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

Category: Politics

  • A point of honor

    Last night I got an email from Confederate Yankee who has often been running point on the Beauchamp/The New Republic story for the entire blogoshere. He asked me to support a boycott he was starting against The New Republic. Of course I said I would, then I fell asleep waiting for the Redskins to score. But I’m refreshed this morning and so so here’s the gist of the plan from CY;

    We know that TNR allowed all three of Scott Beauchamp’s stories to be published without being competently fact-checked, if fact-checked at all.

    We know that the editors of TNR, led by Franklin Foer, lied when they said that the stories had been competently fact-checked, we know they deceived their readers and misled at least one civilian expert in an attempt to create a whitewash of an investigation.

    […]

    We know The New Republic attempted to stonewall their way through obvious, blatant, and grievous breaches of journalistic ethics. In so doing, they have attacked the service, integrity, and honor of an entire company of American soldiers serving in a combat zone to avoid taking responsibility for their own editorial and ethical failures.

    Alfred A. Knopf Allstate Amazon.com American Gas Station
    American Petroleum Institute Astro Zeneca (current issue) Auto Alliance Bearing Point
    Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (current issue) BP (current issue) Chevron (current issue) CNN
    FLAME (current issue) Federal Express The Financial Times Focus Features
    Ford Motor Company Freddie Mac GM Grove Atlantic
    HBO Harvard University Press History Channel Hoover Institution (current issue)
    MetLife Microsoft Mortage Bankers Nuclear Energy Institute
    The New School New York Times Novartis Palgrave Macmillan (current issue)  
    Simon & Shuster John Templeton Foundation (current issue) University of Chicago Press University Press of Kansas (current issue)
    U.S. Telecom Visa (current issue) The Wall Street Journal Warner Brothers
    Warner Brothers Home Video W.W. Norton Wyeth Laboratories Yale University Press (current issue)

    I’d ask U.S. military veterans, military families, active duty personnel, and the vast majority of Americans who support our servicemen and women to call these companies, institutions and agencies to pull their advertising from TNR, effective immediately.

    […]

    We cannot force The New Republic to behave honorably, but we can make their dishonesty come at a price.

    I’m 100% behind this – Beauchamp has at least decided to rehabilitate himself, on the other hand, TNR hasn’t shown the least bit of remorse for their skullduggery.

    Blackfive‘s The Wolf and Chickenhawk Express are on board.

  • Edwards Runs on Raising Taxes (People LOVE to hear that…)

    The Silky Ponyâ„¢ wants everyone to go to preschool and college and he wants to raise everyone’s taxes to do it! It is rare for any politician to be this honest about an idea that NO one likes, paying higher taxes. The Concord Monitor has the story.

    Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina, says the federal government should underwrite universal pre-kindergarten, create matching savings accounts for low-income people, mandate a minimum wage of $9.50 and provide a million new Section 8 housing vouchers for the poor. He also pledged to start a government-funded public higher education program called “College for Everyone.”

    “It is central to what I want to do as president to do something about economic inequality. I do not believe it is okay for the United States of America to have 37 million people living in poverty,” he said in a meeting with Monitor reporters and editors this week. “And I think we need, desperately need, a president who will say that to America and call on Americans to show their character.”

    Um, if everyone goes to college, who will work on our cars, build our houses, flip our damned burgers? College is not for everyone, and everyone is not for college. While a well educated populace is a lofty (and worthwhile) goal, this idea simply ignores reality. There will ALWAYS be a need for menial labor, the gardeners, the roofers, the fast food employees, mandating that everyone goes to college is as pointless as it is expensive (hint: Very)
    Edwards’ proposals would do nothing more than apply a fresh layer of lubricant to the slippery slope to socialism idealized by the extreme left. All this talk about “Leveling the playing field” and obvious class warfare attacks like this:

    “I think if we want to fund the things that I think are important to share in prosperity, then people who have done well in this country, including me, have more of a responsibility to give back,” he said.

    are good examples of how to lower productivity. If there is no incentive for exceptional performance, what reason is there to work hard? I’ve always thought the best illustration of this is the automotive industries in the US and Japan (free societies)
    Dodge Chargervs those of the Soviet Union (Not so free society…) Soviet Era Car

  • Beauchamp and second chances

    Like everyone else, I piled on Scott Thomas Beauchamp. His fables sounded like latrine humor to me, and it turned out that I was right. That post still gets a couple of hits every week – mostly from dot-mil addresses. I’ve taken pot-shots at Beauchamp every chance I got, but those days ended last week.

