what if?

A Most Deadly Enemy

One of my friends said that no matter what we try to do to combat terrorism, the terrorists will continue to try to meet and foil our new methods.

Unfortunately, my friend was correct.

Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them.

Until now, terrorists have attacked airlines, Underground trains and buses by secreting bombs in bags, shoes or underwear to avoid detection.

But an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting ‘surgical bombs’ inside people for the first time.

An enemy that is willing to endure any amount of pain - even to the point of death - to insure death of their foes - is an extremely deadly enemy.

All I can say is that I am glad I am not in charge of trying to calculate how to combat people who believe that this kind of murder is appropriate and even good.  Addressing an insane and murderous enemy is a Herculean task.

 

When You're a Hit on Jon Stewart

Time to give up being a news pundit?

I report; you decide.  Beware of seriously dangerous laughing, too, should you dare to watch.

More Transparency

NOT less speech.

So many liberals I know are hyperventilating about Citizens United.  Instead of viewing it as a victory for free speech, they see it as a coming dark cloud of disaster.  Zillions of dollars from eeeeeeevil Big Business Corporations will flood the airwaves and print with awful messages.  In turn, stupid puppets (e.g. American citizens) will be unable to separate wheat from chaff.  They'll vote for The Worst Possible Candidates (e.g. puppets of Big Biz) and soon the world will come to an end.  See here for but one expression of what will happen: 

Seems like just last week the righties were railing against a One World Government. But this week they’re all for corporate domination of the planet.

I will say, however, that kudos are due to a few of my liberal buddies.  One in particular, with whom I disagree on roughly 94% of the issues, is on the MN ACLU board - and has been battling since the ruling with all his lefty friends.  He has all of the vicious "winger" talking points:  liberals are underestimating the ability of people to hear speech and weigh it, bad speech can be countered with more speech, and so forth and so on.

Do check out the link to Hot Air at the top of this post.  It demonstrates that those who think censorship is the answer to "equity" and "fairness" in government isn't at all the case.  It also shows that real transparency and more speech are what we need to foster a better marketplace of ideas - not censorship.  Somehow, with censorship, ideas still find expression.  Better, however, that they spring into the light of day, rather than fester hidden in dark, musty places - like mold.

Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Weirder...

And I thought Governor Sanford of South Carolina was unbalanced!

"I Forgot He Was Black"

From the moment I heard this quote from Chris Matthews, I was astounded.  What on earth does it really mean?  That Matthews is constantly thinking "This is a black president - and not a "regular, white-guy president?!"  That race is always first and foremost in his mind when he sees or hears the President?

My friend Shay at Booker Rising got a round up of opinions and comments on this.  Her very long laundry list from the President's entire speech is here.  The comments about Matthews are below.  I bolded and highlighted the comment that most struck me as on target.

James Harris, a conservative Republican radio host in Milwaukee, Wisc., opines: "Liberals are so impressed by their own liberalism. 'Look at the light skinned Negro speaking in a non-Negro dialect...Wow...I forgot that he was a Negro!' Nice."

Rosita James, a conservative Republican in New York City, writes on Facebook: "Any REPUBLICAN who said that would be tarred and feathered.....**sigh** the hypocrisy"

Edward Staples Jr., a moderate in Cincinnati, Ohio, writes: "WTH? How can you forget the man that sends a tingle up your leg is 'black'?? Chris Matthews never ceases to amaze me. Hey Chris don't worry... I forgot that MSNBC was a new channel.. apparently so did 40M other viewers. I also forgot that you are a journalist....but sometimes I think you do to. A hack..."

Sugarthegirl, a conservative Republican in Maryland, writes on Twitter: " She adds: "But, he implies that Obama's 'blackness' is a negative or a distraction to him. As in, he was so good, I forgot he was black." More: "If Hannity had said 'I forgot he was black for an hour' about Obama, he'd be fired inside of 24 hours."

Cedric Tate, a conservative in Milwaukee, Wisc., writes on Facebook: "So for the other 364 days and 23 hours, he was very aware the The President is Black."

Case #3,298,119 of What's Wrong with Our Government

Sometimes a single fact in a news story will jump off the page and leave you asking: Could that possibly be true?

Wanting Health Care Reform

When Democrats say that most Americans want health care reform, I agree with them.  I find it difficult to find almost anyone on either side of the aisle who thinks that there are no serious problems with our current system.

As always, however, the devil is in the details.  As much as I believe we need reform, the plans I've seen from the Democrats would create a worse system, not better.  Of course, if you're going to criticize, then you need to offer something positive in its stead.

I haven't looked at the details yet.  Busy packing to go visit my family where the temps are about 65 degrees warmer than they are here in Minnetonka; yay!  Still - at least the Republicans are doing something.

