Back Talk

Aren’t you just proud of our state Democrat legislators? We are drowning in debt and they can’t balance the budget because of their rampant spending, can’t even come up with an budget in a timely fashion, can do nothing about the illegal alien catastrophe, cannot solve the water issues, but can come up with some 1,000 bills that would be laughable were it not so bad for our society.

In the name of deciding what is best for us, liberal lawmakers are enacting laws that erode our freedoms of choice year after year. Someone said, “Those who set out to be our keepers end up being our jailors.” Just a small sample of new laws for 2008: Firing a BB gun in a “negligent manner,” discount drugs for the underinsured, require public school kids to have a dental exam, dog tethering law because tethering “makes dogs aggressive,” drivers must use hands-free cell phones, beer sampling, landlords must give 60 day, not 30 day notices, new homeless shelters that the homeless typically refuse to use, and, most California-like, a bill requiring driver’s licencees to sign on to subjecting them to a murder charge if accidentally killing someone while intoxicated. What makes this latter law so Californiaish is that it sounds so nice but is useless because even the lamest legal lizard could blow this one over in court. Another typical case is the law against smoking with a child in the car; however, police may not stop a car for this violation alone, but for some other reason. These self-serving political hacks did spend our tax money devising a ballot proposition to scam the voters into changing the formerly approved term limits law. We Californians are re-electing liberal Democrats to our legislature to our peril.

Posted by Jim at 05:13 PM | Permalink

Who said the following? “The Gucci set make all the money” and “the champagne and caviar set and have done astonishingly well while the rest have had to tread water or drown,” and “the average person doesn’t get a fair share of economic benefits from their hard work.”

On a roll, this person said, “inequality is pounded into the system by the corporate crowd,” and “Americans are without the clout of strong unions and are arrayed against the mighty power of the corporations,” and “Americans have exhausted their power to tread water.” He really likes this water treading metaphor. Not finished, he said, “the American mythical dream is on life support, and there are dark clouds of possible recession,” and “workers are filled with anxiety about the economy,” and “American workers are looking with dread toward 2008.” I know what you are thinking; the writer must have been a Socialist/Communist hater of capitalism. No, the writer was not Karl Marx, not Vladimir Lenin, not Leon Trotsky, not Nikita Khrushchev, not Hugo Chavez, and not even a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Our very own leftist New York Times writer, Bob Herbert made these remarks to describe our very good six year economic boom in spite of the war and the home mortgage problems. He said earnings of men in their thirties have remained flat for four decades which is, of course, a flat out, bare faced lie. He thinks it’s bad for the top earners to increase their earnings because, like all socialists and economics-challenged journalists, he thinks it’s a zero sum game where one person’s gain is another’s loss. Either he has no clue or is not willing to accept that the high-end earners invest, produce capital investment, and hire workers. Herbert gleefully reported that 80% of Americans think our economy is in trouble, a laughably ironic statement since he and his ilk are largely responsible for that negative attitude. It is nothing short of amazing that our economy is so healthy given the constant negative slant that our mainstream media pushes upon us.

Posted by Jim at 01:54 PM | Permalink

The environmental lobby has intimidated congress into mandating a huge increase in the development of ethanol as motor-fuel.

How long will it take the law of unintended consequences to wake them up to the affect on the environment of growers converting more and more land to growing corn and the corresponding increased use of fertilizer and pesticides? What about the jump in demand for water to nourish the water-intensive corn? We already have problems because of the increased demand on ground water resources. Even worse, the ethanol development process uses a lot of water. With the government subsidizing farmers to raise corn for ethanol, many naturally grow fewer other grains which, in turn, causes a shortage of those commodities and a jump in prices. Beef prices are up because of the increased price of cattle feed grains from fields that are now devoted to ethanol. We have here just one more case of political malfeasance. The politicians get some kudos for appearing to solve the energy problem, the land owners make money growing subsidized corn, and, as usual, the public obliviously pay for it all with higher prices and more taxes. A typical politicians’ scam on the taxpaying public, once again, the old mushroom theory of governing: “keep em in the dark and feed em lots of manure.”

