The Senate passed a big bill to save Americans from the housing crisis. So, we are once again saved from our bad decisions and are free to make future, um, bad decisions:

The bill props up Fannie and Freddie, known as government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), allows the refinancing of up to $300 billion in distressed mortgages, enacts a package of tax breaks to help the housing market and tightens federal oversight of Fannie and Freddie. The two mortgage giants saw their stock plunge this month as fears rose about their solvency.

As Elizabeth Crum wrote at E!! True Conservative Story™, “here’s the real kicker:”

Specifically, the bill would give Treasury officials temporary authority to offer the GSEs an unlimited line of credit and to invest in the companies.

That is an unlimited line of credit from you and me.

So, to sum it up, rather than get out of the way and let a free market run things, Congress’s answer to the housing problem created by the government is to throw an endless stream of money at it and to create more government oversight.

In other news, the energy market crashed after the graves of our Founding Fathers were opened and electric generators were hooked up to their spinning bodies.

Referring to Democrats as “communists,” Howard vowed to never vote for them again:

Stern described a phone conversation he had with his agent, who he described as a “liberal Democrat kind of guy.”

“I go, ‘That’s it!’” Stern said. “[I] go, ‘You know what Don, I’ve voted Republican and I’ve voted Democrat. I have vowed I will never vote for a Democrat again. I don’t give a [expletive] – no matter who they are. I don’t care if God becomes a Democrat.’ I said, ‘I backed Hillary Clinton, I backed Al Gore, I backed John Kerry. I am done with them.’”

Stern took it a step even further and called Democrats on the FCC “communists” and referred to their tactics as “gangsterism.”

“The fact that these Democrats on the FCC are communists,” Stern said. “They’re for communism. They don’t want to see companies – this is gangsterism. I said, ‘This is crazy.’”

The FCC commission is a five-member panel made up of three Republicans and two Democrats. The Democrats include Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps. The Republicans include FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Robert McDowell and Deborah Taylor Tate. Tate had been the swing vote on the proposed merger and on July 24 The Wall Street Journal reported she would vote in favor of the merger.

Howard is right. There is no reason to hold up this merger. This would not create a monopoly. Get real! Pay radio is a monopoly when you have free radio? Hardly. Then add iPods, Zunes, portable DVD players…the list is vast.

Approve the merger already.

Video of Howard’s comments:

Via Reddit, I found out about the death of Randy Pausch. Prof. Pausch gave the “Last Lecture,” a lecture that is maybe the most inspirational talk I have ever heard.

In May, Dr. Pausch spoke at the Carnegie Mellon University commencement. He said a friend recently told him he was “beating the [Grim] Reaper” because it’s now been nine months since his doctor told him he would die in six.

“But we don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well,” said Dr. Pausch, who urged the graduates to find and pursue their passion. He put an exclamation point at the end of his remarks by kissing his wife, Jai, and carrying her off stage.

He died yesterday of pancreatic cancer.

If you have not seen it, take about an hour and a half and watch it. Here it is:

Imagine for a second that you are a father and you have a son. One day, you find out that your son is the victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of a school teacher. It is discovered that the school teacher has been taking your son to a school supply closet and forcing him to have sex with him. Other times, the teacher would call in sick for work, take your son to his house for sex and drop him off at school near the end of the day.

All of this comes out in court. All of this is entered into the record. The school teacher is convicted of 13 counts, which include lewd battery, molestation and child abuse. He is sentenced to 43 years in prison.

Now imagine this: two years after the conviction, this monster hasn’t served a single day behind bars.

You may feel a fraction of what this father feels:

Weeks after the trial, Broward Circuit Judge Marc Gold, who presided over the trial and sentenced Mohanlal, granted the teacher a rare bond that allows him to remain free while his case is tried on appeal, a process that could take years.

During the two months CNN has investigated this story, Mohanlal has been working a construction job in Broward County and spending time at a house in Sunrise, Florida, 15 miles from where the boy and his family live, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.

He resigned from his teaching job in 2005 after his arrest.

“The idea of that monster being that close to my family again is outrageous,” said the boy’s father, who is often so overwhelmed with rage and sadness that he drives to a park, leans against a tree and sobs.

