With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. - Herman Melville > Moby Dick
Here's one of the big questions, really, one to chew on over the weekend, one that's asked a lot around this town. How could a bunch of people who ran such a brilliant campaign be doing such a lousy job at the politics of governing?
The answer is actually very simple.
Obama and his team have successfully rammed through a number of measures through the congress that would, and will, fundamentally change the nature of our government and our relationship with it.
Obama's plummeting popularity is a consequence of his political success.
Confusing President Obama's popularity with his political success is a mistake. He has been very successful. Obama is very unpopular now because of his political successes.
"Donors wanted! Become a member today!" reads an announcement on the website. On the menu page, the restaurant, called Flimé, is careful only to indicate "meat" without giving away what kind -- surely an effort to keep the ruse going. Those who want to become members must submit a form complete with responses about health and exercise habits.
"After the medical check, you can decide which body part you want to donate!" the website says. The form tells prospective members that "Flimé only covers the costs for hospitalization.... The designated use of the donated body part is free to Flimé." The German version of the website is also advertising for a job opening for an "open-minded surgeon."
Dekker wants to break the record for the youngest world solo sail set in May by Australian teenager Jessica Watson. Watson completed a non-stop, unassisted round-the-world trip a few days before her 17th birthday.
Dekker turns 17 on September 20, 2012, allowing her a little over two years to complete the trip, during which she intends to stop at several ports along the way.
Dekker has said her route from Portugal will take her across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Pacific via the Panama Canal. She plans to stop at the Galapagos islands before heading to Australia, Thailand and through the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden back to Europe.
This is not the same race as Jessica Watson's. It is similar, but it is not the same.
Jessica Watson sailed The Three Capes route. Laura Dekker is sailing the equatorial route. Another difference is that Jessica Watson sailed non-stop and Laura Dekker will make port in several places.
I am less comfortable with Laura Dekker's adventure then I was with Jessica Watson's.
Laura Dekker is very young. Many people will object on that alone. While I find her age to be a little worrisome, I am more concerned about the route that she will travel. Jessica Watson traveled south and sailed around the three Capes, Cape Agulhas, Cape Leeuwin and Cape Horn).
Where Watson had to brave stormy seas, Dekker will have to brave filthy pirates. I would prefer storms over pirates. Where as the sea and the storms are indifferent and lack malice, pirates are the scum of the planet. Pirates are malice.
Training can solve most problems associated with age, storms and seas. Pirates are different. With Pirates, age becomes a problem.
Laura Dekker will be at sea for over a year. She will travel around the equator and pass through some of the most pirate infested waters of the world. She will avoid the physical dangers of the three capes. Hopefully she will be able to avoid the Pirates as well.
Often in politics, the wrong solution to a issue is sought to solve a problem that the law already provides a workable remedy.
In an attempt to discourage illegal immigrants from exploiting their children as a means to remain in the US, Republican politicians are suggesting that it is time to revise the 14th Amendment of the constitution to disallow birth-right citizenship.
Birth-right citizenship is being exploited. The numbers are truly staggering.
In Texas, between 60,000 to 65,000 babies achieve U.S. citizenship annually by being born in the state's hospitals, according to a tally released by the state's Health and Human Services Commission. Last year, such births represented almost 16 percent of the total births statewide.
Between 2001 and 2009, births to illegal immigrant women totaled 542,152 in Texas alone.
Thats just Texas.
It would be interesting to know what the national numbers are.
The 14th Amendment is not the problem. The lack of will at the federal level to enforce our immigration laws is the problem.
If Illegal aliens have a baby in the US, fine. The children may have US citizenship. The parents still do not. The parents still should be made to leave the US. The children may return to the US at a later time or even be allowed to remain with legal US residents. The Illegal parents still MUST leave.
If the law was enforced, there would be no anchor-baby problem. The law is not enforced, so anchor-babies are exploited.
“What’s very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU,” Babeu said.
What is the Obama Administration's goal? Why do they refuse to meaningful defend the border and why do the want to prevent the States from doing the job the Federal Government refuses to do?
