The American Tune

California Hunting - Here we come

2011-12-18T13:04:00.001-08:00

If you heard guns a blazing at 6:50 am on October 22, chances are pretty good you live near a body of water large enough to support waterfowl hunting. The season officially opened on Saturday and I was fortunate enough to join the throng of duck and goose hunters in Calaveras County that embrace the ancient sport of water fowling.
For me it was a week of hunting as I started out on Tuesday in the corn and milo fields of central South Dakota hunting pheasants. South Dakota is one of my favorite states as South Dakotans are typically rural folks and when you step off a plane in Sioux Falls there are banners greeting the Pheasant Hunters. Orange emblazoned clothing is seen everywhere and the local and out of town hunters mix to work the fields to take a few shots at wild pheasants. Add to this mix golden retrievers and Labradors and you have what I consider the perfect mix of guns, dogs and the outdoors.
Upon my return, I found time to chase a few quail out at the ranch on friday. Pheasant and quail hunting are pretty similar. You work an area looking for groups of birds that use their legs first and their wings second to depart quickly from the advancement of the hunters. You need a place to hunt, a shotgun and ammo, and a hunting license to go after these two upland game birds. The shots are far more difficult that most imagine and for the most part hunters mimic their fly fishing brethren in the notion of catch and release, ( shoot and release we jokingly call it) meaning the shots miss and the birds fly away to a safe spot far from the hunt.
Duck hunting is something relatively new to me as the last time I hunted ducks was in the early 70’s. I used to hunt in the Bay area just off the west entrance to the Dumbarton Bridge. I literally would throw a shotgun into my car, go to high school in Menlo Park, and after school a few of us would travel to the bay lands to shoot ducks in the evening. If a kid even took a picture of a shotgun to my old high school now he would be zip tied by the school authorities and expelled, but this was the 70’s.
When I found the guys that hunt the Salt Spring Valley reservoir I asked how I could join - fully unaware that modern duck hunting requires a lot more equipment than pheasants or quail. You need a camouflage boat with an outboard motor, waders, duck and goose decoys, guns that can shoot steel shot, and about a dozen other items that add up pretty quickly.
My wife was wondering why box after box arrived from Cabela’s and why I spent so much time at the Bass Pro shop in Lathrop. Choosing the right camo pattern took more time that I normally spend selecting ties and suits for work. You need camo waders, jacket, raingear, a head cover, gloves and then there is the actual hunting blind itself. Walking around the house with all this camo gear on made my wife ask if I was planning on putting a rusty car up on blocks in the front yard next. I grimaced, and gave her a courtesy laugh.
The Salt Springs reservoir is a lot like most lower Sierra lakes in that it’s size expands and contracts based on the rainfall and the evaporation of the summer. This means you need a portable blind and most of the hunting stores sell what is called a lay down blind. It is a contraption that I suspect was designed by former workers from the old MG convertible factory in England that combines waterproof canvas and support bars in a mind numbingly complex arrangement. The goal is to hide from the wary waterfowl but still allow you to see birds zipping by overhead, and pop out at the right moment to fire when the birds are in range. The blinds are also supposed to keep the rainfall out, but like the old MG tops they leak and are crazy hard to assemble in the dark on a muddy lakeshore.
The other oddity is duck hunting is an early morning sport. We met at 5 am at the boat launch, and in pitch black I dropped a boat into the black liquid around me, and took off across the lake trying to visually distinguish the air from the water. I blindly careened over the water to an unknown spot somewhere across the great beyond. It was after the morning shoot that I discovered I was missing one key piece of equipment - a handheld GPS with pre-programmed coordinates that tell you where to point the boat to reach your shooting spot. Three ducks and one goose later I had plenty of meat for the dinner table and off I went to clean and prepare the birds for that evening’s meal.
Fall bird hunting is alive and well in the West County and like South Dakota it is un-crowded, beautiful and the bounty is plentiful.

