Category Archives: Politics & News

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Pardon Me

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Mr. Obama issued 273 pardons and commutations yesterday. He cut Bradley/Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence to time served. The now-transgender soldier was convicted of Espionage Act violations and other charges for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The White House announced that Mr. Obama “has now granted more commutations than any president in this nation’s history.” In fact, they proudly noted that is more than “the total number of commutations issued by the past 12 presidents combined.”

Julian Assange said “Manning should never have been convicted in the first place…” Manning “is a hero, whose bravery should be applauded.” Mr. Assange said he would not fight extradition if Manning was freed.

“It was the right thing to do,” my friend Fanny Guay said. “The Right’s claim that Manning’s leaks cost lives was false.”

Yeah, OK.

Looks like the only secrets the Left care about are the Sony memos and salary worksheets.

“No, that’s not it,” Liz Arden replied, double teaming me. “Only people who do it for the right reasons.”

So it would be OK for the Russians to release the RNC emails but not Hillary’s?

“That’s it!”

It’s required that I release my tax return but illegal to publish a teacher’s salary?

“Exactly!” Ms. Guay said. Ms. Arden did the happy dance that I was finally getting it.

But, wait. I taught at Vermont colleges.

“Oh, then you’re protected,” Ms. Guay said.

Now I do get it. I notice that Mr. Assange is still in the Ecuadorian embassy. He’s still a protected good guy. Except for the little matter of the DNC emails.

 

Everything Is New Again!

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I walk a couple of miles around South Puffin most mornings but yesterday was special.

“It’s a new year” and change was in the air. I expected transformation. I’d greet new people dressed in finery coming out of brand new homes. They would have handsome gardens and all their children would be above average.

It came as a surprise that I recognized every single house on my street. Every one.

Pundits insist on parsing “Make America Great Again” so it means something bad. In fact, on Face the Nation Sunday morning, the consensus was that the slogan specifically evokes racism and anti-feminism and classism and probably fascism.
Why is it so hard to look forward?
David Frum was so negative that he is the absolute embodiment of why I don’t read the Atlantic. He’s a “neoconservative” political commentator and senior editor at the Atlantic. A speech writer for Bush 43, he later wrote the first insider book about the Bush presidency. On Face the Nation, Mr. Frum called the current “crisis of democracy” something that hasn’t been seen since World War II. He was so virulently, consistently negative about Mr. Trump and a Trump presidency that even the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg called him on his negativity.

The very people who wailed and gnashed their teeth over the Bush Administration are trotting out a similar litany again. Maybe one reason we need to make America great again is because these negative nellies are so afraid of change.

Here are some of the stories I’m hearing for 2017:

The president-elect doesn’t listen to anybody else.
Translation: “We need a president who will go along with the status quo.”
Reality: Mr. Trump tallied 1.4 million more votes than Ms. Clinton did in 49 states (only her huge disparity in California gave her a lead in the popular vote). He carried 32 states overall. She carried 18 and the D.C. He carried about 82% of all U.S. counties; she got the other 18%. That was a call for a significant shift. Voters deliberately chose a man who promised not to listen to the politicians.
The hope: Americans are already more hopeful that the country will be better in 2017 than it was in 2016 under Mr. Obama, according to a new AP-Times Square Alliance poll. People are looking forward to having more jobs and more money to spend.

The new administration has no substantive policies.
Translation: “We need to continue the Obama policies.”
Reality: The new mandate is to repair the damage done by years of political skulduggery on both sides of the aisle. More people than ever before fear and hate the federal government.
The hope: New policies will pare down every Federal department; reform the regulatory code; strengthen the U.S. military to discourage expansion by China, Russia, and terrorists; revamp all U.S. healthcare from the ground up and transform the VA; change the EPA from a fascist front to an environmental steward; establish school choice; create a working energy policy; do real science on climate matters; rewrite the 74,608-page federal tax code; and make us proud of our elected government.