Could it be that the Obama Administration does not think that the border should be effectively closed to illegal immigrants?
On the day parts of Arizona's immigration law, SB 1070, went into effect, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in the news for another reason: there's a price on his head - allegedly offered by a Mexican drug cartel.
This is not the first instance of a Mexican Drug Cartel threatening to kill US Law Enforcement Officers.
A Mexican drug cartel has threatened Nogales police officers, saying they will be targeted for retribution if they conduct off-duty drug busts.
Nogales Police Chief Jeffrey Kirkham told the Nogales International on Friday that the threats stemmed from an incident approximately two weeks ago, when off-duty officers surprised marijuana smugglers while riding horseback in an unincorporated border area east of town.
The officers seized part of the drug load, and the smugglers were able to flee back into Mexico with the other part.
“As a result of that,” Kirkham said, “our officers have received threats from the cartel that they are to look the other way if they are off-duty, or they will be targeted by a sniper or by other means.”
In our nation's history, we have dealt with a similar problem with Mexico.
It resulted in what the history books call "The Punitive Expedition" or "The Poncho Villa Expedition."
In late 1915 - early 1916, Poncho Villa began a campaign of killing Americans living and working in Northern Mexico. It escalated from there to a cross border war into New Mexico.
Poncho Villa's raid into Columbus New Mexico, killing 18 and wounding 8, sparked a military response from the US.
A General Pershing type incursion into Mexico to hunt down Mexican Narco-Terrorist may have to be repeated if the Democrat led US Government is unable or unwilling to secure our borders with Mexico. This would not be a good war, though it may become a necessary one.
The Democrats in Washington D.C. need to recognize the risks they are running by refusing to look at the cross border threats from Mexican gangsters as serious threats to our national security.
So far to date, the most aggressive and forward posture that the Obama Administration has initiated to contain the violence that is spilling across the border from Mexico, is to put up signs in the desert on the American side of the border, warning Americans to stay out of threatened US land. Tactically, Obama has implemented a policy of retreat.
The signs were posted over a month after a Pinal County Sheriff's Deputy was shot by suspected drug traffickers while patrolling the area around the junction of Interstate 8 and Arizona Highway 84. Last week, two bodies belived to those of drug mules were found shot to death in the same area where the deputy was ambushed. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said in an interview Tuscon's KGUN TV that the cartels are in increasing control of parts of Arizona, including Pinal County.
As unpleasant as it may be for Obama and the Democrats that control Washington D.C. to consider, they have to secure the US border with Mexico. If they fail to do so, they will be responsible for having failed to prevent a war that we will end up having to fight on our southern border.
[Fenway's Not Another New England Sports Blog! has more on the topic of the Mexican Narco-insurgency and the illegal immigration issue. Its worth taking a look at.]
With Congress gridlocked on an immigration bill, the Obama administration is considering using a back door to stop deporting many illegal immigrants - what a draft government memo said could be "a non-legislative version of amnesty."
The memo, addressed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and written by four agency staffers, lists tools it says the administration has to "reduce the threat of removal" for many illegal immigrants who have run afoul of immigration authorities.
On the surface, it is about the politics of illegal immigration.
But there is something happening here that is working below the surface. It is a "Big Picture" thing. It is something that is working on an emotional level in the Modern American Left.
It explains much of the way the modern American Left feels about the problem that we have with illegal immigration.
John Lennon's Imagine is not just a silly pop song. It is their prayer, their hymnal, their anthem. It is a dream that the Modern American Left hopes is our future and the whole worlds future.
(Yoram Hazony's Israel Through European Eyes explains why Israel is hated by much of the European, and by extension, the American Left. The core of his argument is compelling and it has important implications for all of the Western Nations that fought in WWII.)
