Jihadists Don't Have to Be Popular

I think it doesn't matter how popular Jihadists are. While I generally detest Mao Tse Tung, his saying that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" is generally an accurate description of how Jihadist groups influence politics. Jihadists threaten not only opponents, but also their entire families with torture and death. Very few people have the courage of Anwar Sadat, who made peace with Israel, or the members of the plot to kill Hitler. Win or lose, the results are usually fatal. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The members of the plot to kill Hitler were tortured to death, executed slowly or, in the case of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, forced to commit suicide. Egyptian President Abdel el Sisi knowingly took an increased risk of assassination when he gave a speech against Jihadist terrorism at Al Azhar University on January 1, 2015. While such efforts to change Islam from the inside deserve our sympathy and support, there is very little we can do to influence the internal conversation. The only way the West has of stopping Jihadist terror is to kill as many as we can as fast as we can. Jihadists kill men, women and children indiscriminately if they don't worship in an approved manner. Jihadists are rabid dogs, and rigor mortis is the only cure for their ideology. If the casualty rate is high enough that the futility of Jihadist terror is obvious, recruitment will fail to keep up with the losses. I think the reason Osama Bin Laden is no longer popular is because he's dead. We should be reducing the popularity of other Jihadist figures in the same way

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396697/muslims-and-islamists-victor-davis-hanson

Make a Deal? Obama's In Your Face!

Republicans are still being told they have to compromise with the president even though they shellacked the Democrats in the 2014 election.  However, the Pravda Press is not holding our Dear Leader to any standard of compromise.  “Barack Obama is in Your Face” was the title of Roger Simon’s column on the State of the Union Address.  Mr. Simon was thrilled about the President’s fighting words and veto threats. 

As an ignorant redneck, I don't understand how fighting words and veto threats show that the Chicago Machine Prodigy is willing to negotiate and compromise with Republicans. In Montana where I grew up, if you're in somebody's face you don't expect to make a deal with the guy. You defiantly expect to roll right over him and there's nothing he can do about it. I've lived in Chicago for years and I've seen this behavior before from several mayors when dealing with Republicans. Chicago mayors can do this because they have the votes even before the ghosts cast their ballots. Our Dear Leader does not seem to have made the adjustment to the fact that the Congress is not the Chicago City Council. He's in the Republicans' face, as Roger Simon points out. To me, this indicates that the Smartest President Ever has decided not to compromise on anything. He's decided he wants Harry Reid's gridlock to continue. The only difference is that this time it's obvious the party of no is the Democrats.

The question is whether this tactic will help the Democrats in 2016.  I don’t think so.  The Republicans did not get voted out of power in 2012, although they lost a few seats. They more than made up for what they lost in 2014. The First Black President will not be running in 2016. I don't think Hillary the Inevitable will turn out anywhere near as many minority voters as President Obama did. As far as why the President should compromise, I thought he said that's what he wants to do. My point was that despite his hand wave towards compromise, he has done everything he can to troll for angry Republican responses. Our Dear Leader likes gridlock. That's why Harry Reid ran the Senate to avoid voting on anything, especially bills that passed the House or Republican amendments to bills in either Senate committee or on the floor of the Senate. The change is that blaming it on the Republicans will no longer be possible. It's obvious where the no is coming from now. No amount of Pravda Press obfuscation can hide Presidential vetoes.

Why did Obama win in 2012?  I think our Dear Leader's unsurpassed ability to lie, backed by the Pravda Press motivated in part by their white guilt, got him through 2012. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," was the biggest presidential lie since the Vietnam war. The Benghazi lies in support of the Barry the Magnificent's declaration of victory over Al Qaeda were also a substantial help to his reelection. Everybody knew the Benghazi attack was a terrorist attack by an Al Qaeda offshoot fairly soon after the attack, but it became a protest of an internet video to support Obama's victory declaration with a timely assist by debate moderator Candy Crowley. Now that the true extent of the disasters in foreign and domestic policy are apparent, polls show a large majority of voters wished they had elected Romney. The lies made the difference, and white guilt in the Pravda Press got the lies crucial media support.

