Green with Envy

Green cards are the way that immigrants can enter and stay in the U.S. legally.  In 2009, we issued 1.1 million green cards to legal immigrants ... to me an astounding number.  See Green Card Influx  (You can also click through to the Homeland Security website for a breakdown by years and by country of these green card recipients -- 18,553 to Iranians in 2009 alone no less!)  Now, yes, these numbers are somewhat typical of recent years, including Bush's latter years, but remember this is occurring in the same year 3 million resident Americans have lost their jobs.

Now admittedly, most of these green cards were issued to family members of legal U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, but still this seems to place an undue burden on this country's currently strained resources.  Now, exhibiting my continued political paranoia, I have to suspect that this spate of new green cards during an economic downturn and a period of increased national turmoil might possibly be motivated by reasons other than pure charity.  What do you think?

Climate Change

The huge eruption of a volcano in Iceland has disrupted airline flights all over Europe. Heathrow airport near London is closed for the rest of the day at least. And, all this fly-ash in the upper atmosphere is quite likely to cool down our northern climes for at least this summer ... much like Pinatubo's eruption in the Philippines did in 1991. So, rather than pass the proposed onerous "Cap and Trade" carbon-tax legislation in the Senate this year, why can't we just take all the oratorical effluent being produced in Washington and shoot it into the stratosphere? This should keep us gelid for at least a decade.

Tea Party

Boston is hosting (rather, enduring) a Tea Party on Boston Common this morning with Sarah Palin speaking no less. I find the tea-party movement to be a remarkable political phenomenon ... primarily because of the vitriol it elicits from many liberals:

- being called "tea-baggers" (a lewd reference to a homosexual act). My reaction to anyone using this epithet is utter revulsion. This population unfortunately includes many on network and cable news programs.

- being castigated for not having enough blacks in attendance (Obama did get 96% of the black vote for heavens sake) ... ergo they are racists. This is akin to calling Israelis xenophobes for not having any Iranians in their Knesset.

- being labeled radical right-wing nutty moon bats. I thought "moon-bat" was a word reserved for those who think Republicans stole both Bush elections.

- being named "Astroturf" (i.e., rent-a-mob) by the White House to denigrate the tea party's grassroots origin.

- being compared to Tim-McVeigh-style terrorists. Is it accidental that MSNBC is running a Tim McVeigh retrospective at this time?

- being labeled "birthers" (those who believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.A.). There is a group of lefties who have even threatened to infiltrate tea-party rallies with signs to this effect ... and to the other slimes mentioned above.

As far as I can ascertain, these tea parties are a genuine grass-roots reaction to the fiscal excesses of the current (and past) administrations. And any politician who ignores or disparages this movement does so at considerable career risk.

Hold That Tiger

Tiger Woods is back playing golf in the Masters this weekend in Augusta, Georgia. I might in fact watch some of this august tournament ... but whereas, in the past, I would be rooting for Tiger to win ... this time I will be hoping that he loses.

"What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" -- William Blake

The Poker Game

President Obama has unilaterally given away another big pot in the poker game of world hegemony. He has shown our hand to many of the other players and, as is his all-too-frequent wont, gotten nothing in return. See NY Times Article. He now boasts that the U.S would not use nuclear weapons in a number of situations where, in the past, our enemies were wary of how we would react ... and were therefore constrained. Now these other players have been gifted many more degrees of freedom in there strategic planning. Why Obama pulls these bone-headed moves can perhaps be explained by his over-weaning ego. He may indeed believe in his demigod invincibility: "What if I give up some minor game advantage, since I know that my vision of a world utopia is ordained by my birthright?"

Or, can it be that he is just plain stupid?

A Sign of the Times

Relativity

Recent threats of violence levied against those who voted for Obamacare are to be condemned ... and I herein heartily do. Such behavior is childish and misbegotten. But there have been other public death threats made in the past that were not taken so seriously. Witness Rahm Emanuel's knife-wielding outburst back in 1992 ... see the nutty left. Why is this dismissed as political theater while tea-party activists are chastised for generally more benign expressions of outrage? ... such as: the nutty right. I guess Einstein was right ... everything is relative.

