This morning on MSNBC, former General Wesley Clark, best known for laying a complete egg in his bid for the 2004 Democrat nomination for president, pronounced that because John McCain had no military command experience, his military credentials are questionably suited for the presidency.

Political junkies all around the world either smacked their foreheads or laughed out loud. I think I did both.

Only then, in an epiphany, did I realize that the military acronym “CO” actually stood for “Community Organizer.”  If it is otherwise, Clark’s screwball standards just damned his preferred candidate’s campaign to oblivion. If McCain’s 5 1/2 years as a POW, coming back to serve another eight years in the Navy, and in all, being a graduate of the Naval Academy, is irrelevant to McCain’s credentials to be president, then Obama ought to pack it up and go back to his comrades in Illinois.

Of course, unless Barack Obama’s executive experience in organizing communities is more substantive than John McCain’s military career. I’ll let the Obama-ites make the case for that one.

What’s worse, however, is Barack Obama’s faux slap-down of Clark, claiming that supporters of both sides should be held accountable for denigrating the other’s military service.

What military service a McCain surrogate would smack down of Obama’s is still entirely unclear at the time of this writing. Perhaps we will learn something new. Maybe his organized community troops called him “sarge” or something. I don’t know.

What we do know for certain is that a) Wesley Clark is an embarrassment to himself, and b) Barack Obama is manipulative and disingenous. These two things are certain, and the latter is starting to manifest itself more as a character trait than an anomaly.

Catherine is being brought up in a political household. We often have conversations about the upcoming election at the dinner table and, although her contributions right now are “I don’t like peas” and “Are you done with your chicken, mama?”, I know some of the information is seeping into her brain.

She recognizes Barack Obama and often calls out “Obama!” when she sees him on the TV. However, we had a weird moment while waiting in line at Food Lion last week. She pointed to a magazine with Obama on the cover (not hard to find) and yelled, “Daddy!” (more…)

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Well, hell if we know.

Last November, Barack Obama thought the Washington, DC handgun ban to be constitutional. This past week, he declared his belief that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms.

Conveniently now in general election mode, Obama looked to the recent history of Al Gore’s 2000 gun problem, and quickly shifted gears.

But since we are told that Barack Obama is different, a change agent, the sacred lamb from God, etc. (monkey or Judeo-Christian, one is now unsure), we must look at this change of position not as that of a politician, but as that of a highly moral, well-trained lawyer, who once held the highest law school student post in the land as the editor of the Harvard Law Review. His legal research skills should be second-to-none. He ought to already have had a well-defined take on the meaning of the Second Amendment.

Despite his flipping and flopping about, he does, actually. His real beliefs were exhibited in November, 2007, when he declared he did not believe in the individual right to bear arms. But now, with the new opinion in Heller, and the impending importance of those rural voters he contemptuously tolerates to his electoral chances in November, the tune must change. He has put down the trigger lock and picked up the banjo.

This is an important inconsistency - any time a candidate unequivocally poo-poos an express constitutional right then makes a 180 degree turn it’s news. The bigger story here is that Obama is just another politician.

Except that he is worse, in that his true ideas, which he is daily attempting to mask, are more fit for the socialist democracies of yore than the free capitalistic republic of tomorrow.  He will not run as a proud liberal. He will not tell use what all his proposed “solutions” would really cost the American taxpayer. Some of his more sparkling generalities betray his true intent (like wanting supreme court justices to “feel”, instead of think), but with great determination he is coding every far left policy proposal he would enact once elected. Plus, he’s already playing the race card, blaming the Republicans for doing it last week, when in fact no Republican has the guts to even touch upon the topic.

It is clear now. Barack Obama must be the love child of Al Sharpton and John Kerry.

However, Obama is messianic in one way - never before have we witnessed such a charlatan pitching his case so eloquently for ultimate power, while poorly pretending otherwise. The facade is a-crackin’. Let’s everyone grab a hammer.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has been catching a lot of heat for his comment that Senator Obama is “John Kerry with a tan.”

First of all, how dare he insult Kerry’s fine conservative record (relatively speaking) by comparing it to that of Obama?