The Melting Pot vs. the Salad Bowl

2011-07-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

One of my oddball hobbies is playing guitar in a 50’s & 60’s band on the weekends. We have a “take no breaks rule” in the band so we will often play for 4 hours straight. I’ve had to memorize all my guitar parts over the years for about a hundred songs to accommodate this policy.
Once you commit a block of music to memory it allows you to get better at the details and tonal qualities of the songs. It also allows you to play the easy stuff mindlessly, and concentrate on the audience you are playing for.
One of the reasons I play in a band is to be able to go to a party, but not have to actually dance. My dancing is off beat, herky-jerky and uncomfortable, and those are just the compliments I’ve received. That being said - I am always amazed at great dancers and an event we recently played for was a private party for a group of professionals and their office staff’s in the South Bay Area, with a lot of great dancers.
The audience for this particular event was what I would characterize as a great example of the classic American melting pot. This was a night where I found myself playing to Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, Russian and Indian immigrants, and native born Americans black, white and brown all mixing on the dance floor and singing classic 50’s and 60’s rock and roll songs.
What amazed me is that so many people knew the words to these songs as you figure 50’s music is 50-60 years old, and the 60’s tunes are only slightly younger. Yet these folks knew so many of these “moldy oldies” and had somehow learned these classic rockers. Must be the oldies radio stations doing the advance work for us.
The other concept that hit me is that everyone was engaged in a classically American activity, i.e. attending a party with a live rock & roll dance band. Yet none of the normal ethnic or racial separation that occurs in many foreign societies was present that night. My take away was that the American Melting pot concept works. Not to say that these folks have abandoned their individual cultures. Instead they have decided to embrace the American language and culture while living in the US, whether in music or sports or arts and literature.
My software pals from Asia and India often tell me how their kids are so American now that they resist learning the native language of their parents and don’t want to spend a lot of time going to the old country. They just want to be assimilated into American society. The kids have in turn educated the parents that they too need to release the mores of their old country and more fully embrace the American system. It seems that American culture tends to be the universal solvent, dissolving and absorbing bits and pieces of hundreds of other cultures into an ever changing new standard.
Contrast this to the cultural apartheid advanced by the cultural elites under the banner of Diversity and Multiculturalism. Every culture is supposed to be “separate but equal”. Foreign languages are to be embraced over American English. Every group is supposed to organize their community to loudly rally for greater prominence among a sea of other cultural islands, each vying for ascendance over the other. The metaphor of a salad bowl, where tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers are thrown together, but never mix is the ideal of the diversity crowd.
The facts are of course, are that in America, people do mix. People from all races and cultures intermarry, often for the first time as they would not be allowed to - in the old country. They each carry pieces of their cultural identities to a new American mix, to create a hybrid that is both vigorous and vibrant. The salad bowl is the wrong ideal, as even the best salad will rot and wilt in just a days’ time.
Yet our Universities and many liberals still promote the vision that a distinct, stubbornly unassimilated tribal identity is what gives America its strength. Even dopey Al Gore bungled our most famous Latin phrase in a speech in 1998. He claimed “E Pluribus Unum” meant “out of one – to many” while we know it is the polar opposite “out of many – to one”.
The America I know and love is one where everyone is welcomed and assimilated into our society. Immigrants who obtain green cards or pursue the path to citizenship are warmly embraced and set free to pursue their careers and businesses. On the dance floor that night was a small slice of America where people had come together from all over the world to build their professional practices. They had risked their savings, built businesses, and employed many others. From behind my guitar I saw the America where dozens of formerly distinct and sometimes warring cultures can forget all that, and just gather together to dance and sing Beach Boys, Everly Brothers and Beatles songs, and celebrate by kicking back and rocking out a bit.

The National Anthems Glorious Past

2011-07-30T09:26:00.001-07:00

Here’s an all American - Independence Day pop quiz. What song do we sing at ballgames, air shows, in our Churches, and at most patriotic events? Sure – you guessed it – too easy. The English poem set to music in 1770 called "To Anacreon in Heaven."
Some folks know it better by its Americanized name - The Star-Spangled Banner. The Story behind our National Anthem bears re-telling this 4th of July.
The time of this story is September of 1814, two years into the war of 1812. The nation was just 38 years old and we were a hairs width away from losing America to the British. 4,000 battle hardened British troops, led by their General Robert Ross and had just laid waste to our Nation's 14 year old capitol city of Washington, D.C. They burned nearly every Federal building, including the Treasury, the Supreme Court, the Capitol and the White House. President Madison and his wife narrowly escaped and were hiding in nearby Virginia.
Fresh from the death and destruction in Washington D.C. the British were headed by ships to Baltimore Maryland. They knew if they captured Fort McHenry on the Baltimore Harbor they could effectively cut the United States in half. The British had captured an elderly and well respected American physician, Dr. William Beanes. Dr. Beanes was accused of spying, and was taken as a prisoner aboard the British Flag ship Tonnant anchored in the Baltimore harbor. President Madison called upon a DC attorney, Francis Scott Key to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the British. Francis Key and another fellow who was experienced in negotiating prisoner exchanges named Colonel Skinner, sailed for Baltimore. They reached the Tonnant under a flag of truce and actually negotiated a prisoner exchange with the British Admiral of the fleet, Sir Alexander Cochrane.
One small problem surfaced. The Admiral admitted to Key and Skinner that the whole prisoners exchange treaty would be meaningless in two days anyway. He pointed off the ships bow towards the tip of the peninsula to Fort McHenry and said that with the destruction of Fort McHenry, taking Baltimore would be a snap. The men asked how the British planned to do this. The Admiral pointed to a group of 16 heavily armored and weapon-ized ships approaching, explaining that with relentless bombardment, no fort could withstand the destruction of the British fleet.
The Admiral explained that he had sent word to the Fort that as soon as the Americans in Fort McHenry would lower their flag, the shelling would stop. They even predicted the war would then be over and all the prisoners on both sides would go free… as British, not American citizens. The three men were placed under guard aboard the H.M.S. Surprise to witness the planned attack from the deck of that ship. That night, September 12th 1814 the ships maneuvered to within gun range of the Fort and unleashed for 30 solid hours on Fort McHenry.
The British ships fired hundreds of explosive rounds into the Fort. The design of this Fort had included huge ramparts, large defensive barriers surrounding the interior – in a sort of pentagonal shape. The shelling was relentless, and Francis Key was forced to watch this macabre attack from the ship he, Skilling and Dr. Beane were held on. It was only through the flashing of the multiple explosions that Key could glimpse whether the Stars and Stripes of our colonial flag was still visible or not. Hence the words describing how through the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. The British eventually trained their gunships on the flagpole itself and began a whole new barrage. The morning air on September 14th was so thick with smoke from the explosions and mixed with the dewy mists of the daybreak. The haze eventually thinned out enough so the three men could see the “broad stripes and bright stars” and that our Flag was still there. This signaled their freedom as Americans was still intact.
That morning, Francis Scott Key, pulled an envelope from his pocket and wrote a poem. This epic verse was published in the Baltimore newspaper and later by other newspapers along the East Coast. It was entitled “In Defense of Fort McHenry”. A few years later it was set to the music of the English drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven and re-named the Star Spangled Banner. It was not until 1931 that Congress declared it to be the official National Anthem.
Few people know all four verses, as the last three are generally dropped for brevity. The fourth verse bears repeating here in the column as it speaks to one of my core beliefs that America was and is a nation blessed by God.
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation,
Blest with victory and peace, may the Heaven rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our Trust"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Public Unions are not Public servants