The Nose Knows

There have been a number of "promises" made to the American public that would occur as a result of the passage of Obamacare legislation. These vows are:

- it would not increase the federal deficit

- it would not cause anyone to lose their existing health-care insurance

- it would not increase taxes or fees for anyone earning less than $250,000 per year

- it would not include the plethora of sweet-heart deals (explicit or implicit) made in secret with legislators

- it would not cause existing health-care insurance premiums to increase

- it would not provide for taxpayer funding of abortion

- it would not cause any reduction in healthcare treatments or Medicare coverage

- it would not federally-subsidize healthcare insurance for illegal immigrants

- it would reduce Medicare and Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse by tens of billion dollars

None of these pledges, in fact, will transpire as a result of this just-passed bill. Yet, politicians and political pundits continue to mouth them with a straight face. To me, these group-think prevarications are staggering. And, add to these downsides, the fact that the federal government will now become the only provider of student loans ... and Congress will still exempt themselves from these healthcare insurance constraints ... all this makes for a large case of dyspepsia for this blogger.

But then 26-year old "children" can still be covered on their parents' health insurance policies. This makes it all worth while.

Demon Pass

This Sunday it seems will bring us some interesting national legislative chicanery. The U.S. House of Representatives will be asked to pass a set of changes to the Senate's health-care bill. This House bill has been misnamed a "reconciliation" bill. In this bill will be a provision that the Senate bill will be "deemed to have passed" by the House. At this point, the Senate bill will be separated from the House's hoped for changes and sent to the President for his signature. The House changes will then be sent back to the Senate to deal with (or not deal with) at their leisure. Voila! Barack Obama will win his signature achievement and his Presidency will have been snatched from a monster defeat (after Scott Brown's recent election in Massachusetts removed the Democrats' Senate filibuster-proof majority).

Then, House Democrats, who voted for the "Deem and Pass" back-door way of giving Obama his proto-socialized medicine, will hope that they can hide behind this legislative trick to escape voter retaliation in the Fall. This may be true. But. personally, I kind of hope that this process goes exactly the way Obama's Chicago RICO thugs want ... augmented by that consigliore, Pelosi. This wish of mine seems a little foolish, but hear me out:

First, the Obama/Pelosi tag team will have stuck a stick into a huge hornet's nest of super angry voters and I don't think they have any concept of the national retaliation (not just at the polls) that might be served to them as dessert to their orgy of fiscal irresponsibility.

Second, I believe that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn this unconstitutional "law" in a New-York second.

And lastly, this slimy process has, I believed, opened the eyes of many otherwise naive Americans as to just how fragile our American Democracy is ... and what diligence must be observed to keep it from slipping away.

Choice Cuts

Sarah Palin arouses strong feelings on both sides of the political spectrum. She has shown that common sense can go a long way toward making government work ... but also that sophistication seems a requisite for acceptance by the media elites. And Barack Obama has once again demonstrated why a pedagogical demeanor makes a lousy management style ... but can easily capture the hearts of the utopians. I'm afraid the question Americans may have to answer in less than three years is: Would you rather be governed by an honest rube or a nuanced charlatan?

My only true hope is that our misguided political process will, next time around, give us two rational choices. Choices that will restore my faith in what our forefathers had in mind when they created a government that would not fritter away our greatness. Choices that would demonstrate strength in both mind and heart. Is that too much to ask?

Arrogance

The President held his health care summit yesterday and, as is his wont, dominated the process ... grabbing most of the face time, continually interrupting many Republicans when they managed to squeeze in a few salient points, slipping Senator Paul Ryan the sly finger when he had questioned Obama's arithmetic, and reminding John McCain that it was he who had been elected President. (Oh, how I wish that McCain had said, "could I have a Mulligan on that?") Our President's hubris is becoming his signature characteristic ... just like Gerald Ford was defined by his clumsiness, Bill Clinton, by his mendacity, and George W. Bush, by his oratorical ineptitude. Why Obama is so arrogant is a subject for historians, but may I suggest that his disdain meter often reads all the way over to "hatred" ... hatred for conservatives, hatred for this country's exceptionalism, hatred for our middle and upper classes, hatred for many of our industries and companies, and maybe even hatred for capitalism itself. And this haughtiness, I suggest, may well be his undoing. I would not be that unhappy with this outcome

Now onto a sidebar brought out by yesterday's subject. Howie Carr, a talk-show host here in Boston was taking calls about health care. Someone phoned in from Bangor, Maine and said that the parking lot at the East Maine Health Center in Bangor told the story better than any of these Congressional debates. He said that his cruise through this parking lot showed that at least half the license plates were from Canada. (Also note that the Premiere of Canada also traveled to Florida to have heart surgery ... as opposed to subjecting himself to the vagaries of Canada's socialized health care.) What if Obama and the Congressional Democrats manage to clone the Canadian health-care system here in the United States? To where then are we going to travel to get better health care ... Mexico?

