…and the rest of their kind, like the MSM and your general purpose liberal, as we know are still actively campaigning against the big Dubya, despite the fact that he’s not running for anything.

This is pretty much a mainstay of the liberal mindset. That is, they substitute platitudinal input for proactive tangible action — they have to know that their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do to George W. Bush is undoable, that they are merely making foolish noise in the process of burning up the contributions gleaned from their faithful followers, and more often than not making preadolescent style spectacles of themselves at the same time. I entertain no doubts as to the resentment the Three Stooges would feel had they been able to see these folks attempting to upstage them in the lunacy department.

When the Berkeley kerfuffle commenced (the peoples’ and city government’s war on the Marines recruiters there), I received a bunch of emails from Move America Forward on the issue and on their response to it, and have of course read of it in numerous other places. The backlash from around the country was sufficiently intense as to cause a couple of the Kommie San Francisco suburb’s city legislators to back pedal somewhat.

They say they support the troops but oppose Bush policies. In the same breath that they tell us they have nothing against the Marines, they tell us that the same Marines are murderers and torturers who mercenary themselves to Big Oil.

The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, are but one of several elements that comprise a community whose mission is to insure that those dizzy people in Berkeley remain free to speak out against the government and even…even against the Marines!

Please pardon me, but when the issue hit the news, and when I received the outraged emails from MAF, I hardly raised an eyebrow. I mean, this is Berkeley we’re talking about. These are the same varmints who, before the fires had even been put out on 9/11, were declaring that our country had deserved the terrorist attack. That we’d earned it. That it was our fault. How could anybody actually be shocked at anything of a treasonous nature that comes out of that lefty hell-hole?

If I were suddenly appointed king of America, I would certainly deny any voter in Berkeley, the city government included, even a dime of federal funds for anything, anything at all — this would be right before I had a large, unbroken “keep ‘em in” wall built around that leftist hell hole and then had it declared a nuclear waste dump. From then on, all people convicted of treason would be sentenced to life in Berkeley.

Radioactive Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooo!

However, I didn’t come here to talk about Berkeley. Screw Berkeley. Knock knock knockin’ on treason’s door…

A projected nine inches of snow is in the process of being dumped on Chicago, even as we speak (they’re so lucky in the Burbs, where the snow will stick, covering trees, rooftops and everything else, making for a beautiful morning after), so I’ve spent the day at home, catching up on professional stuff.

There’s a deli here called Ashkenaz that delivers a pleasing variety of Jewish fare, though I have to say that their knishes wouldn’t sell in New York — they lack every single attribute of a genuine knish, from seasoning to filling. But then, Chicago isn’t called the Second City for nothing. However, they do produce lox in all its glory, belly lox, Nova (Nova Scotia lox), etc, and deliver by the pound. They’re rather costly in this endeavor, but as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the product inspires the overlooking of their $40.00+ per pound price for cut lox. To me, salmon rules in its every form from smoked to poached in the seafood category, surpassed only by those big, meaty langostas one finds in the Caribbean.

So I’m spending this particular segment of my evening munching, in leisurely fashion, on lox and cream cheese sandwiches with ultra-thin sliced red onion and, having blown the dust off my old Enya albums (just kidding, I actually downloaded them from Yahoo! Music Jukebox), am listening to Watermark and Shepherd Moons. Celtic music with New Age overtones, good stuff.

However, I actually came here to make reference to yet another portside idiocy, one which, excluding all the above, will not take up all that much of your time. That is, the Waterboarding thing.

The left has villified it on a mega-scale, even the RINO, John McCain, has opposed it, and the tone of the arguments against it has been one that suggests it to be one of many horrible, unconscionable tortures our government employs to wrench, brutally and unmercifully, for days on end, even the most trivial, useless information from captured terrorists. It is business as usual for the fascistic, nazi Bush regime, etc, etc…

And the liberal media plays it up conjure nightmarish thoughts of the torture chambers at Prinz Albrechtstrasse or 2 Dzerzhinski Square.