I guess we will have to do the experiment. The Prevaricator in Chief will continue to proclaim his readiness to work with Republicans while he does everything he can to provoke them and not work with them. He will continue to tell whoppers like, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period." Republicans in Congress will pass reasonable bipartisan bills which President No will veto. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee will have a legislative platform to run on. Hillary the Inevitable will run on lies and Benghazi negligence. We'll see just how gullible the voters are. After all, Democrat BS worked in 2008 and white guilt backed by BS worked in 2012. Maybe more Democrat BS will work in 2016.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/barack-obama-is-in-your-face-114428.html

The Not So Hottest 2014 Climate Scam

This week the Pravda Press had screaming headlines that 2014 was the “hottest year on record.”  However, if you dig into the numbers, the records referred to only go back to 1880.  They are the records of land based mercury thermometers.  Digging further, you find that the difference between 2014 and the next hottest year was under .04 degrees.  So I made this comment:

All years are above average here in Lake Wobegon. If the best liberals can do is measured in hundredths of a degree, we're dealing with statistical noise. The difference is well within the margin of error. No thermometer available in 1880 was accurate to .05 degrees. Even ignorant rednecks like me know this ain't a big enough difference to talk about. In making a big deal out of this, liberals sound like Pinky and the Brain have decided to use the threat of global warming to do what liberals try to do every night, try to take over the world.

In defending the “hottest on record” screaming headlines, some commenters tried to argue that statistically the error of observation is reduced by the large number of observations.  One commenter told me I needed to take a remedial course in statistics.  I had this response:

Me: MS Statistics 1972 University of Illinois. You: MSNBC. Your comment makes no statistical sense and ignores history. If individual readings are only accurate to .1 degree, no amount of multiple observations are going to improve the accuracy of your instruments. The observations come mainly from urban areas which have gotten hotter over time due to increases in paved area. The time span from 1880 to now is an eye blink in geologic time. Even if the readings are as incredibly accurate as you say, they prove no connection between industrial activity and temperature fluctuation. The models used to establish a connection have no statistical significance. The logical conclusion is that you are a disciple of Jonathan Gruber using complication to obscure a power grab (pun intended) of unprecedented proportions. I don't want to live under a dictatorship of East and West Coast Liberal idiots controlling all energy use and forcing rednecks back to horse and buggy technology. You guys are rich enough to pay for dikes to protect your property in the event that the oceans actually do rise. I see no reason I should have to subsidize the foolish superstitions of the 1% by paying exorbitant prices for alternative energy or doing without energy altogether.

At ths point, the liberal commenter complained that the above was a personal attack.  He also said he never watched MSNBC and didn’t know who Jonathan Gruber was.  As always in these arguments, liberal commenters refer to the sanctity of science and proclaim debate as unscientific.  So I hit back with this:

It would seem that you can dish it out but you can't take it. If you tell someone they are so ignorant they need to take a course to remediate their knowledge, that's a personal insult. If you get a response in kind, you should not be surprised. Jonathan Gruber designed Obamacare to be so complex nobody would figure out that it was really a tax increase. The "science" you are pushing is really a political program of increased centralized government control. If government controls all energy use, they control the entire economy with no checks or balances possible to keep them from becoming abusive. If your education was so narrowly focused on gender studies that you can't see that, then I feel sorry for you. Renewable energy is 11.2% of the total energy generated in the United States. There is no way we can depend on renewable energy for all of our energy needs in the near future. Forcing a rapid conversion to all renewable energy would be prohibitively expensive. The only way we might get to much lower emissions in the intermediate term is with nuclear power. However, tree huggers like you don't want that either. We're left with horses, which I can tell you from personal experience are not all that much fun to clean up after. You are a victim of group think. Whether you watch MSNBC or not, you really are spouting the party line on global warming. The models that predict increasing temperatures due to CO2 emissions are not statistically significant. Temperatures in the last 15-20 years have not moved in a statistically significant way. Math is hard for Liberals, but it still is there even if you ignore it. Just to be crystal clear, the burden of proof is that you have to show 1) a significant increase in temperature and 2) a direct provable link to burning fossil fuel. Since you haven't shown either one, you've got no case that would warrant scrapping the Constitution to save the planet. In order to remediate your total ignorance of economics, please consider watching some video here:

(This is a link to Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose PBS TV Series.  It is a great introduction to Supply Side Economics.)