2011-07-18T08:31:00.001-07:00

It is great to see that Madison Wisconsin is finally stepping up to take some of the limelight that follows wildly left wing cities when they misbehave. It’s usually San Francisco or Berkeley that try to grab the prize for the most insane progressive cause, such as outlawing circumcision or requesting to import Guantanamo Bay terrorist prisoners.
As I wrote about a few months ago, the real battles for the next few years in the US will be between the Statists and the private sector. Look at the hateful violent behavior of the Union thugs and their puppet masters in the Democrat Party. Witness the out of state Union bosses employing rent-a-mob tactics of importing protesters from all over the US to Madison. Coupled with their violent rhetoric and riot inducing tactics - they have proven that Unions have one interest only. It is to protect the Unions power over their members and the taxpayers. All financed by heavy doses of cash from their members to push a unionized socialist dream, on an unwilling taxpaying public.
Add to that the run-and-hide tactics of the 14 Wisconsin Senate Democrats that gave the mobs three weeks to try and intimidate the newly elected majority in the State government from making any progress. When you view the picture from above - you see the whole Union /Government cabal in its most gloriously ugly form. The democrats abandoned their jobs, abandoned the taxpayers who elected them for three full weeks. The teachers abandoned their classrooms for several days until public opinion forced them back to work. It is so clear now to see how these “public servants” see the world. Union first, duty second, constituents and students last.
The banal war cry of the left seems to be one size fits all. “You’re trying to take away our rights”. This formula is used for everything from abortion on demand to gay marriage to free needles for drug users to these Union driven demands. Michael Moore, who is front and center in this anarchy, is demanding that all “wealth in America” should be confiscated by the government and re-allocated to the “workers”. I still reel at the term “workers” as it is such a Soviet era term - to describe American employees who are free to work, change jobs, start a business etc. Options which are never made available to the “workers of the world” in socialist regimes which he adores. He never says who should give and who should take, but I notice he has never offered up his own personal massive fortune to the public trough.
Besides extorting money from unwilling state employees for union dues that only support far left causes, Unions impose hugely expensive and unworkable work rules. For example, if a Wisconsin state employee receives a phone call about work after hours they are required to be paid one half hour of overtime. Bus drivers make over $150k a year as they work the system imposed by the Unions to collect massive amounts of overtime due to work restrictions imposed by the Unions. Cha-ching go the Union registers all at taxpayers’ expense.
In any business there are constant pressures to lower costs and prices, from consumers, competitors and the economy in general. The government unions feel they are immune to these pressures and while the whole country is working many more hours for a lot less money, the Wisconsin public employees are working less and receiving more. Wisconsin spends far more than it takes in, so it has two choices, cut the spending or raise taxes on everyone. The Democrats and the Unions have one formula, tax more – followed by spend more, followed by tax more. The Republicans have a separate formula, cut spending followed by lowering taxes followed by cutting spending more. This second formula is what the voters of Wisconsin embraced in 2010 that swept the Governor and Republican majorities in both houses to power. The left refuses to believe elections have consequences unless they win the election. So rather than do the job of debating it and trying to turn the tide in the legislature they ran and hid in Illinois.
The Unions add almost no value to the taxpayers, yet they add an immense amount of cost. That is why the push has been to reduce the public employee Unions costly work rules, allowing the Governor to effectively balance the State budget. Without stripping away the Union death grip on the government the State will never be able to balance its books as the Union rules make it all but impossible to get any efficiency out of the public employee workforce.
It is time the public employee Unions be made to understand that we own them, not they own us. They are the single biggest reason all States are unable to balance the books and need to be heavily curtailed if we are to ever hope to get out of the shadow of an ever expanding government that knows no limit.

