I don't know about everyone else, but I am weary of all of the mean-spirited Bush bashing. I thought it would lighten up as time passed, but it hasn't. It's irrational. It offers nothing to the discourse. It's quite boring and tedious by this time. But that hasn't slowed down any of these seething people who blame everything on George Bush.

It's becoming a running joke in my house. The price of eggs is too high? That's George Bush's fault. Paycheck got messed up? That's George Bush's fault, too. Shootings downtown someplace? That surely would be George Bush's fault as well. We don't need to know how. We don't need to know why. That man is on a dark mission out in the night secretly resetting the price in the pumps at all the gas stations across the map. He probably has enlisted Santa to help him cover so much ground so quickly.

Recently, I went out to a website about the new Star Trek movie. I wanted to see what was going on with that, whatever teasers and tidbits the advance-promo folks wanted to throw to me. I was reading down the page ... and in the comments was more Bush Bashing! No joking! I don't know how or why George Bush has anything to do with this movie. I don't think he is part of the production crew, or that he auditioned for one of the acting roles. If there is a part in the script for an intergalactic megalomaniac, but I can think of some others that would be better suited for that role.

I just sighed and clicked off the website. I'm more weary of the Bush bashing than I am curious about the new Star Trek movie -- and that's pitiful. I expect all kinds of odd fantasy comments from Trekkies. I expect people to be wrapping themselves in aluminum foil and bleeping. I look forward to it. But this has no creative spark, no unbridled imagination. Maybe if the Bush bashing was in Klingon, perhaps that would have been better. Same tedious pap could have a new twist. But this same old tired material has no thought in it whatsoever -- creative or otherwise. Maybe George Bush has gone ahead, where no one has gone before, and is resetting the prices in the fuel pumps on the space stations. Yea, that would work.

I have enjoyed Ann Coulter's writings for years. I own several of her books, and I particularly like "Treason." I read her column when my time permits. I enjoy her style, her impertinence. Beneath that slinky blonde facade lurks a chain dog, and I like the combination.

As election year politics start to heat up, I look forward to another season of debates. I enjoy engaging my neighbors and co-workers in political discussions. Especially, I like it best when I find myself in a room full of liberals. I feel like I am proselytizing to the heathens, challenging them to defend their beliefs and their world-views, bringing them to the truth and the light. It's way more fun than discussing football stats.

But for now, we are just coming into the primary season. For now, we are discussing among ourselves who shall carry forth the Republican banner. For now, we need to be considering the attributes and strengths of several folks who have stepped forward to be our Republican candidate for President. Of course, all of them are suspect because they must know that they are about to get attacked, savagely and viciously, and then by the Democrats, for having stepped up to the call. All of them are suspect because they are career politicians. But they are what we have to choose from and we need to pick from among them.

It appears that Ann Coulter likes none of these would-be candidates. It seems that she doesn't like any of these candidates because not one among them is perfect. Apparently, the only perfect candidates would be either the Resurrected Lord Jesus or the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. Unhappily, neither of these appearances would actually assist in the candidate selection process since neither one would be eligible to assume the Office of the President of the United States (Ronald Reagan has already served two terms and is therefore precluded under term limits and Jesus is not American born).

I would like to think that Ann Coulter's criticisms of all the Republican hopefuls are vehicles to keep her column sharp, even though we all know that anything she says now will reappear later as ammunition from the Democrats when the race is really hot. And perhaps we should all pause and remember Ronald Reagan's admonition that Republicans should not attack each other. I am further hopeful that Ann Coulter is not going to take the approach to urge that Republican voters should stay home rather than turn out to vote for an imperfect Republican candidate. That sort of strategy leads to perfect Democrat victories. Often in life, we must work with imperfect choices, daring to do the best we can with what we have got. For Ann Coulter, it appears to be more incisor than insight.

I saw the pictures of Al Gore getting his Nobel Peace Prize, an event that should have been no surprise to anyone. Naturally, he took this photo-opportunity to remind us how terrible the U.S. is, which was also no surprise to anyone. He is making a lot of money from telling us how horrid we are, so it's very unlikely that he is going to say anything to disrupt that income stream.