http://www.freetochoose.tv/

This is the article I was reacting to:

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/011615-735156-2014-not-the-hottest-year-on-record.htm

Shredding the Constitution for Small Tactical Advantage

Last month the New Republic article linked below was bragging about how brilliant Obama’s executive order amnesty for illegal aliens was politically. In particular, the author thought that amnesty ruined Jeb Bush’s chances to win the White House. The problem is that our Dear Lear was willing to completely ignore the Constitution for fleeting tactical advantage over Republicans. If amnesty by executive order is legal, the next president can legalize drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge with an executive order.  If postponing the Employer Mandate tax collection in Obamacare is legal, the next president can decide he will only collect corporate taxes at a 25% rate instead of the 39% in the law passed by Congress and signed by the President.  So this executive order business is a threat to the separation of powers and can lead us quickly to banana republic style government, and I'm not talking about stylish summer clothing.  And the gain is so minimal that it's disturbing.  It's not like Republicans can't find issues beside immigration.  Just to pick a few areas at random, Democrats have only lies and excuses for their economic performance, lawless regulation and national security meltdown.  Democrats are moving as fast as possible toward their goal of making the whole country as big a financial and physical disaster as Detroit has become under their rule.  It's also not that Jeb Bush is going to win the nomination in a walk without beating a sitting Conservative Governor like Mike Pence or Bobby Jindahl or Scott Walker.  Since the Constitution is now a dead letter, maybe Jeb Bush is finished because our Dear Leader is going to sign a Bill of Attainder executive order barring all potential heirs of George W. Bush from office since everything is his fault.  (Joke hint for clueless liberals:  Bills of Attainder are prohibited in the US Constitution you are ignoring at the moment.)  This whole thing is mindless destruction for minimal temporary advantage.  The article's author does not seem to have any idea what's going on.  No wonder the New Republic is losing money hand over fist.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120571/jeb-bush-running-president-2016-boxed-immigration

Obama Afraid to Go To Paris?

In my Air Force days, we had a saying, "No guts, no glory." The administration did not have the guts to send any important people to this open air event because they are cowards. This administration has courage only when it refuses to negotiate with Republicans. It will negotiate with just about anyone else. Terrorists, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Mad Mullahs, nuclear proliferators and Russin backed Ukrainian Rebels who shoot down civilian airliners are all people this administration thinks it can deal with. The people the administration will negotiate with have one thing in common. They all are armed and extremely dangerous. Republicans, despite propaganda to the contrary, are not a serious physical threat. So they are perfect targets for a no negotiation stance. This is the most cowardly administration in history.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-republicans-inconsistent-attacks-on-obamas-paris-response/2015/01/12/bd223d0a-9aa8-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.html

Democrats' Problems Dealing With Reality

This article in Politico (see link below) shows how Democrats have a problem seeing and dealing with reality. Their policies are destroying the economy and endangering the country. Oil and gas prices have come down in spite of Democrats' efforts to stop drilling, stop pipelines and limit emissions in the name of saving the planet from global warming. Unfortunately, their climate models don't match their data with any statistical significance, so we get expensive energy and Al Gore makes millions off of his Mean Green agenda. The end results of Liberal policies can be found in Detroit, where their one party rule lead to a spiral of decay and finally bankruptcy. The reason Liberals see a war on women and pervasive racism is that they really have nothing else to offer. As Mark "Uterus" Udall found out in Colorado, the war on women doesn't work anymore. The facts of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner refused to cooperate with the Liberal narrative. The evidence showed Brown was the aggressor. Brown tried to grab the officer's gun while the officer was inside his car and Brown was charging the officer on foot when the fatal shot was fired. The supervising police sergeant at Garner's arrest, a black woman, had to be edited out of the picture. The Garner arrest turned out to be a cigarette tax enforcement action, which got a lot of Conservatives to say that nobody should die for cigarette taxes and that big government requires intrusive tax enforcement. The election of Tim Scott, a Black Tea Party Republican, as Senator in South Carolina was not covered at all. The Liberal narrative says Republicans, the Tea Party and redneck whites in the South are all racist. Tim Scott couldn't possibly exist, so he had to be ignored. The President said Al Qaeda is on the run. So the Benghazi attack was a demonstration that turned into a riot, not an organized terrorist attack by an Al Qaeda affiliate. The Iraq War was over because the President said so. The administration then ignored ISIS until it got so big it overran over half of Iraq. This article reads like a pep talk by the coach of a 20 point underdog team before the big game. It ignores the insults and injuries Democrats have inflicted on angry white rednecks like me. Maybe they don't understand that why we are angry has a lot to do with what Democrats said and did to us.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-democrats-2016-blue-collar-unmarried-women-voters-114313.html