    I read Michael Yon’s “Beauchamp and the Rule of Second Chances: Pass it Along” last week and I felt a little guilty;

    Beauchamp is young; under pressure he made a dumb mistake. In fact, he has not always been an ideal soldier. But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

    Just like when I drew on my platoon sergeant experience when I refuted Beauchamp’s stories, that same experience tells me to forgive him his transgressions, for the moment.

    Yon’s conversation with Beauchamp’s former commander reminded me of my infantry platoon sergeant days. I’d occasionally get guys for whom my platoon was their their last chance in the Army. Out of all of them, in my twelve years of pushing platoons, I only chaptered one of them. The rest soldiered their asses off.  If Beauchamp’s leadership has that kind of confidence in his rehabilitation, I do, too.

    But, as I commented at one blog, if Beauchamp has his sights set on being a writer, he should get down on his knees and kiss Michael Yon’s feet for that great post Yon put up in his defense that’ll rehabilitate his image in the blogosphere.

    I’ll also concur with Yon as far as the fate of The New Republic’s staff;

    As for The New Republic, some on the staff may feel like they’ve been hounded and treed, but it’s hard to feel the same sympathy for a group of cowards who won’t “fess up and can’t face the scorn of American combat soldiers who were injured by their collective lapse of judgment. It’s up to their readers to decide the ultimate fate.

    The New Republic treed like a bandit . . . personally, I think they would make a nice Daniel Boone hat.

    Beauchamp’s redemption will come after personal sacrifice, TNR staff will never understand the concept.

    Confederate Yankee takes apart a poorly-researched LA Times /Tim Rutten attack on the military disguised as a defense of TNR (h/t The Jawa Report).

    Glenn Greenwald, sock-puppet extraordinaire, claims the Army is becoming an appendage of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy;

    But there is a secondary issue in this story that is being ignored — how the U.S. military, like everything else, is becoming rapidly politicized, fully incorporated into and following the model of the Republican right-wing noise machine.

    Or, maybe, you goofy, goofy man, the Army decided they’d rather release information for public consumption through sources that would release the primary documents instead of sources that are famous for releasing bits and pieces accompanied by talking points and saturated with misinformed opinions.

    How ’bout that?

  • Hoping against hope

    Unbeknownst to this blogger, there was an anti-war protest yesterday – the Associated Press is a little skimpy on details  ;

    SAN FRANCISCO — Thousands of people called for a swift end to the war in Iraq as they marched through downtown on Saturday, chanting and carrying signs that read: “Wall Street Gets Rich, Iraqis and GIs Die” or “Drop Tuition Not Bombs.”

    The streets were filled with thousands as labor union members, anti-war activists, clergy and others rallied near City Hall before marching to Dolores Park.

    As part of the demonstration, protesters fell on Market Street as part of a “die in” to commemorate the thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens who have died since the conflict began in March 2003.

    The protest was the largest in a series of war protests taking place in New York, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, organizers said.

    No official head count was available. Organizers of the event estimated about 30,000 people participated in San Francisco. It appeared that more than 10,000 people attended the march.

    “Other US cities” – too many to name? “Largest in a series” – that can’t be hard. Protest attendence has been falling off this past year – and in human-speak 30,000 is really about 3,000 given the miscounts by ten-fold I’ve see “organizers of the event” give here in DC. Marathon Pundit reports dreary numbers in Chicago and New York, too.

    Yesterday, Wordsmith at Flopping Aces wrote “What the anti-war movement is really fighting against“  – that answer of course, is that they’re just protesting war, in general. Every war is illegal, every war is immoral and there are no good causes that justify war – recent Left revisionism even has begun arguing that World War II wasn’t a just war.

