This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Big government for tiny brains

    It was just eleven years ago Bil Clinton declared that “the era of big government has ended” after he got stomped in 1994 elections largely due to his failed attempt at a national Healthcare Plan. Now the Democrats in Congress are bringing back that era in an effort to gain political headway. According to the Washington Post;

    “We’re sitting on the doorstep of a definitional moment,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. He said legislation on health care, the minimum wage, homeland security and congressional ethics would respond to virtually all the pressure points of an anxious public.

    Republican leaders plan to stand in the way, arguing that Democrats are reviving big government programs that will intrude into the free market and taxpayers’ wallets. They argue that a homeland security mandate that all maritime cargo be screened within five years will chill international trade. And the children’s health insurance expansion amounts to “a giant tax increase in an effort to expand government-run health care,” said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

    We’ve been through all of this before. Of course, the first thing I think when I hear that healthcare for children will be expanded is “Great!” But, then the right side of my brain asks “who’s going to pay for it?” and “what has government ever done right for anyone?” and I snap back to reality. And the reality is this; Healthcare is already expensive because of government give-aways and boondoggle programs that funnel money to corrupt healthcare agencies and insurance companies.

    I remember, about 5 years before Medicare and Medicaid existed, my two brothers and I were all sick. My mother called the doctor down the street (back when doctors actually lived among us common folk) at about 8 in the morning, an hour-or-so later, he dropped by the house, looked us all over, gave my mother some medicine for us and she paid him $5. You can’t even buy a bottle of asprin for $5 these days.

    One of the big reasons I stayed in the Army was so my kids would have health care – I figured it was part of my responsibility as a parent to make sure my kids were healthy. How stupid of me to think ahead, huh? Granted it probably wasn’t the best care, but it was as good as any HMO, if not better.

    I lived next door to a minister in a rural church a few years back. In his backyard he had a trampoline for his teenage kids to play on. One day when they were all at work or school, some of the neighbors kids decided to avail themselves of the opportunity to play on the unguarded trampoline. of course, one of the youngsters broke his arm. The minister found out about it a week later when he was served lawsuit papers from the child’s parents. The parents apologized, but admitted that they hadn’t taken advantage of the health insurance offered through the father’s work and needed to pay the child’s medical bills. So the minister’s homeowner insurance ended up paying the child’s bills. How many things in that story should be compensated for by the government – the tax payers? Too many bad choices involved, none of them compensable.

    Since when is it the responsibility of people who waited until they could afford kids to fund the poor choices of the impetuous and small-minded goofballs that start spitting out babies as soon as they reach puberty? I’ll grant you that it’s not the children’s fault, but it’s certainly not the fault of society’s real adults either. And it’s certainly not the responsibility of government.

    If government wants to start mandating healthcare, how about mandating that people have insurance for their kids from the moment of conception. But I guess government can’t legislate common sense, especially since government is bereft of common sense itself.

    But then the campaign slogan “Hey stupid! Insure your kids’ health” doesn’t get you votes, does it?

  • Disfavor for President? Unpossible!

    The Washington Post’s Peter Baker astounds us this morning with a huge surprise – President Bush is unpopular – more than President Nixon, it seems;

    President Bush is a competitive guy. But this is one contest he would rather lose. With 18 months left in office, he is in the running for most unpopular president in the history of modern polling.

    The latest Washington Post-ABC News survey shows that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s job performance, matching his all-time low. In polls conducted by The Post or Gallup going back to 1938, only once has a president exceeded that level of public animosity — and that was Richard M. Nixon, who hit 66 percent four days before he resigned.

    Imagine that! What Baker forgets is that out of the two of them, Nixon was the only one who cared whether he was popular or not. The subheadline of the story says that only Truman stayed “down” this long in modern histroy. That’s an apt comparison, I suppose. Neither Truman nor Bush cared what popular opinion thought of them.

    Of course, it’s not surprising that President is so unpopular – the lies and inuendo-passed-off-as-truth have gone on since the Bush campaign started in 1999. Before he was President, someone said he was a coke head and with no evidence it’s become an accepted part of history. He pardoned Libby, just like his predecessors have done, and suddenly it’s unConstitutional.

