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

Category: Society

  • Is there someone who didn’t see this coming?

    I’m just wondering why this is even news;

    Everything I know about the Irish I learned from Family Guy;

  • Ringknockers out of the closet

    TSO sent me this article about Knights Out, which is a gay support group formed at the US Military Academy, West Point.

    Thirty-eight graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., came out of the closet Monday with an offer to help their alma mater educate future Army leaders on the need to accept and honor the sacrifices of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender troops.

    “Knights Out” wants to serve as a connection between gay troops and Army administrators, particularly at West Point, to provide an “open forum” for communication between gay West Point graduates and their fellow alumni and to serve in an advisory role for West Point leaders in the eventuality — which the group believes is both “imminent and inevitable” — that the law and policy collectively known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” are repealed by Congress.

    (more…)

  • Dean on Obama’s perfect health care plan

    Christina Bellantoni of the Washington Times interviewed Howard Dean about the President’s health care program. Of course, Howard Dean took the opportunity to belittle and threaten Republican opponents:

    Mr. Dean said “Democrats can’t cave” on Mr. Obama’s plan, which he called “perfect.”

    “Not every Republican is a right-wing ideologue,” Mr. Dean said in an interview Monday.

    “They called Medicare socialized medicine,” he said. “If they want to filibuster this to death, be my guest and let’s see how they do in 2010.”

    Yeah, who do they think they are to call socialized medicine by that name? It’s working Americans paying for health care for Americans who for some reason or another don’t pay for their own health care. What else would it be called?

    And “perfect”? How is anything perfect? That statement alone should make his intentions suspect in the minds of most Americans.

    The Dean makes an even more absurd statement:

    He said Medicare for all would be a good solution since “people like it,” and “it works.”

    “It’s ridiculous to say care would be inferior,” said Mr. Dean, who was a family practice physician in Vermont and later the state’s governor. “It’s perfectly good for the millions and millions of people over 65 in this country.”

    Yeah, he should ask people over 65 in this country how they like Medicare. I did. I asked my mother who is 73 years old and her husband who is eighty what she thinks of it. She says she couldn’t afford the Medicare Part B that the government tried to shove down her throat, so she found a private supplement that is cheaper and more flexible. See, she contributed her whole life to Medicare, and then when it came time to use it, she had to pay more. And in order to afford what the government had told her would be free, she had to turn to private insurance so they could continue to live on the sparse income they get from Social Security.

    I get my health care from the Army – I earned it, but it’s still government health care. Bill Clinton decided to save money on military health care and began charging us for what we’d been told would be free while we were earning the right to it – fulfilling our end of the bargain. Even now, Congress is discussing whether they want to put caps on our health care, raise our co-pays and being more selective about who gets to participate. Active duty service members used to get dental treatment free, until Congress changed their collective mind and forced an inadequate, expensive dental insurance on families.

    Those are the two heath care programs that Congress administrates now – when costs exceed their projections (read that campaign promises) they get to change their minds. And it’s difficult to plan for your future when you’re trying to hit a moving target.

    Dean goes on about “Baby College” which is a program which “encourages” parents to stay involved in their young children’s lives;

    The “Baby College” idea encourages poor families to attend parenting groups to learn basic skills like reading to children, keeping fathers engaged and in some cases offering adult literacy courses.

    Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’ll be “encouraged”. We know how the government “encourages” us to pay taxes. After poor participation, there’ll be an enforcement policy, and an agency to administer enforcement. Then it’ll be perfect.

  • The IRR Mom, USAToday and TAH

    Those of you who keep up with us on Facebook noticed that I did an interview with USAToday in regards to the “IRR Mom” who showed up at Fort Benning Monday with her two kids in tow for her IRR call up. It was a fifteen minute interview with Marisol Bello and they boiled it all down to a single sentence in the resulting article (it’s the last paragraph at this link). Here’s the screen capture in case they cut it out later;

    Apparently, This Ain’t Hell bloggers are the “go-to guys” for all of the military’s miscreants these days.

    What they left out was the same point I made on Sunday when I first wrote about it; both the Army and Mrs. Pagan had a year to rectify the problem before Monday and neither took advantage of it – the only party who is going to come out ahead is Associated Press (they first wrote about the situation).

