Wednesday - September 09, 2009

BEING OLD DOES NOT MEAN YOU’RE DEAD. THO SOME MAY WISH SO.

I won’t comment on this coz I can’t improve it. He’s worth reading every day and I do.

Old is not “Dead”

By Alan Caruba
H/T WARNING SIGNS

The most troubling aspect of President Obama’s insistence on so-called healthcare reform is the way the proposed changes will harm the interests of those on Medicare or Medicaid, all 65 years and older.

In the interest of “reform” it is clear that healthcare for the elderly will be rationed in terms of what will be covered with age a factor in whether one’s life will be saved or not through medical procedures.

Americans are now living to an average age of 78 and, of course, many are living much longer. My Mother lived to 98 and my Father to 93. Both required medical procedures towards the end of their lives and, good Democrats that they were, both appreciated the protection and benefits offered by Medicare.

I am just shy of age 72 and quite healthy. Given the genes passed onto me by both parents, I expect to live at least another twenty years, but more importantly, I expect to be writing that long as well.

I got to thinking that many now officially considered “old” at 65 made considerable contributions, often based on the fact that age had equipped them with invaluable experience.

At age 65, Winston Churchill became Britain’s Prime Minister. He is credited with leading his nation to triumph through World War II.

Others at the same age made their mark. William Henry Seward, the U.S. Secretary of State, purchased Alaska from the Russian Czar for less than two cents an acre. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time candidate for the presidency represented Tennessee in the famed Scopes “Monkey Trial.” Defending Scopes, legendary attorney, Clarence Darrow, was age 68.

George Cukor directed the Broadway show “My Fair Lady” and Laura Ingalls Wilder published the first of her popular eight-volume series, “Little House on the Prairie”, both at age 65.

At age 66, Michaelangelo completed the “Last Judgment” fresco in the Sistine Chapel and Secretary of State George Marshall announced the post-WWII European Recovery Plan that saved Europe from Soviet ambitions.

Richard Wagner composed his opera, “Parsifal” at age 69 and Noah Webster published “An American Dictionary of the English Language” at age 69. He had worked on it for 22 years and it became one of the best-selling books of all time.

At 70, Golda Meir was elected the Prime Minister of Israel. Nicolaus Copernicus was 70 when he published the result of 30 years of research, “On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres”, that changed astronomy thereafter.

Ronald Reagan, age 73, was reelected President of the United States and many of both political persuasions wish we had his wisdom and guidance these days. It was Reagan who said, “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem.”

At age 76, Thomas Jefferson began designing the buildings and curriculum of the University of Virginia. Giuseppi Verdi composed “Falstaff” at the age of 79. Actress Jessica Tandy won an Oscar at age 80 for her performance in “Driving Miss Daisy.”

I could cite many more examples, but I will close out by noting that Winston Churchill, at age 83, published the last of the four volumes of his “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Old is not “dead”, but the assault on America’s older citizens by the Obama administration will hopefully die in the chambers of Congress. If not, America’s “senior citizens”, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, will teach Obama the power of the vote in October 2010 and again in 2012.

Posted by peiper     on 09/09/2009 at 07:07 AM   
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   Sunday - September 06, 2009

Windfarms? We might as well use hamsters on treadmills.

Another good one from one of my favorites.  I doin’t always agree but then I’m not supposed to. But I try and find something on this subject every wkend, as it touches all of us in one way or another.
And btw, welcome to our German readers and congradulations on leading Europe in the hoarding of the old style light bulbs.  The bulk buying that almost stripped the stores here were bought it turns out, by Germans and exported.  Why do I bring that up here.
Well that’s quite interesting.  You see, it was a German tree hugging planet saving minister in the EU, that instituted this whole ban the bulb thing to begin with.

Anyway ... Heeeeeerrrs Peter.  (Hitchens)

The lightbulb purge will have a piffling effect on energy consumption, nothing like enough to justify the expense and inconvenience forced upon us. I suspect that it has been designed specifically to advance the cult, to make believers feel good about themselves rather than to do good – the main aim of all false religions.

Windfarms? We might as well use hamsters on treadmills
By Peter Hitchens
The Mail on Sunday

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt.

>
Irrational choice: Even Stirling Castle has not escape the new windfarm madness

But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace.

There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us to rely for our power on windmills, million upon million of them, as if we had never discovered more efficient and reliable ways of generating electricity.
Irrational choice: Even Stirling Castle has not escape the new windfarm madness
And they are succeeding. Few areas in Britain are now unthreatened by deranged projects to install intrusive, gigantic wind-farms on prominent sites.

This must be one of the first instances of a civilisation voluntarily and consciously going backwards. We might as well rely for our economic and industrial future on tens of millions of hamsters pattering frantically round treadmills. Hamsters only do this by night. Windmills only make electricity when it is windy. See the problem?

For most of us, the truth has yet to sink in. Our old lightbulbs still function, or we have stockpiled a few. And the nuclear and coal-fired power stations which keep our country going have some years yet to run before they wear out or a Brussels decree shuts them down for ever.

But the time is not far away when we will find the irrational opinions of these maniacs being forced upon us unpleasantly in our daily lives. The lights will be too dim to read by. Then they will go off for long periods of the day or night. Our computers will be down much of the time.

The well-off will buy expensive generators and our suburbs will be like Baghdad, with smelly, noisy, petrol-driven motors bursting into life every few hours as the central power shudders and fails.

Even if the prophecies of the man-made global warming cultists were proven, which they aren’t, these measures would be an idiotic response to the problem. Nuclear power, as the French well know, produces no carbon emissions and also ends dependence on Russia for gas and the Middle East for oil. And it works in a dead calm, too.

The lightbulb purge will have a piffling effect on energy consumption, nothing like enough to justify the expense and inconvenience forced upon us. I suspect that it has been designed specifically to advance the cult, to make believers feel good about themselves rather than to do good – the main aim of all false religions.