    But then the Washington Post wouldn’t mention this stuff because they were/are part and parcel of the problem. I wonder how long the Post would’ve ran a story about Haliburton selling space and defense technology to China? Or if President Bush had bombed an asprin factory in the Sudan and tried to pass it off a weapons plant? Or if Dick Cheney had been caught taking money from Buddist monks who had taken a vow of poverty but somehow scrapped up $5000 per for the Bush/Cheney campaign?

    But, anyway, back to reality. Bush’s (and Truman’s for that matter) unpopularity stems from the fact that they were/are leaders. Leaders make decisions based on what’s best for the whole, not on how well they’re liked. People who try to lead based on opinion polling are called politicians.

    (By the way, I know that “unpossible” is improper – I’m just having fun quoting Ralph Wiggens)

  • Hugo Chavez; uber-moonbat

    Picture from Venezuela Llora, Venezuela Sangra

    The noose around the collective neck of Venezuelans seems to be tightening. An Associated Press story quotes Chavez in a personal ad hominem attack on a Honduran cardinal;

    President Hugo Chavez called a cardinal from Honduras an “imperialist clown” after the Roman Catholic prelate warned of increasing authoritarianism under the Venezuelan leader.

    “Another parrot of imperialism appeared, this time dressed as a cardinal. That’s to say, another imperialist clown,” Chavez was quoted as saying in a bulletin posted Tuesday on the state-run news agency’s Web site.

    Chavez — a close ally of Cuba’s Fidel Castro — was responding to criticism from Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, who said in a recent interview cited by Venezuela’s Bolivarian News Agency that Chavez “thinks he’s God and can trample upon other people.”

    Chavez made the comments during a government event late Monday. He has repeatedly clashed with Catholic Church leaders in Venezuela, calling them “liars” and “perverts,” but he rarely targets high-ranking priests abroad.

    Clowns, liars and perverts. That’s real grown up. Kind of like when he made the “smell of sulfur” comment at the UN about our President. But, the mask is off Hugo now – since he’s been granted “continuous reelection”, the Orwellian term he uses to describe his seizure of the office of Venezuela’s president for the remainder of his life, it seems he can’t be stopped.

    Tank at Venezuela Llora, Venezuela Sangra does an excellent piece on the new Culture of Personality growing up in Venezuela around Hugo in true Maoist/Stalinist style, including action figures of the stumpy little dictator. 

    Daniel at Venezuela News and Views found an article from Foreign Policy that reports that Venezuela’s bolivar is one of the five worst currencies in the world in which to invest – as a result of Chavez’ communistic social and monetary policies;

    With massive public spending fueling inflation and President Hugo Chávez’s nationalization campaign triggering a massive outflow of capital, it’s been a bad year for the bolívar. Thanks mainly to the high price of oil, many of Venezuela’s economic fundamentals look sound. But Venezuela’s currency has lost 21 percent of its value since January 2007….  

    The Devil’s Excrement records a conversation betweeen a community leader and Chavez when the community leader tries to tell Hugo that his advisors are lying to him about conditions in Venezuela. Tinpot Hugo doesn’t want to hear it, of course.

    Julia at The End of Venezuela as I Know It reports that the only way to organize protests these days is by text messaging since the Venezuelan media has fallen under the jackboot of Chavez and his minions.

    At Novosti, Hugo is quoted sounding a bit like the wistful Democrats before the 2000 election when they wished Bill Clinton could run again;

    Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has said he will soon submit to parliament a bill allowing the president to be re-elected an unlimited number of times.

    “If people don’t vote for me, I will leave. I’m not trying to hold onto this place, as I have always said. I won’t cry if I am rejected,” Chavez told the Hello President TV show Sunday.

    “If the Venezuelan people say go, I will go,” he said.

    Venezuela’s leader is elected by a simple majority by a direct national vote and is the head of state and government for six years, and can be re-elected once.

    Chavez first pledged to change the number of allowable presidential terms after he won the presidential election in December 2006.

    “I think the country’s Constitution should be changed. This first of all concerns presidential terms. We have no right to deprive people of the possibility of electing a leader they like for a fourth, fifth or sixth term,” he said.

