True, they paid me nothing and it’s pretty brief but…

The picture and the story as published below gives, you the gist of how it happened. What follows is the ‘rest of the story’.

The story behind the painting, "Sedge's Last Retrieve" is one of sentiment. True, it's been argued by art critics that sentimentality is to be avoided when painting. Nevertheless when the challenge arose to recreate a poignant moment experienced by two veteran waterfowlers, sentiment became the unavoidable subject. Dick Draper, British Columbian sportsman, retired entrepreneur, dog lover and former U.S. Navy SEAL, commissioned me to capture that moment for posterity. The following narrative, in his own words.

Mark Cudney

It certainly looked like a lousy day for ducks: high clouds, dead calm and warm. Worse, the northern birds taking advantage of the mild fall weather had not moved down yet, and the locals had gotten an advanced degree in decoys and steel shot. But Rob Pomroy and I were on a mission to get his aging Labrador Retriever, Sedge, out for one final hunt. Sedge had been fading fast in recent weeks and we worried this might be our last chance.

Rob and I met when we both did a stint as fly fishing guides in Whistler and despite our age difference (he’s as young as my son), we became companions in our shared passions of hunting and fishing.

Old Sedge had been for years, our constant partner at the duck club and did yeoman’s duty as the bow lookout on our fly fishing expeditions to central British Columbia. We recognized these duties would soon fall to another.

Despite the gloomy prognosis for the hunt, we put out the decoys with the usual care and settled in the blind to wait. The few flocks that came by were high and wide and arrogantly uninterested in our set-up. Finally a mallard, which may have been the last uneducated mallard in lower British Columbia, approached within range. Rob and I both opened fire.

Sedge saw the duck fall dead into the water and hobbled out as fast as his 13 year old arthritic legs and cancer-afflicted hips would take him. He mouthed that mallard and headed back but it soon became obvious he wouldn’t make it. He stopped and stared at the blind. Immediately, Rob waded out and picked up Sedge who refused to release the mallard. As he made his way back to the blind with that dog in his arms, tears filled my eyes. And I cursed myself for leaving my camera at home.

The next day I contacted Mark Cudney, an outdoor artist and writer acquaintance whose skills in both fields have greatly impressed me. I sent Mark some photos of Rob and Sedge and he went to work on some preliminary sketches. The final acrylic painting entitled “Sedge’s Last Retrieve” perfectly captures that poignant moment.

Sedge died two months aferwards and as a loyal companion of shared adventures and affections, he is sorely missed.

Dick Draper

Mark Cudney and I never met face-to-face until the painting had been completed. He is the cousin of Jim Cudney, my college roommate for three years, who a couple of years ago sent me a print of one of Mark’s paintings as a Christmas gift. Mark and I then began an email relationship fueled by our mutual love for fly-fishing, the outdoors in general and writing. Mark, of course, is a professional writer and artist and has had a number of his works published, especially in the high end “Gray’s Sporting Journal” and “Sporting Classics” among others. He also has published a book. IOW, he’s a damn good writer and was kind enough to read some of my stumbling efforts and offer helpful suggestions. His art that has appeared on the covers of the above magazines impresses also. You can check that out at www.markcudney.com/. This is where you go to order a print.

When I contacted Mark about doing a painting of Rob carrying Sedge back to the blind I had absolutely no clue how much work was involved in doing a painting like this. So, I asked him how much money he wanted for the job. Understand that all our contact took place through email. Until we met last August when I went back to Buffalo for my 50^th high school reunion, we never even had a telephone conversation. Mark suggested a trade for his services…. He would like a new fly rod and reel in exchange doing the painting. Now unless you’re talking about a hand made split bamboo rod or an antique, the best rods out there go for around $700 or $800. A decent reel is another 150 bucks, maybe. Sounded OK to me.

As the weeks dragged into months while Mark was working away on the painting, I started to do a little math in my head and figured that Mark would be making something like ten cents an hour on this gig. I emailed him and said, “Are you sure about this deal? Would you like to renegotiate?” He came back and said that, no, he was happy with the original arrangement and that he had “his own reasons” for taking the job. He also advised me that when he was working as a commercial artist, a project like this would go for about $14,000. Gulp. I figured he’d need to sell a lot of prints to get even a modest return on his investment of time.