Second, I cannot believe that Norquist injected race into this election! I thought we were going to get to November without anyone mentioning that McCain is white and Obama is black. Haven’t we gotten beyond the point in this country where … oh, wait — (more…)

Bob Corker has signed on to a bill that should garner 100-0 support in the United States Senate

Corker, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he joined more than 40 Republicans signing on to the “Gas Price Reduction Act” and indicated it could be debated in the Senate after the July Fourth recess.

Though it does not include authorization to explore and drill in ANWR, it is a start. The bill would allow for exploration in the Gulf, as well exploitation of shale oil deposits in the American West (the true answer to our energy crisis - read more here).

Alas, it will not pass the Senate, and would certainly die in the House, because Democrats in Congress (and everywhere they reside, for that matter), simply are not serious about energy independence. The proposals of their flag-bearer, the storied Senator from Illinois, are wrought with the ridiculous, focusing on known inefficient petroleum alternatives, such as solar and wind power. On a number of issues, this being chief among them, Barack Obama has shown an incurable penchant for offering childish solutions to adult problems.

Even if we tied solar cells on all our dogs, put mini windmills on their backs, and kept them plugged in all day, we would still not make a dent in energy production.

The real solution is more domestic supply, and at least this bill, though likely doomed to defeat, is a move in the right direction. Remember - our “oil addiction” is only a problem because we must import a disproportionate amount of it from the most backward, unstable places on Earth.  If the vast bulk of our energy came from within our borders, or international waters which we can patrol, all our lives change drastically for the better.

Why this concept is so difficult to comprehend befuddles me. One hundred and ten years of temperature data on a 4.5 billion year old planet, a selection of unreliable core samples, and a love of Arctic Circle wastelands, has birthed a religion that damages American well-being on a daily basis.

America’s greatest asset, which has over two centuries allowed us to do more good than any country ever fathomed, is our historically strong and fast-growing economy and the freedom that comes with it. Our nation’s energy policy and the environmental parishioners who fuel it are putting all that in immediate, and permanent, peril. World demand is increasing, and we are all trying to drink from the same, oligopolic tap.

Sheiks and Marxists are slowly dragging us to our knees, and apparently, some of us seem to really like it.

When speaking at a Planned Parenthood conference last year, Senator Obama said the following about how he would select judges if Americans show amazingly poor judgment in November and elect him to be president:

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.” (more…)

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I just finished my first read of the majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller. Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion is typical Scalia (when he’s good), reading the Constitution in its time, and foregoing a lot of the “Living Document” tomfoolery that the Court’s leftist justices tend to adopt.

In short, Scalia and the Court’s majority confirm that the individual right to bear arms makes up the militia, not the other way around. He portrays a rather exhaustive history, citing scholarly works discussing the original English source of the Second Amendment, to the purpose of the Second Amendment of ensuring self-defense and maintaining a milita, and including references to the many state constitutions that adopted arms bearing right, to include state supreme court jurisprudence in the 19th century discussing the individual right to bear arms vis a vis state milititas (the existence of state militias vis a vis federal militias was largely a Tenth Amendment question). Apropos, the opinion included multiple mentions of Andrews v. State, an 1871 Tennesseee Supreme Court case that is the seminal Tennessee case on the right to bear arms.

Scalia also well-damaged the dissents of Justices Stevens and Breyer, who seemed much more selective in their summary of the history of the Second Amendment. Breyer’s historical focus was on municipal regulations with minor penalties (unlike the criminal penalty inherent in the District of Columbia law), and puzzlingly, proposed the adoption of an “interest balancing inquiry”, which I suppose is some long-lost cousin of the rational basis test, to determine whether firearm regulations were proper. In it, Breyer, proposes that courts “ask(s) whether the statute burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other important government interests.” Breyer Dissent, p. 10.  In short, Breyer’s proposed test, fabricated completely out of whole cloth, would make the Second Amendment a junior member of the Bill of Rights.

