John Stossel certainly gets it, it’s too bad all those career politicians we keep reelecting to govern the country are clueless.

We spend too much time waiting for orders — and money — from Washington.

The collapse of the housing bubble gave politicians a license to do what they wanted to do all along: spend. The usual checks on extravagance, weak as they are, were washed away. Budgets? We’ll worry about that later. Inflation? We’ll worry about that later.

As I point out in my brand new book, “No, We Can’t: Why Government Fails — and Individuals Succeed,”
a true free market doesn’t require much. It’s not like an orchestra in need of a conductor. What it needs is property rights, so no one can take your stuff. Then people trade property to their mutual advantage. Resources move around without the need for a central, coercive government telling people which resources should go where — or telling them that they must get permission to do what they think is advantageous.

Italics mine.

Superbly put, and exactly what America’s founding fathers would have said.

This formula brought a new nation, in less than two centuries, to the forefront of the world in terms of inventiveness, riches and power.

You got something good, you stick with it, right?

Unfortunately, our politicians can’t seem to grasp this concept, so they’ve gone a different route.

You have to wonder if one day, enough of them will wake up and return us to what works.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting…

From the latest of Mark Steyn’s ever-great, fun to read columns:

In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the “war on women,” the Republican theocrats’ confiscation of your contraceptives, or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences. This week’s bit of ham-handed misdirection was “the Buffett Rule,” a not-so-disguised capital-gains tax hike designed to ensure that Warren Buffett pays as much tax as his secretary. If the alleged Sage of Omaha is as exercised about this as his public effusions would suggest, I’d be in favor of repealing the prohibition on Bills of Attainder, and the old boy could sleep easy at night. But instead every other American “millionaire” will be subject to the new rule – because, as President Obama said this week, it “will help us close our deficit.”

Wow! Who knew it was that easy?

A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean counters who project that on Obama’s current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama’s Buffett Rule will raise – stand well back – $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours. So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There’s a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I’m not making any bets.

Let’s go back to that presidential sound bite:

“It will help us close our deficit.”

I’m beginning to suspect that the Oval Office teleprompter may be malfunctioning, or that perhaps that NBC News producer who “accidentally” edited George Zimmerman into sounding like a racist has now edited the smartest president of all time into sounding like an idiot. Either way, it appears the last seven words fell off the end of the sentence. What the president meant to say was:

“It will help us close our deficit … for 2011 … within a mere half-millennium!” [Pause for deafening cheers and standing ovation.]

Heh heh…

{SNIPPING deeply, here}

It’s that easy, folks! Like President Obama says, all you have to do to pay off his 2011 deficit is save $3.2 billion a year for 500 years.

Read it all.

In The half grovel at the urinal, Wesley Pruden hit the proverbial nail right on its proverbial head regarding the infamous, nefarious, dreaded, um, whatever other adjectives might be applied now well known video of U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of newly killed Taliban terrorists.

Yes, I know, one (wo)man’s terrorist is another (wo)man’s freedom fighter, but when you stop to consider the kind of hell-on-earth oppression the Taliban represents for anyone unlucky to be governed by them, especially women, and the fact that they’ve enthusiastically provided a home, cover, protection and support for the monsters of al-Qaeda, these “people” hardly qualify as any kind of combatants for liberty. NO, they’re more like filthy, obscene, satanic animals.

That said, courtesy of Jewish World Review (same link as above), heeeere’s Mr. Pruden!

Where’s a Porta-Potty when a few good men need one?

This is the question Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, ought to concern himself with, instead of trying to top Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, with over-the-top “outrage” over a Marine patrol taking a leak on the bodies of several freshly killed terrorists in Afghanistan.

If Mr. Panetta had been doing his job, he might have found enough Porta-Potties to spell battlefield relief for the Marines. This should teach him a needed lesson. Battlefield rest rooms are important, and will become even more important when women are dispatched to the battlefield. Lady grunts will expect something more than toilet-seat etiquette or an inconvenient bush or tree stump to protect their modesty.