The reporters covering this so-called news story never missed an opportunity to give his full name as "Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore." It's obviously going to stick as permanently, thoroughly and firmly as "Former Presidential Candidate John Kerry Who Served in Vietnam." Such long names! Perhaps that is a sign of an important person -- to have an incredibly long name.

I also saw a marvelous news clip on Paul McCartney's ex-wife, Heather Mills. OK, since we are already going on about long names, let's do this right. The article was about "Heather Mills, Paul McCartney's Soon-to-be-Ex-Wife" -- there that's better. Anyway, she was saying that the rich people she had been enduring for these long, dreadful years of parties as Mrs. Paul McCartney were stingy and snobby. Apparently, she has spent her time among them by trying to raise money for some charitable concern that the article didn't identify. That they weren't willing to listen to her prattle on and on about hungry children or endangered critters would make them appear snobby to her (and her boorish to them?), and that they wouldn't give her and her cause the proper amount of money, whatever she thought was appropriate, made them stingy in her opinion. We can see that Mr. McCartney did not marry her for her intellectual company and he wasn't seeking witty repartee. We suspect that folks who marry supermodels are less interested in wordplay as they may be in other forms of play. The only thing that baffles me is why these girls don't have enough sense to just shut up. Someone needs to tell them that no one cares what they think, if you want to call it thinking at all. Just smile, nod in silent agreement to any stupid thing someone says as if you understood and agreed (although you don't need to understand or agree really), strike a pose or two, and all your work is done, so how hard is that?

But I am glad that no one has explained it to Heather just yet, or I would have missed a good laugh. The article continues that she is still negotiating her divorce settlement with Mr. McCartney. According to this, he has offered her a settlement of $50 million -- but that she is asking for $100 million. Ho ho! Now who is being stingy? If rich people are so dreadful, why would she want all that nasty money anyway? I'm sure she is just going to give it to her charitable cause of choice.

I already believe that Al Gore is way wrong -- but if he believes that the fate of the world really does rest on mankind's ability to reason through a problem, he should not be sleeping well at night. We don't seem to have enough brains among us to fight our way out of a wet paper bag. But  let's see if my plan for World Peace and my own Nobel Prize might help -- we will hook Al up with Heather and let them talk their babble to each other. Meanwhile, I am going to take a huge reciprocating saw and chop Israel away from the rest of the Middle East -- then I am going to drag it up to the U.K. and put it where Ireland is now. I am going to drag Ireland down and put it in the hole left by removing Israel. I will let the Irish women explain the hard facts of life to the Muslim men, that should be entertaining to watch. And the Brits could embrace Israel into the United Kingdom; that should be a good fit -- as long as we don't tell the Brits where we put the Irish.

Let us devise a grand social experiment. Let us conspire to hijack an entire nation, an ancient culture of people with a strong national identity, a population in the tens of millions across a land mass in excess of 100,000 square miles. Then, let's destroy the existing infrastructure; from the factories and schools to the roads and bridges, we'll just bomb them out. Once we have accomplished this, we should draw an arbitrary line across the map of this nation -- not along existing land features lest the rainfall might be more on one side of the mountain range than the other. We will just impose an arbitrary dotted line down the middle.

On the one side of this devasted land, we will introduce Communism, unashamed centralized government, no hybrid concessions, no piece-meal patchwork, but a proud, true workers' paradise in the classic Marx and Lenin traditions. On the other side of this arbitrary boundary, we will leave these poor unfortunates to their own devises, with free market forces to prevail on their own.

Then we should leave this cauldron to simmer for a couple of decades and let's see the comparison of Capitalism and Communism, side by side.

But wait - we already did all that. It was called Post-WW2 Germany. Ravaged by the years at war, Germany was brought to her knees and divided between the Allied Powers; with Russia introducing Communism on the East side of the map and the U.S. and Britain establishing Democracy and Capitalism on the West. Roll the calendar forward a few decades and we see West Germany standing among the economic powerhouses of Europe within a few decades, while unemployment and stagnation were still rampant in Eastern Germany.