“What did we go through a trial for?” he said.

Indeed. The trial must have been terrible. To have to sit there and recount what happened to your son, to be the victim and have to relive the abuse, only to have Judge Marc Gold listen to all the evidence, listen to the testimony, accept the conviction, then turn around and give the abuser the freedom to roam around while on appeal.

Legal experts are baffled:

“For a judge to delay jail is highly unusual, but it’s especially unusual when you have someone convicted of a serious crime like sexual molestation of a child,” said CNN legal analyst and criminal attorney B.J. Bernstein. “One of the concerns is that you have someone who commits a sex offense who, by their employment, seeks to be around children. They have abused that trust between a student and teacher.”

A dozen legal experts, including criminal attorneys based in Florida, said they agree with Bernstein. None could recall a single case of a violent offender receiving the same kind of treatment.

The only thing you can get out of Judge Marc Gold is this statement: “The simple truth is that I had to rule based on what was presented to me during that hearing. And I took everything into consideration and felt a bond was appropriate.”

He listened to the testimony and thought setting a man convicted and sentenced to 43 years free to live just 15 miles from his victim and his family was “appropriate.” Here’s a bit of that testimony:

Other students in Mohanlal’s class testified that their teacher handed them fliers, with the boy’s picture and phone number, that falsely accused the teen of having sex with animals. Caught on surveillance camera at a grocery store copying the fliers, prosecutors say Mohanlal had become a disturbed lover scorned when the boy entered high school and began rejecting his advances.

Disgusting.

There were two hard and fast rules I used when I worked with adolescent sex offenders. Without fail, each would all tell me the crime they were convicted for was the only time they did anything like this, even if they told another staff member a different story. The first rule was: sex offenders lie. The second rule was: no one gets caught the first time.

My point is simple. This kid wasn’t the first victim of this guy. There are others out there who need justice also.

This monster was convicted of terrible crimes, and the fact these crimes go unpunished just forces the victims to relive them. There is no closure on this crime.

Judge Marc Gold, shame on you. You are a disgrace.

Bob Unruh over at WorldNetDaily has an article up about Barack Obama’s global poverty act. As you loyal readers know, I covered the topic here. Bob must have liked what he read, because he quoted me in his article:

Objections have remained strong. Duane Lester, writing at the All American blogger, warned that the U.S. has yet to be able to win its own war on poverty.

“On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.” This “all-out war” would last through the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. We have spent billions of dollars fighting this war, and what have we achieved?”

He continued, “Very little. In 1964, there were 36 million Americans living in poverty, or about 19 percent of the population. In the 40 years between 1964 and 2004: … poverty never measured less than 11 percent of the population. In 1983, under President Reagan, poverty registered 15.2 percent; in 1993, at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency, poverty was measured at 13.7 percent of the population. In 2004, under George W. Bush, a president often accused by the political Left as not caring about the poor, the poverty rate declined to 12.7 percent. Still, some 37 million Americans remain poor.”

Despite that performance, “Obama is ready to take the fight global,” said Lester.

“In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning ‘small arms and light weapons’ and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” he wrote.

Bob quoting me quoting Cliff Kincaid. Still, glad the word is getting out about this bill. It is a monster.

While Barack Obama was on his 2008 European Tour, he was scheduled to visit injured service members in Landstuhl and Ramstein. He didn’t.

The USA Today says it was because Obama felt it would be seen as a campaign event and not true appreciation:

“Senator Obama had hoped to and had every intention of visiting our troops to express his appreciation and gratitude for their service to our country.

“We learned from the Pentagon last night that the visit would be viewed instead as a campaign event. Senator Obama did not want to have a trip to see our wounded warriors perceived as a campaign event when his visit was to show his appreciation for our troops and decided instead not to go.”

John McCain’s campaign offered a lukewarm, “Barack Obama is wrong. It is never ‘inappropriate’ to visit our men and women in the military.”

However, the really interesting perspective on this comes from NBC. Yes, that NBC:

A U.S. military official tells NBC News they were making preparations for Sen. Barack Obama to visit wounded troops at the Landstuhl Medical Center at Ramstein, Germany on Friday, but “for some reason the visit was called off.”