The defense secretary and the secretary of state were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other, playing for the cameras a ferocious game of “can you top this?” Mr. Panetta said what the Marines did was “utterly deplorable.” It’s hard to get beyond “utterly,” but Mrs. Clinton called in her crack linguistics team at the State Department — where plain speech is utterly frowned on — and she soon pronounced herself in “total dismay” on hearing the news, and was sure that the “vast, vast” majority of “American military personnel” would never, ever do what those awful Marines did.

Mrs. Clinton’s description of that “vast, vast” majority, and not merely a “vast” majority, was taken to be an indication that she thought the Marines’ offense must have been twice as bad as the offense of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” tormenting Bubba for indulging in inappropriate merriment with a regiment of big-haired ladies at the White House. A secretary of state must use language precisely, and carefully ration her vasts.

Nevertheless, urine is rarely a proper salute even to dead terrorists, and the four Marines who relieved themselves on Taliban corpses should be properly disciplined. Americans, instructed by a culture informed by the certitudes of Jewish and Christian faith, are better than that. Still, sending two senior Cabinet officers do what a second lieutenant could have done was just short of a full grovel. The Obama administration stopped just short of sending the president himself to deliver a deep bow and a fulsome apology to the Taliban terrorists.

Mr. Panetta, who served two years as an Army intelligence officer several decades ago, knows better. Mrs. Clinton, whose hands-on knowledge of warfare and weaponry is limited to the lamps she threw at Bubba in the White House, has no knowledge of what Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the infamous Civil War firebug, was talking about when he famously said “war is hell.”

Dehumanizing the enemy is the first task of the men who send boys to war, men who never have to learn that war is more than merely a policy option. “But of course [these Marines] have dehumanized the enemy,” Sebastian Junger, a documentary filmmaker who spent a year with an Army platoon in theKorengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, observes in The Washington Post. “Otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven’t just committed their first murder — that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.”

Rick Perry got it right when he said the Obama administration’s rhetoric showed “a disdain for the military.” The incontinent Marines should be reprimanded, but filing criminal charges against them is unreasonable. “Kids, 18- and 19-year old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what occurred here. To call it a criminal act is over the top.”

An anonymous veteran of the Vietnam war makes a similar point in an Internet blog. “I was on the line in the A Shau Valley with the 101st Airborne Division. At Camp Sally, not a Club Med place to be. Nor for the faint of heart. You must understand that those who live war are a different breed. Perhaps later, much later, maturity rearranges one’s focus.”

What we need now is the rearrangement of the focus of the old men who send young men to war. They don’t have youth and inexperience to excuse their sins, miscalculations and misjudgments. Old men should keep this in mind when deciding how to discipline the Marines they sent across the seas to defend and, if need be die, for the rest of us.

Having been married to a career warrior for going on four decades, I will say this: While my Wolf could not discuss most of his work with anyone not directly involved in it, we have had discussions on the psychological effects of combat on those young men sent to alien places to fight for our country; There is a mortal ferocity to war that I won’t pretend, even after hearing my husband’s first-hand observations on the experience, to understand from the viewpoint of a combatant who is essentially over there fighting not only to achieve victory for his country, but also trying to survive, to stay alive, and to look after his comrades as well.

Acording to the Wolf, different people react differently to combat, these reactions boiling down to “whatever helps the psyche cope with the killing, the fear and the inevitable massive adrenaline overdose that is crucial to staying alive in battle”.

The “utterly deplorable”, “total dismay” and other rhetoric employed by the usual suspects are nothing more than left wing politics by totally deplorable, vastly, vastly left wing liberals more concerned with trashing our country and our military at every opportunity rather than supporting a striving for the excellence of the former or the gallantry and patriotism of the latter.

This is, as we know, a security oriented blog, and as such, there is no way we cannot link this interesting New York Post Op Ed by Stewart Baker, a former mucky muck at the Department of Homeland Security.