As goes Egypt...so goes the World

2011-03-11T20:10:00.001-08:00

When Jimmy Carter lost Iran to the terrorist Khomeini we found out just how bad the replacement government can become. The Shah of Iran was no Thomas Jefferson to be sure - but he was the lone force modernizing Iran. He knew the plans and ways of the 12th century minded Mullahs who occupy the Iranian government today. Lesson to remember…when one Middle East government falls, and America stands idly by, the next one will not be a democracy but more than likely an Islamic totalitarian state.
Now we can say the same thing about Egypt, except it is Barack Obama who lost Egypt and it won’t be just Egypt, it will be Tunisia, Jordan and perhaps the whole Middle East.
Not that Obama had a plethora of good choices. Egypt’s Mubarak ruled with an iron fist since he sat next to Anwar Sadat while the Muslim Brotherhood executed the former ruler Sadat in 1981. The best choice was to support Mubarak, at least long enough for his term to run out in 9 months. How to do it without seeming to meddle in Egypt’s affairs? That would require Statesmanship, a skill which Obama definitely possesses, but one he curiously only brings out to encourage America’s foes and shelves when America’s longest standing Arab ally is in need of our support. Oh well - all that is at stake is the World Economy, Middle East Stability and the future of Israel.
Obama’s reluctance to lift a finger to stabilize Egypt was stunning. American allies have to be wondering what treachery awaits them when anti Government protests start in their country. Couple that with the fact that Obama has been on a two year submission and bowing tour to America’s traditional enemies, one has to wonder if the Manchurian Candidate was really a fictional character.
Obama and his merry band of elitist advisors have a firm overriding belief that America has a need to repent. Repent to whom and for what is always unclear to all but the benighted leftists in Washington.
The prevailing theory amongst these fiddlers of Rome is that most anti-Western sentiment is somehow legitimate, and that any official criticism of anti-Western movements are unjust examples of how the US meddles in the affairs of foreign governments.
The underpinnings of this insanity begin with the belief that non westerners are really just victims of Western Imperialism. The rabid pathologies that have developed in these terrorist organizations turned-states are therefore understood – even justifiable. This is why the US under the wobbly hand of Obama is acting like a toothless manatee instead of the most powerful force for Democracy in the world.
Not to pat my side on the back, as the Republicans of recent past had made the mistake of assuming the entire world yearns to be free - and that given free elections they will choose some form of Democratic rule. We believed that if you just destroyed the totalitarian states and let the people vote – they will create democracy in the Middle East. We wrongly assumed all people want something akin to the American system.
Here are some startling facts. According to an opinion survey in June of 2010 by Pew research, 59% of Egyptians said they back Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Just 27% said they want a democratic government that focuses on modernization. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. 30% support Hezbollah and 20% support al Qaida. 95% of them said they would welcome Islamic influence over their laws and government. 82% of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.
This does not sound like a breeding ground for American style democracy. Reflect back to 2006 when the Palestinians were given the opportunity to vote in open and free elections. They voted for Hamas and its Islamic totalitarian agenda. Even in 2005 the Egyptians were given limited freedom to choose their legislators and where they could they elected the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood to lead them.
When the US Government under Obama did nothing to support Mubarak, apparently hoping that the protesters will magically transform Egypt into Vermont - we have put the entire world at risk. The risk is another Iran – this time in Egypt, and soon the dominoes will fall in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The rest of the Arab world could be plunged into complete and utter darkness.
Obama now needs to support the Egyptian Army, which may be tough as he doesn’t even support our Army. This will prove to be utterly distasteful to this band of change-a-holics – but there needs to be an orderly transition of power and a strong US presence to ward off the virus that is about to infect Egypt.

