I’ve been meaning to share this Dennis Prager column I read the other day, it speaks for itself, so there’s really nothing I can think of to add.

While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society’s moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:

Read ‘em here and (if you despair of the damage these lefties have been and are continuing to do to our beloved country) weep.

Ah, the pleasure of being the custodian of Seth’s email.

This one arrived in a non-politics-oriented inbox and is pretty funny, though also more than a little accurate.

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on.

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,

‘If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.’

In response to Bill’s comments, Ford issued a press release stating:

If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash………Twice a day.

2.. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3… Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single ‘This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation’ warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask ‘Are you sure?’ before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You’d have to press the ‘Start’ button to turn the engine off.

When all else fails, you could call ‘customer service’ in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!!!!

Cudos to a friend of Seth’s named Alan.

One of the things that’s cool about babysitting Seth’s email and Hard Astarboard for the moment is the access I have to “the boss’” daily emails at his various addresses, including one of his professional ones (where he receives stuff pertaining to his professional milieu). I get to read more in-depth articles on various issues that are hardly covered in the media, but also find articles and other items of interest that are specifically pointed out at certain on-line publications, such as this one that has published an article from, of all newspapers, The Tennessean.

Since one of Seth’s largest concerns here and elsewhere is Security with, in large part, emphasis on Homeland Security and one of his pet peeves has long been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), here’s this one:

Thousands of airport security breaches raise alarms

More than 25,000 security breaches — an average of seven per day — have occurred at U.S. airports since November 2001, according to newly released Department of Homeland Security documents.

More than 14,000 were people entering “limited-access” areas by going through airport doors or passageways without permission, or unauthorized people going from airport buildings to planes, according to the documents to be presented at a House subcommittee hearing today.

The documents, obtained in advance by USA TODAY, don’t provide details about the security breaches or whether any could have led to potential attacks on planes or passengers.

The total number of infractions is small when compared with the large volume of traffic at the 450 major airports in the U.S., which have served more than 5.5 billion fliers since 2001. But critics say there is still reason to worry.

“It’s clear the airports are not secure,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations. “For all the money, time and persistence we have thrown at airport security, it’s a real mess.”

Clear/ not clear/ whatever: that many flaws leave plenty of room for one or more of their number to allow one or more incidents which, given that we’re talking airplanes (we need only look back to September 11, 2001 to see how much tragedy can be brought about by unsecured airplanes, even one such plane), which contain not only enough aviation fuel to make them into WMDs, but scores of vulnerable innocent human lives in the form of passengers, as well.

You have to ask, “What are these TSA people and DHS doing with their working hours and our tax dollars, exactly? Playing “tiddly winks”?

Damage Control

Transportation Security Administration spokesman Nicholas Kimball said the breaches represent a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the air travelers who used U.S. airports in the past decade. The term “breach” is broadly defined and can mean accidental violations that pose no real danger to the public, he said.

“Many of these instances were thwarted or discovered in the act,” Kimball said. “These events were reported, investigated and remedied. … We have taken extensive steps to increase the safety of the traveling public, and that is why airports today are safer than ever before.”

Reality

Security consultant Raffi Ron will testify today that the TSA has spent billions of dollars to screen passengers and bags and relegated other aspects of security “to the back seat,” according to written testimony submitted to the House subcommittee.

“As it stands today, the vast majority of commercial airports in this country … do not have the capabilities to detect and prevent an intruder from entering the air side of the airport through the fence or an adjacent waterfront,” said Ron, a former security director at Tel Aviv Ben-Gurion International Airport.

The House subcommittee says it does not have a breakdown by year when the security breaches occurred, but former Federal Aviation Administration Security Director Billie Vincent says 25,000 security breaches indicates a problem.

“We’re open to penetration if someone decides to penetrate,” he said.

The Rest Of The Story

In 2006, tests by the TSA showed that security screeners at Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60 percent of tests, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

In 2003, five undercover Department of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers carried weapons undetected through several security checkpoints at Boston’s Logan International Airport.

Documents to be introduced at today’s subcommittee hearing also show:

6,000 security breaches in which Transportation Security Administration screeners failed to screen, or improperly screened, a passenger or a passenger’s carry-on items.

2,616 security breaches involving an individual gaining unauthorized access to the “sterile area” at screening checkpoints or an exit lane without submitting to all screening procedures and inspections.

1,026 incidents when someone gained unauthorized access to a sterile area but was “contained” or “constantly monitored” by airport or security personnel until apprehended.