Attention all college students! Whether it's the History of Western Civilization or a Political Science class, or any other discipline where you may be asked for a comparison of Communism and Capitalism, you do not always have to yield the field to your liberal college professor. Take this "social experiment" concept and rework it into your essay in your blue notebook. Add every characteristic from your class lectures about Capitalism and about Communism, the centralized vs decentralized economies, whatever your professor tossed out. Really make it clear that you were listening to all his glorification of Communism and denigrating Capitalism. Mark down all the fine details within this framework. Then sum it up with the WW2 Germany clincher. If you kept your intentions veiled until your summary, it always brings them up short. But they really can't flunk you because you have made your point, and answered their question, and cited all the proper historic support for your position. And good luck to you!

I find myself ruminating over a conversation I had a week ago. I keep coming back to these thoughts and considering what the implications will mean for all of us.

The point of departure for this conversation was the drum beat of news stories -- and emerging jokes -- about our nation's high school graduates who can not read their own diploma, who can not find the United States or China on a world map, or who do not have the basic education skills for writing a business letter or balancing their own checkbook. They know there is a First Amendment, but can not tell you what it is an amendment TO. (And they certainly don't know that the words "separation of church and state" don't ever actually appear in the First Amendment.) The statistics come in from all quarters -- that thirty years ago, 70% of all high school students in the country could recite the Ten Commandments; today that number is around 14% (and if you want them in order, that number falls to half that level). It hardly matters which discipline you choose or what skills you cherish, the news stories suggest that our high school students perform at lower levels than the high school students of yore.

The jokes about it can be pretty funny. For instance, question: how can we prove that our military's 'smart bombs' are smarter than our high school students? Answer: our smart bombs can find Afghanistan. And then, of course, there are the many jokes about getting some child who was home schooled to read or write for you.

It may be happening exactly as reported, and it may be just another distortion of facts from the media. I never know anymore what is credible. However, excessive skepticism cuts off any discourse as all conversations deteriorate into "what do you know for sure?" and "what would you take for proof?" Ancedotal evidence is just that, and fact checking still requires a certain faith in some sources of data. But this conversation presupposed that these stories were rooted in a bona fide trend, and that we were -- as a culture -- losing our ability to read, write and perform basic mathematical functions.

This won't be the first time in the history of mankind that such a thing has happened. Such was unquestionably the case in the years following the fall of Rome -- and it was from the discussion of the contributing factors that led to the fall of Rome that this conversation sprang. We call the phenomenon the Dark Ages, not because the sun shone any less brightly or less often, but because literacy was the exception and intellectual pursuits were as close to dead zero as things could get. It was a thousand years before the "Enlightenment" in which the light was a renewed interest in science and the arts, in teaching and learning.

One man in the conversation suggested that he could foresee a new Dark Ages coming upon us if the state of our public education system wasn't changed, drastically and soon. Everyone concurred that the government schools were failing/had already failed, particularly in the county where we were sitting and having this conversation. The local school system is no longer in free fall -- it appears to have hit rock bottom some time ago and is now digging frantically. When a newspaper reporter asked a number of local middle school girls what they didn't like about their school, they spoke of getting spit on in the halls and having their stuff stolen. The generally accepted answer for the locals is either one of the many private schools, or home schooling. The government schools can not seem to figure out why more than half the kids in their district don't answer their invitation for a free education. (Free, indeed! There are activity fees, needed supplies, class fund raisers and more fees and more needed supplies, but that is another issue and I don't want to derail on that). The bone-headedness of the question simply suggests to me that the administrators of the local government schools were themselves educated in the local schools, and they just don't know the difference between what they do every day and a true liberal arts education.

But the vast majority of the private schools in the area -- and the curricula offered for home schooling -- are all sponsored by Christians, openly proud of their faith, unashamed to mix their morality with their multiplication tables. The point of the conversation was that the Christian Church was the keeper of the database during the last Dark Ages, and seems to be stepping into that role once again. Not the bishops and the hierarchy of the great established centers of religion -- no, they brought us the Inquisition during the last Dark Ages, the ultimate monsters in political correctness and world class in their ability to stifle free speech. The libraries were tucked away in the decentralized monasteries and local grassroot churches, waiting for the new day which was a thousand years in coming.

It appears to me that it is going to be nearly moot whether we are in jeopardy of losing our unique American culture to intolerant jihad, to runaway illegal immigration, to U.N. globalism ... or to our own self-inflicted New Dark Ages. These are all serious threats to our way of life. Not only will our media not report it openly, our high school students won't be able to read about it anyway. I doubt they will mind unless or until their Game Boys go dead. Isn't that the modern day equivalent to the Roman circuses?