    Yet, John Edwards and Barack Obama announced the other day during their debate that they’d meet with Chavez (and Castro) according to the Miami Herald (commentary from Babalu Blog). Since Hugo counts Edwards supporter Danny Glover among his pals, there’s absolutely no doubt that they would.

    Despite Chavez guarentees to Venezuelans that their private property rights would be protected by his revolution, he left enough wiggle room in his remarks to steal opponents private property (like he did with RCTV) in the style of Robert Mugabe;

    President Hugo Chavez assured private property owners their rights will be guaranteed in Venezuela under a pending constitutional reform, as long as proprietors and investors respect the law.
     
    “Our socialism accepts private property,” Chavez said in comments published Sunday on the Web site of Union Radio. “It’s only that this private property must be within the framework of the constitution.”

    He did not elaborate, saying only that he would present his proposal to lawmakers in the coming weeks. Few details have emerged from a committee Chavez has appointed to draft the proposed overhaul.

    Critics accuse Chavez of steering this oil-rich South American nation toward Cuba-style communism, and many wealthy Venezuelans fear second homes, yachts or other assets could be seized.

    Chavez denies copying Havana’s economic model, and counters that Venezuela’s socialist reforms will merely broaden the concept of ownership.

    Just like he did with petroleum and power companies – as long as they did what Hugo wanted them to do, they could continue to do business. Constitutional guarentees mean nothing in Venezuela these days since Chavez can now rule by decree – the Venezuelan Constitution is what Hugo says it is.

  • Taliban Guantanamo Grad takes the easy way out

    Abdullah Mehsud, Guantanamo Class of ’04, decided it was better to blow himself to smithereens than to end up in a Pakistani prison according to the Globe and Mail;

    Abdullah Mehsud, 31, spent over 2 years in Guantanamo.

    Shortly after his release in March 2004, Mr. Mehsud shot to prominence by kidnapping two Chinese engineers working in South Waziristan, a region known as a hotbed of support for al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

    “He was killed in a house in Zhob,” Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said, referring to a district of southwest Baluchistan province neighbouring Waziristan.

    A counter-terrorism squad acting on a tip-off raided the house belonging to a senior official from the pro-Taliban Islamist party of Fazal-ur-Rehman, leader of the opposition in the National Assembly.

    “We asked them to surrender but they opened fire,” Mira Jan, the chief administrator for Zhob, told Reuters.

    But how could this be? Abdullah signed a pledge that he’d avoid violence before he was released from Guantanamo. Surely, there’s some mistake. There’s no way those poor innocents held captive in Guantanamo could harm anyone.

    From a three-year-old Reuters story;

    Despite gaining their freedom by signing pledges to renounce violence, at least seven former prisoners of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have returned to terrorism, at times with deadly consequences.

    […]

    The former prisoners include Abdullah Mehsud, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee linked to Al Qaeda who oversaw the recent kidnapping in Pakistan of two Chinese engineers, one of whom was killed.

    On Friday, Pakistani soldiers began a massive search for Mehsud, 28, who returned to Pakistan in March after about two years’ detention at Guantanamo. Pakistan officials say he has forged ties with Al Qaeda since then.

    Oh, so there’s been a massive search for Abby since 2004. From a BBC profile of Abby;

    In a telephone interview with the BBC in 2004, Mehsud told our correspondent that he led his fighters by example by taking risks and surviving in tough conditions.

    Criticising US policies toward Muslims, he said the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was a provocation for the followers of Islam and must be avenged.

    So what do we do now? Now that we’ve suddenly, just today, learned that terrorists don’t keep their word? What’s the alternative to Guantanamo since we can’t imprison thugs and apparently we can’t release them on their own recognizance. What do the brilliant human rights advocates on the Left suggest we do?

    Seems we have a tiger by the tail.

  • Associated Press and the minimum wage

    I just love it when the media celebrates completely useless feel-good legislation – like the minimum wage. The Associated Press is positively giddy about the $.70/hour increase scheduled for September, especially since it’s the only piece of legislation that the 2007 Reid/Pelosi Congressional session has been able to get signed into law;

    The nation’s lowest-paid workers will soon find extra money in their pockets as the minimum wage rises 70 cents to $5.85 an hour today, the first increase in a decade.