One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama’s representatives were told, “he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers.” In addition, “Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama’s visit.”

The official said “We didn’t know why” the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. “He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him.”

The military said it didn’t allow military installations to be used as campaign backdrops. So, really, the Pentagon didn’t say what Obama said it did. The Pentagon said, “Go ahead, but you can’t take your campaign there with you. You have to go without your entourage.”

No media, no Obama. Shows you his true appreciation for their service.

Hat Tip on the NBC Story: Ed Morrissey

Not all of us can make it to Pennsylvania next week to help Tom Burnett Sr. stop the re-hijacking of Flight 93, but if anyone needs another reason to try…

The crescent memorial to Flight 93 will have the 9/11 date inscribed on a separate section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag.

Check it out. As can be seen on our blogburst logo, there will be a copse of trees that sits roughly between the tips of the giant crescent (roughly in the position of the star on a crescent and star flag). That is the Sacred Ground Plaza, which sits just above the crash site. Inside the Sacred Ground Plaza is a two part Memorial Wall that follows the flight path down to the point of impact:

Elevation view of Memorial Wall. (Click picture for larger image. Source document here.)

The lower section of Memorial Wall (on the left) contains forty “translucent marble” blocks, inscribed with the names of the 40 murdered heroes (including Tom Burnett Jr.)

Next there is a gap marked “trail,” then the separate upper section of Memorial Wall has three more translucent blocks, inscribed with the 9/11 date. (There is one more translucent block on the flight path: the huge glass block that dedicates the entire site. It sits at the upper crescent tip, at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway. That bring the glass block count to 44, equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists.)

The path that divides the wall into two parts can be seen on the Crescent of Embrace site plan:

Purple: the path that divides the Memorial Wall into separate upper and lower sections. Aqua: the separate upper section of Memorial Wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date. Red arrow: the centerline of the giant crescent (points to Mecca).

Just by looking, you can see that the upper section of section of Memorial Wall is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, placing it in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. (Click picture for larger image.)

The date goes to the star on the Islamic flag. The date goes to the terrorists.

Just one of many Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned memorial, and all of it remains completely intact in the Circle of Embrace redesign, which only disguises the giant crescent with a few irrelevant trees.

August 2nd

At about 1PM (when the Memorial Project meeting lets out) Mr. Burnett and Alec Rawls will host a press conference and a rally outside the Somerset County Courthouse (where the meeting will be held).

Saturday evening we will have dinner someplace that can be flexible about our numbers (probably a big buffet style restaurant). Sunday morning we will visit the crash site. (Alec is making arrangements with the Park Service now, in case we get a large turn out.)

The only reason to try to make it to the meeting itself (10AM-1PM) is if you want to sign up to speak during the public comment period at the end. Otherwise the meetings are pretty dreary.

The larger purpose is to make a statement to the national news outfits that Mr. Burnett’s presence will likely bring. (Fox news gave Mr. Burnett some nice coverage a couple of months ago.) A substantial rally would help that cause, hard as that will be to achieve out in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania.

Somerset is a long way to go to make a statement, but the crash site is well worth visiting in its own right. If you’ve been thinking of making the trip, the weekend of August 2nd would be the time. It is a chance not just to pay a visit, but to in some small way honor the heroes of Flight 93 by following their footsteps and tackling our own hijacker.

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The FBI is celebrating 100 years of service. As part of it, they have selected “the top ten myths down through the years, leaving aside ones that are so fanciful that they don’t deserve mention here.” Here is the first one:

Myth #10) The FBI has Nikola Tesla’s plans for a “death ray.”