Mark drove up to meet me when we were staying at my former roomie’s house outside of Buffalo during the reunion visit. I suggested we go fly rod shopping to get the payment part of our deal completed. We trooped off to several fly shops in Buffalo to test-drive some high-end fly rods. Nothing impressed him on that day and he later decided on a Winston (Boron, 9ft in 4 wt) and a nice Ross reel.

When the painting arrived in Vancouver (in packaging that would have survived an air drop from 5000 feet) I got it framed and headed for Whistler where Rob had been waiting anxiously. It so happened that all his relatives were in town for a family reunion and that suggested an “unveiling party” would be most appropriate. A little champagne, some appies and a damp eyed unveiling marked the occasion.

Sedge’s Last Retrieve now hangs in the entry to our house, displacing a very nice Crosby watercolor. (Note: Rob has Print #1 and I have promised him that when I take the big dirt nap, the original will be his. I added the caveat that if I should drown on one of our fishing trips as a result of a blow to the back of the head with a canoe paddle that the deal is off.)

This fall when Rob and I were sitting in a duck blind waiting for some ducks to show up, we started talking up our return trip to Minnie Lake in central BC in early June. We agreed that it would really great if Mark could join us at the yurt on Minnie. It will be his first visit to the Pacific NW. Mark has spent his whole life fishing the small streams and rivers in western New York and reports that the biggest trout he’d ever caught on a fly was an 18” brown. Nice fish indeed for those waters but, we both thought he needed to hook into one of Minnie’s 8 pound rainbows and turn that new 4 wt of his into a knot. Mark agrees and will be joining my friend John Alexander from Seattle, Rob and me on the 1^st of June. Sedge’s replacement, Hurley, will be along in his official role as the new bow lookout.

The Depends Bomber

2010-01-06T23:01:00.000-08:00

“The US does not have an (air) security system; it has system for bothering people.” Shlomo Dror, Israeli Air Security Expert, 2002.

The Obama Administration dodged anther bullet on Christmas day when a Nigerian Muslim by the name of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (hereafter referred to as UFA for obvious reasons) attempted to set off 80 grams of PETN hidden in his Depends-like briefs while aboard NW flight 253 as it approached Detroit. You may have seen the video of what 50 grams of PETN can do to a jet liner. 80 grams would surely have done the job, killing all 300 aboard and an unknown number of unsuspecting innocents on the ground. Had UFA’s detonator worked, the public reaction to the resulting catastrophe would be furious rather than the “ho hum, another failed terrorist plot”.

The President, not wanting to disrupt his vacation in Hawaii, took three days to comment on the incident. In his statement he used the word “alleged” numerous times.

Alleged?

Alert passengers subdued this turkey with his genitals on fire and his diaper loaded with high explosives! Obama’s statement plus the fact that UFA was arrested and given a lawyer rather than turned over to the military for questioning certified yet again this Administration’s return to the pre-9/11 mentality of treating terrorism as a legal matter. We know how well that worked out during the Clinton years.

With the lawyer’s sage advice, UFA immediately clammed up and that eliminated any possibility of obtaining any useful information from the guy. Had the CIA been given a crack at him and allowed to water board, we might have learned some useful information about his network in Yemen. Not to worry said spokesman John Brennan on the Sunday talk shows, they might offer UFA a plea bargain to obtain info. Al Qaeda is laughing their asses off. Plea him down to what? Smoking on an aircraft?

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a statement saying, “…the system worked,” thus sliding just under the wire for the Stupidest Statement of 2009 Award. This is no small achievement given her other statements in ’09, such as her pronouncement that “terrorism” would now be called “man caused disasters”. She also opined that veterans, gun rights advocates and various right-wingers were serious threats to national security. Among many notable challengers on the Obama Team, ol’ Janet may be the most uniquely unqualified of the lot.