Meanwhile, only three prisoners, major terrorists all, have been subjected to the actually non-harmful interrogation technique, and the longest duration involved was that of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, a terrible minute and a half! All three subjects revealed information that saved a lot of innocent lives while leading to the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and their plans for further butchery of Americans and others.

Our intelligence pros aren’t electrocuting the functionality out of their testicles, beating them to a bloody pulp or decimating their minds with lysergic acid and amatol, they’re merely creating non-damaging discomfort for what amounts to mere seconds (while SKM, an abnormally tough customer, held out for some 90 seconds, the average is 1/3 of that time).

Yet our political left, who have just as much access to information as the rest of us, have chosen to ignore the facts and use waterboarding as an anti-Bush soap box, transforming the truth into exaggerations and bald faced lies in order to promote their false doctrines — in truth, given their desperation to strip us of our Constitutional system of government and quagmire us in socialism, I can’t say as I blame them: if you want to screw an entire electorate, you have to lie to them in a convincing manner. You have to promote your intended back-door entry as a pleasurable experience, one the entire family will enjoy, knowing that once they’ve let you in, the merciless shishkabobbing, weeping and gnashing of teeth will be beyond their control.

It doesn’t matter whether the sodomist is John McCain, Barak Hussein Obama or Hillary Klinton, the results will be the same.

Speaking for myself, when it comes to interrogating terrorists, I’d just as soon we refer to the Jack Bauer manual. Our misplaced sympathy for “ill-treated” terrorists is well defined in the old song about the gentle woman (for goodness sake) who saved the snake.

We’ve watched our politicians, justices and media intentionally misinterpret the Geneva Convention to “humanize” and redefine the status of the inmates at GITMO, and heard “certain parties” strongly suggest that we bring these terrorists into the American legal system for prosecution.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that these misguided souls are so secure in their illusion that certain bizarre things could never happen to them that they are confident that they’ll be safe, even if they eliminate the very safeguards that keep them safe.

What a bunch of maroons!

Linda Chavez has most certainly pegged Scooter’s successor in the annals of legal vandalism from the left.

His name isn’t yet familiar to most Americans, but I expect it will be by the end of 2008: Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. He is the man, according to recent press reports, who ordered the destruction of interrogation tapes made by the CIA, which allegedly show the effects of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the next few months, his name will likely be dragged through the mud, and he will be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up. I think he deserves a medal.

Hard Astarboard is behind her column 100%. It’s like, like… some occult prescience or, at the very least, simply a conclusion based upon what The Racing Form refers to as Past Performances, only applied to donkeys instead of horses.

I am in full agreement that Rodriquez is highly deserving of a medal for his actions, not the collosal villification he’s sure to have come his way in the not too distant future.

…in liberals’ war on Christianity,

(CNSNews.com) - With Dec. 25 only days away, a central image in the celebration of Christmas — the manger scene featuring replicas of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus — has become the focus of attacks by vandals and leaders of “the secular Left,” Christian groups charged on Wednesday.

Okay, so how far do some of these G-dless folks take this? What’s all the hubbub about? Well, here’s one example:

While the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights was erecting a nativity scene in New York City’s Central Park, the group issued a news release condemning three dozen instances in which manger scenes were vandalized or stolen from Antioch, Calif., to Leesburg, Va., this Christmas season.

“In perhaps the sickest incident, a public school coach in Marietta, Ga., drove students around the area in his pickup truck, instructing them to thrash Christmas displays after dark,” League said.

During their Dec. 8 vandalism spree, 46-year-old John Hayes and several middle school students damaged a number of Christmas displays, let the air out of inflatable figures and rearranged plastic reindeer into X-rated sexual positions.

According to the WGCL TV, Hayes has been charged with trespassing, contributing to the delinquency of minors and reckless conduct.

(above emphasis mine)

So this Hayes fellow is one of those modern, “progressive” school faculty members to whom parents entrust their children and the minds of said children for several hours a day, five days a week. Now isn’t that special…

In addition to physical attacks, nativity scenes are “part of a larger war that the secular Left is waging on all things Christian,” said Gary McCaleb, senior counsel with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) - which describes itself as “a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation” - in a news release.