With the Medicare entitlement disaster looming, Republicans can’t afford to ignore the opportunity again.  Rep. Paul Ryan apparently agrees.  He will reintroduce the GOP version of health-care reform ignored by Democrats last year in favor of their stampede towards government control:

Rep. Paul Ryan is re-introducing legislation in Congress today — amid criticism that his is ‘a party of no’ —  to offer Republican alternatives to health care and spending the same day President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to Congress.

Ryan, the House Budget Committee Ranking Republican and chief sponsor of the bill, said the legislation will “restore our long-held legacy of leaving the next generation of Americans better off.”

The legislation, “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” was initially introduced in 2008, yet the version introduced today “will reflect the dramatic decline in our nation’s economic and fiscal condition” since then, according to a release from Ryan’s office.

“Simply saying ‘no’ to the further government expansions – simply maintaining today’s ‘status quo’ – is no longer an option: our health care sector must be reformed; our economy needs sustained job creation and real growth; and we must tackle the greatest threat to our economic and fiscal future – the crushing debt burden driven by the unsustainable growth in entitlement spending,” Ryan said in a statement.

I look forward to examining the specifics of the Republicans' plan in sunny Florida.

Saab Survives!

It's been my good fortune to be able to drive a number of excellent vehicles over the years.  And, while some ran far better than others and some were clearly superior values to others, none won my heart like this quirky cutie:  my Saab convertible.

The car guys I knew referred to it as "that piece of s*&t" - and to be truthful, it did have more difficulties than all of the other Japanese autos I owned.  Let's not even go to the fact that it depreciated with frightening speed in contrast to the others, too.

Still, it was adorable and fun and I loved it.  Mine was white with a black top.  Compact and salt and peppery; just like yours truly.  News reports gave me fear that no other girls would be able to tool around as I had done in a sporty Swedish car.  Now, however, Saab is saved!  Teensy in the grand scheme of things - but put a smile on my face.

Can't We All Get Along?

Many of my friends are liberals.  Although we love to play bridge together, negotiate real estate deals with one another, discuss the details of photography and so forth, when it comes to how to solve the world's ills, we are not on the same page.  Nevertheless, despite wondering how the other one could possibly hold some of the positions that they do, we still respect one another.  We may not understand why they believe as they do.  Yet, at the same time, we are certain that their goals must be worthy and their intentions decent, as they are good people.  Sometimes, we are even able to discuss these issues without World War III ensuing!

Yet, travel to some sites on the Internet, and real discussion is simply an impossibility. 

I don't remember exactly how I found Mahablog.  After the twin lefty debacles of Scott Brown and Citizens United at the Supreme Court, I decided to go see how my counterparts at Maha's blog were taking it.  Not well.  My one fairly benign comment (I thought) led to a new post by Maha, and a torrent of comments.

I truly hadn't come over to her blog to be nasty.  When it appeared that real conversation was unlikely, I decided to take my leave.  Still, when some of the people wanted me to continue to comment, I continued to leave several comments, both responding to what people asked of me, and stating a few more of my opinions on topics.  This comment by Maha, however, essentially was the beginning of the end.

Fear of Trying

Instapundit has a very telling post this morning.  Unfortunately, I know all too well what fellow bridge player Michael Ledeen means when he says this in his column:

Fear is extremely broad-based.  It is not limited to social class nor to domestic or foreign policies.  Banks are not lending, companies are not hiring, because they are afraid of what Obama will do next.  Both are afraid of onerous taxes, including new health care burdens, and the banks fear new regulations and the consequences of the recently declared war on evil bankers by the president.  Seniors are afraid they will be deprived of medical treatment.  Juniors are afraid they are going to be forced to buy health insurance they don’t think they need.  Across the board, Americans are afraid they’re not going to find work, and won’t be able to afford a house.  And, as the Massachusetts vote showed, Americans are worried about threats from abroad, worried about Iran, afraid of terrorist attacks, and afraid the Obama Administration doesn’t take all this seriously enough.  As Scott Brown put it, most Americans think our tax dollars should go to fighting terrorists, not to pay lawyers to defend terrorists.

As readers know, I'm a Realtor.  Don't even get me started on what is going on with lending today, how literally insane it has become.  People do want to buy and sell homes, for dozens of reasons, as they always do.  Some don't because they cannot obtain financing that normally would not be difficult (and I am not referring to the ridiculous non-standards during the bubble.)  Many don't because as I always state:  if you don't have a job, you can't purchase a house.  Even if a potential buyer has a job, he may fear that he won't for long - or that what he is earning will be cut dramatically.

Pontification Preview

What is "Real" Journalism?

Don Campbell, on the board of contributors for USA Today, highlights some questions being asked about how journalists judge what is news - and what is not.

A gossipy, behind-the-scenes presidential campaign book once again illustrates how the public is poorly served by some in the political press corps.