The president-elect and most of the new administration have no political experience.
Translation: “We need a president who will go along with the expansion of big government.”
Reality: For more than a century, all “first world” countries have been rife with interest groups driving bigger government. The fundamental checks on such growth such as our allegiance to local control and a Constitution that limits the government’s role in economic life have been dissolved by Democrats and Republicans alike. Thank goodness that We the Overtaxed People finally elected someone with no political experience!
The hope: The classical liberal hopes that it may still be possible to stem the growth and return the “power to the people.”

The president-elect is morally outrageous!
Translation: “We need a president who is kind to women like Bill Clinton, or FDR, or LBJ, or Grover Cleveland, or James Buchanan.”
Reality: There’s no excuse for bad manners or illegal behavior but every recent election shows we not only accept it but approve of it from “good” politicians (the ones who confirm their supporters’ bias).
The hope: How about a resolution that we punish crimes and eliminate the Victorian prurience?

The president-elect is a rapacious businessman or a terrible financial manager. Or both!
Translation: “We need a president who knows nothing about business.”
Reality: We haven’t elected many politicians who have ever built anything whether it’s a house, a race car, a rocket ship, or a stent. Look where we are now.
The hope: This country was founded on citizen legislators and public servants. Maybe, just maybe, we can reinvigorate the idea of finding successful, capable people in other fields to “lend” their expertise to the government for a little while and then return to real life.

All the new appointments hate [science | women | foreign policy | the EPA | education | Obamacare].
Translation: “The new appointments will throw away all our hard-gains in newspaper science, affirmative action, and ‘free’ perpetual care.”
Reality: Newspaper science isn’t real. Fake trophies punish real accomplishment. And TANSTAAFL.
The hope: We can move the 46.3 million people in the labor force who were actually unemployed into productive jobs. We will value truth over political correctness and doublespeak. And we will task NASA to collect earthly data and return to the stars.

Plenty of people are trying to rewrite history right now but our best chance is to write a better story from today onward.

 

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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The suburban town of Bethlehem, New York had a “Merry Christmas” sign and a “Happy Hanukkah” sign removed from the busiest intersection in town.

Hello?

Grinches in the town named for the birthplace of Jesus banned religious holiday signs so they “wouldn’t violate any laws or distract drivers.”

There’s more. This year, the town of Menominee, Michigan, took down the Nativity scene in their city park — a long-standing Christmas tradition — after “Freedom From Religion Foundation” complaints.

I so wish we could find three wise men and a camel. Heck, I’d settle for a smart camel.


christmas bird

Every radio station has defaulted to Christmas music. I’m surprised we haven’t lost that, too. I don’t particularly like Christmas music but my radio has an off switch. I don’t have to listen to it if I don’t want to.

I was raised in a family that was Quaker on one side, Presbyterian on the other. I may not be as organized now as I was when I reached the age of accountability and joined the Presbyterian church but I am still a Christian. And, of course, a WASP.

You don’t have to be either.

Today is the day Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the meaning of Christianity. It was a pretty big day before the stock exchange took it over.

It doesn’t mean Do unto all the other religions, then cut out. Unless you are a Member of Congress. Or, sadly, one of too many “modern” Americans.

Here’s the thing. If you offer food to the monks on Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday, I will honor your commitment to the poor. If you celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, I will honor with you the victory of Lord Ram over the demon-king Ravana. If you fast during Ramadan when the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammad, I will honor your patience and humility. If you celebrate the most solemn and important of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I will honor your atonement and repentance. If you light the candles of Kwanzaa, I will help you honor your heritage. And if you are a lib’rul atheist, I will not proselytize.

That maybe the most important message.

Not one American soldier in Afghanistan, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guam, Honduras, Indian Ocean, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Netherlands, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, or the United States has forced any man, woman, or child to convert to Christianity at the point of a gun again this year.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Hindu, Islamic, a Jew, a Kwanzaan celebrant, or an atheist. It is time, on this Christian holy day, to let Christians be Christians.