Supreme Court Should Force Congress To Rewrite Obamacare Law

The Obamacare law says that only residents of states with their own insurance exchanges can get federal tax subsidies.  Residents of states using the federal exchange are not eligible under the law as enacted.  Obama ignored that provision and has been giving subsidies to everybody whether their state has an exchange or not.  A case asking that the law be enforced as written, King versus Burwell, is scheduled for Supreme Court review in March.  Democrats argue that enforcing the law as written will mean chaos as residents of 36 states without exchanges will lose federal subsidies.  The Democrats passed the bill with this provision in it.  By Nancy Pelosi's own admission they didn't know what was in it and passed it anyway. Perhaps next time Democrats draft a 2500 page bill they should take a little more care in drafting it and be a little less hasty in passing it so they have a chance to read it first. The Constitutional remedy for a poorly written law resulting in chaos is further Congressional legislation. Since the One Not Quite All of Us Were Waiting for has a policy of not negotiating with Republicans, this poses a thorny problem that can't be solved by normal methods. You can almost hear the Smartest President Ever going through his list of shovel ready projects, fake red lines, drone attacks, Navy Seal Team 6, blaming George Bush and lies like, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." The Liberal solution is John Roberts has to violate his oath of office and allow the subsidies to continue.  The Supreme Court's job is to rule on what the law is, not what they would like it to be. If their ruling means that the law as written leads to chaos, then the problem is the way the law was written in the first place.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/01/07/progressives-to-scotus-do-the-right-thing-and-ignore-the-constitution/

Garner Arrest About Revenue, Not Racism

The Eric Garner arrest was about revenue. It was a cigarette tax enforcement crackdown. The outcome had nothing to do with race and everything to do with big expensive nanny state government. Liberals want big expensive government and want the police to enforce tax collection. However, they also need to play the race card whenever they can because that's all they have left as far as getting votes. Liberal results for minorities are bad schools and crime ridden neighborhoods. Bankrupt Detroit is the Liberal endgame, the end result of a generation of one party control of city government. Minority voters need to be distracted from the bad outcomes by constant racism allegations. The police are tired of being ordered to enforce tax laws and then being thrown under the bus when they do. The supervising police sergeant on the scene of the Garner arrest was a black woman. This is ignored because of the Liberal need to see racism everywhere. Liberals were quick to blame the Gabby Giffords shooting on Sarah Palin, but are outraged when New York police blame the murder of two cops on Mayor Bill de Blasio using the same logic with a lot more justification. Liberals are being destroyed by their own internal inconsistencies.

Yucky Lunches Will Yield Next Generation of Republicans

Michelle Obama's nutritious but unappetizing lunch program guarantees a generation of young Republicans in the near future. These kids are not going to forget who gave them a choice between yuck and hunger. They will want to get even and could spend a lifetime doing it in the voting booth.

An Obvious Answer and the Hard Truth of Charlie Hebdo

There is one obvious answer to terrorism in support of censorship. We have to deny the terrorists what they want. The terrorists wanted to limit the distribution of cartoons that make fun of Jihadists. We can deny the terrorists their goal by distributing the cartoons to as wide an audience as possible. I think Charlie Hebdo should put out a collection of translated anti Jihad cartoons in electronic editions in various languages and sell them on a web site. I would buy one in English. I am sure many other customers would buy them in their languages as well. I apologize that my French is too rusty to be useful anymore. Charlie Hebdo can raise funds to help the families of the victims and make a statement about freedom of the press at the same time.  If every time terrorists attack to limit cartoon distribution, the cartoons just go viral on the web, it will tend to discourage them.