Game Change, by John Heilemann, a writer for New York magazine, and Mark Halperin, a reporter for Time, raises the question for non-political junkies of why so much about candidates remains hidden from public view until after the vote.

The answer, based on my nearly 40 years of covering politics, directing coverage and teaching college students who aspire to the craft, points to the too-cozy relationship between reporters and the political class.

Personally, not being a journalist, I'm not sure how they're supposed to weigh.  Nevertheless, I do believe that this might be a good time to reflect on what Campbell is saying.

The answer, based on my nearly 40 years of covering politics, directing coverage and teaching college students who aspire to the craft, points to the too-cozy relationship between reporters and the political class.

Free Markets

Heart warming to see that ultimately, Americans still do cherish a critical part of what has made our nation great: free markets.

People are sick of the spending, sick of the debt, sick of the bailouts, sick of the handouts, sick of the back room deals, sick of the taxpayer funded bribes, sick of the bureaucrats. They want unyielding, unapologetic fiscal conservatism.

In short, what the GOP needs do is return to its Reaganite roots.  As the Gipper might have said, freedom is the glue which holds our party together.  Let’s hope his heirs remember this as this go forward this fall.

Economist Rap

Best way I've ever seen - and heard - to learn about economics!

More Hope and Change

No one will get an argument from me that Candidate Obama didn't do a masterful job while running for president.  He had to perform; surely his credentials were not up to those of the other candidates.

But, now that Candidate Obama has been President Obama for a year, how is he doing?  How many campaign promises are being met?  And how many are not?  Here is one that was quite near and dear to the heart of many a progressive.

Despite President Obama’s long history of criticizing the Bush administration for “sweetheart deals” with favored contractors, the Obama administration this month awarded a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan to a company owned by a Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids.

The legality of the arrangement as a “sole source,” or no-bid, contract was made possible by virtue of a waiver signed by the USAID administrator. “They cancelled the open bid on this when they came to power earlier this year,” a source familiar with the federal contracting process told Fox News.

“That’s kind of weird,” said another source, who has worked on “rule of law” issues in both Afghanistan and Iraq, about the no-bid contract to Checchi & Company. “There’s lots of companies and non-governmental organizations that do this sort of work.”

During the Bush years, the Left used to chant “Halliburton!” to attack Bush on this point, but the vast majority of parent company KBR’s contracts came from competitive bidding, as high as 98% in 2007 and 99.8% in 2008.

Update: Interestingly, according to FedSpending.org, the new contract is about a third of what Checchi got over the previous eight years put together — 92% of which came in full competition.  Suddenly, in the Obama administration, Checchi gets a pass from competition.

How's that "hope and change" working out for you?

What Happens?

What happens when you're the left-leaning MSM?  What happens when you think that Tea Party activitists are outlier "teabaggers" to mock and ignore?  When a large segment of the voting public is a "mob"?  When activity supporting your personal beliefs are "the news" - yet the rest of it isn't?

This.

The mainstream media are usually surprised by stories unfavorable to the liberal narrative. For months in late 2007 and early 2008, they feigned ignorance of the Iraq surge’s success, until candidate Barack Obama visited and there was a mad scramble to catch up to the story. The New York Times ignored the Reverend Wright story for weeks during the campaign. The Van Jones story also caught the liberal media unaware. The ACORN scandal did too. And the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial GOP victories seemed to come out of nowhere — but these could then be ignored, they hastened to add, since they weren’t reflective of any national trend (until Scott Brown made it a trifecta). Then the tea party protest movement was ignored or mocked, as were the town hall protests. Notice how the ignored stories all share a common characteristic: bad news for the Left.

The media never seem to learn or improve. The pattern repeats because this is inevitably what comes from discounting facts adverse to one side and minimizing grassroots activism on the Right. When you deride and name-call citizen activists, you wind up missing entire political movements.

Trust, But Verify

This curious phenomenon, as recounted by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, is of particular interest to me.  For those unaware, someone named "Ellie Light" was sending letters to the editor that were very pro-Obama, and many were getting published.

You may respond with a big yawn, but here comes the oddity.  Not only was she getting her letters published, the newspapers in which they were being published obviously did not check her identity.  How do we know this?  From the papers themselves.  "Ellie Light" wouldn't sign her letters with a single address.  Each letter seemed to have an address that coincided with the location of the paper.  So, unless this woman is some immensely wealthy person with literally dozens of homes around the nation, she is a fraud - and a fraud that no paper, save the Cleveland Plain Dealer, bothered to confirm

I have a particular interest for a most strange reason.  One day, I opened the Star Tribune.  There, I saw a letter to the editor from one Peggy Kaplan of Minnetonka.  Nice, eh?  Particularly as it would so happen that I was an occasional letter-writer to the paper, and rarely did my letters see the light of day.  Finally, one did!