If you don’t know the name, Nikola Tesla was a prolific inventor and gifted physicist and engineer—most known for developing the basis for AC power—who was born in Croatia in 1856 and settled in the U.S. in 1884. When Tesla died in New York in January 1943, his papers—which were thought to include plans for a particle beam weapon, dubbed a “death ray” by the press—were temporarily seized by the Department of Justice Alien Property Custodian Office (“alien” in this case means “foreigner,” although Tesla was a U.S. citizen). Despite longstanding reports and rumors, the FBI was not involved in searching Tesla’s effects, and it never had possession of his papers or any microfilm that may have been made of those papers. Since 1943, we have told a consistent story to all who have asked. Reports to the contrary appear to be based on an initial confusion of FBI agents with other government officials—especially Alien Property Office personnel. These rumors have long been repeated in biographies and articles on Tesla without double-checking the facts as reported in our files.

Read the other nine here. Happy anniversary, G-men.

Hat Tip: The Blogfather

In another display of arrogance, Barack Obama has already assembled a transition team for when he becomes president:

The Democratic candidate is putting together a team to prepare him for taking office in January should he win the Nov 4 election. It is headed by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff when he was in the White House.

A senior adviser traveling with Mr Obama on his global tour told Atlantic.com: “Barack is well aware of the complexity and the organisational challenge involved in the transition process and he has tasked a small group to begin thinking through the process.

“Barack has made his expectations clear about what he wants from such a process, and the establishment and execution of his timeline is proceeding apace.”

Barack already took flack for his personal presidential seal, and he had it removed. This is another opportunity for the McCain campaign to show how full of himself Obama really is. What did they do:

A McCain spokesperson said the campaign would not discuss the subject with reporters.

Brilliant. That’ll show ‘em. Either I am missing something, or these guys are running one of the most inept campaigns I have ever seen. Maybe they are expecting the Republican party and 527s to do the dirty work.

Do we not have enough financial worries in this country without giving away millions of dollars to upgrade another country’s military?

The White House confirmed Thursday that it wants to shift 230 million dollars in aid to Pakistan from counter-terrorism programs to upgrading Islamabad’s ageing F-16 fighter jets.

…

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said a New York Times article detailing the shift was “accurate,” but rejected criticism that Pakistan chiefly views the jets through the lens of its nuclear rivalry with neighbor India.

“The F-16s that they have are used in counter-terrorism operations. We made them available to the Pakistanis and they need to be maintained,” Perino told reporters.

Pakistan’s new government “is facing a lot of pressure from a severe fiscal situation” stemming partly from soaring food and energy costs, and “they need assistance from the United States,” the spokeswoman said.

Read that again. Pakistan is facing pressure from food and energy prices, so we need to give them $230 million.

By the way, our national debt, as of this writing, sits at $9.5 TRILLION, and increases “an average of $1.74 billion per day.” You know, I would rather that they took that $230 million dollars and gave it out in bonuses to our military. For that matter, give a couple million to service members like Ty Ziegel. But don’t give my money to Pakistan.

And don’t forget the $54 trillion time bomb:

Here the news is quite sobering. The U.S. has $1.6 trillion in assets and $10.8 trillion in liabilities, resulting in a negative net worth of $9.2 trillion as of the end of its Sept. 30, 2007, fiscal year. Of those liabilities, $5.1 trillion is owed to the public. Another $4.8 trillion is owed for federal employees and veteran benefits. The killer item, however, is $45 trillion in off-balance-sheet debt, which is the present value of future benefits owed for Medicare and Social Security.

As Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS, HSBC and others recently discovered with their structured investment vehicles, these liabilities should be treated as real balance sheet liabilities. For the U.S., that would mean a net debt of $54 trillion, a figure 3.9 times our revenues, if we consider our $14 trillion economy as our figure for “sales.”

Yeah, we pretty much have money to give away.

Via Heliogenic Climate Change, comes a fisking like no other. Patrick J. Michaels, “a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and an active member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” takes Al Gore apart in this latest National Review Online article.

Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context. Here’s a list of his climate exaggerations from his well-publicized July 17 rant, along with a few sobering facts.

Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”

Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!

Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”

Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.

Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”

Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”

Gore: “ . . . bigger downpours and record floods . . . ”

It’s true, U.S. annual rainfall has increased about 10 percent (three inches) in the last 100 years. But it’s equally true that this is a net benefit. Temperatures haven’t warmed nearly enough to increase the annual surface evaporation by the same amount, so what has resulted is a wetter country during the growing season. Farmers love this, because most of the nation runs a moisture deficit during the hot summer growing season. Increasing rain cuts that deficit.