1,318 incidents in which someone gained unauthorized access from airport perimeters to aircraft operations or security identification display areas and was under constant surveillance until apprehended.

Vincent, who praises the TSA for compiling security-breach numbers, says that very few perimeters at airports worldwide are secure.

Chaffetz has no praise for TSA.

“It’s absolutely stunning that the vulnerabilities are so wide,” Chaffetz said. “There’s not much to suggest that airports are more secure than years ago. We’ve just been lucky.”

The article is here.

This Washington Times Op-Ed carries the by-line of one Dr. Milton R. Wolf, no relation to my hubby, but a cousin of President Barack Obama’s.

Well!

Something unexpected happened along the president’s breezy cruise to re-election. “No drama” Obama is suddenly looking about as calm as Jerry Lewis in a French film, about as brave as Ted Kennedy after an evening drive through Chappaquiddick. Witness Team Obama’s recent panicky behavior.

No cousinly partiality here, is there?

Obamanomics anxiety. The White House is reeling as its reverse Midas touch to the economy is being exposed. Its own economists acknowledge now that each job created or “saved” by the so-called “stimulus” cost taxpayers a whopping $278,000. This is still fantasyland because there are 1.9 million fewer jobs on record now than on the day the stimulus was signed into law, but nonetheless, the quiet pre-holiday Friday night news dump of an announcement reveals the administration’s worry. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke admitted last month that he’s clueless why America’s economic malaise continues. Tax cheat and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who called President Obama’s budget “unsustainable,” wants to abandon ship along with the rest of the “economic dream team” escapees: Lawrence H. Summers, Christina Romer and Austan Goolsbee. Meanwhile, the president, apparently believing no news is good news, has put his fingers in his ears - “La la la, I cannot hear you” - and, at one point, canceled his daily economic briefings.

Obamacare waivers wild ride. That the White House would exempt its best friends from Obamacare underscores everything you need to know not only about the deeply flawed health care takeover itself but also about the White House’s embrace of cronyism. Team Obama vigorously defended those waivers right up until the moment when political expediency forced the president to wave them goodbye. About 1,400 “Get out of jail free” cards later, he thinks you will forget that his union friends were exempted from the rules you must follow. Parenthetically, look for those waivers to return quietly at some point under a new Obama Ministry of Truth name. Perhaps in accordance with the creative euphemism the administration chose for its Libyan war, it will call them “kinetic medical actions.”

Dr. Wolf definitely covers all the bases in describing the ills of his cousin’s administration.

Read the rest.

On another note, as I walked around Manhattan yesterday, I saw a young man wearing a tee shirt Seth would have wanted to purchase immediately, right off the wearer’s back if necessary, and my big, bad Wolf would have chuckled over. It said, Nuke The Whales

And at the Washington Post, no less.

From the Washington Times:

Jose Antonio Vargas, a former Washington Post reporter, has come out of the closet and announced to the world that he is an illegal alien. In his tell-all confession, published in the New York Times Magazine, he outs not only himself, but others who abetted his illegal presence and employment in the United States, including The Post itself, which continued to employ him even after a member of the paper’s management learned that he had lied about his citizenship.

Most important, Mr. Vargas‘ confession exposes the ease with which he, and millions of illegal aliens like him, can circumvent the law. It was as easy as a piece of white masking tape and a photocopy machine. Mr. Vargas writes that when he was a teenager, he and his grandfather covered over the portion of his Social Security card that said he was ineligible to work in the United States before photocopying it. Using a copy of an already flimsy card that constitutes the most important piece of identification Americans possess, Mr. Vargas was able repeatedly to flout the law against illegal aliens working in this country.

Why, you must wonder, does it seem like this kind of thing would only be likely to go down at liberal (or multiple liberal, in this case, as indicated in the article’s next paragraph) newspapers?

If any of his employers - The Washington Post, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post - had simply verified his Social Security number, they would have learned that it was invalid for employment. If the Social Security Administration (SSA) had been required to disclose that it was collecting taxes on an account that was not authorized for employment, the government itself could have identified Mr. Vargas as an illegal alien and taken action. But employers are not required to verify Social Security numbers, and government agencies are not required to inform other government agencies that laws are being violated. And so we have an estimated 7 million illegal aliens on payrolls in the United States.

Whether it was his intent or not, the timing of Mr. Vargas‘ confession provides compelling testimony in support of legislation introduced earlier this month by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (Texas Republican) and the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa Republican). Both of these bills would mandate that instead of a cursory inspection of any of more than two dozen different documents, all employers would be required to use the E-Verify system, which verifies information against Social Security and immigration records.