    It ends the longest span without a federal minimum-wage increase since the pay floor was enacted in 1938. The last increase came in September 1997, when then-President Bill Clinton signed a bill raising the minimum wage 40 cents to $5.15 an hour.

    Legislation signed by President George W. Bush in May increases the wage 70 cents each summer until 2009, when all minimum-wage jobs will pay no less than $7.25 an hour.

    Government figures show about 1.7 million people earned $5.15 or less in 2006.

    So who are those 1.7 million low-income workers scheduled to be rolling in dough in a few weeks? Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006, the number is actually 1.692 million out of the total workforce of 76.517 million workers – 2.2% of the workforce earn minimum wage or less. 1.2 million of that 1.6 number (3/4) earn less than minimum wage now – so how’s a minimum wage increase going to help them?

    866,000 of them (over half) are between 16 and 24 years old – high school and college kids. 1.24 million of the total work in service related industries, the largest occupational group of minimum wage workers, out of that number, 880,000 are in food service and preparation (um, MacDonald’s), 24,000 are security guards, 52,000 are janitors. Only 340,000 work 40+ hours every week (less than 1 in 5 minimum wage earners) at the job for which they’re paid minimum wage.

    477,000 have less than a high school diploma, 127,000 have college degrees (how many of those are grad students I wonder). 8,000 have master’s degrees, but there are no Phds making minimum wage – some kind of correlation there?

    Not quite the picture of sustained poverty that AP would like us to think, is it? And that extra $28 bucks is going to do a world of good for them, huh? In ten weeks they’ll finally be able to afford that PSP they’ve wanted for playing video games in class.

  • Sheehan and her tens of tens in DC

    The media has pretty much tossed Cindy Sheehan aside as their “ultimate moral authority” figure on the war against terror. She’s been on a whirlwind tour of the South spreading her ultimate moral authority over everyone who’ll listen. She finally made it to DC yesterday with her tens of tens supporters (about 300, actually) and the best coverage I’ve seen is from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank;

    As a retiree, Cindy Sheehan was the Michael Jordan of the peace movement.

    “I am going to take whatever I have left and go home,” she announced in her May 29 “resignation letter” as antiwar activist. “Good-bye America.”

    The retirement — and Sheehan’s attempt to “be normal,” as she put it — lasted exactly 34 days. On July 2, she un-retired after hearing that President Bush had commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. And yesterday, bullhorn in hand, she led a march of demonstrators from Arlington National Cemetery to the Capitol, where she ended the day by getting arrested.

    Yeah, that’s what did it, Scooter Libby’s pardon. She probably heard in the local Starbucks (where she was panhandling) someone said “Bush can’t do that” and she accepted it as legal advice. Or she just got tired of not being on the nightly news.

    Sheehan then waded into constitutional law, and the little- known mandatory impeachment clause. “Impeachment is not a fringe movement — it is mandated in our Constitution,” she asserted. “Nancy Pelosi had no authority to take it off the table. If she takes impeachment off the table, what else will she take off the table — the First Amendment?”

    It’s funny how the Left always finds things that aren’t in the Constitution. There must be a broom closet somewhere of all of the rules the founders didn’t want to clutter up the one-page document and then gave the keys to the industrial-age equivalence of a moonbat who drags out the dusty unknown rules on cue.

    Milbank claims that the Sheehanistas were a bit paranoid;

    …by yesterday Sheehan even thought the planes departing from National Airport were conspiring against her. “They stepped up the air traffic,” she complained as a jet interrupted her speech.

    The paranoid also may have been suspicious about the low-flying military helicopter as the marchers crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge, or the man in the car with U.S. government plates who took pictures of the demonstrators as they reached the Tidal Basin — “for personal use,” he claimed.

    Yup, all of the airlines got together and decided to make their flights all leave while Cindy was speaking to the tens of tens gathered to hear her screech. Be sure to read the whole Milbank article – finally a fair treatment of Sheehan, replete with accounts of counter protesters from Free Republic and Gathering of Eagles.

    Aside from Milbank’s video, I haven’t found any pictures yet.

