COULD HILLARY VANISH IN A PUFF OF SMOKE?
Most pundits in Washington have already conceded the Democrat nomination to Sen. Clinton because of the large leads she holds in national opinion polls. But that lead is illusory, because normal people don't pay much attention to politics a year before the election. It's not a surprise that there are a lot of undecideds in the national polls, or that the frontrunners in both parties are the candidates with the highest name recognition. The polls in Iowa -- where a higher proportion of voters is paying attention, because the Iowa caucuses are less than two months away -- tell a different story. There, Hillary Clinton's lead over Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is within the margin of error. Sen. Obama is so wet behind the ears dolphins could swim there. But he's a likeable guy, and people tend to vote for the candidate they like.
Chapter Thirty-Two: “WE HAVE KILLED MALINCHE!”
[After an absurdly long bout of inexcusable procrastination, Chapter Thirty-Two of The Jade Steps in finally here. There are only two more chapters to go: The Sowing of the Whirlwind, and La Malinche, followed by an Epilogue. The end is in sight!] The Jade Steps Chapter Thirty Two: "We Have Killed Malinche!" Cortez lay awake in his bedchambers at his headquarters in Tepeaca. He and his forces had returned from Huaquechula in time to celebrate All Saints Day and pray to those who had achieved the beatific vision in heaven that this "ultimate end of human existence" might possibly be granted to them when they die. That was yesterday. Today, they held the Feast of All Souls Day, to pray for those departed Christian souls being cleansed of their sins in purgatorium. For some reason, he had felt an unusual uneasiness during the prayers at Mass, which he expressed to Doña Marina. Now he was even more uneasy, for where was she? Gone on one of her evening learning expeditions. This one was taking too long. He wished that she was next to him right now. Suddenly she was. She had burst wordlessly into the room, quickly removed her dress, and snuggled up to him in their bed. A look into Cortez's eyes told her what he had been thinking. And when he looked back into hers, he knew something was wrong. He waited for her to tell him.
ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING ABOUT $100 OIL
Yesterday (11/08), the Wall Street Journal ran an article giving ten reasons Why $100 Can't Float. They were good, persuasive reasons. Yet taken together, they were not sufficiently persuasive as they ignored the political dimension of the problem. Put in a nutshell, we have near $100 oil instead of energy independence at a fraction of the cost because Congress is an obstacle rather than a solution to the problem. Right here in America, we have enormous energy reserves of coal, natural gas, liquid oil, and oil shale. With foreign oil now so expensive, it should be easy to produce our own energy at far less cost. And it will be easy if Congress does three things:
MOSLEM TERRORIST DRUG LORDS WITH NUKES
How's that for your basic nightmare scenario? Welcome to Pakistan's future. And for once, the Moonbats are right. It is Bush's fault. It is not, of course, Bush's fault that Pakistan is a make-believe country ludicrously constructed by the colonial British, as we learned in The Lunacy of a British Legacy. It's not his fault that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI - the Pak CIA) created the Taliban as a joint business venture to run the Afghan heroin trade (as we learned about in The Bourne Absurdity). But it is his fault for not eliminating Afghanistan's poppy fields, which are capitalizing the Islamist maelstrom engulfing Pakistan. That's because the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, along with the family's business partners in New Jersey, are making millions from Afghan heroin as well. All the media attention is now on Pervez Musharraf and his consolidation of power, with predictable puerile moaning about his "threat to democracy." Naturally, almost no big media attention is paid to the heroin drug money fueling the crisis. If they did, reporters' attention might better be directed away from the riotous streets of Islamabad and towards a McMansion on a leafy quiet street in Mendham, New Jersey.
BESLAN IN AMERICA?
On Sept. 1, 2004, Chechens affiliated with al Qaeda seized a middle school in Beslan, Russia. In the three day siege, 334 people --most of them children -- were killed. Could something like that happen here? * In May of 2006, two Saudi students at the University of South Florida boarded a school bus. They were "cagey and evasive" in explaining why they boarded the bus, said a spokesman for the Hillsborough County sheriff. * In March of 2007, the FBI issued a bulletin to law enforcement warning that Moslems "with ties to extremist groups" were signing up to be school bus drivers. * A Houston television station reported in August of this year that 17 large yellow school buses have been stolen. Al Qaeda prefers middle schools because the girls are old enough to rape, but the boys aren't big enough to fight back, says retired Army LtCol. Dave Grossman, who runs a private security firm. Why would al Qaeda contemplate something so monstrous?