Posted by Jim at 02:08 PM | Permalink

The mainstream media, always eager to report bad news and with a general ignorance of economics, declaim every downtick in the Dow Jones and every uptick in consumer prices a crisis forming in our economy. On the other hand, good economic news escapes their notice. They have been reporting for several weeks the home sales upheaval would cause a poor Christmas shopping season for merchants, possible inflation, and worse. Now, the news they didn’t cover. Consumers apparently were not too worried about slumping home sales and soaring gasoline prices and hit the shopping centers big time in November, pushing spending up by the largest amount in 3 1/2 years. The November increase was the biggest one-month jump in four years and was even higher that the economic analysts projected.

Posted by Jim at 10:08 AM | Permalink

Arguably our most inept Senate Majority Leader ever, musty old Harry Reid, who told the world nine months ago that we had lost the Iraq war and then later further confirmed his loser commitment by saying the Troop Surge would do nothing, has now begrudgingly confessed, “The surge certainly hasn't hurt.”

This in spite of our tremendous success during the last several weeks with the Surge. The Democrats have tried to make their predictions of America losing in Iraq by withholding complete funding for the troops. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said “paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fits and starts undermines U.S. military planning and risks gains made by U.S. troops over the past year.” Reid has presided over a Senate majority that has done almost nothing of substance after making loud noises of their intentions when they took charge. When asked why the Senate has accomplished so little and incurred a record low public approval rating, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said, "Regretfully, we've spent most of the year having repetitious Iraq votes and investigations of the administration. It seems like all that happened was the approval rating of Congress kept getting lower and lower." If the good people of Nevada re-elect Senator Mildew for another term in the Senate, their state should be given back to the tarantulas.

Posted by Jim at 03:17 PM | Permalink

I understand council member Robin Huffman is going to give a Dale Carnegie talk on “How to Make Friends and Influlence people.”

Robin must be a devout Liberal since ersatz political cartoonist Drew Kelson scratched out a cartoon showing her as a victim of the other members of the council. I avoid looking too often at Drew’s cartoons - like looking at the same gargoyle week after week. Ok, I admit that not all political cartoons are visually attractive, but they are normally clever, satirical, or at least whimsical. Huffman almost certainly violated the Brown provision in the manner in which she contacted her associate members to coerce them into making her mayor. Our first real notice of her was her chutzpah in attempting to change the long standing council meeting schedule for her convenience. She considered it great restraint on her part not to make a public fuss about the council’s refusal to change the schedule as evidenced by her mentioning again during this current embarassing spectacle. She somehow thinks she is intitled to be mayor because it is her turn and has forewarned the members she is going to get even for denying her that. She has given notice she is not going to play nice and plans to give them plenty of grief during the coming year. Perhaps she should speak on, “How to Succeed in Politics by threatening your colleagues to cause trouble unless they let you be in charge.”

Posted by Jim at 08:18 AM | Permalink

Tell me it isn’t so. Please tell me the news item is not true, that nine members of Congress voted no on a resolution condemning the persecution of Christians around the world.

I can think of no sensible reason for their refusal except that, in their perverted way of thinking, they are afraid of offending either Islamic extremists or Communists. Heaven knows we don’t want to offend the screwball Iranian leader who vowed to destroy us and wipe Israel of the map, and that we should always go out of our way to appease our enemies. Some time back, Fred Thompson commented on appeasement by saying, “We need to drain the swamp, and the Democrats are concentrated on making nice with the alligators.” Perhaps it is just a case of political cowardice in the face of taking a stand on anything. It is depressing to realize that these people are representatives of the governing body that makes our laws and defends our culture – protectors of our Democracy.

Posted by Jim at 10:03 AM | Permalink

We are all familiar with P.T. Barnum’s oft-quoted saying, “There is a fool born every minute, and they all live.”

Well, many of them seem to find they way into the various governing bodies; those who can’t make it to the Fed, try for the State governments. Failing that, they move to California and become representatives, and when all else fails, they become members of the Chico and Paradise Town Councils. Witness the 1000 ridiculous laws our state bureaucrats pass every year. Because of a single study, the Federal bureaucrats will force coffee manufacturers to include one of those CYA warnings about possible health risks on all their products. They are not dissuaded by the fact that every other year for the last forty years some group has convinced the Federal Government to give them grant money, wasted it on another coffee study, and found results exactly opposite to the previous year’s results. Everybody’s favorite silllyland capital, San Francisco, has even decided to apply a special tax on all caffeine products. Because of society’s trend toward full-nanny Socialism, it is not difficult to look down the road and see the government telling us how much caffeine we are allowed to consume. Erosion of our freedoms has been increasing slowly but steadily starting with forcing us to wear seat belts or helmets and telling us where and when we may smoke to what we may eat. These bumbling caretakers of our welfare, ironically, believe they are so much more intelligent than us that they must decide how we should live our lives..