During the past week, ADF attorneys have offered to defend free of charge two cities in Wisconsin that faced legal action from the secularist Freedom from Religion Foundation (FRF) if those governments did not remove nativity scenes from their public holiday displays.

Thank G-d that there are some people like those at the Alliance Defense Fund out there to counter satanic wingnuts like FRF.

Face it, these self appointed grinches fall into two and two categories only:

1) Socialists with communistic leanings who understand that as long as the majority among the masses are united by common religious beliefs, these beliefs will stand between the people and total government control of hearts and minds, and

2) Spiritually empty pond scum who feel it is their duty to force their atheism on the rest of us. The mutts described in “1)” do all they can to encourage these soulless losers to do whatever it takes to dumb down Christian religious expression, and Christmas is the most accessable target because being the holiest, it invokes the most outright public symbolism of any Christian holiday.

The claim by liberals (liberals, atheists, same thing) that Nativity scenes on public property constitute the ironclad merging of church and state is pure fallacy, another piece of lying propaganda by a segment of our society that has been eroding the core values of our nation, principally through left leaning courts and portside politicians, for the last three decades, increasingly gaining momentum along the way.

The linked article, in its entirety, can be read here.

Perhaps it’s just me, a product of Ukranian and Polish grandparents who, prior to producing my mother and her two sisters and later raising me, immigrated to the United States and immersed themselves in the business of becoming English speaking, patriotic Americans, but…

I have long been rather nonplussed at the drive by our portside political community to make light of the above concept.

Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn’t think that’s controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.

The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show “the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English.” A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it “very important” that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.

But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment.

What aggravates me here is that, we being a democracy and all, the Democrats, knowing that the vast majority of Americans believe that the English language should be coin of the realm here in the U.S., continue to press their multi-lingual agenda — of course, we know that they are motivated by targeted minority votes rather than the good of our country — and that they are willing to make light of the will of The People as such.

Maybe they should rename their party…

Yet the public is ready for leadership that will forthrightly defend reasonable assimilation. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won plaudits when he said last June that one way to close the Latino learning divide was “to turn off the Spanish TV set. It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.” Ruben Navarette, a columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune, agreed, warning that “industries such as native language education or Spanish-language television [create] linguistic cocoons that offer the comfort of a warm bath when what English-learners really need is a cold shower.”

“SNIP”, as they say,

But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that last year filed over 200 lawsuits against employers over English-only rules, has a different vision. Its lawsuit against the Salvation Army accuses the organization of discriminating against two employees at its Framingham, Mass., thrift store “on the basis of their national origin.” Its crime was to give the employees a year’s notice that they should speak English on the job (outside of breaks) and then firing them after they did not. The EEOC sued only four years after a federal judge in Boston, in a separate suit, upheld the Salvation Army’s English-only policy as an effort to “promote workplace harmony.” Like a house burglar, the EEOC is trying every door in the legal neighborhood until it finds one that’s open.

The EEOC is no friend of the American People. They stink of the SPP/NAU agenda.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he’s generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that “there ain’t going to be a bill” including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department’s budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. “I was turned down flat,” he told me. “We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English.”

That’s what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. “If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else,” Jose Martin Samano, Azteca’s U.S. anchor, told Fox News. “Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people.”

Azteca isn’t alone. Next month, a new group called Our Pledge will be launched. Counting Jeb Bush and former Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros among its board members, the organization believes absorbing immigrants is “the Sputnik challenge of our era.” It will put forward two mutual pledges. It will ask immigrants to learn English, become self-sufficient and pledge allegiance to the U.S. It will ask Americans to provide immigrants help navigating the American system, the chance to eventually become a citizen and an atmosphere of respect.

Go to any other country in the world and try to undermine its official language, and see how well recieved you are.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton said “new immigrants have a responsibility to enter the mainstream of American life.” Eight years later, Clinton strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville are warning their fellow Democrats that the frustration with immigrants and their lack of assimilation is creating a climate akin to the anti-welfare attitudes of the 1990s. They point out that 40% of independent voters now cite border security issues as the primary reason for their discontent.

