It’s plain to see why the Democrats in various states don’t want to give our military personnel stationed overseas, particularly in combat theatres, elbow room to vote when time permits:

From Michelle Malkin –

What About the Camp Bastion Attack?

Three days after the bloody 9/11 siege on our consulate in Benghazi, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The murderous jihadists released video exactly one month ago this week showing off their training exercises in preparation for the assault. Where are the questions?

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the Obama administration? Where’s the press? Where’s the outrage?

Two heroic U.S. Marines were killed in the battle. Their names — Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and Sgt. Bradley Atwell — have not been uttered publicly by the commander in chief. Their arrival back in the U.S., in flag-draped coffins, was not broadcast on network TV. But their brothers-in-arms did not and will not forget. And neither must we.

Read On…

And then, there’s this one from Weekly Standard:

Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, reveals details of meeting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the publically broadcast memorial service for the slain Americans at Andrews Air Force Base only days after the attack. And, in a recent radio appearance, Woods publicly questions who made the call not to send in back-up forces to possibly save his son’s life, as well as the three other Americans killed in Benghazi (which includes the American ambassador to Libya).

“When [Obama] came over to our little area” at Andrew Air Force Base, says Woods, “he kind of just mumbled, you know, ‘I’m sorry.’ His face was looking at me, but his eyes were looking over my shoulder like he could not look me in the eye. And it was not a sincere, ‘I’m really sorry, you know, that your son died,’ but it was totally insincere, more of whining type, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Woods says that shaking President Obama’s hands at his son’s memorial service was “like shaking hands with a dead fish.”

“It just didn’t feel right,” he says of his encounter with the commander in chief. “And now that it’s coming out that apparently the White House situation room was watching our people die in real time, as this was happening,” Woods says, he wants answers on what happened—and why there was no apparent effort to save his son’s life.

“Well, this is what Hillary did,” Woods continues. “She came over and, you know, did the same thing—separately came over and talked with me. I gave her a hug, shook her hand. And she did not appear to be one bit sincere—at all. And you know, she mentioned that the thing about, we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video. That was the first time I had even heard about anything like that.”

Yes, the indifference of this administration to our nation’s military, the people who put life and limb on the line on our behalf, is once again manifesting itself, not surprisingly, as it did when a campaigning B. Hussein Obama went to Afghanistan back in 2008 to talk to some brass, blatantly ignored troops who stood waiting to greet him after he arrived, then staged a fake photo op basketball shoot by himself that was supposed to look as though he were “shooting hoops” with the troops.

What an insincere hemorrhoid a whole lot of uninformed, flat out ignorant or simply America hating *ss#0!es subjected us to when they voted this creature into the White House four years ago.

Let’s hope we don’t see the same mistake made again!

A spot-on rant from Jason Mattera:

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Princesella Smith, who raked in $89,599 for operating the toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2011.

Good work if you can get it!

Smith isn’t alone. An investigation by the New York Post revealed that another toll booth operator pulled in a whopping $102,670 in 2011, $40K of that money coming in overtime. In total, as the Post notes, there are at least 24 New York and New Jersey workers who have raked in more than $80,000 as “public” workers at a job that requires us to hand them even more of our money.

Yep, in essence, we’re paying them to sit in an outside cubicle all day and deplete our wallets further if we want to travel between New York, New Jersey and the surrounding states.

Must be nice.

I can’t say as I would blame the employees themselves for any of this, I mean who wouldn’t take the hours and the pay involved? I would, however, blame the supervisory personnel and the bureaucrats who make all this possible.

What a country!

Besides excessive wages to people whose only skill requirement is to sit on a stool and count and collect dollar bills, tax dollars reserved for transportation uses have gone to a panoply of nonessential programs. As Ronald Utt of The Heritage Foundation points out, the “highway trust fund” has been raided to pay for Indian reservations, historic preservation sites, Appalachian and Mississippi Delta development, roadside beautification, bicycles, hiking paths, university research, and—the granddaddy of all expenses—feeding the $425 million beast that is the Department of Transportation.

The Port Authority (PA), for instance, employees a gardener for $94,000 and a blacksmith for $146,000 a year. Heck, there are even retired PA employees who are making around that amount by cashing in on unused vacation and comp time. (Here’s an idea: As we’re facing budget deficits well into our future, how about requiring public employees to use their vaca time … or lose it. No cashing in allowed.)