Posted by Jim at 07:10 AM | Permalink

The Hillary campaign is in danger of imploding so we are getting a display of the Clinton war room dirty tricks for which they are so famous.

It’s the same crowd that did the dirty deeds during slick Willie’s reign. Here’s the drill: a Clinton staff member –Hillary never does this herself since, like a mafia leader, she must have plausible deniability later on, fires a mud missile smearing the opponent. The next day, Hillary apologizes, declaring with heartfelt sincerety that she didn’t authorize the smear. Some wag said that sincerity is the best asset politicians can possess; once they have mastered that, they have it made. Hillary and her camp know full well that once they have planted the nasty seeds, the damage has done regardless of apology. They began their campaign a couple of weeks ago when an operative, just to put a little doubt into voters’ minds, said they had damaging information about Barack Obama’s past but because they were so ethical they were not going public with it. Then they announced that Obama lied when he said he had never had aspirations about being President – they actually traced it back to a statement he made in third grade. With every dropping percentage point, Hillary’s war room staff get more crazy. Last week, a Clinton staffer accused Obama of being part of a Muslim takeover of the U.S. Now, this week, another Clintonite accused Obama of not just using drugs in his younger years but selling them as well. Now, three bloggers have been ejected from a political web site for violating the site rules when the site manager traced the bloggers back to the Clinton Staff. I see that Hillary is airing TV ads in Spanish with promises that she will grant them free health care and provide millions and millions of jobs. No mention of where those jobs are coming from and she obviously avoided any mention of immigration reform or border security, just the usual DemPol “promise them free everything and worry about reality later.”

Posted by Jim at 11:06 AM | Permalink

A Drudge Report piece adds to my worries about the steady decline of our Education System, if you want to call the government bureaucracy, stifling obstructive unions and lifetime tenured teachers a system. A New York secondary school principal issued a memo chastising his teachers for failing too many students. He informed them that, if they are passing too few of their students, they are not designing their classes to “meet the students’ abilities.” That this will set their students up for failure” and, at the same time, limit the “teachers’ success as a professional." Yikes; talk about dumbing down our youth. This principal actually thinks sliding students through school will help them succeed in life. New motto for teachers: Slide em through, dumb em down, everybody's happy.

Oh yes, one final note: Teachers at the New York school will receive $3,000 bonuses if their school improves.

Posted by Jim at 07:32 AM | Permalink

After all these years, whenever I see Senator Ted Kennedy appear on television, I think of a drunken Kennedy driving off a bridge with Mary Joe Kopekne in the car, leaving her trapped and drowning, going home and not reporting it until the next day.

As a member of the ruling elite and Kennedy clan, he simply held a press conference the next day to clense his image with the public and, along the aid of the partisan press, has been free and a perennial member of the U.S. Senate ever since. Anyone else would have gone to trial, been convicted, and done prison time for manslaughter. His latest appearance was to once again join our enemies in the war on terrorism by trashing the CIA regarding prisoner prisoner waterboarding – a device to scare but does no permanent damage. He has failed to support our troops and fought against all congressional attempts to strengthen our security. From the start, Kennedy consistent lambasted the war calling it a quagmire, saying our troops should come home immediately, surrender Iraq to the terrorists, trashing the commanding generals, and demanding that Secretary Rumsfeld resign his post. At the Senate hearing, General Abizaid pointed out that Senator Kennedy and his like-minded colleagues such as Harry Reid have endangered the lives of our troops. The General asked Kennedy: if our troops do not have the support of their leaders, what does that say to the enemy? We are a very strong nation to be so successful in spite of such leaders as Ted, the non-swimmer, Kennedy - a bloated politician in a bloated bureaucracy.

Posted by Jim at 11:17 AM | Permalink

It is difficult to feel surprised by the journalistic malfeasance that we see daily in our newspapers and television. It seems I am no longer naïve enough to think that the press is dedicated to balanced coverage.