What’s the best way to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11? By returning to the mindset of Sept. 10, apparently. At least that’s the message delivered by the Associated Press and a chorus of blogs hyperventilating about the NYPD’s antiterror tactics.

I spent what felt like the better part of a day reading the long AP article and the commentary, thinking that surely there must be a scandal in there somewhere.

Nope.

When you’re done, you find that the New York Policy Department is uniquely determined to find terrorists before they strike. To do that, the NYPD is willing to go far outside its borders — to London, to Jerusalem, even to New Jersey.

It partners with counterterror analysts at the CIA. It looks for leads in places where terrorists have been found before — in immigrant communities and in mosques, for example — and it doesn’t give terrorists a haven where they know the cops can’t go. It takes advantage of its diversity by asking its officers to hang out in communities where they blend in. It recruits street sources wherever it can find them. It maps the neighborhoods it’s most concerned about.

Shocked yet?

Me neither.

So what gives? How come we’re getting this story, at this length, at this time?

What gives? How come? Read on.

Mr. Baker’s explanation most definitely sounds about right, given the territorialism over teamwork mentality of government agencies and the general state of the liberal media, which seems increasingly to be a general state of anti-United States.

Here is a former rock star/ NRA member/ conservative of whom the big, bad Wolf has always been a fan, writing, as usual in point blank, no-holds-barred style on the problems brought upon us by the liberal segment of our society.

One needs only to look at goings on in England to confirm what Mr. Nugent is writing about.

Did you really expect anything different? From London to Philadelphia to Milwaukee, goons are rioting in the streets. And guess what? I don’t believe it is the fundamental fault of the goon squads that they’re rioting, although there’s no excuse for beating people and destroying property.

Societies, especially America’s, have created a shattered social system in which lawlessness and irresponsibility are excused by boneheaded liberals because they don’t think government has provided enough for these supposedly disadvantaged and downtrodden people.

The shiftless, looting goons and their liberal allies think rich people should be taxed more, and more economic advantages must be provided to largely uneducated, unskilled, lazy, incompetent goons. Eat the rich, my foot.

The problem, of course, is the exact opposite. For decades, government has provided too many programs, too many checks, too many safety nets, too many handouts and too many taxpayer-provided gimmes. The goons literally expect a handout instead of a hand up.

Right on!

The narrative sounds an awful lot like my hubby might have been dictating it himself, LOL, though there’s no use of one of his favorite terms, “mullet heads”.

Anyway, read on, and “Go, Ted!”

Okay, a second post for today, this one from a visit to one of NYC’s free morning papers, A.M. New York, and a column by Todd Harrison titled, You need a storm to experience the calm.

The stock market has been a bipolar stroller this week, and it’s freaking people out.

There are many ways to view the seismic shift we’re witnessing: anger (as expressed by Main Street), sadness (as savings are destroyed), fear (as reality bites) and confusion (as folks try to understand how this could happen).

And there’s anticipation as we cast an eye forward and look for the phoenix that will eventually arise from the scorched earth.

The capital market destruction is a cumulative result of risk gone awry. It’s been percolating under the seemingly calm surface for years, magnified by financial engineering and consumed by an immediate gratification society.

Mother Nature has unleashed her wrath as she explores the other side of the business cycle that politicians have tried so hard to avoid. It’s certainly scary, as new beginnings typically are — therein lies the opportunity.

The media portrays the Great Depression as a time when everyone in America stood on street corners or waited in a bread line. A closer look shows that, similar to our current situation, economic hardship for the middle class began well before 1929.

We’ve got a few lean years ahead, but that’s nothing to fear. In fact, it’s a healthy and positive progression. To get through this, we need to go through this, and as painful as the process is, it takes us one step closer to an eventual recovery.

I view the Great Depression as the framework for optimism. Most of society worked, great discoveries were made and formidable franchises were established.

Disney (DIS) built a global franchise through that period.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) was born on the back-end.