Instead, Scalia places the Second Amendment on par with the likes of the First Amendment. Though a victory for the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, this opinion is not a sweeping removal of firearm regulation, and should not affect state regulation of the right to bear arms.

According to Heller, the federal government can still license firearms, such as hand guns, but cannot prohibit their possession in the home. Scalia interprets the Second Amendment in view largely of the time of its adoption, to include only firearms that were reasonably expected to be carried by individuals if called for militia duty. In this way, he avoids invalidating the federal government’s machine gun prohibition, and prohibitions generally on other weapons, such as sawed-off shotguns. Under his interpretation, hand guns qualify as protected weapons under the original meaning of the Second Amendment.

He also discusses the last SCOTUS case on the Second Amendment, United States v. Miller, on which Stevens largely hangs his judicial hat. The history of Miller is interesting, as Miller himself did not appear before the court. The Miller case involved the criminal prosecution of two individuals carrying sawed-off shotguns across state lines. Despite the solicitor general’s lone argument before the Court that the Second Amendment defined only a collective right, the Miller court did not explicitly adopt that holding. Scalia noted the focus of the Miller court was on the type of weapon - a sawed-off shotgun - which did not fit within the historical definition of weapons fit for self-defense or militia use. The individuality question was not the material aspect of the Miller court’s opinion.

Scalia concluded the majority opinion in Heller thusly

Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

Indeed.

The Second Amendment lives, by the slimmest of margins. The SCOTUS struck down the District of Columbia hand gun ban just moments ago, in a predictable 5 to 4 decision (ponder this - an Obama shaped court would have been 5 to 4 the other way). Scalia penned the majority opinion.

I feel like a kid at Christmas - I can’t wait to delve into the thing.

Until the opinion is widely posted (which should be any time now, download it here), all we know is that the Court moved in the right direction.

UPDATE A quick legal analysis here (it may be the first in the world, but I can’t substantiate that claim!).

Okay, this is just odd.

Barack Obama is apparently a devout follower of Lord Hanuman, a brass monkey.

Perhaps his campaign song should have a certain Beastie Boys flavor to it.

I mean, if I was to go pagan, I’d probably go get a Zeus idol. Maybe even some Zule for a pop culture effect (and one of the greatest movies of all time).

But no, Obama, according to his Indian spokeswoman Carolyn Sauvage-Mar, has adopted the monkey god, best known for leading a monkey army to fight the demon King Ravana and rescue a kidnapped princess.

And all this time, we though the Trinity United Church of Christ was screwed up beyond belief. They are friggin’ mainstream compared to the leader of the monkey army.

A) just another hypocritical politician.

B) lacking any ability to critically analyze a situation.

Think carefully before choosing your answer. One of them has to be correct, and both options are quite telling about the man who actually has a lot of support for his presidential bid! (I still bang my head against a wall every time I think about that … I’m running out of gauze and Ace bandages.)

Obama has decided not to use public financing for his campaign, despite previously pledging to let the government fund him. I loved the ridiculous statement on his website — “I wanted to tell you guys first. I have decided to forgo $80 million in public financing.” Wow! He is sacrificing for us. He IS just like Jesus! (more…)

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I’ve been spending the afternoon doing some light work on the couch, watching Italy v. Spain, and then switching between the United States v. Barbados World Cup qualifier, and the Braves game.

I think I could have taken my cell phone and done a better video job on the US / Barbados game. Seriously. This is bad. I know it’s not a big game, and the United States leads 8-0 after the first leg, but geeze. This is like watching video footage from one of my high school games. If it was Beta, it would be twice as good.

Yet another blow to the cretins who believe we liberated Iraq for its oil

Iraq will award contracts to 41 foreign oil firms in a bid to boost production that could give multinationals a potentially lucrative foothold in huge but underdeveloped oil fields, an official said on Sunday.”We chose 35 companies of international standard, according to their finances, environment and experience, and we granted them permission to extract oil,” oil ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told AFP.

Six other state-owned oil firms from Algeria, Angola, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam will also be awarded extraction deals, Jihad said.

I guess that means we need Vietnamese companies to drill in ANWR, then, since we won’t let our own.