Christmas comes but once each year

2011-01-05T08:36:00.001-08:00

Christmas always sneaks up on me. Not that I don’t know it’s coming well in advance, as the stores seem to go from Halloween to Christmas overnight. My business is busy in November and December (thankfully so) and so many of the glorious days of Christmas prep go on without my taking notice. One tradition that I have to perform is put up the Christmas lights on our home. That job better be done by the end of the weekend after Thanksgiving – or I am in the doghouse.
Every family has formed their own traditions. One of the more modern ones is the Christmas family letter. My wife creates and sends ours but we receive many from friends that are so funny you wish you had created them yourself. Others are pretentious, where the writer refers to their own children as “our son, Dr. Houser”… or they claim that between vacationing in Switzerland and Paris they barely had time for fashion week in Milan…you know the type.
Many of the traditions we now take for granted have very odd origins, and many are misunderstood. Take for example the word Xmas. For years I thought this was a disrespectful clipping of Christ’s name from Christmas. Turns out the origins of that word form is Greek. The first letter of the Greek word for Christ is chi, which is X. With the invention of the printing press, "Xmas" was often used, in print, to save the hand setting of type and ink. The English word “Christmas” derives from the old English Christes maesse, meaning "Christ's mass."
Christians have been celebrating Jesus' birth on December 25 since the early fourth century. The December date for the holiday probably arose from a desire to provide an alternative to the Roman "birthday of the unconquered sun" and the Persian birthday of Mithras, both of which were celebrated on or around the winter solstice. The first evidence of its observance is in Rome in 336 AD. The earliest Christians do not appear to have commemorated the nativity, but only the baptism and resurrection of Christ and the deaths of the martyrs.
Did you know that Christmas did not become a national holiday in America until June, 26, 1870 by President Ulysses S. Grant? The first state to recognize the Christmas holiday officially was Alabama.
How about Christmas Trees? The Germans tell how in 722, Saint Boniface encountered some pagans who were about to sacrifice a child at the base of a huge oak tree. He cut down the tree to prevent the sacrifice and a Fir tree grew up at the base of the oak. He then told everyone that this lovely evergreen, with its branches pointing to heaven, was a holy tree - the tree of the Christ child, and a symbol of His promise of eternal life.
Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, was the first to add lighted candles to the tree. He was so taken with the Christmas night sky that he wished to bring "the lights of the stars" into the home of his family. From this, decorating the tree with ornaments and small gifts emerged in later centuries leading to our customs today.
A wreath with holly, red berries and other decorations began in the 17th century. Holly, with its sharply pointed leaves, symbolized the thorns in Christ's crown-of-thorns. Red berries symbolized the drops of Christ's blood. A wreath at Christmas signified a home that celebrated to birth of Christ.
The creation of Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer is also interesting. A man named Bob May was a copy writer for the retail chain Montgomery Wards. He was given the job of creating a booklet containing a Christmas story that Wards could give away as a promotional item. May created a story about how being different from everyone else could be a positive. May told the story over and over to his 4 year old daughter, changing it day by day until the version we have today was created. The familiar story emerged of Santa being faced with a problem, in that one Christmas Eve the earth was engulfed in a thick fog. Rudolph with his red nose glowing bright provided a way to light the way of Santa’s sleigh and cut through the mists, saving Christmas. Rudolph went from weird looking pariah among Reindeer, to the Hero of Christmas Day.
The booklet was so popular that by the end of 1946 6,000,000 copies had been given away or sold, making Rudolph one of the most widely distributed books in the world. In early 1949 Bob May secured the rights to his creation, and he and his brother in law turned it into a catchy song. Later that year it was recorded by Gene Autry and sold 2 million copies.
Hope you’ve enjoyed these little Christmas stories and I wish all of you, your families and friends a very Merry Christmas and thanks for reading this column.

Israel Israel Conservatives are Calling

2011-01-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

Why do American Conservatives have such a strong attraction to Israel ? This is a question posed by many liberals who do not understand why we so strongly support the Jewish state. Like most of our stands on issues, there are Social & Political explanations - and there are Religious grounds for our backing.
The ‘secular conservative’ feels that Israel is an ally of the US, based on their Democratic form of Government and their Westernized approach to business and society. If you go to Israel you will find it seems a lot like America. People of all races, nationalities and yes, religions co-exist in Israel. Almost every citizen speaks English, owns a car, watches Western movies, wears American style clothing, and votes in their regular elections.
Israeli entrepreneurs create all sorts of innovative companies - looking to cash in on capitalism - much the same as we do. Many of the software companies I have worked with in the last 20 years started in Israel. Our farmers in the central valley are using drip-irrigation products, sophisticated water pumps, and ingenious agricultural accessories that are created and produced in Israel.
Israel - like the US - also has a free press. Israeli newspapers and television reflect a diversity of views, and you can select media that represent every view from ardent Zionism to almost suicidal pacifism. Over one million Arabs live in Israel and account for about 20 % of the population. They enjoy full rights of citizenship, vote in elections and serve in Israel’s parliament. When you talk to Arab citizens in Israel, many proudly proclaim their Israeli citizenship.
Another aspect that appeals to conservatives is that Israel is the top military deterrent to the aggressive anti-Semitic nations such as Iran and equally virulent regimes such as Hamas in Palestine or Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Israeli military is fast, effective and ever ready. They employ technology that comes from years of winning wars of repelled invasions. Their military discipline and logistical efficiency is world renowned.
Israel occupies only 10,000 square miles compared to the adjacent Arab countries that are over 5,000,000 square miles. Israel has never sponsored any terrorist act, never kidnapped innocent citizens of other countries, and has fought for its very existence often since it was founded in 1948. Conservatives feel that any democratic pro-American presence in the Middle East is of supreme value to our country. Just turns out that Israel is the lone ranger in this category.
To the American religious conservative it is all of the above plus a special understanding of who the Jewish people are. Conservative Christians interpret the word 'Israel' in the Bible to mean 'the Jews' and not 'the Church.' It means that the Jews are still the chosen people, that they are still in covenant with and beloved by God, and that they are still the rightful heirs of the land of Israel. Christian conservatives that embrace the Bible reject all forms of anti-Semitism while embracing both the Jewish people and their national aspirations in Israel.
This positive theology towards the Jews originated with some small Protestant sects in Europe. When the seeds of these ideas crossed the Atlantic, they took root and have become mainstream Christianity here. The American Founding Fathers had such reverence for the Bible and the Jews that they seriously considered making Hebrew the official language of the new nation. George Washington wrote his famous letter to the members of the Touro Synagogue warmly welcoming their civic participation and condemning bigotry in the strongest terms.
If you read Genesis 12:3 in the Old Testament and Romans 15:27 in the New Testament you will see ample evidence of the Lord’s admonition to always stay on the side of Israel. The Genesis reference is to the Lineage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, i.e. the people of the House of Israel. It simply states that if you bless Israel you will be blessed and if you curse Israel you will be cursed. In the Romans passage the Apostle Paul says 'If the Gentiles have shared in the Jews' spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings.' For Christians the New Testament recognizes that the Jews have given spiritual blessings to us as Christians, and inspires true Christian charity towards the Jews. It is in this same spirit that Christians join Jews in following the calls of the Hebrew prophets to care for the poor and the persecuted around the world.
I trust we will continue to ignore the cries to stop supporting Israel that have been heard from various groups inside the US. I dearly hope that we never follow this path, as I believe the future of America is inextricably inter-twined with the future and success of Israel.