Check out the full article here.

Tar baby. Oh, yeah…I said it. Just using the term as it is historically defined can be, well, a tar baby.

Here’s the meaning of the term:

Tar-Baby was a doll made of tar and turpentine, used to entrap Br’er Rabbit in the second of the Uncle Remus stories. The more that Br’er Rabbit fought the Tar-Baby, the more entangled he became. In contemporary usage, “tar baby” refers to any “sticky situation” that is only aggravated by additional contact. The only way to solve such a situation is by separation.

Mitt Romney used it like that when he was describing the Big Dig in Massachusetts:

In a speech Saturday, Romney, a Republican considering a run for president in 2008, acknowledged he took a big political risk in taking control of the project after a fatal tunnel ceiling collapse, but said inaction would have been even worse.

“The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can,” he told a crowd of about 100 supporters in Ames, Iowa.

The self-appointed black leaders threw a fit at the use of the term, and Romney had to apologize for using it appropriately.

John McCain used it when discussing divorce in America:

A questioner asked McCain whether as president he “would be bold enough to address the issue of equal access to children for fathers that have gone through divorce.”

The Republican presidential candidate responded, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, I am not going to overturn divorce court decisions. That’s why we have courts and that’s why people go to court and get a divorce. If I as President of the United States said this decision has to be overturned without the proper appeals process then I would be disturbing our entire system of government… But for me to stand here before all these people and say that I’m going declare divorces invalid because someone feels that they weren’t treated fairly in court, we are getting into a, uh, uh, tar baby of enormous proportions. For me to stand here before all these people and say that I’m going declare divorces invalid because someone feels that they weren’t treated fairly in court, we are getting into a, uh, uh, tar baby of enormous proportions.”

How you could interpret any racism in that is beyond me. Race isn’t even mentioned in the entire conversation, yet “CNN’s Senior Political Correspondent Candy Crowley asked McCain about his use of the phrase “tar baby,” viewed by some as having racist overtones.”

McCain apologized.

When he was the White House Press Secretary, the late Tony Snow used the term while talking to the press. Think Progress covered it, and labeled him an obvious racist. Here’s what Snow said:

SNOW: Having said that, I don’t want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program, the alleged program, the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny.

QUESTION: What are your personal goals? What do you hope to achieve here? Will you continue to televise these briefings? And would you put into English the phrase (OFF-MIKE) the tarbaby?

SNOW: Well, I believe hug the tarbaby, we could trace that back to American lore.

It’s obvious what he meant in the way he used it. But the readers of Think Progress wouldn’t let that stop them:

• “this is nuts…its 2006, not 1956, what the hell is going on…lets see tony walking around dc using the term as loosely as he is buried in the wh”
• “Just the kind of enlightening diatribe you’ve come to expect from the Reichwing of the neocon (bowel) movement. Set the bar a little lower than you normally would for this cult, and Snowjob will never disappoint you. I won’t feel sorry for this clown…he knew damn well what he was getting into. Tony Goebbel head dick of the propaganda ministry.”
• “Well that didnt take long…

  and since Tony believes Racism is dead…..

  I guess African Americans will not be upset by the incredibly non-sensical use of this term…..

  to that I say “That cracker is crazeeeeeeeeeeeee”
  “

Two of my favorites from Think Progress:

• “The only way I understand “tar baby” to mean is as a racial slur.
  How can anyone else not?”
• “Another ignorant racist employed at the White House. No shock there.”

Well, since this is how I understand it, there can be no other historical meaning or definition, and then a commenter obviously ignorant of the original use of the term saying Snow as an ignorant racist. It’s almost too much.

Another Republican used the term in a memo, and the Fark headline read: “If you thought the Republican party could make it through this election cycle without using the phrase “tar baby” to refer to Obama, you should have a word with Rep. Tom Davis”

Crooks and Liars covered it as racist also. with the headline “Rep Tom Davis Uses Term “Tar Baby” In GOP Memo.