NBC has rejected a TV ad by Freedom Watch, a conservative group that supports administration policy in Iraq and wanted to send out a plea to viewers to remember the troops and thank them for their service during this holiday season. Freedom Watch President Brad Blakeman said "Anybody in the world would surely look at this ad and come away with nothing other than we should be thankful for their service." When the New York Times gave the far left Moveon.org a 50% discount amounting to tens of thousands of dollars to run a full-page ad, I shrugged it off. When I read that 90% of the ABC news staff are registered Democrats, I was nonplussed because it is out of my control. When the Pew Research study showed that the media has been carrying political campaign reports that are four times more frequent for Democrats than for Republicans, I was unsurprised. When 30-year CBS News veteran Bernie Goldberg wrote that a liberal bias was widely known and accepted by those in the news department, it merely confirmed my belief. But when the mainstream media joins the DemPols in denigrating anything involving the Iraq war, and by extension our fighting men, it is revolting.

Posted by Jim at 06:25 AM | Permalink

As a native Iowan, I have been watching the frenzied lead-up to the Iowa Caucuses (the Hawkeye Cauci.) The scuttlebut is that Barack Obama is moving up swiftly in the polls and the Clinton camp is panicing which always makes them act a little crazy, i.e., Clintonesque.

They have definitelly started a trash Obama campaign. They seized upon his statement that, until recently, he had never thought of becoming President, and began a dirt-search that went all the way back to a third grade (that’s right, third grade) comment he make while not even living in the U.S. that he wanted to be President. After the public, and even the partisan press, made fun of them, they tried to shrug it off as a mere joke. Then, a couple of days ago, a Clinton campaign aide penned an E-mail suggesting that, because of his Muslim background, Obama was part of a conspiracy to allow Muslims to take over America. Fasten your seat belts, folks; once the Clinton war room of Slick Willie, Blumenthal, Begala, Ickies, Carville, Podesta, Emanual, et-al get rolling, there is no telling what will come next.
Iowa will undoubtedly go Democrat in the general election owing to their having become a dependent class of the Democrat party.
Iowa has been in slow decay for years with small towns drying up all over the state because of backbreaking taxes and creeping Socialism. This even though the heart and soul of the state has always been the family values farmers. The problem is that the DemPols have handed down to farmers the good news welfare subsidies and price supports with one hand and the bad news rules and restrictions with the other for so long that farmers feel they must vote Democrat to keep the welfare checks coming even while suffering the restrictive government control. Paying a farmer not to grow crops or giving him a guaranteed above free-market price for his products, aside from causing all Americans to pay higher prices, has a stultifying effect upon the independent spirit. The once first-rate Des Moines Register, virtually the sole purveyor of news in Iowa, has become a Socialist rag with an agenda. You are not going to believe this but while I was visiting there, the Register editorialized in favor of Socialistic pending legislation to force even non-union workers to pay union dues – incredibly, a government move to force workers to join a union. A little neo-Stalinism is corn country.

Posted by Jim at 01:25 PM | Permalink

The Hollywood crowd is advocating the release from prison of a convicted cop killer.

In 1981, Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal murdered twenty five year old Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. He shot the officer in the back and then witnesses testified he shot him again as he lay defenseless on the ground looking up at the killer. The anti-anything-American Hollywood lefties such as Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell and famous America-hater Michael Moore, always looking for some left-field cause that goes against American values but still quenches their need to feel they are involved in something more than the trivial life they lead acting in movies. This is the perfect crusade for these lefties since it involves a minority vis-à-vis the police. One of these socially aware crusaders, Mike Farrell, who one must assume believes in the killer’s innocence, stated that he had never gotten around to reading the trial transcript which is publicly available.
Some writer - can’t remember who - said, “A leader of public thought in Hollywood wouldn’t have enough acumen anywhere else to hold a place in the breadline.”

Posted by Jim at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Take a look at where the country may be headed, folks. The Democrat Presidental aspirants, hitting the airwaves in full campaign propaganda mode, are inundating us with the usual sob stories about the terrible plight of the poor “undocumented immigrants.”

For starters, they are not “undocumented immigrants,” they are illegal aliens who broke the law and sneaked across our southern border. Is there anyone out there who believes these career lawyer politicians care a whit about these lawbreakers? They care about on thing and that is signing them up as Democrat voters. They want to grant citizen rights such as drivers licences, identification cards, and special college tuition rates; illegals already use social services, schools, and emergency rooms and only a DemPol could make a case that if we withhold a reward such as special tuition rates to children of illegals we are “punishing them.” Are we punishing illegals by not buying them a car, paying their rent, or giving them free postage to sending money home to Mexico? The Democrats refuse to declare English as our national language. They tacitly agree with city governments, such as the neo-Stalinist San Francisco city council, who are violating the law regarding harboring criminals when they declare themselves “sanctuary cities.”