I concur.

The rest of the column is here.

I was new to America during the Carter Administration and not really cognizant of the former Georgia governor’s blunders as president, though I used to hear quite a bit of belly-aching about them from the big, bad Wolf (my beloved hubby). The consensus among conservatives I knew then seemed to be that a president couldn’t get any worse than Carter was, though in hindsight, I think they were a little premature along that line. But then, they had never heard of Barack Obama, either. For that matter, neither had Barack Obama, at least in the context we now know him.

Every time I think the present administration has outdone itself where idiocy, too-far-leftism or simply complete failure to embrace reality is concerned, I read something like…

From the Washington Times:

Why did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let criminals buy firearms, smuggle them across the Mexican border and deliver them into the hands of vicious drug cartels? The ATF claims it launched its now-disgraced Operation Fast and Furious in 2009 to catch the “big fish.” Fast and Furious was designed to stem the “Iron River” flowing from American gun stores into the cartels’ arsenals. The bureau says it allowed gun smuggling so it could track the firearms and arrest the cartel members downstream. Not true.

During the course of Operation Fast and Furious, about 2,000 weapons moved from U.S. gun stores to Mexican drug cartels - exactly as intended.

In congressional testimony, William Newell, former ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix Field Division, testified that the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were “full partners” in Operation Fast and Furious. Mr. Newell’s list left out the most important player: the CIA. According to a CIA insider, the agency had a strong hand in creating, orchestrating and exploiting Operation Fast and Furious.

Wasn’t it only a couple of decades ago that the liberals in media and government were attacking the CIA for taking what one might term “initiative” in their pursuit of projecting U.S. policy? Well, now an extremely liberal administration may be using what Wolf smilingly calls Christians In Action to intercede, albeit only semi-directly, in the internal political affairs of another country.

If, that is, this report is correct.

The CIA’s motive is clear enough: The U.S. government is afraid the Los Zetas drug cartel will mount a successful coup d’etat against the government of Felipe Calderon.

Founded by ex-Mexican special forces, the Zetas already control huge swaths of Mexican territory. They have the organization, arms and money needed to take over the entire country.

Former CIA pilot Robert Plumlee and former CIA operative and DEA Director Phil Jordan recently said the brutally efficient Mexican drug cartel has stockpiled thousands of weapons to disrupt and influence Mexico’s national elections in 2012. There’s a very real chance the Zetas cartel could subvert the political process completely, as it has throughout the regions it controls.

In an effort to prevent a Los Zetas takeover, Uncle Sam has gotten into bed with the rival Sinaloa cartel, which has close ties to the Mexican military. Recent court filings by former Sinaloa cartel member Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, currently in U.S. custody, reveal that the United States allowed the Sinaloas to fly a 747 cargo plane packed with cocaine into American airspace - unmolested.

The CIA made sure the trade wasn’t one-way. It persuaded the ATF to create Operation Fast and Furious - a “no strings attached” variation of the agency’s previous firearms sting. By design, the ATF operation armed the Mexican government’s preferred cartel on the street level near the American border, where the Zetas are most active.

Operation Fast and Furious may not have been the only way the CIA helped put lethal weapons into the hands of the Sinaloa cartel and its allies, but it certainly was an effective strategy. If drug thugs hadn’t murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry with an ATF- provided weapon, who knows how many thousands more guns would have crossed the U.S. border?

This is beginning to sound more and more like the kind of thing the Democrats are always accusing Republican administrations of being up to, from Watergate to Contragate.

The ATF has never been an “approved agency” in our household, nor has the BATFE Gestapo been an object of respect or admiration here at Hard Astarboard. I wonder why…

To be sure, Operation Fast and Furious suited the ATF’s needs. It was all too willing to let guns walk to increase its power, prestige and budget in Washington. It actively recruited so-called straw purchasers and happily used American gun dealers as pawns. And it was only one agency in a mosaic of federal agencies helping the CIA actualize its covert plans.

The article in its entirety is here.