In 1996, Mr. Clinton and a GOP Congress joined together to defuse the welfare issue by ending the federal welfare entitlement. Bold bipartisan action is needed again. With frustration this deep, it’s in the interests of both parties not to let matters get out of hand.

The entire quoted Opinion Journal column, by John Fund, is here.

The only reason the Democrats are so dead set on creating a multi-lingual America is to get the votes of those immigrants/minorities who don’t consider learning English or otherwise assimilating into mainstream America a priority.

The modern Democratic Party is so, so different from the one to which I belonged and that which I supported during my younger, less informed years. Today, they are more than willing to sacrifice our country, the form of government that makes it great and any and every other ideal that distinguishes America from infinitely less desireable geographic entities for the sole purpose of having their politicians elected to office.

To my way of thinking, that is not only grossly disgraceful, but it is also pure, unmitigated treason.

…to legislate surrender in Iraq?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday that she will bring another troops-out-of-Iraq bill to the House floor on Friday.

It will be the 58th “politically motivated” bill on the Iraq war by the House and Senate this year, Republicans complained.

The Fifty Eighth!

Now, I may sound a bit partisan here, but repeated failure seems to be a recurring theme among the folks over there on the left side of the aisle. I mean, they embrace socialism… despite its extreme lack of success in every government that has adopted it over the years… and they want to force it on the rest of us, here in America, marketing it as “freebies” for all.

So this 58 business, while lending new meaning to the old adage “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”, is also somewhat embarrassing to me, as an American, despite the fact that it comes from the left, which is as indictable as El Nino once was in its own milieu, for all sorts of problems.

Foreign media report on our Congressional activities, simply because the United States is what it is in the world, and a Congress that spends most of its time trying to disrupt the CIC during a time when American troops are in harm’s way demeans the image of America and our political system (think all us voters, who put these people in office).

Fifty Eight failed attempts by the majority on the Hill to surrender to terrorism must make us look pretty lame.

“We are restating the differentiation between us and the president of the United States,” Pelosi said at a press conference. “This gives voice to the desires of the American people,” she said of the bill, which ties war funding ($50 billion for four months) to an immediate troop withdrawal.

Right, they are “re-stating” the differentiation, etc, etc…

Liberals will be liberals.

These are people who will sink in quicksand to protest an anti-quicksand policy and wonder, as they begin to smother (ooops! too late!), if it was a worthwhile cause.

However, I digress…

The 58 surrender attempts have all had one thing in common: They all happened on the taxpayer’s dime. What Pelosi blatantly admitted in that single short paragraph was that the Democrats have no problem with flogging a dead horse on our time and money to press a political agenda.

Try being as unproductive in a salaried private sector job and see how soon you encounter the need to edit your resume.

House Republican Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) criticized Democrats for refusing to recognize the important of the U.S. military mission as well as the “tremendous progress we’ve made against all odds in capturing and killing agents of terror, and providing a level of security for political reconciliation to take place.

“This bill is deja-vu all over again,” Blunt said. “The last time Democrats tried to tie funding for our troops to a date for surrender, they failed - and that was before the marked turn-around we’ve witnessed on the ground over the past several months.”

Truncating…

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that American forces have routed Al Qaeda in Iraq from every neighborhood of Baghdad, according to a top American general - “allowing American troops involved in the ’surge’ to depart as planned.”

Which brings us to this:

The upbeat assessment from the New York Times and other major newspapers had some Republicans questioning the Democrats’ timing:

Blunt said the House on Friday would be taking up a bill “that has far less to do with building on our continued progress, and far more to do with pandering to their (Democrats’) base.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a statement on Thursday questioning the continuing Democratic push for a troop withdrawal.

“What unfortunate timing for Democrats, announcing yet another attempt at a withdrawal date on a day when the papers are filled with encouraging news from Iraq,” McConnell said.

President Bush vetoed a bill tying war funding to a troop withdrawal in May, and he undoubtedly would do so again, given the chance. Some troops withdrawal bills, facing the prospect of a presidential veto, have not mustered enough support to pass the Senate.

