Crisis Management

No doubt we all remember Rahm Emanuel’s caution to his liberal brethren, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."  The crisis that has been played out in the media for four days now is the shooting in Arizona.  With the various TEA movement groups lambasting liberal legislators and after a historic “shellacking” of Democrats by the Republicans this is providing a desperately needed breather for the traitor party.   

After months of hate-filled screed about Republicans, the Democrats now want to change the discourse.  They in effect want to neutralize some of the most effective weapons that the right has – Talk Radio, the TEA movement, and yes, Sarah Palin.  You have to give liberals credit – it is a brilliant strategy.  Democrats are reeling from body-blow after body-blow but the Republicans foolishly pulled the repeal of Obamacare off the table because some left-wing lunatic sprayed a crowd of people in Arizona with bullets.  The anti-Semitic cretin was aiming at Jewish Congresswoman  Gabrielle Giffords (D) but managed to kill Republican John M. Roll, the chief U.S. District judge in Arizona along with five others. 

Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor – don’t stop now – pour it on.  Nothing that happened in that Safeway was your fault.  Indeed the degradation of our society and the liberal pabulum that Jared Loughner apparently devoured were the real culprits in this drama.  In effect Loughner is a product of the liberal society that he was brought up in.  Had he been a practicing member of most any local church or been under the influence of the local College Republicans he wouldn’t have been a danger to anyone. 

This is liberal 101 – misdirection.  I’ll never forget the beating that liberal knuckleheads were getting in the media over Cap and Trade and then world famous pervert and weirdo Michael Jackson managed to kill himself.  The outpouring of grief knocked Cap and Trade right out of the news. 

Don’t take your eye off the ball.  Get back to the business of saving the country.  

 

Environmental Consequences

Dear Editor,

I enjoyed Davon Gray’s column “Time to bag the bag tax” (1/10/11).   I completely agree that there should be no bag tax, but the environmental damage caused by plastic bags is a disaster produced by environmentalists. 

My first real job (before Mr. Gray was born) was as a bagger in a California grocery store.  The standard bag was a large, stiff, brown paper one we called a “barrel bag.”  It would hold a great deal, stand up straight on the back seat or in the trunk of your car, and note to environmentalists: if you buried it in moderately damp soil it would disappear quickly adding nutrients to that soil.  Without regard to the utility and Earth-friendly properties of these bags, environmentalists howled that trees were sacrificed precisely to make paper bags.  While that is probably true, note to environmentalists: trees are a renewable resource – we can grow more. 

Unable to stand up to their hysteria grocers Nationwide changed to a less bulky and cheaper alternative – plastic bags.  Plastic bags don’t stand up on the back seat of your car and they free everything to roll around in your trunk as you turn out of the grocery store parking lot.  You can bury them today and come back years later and dig them up.  Further someday in centuries hence we will run out of oil the main ingredient required to make plastic bags.  In the “old days” we cut up those paper bags and covered our school books with them.  Try that with a plastic bag. 

Now the very same environmentalists who demanded plastic bags want to tax us to reduce our use of plastic bags.  Surely even the most radical environmentalist can see the irony here. 

I have a better idea – reintroduce the heavy-duty brown paper barrel bag and tax environmentalists. 

Sincerely Yours,

Flood the Zone

Brace yourselves for the inevitable cascade of anti-gun knuckleheads in the wake of the tragic shooting of an Arizona Congresswoman.   One Hundred and Thirty One victims in Washington, DC during 2010 didn’t bring them out but the wounding of a Congresswoman will.  Indeed the early reports were trying to pin this one on Sarah Palin before we found out that the shooter is a liberal. 

Yet another violent liberal has violated every gun law on the books.  Early reports say he was a fan of Mien Kampf and the Communist Manifesto both written by famous liberals.  However this criminal act will predictably trigger an outcry for more restrictive gun laws.  That is not the answer to violent crime or lunatic crime in the United States.  The real solution is to flood the zone with guns in the hands of the law abiding citizenry.  In an environment where there are no guns a lone gunman is king as in that Safeway on Saturday, as on the Virginia Tech campus and in many places these lunatics choose to commit violent acts.  These madmen aren’t crazy enough to attack an NRA convention or Hunting & Fishing shows, rather they are more likely to attack a school.  Had the Congresswoman held her meet and greet at a Cabelas or a Bass Pro Shop I’ll bet you even this lunatic would have thought twice about his attack. 

The United States of America has a militia or armed citizen tradition.  In “33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask” Thomas E. Woods Jr. points out that contrary to popular mythology and movies the “Wild West” wasn’t really very wild because most everyone was armed.  It’s amazing how polite people are when you have a pistol on your hip.  The James-Younger Gang met their particular Waterloo at the hands of an armed citizenry in Northfield, MN.  In any similar scenario today citizens are completely at the mercy of any barbarian who decides to do violence. 

Last year a retired Baltimore policeman stopped a robbery while waiting in a restaurant for his take-out order.  His decades of training and experience didn’t go to waste in retirement as he was armed.  Every town or county has a potential cadre of citizens who have the training, temperament, and experience to carry firearms in public places that would make them orders of magnitude safer than they are today.  Retired and former military members would be superb “deputy sheriffs” in the manner of the old West.  Retired policemen should be required as a condition of their retirement to carry firearms in plain view as their active duty fellows do.  Experienced hunters and target shooters would also be a superior group to recruit deputies from. 