    You can factor in that the US is winnng the war against the thugs (link to The Redhunter) in Iraq who’ve taken to bombing and beheading civilians just for the shock value. Michael Yon writes ;

    I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

    Even today, with the stunning successes in the last few months over the psychopaths in Iraq, the Associated Press tries temper the good news that trickles down to the American public with an unsourced rumor that al Sadr may bring his goat-roping minions out of retirement;

    Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr could end a ban on his militia’s activities because of rising anger over U.S. and Iraqi raids against his followers, an aide said Friday amid concerns about rising violence and clashes between rival factions in the mainly Shiite south.
     
    Al-Sadr’s call for a six-month cease-fire has been credited with a sharp drop in the number of bullet-riddled bodies that turn up on the streets of Iraq and are believed to be victims of Shiite death squads.

    “An aide” – some guy who says he’s al-Sadr’s aide. And the AP credits al Sadr’s non-participation in the campaign against Americans as the reason the “surge” worked. al Sadr was afraid he’d lose his entire Army – that’s why he stopped opposing the Americans. He was getting his ample butt kicked.

    And from the Washington Post we get “I don’t think this place is worth one more soldier’s life” – another newspaper article based on the fact that soldiers bitch;

    Their line of tan Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles creeps through another Baghdad afternoon. At this pace, an excruciating slowness, they strain to see everything, hoping the next manhole cover, the next rusted barrel, does not hide another bomb. A few bullets pass overhead, but they don’t worry much about those.

    “I hate this road,” someone says over the radio.

    They stop, look around. The streets of Sadiyah are deserted again. To the right, power lines slump down into the dirt. To the left, what was a soccer field is now a pasture of trash, combusting and smoking in the sun. Packs of skinny wild dogs trot past walls painted with slogans of sectarian hate.

    I guess that’s more important than the fact that violence against our troops and Iraqis is down over 70%. Soldiers complain – that’s what they do when they’re not fighting for their lives. It’s not exactly worth a front page story. It wasn’t news in 1944, and it’s not news now.

    Any mention of the fact that Karbala and several other provinces have been turned over to the Iraqis?

    U.S. forces will turn over security to Iraqi authorities in the southern Shi’ite province of Karbala tomorrow, the American commander for the area said, despite fighting between rival militia factions that has killed dozens.
    Karbala will become the eighth of Iraq’s 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control, despite President Bush’s prediction in January that the Iraqi government would have responsibility for security in all of the provinces by November.

    The public has to go on line to find support for the war, support for troops, and to discover the truth about conditions and successes in Iraq. Americans are shut out of the discussion by misleading editorial boards and the politics of misinformation.

    Scott Malensk at Flopping Aces wrote that the Democrats in Congress are trying to take credit for our planned withdrawals from Iraq next;

    Then it hit me like a shot o’ Irish Whiskey in the java! U.S. forces are already scheduled to be withdrawing in that time frame. Cutting the funding to force a withdrawal is moot. There’s no point. Just a few weeks ago General Petraeus told Congress (including specifically Senator Carl Levin who is trying to cut funding for the war next year). I searched for his speech, and there it was:

    The fact is; the reason we’ve been in Iraq for nearly 5 years is because the insurgents and the other malcontents in Iraq thought they had a shot at defeating us politically. The Iraqis themselves weren’t helping either because they were pretty certain we’d abandon them like we had in 1991 and the dozens of times we’ve abandoned struggling people in the past decade or so.

    Want to know why the “surge” worked? Because even after the loud-mouthed Democrat Congress won the election last year and promised to abandon the Iraqi people to their tormentors, President Bush did the opposite, increased presence and took the fight to the enemy. The Iraqis saw that as long as President Bush was in office, they would get our unwaivering support, despite the political climate. That’s what’s winning this war.

    I suspect that by this time next year, the Democrats in Congress are going to have egg on their faces when Americans come out of their polling places.

  • Well, They Have Great Examples of What NOT to do…

    Reuters reports that Secretary of State Rice has been speaking to former Presidents Clinton and Carter about peace in the Middle East.

    Rice invited Carter, a vocal critic of Bush administration policies, to the State Department on Wednesday where the two discussed his Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts in the 1970s

    Rice also telephoned another former Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who tried, and ultimately failed, in his eight years in office to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together.