The monumental absurdity of Napolitano’s statement became glaringly obvious when it was revealed that not only had his own father reported to the State Department that his son was a threat but also, that the British had warned the US about this guy over a year ago. He had purchased a one-way ticket with cash and traveled with no luggage. The Brits had denied him a visa and yet he had a valid one from the US. This nut job was waving more red flags than a North Korean May Day parade. The only way he could have been more obvious would be to wear a tee shirt with the word “Terrorist” on the front and an arrow pointing to his crotch with the words “bomb here” next to it.

The system worked? Nothing worked… most importantly the detonator. A week after the incident Obama, after meeting with his “security advisors”, announced that, yes, “mistakes were made”. That’s my all time favorite Washington cliché. It covers crimes big and small. He informed us that from now on they would be looking more carefully at people flying in from certain Middle Eastern countries.

That’s a start but still avoids the major and blindingly obvious issue: 100% of the terrorists are Islamic fanatics, young men and primarily Arabs. Obama’s new policy would not have stopped UFA since he boarded the plane in Amsterdam. And, what about flights originating at US airports? The BHO administration, and Bush’s before him, refuse to do the one thing that would make us safer….PROFILE. Giving young Muslim men the identical scrutiny as white haired grandmothers from Omaha can only be described as idiotic.

This political correct mania and reluctance to offend any Muslims is what got 13 soldiers and one unborn child killed at Ft. Hood recently. And, it’s behind the decision to try KSM and his 9-11 terrorist cohorts in NYC instead of using military tribunals.

I can’t understand why Obama thinks it perfectly fine to vaporize suspected terrorists in Pakistan with missiles from Predator drones, but if we happen to catch one, we give him US Constitutional rights and a free lawyer. God help any SEALs or spec ops guys who might give the terrorist a fat lip in the process of capturing him. And profiling? Furgetaboutit.

Meanwhile, the TSA and FAA are dreaming up more ways to make air travel even more inconvenient and intrusive. Not only will we be just taking off our shoes and having our toothpaste and shampoo confiscated, carry-ons are now forbidden and no standing up or potty breaks on the last hour of the flight. What’s that supposed to do? Next up: full body scanners. They’ll see what Granny has in her knickers but still won’t give any special attention to the young man from Saudi Arabia with the sweat running down his forehead. Maybe everyone should simply refuse to fly until some common sense gets injected into the issue? I wonder how long it would take?

The New Deniers

2009-12-22T23:55:00.000-08:00

Skeptics of man made global warming have been called “deniers”, a name purposely chosen to tie them to “holocaust deniers”. In other words, nut cases refusing to recognize the obvious. Skeptics like me were held in contempt and shouted down by the true believers. Most skeptics kept their doubts about the doomsday predictions to themselves.

One would have thought that after the publication of over 3000 emails and reams of data either hacked or released by a whistle blower on November 17th from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, that things would change. I naively expected that the scandal dubbed “ClimateGate” would anger journalists and editors and they would now aggressively investigate and report on what appears to be a massive fraud. HA! Silly me.

“The Vancouver Sun” reluctantly ran a brief report on “ClimateGate” a week or so after the story broke on the internet and then pretended it did not matter, running one global warming scare piece after another on the buildup to the climate conference in Copenhagen. Today they ran four pieces lamenting the failure of the UN conference to impose massive restrictions and taxes on Canada and the developed world.

The ClimateGate emails revealed that the dons at CRU had fudged and cherry picked the data, conspired to “peer review” each other’s work, frustrated FOI requests for other researchers to see their data and methods and pressured scientific journals to exclude articles critical of their positions. Now they claim they have “lost” the original data on which they based their research! They also wrote each other lamenting the inability of their theories to account for recent cooling. Pretty damning stuff and those defending the emails as simply ‘banter between scientists’ sounded more than a little lame.