…coincidentally in the aftermath of U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton’s predictably anti-American (yes, I say anti-American because I don’t believe any judge who would, given the circumstances, rule as Bolton did on the Arizona immigration law signed by Governor Jan Brewer has any right to call herself an American — it’s too bad U.S. district judges can’t be replaced by illegal aliens, for a fraction of what we pay Ms. Brewer, of course) ruling, I was walking around in the neighborhood in which I grew up.

Forest Hills, in the Borough of Queens, New York.

When I was growing up here, the neighborhood was a mixture of nationalities, eastern European, Irish, German, various generation Americans, a few Asians, WASP, Jewish, Catholic. One thing we all had in common in those days (late 1950s through early 1970s), including the immigrant population, was that everybody could speak, read and write English. If they couldn’t when they arrived here, they certainly could by then.

But I digress: I was sort of flabbergasted when, earlier, a very frustrated guy (N.Y. accent, born in New York) came up to me right here in Forest Hills, asking for directions, and the first thing he said was, “Please, tell me you speak English!”

How bad are things getting, for crying out loud!?

Back from a Memorial Day spent aboard my maritime home, celebrating Memorial Day with half a dozen ‘Nam and “other places” buddies. To us, celebrating is the proper word, for we do indeed celebrate… the lives and times, the bravery and the selfless patriotism of friends and comrades who died while putting themselves willingly in harm’s way for our great country.

There were surpluses of good food (I had the modest affair “catered” by an excellent local eatery I frequent), Jack Daniels, both black and green labels, Sam Adams and Anchor Steam Beer and their dy-na-mite Porter (three of the better American brands, since imports wouldn’t be right on a day honoring fallen American heroes) and a lot of heartfelt toasts to good men gone.

This post is also on the topic of war, in this case an injustice that is apparently being done by Big Brass to cover their own asses by kicking the truth to the curb.

Many readers of Hard Astarboard are probably familiar with war correspondent Michael Yon, an ex Special Forces guy who has covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as an embed who, unlike most of his “colleagues”, actually gets in there and covers his beat, risks be damned, then reports things as he sees them, without the political bias of mainstream media reporters. With his own military background, again unlike his “colleagues”, he is eminently qualified to comment knowledgeably on that which he encounters.

That said…

The military has cut short a war correspondent’s embed, and there may be evidence that the decision may have been part of a smear campaign against the writer.

Michael Yon, a former Green Beret, has been covering Iraq and Afghanistan for six years. He has also covered conflicts in Thailand, the Philippines, and Nepal. Following a string of events covered by Yon that cast a negative light on two top NATO commanders, the military decided to terminate Yon’s embed prematurely, citing reasons that didn’t add up.

ISAF’s reason for disembedding Yon was “embed overcrowding.” Yet in an email to Admiral Gregory J. Smith, an ISAF public affairs officer, Yon wrote, “I rarely see journalists. Those journalists I see have been doing drive-by reporting.”

Yon states that he has forwarded to his attorney “compelling evidence” of a smear campaign perpetrated by members of Gen. McChrystal’s staff. He says that the general’s staff have released official statements that are “defamatory and libelous.”

“A writer must be able to spot libel just as a soldier must be able to spot IEDs,” writes Yon. “It’s part of the job. If you can’t spot it, you will get hurt.”

So here they go, members of the military top brass, purportedly looking to save their own skins by using a technique favored by propagandizing, low life commie liberals “progressives”.

Sweep the man under a rug, render him inoperable in hopes of preventing him from imparting the truth to the people.

In March, Yon began investigating a possible weapons mishap by Canadian Brig. Gen. Daniel Menard, the top Canadian general in Afghanistan and also Commander of Task Force Kandahar. Reports say that Menard nearly shot Canada’s Chief of the Defense Staff, Gen. Walt Natynczyk while preparing to board a helicopter at Kandahar Airfield. According to Yon, Menard didn’t acknowledge the incident until ISAF learned that Yon was looking into the matter. Menard was found guilty of negligent discharge and fined $3500 on Tuesday.

Menard has operational control over three battalions of U.S. Army soldiers. And as Yon points out in his website that “while Canada increasingly shies from combat, American units under Canadian command will spill blood under Canadian military leadership that answers to Ottawa.”

The Canadian general’s defense counsel stated Menard “accepted full responsibility.” But in a separate incident just days before the shooting, Menard took absolutely no responsibility for a fatal incident on a strategic bridge near Kandahar when a suicide bomber killed a U.S. soldier.