    You don’t ask idiots for advice. This is like asking Ted Kennedy for driving lessons…
    Clinton’s State Department, the vestiges of which (due to Bush’s “New Tone”) we are still plagued by was an absolute failure in everything they tried to accomplish. Proving, once again, madmen and terrorists can be negotiated with, they’ll just screw you later.
    Carter? Good God! Look, I am only 35, I was in kindergarten when Carter took office, but, I can remember the long lines at the gas pumps and watching my parents shake their heads and pray for the hostages Carter left to the tender mercies of Iranian terrorists. Unless Dr Rice is looking for advice on what does not, has never and will never work, she is talking to the wrong people.

  • HG Wells Treated as Actual Science

    The Daily Mail has this story, about Dr Oliver Curry‘s theory that the human race will split into two different species,

    an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures

    The two will be called, no doubt, the Eloi and the Morlocks…
    This is worse than the Manbearpigs of Algore’s global warming, this is plagiarism of FICTION calling itself science. What really takes the cake, though, is Dr Curry’s research was funded by

    men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.

    You know, TV’s home of such serious scholarship as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, West Wing re-runs and James Lipton. This article is either 6 months early for April Fools Day 08 or 6 months late for this year.
    In case you were wondering:

    Dr Curry’s research interests are focussed on evolutionary explanations of human nature, especially moral and political thought and behaviour as well as the implications for social sciences especially moral and political theory.

    This is a pretty good example of the kind of science you get from a Poly-sci prof at an economics school.

  • Higher taxes imminent in Maryland

    Well, when the electorate votes in Democrats they get higher taxes – that’s just the way Democrats work – it’s how they insure their jobs. Here in Montgomery County, we have Democrats as far as the eye can see – the governor proposed raising taxes and the Montgomery County legislators are falling right in line behind him, according to the Washington Examiner;

    Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett praised the governor for offering “a fair and comprehensive solution” to the state’s budget problems, and he said the counties would suffer by “shifting responsibility” for education and public safety.

    “We can’t use this as a scare tactic,” Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon said of the possibility of reducing funds.

    But “citizens need to understand” the consequences of cutting local aid, she added. “It could take us back two, three steps” in the progress made in the city.

    “A fair and equitable solution” – raise taxes. Fair and equitable to whom? Especially when one takes into account, in another Examiner article, Governor O’Malley wants to increase  Medicaid spending $250 million by adding another 100,000 people to the roles. Doesn’t that seem a bit at odds with his threats to slash spending by $1.7 billion?

    The proposal hinges on passing new taxes and slot machine gambling in a special session of the General Assembly that begins Monday, O’Malley said Thursday. The plan comes two days after he disclosed $1.7 billion in budget cuts he would have to make if the legislature does not raise taxes, including doubling the cigarette tax.

    “They are really part of the same mission to make our state a better place,” O’Malley said. “There is broad consensus in the General Assembly” for health care improvement. “If we’re unable to make progress, we will continue to backslide” on this issue.

    So, the truth is; O’Malley doesn’t really want to cut spending, he just wants to spend my tax money on paying off constituents for their votes. “Backslide” must mean that he’ll lose the elction in three years unless we fund his campaign with tax dollars.

    “It is very easy to be against tax increases in the abstract,” Howard County Executive Ken Ulman said. “We’re all making progress. The people in Howard County do not want their library system eroded. It’s time for the structural deficit to be solved at the state level.”

    In the abstract? The abstract being, I suppose, that I can’t afford to pay higher taxes and still be able to fund my retirement savings. When you’re talking about a state solution for your library in Howard County, you’re telling me to fund your library in your county where I don’t live. You’re shaking me down for your stupid library.

    In yet another Examiner article, a spokeman for Ike Leggett, the County Executive, touched briefly on the impending problem for the State of Maryland;

    “Our concern is not whether people making that much could or should pay more taxes,” Lacefield said. “… But one unintended consequence could be that people might not choose to live in Montgomery County. They can move across the district line, they can move to Virginia.”

    And then there goes your source of revenue – while you’re still stuck with bloated spending. Just like planning on the tobacco taxes to fund soending – if people quit smoking, no more revenue – but still higher spending. Doesn’t it take just a little bit of common sense to realize that maybe the problem is revenue – it’s spending you goofballs!