Why don’t we resist? Partly because, once again, there is now no major political party which speaks for common sense

SOURCE,THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

Posted by peiper     on 09/06/2009 at 02:45 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Environment • EUro-peons • UK •  
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   Monday - August 31, 2009

A THREAT TO THE USA?  Read and decide for yourself.

Once again H/T to Alan at Warning Signs.
I did not post here the entire editorial as it is long. I have edited for space but otherwise made NO changes.

I suggest you follow the link provided and perhaps bookmark Warning Signs.

A Russian Warns Americans Against a Communist Takeover

By Alan Caruba

There is considerable irony involved when a Russian warns Americans against what is taking place before their eyes as President Obama seeks to transform and ultimately acquire dictatorial powers by a series of steps that are both bold and obvious.

In April, Stanislav Mishin’s post on his blog, Mat Rodina, was published in Pravda. The title was “American capitalism gone with a whimper.”

You can read the commentary at
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-american_capitalism-0.

Having lived under Communist rule in the former Soviet Russia, Mishin and his fellow Russians were literally freed by the fall of that regime that began with the overthrow of the Czar in 1917 by the Bolsheviks. What followed was an experiment in Communism that killed millions of Russians as a succession of dictators, starting with Lenin, sought to impose an economic and political system that simply does not work.

Mishin enumerated the ways the path to the present effort to destroy capitalism and our political system has been laid in America.

“First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather than the classics.” There are few that would argue that the American education system is not controlled by the National Education Association, a union, and the American Federation of Teachers, a union. Both have long supported the Democrat Party. Virtually every way one can measure the system reveals its failure to educate the millions passing through government schools.

“The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama,” says Mishin. I would argue that the threat Obama poses to the U.S. Constitution and to our economy is indisputable. “His spending and money printing has been (a) record setting,” all pointing to an America that “will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.” The former preceded the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s and the latter’s money is worthless.

What better way to destroy America than to destroy the value of the U.S. dollar, the standard against which all other currencies are set? If you want to know why Obama has instituted the spending of billions in just over a half year’s time and imposed a $9 trillion deficit on the nation, you need look no further for an explanation.

Nor did it escape Mishin’s notice, having lived in a nation in which all industry was under the control of a central government, that under Obama the government now owns General Motors and that the President demanded and got the resignation of the company’s former president. Every other CEO in America got the message. No where in the Constitution will you find permission for public money to be spent in this fashion.

The ironies and the threat to our nation continue. “Prime Minister Putin…warned Obama…not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster.”

In brief, here’s the case for free market capitalism as opposed to government-run enterprises and interference.

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. It took 234 years to get it right. It is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935. It has had 74 years to get it right. It is broke. Cost of living increases to recipients will not be enacted for the next two years. It is broke.

Fannie Mae, an intrusion into the housing and mortgage market place was established in 1938. There have been 71 years to get it right. It is broke and it was a major contributing factor in the failure of the mortgage lending system and the present failures of banks across the nation. Likewise, Freddie Mac was established in 1970. After 39 years to get it right, it is broke.

The “war on poverty” set in motion in 1964 was a classic “redistribution of money” as a transfer to “the poor.” Now the nation is, for all intents and purposes, broke.

Medicare and Medicaid were established 1965. After 44 years, both are broke.

The Obama administration is allegedly seeking to “reform” both by rationing medical services to the elderly while expanding the systems to require all Americans to involuntarily purchase insurance. Universal healthcare requires more doctors. Until tort reform is enacted and until doctors can be free to practice in a free market, there will be fewer and fewer doctors.

Posted by peiper     on 08/31/2009 at 03:45 AM   
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   Thursday - August 27, 2009

IS THERE REALLY A MEAN STREAK IN MAINSTREAM AMERICA?  I MUST HAVE MISSED IT.

Well, I do believe that’s what this writer for The Independent is saying. She has btw way discovered that the left in America isn’t exactly what the left is in Europe and the UK. ??  Could’ve fooled me.  She says the American left is still quite a bit more right then Europe.  Not right enough for BMEWS.
Here, give us your take on her editorial.  In fact, you can email her if ya want to. 
This is from The Independent. 
oh yeah, catch that next to the last paragraph for sure. I kinda mention that for those who won’t read all of this.

Mary Dejevsky: A mean streak in the US mainstream

The US tolerates more inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here

When we Europeans – the British included – contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States? How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?

The second response, as automatic as the first, is to blame heartless and ignorant Republicans. To Europeans, a universal health system is so basic to a civilised society that only the loony right could possibly oppose it: the people who cling to their guns, picket abortion clinics (when they are not trying to shoot the abortionists) and block funding for birth control in the third world. All right, we are saying to ourselves, there are Americans who think like this, but they are out on an ideological limb.

If only this were true. The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle – even though it was central to his election platform – is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend – although this is a big part of it.

It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea. And they include not only mainstream Republicans, but Democrats, too. Indeed, Obama’s chief problem in seeking to extend health cover to most Americans is not Republican opposition: he thrashed John McCain to win his presidential mandate; he has majorities in both Houses of Congress. If Democrats were solidly behind reform, victory would already be his.

The unpalatable fact for Europeans who incline to think that Americans are just like us is that Democrats are not solidly behind Obama on this issue. Even many in the party’s mainstream must be wooed, cajoled and even – yes – frightened, if they are ever going to agree to change the status quo. Universal healthcare is an article of faith in the US only at what mainstream America would regard as the bleeding- heart liberal end of the spectrum.

As some of Obama’s enemies warned through the campaign – and I mean warned, not promised – this is the philosophical terrain where, his voting record suggests, this President is most at home. But many more are not. The absence from the Senate of Edward Kennedy, through illness, and Hillary Clinton, elevated to the State Department, has left his pro-reform advocacy in the legislature sorely depleted.

