Stop Hillary

A letter to the editor in the Star-News caught my eye, and in my battle to save the country by stopping Hillary Clinton, I thought I'd share some of it with y'all:

"Many syndicated pundits frequenting the Star-News pages are wriggling on their bellies to kiss Hillary Clinton's feet and crown her even before the election.

They've conveniently buried the commodity market and land development (deals) the Clintons were involved in, the political favors … and Bill's 140 pardons and 36 sentence commutations in the last hours of his presidency …
Marc Rich, who fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution on tax evasion, was pardoned after his wife contributed $70,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign and even more to Clinton's presidential library.

The powerful Clintons escaped, though several of their partners went to prison. The Bush administration has cooperated with the Clintons by refusing to release unredacted Justice Department records regarding these matters.

Lastly, Clinton's advocacy and passage of NAFTA was the beginning of outsourcing and the end for America's manufacturing industry and good paying jobs.

Who wants the Clintons in the White House again - and why?

Stan Bozarth

Wilmington"

Now I'm no Clinton-hater, but my man Stan has some good points I'd like to elaborate on myself. Many of Bill Clinton's pardons at the end of his second term were a slap in the face to justice. I had hoped this meant that Hillary would never run for president, because they really let loose some evil folks who did bad things for the country while lining their own pockets, and the Clintons' campaign coffers. Money for pardons, basically.

NAFTA could have been worked to be favorable for our interests and Mexico's and Canada's too, but instead, it became a gift to big corporations who took advantage. Reagan's immigrant amnesty was tied to making NAFTA work, providing good paying jobs to Mexicans in Mexico, so they would not have to come here to make a decent wage, so they could build a strong economy and become a better neighbor. Instead, the NAFTA we got allowed companies to move down there, ignore environmental laws and pay lowly wages that only encouraged more of them to immigrate here. The Clintons bow down to big money just as much as the Bushies do.

Lastly, a point I have not seen elsewhere... I believe Hillary's run is against the spirit of the 22nd Amendment. That's the one about a two term limit. Sure, Hillary was not president, but she was part of the team. When they ran, Bill claimed that we'd be getting "two for the price of one". I suggest that Hillary has already served two term in the White House, and her attempt to regain control runs counter to the spirit of the 22nd Amendment. She's flaunting our Constitution, folks!

Do we really want Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton? 20+ years of the same bought and paid for leadership? Have they really been that good for the US? I submit that Clinton/Bush are two sides of an expensive coin, and we'd do better to toss that coin into a wishing well and elect a leader who will take us in a new, more moral and upright direction.

Hola! Roy's Got Vertigo

Roy Williams, Carolina Basketball Coach and all around good guy has been battling Vertigo:

From The Raleigh N&O:
""Right now, I'd say I'm 85-90 percent, but I can still feel it,'' he said. "... But I'm going to be fine. I don't think there's any doctors laying awake at night about 'Ol Roy, and I don't think they should."

Williams said that over the years, doctors in Chapel Hill and Lawrence, Kan., and at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., have diagnosed him with what's termed "benign positional vertigo."...

"I'm not as comfortable as I'd like to be, and when I get up, I get up slower,'' Williams said. "Early in the mornings, I'm a little more light-headed than I'd like to be.

"... But I'm still more fortunate than 99.9 percent of people in the world. That's the way I look at it."

The man has a good attitude. Catorce!

Global Warming Talk Overheated

How much CO2 do we humans add to the atmosphere? A lot less than Al Gore would have you believe.

From WND:

"Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038 percent)," said meteorologist Joseph D'Alea, the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast.

"Only 2.75 percent of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1 percent a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (plus 0.45 percent per year)," he said. "We are responsible for just 0.001 percent of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor."

Former Harvard physicist Lubos Motl added that those promoting the fear of man-made climate changes are "playing the children's game to scare each other."

"By the end of the (CO2) doubling, i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 – assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time – Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only – a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to," Motl explained.

NPR and other news outlets have stories on global warming every day, when any effects have been minimal at best. The human impact on global warming seems to be almost infinitesimal when you look at the big picture. The Chicken Little cries of "the sky is falling" are laughable.