 

 

As everyone may have already heard, there is a non-binding resolution pending in the Congress. This resolution addresses the 1915 supposed Armenian genocide by the Turks. I say 'supposed' because the incident happened nearly one hundred years ago and is something of a cold case. The United States had nothing to do with it then, and has nothing to do with it now. And though I would love to debate the historic facts, that is not what this blog is about. It's about the true meaning of the current resolution.

If the incident is old news and irrelevant to today, why is the Congress doing this now?

I say it is irrelevant to today because the Turkish government is different now than it was then. Then it was a Muslim government and now it is a secular government. This incident has been brought before the Congress several times before. I don't have my fact checker at the ready, so I am going to say that I seem to recall that even Bill Clinton asked Congress not to pass a similar resolution. So why is the Congress doing this now?

Remarkably, no one seems to be able to see that this is an anti-war bill in disguise. The intent of this legislation is to disrupt our supply lines into Iraq. The Democrats know that Turkey is extremely sensitive over this historic issue, and it is the Democrats' desire to open old wounds if it will help us lose the war in Iraq. Turkey has been an ally of ours for many years and a base for many of our Middle East operations. A majority of our war supplies today comes into Iraq through Turkey. 

Apparently, Pelosi & Friends believe that they have found a new tactic to force an end to the war. This isn't about Armenians and Turks, and this isn't about a 100 year old massacre. This is about surrender. They can't get enough popular support to pull funding from the war in a straight-up vote. They can't get enough traction with the left wing anti-war movement to sway public opinion against this war. So they are disguising their moves to persuade enough Democrats in Congress so that they can shut down the war through the back door.

Disrupt the supply lines, and you will disrupt the war effort. If we can't get supplies to the war, we would have to pull our troops out. Best of all, going into the future, the Democrats can blame Turkey for the logistical failure that will have caused the troop withdrawal. The Democrats get what they want -- troop withdrawal -- and get the political cover to shift the blame away from themselves. What could be better?

Was there anyone who DIDN'T know that AlGore was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize? Let's see by a show of hands how many of you were surprised at the "news" that Al had been awarded his Peace Prize .... um hmm, I see one ensign down on Deck Ten who says this was a total shock. Anyone else? I didn't think so.

I sure knew it was coming -- but it is still embarrassing to see such a ridiculous public spectacle, all the same. And to have to share it with a panel from the UN, well, I wouldn't want to admit to such a thing in public even if I were "honored" in such a way (which, thankfully, I don't have that problem). Entertainingly, this week another court -- this one in the UK -- has officially ruled that, upon their measured consideration and in light of all the evidence they can find and review, the "Inconvenient Truth" is more aptly about "Convenient Partisan Exaggerations" but that doesn't matter, either. This award is truly a world-class Liberal Love Fest -- and they are welcome to it. Any scrap of credibility that might have been left with the Nobel Prize Committee is now officially gone. They might as well celebrate that at the same time.

The only remarkable moment to me is that they seem to be totally unaware of how they have embarrassed themselves publicly. This brings me to my question -- if you are too gauche or oblivious or too crudely raised to know that you have embarrassed yourself, have you actually embarrassed yourself? I mean, what level of self-awareness is needed? When the "grieving widow" cries out at the funeral service, "Can you PLEASE get on with this and get this jerk into the ground, so I can get my check?" .... has she embarrassed herself? Or does she need to know that she has said something crude, or at least indelicate, in order to have the rules of embarrassment and humiliation apply? It seems to be the newest restatement of the question of the tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it -- does it make any sound?

Without question, there is no shame among the Love Fest revelers. Secure in their intellectual cocoons, they are thrilled to continue to award themselves and each other these great honors. Never are they ever actually required to be held accountable for their great plans. AlGore isn't going to have to give it back when history judges the actual events against his predictions. There will be plenty of room for him to take his seat next to Edgar Cayce, who predicted that Atlantis was going to rise in 1952 and flood the Eastern Seaboard. But as Country Joe said so many years ago, "Whoopee! We're all going to die!!"

ATTENTION ALL EX-WIVES!!