Here’s what Davis wrote that was so racist:

“Remember,” Davis writes, “Hispanic voters are a swing group in this election and future elections. John McCain, being from a border state, may be out of sync with many Republicans but he has standing among Hispanics. Barrack Obama has not made the sale to Hispanic voters. Thus, this issue is a tar baby for anyone who touches it, with land mines everywhere.”

Politico’s readers were livid:

• have you ever been called a “tar baby”? you might as well say n****r. you know, like that fool tom davis, what “tar baby” means so stop making excuses for a racist. my god, some of you people are idiots!!!!
• As for “tar baby” we all know it is meant to remind everyone who may have forgotten, that Barack is Black and a Democrat. Doesn’t get much worse than that, does it! Guess that is the equivalent of Lucifer to a moron like Davis. And, please, don’t say “Tar Baby” was an innocent expression. It was absolutely calculated and typical of how low the GOP stoops. Ooh, how does THAT feel??
• The statement makes no sense the way it is said. There is no chance it was innocent.
• No matter how you spin it, tar baby has a racist connotation to it. Who, in these days and times, uses the term tar baby, unless that person wants to invoke a negative meaning.

And my favorite:

• Tar baby can be used in a non-racist manner now? Really? Huh? Imagine if he had said, “This situation is a n****r for anyone who touches it.” Is THAT being said in a non-racist context, or are you all just stupid? Because that’s basically what he said. Geesh, what I country we live in.

“Tar baby can be used in a non-racist manner now? Really?” This question really shows the commenter’s ignorance. It has been used in a non-racist manner for decades.

Well, after labeling all these Republicans as racist for using tar baby, what are they going to do with this:

Will Al Sharpton be calling for him to resign? Will Think Progress vilify him as a racist as they did Tony Snow? Probably not. And you know what? They shouldn’t, just as they shouldn’t have labeled the others. But we live in a time when using the scientific term black hole can get you branded a racist. Sad, isn’t it?

While tar baby can be used as a racist attack on black people, it isn’t used that way in any of these examples. John Kerry used it in the same manner as John McCain and Mitt Romney. I, for the first time, find myself coming to the defense of John Kerry. He isn’t racist because of what he said here (but he is still an elitist windbag.)

The fact is this: You are being played, and those playing you for a fool rely on your ignorance. Pick up a copy of “The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus” by Joel Chandler Harris. Learn what it means. It is ignorance (and a little politics), not racism, that is fueling these so-called controversies, and that is doing more harm than good when it comes to unifying the country and eliminating racial boundaries.

Folks in Los Angeles will eventually have to pay to carry their groceries home, courtesy of the nanny state. The LA City Council voted Tuesday not only to ban plastic bags, but to require that stores charge 25 cents for paper bags to carry groceries. The ban doesn’t actually take place until 2010, giving stores plenty of time to use up their current supply of plastic bags.

The state of California is considering a similar bill banning plastic bags, which would take effect in 2012, and charge “at least” 15 cents per paper bag. I’m guessing this would be added onto the city’s fee, charging customers “at least” 40 cents per bag.

For a family the size of mine, at that price, buying paper bags would add around 15-20 dollars onto our monthly grocery bill. Of course, there is always the option of bringing your own bag, which most stores are already selling right by the check-out lane. Where I live, decent ones go for about five dollars each, which would halve the yearly cost of the added fee for buying food. Being frugal, I myself would use recycled material and my handy sewing machine to whip up my own. Most families these days don’t own a sewing machine or have the foggiest notion how to sew though. When considering low-income families, who are already struggling to put food on the table, it doesn’t matter whether they buy paper, buy cloth, or buy a machine to sew their own, it’s taking money from their budget that could actually be spent feeding them. For a state that’s so terribly concerned about the poor and the homeless, they sure do pass a lot of stupid laws that hurt them.

Not surprisingly, the stores will be allowed to keep only 3 percent of the paper bag fee they are required to charge, although I’m sure they will still be the ones buying the bags to be used. Three percent will go to the state, and the city will keep the rest to fund “an education campaign.” Education on what? Sounds to me like the City Council could use an education campaign on the negative effects of the nanny state- maybe Drew Carey could teach it.