We do need new clean energy sources, though. Not so much to protect us from global warming, but because our fossil fuel resources are going to run out someday. We need energy, and finding new sources should be a top priority. Many of the ideas of the global warming fans are ideas I share....conservation, clean alternatives to oil/coal/gas....but we need these things more to protect our economy than our atmosphere, in my opinion. I could be wrong, and I wish the global warming fans would admit as much.

image courtesy npr's flickr site

Citizen Watts, Global Warming Troublemaker

Anthony Watts decided somebody needed to check on the US's 1,221 ground weatherstations to see if they're measuring temperatures accurately. So far he's checked 227, and many of them do not meet NOAA specs, giving misleading warming information.

From Bill Steigerwald at Human Events:

"Citizen Watts may look like a troublemaker to NASA's experts but he's convinced he's on to something important. He's found no evidence that anyone except him has ever made an effort to verify the quality-control standards at every weather station site.

Until he finishes his project, Watts says, not even Jim Hansen will ever know for sure if -- as a recent scientific paper at the University of Colorado puts it -- "the use of the data from poorly sited stations provides a false sense of confidence in the robustness of the surface temperature trend assessments."

In English, that means Watts may be on the way to proving that the country is not as dangerously hot as we've been led to believe."

Interesting article, I'm sure this Watts guy is on the ball! Here's an interview with Watts from chicobeat.com

Buchanan on Bush/Rove

Pat Buchanan really sums up the blunders of Bush/Rove in another brilliant editorial:

"Sometime between Sept. 11 and his axis-of-evil address, Bush sat down and ate of the forbidden fruit of messianic globaloney. Consuming it, he got up and committed the greatest strategic blunder in American history by ordering the invasion of a country that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us.

The Bush-Rove rationale: For our survival, we had to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that we now know it did not have.".....

"In seeking a new GOP majority, Bush and Rove rejected the Nixon-Reagan model. Instead, they embraced the interventionism of Wilson, the free-trade globalism of FDR, the open-borders immigration ideas of LBJ and the budget priorities of the Great Society. It was a bridge too far for the party base.

Now, Rove walks away like some subprime borrower abandoning the house on which he can no longer make the payments. The Republican Party needs a new architect. The firm of Bush & Rove was not up to the job."

Here Here!

Decline of Empire: Sound Familiar?

"Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress."

Interesting article from the Financial Times of London....Mr. Walker is in a good position to talk about these sensitive matters, and it's patriotic of him to speak up, especially since it's a message we don't want to hear. They sky isn't falling.....yet, so we need to go ahead and face the reality of our situation now and make necessary changes, or face the cruel fate that our lessons in history have taught us.

Bono on a Train

Just heard from an old friend who lives in NYC and he writes:

"I just got out of the subway- was on the "6" train going downtown and on the train right beside me was your man Bono. Couldn't f'ing believe it."
Thanks for the tip, Stu!

This isn't Bono's first train trip...it seems he does this kinda traveling pretty often as Matt from @U2 writes in this column:

"Bono took Amtrak from D.C. to Philly the afternoon of the 21st on his way to speak with the World Affairs Council. I know, because @U2 reader Dan M. has a friend who works for Amtrak, and this friend tipped him off to Bono's arrival at 30th Street Station that afternoon, and Dan M. ended up with a brief but private audience with the biggest rock star in the world"

Read the story for the full version

George W. Ain't No Ronnie

Steve Chapman , of the Chicago Tribune has an interesting take on George W., from Human Events, the mostly conservative site that features Pat Buchanan (yay!) and Ann Coulter (boo.....nah, hisssss):

"Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of a boy so optimistic that when he woke up on Christmas morning and was confronted with a huge mound of manure, he gleefully began shoveling. "There's a pony in here someplace!" he exclaimed.

For President Bush, when it comes to Iraq, every day is Christmas day. He's been shoveling for more than four years but still fully expects that pony to pop out at any moment. On Capitol Hill, though, even Republicans are starting to suspect that the malodorous pile is that and nothing more."

Even some (real) conservatives are starting to see that George W. ain't no Ronnie.

King George W, Imperial President

Robert Scheer has an interesting article about our current president up at Alternet:

"George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress."

It's been a while since I went off on Bush, mostly because I figure that anyone left needing convincing is a lost cause. 20-30% of folks drank the Kool-Aid, and they would certainly be following Hitler if he were in George W's spot. Congress would do well to reconsider articles of impeachment....I know that would not be best for the Democratic Party, but it would be best for our country. We don't need no stinkin' king!

1987 Hit Songs

JEB Stuart Class of 1987 has a list of downloadable hist from 1987, I thought some of my classmates would enjoy these, so here you go.