I am only prompted to write this after having watched MSNBC for the last half hour this morning, and seeing that MoveOn.org “Alex” ad about five times.

Look, you “3 million” MoveOn.org members (I use quotes, just in case they are using “Million” Man March math), the military is a voluntary entity. And anyway, the Department of Defense hasn’t quite gotten to the point where they send toddlers into battle - that’s the other side, the Muslim extremists, who blow up children in their twisted efforts to advance their religion.

Iraq is not Vietnam. Repeat, Iraq is not Vietnam (rinse, repeat, and repeat again). The only person to propose re-instating conscription is Charlie Rangel, a New York Democrat. There are absolutely no similarities to the Vietnam conflict, other than our military is in a foreign land, which is hardly historically remarkable. The gloomy view of the future wrought by MoveOn.org against poor “Alex” is grounded in some alternate, ideologically skewed reality. The force size in Iraq is smaller by multiples than it was in Vietnam. The casuality rate, and the casualties themselves, do not compare. The enemy is not a surrogate for an enemy super power. The enemy has no government, and the desert is a heck of a lot harder to hide in than the Indochina jungle. Thinking of Iraq as Vietnam II requires a certain reliance on anecdotal reasoning. The similarities are immaterial.

Hence, “Alex”’s mother is just not that bright.

Then again, what if all this moot. Say that“Alex” is a patriot, and wants to serve his country when he grows up. Maybe he will be a Marine. In that case, MoveOn.org (or whatever bastardly progeny has taken its place by then) will still have the right to spend millions of dollars saying inane things on cable news.

And for it, they would be able to thank people like Alex.

Technorati tags: John-McCain, Election-2008, war-on-terror, Iraq, Del.icio.us tags: John-McCain, Election-2008, war-on-terror, Iraq, LiveJournal tags: John-McCain, Election-2008, war-on-terror, Iraq

I am not breaking any news by writing that tragic flooding is occurring in Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. In the two latter states, levees have been breached. Entire towns are under water. The cost of damages will be billions of dollars. Safe drinking water is a precious commodity.

“This is our version of Katrina,” said Johnson County (Iowa) Emergency Management spokesman Mike Sullivan. “This is the worst flooding we’ve ever seen.” (more…)

Drudge linked to an article in the International Herald Tribune leading with the story that Maclean’s, a Canadian news magazine institution, was on trial for saying bad things about Muslim theocrats

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Well, yeah. That is because the United States is (contrary to the opinions of many on the Left) more advanced, and more free, than the rest of the world, to include our typically benign neighbors to the north. European laws are hardly different than those in Canada.

Of course, with those laws in place, who gets to decide what speech is unacceptable?

Well, the government, of course.

Practically speaking, there are few limits on free speech in America, short of imminent violence and yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. And this should not change anytime soon, contrary to the opinions of posing legal “scholars”

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

That is a broad, dangerous, and daresay, an absolutely stupid standard to advocate. Also included in this piece is a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Holmes wrote. “I think that we should be eternally vigilant,” he added, “against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

That’s right. Ideas are to be waged, not accepted by fiat. The rest of the world is, quite respectfully, wrong on this point. Suppressing the expression of hate does not kill it, but lets it fester, grow, and reemerge more powerful than before. Let us have the courage of our convictions - awful ideas must be confronted with reason and destroyed, not shrunk from and prohibited. Only one unconvinced that his beliefs are correct wishes for the government to intercede and take on the weight.

The position that thought can be controlled by a central authority, and that this is good, gives mankind no credit whatsoever. It is thinking people that have changed the world we inhabit, and it is thinking people who conquer those who are randomly firing the most hate-filled of neurons.

To the rest of the West . Let the morons speak - we can handle it. And to Canada, if they aren’t morons, we’d like to hear from them.