    But actually, Sheehan’s experience with the Democrats should serve as a warning to all single-issue voters, especially the Republicans (who tend to throw the party under the bus whenever a candidate doesn’t support our particular cause – resulting in eight years of Clinton). Sheehan was an icon of the anti-war Left, and now in the words of Bob Parks of Black and Right, she’s the Paris Hilton of the anti war Left – in just 34 days.

  • Hugo Chavez barking at the moon again

    I see Hugo is now concerned that non-Venzuelans might criticise him while visiting Venezuela according to AP (by way of Fox News);

    President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that foreigners who publicly criticize him or his government while visiting Venezuela will be expelled from the country.

    Chavez ordered officials to closely monitor statements made by international figures during their visits to Venezuela — and deport any outspoken critics.

    “How long are we going to allow a person — from any country in the world — to come to our own house to say there’s a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?” Chavez asked during his weekly television and radio program.

    The Venezuelan leader’s statements came after Manuel Espino, the president of Mexico’s conservative ruling party, criticized Chavez during a recent pro-democracy forum in Caracas.

    That’s odd since Chavez came to the United States last year and said this about our government, according to CNN;

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tore into his U.S. counterpart and his U.N. hosts Wednesday, likening President Bush to the devil and telling the General Assembly that its system is “worthless.”

    “The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said, referring to Bush, who addressed the world body during its annual meeting Tuesday. “And it smells of sulfur still today.”

    Chavez accused Bush of having spoken “as if he owned the world” and said a psychiatrist could be called to analyze the statement.

    “As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: ‘The Devil’s Recipe.’ ”

    Chavez held up a book by Noam Chomsky on imperialism and said it encapsulated his arguments: “The American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its hegemonistic system of domination, and we cannot allow him to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.”

    Notice he said “the American empire” not “the Bush empire”…so there is an equivalance. Did President Bush react by expelling Chavez? Did he pass free speech “reforms” like Chavez has done?

    So who’s the dictator here? 

    Michael Moynihan recalls Daniel Ortega’s similar behavior more than twenty years ago. 

  • Obama choses image over substance

    I love it when my posts become reality. Yesterday I wrote two – one about La Raza and the other about image vs. substance. While I was writing, Barack Obama was writing my post for today, according to Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times;

    Sen. Barack Obama told the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy group yesterday that he earned their support for his presidential campaign by marching in last year’s May 1 immigrant rallies and challenged them to learn whether others met that standard.

    “Find out how many senators appeared before an immigration rally last year. Who was talking the talk, and who walked the walk — because I walked,” Mr. Obama said at the National Council of La Raza’s annual convention in Miami Beach. “I didn’t run away from the issue, and I didn’t just talk about it in front of Latino audiences.”

    The Illinois Democrat said the recent Senate immigration debate “was both ugly and racist in a way we haven’t see since the struggle for civil rights.”

    Racist in what way, Barack? In a way that we don’t encourage people to break the law? When people who want to live in this country and make a better life for their families here, stand in large groups and wave the flag of another country – the country from which they escaped? The country that repressed them in the first place and made them want to come here? In that way?

    And since when does marching with a group of people give you some sort of credibility? Again, Democrats depend on imagery – no substance. Marching in a large group of people doesn’t get you anything except photo ops. In fact, it’s comical that Obama thinks that he has more credibility with latins than his opponents who didn’t walk. I guess we know why he marched with them in the first place, don’t we.

    I don’t suppose Obama noticed that denouncing racism to a group that calls themselves The Race is pretty hypocritical.

    Almost as bad as Clinton II blaming the poor Bush economy for the venom in the immigration debate;

    In remarks during a morning brunch, Mrs. Clinton said she has been trying “to understand where all of the venom and the incredible anxiety came from” in the immigration debate.

    “I am very disappointed, and I was really quite offended by the tone of the debate and some of what was said by outside parties who were trying to influence the debate,” she said.

    She blamed the tone on what she called a poor economy under President Bush.

    “Until recently, I did not hear the kind of insecurity and opposition to bringing immigrants into American society as I hear today,” she said, adding that when her husband was in office, “people were too busy getting a better future for themselves.” 

    You know, the economy that’s been growing at a faster rate than in the 1990s, the economy that has seen the lowest sustained unemployment rate ever in our history of keeping those statistics – as Larry Kudlow calls it “the greatest story never told”. More image over substance.