On the morning of March 1, a suicide car bomber attacked a U.S. convoy as they crossed the Tarnak River Bridge leading to Kandahar. The bridge is a chokepoint on a crucial route between Kandahar Airfield and the town of Kandahar, and on out to Helmand Province. The bridge was damaged in the attack, which killed U.S. Army Specialist Ian Gelig, several Afghan civilians, and wounded several other soldiers. Numerous missions were canceled as the river could not be crossed.

The Stryker Brigade that Yon was embedded with was tasked with keeping the roads open. And the British Royal Air Force is responsible for much of the ground around Kandahar Airfield, including the land around the bridge. And the Afghanistan National Police, mentored by U.S. military police were guarding the bridge. However when Yon investigated the matter, he was informed by multiple officers that Menard was ultimately responsible for the bridge at the time of the attack as it belongs to Task Force Kandahar.

“Menard ultimately had responsibility for the bridge,” Yon stated in an interview. When Yon investigated the matter, he was informed by multiple officers that the bridge at the time of the attack belonged to Task Force Kandahar. Menard tried to pin the blame on his supervisor, British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter. Yet during a meeting with ISAF officials, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Ben Hodges took full responsibility, although Yon did not believe him.

When asked why the U.S. military would possibly cover for Menard, Yon replied, “I think the cover was in the interest of Coalition warfare. An American putting it to a Canadian would have had political ramifications.”

I’ve followed Yon’s reporting and photo-journals for a long time, now, and, even though he was a blanket-head in service (that’s what we used to call those Army dudes with the berets back in my time), he was still a member of the elite community of warriors and one whose word I would take over some self-serving career officer’s line of lube any day of the week.

Yon has stood alone in his criticism of Menard and received heavy fire for doing so. He called Menard incompetent and said he needed to be fired. He also stands alone saying the same about McChrystal. Yon recently wrote, “This is clear as day: General Stanley McChrystal will lose this war.”

“The reason stated for my disembed was ‘overcrowding.’ Clearly this is untrue,” Yon said. “The war is going poorly and it is widely known that I will call the ball where it lands. We are losing the war and it seems likely that McChrystal and staff don’t want me in combat reporting their failures.”

So with the upcoming operation in Kandahar – which would be commanded by Menard – it seems entirely possible that ISAF wanted Yon out of the theater. His criticism of not only Menard but of ISAF commander Gen Stanley McChrystal could well be the reason behind the ending of his embed.

While the military may view Yon’s dispatches as controversial, the American people deserve the truth. And as Kay Day from the US Report says, “No one reporting on the Global War on Terror has done a more effective or honest job than Michael Yon.”

Past statements by Yon were initially viewed as controversial – such as being the first journalist to say the “Surge” was working, or that Iraq was experiencing a “civil war.”

However, these events would soon become conventional wisdom. Could his assessments of Gens. Menard and McChrystal soon become conventional wisdom as well?

Perhaps a comment from a reader at the United States Naval Institute sums it up best:
Frankly, I trust Yon more than I trust McChrystal at this point.

The man who took part in the cover-up of [Army Ranger and former professional football player Pat] Tillman’s death has lost quite a bit of credibility. In fact, McChrystal admitted as much – years later – before the Senate.

Yon, meanwhile, was right about Iraq. He was right about Afghanistan. He was right about Petraeus. He was right about Menard.

And I suspect he’s right about McChrystal.

The Tillman link above was added by me, to refresh the memories of anyone who may not recall any of the details.

Hell, to my way of thinking, while Michael Yon is a proven force in his area of endeavor, General McChristol is, as I said, a career officer and, more to the point, he is acceptable to President Barack Obama, or he wouldn’t be there.

Now, knowing how we at this blog feel about the lack of scruples and the paucity of American patriotism present in the Obama Administration, what kind of a reference is that?

…couldn’t blame George W. Bush enough for the federal response to Katrina, expending so much hot air that one has to wonder if perhaps that’s where they discovered what they thought was evidence of global warming, yet here we learn that Osama Ooops, sorry, Mohammed Damn! Sorry again, wait, I got it…Saddam Whoops, okay, B. Hussein Obama, Janet Napolitano and their Khoir of Kommunism aren’t even bothering to adequately fund and staff what is arguably the most effective (when staffed and funded to the point of operational status) search & rescue/ maritime emergency response organization in this nation.