But there is something else at work here, too, beyond defective advocacy, and it lays bare a profound misunderstanding. Europe hailed Obama’s landslide election victory as evidence that America had reclaimed its better self, turned to the left and bade farewell to ingrained racial divisions as well. That was a benevolent, but ultimately idealistic, gloss.

Obama’s victory can indeed be seen as a reaction to eight years of conservative Republicanism under George Bush and a turn by US voters to the left. But that left is still quite a bit further right than in most of Europe. Nor was it just a leftward turn that cost John McCain the White House; it was also a rejection of the weaker candidate. Obama’s great asset was that he came across as more competent on the economy, at a time of global financial meltdown. From this side of the Atlantic, we convinced ourselves that Americans had voted with their hearts, but there was a considerable element of the wallet as well.

That wallet element helps explain the deep-seated misgivings that have surfaced about Obama’s plans for health reform. A majority of Americans believe they have adequate health cover. Their choice of job may be limited by their insurance requirements (and labour mobility reduced). And their calculations may be upset – sometimes disastrously – by accident or illness.

But with most pensioners protected by the state system known as Medicare, an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude prevails. It coexists with the fear that extending the pool of the insured, to the poorer and more illness-prone, will raise premiums for the healthy and bring queuing, or rationing, of care – which is why stories about the NHS inspire such dread. The principle that no one should be penalised financially by illness is trumped by the self-interest of the majority, then rationalised by the argument that health is a matter of personal responsibility.

The point is that, when on “normal”, the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.

This transatlantic difference goes far beyond the healthcare debate. Consider the give-no-quarter statements out of the US on the release of the Lockerbie bomber – or the continued application of the death penalty, or the fact that excessive violence is far more common a cause for censorship of US films in Europe than sex. Or even, in documents emerging from the CIA, a different tolerance threshold where torture and terrorism are concerned.

Some put the divergence down to the ideological rigidity that led Puritans and others to flee to America in the first place; others to the ruthless struggle for survival that marked the early settlement years and the conquest of the West. Still others see it as the price the US pays for its material success. What it means, though, is that if and when Obama gets some form of health reform through, it will reflect America’s fears quite as much as its promise. And it is unlikely to be a national service that looks anything like ours.

MARY

Posted by peiper     on 08/27/2009 at 11:30 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • UK •  
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   Monday - August 17, 2009

The New Dark Ages of Britain & The U.S.

H/T Warning Signs
Reading this is not a waste of your time. Take a look.
It’s long so see LINK for the rest.

The New Dark Ages of Britain & The U.S.

By Alan Caruba

I have long believed that the environmental movement, particularly in America, is quite literally an internal enemy, no less insidious than the efforts of the former Soviet Union to infiltrate spies and agents of influence into our government to affect policy.

I know that sounds harsh, but one needs only look at Great Britain where environmentalism has turned that once great nation into a virtual police state where every bizarre and insane environmental policy is culminating in a nation that will soon be experiencing blackouts and brownouts to its entire system of providing electricity.

“In the frigid opening days of 2009, Britain’s electricity demand peaked at 59 gigawatts. Just over 45% of that came from power plants fuelled by gas from the North Sea. A further 35% or so came from coal, less than 15% came from nuclear power and the rest from a hotchpotch of other sources.” The problem England faces, according to the August 8th edition of The Economist, is that it will soon be dependent on “Vladimir Putin’s deeply unreliable and corrupt Russia.”

This report comes when both the Russians and the Chinese have signed agreements with Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida, to begin to explore and extract its offshore oil. America, however, denies access to 85% of all of its offshore oil and natural gas reserves along its extensive east and west coasts. It further denies access to its huge deposits of coal in its Midwestern States. We import 60% of the oil we consume; much of it comes from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.

There hasn’t been a new refinery built in the United States since the 1970s. The bulk of our electric grid for the distribution of electricity was built in the 1950s and 60s. In the last days of his administration President Bush rescinded the ban on offshore exploration and extraction, but that ban has been reinstated by the Obama administration.

As The Economist noted, regarding the United Kingdom’s energy policy, “this is almost criminal.” It is no less so for America, a nation’s whose success has been based on vast amounts of coal, oil and natural gas. It is coal that provides just over 50% of our electricity. It is nuclear power that proves another 20%. The rest comes from our own hotchpotch of gas and hydroelectric power.

In recent years, leading environmental organizations have been crowing about having thwarted the building of more than one hundred coal-fired new plants. Wilderness areas like Alaska’s ANWR have been put off-limits to extraction despite estimated reserves of oil in the billions of barrels.

Comparable areas in America known to have vast reserves of coal have been put off-limits as well. The process of securing the permits to build a nuclear plant has slowed it to a crawl and often meets with NIMBY (not in my backyard) resistance.

If a foreign enemy denied this “master resource” of energy to America, we would go to war with it, but the enemy is internal and, at present, it occupies the White House and is in control of the Congress.

Posted by peiper     on 08/17/2009 at 08:11 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Environment •  
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   Friday - August 14, 2009

Does anybody else notice a problem here?

First, go to to Hot Air Pundit. Watch the videos.

Posted by Christopher     on 08/14/2009 at 02:06 PM   
Filed Under: • Commies • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Editorials • Government • Corruption and Greed •  
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   Tuesday - August 11, 2009

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from Richard Littlejohn. A worthy read.

Littlejohn is one of the very best at what he does, and I have yet to find him mistaken, unfair or wrong. Granted, I’m partial so I might miss something here and there. I might, but I kinda doubt that.
My previous post on this subject will with this editorial, make things even more clear for American readers. You folks at home in the USA have no idea how serious this problem is.  Sure, we have our leaky borders and problems with immigration both legal and otherwise.  But nothing like this. 
I seriously doubt America would have this exact same problem. First, Americans wouldn’t put up with it from the get-go.  I don’t think we’d allow it to become so well entrenched.  But then again, ya never do know for certain. Do we?

Some translations for those who may not be familiar with terms.
A boot sale would be about the same as a flea market.