Public Employee Compensation Columns

2010-11-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

The real battle of the next 20 years will not be against Jihadists, Communism in Latin or South America or even Liberals versus Conservatives. It WILL be the battle of the Public Sector versus the Private sector. Why? The public sector has been on a wild binge of runaway salary and pension spending - and has conveniently mailed the bill to us and our children.
Sure the Public Employee Unions and the grand daddy of this problem - former Governor Jerry Brown -are trying their best to play the Jedi mind trick on all of us. They mumble “These are not the Government Droids you are looking for“. They want us to focus on anything but their hideous records of bloated civil service spending and pension contracts. It would be great to review Brown’s records as governor to see what he actually did - but hey- he took the unusual step of writing a law just before he left to seal his records for 50 years – until 2038 !
The reality though - is that there are way too many government workers and they are paid way too much.
Professor Paul Light of NYU –calculated that the size of just the Federal Civil service as a sum of Civil Service employees, (1.9m) military personnel,(1.4m) government contractors,(7.8m) grant jobs( 2.9m) and Postal Service employees (.7m). All of those add up to 14.6 million federal workers. That’s just the Federal Government. We have State, County and local government to add to that number.
Then there is the income disparity between the Public and the private sector. If you measure the average Salary between the two – you see that the average federal worker receives $79k and the average salaried private sector worker just $50k annually. When you compare total compensation it gets worse. The average bureaucrat gets $119k a year and the private employee $69k. That means the government bureaucrats make almost twice as much per year as the people paying their salaries.
At the California State level the average government worker makes 45% more per hour than their private sector counterpart. To make it worse State Government workers often retire at age 55 on full pensions that run for3 to 4 decades at full pay and benefits. These unbelievably great pensions are time bombs, as the same government weasels that brought them to us have consistently underfunded the pension funds. The current forecast of just how much the State of California public pension fund is “underfunded” is 535 billion dollars.
Don’t forget – it was Jerry Brown that did this to us in his first regime as governor in the 70’s.
Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, when Governor of California in 1978, signed the “Dill Act" which gave California public employees the right to collective bargaining. That’s when this monstrosity of a problem started. He did it again as the Oakland Mayor, and as Attorney General has been so cozy with all four of the public employee unions - that they have dumped multi millions of dollars of grateful cash in his election deposit box.

Jerry Brown empowered the Unions grip on the system - making it virtually impossible to fire government bureaucrats. As an example, the Los Angeles Union School District has only tried to fire 7 teachers in the last 10 years. Of this miniscule number, they succeeded in only getting 4 of the worst burnouts you can imagine fired. The price tag? $3.6 million to terminate 4 bad teachers. The US Bureau of Labor statistics show that involuntary termination rates in the private sector are over 6 times as high as federal or state government workers.

To sum it up, Jerry Brown created the network of Government Unions that hired far too many public employees; made sure they got paid way too much, and made them impossible to get rid of.

And 50% of Californians are cheering him on to be Governor again? Which half? The Government half or the private sector half? Which side are you on?