I’m talking about the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard’s plans to cut 1,100 uniformed personnel in 2011 and reduce some of its missions at a time it must respond to an enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico certainly highlight the stark choices Coasties face over the next few years. Meanwhile, the Navy is moving into the littoral and increasing its focus on anti-drug and anti-piracy operations, raising questions about just what the Coastie’s future roles and missions will be. Robbin Laird, a defense consultant who has been working on Coast Guard issues, penned the following commentary about the Coast Guard and its future.

The Coast Guard is being starved of resources just when the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to demonstrate again just how important the service’s expertise is in responding to such events.

The Obama administration is not fully funding for catastrophic spill equipment for the Coast Guard. And with elimination of the Coast Guard’s national strike fleet coordination center at Elizabeth City, North Carolina next year, the nation will lose a vital organization that manages all Coast Guard responses, and is also the key player for inter-agency coordination and leadership of scores of state and local, commercial and NGO responders.

Those groups play vital roles in preventing and responding to spills. Success requires the authorities possessed by the Coast Guard, highly competent people to run it and adequate equipment. The Coast Guard is the only maritime organization that can do these jobs on the vital waterways of our country and it does not have enough assets to do the job in the Gulf of Mexico, where a BP oil rig exploded last week, killing 11 and creating an enormous oil spill that threatens the Gulf Coast.

As a senior Coast Guard official commented in a New Orleans interview 10 days before the explosion that “we have not enough inspectors and inadequate numbers of ships and helos to secure the emerging deep water oil enterprise being built off of the Gulf Coast. This enterprise will be further and deeper than the current offshore oil drilling.

These facilitates will not only drill oil, but will process oil at sea. We must go further than we normally do to regulate and work with the private sector in this area.”

The Coast Guard has worked within its limits to deal with the crisis. The Department of Homeland Security’s leadership has not responded to the crisis by trying to get the USCG more deployed assets. Instead, the Administration has deployed Navy assets and has scurried to find private inspectors they can hire on a temporary basis to deal with the crisis.

The men and women of the Coast Guard are highly capable, brave and dedicated people, but like most services, they need to be properly equipped and their units realistically manned in order to do their job.

At this rate, it’ll be late January, 2013 before our government has its priorities straight!

…too funny, despite being rather f—ed up, but funny (there’s no accounting for my sense of humor, what can I say?) nonetheless, to ignore. I just have to post on it…

Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.

The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

Taxes, as they used to say, working for the people.

A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.

• Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” earning salaries of up to $222,418.

• The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.

The entire article is here.

An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night.

Well, lookee here!

The Obama administration has asked Congress to extend three contentious provisions of the USA Patriot Act - a bill once described by President Obama as “shoddy” - and urged an appeals court to deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan.

Can’t get enough
of that “shoddy” stuff…

Civil liberties groups immediately criticized both moves, which would extend Bush-era terrorism policies that have long been unpopular with Democrats.

In a letter made public Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asking Congress to reauthorize three portions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Well, we might say that now that he’s in the hot seat himself, maybe B. Hussein Obama realizes that perhaps there were some good reasons for some of the Bush anti-tango policies.

Then, on the other hand,

The three portions permit roving wiretaps, the seizure of certain business records and the monitoring of suspected “lone wolf” terrorists. Mr. Weich said the administration is willing to consider modifications that provide additional privacy protections provided they do not undermine the effectiveness of the provisions.

roving wiretaps and the seizure of “certain business records” somehow go hand in hand with the kind of communistic government the Obama and Pelosi seem hell bent on delivering.

If Bush could use these provisions to protect us from terrorism, why can’t Obama use them to keep a weather eye on us in the event that there are conservative “subversives” afoot?

While we’re on the subject,

…deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan…

Hey! Is that you, O?

Tell me it ain’t so!