Tarmac gang:  Often guys will arrive in a truck loaded with asphalt and claim that they have left over from a previous job and will relay driveway cheap.
It’s that alright.

Wigan Council’s consumer watchdogs are warning residents to be on their guard against a gang of unscrupulous workers who are charging elderly and vulnerable people top dollar for rock bottom work.

In the past week alone an 83 year-old Lowton woman has already shelled out more than £300 for sub-standard repair work to her drive.

While neighbours in Whelley have also been stung by the same firm to the tune of hundreds of pounds for pretty shoddy block paving work.

Residents of an Oxfordshire town are being warned about a group of men who are visiting homes and offering to tarmac driveways.

Are you sitting comfortably? Let’s go tarmacking with Teabag, Tess and Toby

By Richard Littlejohn
Last updated at 10:26 AM on 11th August 2009

Are you sitting comfortably, children? Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time there was Janet and John, who lived with their mummy and daddy in a neat suburban house. Their harmless adventures helped millions of children to read.

Now meet Tess the Traveller, her son Toby and their dog Teabag, the new stars of a reading book for three to seven-year-olds being distributed in primary schools across the country.

It’s part of a government initiative aimed at promoting tolerance and understanding towards gipsies and travellers.

Needless to say, Tess, Toby and Teabag lead an airbrushed, romanticised existence. This well-scrubbed trio roam the land, attending traditional gipsy dances, horse fairs and even an eco-camp.

Nowhere is there any mention of Toby’s father. Tess is a strong, capable single mum who can turn her hand to anything, including mending a flat tyre on their caravan.

The ‘diversity’ brigade can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that fathers have any part to play in bringing up children. I’m surprised that they didn’t make Tess a lesbian, who became pregnant by artificial insemination using sperm donated by a transgendered friend.

If they were really striving for authenticity, Tess would be married, probably from the age of 14. Travellers are one of the last bastions of both the nuclear and extended family.

In a nod to accuracy, Tess makes her money at car boot sales, although the stories don’t elaborate on where she gets her merchandise. Car boot sales are notorious for the disposal of stolen property.

Here in the real world, Tess would be claiming welfare benefits while pocketing the cash without declaring it to the taxman.

She would be driving a £50,000 Toyota Landcruiser (running on red agricultural diesel) with a stolen lawn-mower in the boot; living on either an illegal camp site or in a subsidised council house; and running a Tarmacking gang.

Toby wouldn’t look like one of the gang from Scooby Doo. He’d be a snot-nosed scruff begging outside the local pound shop, accompanied by Teabag, a snarling, mangy mutt on a piece of string, rather than a playful contender for Crufts.

Over the past few years, travellers have been transformed into a protected species, their lifestyle subsidised and proselytised.

They are treated as an oppressed ethnic minority, even though the term ‘travelling community’ encompasses everyone from genuine gipsies and Irish tinkers to Roma criminal gangs and assorted hippie throwback layabouts.

One thing they all seem to have in common is a reluctance to travel anywhere - or, at least, in the case of the Irish and Eastern European contingents, to stay put once they’ve arrived in England, where a buffet of benefits is laid before them.

Many live blameless lives of self-sufficiency, in particular law-abiding circus folk, who move from town to town providing innocent pleasure at rip-off prices. Others, though, are a menace to society, earning a living from dubious practice and outright criminality.

I bet the horse fair attended by Tess, Toby and Teabag didn’t have to be stormed by a police armed response unit, as happened recently at a similar gathering in Kenilworth, following reports that revellers were firing guns and shoplifting.

There’s a whole industry dedicated to pandering to the needs of travellers, even though most contribute absolutely nothing to society.

Yesterday, as Irish tinkers demonstrated in Basildon, Essex, against a long-overdue order to evict them from Europe’s largest illegal settlement, it was revealed that £4.7million of Lottery money has been spent helping travellers to subvert the planning laws.

Wherever these camps are established, there is invariably an increase in crime. Even when they do move on, they leave behind scorched earth and piles of rubbish.

Yet the travellers are indulged by the authorities, while law-abiding, taxpaying local householders who voice their complaints are routinely threatened with prosecution for ‘racism’.

As I reported recently, Warwickshire Constabulary even threw a pikeys’ picnic on the lawn of police headquarters in an effort to improve relations with the ‘community’ following the shootout at the Kenilworth horse fair.

Elsewhere, police have been offering free driving lessons to travellers to try to persuade them to take a test, tax and insure their cars, all of which are apparently alien to their ‘culture’.

Mobile benefit offices have been set up at illegal camps to spare them the inconvenience of having to travel in to town to sign on. And the NHS has ordered that gipsies be fast-tracked at GPs’ surgeries.

But our children won’t be reading about any of this in the fantasy world of Tess, Toby and Teabag.

Are you still sitting comfortably?

LITTLEJOHN

Posted by peiper     on 08/11/2009 at 11:58 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Travelers/Gypsies/Squatters • UK •  
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   Friday - August 07, 2009

TAX AND SPENDING AND LOTS OF BOTH

Check this site daily. This fellow is good.

By Alan Caruba

We sometimes forget that the primary reason we live in the United States of America and not some British Commonwealth nation is that the people who fought our Revolution got fed up with all the taxes that King George and Parliament kept imposing on them. No taxation without representation was the rallying cry.

Now all we seem to have, whether at the federal, state or local level is endless taxation on virtually everything we purchase, use or own. In many cases those taxes have risen obscenely in recent days.

The new tax on tobacco products is, we’re told, intended for our own good, making them so expensive we will give up smoking. Other proposed taxes on “fast food” and even soda are passed off as being an incentive to eat in a more healthy fashion. Our personal health is our business, not the government’s and surely not an excuse to tax us!

There have always been “sin” taxes on things like tobacco and alcoholic beverages, but thanks to the profligate spending of all legislatures everywhere, these taxes are rising to obscene levels, unrelated to anything than a desperate effort to fill gaps in the budget.