Off Balance

The current sovereign-debt crisis in Greece is apparently caused by unfunded off-balance sheet transactions (reportedly aided and abetted by Goldman Sachs ... so what else is new?) I am over seventy years old and I can't remember a single financial crisis, either private or public, which was not caused in whole or in part by off-balance-sheet shenanigans -- last year's banking crisis, Mexico's near collapse in 1994, the Enron scandal, AIG, Tyco, etc. ... the sliminess goes on and on. How can the accounting community, which has created such a beautiful mechanism for faithfully representing the fiscal health of corporations, charities, and public trusts, continue to allow these entities to subvert this process with off-balance-sheet transactions of any type? It is as though the Swan Lake ballet was being danced in a garbage dump ... or Mozart was being played with kazoos.

Until such time as veracity is returned to the accounting profession, we will continue to enjoy a conga-line of financial crises into the forever future. And this, unfortunately, includes how we, as a nation, keep our own books.

Do You Know ...

where your children (and grandchildren and great grandchildren) are? This woman has built candy-covered gingerbread houses all over California ... just waiting to lure our innocents into her fiscal oven. She is using promises of free-health-care gumdrops, no more carbon-dioxide spinach, chocolate-covered civilian trials for terrorists, and ice-cream-sundae federal deficits into the hereafter to seduce them to their doom. And when she has corralled all our little ones and turned them into cinnamon cookies, she will use their rendered baby fat to keep her ruby-red lips pouty. Please! please! do not let your children again vote for this cackling crone.

"Corpse Man"

Dan Quayle could not have said it better than Barack Obama at yesterday's Prayer Breakfast ... referring (three times) to a Navy corpsman. I didn't see or hear these Presidential snafus on any news show this AM. Amen.

Tortured Logic?

Indulge me the following scenario: A Muslim man in his early twenties is picked up in Boston because his cell phone has been the source of a series of suspiciously encoded text messages to a known Al Qaeda operative in Yemen ("The pumpkin pie is in the oven," etc.) These intercepts were done by the NSA under the aegis of the American Patriot Act. (Trust me, they can do this.) He is then found to be in this country illegally ... and when his clothing is scanned by a Geiger Counter it exhibits a dangerously high level of radioactivity. His laptop computer is also found to have detailed and credible diagrams of a suitcase nuclear weapon. Other notable intelligence suggests that an illicit atomic bomb has been smuggled into the United States and is now hidden somewhere, ready to be detonated.

For you Pollyannas who believe that such an event is impossible, please explain 9/11. Now, how do you, as our head of Homeland Security, deal with this captured Muslim man to find out the who, what, when, where and how of this possible devastating terrorist attack ... knowing that it might kill hundreds of thousand of Americans and set back our economy for possibly a generation? And, obviously, time is of the essence. Would you immediately and continuously waterboard him until he spilled the beans or, perhaps, read him his Miranda rights and lawyer him up?

A Stopped Clock Is Twice Right

President Obama occasionally gets things right. In his State of the Union address he called for more "safe, clean nuclear power plants." And yesterday he called for $54 billion of federal loan guarantees to those who would build this new generation of nuclear power. See: Loan Guarantees. IF we can take him at his word (the big "if" is on purpose), then this would be an important step forward in the U.S.'s attempt to achieve energy independence. In this speech he also mentioned more offshore drilling for gas and oil. This would be wonderful if it happened, but my cynicism takes over here and such a development (ANWR too?) I'm afraid, is even more suspect.

It would seem to this author that the real path to our nation's energy independence might require the following steps:
1) Build as many new nuclear power plants as can be economically financed and open up Yucca Mountain for long-term nuclear waste disposal (if required).
2) Aim to generate all our electrical needs from nuclear energy (east and west coast) and from coal-fired plants (middle America). No more natural gas and oil-fired electrical power plants should be given permits.
3) Encourage all Americans to heat their homes with natural gas and help build the infrastructure and offer the tax incentives to accomplish this. The objective should be no more oil-heated homes.
4) Specify that kerosene, diesel fuel, and gasoline are the most desirable fuels for transportation vehicles (air, rail, and ground). Offer the necessary incentives to achieve better mileage in these vehicles (including hybrid technology). Investigate liquefied coal as a long-term vehicular fuel option.
5) Set a national goal of ceasing all foreign oil imports within ten years (using the above methodologies and including oil recovery from our vast oil shale deposits.) I predict that the price of Mideast oil would plummet as a consequence of just such a goal setting.
6) Stop wasting federal funds on solar, tidal, geothermal, and wind-power projects and use these funds instead on the above items. Let the private sector fund any of these "green" projects that make any economic sense (likely very few).