THE ENTITLEMENT CRISIS AS A MORAL CRISIS
The U.S Comptroller General and head of the GAO, Government Accountability Office, has described the entitlements crisis facing this country as a "tsunami" that approaches while we continue to party on the beach. What GAO head David Walker is talking about are the massive upcoming obligations under Social Security and Medicare that we have no funds to meet. Tens of trillions of dollars of supposed commitments, promises made to us by our government, that today we have no clue how we'll pay. In those rare moments when our political "leaders" screw up sufficient courage to acknowledge this dark and ominous fiscal cloud hanging over us, the discussion is invariably technical. Proposed tax increases, cap increases, retirement age increases, benefit cuts, indexing -- all geared to "save the system." But who has considered that, despite all the discussion about unfunded liabilities, what we really have on our hands is, at root and core, a moral crisis?
MAY THIS STRIKE LAST FOREVER
From Islamabad to London to Paris to Moscow to Los Angeles - wherever a flickering video image could reach - the nerves of the world became more frayed this week with the images of mass demonstrations in the streets and the stunning announcement that Hollywood writers have gone on strike for more humane working conditions. The contract between the 12,000-member Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) expired Oct. 31. (Who knew it took 12,000 writers to produce the dreck coming out of Hollywood these days?) Imminently we will be seeing the pathetic consequences of the strike: heartbreaking images of Jay Leno telling lame jokes (well, not all things will change), Jon Stewart silently making mere faces at the camera (his clever lines having been unwritten due to the strike), Stephen Colbert, denied the words written for him to mock Bill O'Reilly, forced to pointlessly over-gesticulate.
MOSLEM NAZIS
During the Second World War, the Nazis worked on plans to build the Messerschmitt Me 264 Amerikabomber, an airplane specially devised to fly suicide missions into Manhattan's skyscrapers. Albert Speer, the Nazi minister for armaments, recalled in his diary Inside The Third Reich: "It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky." Hitler hated Manhattan. It was, he said, "the center of world Jewry." Less than 60 years later, Hitler's plans were executed by Moslem immigrants living in Germany. At the 2003 trial of the network around Mohamed Atta (the pilot who flew into the World Trade Center), Shahid Nickels, a German convert to Islam and a friend of Atta's, said that the Islamists had targeted Manhattan because it is "the center of world Jewry, and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it." The parallels between Nazism and Islamism are overwhelming. Yet the subject is a taboo.
DEMOCRACY, DEMOCRATS, AND TAXES
In response to The Salvation of 2008, TTPer "Bogie" was thoughtful enough to post on the User Forum a list of 50 reasons for The Fair Tax. Together, they make a pretty convincing case for replacing all personal/corporate income taxes, FICA payroll taxes, gift/death taxes and the AMT with a national retail sales tax. I would add #51, the end of the depreciation schedule for a business' capital expenditures. Yet there is another overarching reason for the Fair Tax replacing our present tax structure, which is that it is vastly more democratic, and provides a far firmer and more stable foundation for a democracy. Which is why Democrats are against it because they don't want a real democracy. Take a look at the Who Pays Income Taxes charts from the National Taxpayers Union. You'll see that over the last several years, the percentage of total income taxes paid by the top 1%, top 5%, top 10% of taxpayers has gone up, while that paid by the bottom 50% has gone down. 1% of taxpayers now pay almost 40% of all personal income taxes, while 50% pays 3%. How dangerous this is for a democracy can be seen with this simple image: imagine balancing a pyramid on its point.
WE NEED PROTECTION FROM POLITICIANS TRYING TO PROTECT US
Skiers sometimes die, as do mountain climbers and motorcyclists and bicyclists, because what they do routinely is dangerous, risky. Indeed, there is very little in human life that does not entail some measure of risk, even fatal risk. When I moved into Silverado Canyon in Orange Country, California, I did so with full knowledge that the place is exposed to certain serious hazards - earthquakes would hit harder because the houses are on steep slopes, fires would spread faster because vegetation is abundant, even mudslides are likely because after a fire the ground is ready to move around quite freely. Yet I liked the area a lot. The Sierra Madre atmosphere, the funkiness of the neighborhood, the rustic abode in which I would be living meant enough to me to take on the risk of living there. The region was also near enough to more populated and developed areas so that one wouldn't be out in the boonies like a hermit. So, I decided that the risk of my home burning down wasn't great enough to override the benefits I would gain from living there. And to this day, even after the fires that may still consume my home, I would insist on this. But California Senator Diane Feinstein and her cohorts disagree with me, think the risks of living in places such as Silverado Canyon are too great and no one ought to be permitted to assume them. You might ask, "The risks to whom?"