Doug Marlette will be missed

Doug Marlette died in a car wreck last week. I didn't care too much for Kudzu, but his political cartoons were second to none, and his wit and wisdom will be missed. What a shame! Here's a link to his website. And here's Daily Kos's take.

Lamb Lambasts Land Laws

Henry Lamb
Henry Lamb has an interesting article about property rights and climate change up at WND:

"An official delegation from the U.S. government actually signed a U.N. document that says:

"Private land ownership is a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. ... Public control of land use is therefore indispensable. ..."

The document was signed by then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Carla A. Hills, as head of the U.S. delegation, and William K. Reilly, who became administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. This 1976 Report of Habitat I: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (subscription), contains 65 pages of specific recommendations about how governments can put an effective end to private land ownership and gain absolute control of land use.

Since then, virtually every land use policy adopted by Congress or the agencies of government has been designed to erode private property rights and grant to government the power to control all land uses. The Endangered Species Act has been hijacked and is now simply an excuse to prevent land development on private property. The Clean Water Act has been hijacked and is now another excuse to prevent the use of private land anywhere near a mud puddle. "Comprehensive planning" is another recommendation from the 1976 document that has recently come into its own, empowering government to prevent private landowners from using their own land."

I'm not one to think that the government should have no say in how land is used....zoning laws and environmental laws can be effective means to help create an orderly, sustainable society.
But look out! These draconian laws may be a distraction, and our property rights might be in more danger than the darter snail or the woolly-headed woodpecker! Click through for an interesting, succinct read from the William Burroughs look-alike. Dang badgers!

William Burroughs

Fleeting Expletives

From Wayne Friedman at TV Watch:

"From whom do you want to hear vulgarities?
From honored World War II veterans — or Bono, Cher, and Nicole Richie?"

Wait a minute Wayne! That should be: "From honored World War II veterans and Bono — or Cher and Nicole Richie?"

"...Even the FCC ruled that broadcasters shouldn’t be penalized for airing Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” movie about the invasion of Normandy during World War II, because of the repeated use of vulgarities.

The FCC said deleting the expletives “would have altered the nature of the artistic work and diminished the power, realism and immediacy of the film experience for viewers.”

But somehow when Bono at the Golden Globes feels honored, or maybe drips with sarcasm, that’s not art. Because, as we all know, the FCC knows art.

As he might say, this is really, really great — f@#king brilliant."

Bono crosses the line between respected humanitarian and potty mouth rock star... It was OK for Nixon on 60 Minutes, OK for some movies on TV, but not others....looks like a judgment call...I know, let's start a new bureaucracy to look into and regulate this so-called "speech"!

I think he's purposely poking fun at our fear of swear words.

I dig the term "fleeting expletives", that is just so funny.... Bono got away with it because they thought it was genuine, from the heart, part of his art? ....and live. I think he slipped it in there on purpose, he's done it before (1993 Grammys). He can get away with it because he says the "f" word in a "fleeting" manner. And he's Bono. Not Cher or Nicole Richie for crying out loud. Can't we just get back to thinking about poor Paris in that cold jail cell....

Ilana Mercer Hates on Bono

Angelina Jolie isn't much help for Bono in my opinion. She's not quite as smart and saavy with her desire to help poor folks in Africa, and some people like Ilana Mercer put her and other do-gooders in the same category as Bono:

"Beavering away to shape public opinion – and policy – about Africa are the likes of Angelina Jolie and Bono.
In their capacities as U.N. goodwill ambassadors, or Time magazine "Persons of the Year," in the free access they enjoy to popes and presidents, Brangelina (Jolie + the pug-faced Pitt) and Bono, and their enablers in the media (CNN's Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper), are dictating the cultural and political script vis-à-vis Africa. To use a Peggy Noonan refrain, "These people have read an article and now want to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.""

C'mon Ilana! Bono's done a lot more than read the article, he's practically written it. I'll agree that a lot of aid money sent to Africa has been wasted and many of their problems are their own doing....so? So we as Americans, as Christians, should simply refuse to help the poorest of the poor? I imagine Jesus would have a different opinion. I'm amazed when folks like Ilana tear down people who are trying to help the poorest people in the world. And she doesn't even offer any alternatives....if you're gonna tear down people who are trying their best to help Africa's poor, at least take the time to make some suggestions yourself. What should we do? Seems to me she thinks we should let them all starve and die, that the world would be a better place without them.

Ilana mentions Jesse Helms saying foreign aid is "money down a rathole". Well, Ilana, even Jesse Helms agrees with Bono now, so you'll have to find another arch-conservative to quote next time.