Just one problem.  Whoever wrote this letter wasn't me.  The views expressed in it were very clearly nothing that I would ever advocate.  In fact, many people I knew contacted me, perplexed.  "Why would I write such a letter?" they wondered.  Answer:  I hadn't.  My guess was that some "friend" of mine thought it would be a cute joke.  And, my further guess that the paper hadn't checked out whether or not this was a fraud was confirmed after some sleuthing.  Although the paper requests certain data from all writers who get their letters published, the paper confirmed that this particular letter had no corroborating information, other than the fake "Peggy Kaplan, Minnetonka" signature.  (And yes, I really am the only Peggy Kaplan in our suburb!)

Essentially, when papers publish these fake letters, they are doing a disservice to us and themselves.  To us, because we trust them to give us factual information, but they have not.  To themselves, because the more this sort of thing occurs, the less we will trust them - and purchase their products.

Trust, but verify.  Both for those who deliver the news - and for those of us who consume it.

Getting It

Many moons ago, I learned a simple lesson.  If you want to convince people of something, then be nice to them.  Treating them well is no guarantee that you'll change any minds.  But, most of the time, it heightens your odds of success.

The converse is also true.  Tell them they're too stupid to understand what you yourself are able to comprehend. 

"That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."

But you schlubs aren't that smart. You didn't get it.

Tell them they're an "angry mob."

Welcome to the mob: an angry, wounded electorate, riled by recession, careening across the political spectrum, still craving change, nursing a bloodlust.

Insult them like this, and ...  Unfortunately for too many Democrat supporters, we don't see ourselves as stupid.  We don't see ourselves as an "angry mob" - we see ourselves as citizens voting our displeasure and disappointment with the current ruling party.  You know; exercising our constitutional rights.

Do people like our president and Charles Blow of the New York Times and many others think that they will "woo us" with sweet nothings like "that stupid angry mob just cannot comprehend how our very smart policies ultimately - one day - are really going to help them"?

More than a few people commenting about Blow's column had responses such as these:

It's not about the fickleness of the mob or whether they are liberal or conservative, or Democrat or Republican. The group of people you characterize as a "mob" with your clever comparisons to Rome (really?) are a group possessed of what used to be (and still exists as) common sense. They're just good people who operate on a base level of principles without overriding concerns about what party they're in or whether they are primarily liberal or conservative. That's it! Get them and they'll forgive almost any failure; lose them, and all of the Ivy league pedigrees in the world aren't going to save you.

And,

Let me just clue you in on why Obama is so unpopular as you seem to be as arrogant and clueless as Obama himself. When you call voters, American citizens, hard working people who don't like to see the Unions exempted from a tax the rest of us unwashed masses have to pay, "the mob",you have now denigrated at least half of America. I know, we don't all have Ivy League degrees and eat arugula like our Dear Leader but we do understand condescension, corruption, and communism when we see it.

Like I said.  No guarantee that being pleasant to those who oppose you will change their minds.  Insulting them to the hilt, however, seems likely to guarantee that they will not.

Get it?

A Victory for Free Speech

Many of my liberal friends are lamenting what they perceive to be a horrible ruling about money and politics.  At the same time, I and many of my free speech devotees think it's a return to freedom.

Perhaps this interview with law professor Ilya Shapiro will help to elucidate our position.

To the extent that there has been a diminution in the public’s faith in the democratic process, the government is probably more to blame than the corporations. Earmarks, special tax breaks, the dispersal of government goodies and baddies – these types of actions harm democracy much more. McCain Feingold was never about regular citizens. It was a creature of the Beltway. There was no great call from the hinterland to get money out of politics.

I don’t think democracy will be diminished as a result of the ruling. What we could see is more ads like the Swift Boats ads during the 2004 presidential campaign or the Hillary movie. But the way the law stood, some government bureaucrat could have simply banned books that were critical of a political candidate in an election year. That would have been far worse.

*************

No one is saying that corporations are human beings. But corporations are groups of private individuals who have legal rights. Take Front Page magazine. It’s not an individual. But the government can’t raid your office and just seize your computer. That would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Similarly, corporations have First Amendment rights. Think of it this way: George Soros ^[9] can spend as much as he wants in an election, but if you and a hundred other people get together to spend your money, suddenly, that can’t work. Individuals don’t lose their rights just because they come together to magnify the effects of their donations.  

More here from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

What Might Have Been

What if the Enquirer had given up its quest to find out the truth about John Edwards and his lies?  Would we have a President Edwards today?  Would John Edwards be our attorney general?

Why didn't virtually any of the MSM look into Edwards' sordid behavior - along with potentially illegal actions (using campaign funds to pay his mistress and keep her on the campaign trail)?

An important story about how critical a free - and vigilant - press is to our well being.  Also a reminder that just because a lot of us refer to something as a "supermarket rag" - doesn't mean that its people can't be capable of producing diligent and fine reporting.