For fun, check out this Saturday Night Live Skit which parodies this very situation. http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/public-employee-of-the-year/1222306

Tea Party helps Republicans be Republicans

2010-11-09T22:16:00.001-08:00

I read the news today – oh boy. USA Today said the Recession was over in June 2009. That’s what the National Bureau of Economic Research said on Monday. Really ? 14 months ago the recession ended ? Did anyone ask the follow up question…”When then did the Depression begin ?” No one seemed to ask this panel of Government paid economists… Hey, how’s that unemployment thing going ? What about the 40% decrease we’ve seen in our home values ? Couple that with the “spend till they drop” policy that the Obamunists have blindly followed and I bet not one out of ten people feel the recession is over.
The fall elections are going to be a referendum on the recession. The one party that has the only sensible solutions is not really a political party at all. It has not even run any candidate under it’s Party name, nor seeks to promote folks that run as a third party candidates in the general elections. It does seek to run the most fiscally conservative candidate in the primary system, challenging the status quo for many Republican candidates. That’s why I’m a Tea Party Republican.
I was a Democrat growing up, voting for Jimmy Carter in my first election. Ay yi yi – what was I thinking ? Jimmy Carter was the very definition and personification of malaise. But, Carters incompetence gave rise to the best President of my lifetime – Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the candidate who uttered the words, “Government is not the solution to our problems, Government is the problem” I switched from a Democrat to a Reagan Republican then – and still count myself as a loyal Republican, but I solidly identify with the Tea Party as it has the most sensible fiscal platform out there.
The Tea Party has been a joyous phenomenon to watch. For years we have been trying to get our Republican party to stop running these Democrat-lite candidates and dressing them up as Republicans. They politely would appear to listen to us then would give us Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain.
The Tea Party has been the baseball bat with a nail driven thru it the Republican leadership has needed applied to their mindset of running “Obama Republicans”, just to reclaim their power base. The core values of the Tea Party are pretty simple. Shrink the Government now. Return individual liberties to the people. Help the business community get back on its’ feet so businesses can hire new employees.
The miserable reality of electing liberal leaning moderate republicans is well known. They vote almost lockstep in concert with the democrats. They have learned how to campaign as if they were in favor of shrinking government then when the election is over they go back to the right side of the government trough to feed.
Liberal friends of mine chided me during the Bush years about the concepts of “Big Government Republican-ism”. They were right. Republicans were not adhering to the principles of smaller government and individual liberty that we all believed in and voted for. They were consumed with doing whatever it took to stay in power, even if core conservative principles had to be discarded. The RINO led Republican Party talked a decent game but their actions were completely different. Their voting records were so close to liberal democrats that any hope of stopping the nanny statism that keeps rolling forward seemed impossible.
Then the Tea Party came to life. Tea parties sprang up all over the country. Ordinary folks who normally were part of the silent majority spoke up loudly - to roll back big government policies. The big government liberals giggled and the big government republicans yawned and both went back to the trough. The Tea Party decided they were not going to make the same mistakes that Ross Perot’s 3rd party made in the early 1990’s. The Tea Party ran candidates that were hard core fiscal conservatives in the Republican primaries. Suddenly the old guard Republican candidates that were not conservatives found themselves losing those primaries.
The President said Monday that the Tea Party should tell him specifically how the Government can be rolled back. I felt like shouting at the radio – “That’s your job” but I didn’t want to yell at two things that are only capable of broadcasting - and are deaf to anyone’s voice. Here are some of the concepts that Conservatives have been saying for years to the hear nothing politicians.
• Reduce Tax Rates. Our corporate income tax rate, is the second highest in the developed world, must be cut to restore U.S. competitiveness.
• Spend Less. Congress needs to cap the annual increase in total government spending, limited to inflation plus population growth. Lawmakers need to establish policies that return federal spending to less than 20% of U.S. GDP.
• Eliminate Government Intervention. The government should end the TARP program. It should also force privatization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Companies should be allowed to fail, and laws and regulations should create no expectation of a future bailout.
I’ll end with one more Reagan quote for the road. ”Republicans believe every day is 4th of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15.”

The Left was Right !