Neither the states, nor the federal government seem to understand the need to STOP SPENDING. Every new “entitlement” program, like the proposed healthcare “reform” just imposes more and more taxation, and creates larger debt.

Here’s a list of just some of the taxes we pay:

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Excise Taxes
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline TaxGross Receipts Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges re IRS Penalties
Liquor Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property TaxService Charge Tax
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax
Sales Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

In my home state of New Jersey, the tax per gallon of wine and spirits increased 25% this month. That’s about $5.50 for liquor and 87.5 cents per gallon of wine. New Jerseyeans are famous for being among the most taxed citizens in the nation. No wonder some of us drink! We have exorbitantly high property taxes, along with income and sales taxes. Born and bred here, I remain mostly out of inertia and old age.

Now, in President Obama’s words, “we’re broke” and the answer he and Congress propose is to raise taxes while increasing the national debt by trillions so that your children’s children will be born having to pay it off.

The history of the Great Depression and sheer common sense argue against this.

At the same time, the federal government is taking ownership of a large piece of the automotive industry, owns a majority interest in a huge insurance company and is owed billions in TARP money by banks, investment houses, and AIG.

The Democrats want to take over healthcare in America.

The Democrats want to put a tax on all energy use.

The Democrats are even proposing to set how much executives can be paid.

There is a word for this. It’s communism.

There has long been talk of “a flat tax” and a “value-added tax.” The former is advocated by Steve Forbes and, if he’s for it, it is probably a good idea. The latter is favored by European nations and is a form of sales tax.

The great problem with all taxes is that, once imposed, they are rarely, if ever, repealed. The profligate spending by state and federal legislatures is the problem.

What is wrong with this picture? EVERYTHING!

WARNING SIGNS BLOG

Posted by peiper     on 08/07/2009 at 11:05 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Editorials • Taxes •  
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   Monday - July 27, 2009

admiration faculty and deans feel toward themselves.

I can’t think of a single thing to add to this. Can you?

It’s late ... leaving the net for now.

Cheers.

Why Some PhDs Are Jerks

By Alan Caruba
WARNING SIGNS BLOG SITE

July 27, 2009

I was talking with a friend about the latest hot topic involving Prof. Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department.

We both agreed that some of the stupidest people we have ever known were PhDs who too frequently turned out to be over-educated fools.

In this country, we have been taught to revere anyone with the title of doctor, starting with physicians and working our way through the maze of doctors of law, education, music, library science, and the long list of fields of a study that grant these degrees.

These days physicians leave medical school owing about $100,000 on the average and, if the president’s healthcare reform passes, they will never be able to pay it back no matter how long they are in practice. Having to pay $200,000 for insurance against malpractice every year has done more to drive up the cost of medical care than anything else.

I used to work for an institution of higher knowledge, a well-respected institute of technology and, while I came to respect the technical achievements of those pursuing engineering or architecture degrees, I also learned that many of those teaching these ancient skills and modern technologies often displayed all the personal failures of judgment and deportment of those far less educated than they.

The one thing one learns in a college or university is that the admiration which its faculty and deans feel toward themselves. It is their bulwark against the real world where people are actually growing, inventing, making, and selling things.

The problem, as my friend noted, is that PhDs may know a great deal about a particular thing, they are often totally out of their league when it comes to extrapolating that niche of knowledge to practical matters or the great issues of the world.

The recent passing of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for Lyndon B. Johnson is a case in point. A good and decent man, McNamara was a wunderkind of the Ford Motor Company who had previously taught at Harvard. He was one of “the best and the brightest” brought into government by John F. Kennedy.

The re-airing of a C-Span interview with him made clear that he went to his grave knowing that he, President Johnson, and his colleagues had been quite thoroughly wrong about expanding the Vietnam War beyond the provision of U.S. military advisors. One can be very gifted in an area of expertise, but that does not necessarily transfer to real world, real time situations.

Moving forward in time to the present, President Obama has surrounded himself with lots of PhDs and each one is just weirder than the next. Dr. John Holdren, his science advisor, once advocated putting stuff in the food supply that would reduce the fertility rate. His Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, is a Nobel Laureate who thinks painting all our roofs white will stave off global warming. His Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is hell bent on ensuring that not a drop of oil is sucked out of the vast U.S. reserves, nor a single new ton of coal if he has anything to say about it.

Barely a day goes by when one of these loons says something so stupid that you have cause to fear for the future of the republic.

The reason “Joe the Plumber” made all those headlines during the campaign was that he was not a PhD. He was a working man with a very useful skill and he was smart enough to know that Obama was a…how can I say this nicely? Someone not telling the truth and a Marxist.

Prof. Gates suffers from the hubris that goes with being a Harvard professor. He has made his reputation on the basis of his research about the Negro race in America. Any ghetto homeboy could have told him to be polite to the police officer, but Prof. Gates flew into a rage when asked to identify himself and continued to hurl the racism charge at a police officer who was immediately defended by his Black and Hispanic colleagues.

President Obama, despite saying he was unfamiliar with the details of the incident, could not resist visiting the theme of racial profiling. We are now decades passed the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement but the beat goes on.

America used to be a meritocracy. Now the nation is so heavily into “diversity” that we are dumbing down the standards for everyone from firemen to surgeons.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution when some PhD advises you on anything more complex than your digital camera. It is said that a little education can be a dangerous thing, but too much education can actually blind those chosen to lead the nation and teach its youth to the lessons of history and to plain old common sense.

Posted by peiper     on 07/27/2009 at 02:46 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Education •  
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   Tuesday - July 21, 2009

WHO IS THIS GUY SHOUTING AT AND WHAT’S HE SHOUTING ABOUT?

Off yesterday ...  problems,problems and it kinda looks like there might be continued water supply problem with the new house being built next door.

I could write about it again, and I will do later.  One of those things where I really have to get a photo and right now the construction crew are there.
Will wait till 4pm when they leave.
Meanwhile .....