The Smith and Grassley bills also would discourage an additional and common form of fraud perpetrated by Mr. Vargas. In his public confession, Mr. Vargas admits to having perjured himself repeatedly by attesting that he was a U.S. citizen on the I-9 forms he filled out for employers. Mandatory verification of his Social Security number would have revealed that he was neither a citizen nor an alien authorized to work in this country and could have subjected him to criminal charges.

On the other hand, there being a certain amount of competition between newspapers, perhaps the Washington Post et al were merely trying to outdo the New York Times’ Jason Blair episode.

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!

There’s something in one of Seth’s email inboxes that I’ve been delegated to monitoring when I have time, called The Robbins Report, that has an interesting piece within that I’d like to share.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been posted to the web outside mailings to subscribers and I can’t get a link yet, so:

I’ll copy and paste it into this post and hope a link becomes available quickly.

Enjoy

Sarah Palin’s critics routinely mock her intellect, so when the state of Alaska released 24,000 emails she wrote while serving as governor, “AOL Weird News,” an offbeat component of AOL.com, had a representative sample analyzed to see how well she wrote. They expected the results to confirm their anti-Palin bias, but they were in for a surprise.

Far from being an illiterate bumpkin, the standard Flesch-Kincaid readability test showed that Ms. Palin’s emails were written at an 8.5 grade level. This was “an excellent score for a chief executive,” AOLWN reported. To put some perspective on this number, Martin Luther King’s August 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — much more heavily edited than Ms. Palin’s emails — ranked at 8.8 on the same scale, while Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address came in at 9.1.

A study by Smart Politics on the readability ratings of recent State of the Union addresses also showed Ms. Palin in good company. President George H.W. Bush’s average SOTU score was 8.6. Bill Clinton came in at 9.5. Ronald Reagan, who like Ms. Palin was heavily criticized by liberals and regarded as a doddering old fool, logged an impressive 10.3 rating. And George W. Bush, who earned even more left-wing contempt than Mr. Reagan, if that’s possible, edged the Great Communicator with a10.4 ranking.

Then there is President Obama, heralded as the smartest president and the most gifted orator in living memory, but whose 2008 “Yes we can!” victory speech came in at a comparatively anemic Flesch-Kincaid rating of 7.4. Some numbers just speak for themselves.

Well, well.

And speaking of President Obama…

As President Obama shifts increasingly into reelection mode, he is feeling persistent anger and discontent from the left as well as the right.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer was heckled and booed Friday at the annual Netroots Nation conference in Minnesota, a gathering of liberal activists from the online political community. When Mr. Pfeiffer reminded the audience that the president championed an equal-pay law, the moderator replied, “Frankly we’re a little sick of hearing about that one.”

Less than 24 hours earlier, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley heard heated complaints from business leaders about burdensome government regulations at a meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington. As Mr. Daley listened to tales of the administration’s unnecessary interference in industry, he replied, “Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible.”

Indeed you can’t.

I am in Manhattan for a couple of days (I can’t really stand the place anymore, it’s become so much more abrasive, overpriced and less pleasant since my first experience with the borough, but that’s another story).

Earlier today I was walking across one of the many parks (one of Manhattan’s few saving graces), Madison Square Park at 23rd Street and Broadway, when a scene on one of the benches caused me to stop and, well, rubberneck.

There was a man sitting there eating a sandwich. He appeared totally inoffensive (clean shaven, well groomed and neatly dressed). There was a small backpack sitting on the bench beside him and there were no other people sitting anywhere nearby.

There were five N.Y. Police officers standing around him, four patrolmen and one whose uniform included a white shirt who I think must have been a lieutenant, and they seemed to be giving him a hard time.

As I listened, the situation became apparent: In New York City, on top of the recently enacted law against smoking in city parks, on beaches or on city owned public concourses, there is also a law against placing ones backpack on a bench, thereby occupying a second space. It evidently doesn’t matter whether there’s anyone sitting nearby or anyone wanting, or not wanting, to sit where the backpack is sitting.

The police were threatening to give the man a ticket if he didn’t place the backpack on the ground.

This seems rather excessive to me in terms of the authority of the law, or whatever it’s called.

If my knowledge of American History is at all accurate, I could swear that a war was fought back in the 1770s to free Americans of such oppressive micromanagement, just as it was fought to liberate the people from the kind of overbearing taxation, including taxation without representation, as we are experiencing today.