You want safer streets?  Put guns in the hands of men and women who know how to use them – then all you barbarians look out.  

                       

Good Riddance

From Friday's The Washington Times:

JUST SO YOU KNOW
"In the 1,461 days that Rep. Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, served as speaker of the House, the national debt increased by a total of $5.343 trillion, or $3.66 billion per day, according to official debt numbers published by the U.S. Treasury," says Terence Jeffrey, columnist and editor-in-chief of CNS news service.

Iwo Jima memorial needs rescue mission

Though the responsibility of the National Park Service, the iconic Iwo Jima Memorial is in need of repair.  A former Marine is soliciting funds to restore the statue and improve the surrounding grounds.  See the article in The Washington Times at:  

Iwo Jima memorial needs rescue mission

 The friends group is at: 

Marine Corps War Memorial Foundation

Doesn't appear that they are ready to take on-line contributions:

Contributions should be made payable and sent to:

Marine Corps War Memorial Foundation

P.O. Box 75

Waynesboro, Virginia 22980-2727

The Constitution Out Loud

Next to the Bible, the most important document the world has ever seen is the United States Constitution. Some people might argue that the Magna Carta or Hammurabi’s Code are competitive, but they are not. Hearing our Constitution read by the people who should be most governed by it was moving for me today. I hope that they were also listening. No doubt though they had all sworn an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United Sates” many had probably never read it and fewer still understand its importance. I carry one in my hip pocket. Imagine that – our Nation was founded by a document that fits in a pamphlet 38 pages long that you can tuck in your pocket but those knuckleheads can’t write a bill to fund that government that is less than 1900 pages long.

As part of my military education I had to read "The Constitution and National Security" by Edmund S. Muskie and Walter R. Thomas. One passage was burned into my brain. Even though Muskie is an odd source - I still love the elegance of the phrase speaking about the members of the Constitutional Convention:

“But these were men who represented a degree of collective intellectual candlepower that has not been seen since in the corridors of American government.”

That statement remains true today. As I look across the spectrum of the current Congress, while there are good men and women represented there are also nitwits and scoundrels. I can’t help but wonder where the Americans with the stature of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and John Adams are. While some of the people present in the chambers of our government might make it into the history books with similar acclaim as our Founding Fathers, the people I mentioned were famous men of great accomplishment before they sat in the Second Continental Congress to work on the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitutional Convention to design the United States Constitution.
Can you even imagine the scorn that people like Elbridge Gerry, Francis Lee, Gouverneur Morris or Benjamin Rush would have for Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, or Charlie Rangel? Can you visualize a debate between Samuel Adams and Joe Biden without breaking out into peals of laughter? And who would put Barrack Obama on the same intellectual plain as James Madison or Alexander Hamilton? The very idea is preposterous.

The lesson we should all learn from the past four years is that our Congressmen are not “fire and forget.” We cannot send them to Washington and not continue to remind them of their responsibility to “support and defend” that magnificent document that is still the basis of our freedom and prosperity. Write, call, and attend town hall meetings to remind your Congress critter who he or she works for.

                       

Surrendering Freedom

Davon Gray’s piece (Our rights and the new realities) on November 29^th brought into focus how our Republic will die.  We will not go out in a blaze of glory but rather with a whimper as we surrender yet another right guaranteed us by our Founding Fathers in the name of an emergency.  With our First and Second Amendment rights constantly under siege, an unelected and unassailable group of Federal bureaucrats has taken away our Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” at all our airports and threaten now to do the same at train stations.  The feeble protestations about safety are utterly absurd. 

Beyond this, Mr. Gray admits that profiling might help as long as we don’t look at race or religion.  Of course those appear to be the only reliable profiling criteria that would have snagged every single one of the perpetrators of aerial violence for the last three decades.  Though skin hue varies slightly all of the perpetrators have two things in common:  They were (1) swarthy or dark young males of (2) Islamic faith.  Profiling for these characteristics (the potentially most effective means of preventing the next disaster) is ruled out by Mr. Gray. 

No American has blown up or commandeered a commercial aircraft bent on mass murder.  Yet Americans make up the overwhelming majority of the people who the TSA is groping, delaying, and inconveniencing.  I would be willing to listen to TSA if they had ever caught anyone bent on stealing or blowing up an airplane – but they haven’t.  Each of the 9/11 hijackers walked through airport security to get on those four aircraft.  

The simplest and most effective way to deal with this problem would be to put in an “Express Lane” in every airport to deal with people who don’t blow up or steal airplanes.  That group encompasses virtually the entire American population.  At a minimum we could fast track aircrew, holders of American-issued black (diplomatic) and red (official) passports, and all active duty and retired US military.  We could safely throw in all active and retired policemen, firemen, DEA, FBI, Federal Marshalls, local sheriffs and EMT professionals and volunteers.  No American school teacher, plumber, businessman or woman, chef, or crossing guard has tried to steal or blow up an airplane.  A valid union card might be adequate to prove someone isn’t a nut.  The point is that there is a tiny portion of the flying population that is both suspect and readily identifiable that should be targeted for extra scrutiny – they aren’t Americans.  With that said – I would subject journalists to extra screening regardless of their country of origin. 

We shouldn’t put a happy face on the loss of sovereign American rights, we should resist.  This ain’t rocket science unless you turn it over to the government – then the readily apparent somehow becomes unfathomable and opaque.  The “new reality” is the government is taking away our rights – that needs to stop. 

Sincerely,