Who is this fellow and why is he shouting?

I found this nifty site:  http://www.anxietycenter.com/ and yes, it is political. No it isn’t liberal.
Now why there’s a connect between that and the site this is on, Warning Signs , I don’t know.

I admit I get a bit lost in numbers and charts that aren’t related directly to the stock market market the Q’s.  But I understand this okay. Oh boy do I understand this.

Call Him Irresponsible
By Alan Caruba

Is it just me or does President Obama look and sound more desperate with every passing day? He thought he could fool all of the people all of the time and it turns out that he can’t.

Mark your calendar for Saturday, September 12, 2009. That’s when a Washington, D.C. protest march is planned. Led by FreedomWorks, their website says they will be joined by many other national co-sponsors such as the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Young America’s Foundation, and Tea Party Patriots, to name just a few.

This is why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

I doubt that President Obama will be among the speakers that day, although he has been out on the stump of late trying to convince Americans that things will improve if the government is given control over the nation’s health system. He’s already nationalized part of the auto industry, a major insurance company, banks, and probably little Bobby’s lemonade stand in front of his home.

Obama’s relentless assault on the private sector of the nation’s economy can be seen in the following percentages of the Gross Domestic Product: Healthcare represents 17%, energy is 9.8%, and financial services are 8% of GDP. These are the sectors that have been targeted for takeover by the Obama administration. It adds up to 35% of GDP!

In May, columnist Robert Samuelson, writing in Investor’s Business Daily, asked “Just how much government debt does a president have to endorse before he’s labeled ‘irresponsible’?”

“The GOVERNMENT has done this to us. Obama has exponentially increased the problem.” ( Warning Signs)

See the rest of this editorial here > WARNING SIGNS

Posted by peiper     on 07/21/2009 at 05:32 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Economics • Editorials •  
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   Wednesday - July 15, 2009

THE NEW RIGHT, ER, LEFT .  Steyn on Britain and Europe

Wish I had the talent/brains to write like this guy. Oh well, thankfully I can read and so here with no comments cause I don’t need to make em,
is the truth, the whole truth and nuthin’ but .... from Mark Steyn.

THE NEW RIGHT, ER, LEFT
Steyn on Britain and Europe

Are you getting just a teensy bit tired of the ol’ “Whither The Right?” navel-gazing? Even with our good friends at The New York Times, The Washington Post et al so eager to offer helpful advice, there’s a limit to how much pondering of conservatism’s future a chap can take. So how about, just for a change, “Whither the left?”

Exhibit A: The European parliamentary elections. The Continent’s economy has taken a far bigger clobbering than America’s: Capitalism is dead, declared Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. In France, President Sarkozy agrees, while being careful to identify the deceased as “Anglo-American capitalism”. And woe betide any Continental foolish enough to have got into bed with it: In Spain, the unemployment rate is 17 per cent and rising.

In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes and savings vanish, the downtrodden masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead, the Euro-left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a significant chunk of the electorate switched to the “far right” – the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican Party adopt it, but no doubt within a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement, and governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and the whole brand would go to hell.

Perhaps it’s just as well. On closer inspection, Europe’s “far right” doesn’t seem to go very far at all. The British National Party’s parliamentary victories are a very belated breakthrough for Fascism, for which in Britain there were few takers back in the Thirties. So what do they stand for? Well, they won’t accept blacks or Asians as members. Typical right-wing racists, eh? Also, they want protectionist laws limiting the import of foreign goods. And they favor giving workers shares in their bosses’ companies. And they want to nationalize the public utilities, railroad companies and so forth. Economic protectionism. Worker cooperatives. State ownership. Boy, these right-wing nuts with their crazy ideas on free market capitalism.

If the British elections are beginning to sound like the dinner-theatre production of Jonah Goldberg’s book, you’re right – if by dinner you had in mind tripe, pork scratchings and mushy peas washed down with 14 pints of brown ale and a knife fight. Economically, the BNP is the Labour Party before the Blairite metrosexual makeover, and its voting base comes all but entirely from the old white working-class abandoned by “New Labour” in its pursuit of more fashionable identity groups.

Of course, economic protectionism is not its principal appeal. But yoke economic protectionism to cultural protectionism, and you’ve got an electorally viable combination. These are bad times, but they’re not just bad economically. According to a YouGov poll, the average BNP voter is a manual worker with an annual household income of 27,000 pounds – or about 2,000 pounds less than the national median. Two thousand quid isn’t to be sniffed at, but it doesn’t explain why these voters were willing to take a flyer on an openly racist party universally reviled by the media and political class and banished from public discourse.

England has (or had) a three-party system: Labour, Liberals, Tories. But on any number of issues – the European Union, immigration, crime, the remorseless one-way multiculturalism under which what were homogenous white working-class communities 40 years ago Islamize ever more rapidly with each passing day – on all these issues, the big three parties plus the BBC and the rest of the elites are in complete agreement: We don’t want to talk about it. Since the election, the grand panjandrums of the Palace of Westminster have been competing to out-Lady Bracknell each other in professing how “horrified” they are by the BNP’s success. Such protestations are invariably accompanied by ostentatious recital of their own multiculti bona fides, nicely parodied by Ed West in The Daily Telegraph: “I was just saying how awful the BNP were to my Polish cleaner yesterday. She agreed, as did my Chinese nanny, Wen or Yen, or whatever her name is. My Brazilian catamite wasn’t that bothered.”

If 15 per cent of the US electorate had voted for the American Fatherland Front or some such, you’d never hear the end of it from Le Monde and The Guardian and all the rest. But the Euro-elites have adjusted to the knuckledraggers’ lese-majeste, and are already congratulating themselves on holding the “far right”’s vote down to the low double-digits. It won’t be that low next time, but they’ll adjust to that, too. You can’t blame ‘em: It’s easier to do that than re-thinking your entire worldview, never mind trying to figure out anything you could actually do about these issues.

