Blogging At American Issues Project

This morning a blog post I wrote for the American Issues Project was published on their site. Do check it out. I have recently joined them as a blog contributor, and will post there a few times a week.

Tuesday Afternoon Open Thread

Have at it, dear friends, and liberals. Plenty to talk about today – one suggestion: Is Obama an idiot, or nefarious? Is he cutting America off at the knees ’cause he doesn’t realize the sword is sharp, or because he thinks we need cutting off at the knees?

Thomas Sowell Speaks

And he’s just much smarter than any of us, so listen:

JH: Now, we’ve heard people say that this is a uniquely bad economic situation — that it could be as bad as the Depression, etc. However, looking at GDP and job loss numbers, it doesn’t look as bad as, say, the recession in the early 80s. So how bad is this really and if you were advising the president, what would you tell him to do?

Thomas Sowell: Resign.

JH: (Laughs) That would be helpful.

Thomas Sowell: Yes, because he is determined to interfere in the market. How did we get out of the recession in the early 80s? Reagan did nothing. The economy adjusted and we’ve had 20 years of growth, low inflation, and low unemployment. Many people argue that the New Deal got us out of the Depression by spending. Well, the New Deal spent for years without getting us out of the Depression and then the war came along. The defenders come along and say, “You see with the war, spending increased and that did it.” What the war did was put an end to the New Deal. When the New Deal ended, the economy revived…

…JH: Now, I’d like you to elaborate on something you wrote in National Review back in 2007:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Thomas Sowell: That’s true, unfortunately. I just noticed this morning that … I am getting more and more emails from people who are simply despairing. They are saying that we may have reached the point of no return. We have had dumbed down education for enough generations that people don’t even realize that it’s dumbed down education. We have propaganda against all the institutions of this society, literally from the elementary school to the universities. You can’t raise a whole generation of people who don’t know how to think but are taught to resent anything that they don’t understand, and expect that you are going to survive in the long run.

JH: One last question: if John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Michael Steele — the guys who are leading the Republican Party today — came to you and said, “Thomas, we respect you. Tell us what you think we should be doing.” What would you tell them?

Thomas Sowell: One good thing they are doing right now is not going along with this stimulus. Too often, the Republicans have acted as if they have to be players and join in with the Democrats so we can all go over the cliff together. The other thing is that they have got to learn is to talk. The inarticulateness of the Republicans can be fatal politically.

Obama is a man entirely out of his depth and you don’t need the immense intellect of Thomas Sowell to see it – but it is important to understand that Obama’s plans are based on the false premise that the New Deal helped. It didn’t – it just made the Depression deeper and longer. You can’t spend money you don’t have an come out ahead of the game – the more you spend money you don’t have, the worse it gets. This can be easily understood by anyone sitting around in a swank house which has lost half its alleged value while surrounded by tip-top consumer goods and $35,000 in credit card debt at 29.99% – that guy, if he’s any sense at all, wishes he had no house and no goods and no debt.

Unfortunately, Obama and his boys and girls are not people who have actually had to live in the real world – ensconced in the overlapping worlds of advocacy, education and government, they’ve never had to produce a product for the market, nor measure up to a strict set of standards for success. And when we take the clueless (like Obama) and couple him with the corrupt (like Pelosi and Reid), then we get a toxic political mix which can result in utter catastrophe. The liberals are driving us off a cliff which will lead, at best, to an economic depression, at worse will land us in civil war.

The key, now, is for those who understand just how bad these liberals are is to stand fast – all of those, right, left and center, who know that Obama is a false promise and a tin-plated messiah must hold the line as much as possible, and work for a new political alignment in 2010 and 2012 to first slow, then reverse, the damage Obama and his Democrats are inflicting on the nation. There once was a liberal who did say something smart – we have nothing to fear but fear, itself.

Ooops!

Geesh:

The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the aging W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles to prolong their life and ensure they are safe and reliable but plans have been put on hold because US scientists have forgotten how to manufacture a mysterious but very hazardous component of the warhead codenamed Fogbank. ‘NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency,’ says the report by a US congressional committee.

We’ll want to be working on this one, boys and girls.

The Triumph of Ideology Over Science

In Obama’s overturning of the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research:

The U.S. bishops’ conference pro-life committee chairman is denouncing President Barack Obama’s executive order that will allow federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Cardinal Justin Rigali issued a response to the U.S. president’s order today that will allow federal tax dollars to be used to fund scientists in the destruction of live human embryos to develop stem cells for research.

The cardinal said: “President Obama’s new executive order on embryonic stem cell research is a sad victory of politics over science and ethics.

We don’t need embryonic stem cells to do stem cell research – we have plenty of other means of obtaining them and, indeed, while embryonic stem cells are proving worthless as a treatment, adult stem cells are proving ever more worthwhile. It is sheer culture of death bloody mindedness which impels Obama along this path – that plus the amount of research dollars and reputations already tied up in embryonic stem cells, and thus the vested interest in keeping this useless line of inquiry open.

Keep in mind, dear people, that we will be making human beings in order to kill them for our personal benefit – and that is only if, by some odd chance, a treatment actually comes out of embryonic stem cells. If, as I expect, embryonic stem cells continue to prove unusable, then we will have made human beings to kill them for nothing.