Are you entitled to receive child support payments? Would you like to see your ex-husband pay more? That's right -- even if that mean old judge says you are already getting your "fair share" of his earnings, you can make him pay more whether he agrees or not!

I know it sounds outlandish. I didn't believe it when I first stumbled into this little secret. Here's what you have to do: pack up and go to Idaho. When you arrive with your kid(s) and no job, immediately apply for welfare benefits from the State of Idaho -- no waiting. The rest is done for you! Regardless of the status of his payments, without ever having a hearing in an Idaho court, without anything more required than your receiving benefits from the State of Idaho, his child support payments will be re-assessed to cover the costs to the State of your benefits. Don't forget all the goodies beyond the traditional cash payment -- be sure to ask for health insurance coverage for the kids, food stamps, maybe the state would like to furnish you an apartment (if only until you can find a place you prefer), and ask your welfare worker about emergency relief payments, clothing allowances, really pile it on. Remember, he is going to be paying for all of it. By the time he learns what you have done, he is already legally liable, regardless of the agreement or payment history in the state where your case file resides. No one ever asks his opinion, just surprises him with a new bill to pay. What could be better than that?

I would never have thought it possible. I used to think it was unconscionable to make someone responsible for someone else's behavior -- especially in cases where there is traditionally a great deal of animus such as a divorce. But that's exactly what the law says. CAUTION: I am no lawyer -- not yet, although I energetically intend to include law school in my plans as soon as I possibly can -- but I am told by other folks who already suffer from law degrees that there are several other states with this arrangement as well. So you may want to check it out to see if there is one nearer you than Idaho.

Why am I saying all this? Child support regulations are out of control. The whole child support system gets its public and political steam from the emotional reaction to the image of ragged, sad-eyed children who need their milk money to stave off starvation. Who can argue against that? Nothing could be farther from the truth, so the continued support for more and more child support restrictions is based on a fraud. I believe I read somewhere that about 80% of all court-ordered child support payments will actually go to the states where the custodial parent lives. These payments are for reimbursement of all sorts of support payments that the family received. I know of at least one instance where the support payment goes to repay health insurance premiums that the family never accessed because they didn't even know they had the coverage, and stopped it when they figured it out.

So this supposed compassion of taking on the mean ex-husband who rudely dumped his sweet, innocent wife in tears and abandoned his family in a desperate state of need and hunger, all forlorn and pitiful -- am I making you gag yet? -- is really a grab for an additional income stream to the states. This isn't milk money, this is a stealth tax. So there is no motivation to let the truth out. Nothing is going to get any better until things have gotten so bad that the imbalance comes into the public eye. When is "bad enough"? Hard to say. But let's talk about it.

Sometime during the weekend, I saw a news article. It seems the president of Duke University made some sort of speech, some public pronouncement that the University had not properly communicated its support to the Lacrosse team during the rape scandal of 2006-2007.

I couldn't possibly disagree with him more!! I think the University was extremely clear in its communication regarding its support of their team and these players. Unfortunately, that support was registered in negative numbers -- but their communication of their opinion was extremely clear. They suspended the accused students, fired the coach, cancelled the rest of the Lacrosse season and a large number of the faculty took out a full page ad to make their biases and condemnation as public as they possibly could. There is nothing unclear about their position. I don't know what more they could have done to make their position clear.

Unhappily for them, once the facts of the case played out, their blind hatred of these accused students was not borne out by any evidence. I don't think that means that their hatred has gone away. I'll happily bet the farm that there are faculty members who still believe the accuser and the district attorney, despite everything that has come out about both, that they still prefer to believe the original story and all the rest of what has been said is a great whitewash cover-up by rich white boys, a small part of a greater conspiracy of racial inequities and injustices in our country -- which, of course, is always wrong. If only I could find someone to take that bet!

But I understand what the president of Duke University is trying to do. It's the Jimmy Carter Gambit. After all, it was Jimmy Carter who first set the current trend to come out and apologize for everything under the sun. It's supposed to alleviate someone's guilt, I suppose, but it generally makes the speaker look weak and disgusting. He wants to apologize that his university has made fools of themselves publicly, and the best way he can think to do that is to begin rewriting the history of the events. He says he reminded everyone that the accused should be presumed innocent until proven guilty ... while I don't remember him saying anything like that, the university suspended the students all the same. If my parents taught me that actions speak louder than words, than I guess it doesn't matter what I remember him saying, only that I remember the university suspending the students, firing the coach and blasting these boys in the newspaper.