Texas Instruments (TXN), Tyson Foods (TSN) and Continental Airlines (CAL) were birthed.

Read the rest. It’s nice to get a positive commentary on one of the gloomier aspects of our grim economic picture.

In an Op Ed by Michael Reagan from today’s Washington Times:

More than three decades ago, my father took ownership of the smoking ruins of the American economy armed with nothing more than four very basic principles: Keep taxes low, restrain government spending, minimize the amount of regulation on private enterprise and keep the money supply sound.

His approach may have appeared basic, but the results were unassailable. Over the next eight years, more than 16 million new private-sector jobs were created, a payroll expansion of 17.6 percent.

It was called the “American Miracle” and was replicated by world leaders across the globe, who met with similar success.

Looking back at it from a distance, it’s remarkable to me that the concepts that worked so amazingly well just a short time ago have fallen so far to the wayside.

Well, the rest of the column speaks for itself.

During a time when most companies appear to be insecure about adding to their payrolls because of the uncertainty surrounding our economy, this country would be wise to carefully study why Texas employers seem to be largely immune to this insecurity.

Ay men!

I just read this week’s Ann Coulter column, Look For the Union Fable and thought I’d post it in case anyone coming to visit Hard Astarboard hasn’t seen it yet.

A sampling:

The need for a union comes down to this question: Do you have a boss who wants you to work harder for less money? In the private sector, the answer is yes. In the public sector, the answer is a big, fat NO.

(snip)

It used to be widely understood that collective bargaining has no place in government employment. In 1937, the American president beloved by liberals, FDR, warned that collective bargaining “cannot be transplanted into the public service.” George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO for a quarter century, said unions were not appropriate for civil servants. As recently as 1978, the vast majority of states prohibited unionization of government employees.

(Snip2)

But government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions. They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a “living wage” — all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements.

Read the entire column.

…Victor Davis Hanson must be shared. I rarely post an entire column, but this one is just so… so…

Well, it’s titled, appropriately enough, Rethinking George Bush?

Former President George W. Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon. In reaction, for nearly two years President Barack Obama won easy applause by prefacing almost every speech on his economic policies with a “Bush did it” put-down.

But suddenly Bush seems OK. Last week, the president did the unthinkable: He praised Bush for his past efforts to reach out to Muslims. Vice President Joe Biden went further and blurted out, “Mr. Bush deserves a lot of credit.” Biden topped that off with, “Mr. President, thank you.”

Even liberal pundits have now called on Bush to help Obama diffuse rising tensions over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and Arizona’s illegal immigration law.

What’s going on?

For one thing, recent polls show an astounding rebound in the former president’s favorability — to the extent that in the bellwether state of Ohio, voters would rather still have Bush as president than Obama by a 50-42 margin. Nationwide, Obama’s approval ratings continue to sink to near 40 percent — a nadir that took years for Bush to reach. It has become better politics to praise rather than to bury Bush.

Iraq seems on the road to success, with a growing economy and a stabilizing government. Don’t take my word on that; ask Vice President Biden. He recently claimed that the way Iraq is going, it could become one of the Obama administration’s “greatest achievements.”

Obama himself seconded that when the former war critic called the American effort in Iraq “a remarkable chapter” in the history of the two countries.

Then there are the growing comparisons with Bush’s supposed past transgressions.

Compared to Obama, they’re starting to look like traffic tickets now. Take the economy and the war on terror. Americans were angry at the Bush-era deficits. But they look small after Obama trumped them in less than two years.

For six years of the Bush administration, Americans enjoyed a strong economy. So far, there hasn’t been a similar month under Obama. Bush had a one-time Wall Street meltdown, but Obama’s permanent big-government medicine for it seems far worse than the original disease.

If Hurricane Katrina showed government ineptness, so did the recent BP oil spill. Maybe such problems in the Gulf were neither Bush nor Obama’s fault alone, but are better attributed to the inept federal bureaucracy itself — or to freak weather and human laxity.