So what it all boils down to is that the Democrats have so little regard for our tax dollars or for the Will Of The People that they’ve got absolutely no problem with wasting the time and the resources of the American People by squandering two years of a Congressional majority performing the Kiss of Shame on the far left.

Fifty Eight (count ‘em, 58!) attempts to surrender to the anti-thesis of our very civilization, “Paid for by the Democratic Party”.

…defines, in this column, the true source of the “War On Children”.

Put as succinctly as this, any logic blessed American voter reading the column should stop and ponder:

1. Why aren’t the Democrats in Congress thinking about the future their social programs will leave to “the children”, who will grow up to be tax-paying adults? Why do they attempt to emulate failed European policies while ignoring the negative results of same?

Could it be that they’re only concerned with the politics of the now rather than the realities of the future?

2. Assuming they are concerned about the future of our country and about “the children”, is this simply a case of the Democrats being incapable of assessing the down-the-road ramifications of policies they set today?

Are political leaders who lack even an iota of perspicacity qualified to lead the country?

The United States of America is a perpetually ongoing concept, yet the Democrats treat it as though it is a political Busy Box whose attention span needs only to extend from one Election Day to the next.

If the Democrats feel the need to invoke “the children”, they need look no further for invokees than those occupying seats to the left of the aisle.

…about the price of gas being over $3.00 a gallon at the pump, the cost of heating a home in winter and water year round with natural gas, and the cost of electricity going up as consumption increases, Democrats and Republicans alike. I’ve heard a vicious, nasty, ugly rumor that many on the left blame George Bush. Can you believe that? I mean, Democrats blaming Bush for something. Preposterous!

How could they? It is, after all, the Democrats who are responsible for the lion’s share of our dependence on greedy, terrorist producing countries for oil. They’re the culprits behind energy resources and capabilities laying fallow within the boundaries of U.S. territory and good old American know-how.

I ran across this spot-on commentary by Pete Du Pont in yesterday’s (30 July 07) Opinion Journal, titled Just Drill, Baby that literally brims over with information.

America’s domestic oil production is declining, importation of oil is rising, and gasoline is more expensive. The government’s Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. crude oil field production declined to 1.9 billion barrels in 2005 from 3.5 billion in 1970, and the share of our oil that is imported has increased to 60% from 27% in 1985. The price of gasoline has risen to $3.02 this month from $2 in today’s dollars in 1985.

Washington politicians will tell you this is an “energy crisis,” but America’s energy challenges are far more political than substantive.

First, we are not running out of oil. In 1920 it was estimated that the world supply of oil was 60 billion barrels. By 1950 it was up to 600 billion, and by 1990 to two trillion. In 2000 the world supply of oil was estimated to be three trillion barrels.

I can testify, personally, on the heady days of the late 1970s, when I worked in the offshore “oil patch” for awhile out of Louisiana. I say “heady” because every other week was seven days of party time on “the beach” (in Nawlins) between weeks on the rigs. Back then there was an oil boom in the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere in the very early 1980s, the oil companies capped most of the wells in favor of keeping our domestic oil in reserve and buying from the Arabs.

Depending on the Mooslims for our main sources of energy and transportation fuel is pretty dumb when there are alternatives. Lately, OPEC went so far as to cap the amount of oil they produce in order to keep prices up.

And there are alternatives.

The U.S. has substantial supplies of oil and gas that could be accessed if lawmakers would allow it, but they frequently don’t. A National Petroleum Council study released last week reports that 40 billion barrels of America’s “recoverable oil reserves are off limits or are subject to significant lease restrictions”–half inshore and half offshore–and similar restrictions apply to more than 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (We consume about 22 trillion cubic feet a year.)

Access to the 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve has been prohibited for decades. Some 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, but a month ago the House again, as it did last year, voted down an amendment that would have allowed the expansion of coastal drilling for oil and natural gas. All of which leaves the U.S. as the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Just as we’re the only country on earth that permits rampant violation of our borders and permits our immigration laws to be made a mockery of, we are the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Then there are all the other energy ideas Congress wishes to adopt–better energy efficiency for washers, driers, boilers, motors and refrigerators; greater fuel efficiency for cars; and more use of wind, solar and geothermal power generation. Good ideas all–especially more fuel-efficient automobiles–but not substantively or immediately very helpful in meeting the challenge of increasing America’s energy supplies to keep our economy, jobs and prosperity increasing.