I'm getting real tired of how apologies are supposed to make everything all right. They don't. I remember when Bill Clinton apologized for slavery -- even though he never owned any slaves -- and it hasn't made a whit of difference in the public discourse, except to make himself look silly by apologizing for something he had nothing whatsoever to do with. I don't think he ever owned any slaves. But I supposed I could be mistaken on that point. His apology did not change the history of this country, and folks that want to remain angry over events that took place centuries ago are still angry. 

In the case of the University president, he did have a hand in the disaster, and perhaps an apology is in order. But for him to think that "unclear communications" is any substitute for "I'm sorry" is pitiful. I read the coach got some sort of a cash settlement, and that is something by way of an apology to him. But I would much rather see the faculty, all the ones who signed that hate document in the newspaper, make some sort of public apology, admit some sort of faulty reasoning, eat some sort of humble pie for their outrageous behavior. Of course, that isn't going to happen.

Free Health Care?

It's hard to understand how this term "Free Health Care" can be repeated so many times in the course of a week. It doesn't make any sense. There is no such thing, and never will be. At best, we are simply discussing the concept of shifting the payment of services to someone else -- but that doesn't make anything FREE!

Let's start with all those insidious television ads for motorized wheelchairs. When my kids annoy me for being so lazy, I ask them if they want one so they won't have to walk anymore, ever. But the big selling point for these chairs is the 'no cost to you' promise. They are mincing at words, and in doing so only help to make my point. These ads appeal to the notion of getting whatever you want at someone else's expense, whoever that might be. These chairs are not free. Someone bought the materials to make the chairs from someone, and paid some other people to assemble the parts. The assembly workers aren't willing to work for free, because they need to pay their mortgages and feed their families. These chairs don't deliver themselves, so the delivery people are going to expect to be paid for their labors, too. So, since these chairs aren't ever going to come into this world without someone paying someone for their services and for the parts and for the people who produced the parts and so on, and the television commercials are going to have costs, too, for the actors and the air-time and so forth; in short, these chairs are going to cost someone something. To offer them to me at no cost means that someone has to pay for those costs, and if not me, then who?

Similarly, for me to demand that a doctor see me for free, I would have to be suggesting that the doctor should volunteer his time. Moreover, even if the doctor did not wish to support his family or pay his own mortgage, someone would still have to pay for the facilities at the clinic. Someone would have to pay the electrical utility that furnished the power to run the lights and the sophisticated medical equipment. And what about that medical equipment? It could no more magically appear in the clinic than the power wheelchairs can arrive at someone's door without charge.

So we come back to the idea that there is no free lunch. There is no free wheelchair. There is no free health care. There is only the idea of a third party payer.

Try this experiment in democracy: take a classroom of 20 college students. Most of them are broke. I certainly was when I was a student. Now suppose it is discovered that one of them has $20 in his/her pocket. Ask the class to vote whether or not it would be fair to take that $20 away from the rich student and distributed to all equitably at $1 per person, and the vote will most likely be somewhere right around 19 in favor to one opposed. The one vote opposing will be the selfish one who would have to forfeit the $20 to this social experiment.

But I don't think it is selfish or unfair to want to keep one's own wages. I had some pretty thankless job in my day, and particularly while I was a student. I have to ask whether or not I would have been willing to do my job if I knew that I was going to forfeit my earnings to be redistributed among my classmates because they wished it, we voted for it, and I was voted down. I worked and expected to get paid because I needed the money for my own selfish needs; like paying the rent on my pathetic apartment, buying exorbitantly expensive textbooks, and trying to find things to eat occasionally.

So it seems to me that, before we all hail the concept of going to the doctor but not paying our own doctor bills, we need to take a look at who will be paying. Someone is going to have to pay. If we are piling up debt for our grandchildren, simply because we voted it that way, perhaps this isn't such a good idea. We can vote to award ourselves these great "free" benefits, but someone will have to pay for it. It won't be FAIR to the folks who have to pay, whoever they might be.