On the war on terror, Obama has dropped all the old campaign venom. Bush’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility, renditions, tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, predator drone attacks, and policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are no longer dubbed a shredding of the Constitution. All are now seen as national security tools that must be kept, if not expanded, under Obama.

In comparison to Obama and his gaffes, Bush no longer seems the singular clod whom his opponents endlessly ridiculed. The supposedly mellifluent Obama relies on the teleprompter as if it were his umbilical cord. His occasional word mangling (he pronounced “corpsman” as “corpse-man”) and weird outbursts (he recently complained that opponents “talk about me like a dog”) remind us that the pressures of the presidency can make a leader sometimes seem silly.

Bush now seems cool because he has played it cool. The more Obama and Biden have trashed him, the more silent and thus magnanimous he appears. Bush’s post-presidency is not like that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton — both have criticized their successors and hit the campaign trail — but similar to that of his father, who worked with, rather than harped about, Bill Clinton. That graciousness not only has helped George W. Bush in the polls, but it finally seems to be mellowing out Obama as well.

Criticism of Bush got out of hand the last few years of his term. Writing novels or making documentaries about killing the president, or libeling him as a Nazi, is not the sort of politics that we want continued during the Obama years. So it makes sense before the general election to halt the endless blame-gaming, before what goes around comes around.

The frenzy of Bush hatred and Obama worship that crested in the summer of 2008 is over. We now better remember the Bush at Ground Zero with a megaphone and his arm around a fireman than the Texan who pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” Meanwhile, hope-and-change now seems to offer little hope and less change.

America woke up from its 2008 trance and is concluding that Bush was never as bad, and Obama never as good, as advertised.

Well done, sir!

…revisit Arnold Ahlert, didn’t I?

Well, here he is again, telling it like it is, no nonsense and no punches pulled.

This time, I feel compelled to post the entire column. Read it and…simmer.

“Barack Obama’s presidency is effectively over. Strong words? Ask yourself this: what other president of the United States would have spent almost three minutes speaking at the Dept. of Interior before getting around to mentioning the fact that twelve soldiers had been killed, and thirty one wounded in a massacre at Fort Hood in Texas?”

Alas, most Americans let this travesty slide down the memory hole. Thankfully, like he has with so many other unpopular positions, Barack Hussein Obama has “doubled down:” his support of the Ground Zero mosque is game, set, match.

As I wrote in my previous column, the true intentions of the mosque builders were revealed when they turned down NY Governor David Patterson’s offer of state land in return for re-locating the mosque away from Ground Zero. They refused. That this “factoid” was seemingly irrelevant to the president speaks volumes.

It is worth remembering this is the same president who belittled ordinary Americans for “clinging” to religion. I guess Muslims “clinging” to a location that infuriates the overwhelming majority of Americans is perfectly fine, even after it’s been revealed for the rankly provocative plan it truly is.

Ordinary Americans? They recognize a self-aggrandizing, holier-than-thou phony when they see one. They aren’t fooled by a president who says that, “Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground”–only seconds before he reveals the total hollowness of that statement by saying he’s fine with a mosque on top of it.

Some one must have told Mr. Obama it wasn’t flying. On Saturday, he issued a “clarifying” statement: he wasn’t commenting on the “wisdom” of putting a mosque in a particular location, but on the “right people have that dates back to our founding.”

Baloney.

Reasonable Americans aren’t demanding anything remotely resembling a ban on Islam or the ability of its adherents to worship as they please. They’re saying show some respect for American sensibilities, and don’t build a mosque adjacent to the place where a national tragedy took place–one perpetrated in the name of Islam.
I have tremendous respect for the office of the presidency. That respect has gotten me and doubtless a lot of other Americans through some pretty tough times. And as much as I’ve disliked some of the people who’ve occupied that office, I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that, when push comes to shove, every one of those men, irrespective of political ideology, had America’s best interests at heart.

No longer. For the first time in my lifetime, we have an alien in the White House.