I doubt the new kids on the block will be able to do anything, either.  But, for a while, there will be votes in impotent rage, and the economic-&-cultural protectionism twofer will eat deep into the mainstream left’s base. They in turn will not change – for, in Britain and elsewhere, they have determined to celebrate diversity even unto societal death.

MARK STEYN

Posted by peiper     on 07/15/2009 at 02:24 PM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff • Editorials • International •  
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   Tuesday - July 14, 2009

CIA drew up plans to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, Cheney kept mum, and the F~!!#n libs are PO’d

Well screw the bastards.  God how I HATE some of the dems mentioned in this article. Woo-freeken- hoo.  Someone kept a secret.

Let the Dems know and so does the enemy.

Hey you Trotsky loving ,tree hugging, traitorous swine Liberal left libtard gas bags in power.  I really want you ALL to stop breathing right this minute!

I see NOTHING wrong with what the CIA planned or what Cheney kept from Congress.  Those asswipes might be as great a danger to the USA as the Taliban.

The CIA drew up secret plans for an undercover team to assassinate key al-Qaeda figures around the world, it has been claimed.

By Alex Spillius in Washington
Source is The Telegraph

The agency is said to have spent time planning and possibly training operatives for the mission in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
A small unit examined the potential for killing al-Qaeda members, despite the fact Gerald Ford banned assassinations following CIA abuses in Latin America in the 1970s, according to former intelligence officials.

Advocates of the plan wanted to create co-ordinated teams of CIA agents and special forces troops to hunt down terrorist leaders.
Details of the scheme are said to have been withheld from Congress on the orders of former vice president Dick Cheney.
“It was straight out of the movies,” one ex-official told the Wall Street Journal. “It was like: Let’s kill them all.”

The CIA is said to have been acting on a 2001 presidential legal finding, which authorised the agency to pursue such efforts. The initiative never became fully operational and according to one former official met with scepticism from George W Bush.

But it was not ruled out completely until Leon Panetta, the new CIA director appointed by President Barack Obama, learned of it last month.
“We are not commenting on the substance of the effort,” said George Little, a spokesman for the CIA, adding that “a candid dialogue with Congress is very important to the director… and the agency”.
But Democrats in Congress have expressed fury that the intended programme was never revealed.

Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the senate intelligence committee, said: “We were kept in the dark. That’s something that should never, ever happen again.”
She said that Mr Panetta had informed her committee of the programme at a closed hearing in late June when he also disclosed that Mr Cheney had ordered officials not to brief Congress.
Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “I think it’s impossible to just leave it lay when you have something like this.”

Oh right. Feinstein and that total phony bastard Leahy. Two absolute paragons of virtue.

But with many Democrats and human right groups maintaining pressure, the controversy has refused to go away.

Eliminate both groups and the controversy will go away.

Charles Schumer, Democratic senator for New York, said: “Where there are egregious violations, you can’t just brush them under the rug.”

Oh YES you can! 

Having trouble making a link to that article above but it comes from The Telegraph.

Now then ....  All that and another article on the CIA brought me to this cartoon. And it’s a good one.

Toon and article are from The Independent.

The Big Question: What’s gone wrong at the CIA, and should it be abolished?

By Rupert Cornwell

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Almost from its inception in 1947, at the start of the Cold War, the CIA has made news

Why are we asking this now?

The CIA is currently embroiled in two controversies that go to the heart of the problems surrounding the world’s largest intelligence agency. It is accused of keeping Congress in the dark about a secret post-9/11 project, on the orders of the former vice-president Dick Cheney and probably in violation of the law. Meanwhile the Justice Department is moving towards a criminal investigation of whether CIA operatives illegally tortured captured terrorist suspects. A rule of thumb about an intelligence service might be: the less you hear about it, the better it’s probably doing its job. Instead, the CIA seems to be eternally in the headlines.

But hasn’t that always been the case?

Indeed. Almost from its inception in 1947, at the start of the Cold War, the agency has made news. In 1953, it staged the Operation Ajax coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran (with repercussions that continue to this day). In 1961 came the humiliating failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the most spectacular of many unavailing efforts by the CIA to get rid of Fidel Castro.

After other abuses were revealed, including the agency’s tangential involvement in Watergate, the agency’s sins were subjected to an unprecedented public investigation by the Church Committee, under Senator Frank Church of Idaho, in the mid-1970s. But that did not prevent further scandals, notably the 1985/86 Iran-Contra affair, in which the CIA had an important role.

Oh right. Frank Church. That silly looking pile of shit. I was sooooo happy when he croaked his last. I hope it was painful. Him and that fat loud mouthed Bela fat face Abzug.  She was even worse looking then Church. Mealy mouthed bastards both.

So why doesn’t the CIA work better?

One reason is the historic fragmentation of US intelligence operations. At the last count, 16 separate government agencies were involved in intelligence. Of them, the CIA has always been the most important, but formally only primus inter pares. The consequence was bureaucratic infighting that severely strained relations with the Pentagon and with the FBI in particular. The inability of the CIA and the FBI to share information was one reason why 9/11 went undetected, and although the Intelligence Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2004, was supposed to address that, it only did so up to a point.

SEE THE REST HERE

See the link for the rest of the article. It really isn’t bad.

Posted by peiper     on 07/14/2009 at 11:13 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Editorials •  
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I did a previous post before receiving another three newspapers, The result of which is this ……

Even the liberal sometimes left , The TIMES of London, has claimed that the forces fighting overseas are not being fully supported and the govt. has shortchanged the military.

All the papers today making the same charge although I haven’t seen the far left Trotsky Guardian, nor do I want to. I’m sure they must have a different take.
OK, maybe I should Google them and see before I make that claim.

Anyway ... this very telling cartoon say as much as words.

THE MAIL

Littlejohn’s lead headline reads;

THEY’RE PAYING THE BLOOD PRICE OF PUTTING WELFARE BEFORE WARFARE.