(This article is reprinted in its entirety with permission from the author.)

By Bill Harrison

“We have been all over India and we have decided that India isn’t big enough for such as us.”

“We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.”

British Indian Army Sergeants Danny Dravot (Sean Connery) and “Peachey” Carnehan (Michael Caine) to Rudyard Kipling announcing that they are off to Kafiristan in John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.

Barack Obama in an op-ed appearing in the New York Times on July 14, 2008

______________________________________________________________________________________

Leaving aside the fact that Barack Obama is not proposing any sort of “new strategy” for Afghanistan, what are the challenges facing the United States, Afghanistan and our NATO partners in stabilizing Afghanistan against a Taliban insurgency allied with al Qaeda that emanates across the border with Pakistan? Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order here.

Tribal map of the region.

The provinces of eastern and southern Afghanistan where most of the trouble is and the sanctuaries for the militants across the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are the realm of the Pashtuns, fiercely independent tribesmen whose resistance to central authority goes back to the time of classical antiquity and Alexander the Great’s inability to bring the area under his control. But while the Pashtuns are uniformly hostile to attempts to control them from afar they are also hospitable to outsiders who come as travelers as is codified in the Pashtunwali, or “Way of the Pashtuns”, their unwritten tribal code. This code governs all forms of Pashtun societal intercourse from the local ruling councils (jirgas) to the conception of honor (nang) and most importantly for our purposes here nanawatey or “truce/asylum”.

We are all now familiar (or should be so) with Osam bin Laden’s “last stand” at Tora Bora in 2001 and his subsequent flight with his band of Uzbek, Chechen and Arab fighters into the FATA back in December of 2001. Not long thereafter a report surfaced in the Washington Post (article no longer available on the web) from an American filmmaker traveling in the region that he encountered foreign militants living openly in the tribal regions as “honored guests“. This would be fully in keeping with the Pashtunwali’s emphasis on giving succor to outsiders provided that they observe tribal customs. Most Americans would be astounded to learn this but until the Soviet war it was quite possible to travel in this region (with connected local escorts, of course) as a Westerner without undue fear as did a friend of mine who was studying Hindi and the local languages and history of the region while we were both graduate students at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s and had traveled there as an undergraduate in the mid 1970s.

In reality the border separating Afghanistan from the FATA is more of an arbitrary division. The Durand Line separating the two has never been accepted in Afghanistan and is merely a British contrivance left over from the days of the “Great Game” in southwest Asia of the mid-nineteeth century. These are Pashtun lands on both sides of this line of demarcation and the Pakistani government and army in Islamabad composed of Punjabis has over the years from time to time encouraged militancy in the area as a form of exerting influence over its neighbor Afghanistan. The Taliban (Pashto for students) originiated in the refugee camps of the FATA during the Soviet-Afghan war and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may or may not be (probably the latter) purged of Taliban-al Qaeda sympathizers with most of this faction allied with the former head of the ISI — Gen. Hamid Gul whose views in this regard should be viewed with alarm.

Under the Musharraf government, Pakistan would make periodic forays into the FATA in brief but bloody engagements with local militants. But the Pakistani army is composed of primarily Punjabi officers and the paramilitary Frontier Corps (which goes back to the famed Khyber Rifles of the British raj) composed of local Pashtuns is poorly equipped and led. Over the past seven years these engagements have brought little in the way of stability to the region or succeeded in neutralizing the troublemakers but they have alienated many of the local tribles. Periodic truces with the militants have accomplished little more. And economic aid projects in the area, of equal importance to security operations, have not really gone forward and planned stepped up US aid to Pakistan in this regard remain mired over questions of possible corruption in Islamabad.

Pashtun tribal soldiers of the “Khyber Rifles” Photo: Wikipedia

Now no one questions the need for additional ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made repeated calls for more soldiers from our NATO allies but aside from a battalion of French special forces and the continuing commitment of Danish, Dutch, Canadian and UK soldiers to the spear’s tip in the south and east the rest of NATO continues to sit on its collective hands. Things have gotten so bad in this respect that even former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has lambasted his fellow Germans and the Merkel government for refusing to allow Bundeswehr soldiers to serve in the fighting area. Nor are things much better on the economic aid front which is just as important as the military effort. At a recent donors conference in Paris in June, while the United States pledged 1/5th of the total $50 billion pledged, the EU contingent’s pledge amounted to a niggardly $770 million.