And that doesn’t mean what some of you might think. For the purposes of this column, the “birther debate” is irrelevant. What I’m talking about is a man completely divorced from the American ethos. A man who is utterly clueless about what most Americans want, think or feel. The first president of the United States on the public record with the idea that American exceptionalism is nothing more than one item on a laundry list of national exceptionalisms–none better or worse than any other.

A man who will take America’s side–only after he’s concluded that it doesn’t conflict with his larger worldview.

Sadly, we’ve reached a point where most Americans don’t expect anything different. And why should they? This is a man up to his neck in meaningful associations with card-carrying members of the Hate America crowd–from boyhood mentor, communist Frank Marshall, and racist preacher, Jeremiah Wright, to Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, and other rabid leftists. This is a man who has stacked his administration with a roster of radicals dedicated to the idea that America is a nation of unrepentant bigots, racists and other low-lifes who must be whipped into “progressive” shape. This is a man who learned–and taught–the “Alinsky Method,” a blueprint for the radical re-organization of America by stealth.

Why has the president doggedly kept entire parts of his life, from his early college years straight through law school, away from public view? Bet the farm it’s because any paper trail from those years would reveal this president to be the Marxist/socialist radical that occasionally breaches the “teleprompted” facade he has so carefully erected.

Last Friday, the mask slipped once again. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to point a comment directly towards the Cordoba House builders explaining that, while freedom of religion is a sacred American value, their refusal to accept an alternative site on state land offered by the governor is very troubling. He could have called their bluff and said he stands with the overwhelming majority of Americans who find such a refusal appalling. He could have said that “cultural sensitivity” is a two-way street, and that it is about time self-professed “moderate Muslims” demonstrated their moderation
.
But he didn’t. And he didn’t because, for this “citizen of the world,” the idea of “putting America first” requires considerable effort. Quite frankly, this is astounding. There is no other position in government where the idea of being “reflexively American” is more important. There is no other man in the country with the unfettered power to put American men and women in harm’s way. That fact alone requires unstinting loyalty to our nation, and an unbridled sense of patriotism.

Is that what Americans see when they look at Barack Obama? Or do they see a narcissistic, serial apologizer, a split-the-difference-with-our-enemies appeaser who golfs and parties–while America burns?

This president, along with his lap-dog media supporters, will continue to tell Americans that their anger and disgust has little or nothing to do with the shortcomings of Barack Obama. Everything wrong with the country is “someone else’s fault,” be it “racist” tea partiers, “fat cat” bankers, “greedy” doctors, “irresponsible” corporations, Republicans, or their favorite whipping boy, George W. Bush.

Sorry, Mr. Obama, no sale. You’ve done a grand job of alienating the majority of Americans all by yourself. And you know it too, or you wouldn’t have “clarified” your position on the Ground Zero mosque twenty four hours after the “real you” revealed itself.

Perhaps someday we’ll have someone in the Oval Office with a more jaundiced view of America than yours. I hope I never live to see it. And I fervently hope Americans remember exactly who you are when 2012 rolls around. We can probably muddle through two more years with a charlatan in the White House.

Heaven help America if it’s six.

As if that isn’t enough, let’s visit Always On Watch, and read about some blatantly offensive revisionist history ala B. Hussein Obama.

[Obama said:] “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.”

Indeed!

That would be the same Treaty of Tripoli that was essentially a protection racket against the United States, requiring that tribute be paid to avoid being the victim of piracy.

That would be the same John Adams who reluctantly figured that bribing the pirates of Barbary was cheaper than military engagement (out of an understanding that the political will and money for creating the necessary naval force was out of reach for the time being).

And that would be the same Thomas Jefferson who, with his great knowledge and understanding of the Koran, reversed our course and decided that military engagement against the various Muslim states engaged in piracy was the only sensible way to proceed.

And then bombarded their coastline, invaded them, and persuaded them to find a new hobby….

Heaven help America if this jamoke makes it through his FOUR without getting the boot!