I only hope those police officers don’t DARE have the nerve to expect extra pay for working the 4th of July or to barbecue and otherwise enjoy having the holiday off, because their in any way benefiting from Independence Day would be profound hypocrisy, just as would be the lawmakers who come up with such laws and, of course, the weasel named Michael Bloomberg.

No, despite his getting the credit for it, Barack Obama had little responsibility for it, other than authorizing the mission.

As Ann Coulter puts it:

American intelligence operations located Osama by following his trusted couriers, whose names were given up by al-Qaida members during harsh interrogations at CIA black sites under President Bush.

Say it, Ann!

It’s great that we got bin Laden, but if the last Democratic administration had been doing its job, there would have been no Osama bin Laden and no 9/11 attack to begin with.

Democratic presidents are always too busy feverishly redistributing wealth at home to devote serious attention to our national interests abroad.

Obama gets to reap the rewards of Bush-era terrorism policies — policies that he, his fellow Democrats and Jane Mayer hysterically denounced at the time — while Reagan and Bush had to deal with the consequences of Carter’s Iranian policy and Clinton’s bin Laden policy.

According to Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA for many years, President Clinton was given eight to 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden but refused to act, despite bin Laden’s having publicly declared war on the United States and launched various terrorist attacks against us, murdering hundreds of Americans.

(If only one of those opportunities had presented itself on the day of Clinton’s scheduled impeachment, instead of Clinton’s bombing Iraq, he might have postponed his problems at home by finally taking out bin Laden.)

Clinton’s CIA director, James Woolsey, never once met with Clinton in a one-on-one meeting. This is in contrast to Monica Lewinsky, who got about a dozen face-to-face — or face-to-something — meetings with the president.

That’s why Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, was caught stealing documents from the National Archives during the 9/11 commission hearings. That’s also why Clinton blew a gasket and forced ABC to cancel the DVD release of the docudrama “The Path to 9/11″ — based on the commission’s report.

Bush had to deal with the ticking time bomb of Osama bin Laden left by Bill Clinton.

All presidents have had to deal with the ticking time bomb set by Carter’s passive acceptance of the Iranian revolution in 1979, giving Islamic lunacy its first nation-sponsor.

What ticking time bombs are being set around the globe by our current Democratic president?

Read the entire column.

While we’re in reading mode, here’s one along a similar vein that just goes to show…something about Obama and his ilk.

Since our president has come into office (actually before he came into office, if his attendance for decades at the pro-Palestinian terrorist, anti-Israel Reverend Wright’s church is any indicator), he has made it abundantly clear that he is just chaffing at the bit to aid his Arab friends in their quest to put an end to Israel once and for all.

The only thing holding him back from going all out in an anti-semitic frenzy, in my opinion, is the fact that most American voters and indeed most American politicians of either major party look upon the Jewish state as a friend and ally of the United States.

From a column by Wesley Pruden in today’s Jewish World Review, a favorite read of Seth’s when he’s around (Hmm, that hasn’t been for awhile now, but we’re praying that he’ll be back soon and everything will again be as it was):

Another tough decision is coming up for Barack Obama. This one ought to be easy, even for the ditherer-in-chief. But before he decides to do the right thing he’ll need all the bicarbonate of soda in the White House pantry.

The Arab League, on whom the United States and the “great powers” of Europe depend for the moral authority to impose the no-fly zone over Libya, now wants the United Nations to impose a similar no-fly zone over Gaza, whence the Palestinians fire their rockets at Israeli schoolchildren. The Israelis, naturally, fire back with air strikes. This inconveniences the Palestinian rocket batteries no end, of course, and the Arab League is eager for someone, since the Arabs have never been able to do it, to make the Israelis submit to their own destruction.

How do you say it? Oh, yes SNIP!

President Obama has peopled his administration with prominent policy-makers and aides who wear their hostility to Israel like Easter finery. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is a passionate and impetuous critic of America’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. Samantha Power, the senior director for multilateral affairs (this is not as naughty as it sounds) at the National Security Council, once in a fit of little-foot stamping proposed landing a “mammoth force” of American troops to protect the Palestinians from Israel. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is appropriately diplomatic in her present incarnation, but as the first lady she famously embraced Suha Arafat, widow of Yasser Arafat, with hugs and kisses at a rally in the Middle East in 1999.

Here’s the column in its entirety.

Now, I suppose, we wait and see how the “Ditherer-In-Chief” responds.