In enjoining Arizona’s landmark immigration law, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton maintains the Obama administration’s carefully cultivated fiction: that what concerns the White House regarding S.B. 1070 is its effect on legal, rather than illegal, aliens. Almost nowhere in the government’s briefs or the judge’s ruling is the arrest and detention of illegal aliens addressed. This fiction is transparent, however. The real threat posed by S.B. 1070 was that it would disrupt the de facto amnesty that the executive branch has accorded to the vast majority of illegal aliens. It would start to implement congressional mandates and the public will that the immigration laws be enforced. For that reason, it had to be stopped.
[Emphasis is mine.]
The ruling will be appealed. Jan Brewer knew that no matter which way Clinton appointed U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled, the law would be appealed up through the courts, eventually reaching the Supreme Court Of The United States.
What I want to draw your attention to in this article is not so much the mundane everyday example of the insanity of a city run lock-stock-and-barrel by Democrats, but the way the left-media reports the news when Democrats do psychotically stupid things.
Here is the key:
Ann Arbor City Council member Stephen Kunselman, a Democrat, opposed the art deal.
Kunselman's party affiliation is a fair thing to report. But what is the missing context? (Read the whole article.)
What does that one line, the only line in the article that mentions the political party of any of the politicians involved, imply?
Doesn't it suggest that those that supported laying off firefighters and spending almost a million bucks on a fancy sprinkler spigot were not Democrats?
As it turns out, the City Council is 100% Democrat.
Singling out Kunselman as a Democrat, without also explaining that the whole city council is made up of nothing but Democrats, leaves out important and informative detail.
It is a deception.
So when you are reading or watching the news, always, always, caveat lector. Especially if the reporter claims to be non-partisan.
Oliver Stone is an influential shaper of public thought.
His movies, which include Natural Born Killers, Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Nixon, and W will be viewed by hundreds of millions of people, not just in the US, but all over the world. The people who see his movies, see the world through his world-view.
LONDON – The Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows that the United States should follow the example of South American socialists in nationalizing its energy industry, filmmaker Oliver Stone said Tuesday.
The Academy Award-winning director of "Born on the Fourth of July" and "JFK" said that America's country's natural wealth was too important to be left in private hands, telling journalists in central London that oil and other natural resources "belong to the people."
"This BP oil spill is typical" of what happens when private industry is allowed to draw revenue on what should be a public good, Stone said.
"We shouldn't make this kind of profit on oil or on health or on war or on prisons. All these industries should be public industries."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is not a nice man. Egypt owes him much. The world owes him much. And all the same, he is not a nice man.
Advancing in age, and reported to be suffering from terminal cancer, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will soon be unbound from this mortal coil. His long, difficult, and sometimes extremely unpleasant leadership of the people of Egypt will soon come to a close.
From those days long ago, immediately following the assassination of Anwar Sadatt, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has kept Egypt a relatively sane Muslim nation.
Egypt's peace with Israel, while strained and at times uncomfortable, has held.
How long will this peace last after Mubarak passes?
Would you give it days, weeks, months or optimistically, years?
When Mubarak leaves this world, the peace that we have enjoyed in the middle east, what little peace there was, may come to seem a golden age long past.
Yoram Hazony makes a similar argument. Hazony argues that books and schools are the big drivers in the culture. I think that both Whittle and Hazony are correct. Books and Movies are entertainment venues. Schools shape the people who will wright the books and make the movies that America and the world will read and see.
What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in college. If you’re used to academic books, it’s an easy read. And if not, it’s a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a clearer insight into what’s happening to Israel today in the international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in Israel’s universities.
After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed. There’s much to be said about this, and it’s not for now. But I’ll leave you with just this thought as a start on it: Paradigm shifts aren’t like an election campaign or a struggle over some aspect of policy, much less a short-term media battle like the one over the Turkish flotilla, which can be resolved one way or another in matter of weeks or months, if not days. Paradigm shifts are unusual in the lives of individuals. And when they happen, they often take years to work themselves out. For this reason, clashes between political paradigms tend to play themselves out over a generation or more. By the same token, the relevant media in which these clashes are played out aren’t the newspapers or television or the internet. By the time we’re reading the newspapers or watching CNN, we’ve already got our paradigm in place—just like the reporters we’re watching, who just keep reporting from within their own set paradigm, over and over again. When it comes to shifts of political paradigm, these take place principally through books, which expose people to an idea at length and in depth; and in schools, where such books are studied and discussed, especially universities. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the paradigm that has served as the foundation for Israel’s existence, that’s where the work is going to have to be done.