Cutting Defense Spending

The news story:

President Barack Obama fired a surprise broadside at the defense industry, saying he intends to clamp down on practices that have resulted in billions of dollars in cost overruns and delays in recent years.

At a time when Washington faces the prospect of bailing out multiple sectors of the economy, contractors’ cost overruns are showing up on the radar of many in the capital. And the Pentagon, which spends about $330 billion a year to buy everything from fighters to paper clips, is a particular focus of the new administration.

Mr. Obama has singled out the defense industry as one of the most wasteful. Last year, the Government Accountability Office found that 95 major Defense Department weapons contracts were over budget by a total of $295 billion — though some point out that the GAO’s figure includes legitimate changes to some contracts.

“In this time of great challenges, I recognize the real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich,” the president said Wednesday.

Which is all well and good and any military veteran can tell you that waste in Defense is rather endemic – it is what happens when you’re spending other people’s money, which lesson liberals should take to heart as they go about spending trillions of dollars of other people’s money with Obamunism. Don’t fault the actual troops in the field – the problem usually comes in with defense contractors and those civilian and military Defense personnel who are looking for a cushy berth as well as pork-barreling politicians (like Jack Murtha (D-PA), to name a particularly nauseating sample of the species). As with all government agencies, a careful examination of Defense will discover a lot of money which is being wasted – and the more we attack such things, the better our military will be.

But as we go about looking for waste, fraud and abuse, we must not demonize the Defense industry, nor the military, nor cut vital programs just because they are large and expensive. The defense of the United States of America is the most important function the federal government has, and we must never find ourselves in a future war in the condition we were in 1941, when understrength military forces were using obsolete weapons to fight off powerful enemies – men died because short sighted politicians in the 1930′s stinted defense. We cannot engage in that level of criminal irresponsibility ever again.

It is a natural that a liberal, Democrat Administration will seek to cut defense – elections have consequences and one of them will be our military having to do more with less. The troops are up to it, but we must not betray them and send them into battle with anything less than the best we can provide at the time.

14% of Americans Would Rather Live on Their Knees

Than die on their feet:

Seventy-five percent (75%) of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of an average citizen to own a gun, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Just 14% say gun ownership is not a constitutional right. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.

We have had some useful polls of late – how many Americans think politicians know best (13%), think government is the solution (28%) and now how many people are afraid to defend themselves (14%). We’re closing in on figuring out just how many people are completely dyed-in-the-wool liberal weenies in this nation. Once we’ve got that figured out, we can work on tricking them into not showing up on election day…we’ll tell them they’ll have to bring a gun and make up their own mind. They’ll never vote again!

Comparing 1994 with 2010

Interesting analysis from Real Clear Politics, with good and bad news for GOPers and Democrats. Well worth reading.

Rebuilding Respect for America Abroad

Yeah, right – perhaps we should have sent a different broad:

Russian media has been poking fun at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she gave her Russian counterpart a “reset” button with an ironic misspelling.

Clinton’s gift to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at their meeting in Geneva on Friday evening was meant to underscore the Obama administration’s readiness to “to press the reset button” in ties with Moscow.

But instead of the Russian word for “reset” (perezagruzka) it featured a slightly different word meaning “overload” or “overcharged” (peregruzka).

Daily newspaper Kommersant put a prominent picture of the fake red button on its front page and declared: “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton pushed the wrong button.”

Do keep in mind that I consider Hillary one of the few adults in the Obama Administration – but being as she is a liberal Democrat and the SecState of the first socialist President of the United States of America, its a natural that sheer idiocy will become national policy. Only in the paranoid, raving mind of the kook left was there any need for a “reset” of US/Russia relations – we have our problems, but to consider the last 8 years a complete disaster, as the kook left does, is to ignore the fact that, by and large, President Bush had treated Russia as necessary and was rapidly building up the collective security net around Russia necessary to curb Russia’s imperialist ambitions.

In comes Hillary with words of wisdom from her boss, and it all goes up in a puff of laughter as a stupid conception of foreign relations meets a stupid symbolic gesture, which was then done all wrong.

Its going to be a long four years, boys and girls.

What Happens if Citi Fails?

The editors of The Atlantic ponder:

What hidden issues like this lurk in a Citigroup bankruptcy? Compared to Citigroup, Lehman was a simple entity; it borrowed some money, it issued some securities, it bought and sold some other securities. Citigroup is a bank, a trading operation, an insurer . . . and it has commercial banking operations in something like 119 countries, all of whom have their own opinion about what should happen to the company, and regulatory authority over at least a piece of it. It’s tempting to think that the Lehman bankruptcy has already exposed the potential problems from any collapse.

The actual answer: its assets will be picked up for a song by other enterprises which weren’t as boneheaded as Citi and after a few years, most people will forget there ever was a Citi for us to worry about. Its called life – and some times it doesn’t work out the way we like.

Attempts to keep failed corporations like Citi alive via infusions of taxpayer dollars are foolish and counter-productive. They just put off the day of reckoning and ensure that when it does come, it will be worse than otherwise.