Honest and diligent reporters should have smelled out this story years ago. Canadians Steve McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick have been working on it for years and have written papers discrediting Dr. Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph widely used by alarmists. The graph showed a dramatic rise in temperatures in the last century and eliminated the Medieval Warming Period of 800 years ago. M and M, as the CRU scientists called them, discredited the hockey stick proxy data showing that they had cherry picked the data. (Recently Russia revealed the CRU had also selectively utilized the weather station data provided to them by Russia. CRU researchers only used 25% of the data, selecting the warmest locations.) McIntyre also made NASA back off from their contention that 1998 was the warmest year on record. It was actually 1934. NASA admitted their error. Did you read about any of this in your local newspaper or see it on TV? No, of course not. Should they take Al Gore’s Nobel Prize away and give it to McIntyre and McKitrick? Certainly.

You would think that when new evidence is presented a rational person would reevaluate their position. That does not seem to be the case with global warming (oops. Climate Change). And, with record breaking cold and massive snow dumps in Europe and North America even before winter’s official start (yesterday) one would expect some concern. Hey, it actually snowed in Houston and collected on the beaches in the south of France. Hello. Oh, I forgot, that’s climate change formerly known as global warming. Right.

There seem to be two camps that have a vested interest in perpetuating the global warming alarmism: The scientists who receive massive amounts of money from various governments to conduct their research. If scientists scream the world is coming to an end government opens the purse to fund the research. CRU received $20 million from the Brits. The US has doled out far more. This camp also includes those who invest in industries poised to gain from government funded alternative energy projects and those who can get in on the carbon trading schemes.

The other camp includes socialists who believe the solution to all the ills of society can be rectified by a world government. Craig McInnes wrote a piece in today’s Sun (After Copenhagen: Political Climate Change Begins at Home). He summed it up for us with this quote: “What Copenhagen demonstrates again is that we don’t have a system of international governance that allows a global interest to override national interests…” Just what Canadians need, the UN telling us how many cow (or moose) farts are allowed, how we can heat or light our homes or whether we can barbecue a steak. If you think about the UN Food for Oil scandal or the ongoing slaughter in Darfur you can probably guess how well global governance might work out.

What about the editors and journalists, you might ask? I suppose some are just lazy or hired to be the “environmental reporter” inclined to lean left and green. They have tended to just parrot news releases and propaganda put out by environmental groups without doing any serious checking of the facts. Hey, scary stuff sells papers. Don’t rock the boat.

If you really want to get information on global warming you have only to go to the internet. (Journalist take note.) You can start by viewing a special report by Fox News called “Global Warming, Or a Lot of Hot Air”. It ran last Sunday but it’s now posted on YouTube (part 1 of many--look for other links). If I could find it, you can. Next I would suggest Steve McIntyre’s site, Climate Audit and then Climate Depot. If you still believe in global warming after a little honest research God love ya. You’re a New Denier.

The Fisting Czar

2009-12-15T22:37:00.000-08:00

Note: This piece contains adult content. If you have cable it’s probably not too shocking but….. you are forewarned.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, openly gay Kevin Jennings is Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” (the official title: Assistant Deputy Director for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools within the Department of Education). Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Jennings was the Executive Director of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) which he founded and where he was paid an annual salary of $273,573.

Jennings encountered some grief after his appointment when it was revealed that he, in his former role as a teacher, had advised a student who had revealed he’d had a homosexual encounter with an older man. He did not suggest that such activities might be unwise, but only that a condom might be a good idea in the future. While that raised some questions, it was not enough to get him fired.

Recent revelations posted by Scott Baker, co-host of B-Cast at Gateway Pundit and Biggovernment.com should, if there is any sanity left in the World, do the job. GLSEN and Jennings were giving seminars to students and teachers in Massachusetts in 1995 and were discovered by Mass Resistance to be distributing a booklet entitled: “The Little Black Book: V2.0 Queer in the 21^st Century”. This illustrated manual exposed teens to the bizarre homosexual practices of fisting (inserting one’s hand into the anus of another male), rimming (tongue to anus contact) and water sports (the joys of urinating on one another).

The Little Black Book also discussed the pressing issue of whether to “spit or swallow” and offered a helpful list of the local gay bars where teens could hook up with older gays. Gee, to think that I spent my teen years trying to unravel the mysteries of bra hooks when all this stuff was out there.