I-dosing involves donning headphones and listening to “music” — largely a droning noise — which the sites peddling the sounds promise will get you high. Teens are listening to such tracks as “Gates of Hades,” which is available on YouTube gratis (yes, the first one is always free).
Those who want to get addicted to the “drugs” can purchase tracks that will purportedly bring about the same effects of marijuana, cocaine, opium and peyote. While street drugs rarely come with instruction manuals, potential digital drug users are advised to buy a 40-page guide so that they learn how to properly get high on MP3s.
Oklahoma’s Mustang Public School district isn’t taking the threat lightly, and sent out a letter to parents warning them of the new craze. The educators have gone so far as to ban iPods at school, in hopes of preventing honor students from becoming cyber-drug fiends, News 9 reports.
This strikes me as being just plain silly, both the fad and reaction to it.
I half wonder if it is just a bunch of kids trying to freak-out their parents.
Democracies produced Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, fulfilling the expectation of Socrates and Machiavelli that democracies end in tyranny. Now democracies are fulfilling the complementary expectation of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman that democracies end in bankruptcy. Put a democracy in charge of the Sahara, Mr. Friedman once said, and sand itself will become scarce. Democracies are indeed profligate trustees – or have been for the past 30 or 40 years. Mr. Friedman’s primary fret, though, was the tendency of democracy to centralize political and economic power in the same hands. Most critiques of democracy reflect this elemental distrust. “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb,” Benjamin Franklin reputedly said, “voting on what to have for lunch.”
Democratic self-deprecation isn’t quite as funny as it once was. Mobs have already taken to the venerable, iconic streets of European states, notably among them Greece, birthplace of Athenian democracy. It’s apparently easier to give wealth away than it is to take it back. Democracy assembled the welfare state peaceably enough. Can democracy dismantle it as peaceably? No, it can’t. The mobs are not finishe
d.
Further down in the article is this gem:
“The adoption of Keynesian analysis provided politicians with a rationale for borrowing money to buy votes.”
And here we in the US find ourselves, much as our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic do, broke and deep in debt.
The trouble stems from the fact that you can't really buy a person's vote. At best you can only rent it, one election at a time.
It doesn't take a degree in economics to understand that borrowing money to pay a rent is madness.
Not that madness seems to bother politicians much.
And where will it all end?
Democracies have made people more dependent on the state than any humanitarian necessity required. For Italy, and for other democracies, the worst is surely yet to come. Already, hundreds of thousands of middle-class people have thronged the streets of Paris and Rome, of Milan and Sarajevo, of Reykjavik and Bucharest (where demonstrators stormed the presidential palace, an insurgent act that evokes the spectre of revolution). The World Socialists’ website proclaims an age of rage ahead – and chillingly quotes British historian Simon Schama: “You can smell the sulphur in the air.”
Devon was one of three operators of Diamond Offshore rigs that invoked a force majeure clause in their contracts, claiming that the drilling moratorium would prevent the rigs from working. Diamond Offshore said late last month that it does not believe a force majeure exists under the terms of those contracts and is working with its customers to assess each situation.
[Emphasis is mine-Syrah]
This was at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal article published on the 9th.
Democrat President Obama's disastrous handling of the oil spill, particularly in his strange and oddly tenacious attempts to shut down all deep-water drilling in the Gulf, will have long term consequences for the US and for the world.
Its a big planet. Those oil rigs can be moved anywhere in the world. We are very likely to see a number of them end up off the coast of Brazil much to the benefit of Petrobras and its investors.
The US can profit from the Oil in its territories, or not. It looks like Obama and the Democrats would prefer that the US is made even more dependent on foreign sources of oil.