    Pagan had a year to come up with a family care plan, and the Army had an opportunity to discharge her during her previous attempts to dodge her duties. If the Army wanted to take a stand, they’ve had other opportunities to take a stand with Matthis Chiroux and countless others who’ve dodged their responsibilities without the benefit of toddlers as props for the media.

    I also told her that if the Army lets her off with out at least a wrist-slap, they’re opening themselves up to millions of problems from millions of parents in the military.

  • US troops to pullout; residents worried

    Apparently, US troops are finally being pulled out of New Orleans and the residents of that city are worried that they’ll be left unprotected. First the screen capture;

    Now the story;

    The last of the troops were removed in January 2006 as civil authority returned, but then, after a surge in bloodshed, 360 were sent back in beginning in mid-2006 to help police keep order. As of February, only about 100 troops were left in the city.

    With Louisiana facing a $341 million budget deficit, state lawmakers were reluctant to keep the Guard in place any longer.

    The Guard was used to patrol the less populated sections of the city where Katrina’s floodwaters left most houses uninhabitable. That included the woeful Ninth Ward, where renovated houses are outnumbered by moldy, boarded-up wrecks and weed-choked vacant lots.

    In their camouflage uniforms and Humvees, the troops were often a welcome sight.

    Now you know how the majority of the Iraqis and Afghans feel. Wherever our troops go, they leave goodwill and a sense of security in their wake. Even in third world countries like New Orleans.

  • Military recruiting adolescents?

    I’ll tell you, this is the stupidest video ever created. Mostly, it’s about military recruiting through the use of the Junior ROTC program.

    The intro on the YouTube video reads;

    14-year-olds are recruited into the Army through the JROTC with the hopes of college money and a career. But when our soldiers come back from war, they face a back-logged Veterans Affairs Department, and can’t get the health care and other help they need. This documentary take a look at the U.S. war machine through the eyes of Veterans and JROTC cadets. It also looks at how veterans of past wars are forced to compete for services with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

    So the military is recruiting 14-year-olds now? Just like Nazi Germany in the final months, I suppose. I’m pretty sure the military is only recruiting 18-year-olds. But let’s look at all of the pretzel logic you have to believe before you can believe that recruiters are evil.

    One expert they interview is a homeless “veteran” who advises youngsters that his service didn’t advance his own goals in life – on Veterans Day he “earned” only about $15 from panhandling. “They don’t care if you’re a veteran”, he tells the interviewer.

    Since most of us veterans are homeless panhandlers, we can probably give youngsters the same advice. He does make the point that cops do give him a break when they’re clearing the streets of hobos, though – so you see, there’s a veteran benefit right there.

    Another group of “experts” are the IVAW members who testified at Winter Soldier II that socialized healthcare provided by the military and the VA sucks – their solution is to throw more money at it, of course. Yet the entire Left thinks the answer to our national “healthcare crisis” is to force the system on the entire country. I’ll never be able to figure that one out.

    Another interviewee, a high school-aged student described how recruiters “pressured” him by offering him job opportunities. Since he didn’t join, I guess they couldn’t have pressured him too much.

    A teacher makes the claim that recruiters offer illegal green cards to “undocumented” students. Now, why would they do that? I mean, honestly. Why would a careerist jeopardize his future by offering a youngster, a youngster who has already broken faith by illegally occupying a space in a classroom funded by taxpayers, an illegal document just to make numbers for a month?

    Other experts they interview are young teenagers who seem eager to advance their lives through the benefits the military offer inner city kids. The youngsters also seem anxious to defend their country, and they have unrealistic expectations of the glory of going to war. How uncharacteristic of teenagers to not understand the gravity of war.

    They also show a clip of Phil Donahue, the king of sleazy television, advocating for the stream of flag draped coffins across out TV screens nightly. The same guy who an hour interviewing a former guy who went through a sex change operation only to discover he was a lesbian. Yeah, he knows what makes good TV.

    Seein’s how, by the video’s producers’ own admission, only 30-50% of JROTC students go on to join the military, I guess the military isn’t doing a good job of brainwashing and arm-twisting.