In 2000 GLSEN and Jennings sponsored a conference at Tufts University where kids as young as 12 were instructed on the technique of fisting and “fisting kits” were handed out. I am not exactly sure what a fisting kit is and, frankly, at this point can live without knowing the specifics. And, of course, the old dilemma of spitting vs. swallowing came up again, this time under the question of “is it rude?” I wondered when I read that… which one? Or, the whole concept? And, of course, helpful hints were provided on how the teens could hook up with older pedophiles. I had to wonder why they did not show old re-runs of ABC’s, “To Catch a Predator” just to balance things out.

I have always believed that what you do in your own bedroom with another consenting adult is nobody’s business. I am also convinced that people attracted to their own sex have always existed, although I have been skeptical of the percentages promoted by the gay activists. Of course, there are no gays in Iran and if they were ever to find one, they would kill him.

My problem with the gay movement is that I object to having their life style rubbed in my face. They are not so much after acceptance and equal rights as in convincing everyone that their sexual preferences are normal. What I really object to is the attempt to promote this life style to young and impressionable youth. They are recruiting among teens and pre-teens struggling to figure out their sexual identity. You will have a hard time convincing me that a guy like Jennings who thinks it’s just swell to teach 12 year olds the joys of fisting and hooking up with old pedophiles, has any concept of “safe” schools. If Obama had any sense of shame, he would fire this idiot tomorrow.

Tale of Two Crimes

2009-12-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

Unless you have been in a coma or perhaps hiding out in the Space Station, you have certainly heard about the murder of four police officers in Lakewood, WA. Executed is more like it. They were all sitting in a booth having morning coffee before their shift when a dirt bag by the name of Maurice Clemmons walked in and shot them all. One officer managed to get off a round hitting Clemmons in the gut before he himself was killed.

A massive manhunt began and I told my wife as we watched the TV coverage, “This asshole is never going to see the inside of a courtroom.” Sure enough, 48 hours later a cop recognized Clemmons and gunned him down. The carefully worded statements suggested that, yes Clemmons did have a gun, but that he was nowhere near it when the officer shot his sorry ass. The overwhelming public sentiment was “good riddance”. Debate then shifted to apportioning blame for whether Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas or the judge in Seattle should be held responsible for letting this guy run loose given his repeated convictions and penchant for violence. The question of whether the cop had gunned down an unarmed man never came up and nobody really cared.

About the same time another news story popped up, but on this one you would really need to be alert since none of the major networks except FOX gave it any coverage. The news: three Navy SEALs are going to be court marshaled in January for the crime of “abusing” a terrorist.

Perhaps you remember back in 2004 four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah, Iraq were captured by the Al Queda in Iraq insurgents. They were executed, mutilated, dragged through the streets, burned and hung from a bridge over the Tigris River. After years of searching, the ringleader of the group, Ahmend Hashim Abed, was located and captured by three SEALs: Matt McCabe SO2, Jon Keefe SO1 and Julio Huerta SO1. During the course of the arrest Abed reportedly received a fat lip (some reports say he was punched in the stomach). This incident got reported and the Navy decided to charge the SEALs with prisoner abuse.

The “SEAL Net”, a loose collection of email networks tying together ex-Navy SEALs, suggests that the charges of abuse came from the military police who took charge of Abed when the SEALs turned him over. It is also widely known that the terrorists are well aware of our penchant for political correctness and frequently bash themselves or attempt fruitless escapes so that they can claim abuse. They know how to game the system. And, of course, there is an endless supply of ambulance chasers more than willing to take the cases of these poor abused terrorists.

The three SEALs faced a disciplinary procedure known as Captain’s Mast or what is called Non-Judicial Punishment, a practice that harkens back to the days of sailing ships long away from their homeport. Captain’s Mast in no way resembles a court of law, the captain of a ship at sea being the closest thing to a god. The skipper hears the charges and the explanation from the accused and makes a decision on the spot on guilt and the appropriate punishment. The three SEALs in this situation were assured of receiving a career-ending letter of reprimand in their service files. As is their right, they opted instead for a full-fledged court marshal with the upside of being found innocent of the charges. They gamble, however, that if found guilty they might spend some hard time in the brig and receive a dishonorable discharge.