"There are two types of rigs in the deep-water Gulf today: those that are leaving the country and those that want to, because with this moratorium hanging over their heads, they simply can't go back to work," Brady said. "I'm afraid this is the first of many rigs and many American jobs to leave the Gulf."
The first rig to leave the Gulf is headed for Egyptian waters.
The Democrat Obama Administration is going to destroy the US Deep Water Drilling industry.
The Democrats are about to get their clocks cleaned. That doesn't mean that they will just go away. They are planning a humongous lame-duck party where they can pass huge whopping gobbs of legislation in a big fat "Fuck-You!" to all of the American people that have voted them out of office.
Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they're leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won't return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal's Charlie Cook, the Beltway's leading political handicapper, predicted last month "the House is gone," meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.
The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don't want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.
"I've got lots of things I want to do" in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June.
Get ready people. This is going to be an ugly Autumn.
The Interior Department, which oversees oil and gas exploration on public lands and offshore, is charged with the “prudent and safe” management of those resources, the court filing said.
“A short-term suspension of deepwater drilling while safety regulations are updated is necessary to achieve that goal,” the document stated.
In his original decision to grant a preliminary injunction against Democrat President Barak Obama's Deep-Water Drilling Moratorium, Judge Feldman wrote:This Court is persuaded that the public interest weighs in favor of granting a preliminary injunction. While a suspension of activities directed after a rational interpretation of the evidence could outweigh the impact on the plaintiffs and the public, here, the Court has found the plaintiffs would likely succeed in showing that the agency’s decision was arbitrary and capricious. An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.
The world does not sit around on its thumbs when Democrats try to stop things. The Democrats only have jurisdiction over so much of the world. The rest of the world can and will move on.
A prolonged moratorium would only make an awful situation worse.
Before the administration takes action on the moratorium, here are questions that decision-makers should ask: What would an extended moratorium on deepwater drilling really mean for the country? Are the perceived benefits worth the real costs?
The spill is already taking an enormous toll on the people in the communities around the Gulf that depend on the jobs and wages that deepwater drilling provides. If the moratorium overcomes the current legal challenge and is reinstated, this toll would only increase.
Oil companies cannot let their rigs go idle in these difficult economic times. If they are denied access to Gulf resources even for a short period, they will take their operations to promising new locations off Brazil, West Africa or China and sign new leases.
Once the rigs leave the Gulf it becomes very tough to get them back. Tens of thousands of Gulf residents are directly — and indirectly — employed by the offshore industry. When the rigs leave, so will their jobs. The scenario has been rightfully compared to the auto industry leaving Detroit.
If this moratorium debate drags on, the rest of the nation could get hit as well. Without this critical source of domestic, affordable fuel, we would be forced to import even larger amounts from overseas.
We already spend $1 billion a day on foreign oil. With a moratorium, that number will rise and our dependence on OPEC grow. Both outcomes increase our energy and economic insecurity — moving the country in the wrong direction.
In another part of the world, off the coast of Brazil, large deep-water oil deposits have been discovered. Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant is poised to begin exploiting those oil deposits. Interestingly, George Soros is one of Petrobras' largest investors. As with Petrobras, George Soros is also one of Obama's and the Democrat Party's largest “investors.” Petrobras needs some deep-water oil drilling rigs to become available so that it can exploit its rich deep-water oil deposits. The Democrat Administration's devastating drilling ban has made many of those deep-water oil drilling rigs available.
Better yet, once those deep-water oil drilling rigs are moved and put inplace far abroad, the US fields that they had served will be effectively shutdown for many years to come, increasing the market value of all of that foreign deep-water oil, and the value of George Soros' huge investment in Petrobras, all that much more.
Is the tail waging the dog?
See also JCM's: C2 Saturday A.M. Bulldog Edition for more on the odd Oil Spill Clean-up problems and the strange connections between George Soros, Barak Obama, the Democrats, and Brazil's Petrobras.