To do that we must build many more nuclear power plants and increase our drilling for oil and gas. The NPC report says it takes 15 to 20 years from exploration until production begins, and it costs $3 billion to build an average 120,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery. That is just the opposite of the current congressional policy of reducing oil use, blocking access to existing domestic oil reserves, not increasing nuclear power generation, and touting ethanol as another subsidy for farmers.

Ah, ethanol, ahem…

I’ve already posted on the reality behind the ethanol lie in the past. Evidently, Mr. Du Pont feels the same way I do about it.

Oil, natural gas and nuclear power are the indispensable energy resources to insure the prosperity of America’s economy. But that is not what the congressional leadership thinks. So if we mustn’t drill offshore for oil or natural gas, or build nuclear power plants, what is the politically correct action Congress intends to take?

Increasing ethanol subsidies for farmers is at the top of the list. Ethanol is a politically hot energy substance produced from crops like corn, soybeans, sunflowers and switch grass. Current law requires 7.5 billion gallons to be produced by 2012; the new Senate bill would increase that to 36 billion by 2022.

But ethanol is not a good gasoline substitute. It takes some seven gallons of oil to produce eight gallons of corn-based ethanol–diesel fuel for the tractors to plant and harvest the corn, pesticides to protect it, and fuel for trucks to transport the ethanol around the country. So there is not much energy gain, nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And ethanol yields one-third less energy per gallon than gasoline, so that mileage per gallon of ethanol-blended auto fuel is less than gasoline mileage.

Ethanol is a politically popular subsidized product. Producers get a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy and are protected from international ethanol imports by a 2.5% tariff and an ethanol import duty of 54 cents a gallon. These subsidies have brought more than 100 American ethanol refineries into operation, and another six dozen are going to be built, which has nearly doubled the price of corn, raised the cost of beef and other corn-fed livestock, and increased the cost of milk and corn syrup for soft-drink manufacturers.

(Above emphasis mine, though I will add that I disagree with Mr. Du Pont’s intimation regarding man’s activities having any effect on climate change, ie nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, though the Goremongers might give it some thought)

It’s quite obvious that the reason a large number of these people we elect to the Senate and the House pursue lifelong careers in politics is because they wouldn’t last a week in the private sector…at least as businessmen and businesswomen. Corporate shareholders wouldn’t stand for being bankrupted by incompetents the way we Americans tolerate these idiots bankrupting our country, creating unnecessary inflation and squandering our taxes.

this is very definitely the way to go — as a state project, not a federal affair.

When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as “laboratories of democracy,” he didn’t claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that “progressive” state a Petri dish for government-run health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the “single-payer,” universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is “free” health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

Talk about ruthless mathematics…

Given the trial and error (hit or miss?) process that seems to accompany the regular dose of Murphy’s Law whenever government descends and the inevitable resulting demand for additional funding via taxes collected from We, the People, I am reminded for some reason of dominoes.

In countries whose citizens “benefit” from socialized medicine, taxes are well beyond oppressive by American standards — and all too much of that is due to the cost of their government administrated health care.

By the time a healthy taxpayer is done being taxed, he/she will have been charged more of his/her hard earned pay by the government than it might have cost for a private HMO — or because he/she is in satisfactory or better physical condition, been, quite simply, ripped off: Perhaps he/she hasn’t felt the need for medical coverage just yet. But he/she must be protected whether he/she likes it or not.

Hmmm…that sounds awfully like a personal choice that belongs exclusively to said taxpayer, not unlike to wear or not to wear a motorcycle helmet, strap on a seat belt, order a blood-rare burger, etc, etc…

But it doesn’t strike me as anything the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have endorsed.

But…back to the issue at hand –

What we have here is a state experimenting with socialized medicine. While I brook none of that bullshit on a federal level, I am a fervent believer in states’ rights; If a collection of idiots living within the confines of their own political subdivision exercise their voting rights to elect leaders of the socialist persuasion, so be it. Look at California.