A serviceman has the option of hiring a civilian defense attorney to represent them in a court marshal and all three SEALs have done so. Obviously, these guys are not rich and defending themselves will not come cheap. The good news: there will be plenty of people, including most of the ex-SEAL community who will be willing to contribute to the fund for the defense.

The cop who emptied his gun into the unarmed murder Clemmons gets a pass from a grateful community. I’m fine with that. I am not fine with prosecuting three guys who capture a dangerous, vicious terrorist. They should be regarded as heroes, not criminals. Something is seriously out of whack here.

Another Blue Dress Moment?

2009-11-23T23:03:00.000-08:00

We might all remember the moment it was discovered that Monica’s famed blue dress had a generous dollop of Clinton’s “DNA” on it. (DNA being the euphemism preferred by the press for semen.) In a heart beat all of Clinton’s lies about ‘not having sex with that woman’ were exposed… unless, of course, one were willing to accept the argument that blow jobs were not actually sex. My guess is that 99% of all teenaged males were happy to agree with this thesis. The rest of us? Not so much.

Late on November 19 another “blue dress moment” occurred when it was discovered that over 3000 emails and data files had been either hacked or posted by an insider from the computers of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. All of the information is now all over the internet. The British government has given the scientists at the CRU over $20 million to do research on global warming. Dr. Phil Jones, the CRU Director has confirmed that the emails are genuine.

What the emails have revealed so far is:

1). They have massaged the data in the past to get desired results and openly discuss among themselves how to manipulate the data to eliminate the recent global cooling.

2). They conspired to prevent the release of raw data requested under the FOIA, or to disclose their methods and source code to other scientists so that their work and conclusions could be verified.

3). Only studies favorable to the theory of global warming were published and the CRU scientists and their allies punished and threatened editors of journals that published contrary science.

Here’s a sample email from Dr. Phil Jones to other scientists. “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. From 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

“Mike” refers to Michael Mann who published his famous and extensively promoted “hockey stick” graph in “Nature” magazine. This supposedly depicted a near vertical up tick of global temperatures in recent decades. Al Gore and others used Mann’s work to predict the end of the World. This graph was later widely discredited as nearly any data plugged into Dr. Mann’s model produced the hockey stick result.

“Keith” refers to Keith Briffa who published a study of tree ring data from Yamal, Russia purporting to show unprecedented warming in the last century. Forced by a FOIA request to release his data to Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, it was easily spotted as a fraud accomplished by cherry picking and manipulating the data. (US Climate Reports: They Lie). A number of the released emails acknowledge the deception and discuss damage control and the continued wisdom of withholding data.

Some of the other emails derided skeptical scientists and one even celebrated the death of one of their vocal critics. Being an outspoken skeptic of global warming (frequently called “deniers”) has been an unpopular position, to say the least. A few weeks ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the “Vancouver Sun” criticizing a piece by a columnist who regularly writes doomsday articles on global warming. From the angry reaction I received you would think that I had written endorsing the joys of pedophilia.

While the news was reported by some press outlets, it has been largely ignored by the Main Stream Media. Of course, they are heavily invested in advancing the “settled science” of AGW and would be embarrassed to admit that they have been duped by a handful of researchers more interested in advancing a political agenda than objective science. One would hope that they would now want to reveal this information and promote a true open and honest debate on the science of global warming. John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, says he has a petition signed by 30,000 scientists and meteorologists who want that debate.

This is especially important now as a cap and trade bill has already passed the House and a companion bill is ready in the Senate. Either one of those, if enacted, will seriously damage the US economy and impose enormous costs on everyone. Also, the Climate Conference in Copenhagen scheduled for next month proposes even more draconian rules, taxes and even surrender of sovereignty to the UN. It would certainly appear that a One World Socialist government has been the goal of the AGW proponents all along. As some call them: “watermelon environmentalists”….. Green on the outside, red on the inside.