The only real solution to Jihadist terrorism is to kill the Jihadists wherever they are until there are none.  Jihadists are rabid dogs and there is no other solution.  They have declared total war on everybody who does not worship exactly the way they do, including Muslims who are not sufficiently strict in their observances.  Jihadists have claimed a divine license to kill every man, woman and child who does not meet their requirements.  Jihadists have repeatedly engaged in mass slaughter, demonstrating that they really mean exactly what they say about killing anyone who doesn't measure up.  Hash tags and "Je suis Charlie" signs are not going to stop these killers.  Only rigor mortis is an effective cure for what's wrong with Jihadists.  That's the hard truth.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/show-the-cartoons-charlie-hebdo-sony-attack/384304/

Economic Policy: What Should We Have Done In 2009?

Government spending does not stimulate the economy because government is far less efficient than private enterprise. Tax rate cuts would stimulate the economy because they would reward productive investment with a better rate of return and ultimately put more resources in private hands. The crash of 2007-2008 was due to over leveraging. To unwind it, a lot of debt needed to be converted into equity. A couple of changes would encourage that. First would be to lower the capital gains tax rate to encourage more equity investment. Another thing that would be to make dividends tax deductible to corporations, just as interest payments are. This would remove the bias in favor of debt financing for private firms. The way to prevent too big to fail banks is to force them to have bigger capital reserves than small enough to fail banks. Dodd-Frank could be replaced by a simple rule that says that if the bank is larger than 1% or 2% of the overall banking assets of the United States it needs to have a 10% capital reserve. To make this a little easier, the law could allow banks to sell a special class of bonds that are convertible to equity in the event of regular capital reserves falling to zero. Regular capital reserves for big banks could be 5%, with the additional 5% coming from the convertible bonds. None of the banks that failed or were bailed out would have needed federal help if their capital reserves were this high. Big banks will dismantle themselves quickly to get away from high reserve requirements and the problem will be solved. Republicans should remember who Wall Street backs with political contributions and do the right thing on requiring big reserves from big banks.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395775/debating-economics-james-c-capretta

Recriminations Are Required on Vietnam War

I really can't stand the casual assumption that we were the bad guys in Vietnam. We left all of Indochina to its fate in 1975. The victorious Communists killed about 2 million Cambodians, and hundreds of thousands of other ethnic groups. Two million Vietnamese fled in leaky boats. There had never been any such mass exodus from Vietnam before. Ten to a hundred times more people died after we left than died during the war. I was in Air Force ROTC from 1968-1972 and on active duty from 1972-1976. In college arguments, I always said that if we lost there would be a bloodbath. It was obvious after the Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong left several mass graves of thousands of men, women and children that they executed. The Vietnamese knew about it, but it was not widely reported in the US. Anybody who took the time to look into it could have easily predicted the subsequent mayhem. Here it is 40 years later and the anti-war left has yet to even notice the havoc they unleashed, let alone apologize for it. The willful ignorance is so bad that our Secretary of State, who testified under oath to Congress that Americans commonly committed war crimes in Vietnam, gets a pass for his obvious perjury and is appointed to the highest level cabinet level post in the federal government.

What about war crimes in Vietnam?  The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group was a Pentagon task force set up to investigate.  They found 320 substantiated cases. At the height of the war, there were over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. This number of war crimes were a low productivity hour or two for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  American war crimes were hardly as common as John Kerry testified they were.  He lied.

I think that the post WWII policy of trying to contain communism made the Vietnam War almost unavoidable. I agree that the stated objectives of Kennedy and Johnson did not include stopping the killing that accompanied any communist takeover of any country. However, the anti-war protesters loudly proclaimed that they wanted to stop the killing as one of their major slogans. I heard them loud and clear, up close and personal. They claimed that the killing would stop if the US withdrew from Southeast Asia. The actual outcome did not match their stated goals at all. Worse, the "Peace Movement" didn't even bother to look to see the damage the withdrawal actually did. They patted themselves on the back for making "peace" and went on to their next causes with enthusiasm. They took no notice of the fact that they facilitated massive slaughter. When peacenicks look back, it's with nostalgia for the righteousness of their cause.  They are oblivious to their actual results.  And they are running US foreign policy today with the same disastrous results in Syria, Iraq and Nigeria.

Vietnam War Crimes Working Group link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_Crimes_Working_Group