Notwithstanding the recent spectacular attack that claimed the lives of nine US soldiers, there have been successes in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Aid projects and tribal security have been improved and the militants seldom launch the type of attack mentioned above. Building on the success of similar tactics employed in Iraq, US forces have begun deploying Human Terrain Teams to the area which employ an array of both ‘soft” and “hard” power in classic counterinsurgency tactics and strategy.

So while it is clear that what Barack Obama is talking about isn’t any sort of “new” strategy at all the central fact remains that until such time as the Pakistani government alters its approach in the FATA, and indeed its policies in this regard as described by Jim Hoagland yesterday in the Washington Post can best be called delusional, any such beefed up NATO presence across the border is likely to come to very little in solving this problem in the long run. In Vietnam, despite the presence of 500,000 US soldiers and Marines the war effort there even after the change in tactics to “clear and hold” under Gen. Creighton Abrams who replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as MACV CINC in ’69 and the US incusion into Cambodia as long as North Vietnamese forces were able to use Cambodia and Laos as staging and supply areas there could be no good outcome. At present I am at wit’s end as to offer a suggested plan to get Pakistan off its duff in the FATA or to address the massive problems associated with the growing of opium poppies in both Afghanistan and the FATA that finance much of the instability on both sides of the border and are the source of the world’s heroin supply. If Barack Obama has a plan in this regard, I’m all ears but so far all I’m hearing is the typical lofty and pretty empty rhetoric that isn’t even true as regards recent US actions in the area.

Author’s Note: While the opinions expressed in this piece are mine and mine alone I wish to acknowledge the work of fellow Newsvine members and friends Shaheen Buneri (who reports from the region) and BlaiseP. Their knowledge of the region and its peoples has much to teach us all and I would strongly suggest that fellow Newsviners visit their columns often.

Bill Harrison wrote this article for his column on Newsvine. He has many other great original articles worth checking out. Also, I stumbled the article on Newsvine. If you enjoyed it, please take the time to stumble it as well.

Liberalism in action, California style:

The mayor and others are now admitting what the grand jury reported – that a majority of those on the streets are not homeless. The head of the city’s homeless program, Dariush Kayhan, estimates that 50 to 75 percent of street people live in supportive housing.

“We just warehouse addicts,” said the grand jury’s Stuart Smith. “Granted, it is a nicer place for them, but it doesn’t address the problem.”

Almost three out of four people on the street live in supportive housing. The article explains that people who live in or move to San Francisco accept that things are going to cost more there because of all the caring they are compelled to do for all the “homeless people,” but I wonder if they all know they are spending “$186 million a year on homelessness, six times what was spent in 1993-94.”

What do you get for that kind of money? The status quo:

Hardly a week goes by without a note or e-mail from a tourist who was shocked by behaviors and conditions downtown. When San Franciscans supported Mayor Gavin Newsom’s “Care Not Cash” effort in 2004, many felt that getting the homeless into housing would solve the problem.

The fact is, despite a supportive housing effort that has gotten national attention, the streets don’t seem that much better. And there doesn’t seem to be a standard of measurement for what the programs are trying to accomplish.

How many homeless are we talking about here? There are 744,000 homeless people in America, with the People’s Republic of California housing 170,000 of them. So right now, the City of San Francisco is spending over a thousand dollars a year for every homeless person in the state. So what is the total count for just San Francisco, the city with “the most pervasive homeless problems in the country?”

6,377 people. And that number is up from 2006.

Allow me to lay some mathematics on you: According to the above numbers, San Francisco is spending $29,167 a year on each homeless person in the city, and not only can’t they solve the problem, it’s getting worse.

Remember Quinn’s First Law: Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of it’s stated intent.

This is a great example of what he is talking about. Like the jury member above said: “We just warehouse addicts.”

Think it is time to change what you are doing?