For that matter, look at what the left is trying to do in Wisconsin (damn, I’d love to deliver a “cheesy” pun, but who wants to kick a state when it be about to be “down”?).

Moving right along,

There’s absolutely no mystery why our greatest complaints are in the arena of government-delivered services and the fewest in market-delivered services. In the market, there are the ruthless forces of profit, loss and bankruptcy that make producers accountable to us. In the arena of government-delivered services, there’s no such accountability. For example, government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality services, and what’s the result? The people who manage it earn higher pay. It’s nearly impossible to fire the incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are given higher tax bills.

Oh — kay!

Before we buy into single-payer health care systems like Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s, we might want to do a bit of research. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute annually publishes “Waiting Your Turn.” Its 2006 edition gives waiting times, by treatments, from a person’s referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist. The shortest waiting time was for oncology (4.9 weeks). The longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery (40.3 weeks), followed by plastic surgery (35.4 weeks) and neurosurgery (31.7 weeks).
As reported in the June 28 National Center for Policy Analysis’ “Daily Policy Digest,” Britain’s Department of Health recently acknowledged that one in eight patients waits more than a year for surgery. France’s failed health care system resulted in the deaths of 13,000 people, mostly of dehydration, during the heat spell of 2003. Hospitals stopped answering the phones, and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.

So now, we have problems on both the buy side and the sell side of government run healthcare.

Bummer.

I don’t think most Americans would like more socialized medicine in our country. By the way, I have absolutely no problem with people wanting socialism. My problem is when they want to drag me into it.

That has got to be the single most perfect definition of belief in the rights of Americans that I’ve ever seen. What happens to we believers in the Constitution once that great document has been violated and pissed upon by our very Congress?

The long and the short of it should be that we can thank our lucky stars that this entire exercise is as it should be, a single state event. The only problems I can envision there are the inevitably tragic probable results for Wisconsin taxpayers and what they would invite: FAILURE.

Failure attracts today’s liberal-ruled Democrats — while socialism has long since proven itself a blatant mistake, these so-called intellectual elites, followers of eco-socio-economic theories based solely on Utopian fantasies, want to repeat this same failure.

On the other hand, ownership of immense bureaucracies also attracts the Democrats, and the number of bureaucracies that would emanate from a parasitic healthcare core would constitute tax money negligently flushed down the commode of liberalism. So what’s new?

I can’t caution enough against the successful propagandizing power of the liberal mainstream media, which never stops working to misinform the public on every issue that can be politicized to make George Bush the Snidely Whiplash of global politics.

Now the Democrat controlled Congress, which is running on fumes in the perceptions of American voters, is also fair game, because they’re not browbeating hard enough to convince their Republican colleagues to support the Iraq Cut and Run agenda.

Here’s some hydro-Couric acid courtesy of Newsbusters, for example.

In my opinion, the most WTF!!!?-earning line in the entire article is,

As Couric pointed out how “nearly three out of four Americans say the troop surge is not working, that it’s having no impact, or actually making matters worse,”

…citing “a CBS/NYT opinion poll”.

The operative question here is, of course, how the hell do three out of four Americans know anything about what the troop surge is doing?

The answer is they don’t, but the media is feeding them the usual liberal political disinformation which, for three out of four Americans, is probably the only source of news in town. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, NYT, etc, etc…, and they think they know. And of course, what they think they know but don’t forms their opinions.

It really sucks big green donkey… well, suffice it to say that it is somewhat frustrating when one realizes that the lion’s share of U.S. public opinion is compiled via the process of lying to the people and then polling them based on the same lies. Garbage in, garbage out.

There’s a disturbance in the Force First Amendment. It has been created by unscrupulous political partisans taking fraudulent advantage of a perfectly wonderful Constitutional right in an effort to engender opinions among the American public without giving us all the facts. This is not reporting, it is marketing.

In many ways, it’s like news being replaced by spam.