  • Reparations we can believe in

    You’ve probably heard that John Conyers is back on the reparations mule. Ten years ago on January 6, 1999, Conyers tried to get his foot in the door with HR 40, here’s screen shot from thomas.loc.gov of that HR 40;

    Well, on January 6, 2009, Conyers dusted off that failed bill from 1999 and submitted it again with the same HR 40 designation;

    So that’s how the Democrats plan on healing the wounds of this country – by dividing us even further using the sins of people ages ago to suck even more money out our pockets. To make us MORE conscious of superficial differences in “Post-racial America”.

    In January, 2002, Thomas Sowell wrote this about the reparation scam;

    …the demand for reparations may seem like an exercise in futility. However, seen as a source of a lasting unmet grievance, it is a stroke of genius to keep blacks separated from other Americans and an aggrieved constituency to support black “leaders” in politics, organizations and movements.

    This demand also mobilizes a certain amount of support or sympathy among whites, especially those in the media and in academia, where such support or sympathy costs nothing, and allows those who give it to relieve their own sense of guilt, while risking other people’s money — and national cohesion. Some white politicians can also benefit at little or no cost to themselves by expressing sympathy with the reparations cause or even voting for meaningless apologies for what others did centuries ago.

    Not to mention that people like Jesse Jackson and the other race pimps stand between government and the Black community. He’s already been heard to say that individual reparations paid directly to the intended recipients would not benefit the Black community as much as if that same money was filtered through his grubby fingers first.

    Also, in 2002, Jesse Peterson wrote about Jesse Jackson and his ilk;

    The fading and desperate Jackson, who for over 30 years has built a lucrative career on the backs of black Americans, has paved the way for some of his “offspring” to push for reparations, a plot that if hatched will destroy the black community and divide our whole country. Among Jackson’s chief “descendants” are trial lawyer Johnnie Cochran, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who, among others, have banded together on this unholy crusade.

    Masterfully, they have performed the two tasks on Jackson’s lifetime “To Do” list:

    1. Indict contemporary white America for something of which it is not guilty.
    2. Demand money, and lots of it.

    I can almost see a single tear roll down Jackson’s cheek.

    If Obama wants to be “everyone’s President” he should put anend to this farce and potentially the most divisive legislation since the “stimulus” bill.

  • My experiences at Inauguration parades [Jonn]

    I got the idea for this post from one at Ace of Spades wherein Ace reminds us that President Bush’s limo was pelted with eggs at his first Inauguration. In 2001, my first ever Inauguration parade, my wife and I had flown in the night before from my son’s basic training graduation in San Antonio – a pretty wild trip seein’s how every single Texan was headed to DC on the same plane.

    There was so much animosity towards President Bush, Free Republic organized a “Support Bush” rally (can you imagine having to organize a “support Obama” rally?) on Inauguration day in front of the Supreme Court and there were only a hand full of supporters – which gave me the opportunity to chat with David Horowitz and Jesse Peterson.

    After that rally, we went down to stand near the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue and wait the three hours for the parade. While we waited there, we were surrounded by hippies and sign-toting anarchists who made frequent trips to a nearby coffeeshop to get themselves caffeined up for the days events.

    Through the crowd, I saw a hippie climbing the flag pole at the Memorial to get the flag there. He finally got it down and a Black man nearby tried to get the flag away from the hippie. He was immediately knocked to ground and beaten by other hippies. An elderly woman tried to stop them, and she, too was knocked to the ground. Several of us tried to force our way through the crowd to stop the fight (and kick some hippie ass), but the little cowards fled, and despite the huge police presence, they escaped without being apprehended.

    In 2005, I went to the parade again. Attendence was up, but mostly because of the increased participation by the anti-war crowd who didn’t hesitate to shout and call names at everyone who didn’t have an anti-Bush  sign. I was pushed and shoved because I wouldn’t take a sign they tried to give me. Of course the little cowards danced away before they could get their complimentary black-eye. Those of us who tried to cheer for President Bush and the First Lady as they drove by the throngs lining the streets were forced to the background by the sign-wielding crowd.

    Can you imagine if any of those events had happened yesterday?

    Oh, by the way, today is the 32d Anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s blanket amnesty for draft dodgers.