…Pelosi and Company, the Democrats who are presently in control of Congress, have chosen to leave the American people in the lurch by heading off on vacation without first taking the time to try and solve the current fuel kerfuffle (despite the frustrated objections of a whole passle of their Republican colleagues). Oh, yeah, they have dropped a few half derriered ideas along the lines of depleting the strategic oil reserve for a few seconds’ dubious relief, exhorting the oil companies to drill empty or nearly empty oil leases, and extracting more money from the coffers of the oil companies, completely ignoring the concept of said concerns passing these additional costs on to the consumer, thereby nullifying the added expense to themselves, but hey – who ever said today’s Democrat politicians believe they’re paid to think things through?

I’m reminded of the budget debacle during Bubba’s first term in the White House, when that President repeatedly vetoed the then Republican controlled Congress’ efforts to put forward their budget, and the Democrats all going home on Christmas vacation while the Republicans remained in Washington attempting to hammer out a budget that would meet with Clinton’s approval – kinda’ showed us which party is more dedicated to We, the People, didn’t it? The only thing that saved the day back then was Alan Greenspan’s threat to raise interest rates during an election year if he didn’t have a budget on his desk post-haste – on that note, Clinton, both abruptly and conveniently, misplaced his veto pen and the next budget went through.

So now they’ve demonstrated in no uncertain terms that, whether they hold the minority or the majority in Congress, they will walk out on us without so much as a how-do-you-do because their vacations are more important to them than the work for which we pay them (you know, the “work” for which they periodically vote themselves pay increases whether their performance warrants such raises or not).

We can hardly expect the leftpard to change its spots at this stage of the game, so…

What I find most irksome about this entire thing is that, despite the majority of even their own constituency demanding that we consider drilling our own oil in order to relieve the shortage that is generating the higher gas prices, Pelosi and her House retinue have refused to even debate the subject with the more sensible representatives on the right side of the aisle, let alone among themselves. It seems that the enviro-extremists have infinitely more say among the Democrats than the constituency at whose pleasure these critters serve. For the Democrats in Congress, politics trumps both the will and the well-being of the American people.

Of course, while preventing the oil companies from drilling where there is plenty of black gold, Alaska tea, they blame these same companies for high prices, completely ignoring the facts:

We live in a market based, supply and demand economy. When a commodity is in short supply, in oil’s case this being when the countries we buy from limit recovery quantities and our own domestic drilling is not what it could be (by government mandate, not by private sector choice – Hmmm, where is the Constitution in all this?), prices go up. This has nothing to do with the President, whom the Democrats naturally blame, him being Bush and all, and little to do with our own oil companies, whose prices adjust to the cost of a barrel of oil. If you’re running a candy store and the wholesale cost of a Nestle’s Crunch goes up .25, you’re going to raise your own price a quarter a bar, right?

Speaking of Nancy Pelosi and drilling, I would be amiss without linking to a great post on the subject over at Mike’s America.

Having said my piece on this as relates to today’s irresponsible, purely politically motivated Democrat majority in Congress, let’s go back several days to a Walter E. Williams (yep, the guy who’s become one of my favorite all time columnists over the last few months) column about the environmentalist moonbats’ influence on government that is totally on point and highly relevant to the topic at hand.

Let’s face it. The average individual American has little or no clout with Congress and can be safely ignored. But it’s a different story with groups such as Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. When they speak, Congress listens. Unlike the average American, they are well organized, loaded with cash and well positioned to be a disobedient congressman’s worse nightmare. Their political and economic success has been a near disaster for our nation.

For several decades, environmentalists have managed to get Congress to keep most of our oil resources off-limits to exploration and drilling. They’ve managed to have the Congress enact onerous regulations that have made refinery construction impossible. Similarly, they’ve used the courts and Congress to completely stymie the construction of nuclear power plants. As a result, energy prices are at historical highs and threaten our economy and national security.

Read the entire column here.

The Cap & Trade bit’s a little scary, wouldn’t you say?

…to Great Britain? The English! The Brits!???

England has got to be the single most globally streetwise nation on earth — in the history of their great country, they have had colonies all over the world, learning first-hand of copious diverse cultures, religious customs, governance systems, ethnic mindsets and so forth and Englishmen travel the globe as easily and familiarly as most others move about their own countries, yet their government sits by and not only allows Islam to transition her gradually into the realm of the Sha’aria, but also prosecutes those who protest this disgraceful surrender.

This is unacceptable.

The Brits need to have an aggressive chat with their politicians, pronto!