For a breath of fresh air, however, regarding the troop surge, Kimberly Kagan weighed in on the subject in a WSJ Opinion Journal piece back on 11 July, which I had been saving to spring when I thought we’d heard enough defeatist MSM/ Congressional Democrat mallarkey re “the surge”.

In Washington perception is often mistaken for reality. And as Congress prepares for a fresh debate on Iraq, the perception many members have is that the new strategy has already failed.

This isn’t an accurate reflection of what is happening on the ground, as I saw during my visit to Iraq in May. Reports from the field show that remarkable progress is being made. Violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province is down dramatically, grassroots political movements have begun in the Sunni Arab community, and American and Iraqi forces are clearing al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militias out of long-established bases around the country.

This is remarkable because the military operation that is making these changes possible only began in full strength on June 15. To say that the surge is failing is absurd. Instead Congress should be asking this question: Can the current progress continue?

Read the entire article here.

So the other day a whole bunch of Senators grew brains – (at least temporary ones) and finally got the picture – voting for the amnesty based immigration bill would very definitely have mandated the typing of their resumes before the end of autumn, 2008. A lot of credit goes to junior senators who thankfully opted to buck their more senior counterparts and do the right thing for their country, thus proving my theory that imposing term limits on members of Congress would constitute a much needed reform. So-called “junior” senators apparently still possess the principles that drove them to serve to begin with, whereas most of the “senior” ones have become part of the machine.

At any rate, they shot down the bill. We conservatives are both pleased and relieved. I had been really sure that amnesty would pass if for no other reason than that too many Republican Senators would be sold on the proactive additions to the bill, figuring they could use them to placate their anti-amnesty constituencies. After all, a politician’s only real career asset is the gift of gab. He or she can be as dumb as a post, but as long as his/her skills as a con man (or con woman) remain intact, he or she can continue to parasite off the taxpayer for decades.

But I digress (ahem).

Let’s see what happens next – the amnesty that centralized the bill was like a shark, while all the positive ad-on agendas like securing the border and enforcing work eligibility laws were like pilot fish clinging to the shark.

Unfortunately, these particular Naucrates ductor didn’t enjoy the option afforded other pilot fish of simply dropping off a dead shark’s teeth and going elsewhere, they shared the fate of the shark. Bummer.

Now, watch the amnesty mongers on the Hill interpret this to mean that all immigration issues are up for individual assessment or reassessment. Bush signed off on the border fence, but that was before the Democrats became the Congressional majority. Those critters could promise us the moon, then not fund the acquisition when the time comes, somehow blaming their failure to deliver on the Republicans, the liberal mainstream media making it believable to the folks on Maple Street. Since they didn’t promise the fence, starving the project of funding would be at most a picayune bit of intentional neglect.

Given the above, the entire illegal immigration issue can be brought forward, without definitive resolution, right through the 2008 election season, giving the Democrats something to “champion”, with their own patented brand of misleading spin, as a co-side dish to man made global warming “climate change”, alongside the hefty Iraq entrée.

I perceive this as a political misstep for the Democrats, as their immigration agendas are offensive to the majority of Americans. But they would tear flesh from bone to stifle the viewpoint of right thinking Americans and flood the field with their liberal propaganda.

On the other hand, the more they obfuscate and promote delays, the larger the criminal alien problem can grow. The M-19 gangs can expand their memberships and bloody influence, emergency rooms can continue to close, billions of dollars in untaxed wages can be wired out of the country and out of our economy, American tradesmen such as carpenters, masons, roofers, plumbers, painters and landscapers, as well as general laborers, custodial workers, furniture movers and others can go hungry along with their families while unscrupulous contractors replace them with illegal, dirt wage, benefit free illegals.

In short, our enthusiasm regarding the defeat of the amnesty bill should be tempered by concern as to how both Bush and the Democrat majority, neither of whom has exhibited any real interest in quelling the flow of criminal aliens into the U.S. (actually, quite the opposite), will now attempt to exploit whatever they can in its aftermath in order to perpetuate a continued increase in the problem as they drag it out in hopes of eventually seeing their amnesty agenda succeed via the pressure of continuous attrition.