My right to impose my own beliefs stops at my property line (or the end of my nose when I’m out in public). The Bethlehem, NY, grinches’ right to idiocy should stop at pretty much the same place. It is time to stop accepting that “politically correct” credo and start honoring the true message of Christmas.

Scythian philosopher Anacharsis wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.”

Away With the Manger wasn’t sung quite so loudly this year. Menominee restored the nativity scene to the park because it’s a First Amendment right. After all, if I can get up on my soapbox and decry the crooks in Washington, then Washington (or Menominee, this time) cannot discriminate against another citizen who climbs a soapbox to preach his or her religious faith. In both cases the content is protected speech.

I’m off to pass on my Santa hat to Jake and Liam.

Peace.

This column originally appeared on Christmas Day, 2008. It required very little updating.

 

Big Hack Attack

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The Electoral College convenes in every state today, the last Monday before the start of Winter.

A friend found this meme:

“I’m outraged at the lack of outrage, especially on my side.” former Rep. Joe Walsh said on CNN. “I get that the country’s divided, but my God, a foreign government interfered with our election. That should piss everybody off!” Mr. Walsh is a talk radio host from Illinois who served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If a foreign government hacked our election, that’s an Act of War and I will indeed be outraged.

If the Obama Administration is making up the hack, that’s a Criminal Act and I will indeed be outraged at that.

Here’s all we know for sure so far:

• Ms. Clinton and the DNC conspired to commit election fraud and I am already outraged over that.
• The DNC leaks have been thoroughly dismissed the Obama Administration, by the DNC, by most pundits on the Left, and about half of social media. “It’s been non-news for months. I don’t understand the continual flogging of that dead horse,” one friend said. That’s outrageous.
• The Department of Homeland Security tried to hack Georgia‘s voter data computers. CA, CO, CT, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OR, RI, VA, VT, WA, and DC allowed DHS in without a hack attack (note that I’ve been unable to confirm that list). This is only a little outrageous, right?
• There is a sudden “consensus” among intelligence agencies that the Russians committed election fraud (but that Ms. Clinton did not). And no one has seen the proof. Outrageous.
• The president has ordered the Office of National Intelligence to conduct a review of the Russian interference. The Director of National Intelligence said Friday that they conveniently could not brief the Electoral College because of the review. Another outrage.

Apparently the Administration thinks election fraud by a foreign government is not actually an Act of War. (“I told him to stop it,” Mr. Obama claims he told Mr. Putin in the strongest possible terms.) That is outrageous, as well.

There’s more to this story.

Democrats committed enough election fraud to get Ms. Clinton nominated but couldn’t pull off enough to get her elected. I cited the Daily Kos because it is a fake news source that Democrats quote wholeheartedly.

Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically in the weeks since the election. (If this all sounds too too familiar, recall that Democratic operative Bob Beckel plotted to kidnap Bush 43’s electors to push the election into Congress. Mr. Gore himself tried to flip “faithless” electors.)

Now they have a “new” program they hope we don’t recognize.

Can o' Industrial WhoopassUnlike Republicans who questioned Mr. Obama’s credentials and fitness to serve as president in 2008 and 2012, the “Just Say No” Democrats have used the hack attack to try to “turn” half the Electoral College.

It’s time for something actually new.

I agree with the Democrats but they don’t go far enough. It’s time to open up that can o’ whoop ass. It’s time to rend both parties asunder. It’s time for the Electors to buck the parties and go rogue.

Democrats want the Electoral College to subvert the democratic process and pick an “acceptable” candidate? I agree. They should cast all 538 votes for Ellen Kullman, or Ryan Lance, or Alan Mulally, or David S. Taylor for President and they should cast 538 more for politician and businessman Jon Huntsman for V.P.

 

Trump Budget Could Cut Climate Funding for NASA

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or Where I Think Government Should Spend Our Money

Let’s get something straight.
Climate Change is real.
Political Science is fake.