The American disease of coddling our children and telling them that they all can win every time is spreading across the globe! At a recent school play in Japan, twenty-five girls all dressed as Snow White took the stage. Why? Check this out –

After a relentless campaign of bullying, hectoring and nuisance phone calls, the monster parents had cowed the teachers into submission, forcing the school to admit to the injustice of selecting just one girl to play the title role. (more…)

First off, there is no energy “conspiracy” (I feel the irresistible impulse to throw that out there, to run off or infuriate those who skipped macroeconomics in college). The market is working as every model says it should. The problem is that it is not a free market - it is an oligopoly. Suppliers are not free to enter and leave the market as it is currently situated. Suppliers are fixed, and consequently control supply like you control the flow of water in your hose.

There are two alternatives. One is more suppliers, and more supply. This is accomplished by opening up more of our domestic reserves, to include oil rigs six miles and more off the Gulf coast, and permitting access to the Arctic wasteland we call ANWR for exploration. Neither will fully solve our reliance on external oil production, but both are common sense steps in the right direction. It would take years to get both online - a prudent people would have started yesterday, but we might as well start today.

There is a better way to increase the supply, however, which would put the United States, Israel, and Jordan at the forefront of the global oil market. Announced in 2006, Israeli company A.F.S.K. Hom Tov has developed a process that uses bituminous, the chief byproduct of oil, to more efficiently extract petroleum from shale rock, and to do so in an environmentally friendly way. Unlike with “conventional” extraction technology, otherwise noxious gases are absorbed by the bituminous coating the shale rock. The resultant product costs approximately $25.00 / barrel to produce. This cuts the costs associated with extracting petroleum from shale by about 2/3.

A nice secondary byproduct of the process is the production of natural gas.

Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are rich with shale suitable for extraction. Canada and parts of Latin America are as well. Of the estimated 2.7 trillion barrels of shale oil in existence worldwide, 2.0 trillion of it rests within the borders of the United States, the bulk in the Green River basin in Colorado. In short, a focus on shale not only addresses our energy problem long term, but it would be a seismic shift in geopolitical politics. Consider it the equivalent of an economic SDI - the mere threat and development could have positive near-term effects, and when fully developed, would permanently change the economic and global landscape.

Unfortunately, the religious fervor surrounding the belief in man made global warming has put the focus on conservation, the second, more inferior option. And that is a fool’s errand - we cannot conserve enough to make a dent in the market when the chief suppliers are out of our control. If you were in control of the Saudi oil supply, and your economic analysts told you that conservation in the West would reduce demand by 5% (an astonishingly large amount, actually), what would you do?

If you answered anything other than “Reduce production by the amount conserved” (and OPEC would certainly follow suit), you really need to take another look into the sheik’s soul. And Hugo Chavez’s too, for that matter.

Shale fields would take about ten years to get online. The question is: Who do you trust more to supply the world’s oil: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia - or Colorado, Wyoming, Canada and Israel?

By now, you probably have seen the video of the elderly man getting hit by a car whose driver couldn’t be bothered to stop. As if that initial incident wasn’t bad enough, the footage grows even more disgusting as you watch several other cars drive by the helpless man as if he was a piece of litter. People stand apathetically on the sidewalk … one jerk even crosses the street right next to the fallen man and shows no concern whatsoever!

This tragic moment was caught on tape in Connecticut, but it could have happened in Anytown, USA. I was so sickened by this real look at our callousness and our self-absorption. What is wrong with us?? How can we look at a fellow human being who was just STRUCK BY A CAR and think, “Not my problem” or “I’m sure someone else is coming to help him” or “Now, where was that coffee shop again?” I don’t understand. (more…)

I don’t like to brag, but I’m in pretty tight with a couple of the guys in food service over at MSNBC. Of the many fruits that come to bear out of such a relationship, one is the occasional leak on an important news story.

Apparently, Keith Olberman is facing the inevitable outcome of November’s election and he has already written his childish screed to be yelled on his program the day after we give John McCain the title of President-Elect. He left the draft in the network’s cafeteria atop a half-eaten banana nut muffin (So wasteful, Mr. Olberman Didn’t Messiah Obama tell you we are supposed to start caring about the poor and the hungry now?). I received it by fax late last night, and it is my journalistic privilege to share Olberman’s commentary with you here right now. (more…)