I can dream can't I? Tick ... tick ... tick.

Pinocchio

Barack Obama is sure to try to dazzle us with his State of the Union address tonight. I doubt that any attendee will be shouting out "You lie!", but I still suspect that mendacity will creep into his rhetoric. Ben Shapiro has written an insightful piece in "Town Hall.com" to help us decipher what will oil its way out Obama's cigarette-stained lips tonight. See Obama's Lexicon of Rhetorical Devices. This is one of the funniest columns I have read in quite a while. May I suggest that you print it out and keep it by your side if you plan to watch or listen to Obama's teleprompter tonight. (Thanks to Howie Carr for pointing this column out to us.)

Stealth Socialism

While our nation's attention is diverted toward the Scott Brown upset victory in Massachusetts, the White House and the Senate are quietly pushing forward more of their stealth socialist agenda. Not satisfied with owning two auto companies, keeping the banking industry under its thumb, attempting to become the country's only health-care insurer, and maneuvering to tax the U.S. utility industry out of existence (with Cap-and-Trade), the Obamites are now on the verge of grabbing the $100 billion per year student loan business. See student loan takeover ... and also please click through to the "Wall Street Journal" article to read more of the details.

This sotto voce move by Tom Harkin (with the clear approval of President Obama), will finish what comrade Nancy Pelosi started back in September and will surely squeeze the private sector out of the student loan business in a very few years. To paraphrase P.J. Clark, "If you thought student loans cost the U.S. taxpayers a lot of money, wait until our government runs everything."

By the bye, what makes these transplanted Chicago thugs who currently run our Obamafied government think that they can ever manage the U.S.'s $14 trillion economy when they have never have run so much as a corner candy store?

Head(s) Should Roll

President Obama recently called it a "screwup" in the U.S. intelligence community over the Nigerian Islamic terrorist's attempted crotch-bombing of an airliner over Detroit. Now our President is pointing his finger at these same intelligence agencies for their inability to connect the dots. But as the old canard goes: "When you point your finger outward, three more fingers point back at you." By this I mean that Obama's National Security Czar, John Brennan, after a dismal performance on Fox News this past Sunday (see: Dodge and Weave), has, up until now, evaded any culpability for these "systemic failures" (also Obama's words).

But, what hasn't been generally reported is that John Brennan was the primary person responsible for the software and database that was built to connect these dots, see: the Rest of the Story. He,"having designed and built our multi-agency terrorist threat integration center", now is charged by our empty-suit (but stuffed-shirt) of a President to fix things. From 2005 to 2008 he was the CEO of Analysis Corp. (see: The Analysis Corporation) which spent $50 million of taxpayers funds to build the terrorist-screening system that was supposed to be the ultimate in dot-connectors. Oops.

May I humbly suggest that John Brennan's head clearly should be the first to roll ... closely followed by Janet Napolitano's.

Signal Flags

How is it that the Bush/Chaney administration carried this country through seven years terrorist-attack free while the Obama/Biden duo has had three serious events in its first eleven months? Personally, I don't believe that our operational intelligence apparatus has appreciably changed. However, what has changed is the signals that this administration is sending to Al-Qaeda, viz: the planned closing of Gitmo, no more waterboarding, turning terrorist acts into criminal offenses, renaming the "war on terrorism" into "overseas contingency operations", the non-existence of our "High Value Detainee Interrogation Group" (HIG) ten months after Obama announced its creation, making a Girl Scout leader the head of Homeland Security, closing down military tribunals, moving the KSM trial to New York City, the president's slow, low-key responses to each terrorist act, sending Chinese Islamic terrorists to Bermuda, refocusing our government on global-warming/health-care/fire-hose domestic spending, and finally blaming everything that goes wrong on Bush.

One other point that needs to be reiterated: during the Bush years the war in Iraq was a magnet that drew disenchanted Muslims from around the globe to sacrifice themselves there in the name of Allah. Now, that Iraq is being deemphasized, many more venues have become attractive to would-be martyrs ... including unfortunately the U.S.A. This last reason clearly is not of Obama's doing alone, but our haste to leave Iraq may turn out to be a gigantic mistake ... witness the dramatic increase in terrorists bombings there recently.

So, it may be that style is just as important as substance in combating the terrorist threat we suffer. And, if Obama does not do a convincing 180-degree turn in his rhetoric, we may be in for three more years of "isolated incidents".