“Aides to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, … unveiled plans to remove the budget for climate change science currently used by NASA and other US federal agencies for projects such as examining Arctic changes, and to spend it instead on space exploration,” the Guardian reported.

“Shoot the messenger?” one correspondent asked. “Trump is cutting NASA’s arctic research because the agency brings inconvenient news.”

It’s interesting news and I’m halfway to liking it.

I like funding more deep space exploration. That and the development of colonization technologies is where NASA should spend its money now. Let the Commercial Spaceflight Federation members do the near Earth orbit stuff. And, it sends a message to the scientific community that we won’t fund all the “me too” studies any more. That’s all to the good. Still, I don’t like losing the NASA satellites monitoring temperature, ice, clouds, and other meteorological phenomena because the data itself is crucial.

“Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.” Trump adviser Bob Walker said.

Yay!

Salon and other drum beaters call it “Politicizing climate change.”

Boo, hiss!

“Federal government scientists have been unnerved by Trump’s dismissal of climate science and are concerned that their work will be sidelined,” the Guardian reported.

Granted (heh), scientists who live from federal grant to federal grant like to know where their next meal will come from, but they make one important point.

NASA Launch from Cape CanaveralAnyone who has read history knows that the climate has changed many times in the last 4.543 billion years. Anyone who has read history knows that the climate changed a lot more before our first human ancestor developed speech and the ability to clear cut forests, a couple of million years ago. And, unfortunately, anyone who has read history knows that our climactic data from that time is woefully incomplete. We simply don’t have good, complete, contemporaneous data for planetary conditions two hundred years ago, let alone two million or two billion years ago.

Last week, we learned that “evidence suggests the Earth underwent an ice age so cold that ice sheets not only capped the polar latitudes, but may have extended all the way to sea level near the equator” around 700 million years ago but that during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum “the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle.”

We don’t have enough actual data from any of those times even to build trustworthy quantitative climate models.

That’s an inconvenient truth for the alarmists who have the hubris to sell you that the rising sea will cut off the land bridge across the modern day Bering Strait (but that their settled science will cure it if we humans just stop breathing, farting, heating, and start paying higher taxes).

Loss of contemporaneous data for planetary conditions today is also an inconvenient truth for the real scientists who know that having that data is the only way our human descendants two millennia from now will know what we experience today.

We need good data about today now and we will need that good data about today 200 years from now, too.

Where should our governments spend our money? Beyond the alphabetically obvious answer of public arts, public education, public infrastructure, and public security and social protection, man has some imperatives that are best handled together. Exploration tops the list.

Basic science and basic data gathering is one such area and is an arena that jumpstarts exploration as well as commercial applications. We don’t need a new detailed map of the human brain because brain mapping is already commercially viable and well funded by private business. We do need to cure cancer. The biomedical industrial complex treats profits from its high-budget care but has no financial incentive to find a cure. We don’t need to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail because that’s better done by the cartels. We do need to explore beyond the solar system and we do need to explore this little blue marble we live on.

Every program government funds can profit from the “commercialization” filter.

NASA has publicly archived all of its data received from spacecraft projects — that’s over 4TB of new earth science data every day. The available data includes the CEOS International Directory Network, Earth Plus, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), Gateway to Astronaut Photography, Global Change Master Directory, Global Imagery Browse Service (GIBS), Goddard Institute for Space Studies Earth/Climate Change Data, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center, LandSat 7 Datasets, NASA Earth Observatory, NASA Earth Observations, NASA’s HEASARC Web-based Tools, Ocean Color, Physical Oceanography DAAC, USGS/NASA Landsat Data on New Earth Explorer, Visible Earth, and more.

Global meteorological data. NASA may not be the best agency to interpret the findings but it is still the best agency to ferret it out for us. Pretty soon, we should examine that data for commercialization but, for today, it fits the basic data gathering filter and we need NASA to continue to record and store it.

We need that data so a future generation of researchers and scientists, unencumbered by politics and newspaper punditry, can build climate models that actually work.