Big Government and War, Not Swearing Women, Hukabee

Women swearing is not important enough to be talking about. The fact that we are talking about it means that Huckabee is not presidential material. My grandmother, a Methodist minister's daughter born in 1898 who grew up in Rifle, Colorado, swore like a sailor, smoked, drank and taught me how to play poker when I was an 8 year old kid. As far as I know, none of this was a threat to the Republic.

The crises the country faces are big expensive government at home and war overseas. Social issues are irrelevant to our national survival. Worse emphasizing social issues costs us votes. Some of the most conservative gun nuts I know are gay. Generally they vote Republican, but they don't vote for social conservatives. Huckabee has nothing to offer on anything that's important either to the economy or foreign policy. Therefore, he should go back to work as a TV personality. In his spare time he should watch Free to Choose TV and learn some economics.

As an Air Force veteran, I am familiar with a concept called target servicing. Basically, you shoot first at the most threatening targets. To me, the most threatening targets are Iran with nuclear weapons, Jihadist terrorists and economic collapse brought on by overspending. None of these is a social issue.

Huckabee’s view of the family is nice but perhaps reverses cause and effect. The reason for the collapse of the family is a welfare system that subsidizes family collapse. It pays more if daddy ain't in the house. It pays more if nobody works. Once work requirements were added, the welfare expense went down. If we restructure entitlements and quit subsidizing idleness, we'll get less of it as well as prevent economic collapse.

I don’t see how gay couples threaten the family structure at all.  All my gay friends seem to want is middle class respectability and the rights and privileges granted to married couples.  If anything, their desire for admittance to the structure of marriage shows their admiration of it, not any desire to tear it down.

http://www.freetochoose.tv/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/397421/any-other-women-feel-swearing-huckabee-katherine-timpf

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