    I’ve seen it devastate the economy of New York State, and it can happen in Maryland – of course if it does happen, I’ll be watching it from across the Potomac.

  • Democrat economic childishness

    So who’s surprised? The Democrats get the power of the sound of their own voice in Congress again and they try to hammer the economy to pieces. This morning’s Wall Street Journal Washington Wire reports that Dennis Kucinich wants to do awy with private health insurance;

    Kucinich is calling for a pretty dramatic overhaul of the health-care system — abolishing for-profit insurance, for one thing, and instituting universal coverage.

    “Is health care a right or is it a privilege?” he said. “If it’s a right then it’s appropriate for the government to have a role. If it’s a privilege, then we’re left to the predations of the market – if you can’t pay for it, you’re out of luck.”

    When the WSJ’s Laura Meckler asked what would become of insurance companies, Kucinich said the government would buy them out. “Where there is a conversion of a for-profit institution to not-for-profit, there would be a market-value compensation,” he said. “You’re not going to have an expropriation here of resources.” He didn’t say how much that would cost, but said it would be funded with Treasury bonds.

    His health plan would be paid for by a higher Medicare payroll tax, a tax on stock transactions and higher income taxes on top earners.

    Yeah, that’s pretty looney – how many doctors are going to want to work for a government system, because that’s the end result. When we lived on the Canadian border in New York, the local hospital was staffed with Canadian doctors and nurses who didn’t want to work for the Canadian government – they’d prefer to drive over the Saint Lawrence River to get a decent paycheck instead of the “fair” wages of the government.

    S.A.Miller of the Washington Times writes that Charlie Rangel has done some major tinkering with the tax code;

    The Democrats’ top tax-writer yesterday introduced a massive plan to give tax relief to 90 million working families, a long-anticipated tax-code overhaul that Republicans criticized as the largest proposed tax increase in U.S. history.

    The bill would expand income-tax breaks for the middle class while limiting deductions and adding taxes on high-end earners, increase the tax rate on “carried interest” fund managers earn on investments, and cut corporate tax rates. The Democratic plan also would repeal the alternative minimum tax (AMT), because it is set to penalize middle-income families this year.

    House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel, New York Democrat, said the changes would provide Americans a “greater sense of equity and fairness” about the tax system.

    Whenever a Democrat talks about “equity and fairness” in the tax system and middleclass tax cuts, I grab my wallet. I’m middleclass, but the Democrats idea of equity and fairness is me shelling out a couple of thousand dollars a year in taxes.

    Key provisions include a refundable child tax credit, an increase in the standard deduction and enhanced earned income tax credit — relief measures aimed at the middle class. It adds fairness, supporters say, by targeting rich Wall Street elites with the higher tax on carried interest, which is currently taxed at the lower capital gains rate of 15 percent but the Rangel proposal would put under the higher personal income-tax rate.

    I’m sorry, but my retirement savings is in the hands of those “rich Wall Street elites” and they’ve been doing just fine so far – please don’t get them upset.

    The bill would recoup some of the revenue lost by repealing the AMT — about $800 billion in 10 years — by adding a 4 percent surtax on individuals earning $200,000 to $250,000 a year and a 4.6 percent surtax on individuals making more than $250,000 and families making more than $500,000 a year.

    I wonder why they never go after people with trust funds – like the Kennedys and the Kerrys. It’s always people who EARN over $200,000/year. How about taxing those people who SPEND over $200,000/year and don’t pay any taxes on it because they didn’t EARN it? I’m not in favor of raising anyone’s taxes – but if it has to be done, don’t target the people who producing and working to keep the rest of us employed, f’Pete’s sake.

    Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the committee, said the “crushingly high” surtax would hit about 10 million taxpayers directly, including small-business owners and farmers who report business income.

    “The damage will ripple throughout our economy,” he said in a memo to Republican committee members. “This is a massive tax hike on the engine that drives job growth in this country.”

    He also said Mr. Rangel is “selling pure snake oil” by claiming the bill offers tax relief for 90 million families, since the Democrat counted taxes that most families currently do not pay, such as the AMT.

    Hmmm, the Democrats want to insure people who can afford health insurance and save them money on taxes they don’t pay. Sounds to me like they’re just engaging in a little pre-election class warfare.