Posted by Jim at 03:08 PM | Permalink

Ten years ago, Al Gore (you know, the guy who got the nobel prize for whopper-telling) pronounced that in ten short years, man-made global warming would heat the world’s climate to a dangerous level.

Now ten years later, Argentinians and Brazilians have been suffering with coldest winter in 90 years. In more than a century, only two days had colder low termperatures: November 1914 and 1917. Also, back then, a natural condition that increases the earth’s temperatue - the urban heat island effect - was less pronounced than now. So, what’s the deal Al? That gloom-profit prediction of yours sounds a lot like another of your “Gore-whoppers” that global warming would melt the icecap and cause an ocean level rise of 20 feet; you know, the prediction that scientists, and even the global warming obsessed UN, discredited. A noteworthy footnote: A British judge found nine scientific errors in Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” and ordered British schools to mention them and to teach the other side of global warming. Let’s not hold our breath waiting for American schools to follow suite.

Posted by Jim at 07:50 AM | Permalink

The media is all atwitter today about the NIA (National Intelligence Agency) report that Iran has discontinued its nuclear weapon development program.

The report stated that Iran had a secret Iranian nuclear project, one that we don't know about, but which may already have produced a Bomb, is "plausible but unlikely." Sounds a little like a cover-all-bases weather report, “partly cloudy with possible showers,” doesn’t it? There are many observations one could make about this report. President Bush said Tuesday the international community should continue to pressure Iran on its nuclear programs, that the country remains dangerous to its neighbors and the free world. He said it was “a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program, and they could restart the program." Ahmadinejad has directly threatened Britain, France and Germany, as well as the USA. He said he would wipe Israel off the map. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) reported that, with their 3,000 centrifuges, Iraq could produce enough fissionable material for a nuclear Bomb in one year. The press and talking heads on CNN, et-al have only one reaction, and that is to practically wet themselves over the opportunity to criticize President Bush as having exaggerated the Iranian threat and the war on terrorism in general. It’s the same old political paintball we have come to expect from the partisan press.

Posted by Jim at 11:52 AM | Permalink

A former environmentalist wacko, David Freddoso, wrote on having seen the light of realism after studying the issue in a little more depth.

He wrote, “If you want to save the environment, you can do one of two things. You can just live as you do now, ignore all the scare-mongering and environmental millennarianism, and probably both you and the planet will be just fine until the end of the world — even if that is a million years from now. Or you can start living like I do, and perhaps even fool yourself into thinking you’re making a difference. I am sitting at my desk right now, wearing a winter hat and scarf and shivering in my one-bedroom basement apartment in Washington.” His motivation may well have been by observing that famous advocate Al Gore’s proclamations have not been very credible particularly given Al’s poor relationship with the truth. David’s analysis revealed the glaring fact that the enviros are pushing the boutique methods of solar and wind power, even though they are useless in most areas, and ignoring nuclear and hydroelectric which emit no carbon dioxide. Now, having caught the skeptic’s curse, he discovered the scam that Midwest politicians are pulling on the public regarding ethanol. In particular, it costs more energy to produce corn ethanol than to produce oil, the process itself creates pollutants, and the real thrust of the effort is to provide farmers with a nice subsidy – great for grabbing votes from those happy tillers of the soil.

Posted by Jim at 03:23 PM | Permalink

A politician has no better asset than the short memory of the public.

This axiom has been validated nicely by the Clintons; Bill Clinton reaffirmed that last week when he declared, “I never supported the war in Iraq,” in spite of numerous statements on the public record that he fully supported it. Rather like, “I never had sex with that woman” except that the public did remember this one because of its titilation factor. He is also on record as saying to a European audience, “I loathe the military” and now avows he supports the troops, if not the war. Prevaricating soul mate, Hillary - not as adempt at Bill - didn’t give the public enough forgetting time when she said she supported the New York Governor’s attempt at letting illegal aliens get drivers licenses, and then denying she had said it. All this was was in front of millions who watched the television debate. Democrat Politicians have historically been free to capitalize on this forgetfullness because they have had a partisan press to protect them. Republican politicians would use the same technique but have been more careful because they have learned the hard way that the press is watching them with a critical eye and will shout to the world any such mendacity. Left-wing former Clinton financial supporter David Geffin said, "Everybody in politics lies, but the Clintons do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”

Posted by Jim at 09:11 AM | Permalink