Here’s an excerpt from his excellent column in today’s Mail.

LITTLEJOHN
The Mail
14 July

Nobody really knows what they’re fighting for any more, other than their fierce loyalty to their mates and their regiment.
Post 9/11, we thought we knew the clear objectives of the invasion of Afghanistan. It was to obliterate the Taliban and smash the Al Qaeda training camps, which were churning out terrorists to attack the West.

That seemed a noble and achievable task, even though anyone who has studied history, or even read the Flashman novels, knew it was fraught with danger and potential disaster.

Now what? The Taliban is back and Al Qaeda flourishes across the border in the badlands of Pakistan, where the coalition fears to tread. We’re told that our troops are there to support Afghanistan’s dubious democracy and defeat the international heroin trade.

We are led to believe that it’s a kind of triumph that Afghan women are free not to wear the burka, their former symbol of oppression, even as the burka becomes a common sight on the streets of Britain - which we are invited to celebrate as a symbol of our liberal democracy.
Go figure.

If that really is what it was all about, it would have been better simply to have let the Americans carpet-bomb the place back to the Stone Age than sacrifice a single British soldier.

Brown has never shown much enthusiasm for the military and has always been reluctant to make proper provision for the defence of the realm - slashing spending; scrapping historic regiments; allowing married quarters to become slums; and condemning wounded servicemen to be treated in civilian hospitals, where they have been abused by Muslim orderlies.

THE REST IS HERE

We Americans just don’t know because it wouldn’t be reported, what the Brits are going through and what an uphill battle their military is fighting in order to get the gear they need and the troops needed to continue. The PM is sending another 700 and that’s ONLY TEMPORARY. They’ve asked for two thousand but nobody is listening. Meanwhile, the body count mounts.

Posted by peiper     on 07/14/2009 at 10:10 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • UK • War On Terror •  
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   Sunday - July 12, 2009

Too early to write off Sarah Palin. She will be back, says Leonard Doyle of The Telegraph.

Never did care for Letterman and never thought he was funny.  But apparently many think boring is funny so I’m in a minority or he wouldn’t have that job.

This was a long piece and so I didn’t post all of it. The rest is at the link below.

Sarah Palin may have quit as governor of Alaska, but after gauging the mood in Washington, Leonard Doyle says it’s too early to write her off

By Leonard Doyle
Published: 9:30PM BST 11 Jul 2009

Last Tuesday, Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin showed up on a beach in a fisherman’s bib and waders, hoping to clear the air about her decision to quit her job by the end of the month. But instead of providing the answer to whether she intends to launch a “Palin for President” bid for the White House in 2012, she became fodder for David Letterman, the late-night comedian.

“Is it just me, or is anybody else here having naughty thoughts about Sarah Palin in those waders?” he asked, pointing to endlessly looped footage of the telegenic governor clothed in rubber.

A few weeks ago he was advising her to update her “slutty flight-attendant look” and made an outrageous on-air sexual jibe about her daughter, which he later only half-apologised for.

When the jeering died down, it was not immediately clear whether Palin still had her eyes on the White House. Some of the governor’s friends believe her real aim is to develop a lucrative career on the lecture circuit, perhaps with her own TV talk show – indeed Levi Johnston, the estranged father of Palin’s grandchild, claimed last week that he had heard her talk several times of how nice it would be to take advantage
of the lucrative deals currently on offer. But her currency is based on the likelihood that she will declare herself as a presidential candidate some time next year.

And if anyone from small-town America can grow up to become president, surely it is Sarah Palin. She remains by far the most attractive woman in US politics. Even in her grungy, blood-streaked overalls, she cut a compelling figure for the cameras. But why she quit the top job with 18 months still left to serve remains a mystery.

Speaking to the journalist Andrea Mitchell, she said it was because she “loves Alaska”. She then complained bitterly of multiple and frivolous ethics investigations which had effectively paralysed her administration. The governor was also incensed at the growing mockery of her infant, Trig, who has Down’s syndrome.

America’s liberal elite chortled at the explanations. When someone pointed out that she shot her first rabbit on her back porch aged just 10, the media deemed that, at 45, she had shot herself in both feet.

More jeers were to follow every time the governor updated her thoughts on Twitter. In one early morning burst, she wrote: “Couple of thoughts for the day on beautiful bright AK morn: ‘You have to sacrifice to win. That’s my philosophy in six words.’ “

The governor’s BlackBerry produces half a dozen such haikus on any given day.

“Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy,” was how The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd summed up the situation. Vanity Fair magazine, the bible of America’s chattering classes, dissected what it called Governor Palin’s “narcissistic personality disorder”. On the cable news channel MSNBC, someone described Governor Palin as “incompetent”.

But it was Maureen Dowd’s spoof column, headlined “Sarah’s Secret Diary”, that captured the condescension in which so many sophisticates view her. “No one understands me. It’s like I’m speaking some Eskimo dialect or something,” Ms Dowd wrote, channelling Governor Palin’s style. “Andrea Mitchell follows me all the way to Kanakanak Beach and I get a French manicure and set up this huge photo op for her, even though she spooked the salmon.”

The liberal caricature of Governor Palin has previously been that she is a hopelessly erratic leader. Now she was being redefined as a “quitter” who could not stand the heat of political battle, and is therefore unfit for the Presidency.

The media is often a poor predictor of events in the US. It was slow to identify Barack Obama’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination and the Presidency. It completely missed the story of the global economic collapse. And thus predictions about the end of Sarah Palin’s political life seem premature.

Even though the Democrats believe they are unassailable in the face of a leaderless Republican Party, the country’s mood is fickle. There are signs that the tide is already turning against President Obama in some areas as he struggles to end the worst recession since the 1930s. In Iowa, a key bellwether state, his polling numbers are declining sharply.

THE REST OF THIS EDITORIAL HERE

Posted by peiper     on 07/12/2009 at 01:29 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Sarah Palin •  
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