For further reading on this subject, check out: Climate Audit, Wattsupwiththat or Pajamas Media (Charles Martin).

Mixed Grill

2009-11-13T12:44:00.001-08:00

Just a few thoughts on recent items in the news of late.

Major Hasan’s potential for mass murder was ignored by the Army prior to his attack at Ft. Hood, despite glaringly obvious clues. His many radical public statements and comments to associates (duly reported), his attendance at a radical mosque frequented by the 9/11 perpetrators and attempts to contact Al Qaeda should have rung some serious alarm bells. Nobody did a thing. The only explanation seems to be political correctness. At all costs we must not offend any Muslims.

This tendency continued even as the bodies were being hauled away. Commentators in the MSM carefully avoided the obvious and refused to call the slaughter an act of Islamic Terror even in the face of the facts and that Major Hasan had shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he fired over 100 rounds into the unarmed troops. The contortions were almost funny as the talking heads explained that Hasan had “snapped” and perhaps suffered from “pre-traumatic stress disorder”. Since Hasan had never been in battle (or near it) he presumably contracted this new syndrome from anticipating his deployment or from talking to troops who had seen action. Absurd.

The degree to which the MSM will go to avoid calling a spade a spade was humorously on display last night when Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sally Quinn, veteran reporter of the “Washington Post”. You should watch the interview. He had to practically pin Ms. Quinn to the wall and throttle her to get her to say the words “Muslim terrorist”.

President Obama did not look very good in his handling of this tragedy either. Attending a conference with American Indians he stepped to the microphone to speak to the nation about the attack. Before getting to the Ft. Hood incident he spent several minutes discussing the conference and giving “shout outs” to several attendees. Almost as an after thought he brought up the Ft. Hood shootings. Then he choppered off to Camp David for a relaxing weekend. Meanwhile, with cameras and publicity prohibited, George and Laura Bush quietly drove to Ft. Hood and met with the victim’s families. This is what a Commander-in-Chief does instead of slipping off for a weekend of R & R.

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In case you missed it, the House rammed through a 1990 page health care reform bill with two votes to spare, including one lone Republican. 39 Democrats voted against it. The Dems spent a lot of time figuring out who would be permitted to vote NO and still get the thing to pass. Surely the Democrats in the safest districts (those likely to be re-elected even if caught on video snorting crack while sodomizing a sheep) voted YES with little fear. Those in districts carried by McCain or considered conservative were given a pass. This measure is highly unpopular and will prove more so as the taxes, penalties and coercion kick in. The cynical Democrat calculus is that short- term losses are acceptable, and if they can once get this implemented, will ensure a left of center government forever.

They are nervous though. The public gets ever more angry as the unemployment rate keeps climbing (10.2%) and the debt piles up. The health care bill costs over one trillion dollars even with the increased taxes, and forcing the unwilling to purchase health insurance or face penalties, or even imprisonment. It has people more than a little concerned. Now it’s up to the Senate. They have not even released the bill yet and if Harry Reid is to be believed, it will mirror the House bill. The question remains: if the Democrats don’t have the 60 votes, will they pass the thing by “reconciliation”, the parliamentary procedure requiring only 51 votes? While it’s a highly questionable maneuver, Reid may do it as a parting gift to the liberals as it seems likely the good people of Nevada may toss him out next November.

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As the health care train trundles down the tracks, those busy Democrats in the Senate are quietly preparing the Kerry/ Boxer version of a cap and trade bill. You might remember that the House has already passed its version. Cap and trade is a huge tax on an already strained economy that is struggling to rise out of a serious recession.

Why the Democrats figure hanging these two anchors around the necks of the taxpayers at this time is a good idea befuddles me. I guess just as the health care bill is not about improving health care or making it more affordable, the cap and trade bill is not about reducing carbon emissions. Both of these boondoggles are about power and control. And, if anyone thinks the government can effectively run health care or the energy industry, you have not communicated with the Social Security Administration or the IRS lately. Social security and Medicare are headed for bankruptcy and Amtrak and the Post Office on life support. If you think these new initiatives are a great idea, you need a reality check.