2010-07-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

I have to admit publicly that my leftist friends are truly able to predict the future. I had no idea until recently how good they really are. They told me in the fall of 2008 several very key events would take place if I voted for John McCain. As a side note - for conservatives - voting for John McCain is like getting a bad tattoo on your face. You never understand why you did it in the first place and everyone winces when they realize what you did. That being said, we didn’t have much of a choice way back in ott-eight.
My friends said that if I voted for John McCain we would end up in an endless series of escalations to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were right ! I voted for McCain and we have had several large escalations to the wars in the Mideast. Don’t get me wrong. When we engage militarily anywhere in the world, I am completely behind fighting hard and winning that war, even if I don’t agree with the political motives behind it. Our military is clearly the best trained and armed force to ever walk the earth.
My friend’s son is a Marine recon serving in Afghanistan. He told me how the rules of engagement changed dramatically soon after Obama took office. They are sent in to scout out Taliban bad guys and take them out. Oh – except for the new rules of engagement say if the person is not verifiably armed you cannot shoot them.
These recon patrols sit there for two or three days – completely hidden and watching and waiting to see who comes and goes. The Taliban leaders have learned the Obama policies and have adopted them effectively against our troops. If a recon patrol sees a group of Taliban fighters, towing a covered trailer of weapons, unless these weapons are in the hands of the fighters the Marines are only allowed to report them to their command.
They were sent there to kill the Taliban but cannot fire unless the bad guys are visibly armed. Many times they know on sight the Taliban leaders by facial recognition. The bad guys know this but simply parade around not carrying weapons, or dressed in Burka’s, thus triggering the no-kill provisions of the Obama combat doctrine. They can’t shoot or order airstrikes unless they actually see the weapons on the fighters.
This is the Obama dogma. The administrations anti war planners from NYU know that the real war is fought in American courtrooms. These brave lawyers wistfully dream that they can best defeat our enemies by suing them in Federal Court. Take that you man made disasters… Hopefully General Petraeus will reverse this insane engagement model and allow our troops to actually do the dangerous jobs they were sent there to accomplish.
My friends said if I voted for John McCain the big Wall Street banks and investment houses would be propped up and salvaged from the normal cycle of capitalism. They said that big corporations would be protected and small business would be thrown to the wolves. They were right ! I voted for McCain and we declared the huge Wall Street firms too big to fail and bailed them out. We were fleeced by the federal government to support the international bankers’ interests and make sure that it was business as usual at Goldman Sachs et al. Campaign contributions and caviar for you my good Democrat controlled congress.
The Obama administration has consistently done one thing; protect any government or business that is unionized. We nationalized General Motors and Chrysler, putting the American taxpayer in charge of pumping up two companies doomed to fail. These behemoths were dying from being forced to satisfy bloated union pension obligations instead of investing in replacing outdated manufacturing plants.
What businesses are suffering ? The small businesses of America. Fully 70% of all job creation comes from this sector but they cannot afford to hire anyone. They know that come January 1 2011, their taxes are going to skyrocket, so they are preserving capital, or declaring bankruptcy.
My friends said if I voted for John McCain I would have a President who didn’t really understand the economy or how to steer policy towards ending the recession quickly. They were right again ! I voted for McCain and I have a President who thinks that FDR was an economic genius, emulating his every move. Even though historians have documented at length how FDR’s Keynesian economic policies prolonged the depression. Even Henry Morgenthau, the architect of the new deal declared it was an absolute failure in ending the depression. The déjà-vu Obama policies are prolonging the current recession and yet these politicians whistle as we work, to pay the bills of their newest university experiment on our economy.
Lastly, my friends said if I voted for McCain I would end up with an idiot for a Vice President. They were right ! I voted for McCain and now we have one of the dumbest bags of sand ever to occupy the Vice Presidential office.

The Government - All we want is everything

2010-06-22T22:24:00.001-07:00

This is an open Letter from the Federal Government to our citizens. While many of you are finding comfort in our cradle to grave programs, we find it disconcerting that others are rebuking the very thought of Statism? Especially this 4th of July Holiday when citizens celebrate the glory and power of Government. As our brilliant state controlled media has told you repeatedly, you are the ones that chose us. You elected us as Statists to positions of control over you in the great election. You agreed that government knows what’s best for you. Have you forgotten that?
We now need to help you better comprehend the wisdom of your selection. It is obvious to all but the most rebellious among you that the grand experiment in Capitalism has failed. How many of you are wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. The Capitalist system promised you riches beyond measure, yet has it delivered? No! The wisdom of our switch to a centrally planned Statist system is bearing fruit in the great equalization. Were passing new laws every day that tax all who retain over abundant wealth and re-distribute it to our supporters, the citizens of great need.
Yet we constantly hear over the Internet and especially on those miserable AM radio broadcasts that a few of the old guardians of stolen wealth are haranguing us. Why? For liberating the ill gotten gains from the wealthy - to relieve the costs of life for the masses? It’s time to silence these defenders of the old regime and replace them with the tried and true perspectives of the mainstream media who are true believers in our plans. The criticism by these outdated insurrectionists has been discredited by our objective government content review panels such as Media Matters. The time has come for the government to firmly wrest control from these criminals, stopping them from confusing you with their opposition to the wisdom of the Statists you elected.
After all, the Federal Government only seeks to protect you from yourself and those greedy Capitalists. This is why we will be instituting, under the emerging Global Governance of the United Nations, a few needed programs to guarantee your safety. The first is to rid society at large permanently of dangerous weapons. Guns kill people every day and we seek to end this injustice. Every progressive society in the world has banned private ownership of firearms by their subjects. By asking the small minority of gun owners to surrender their rifles, pistols and shotguns, as per the UN small arms treaty, to the proper authorities we are taking a bold step towards mandated health and safety. You elected us to be bold, didn’t you?
In the same vein, we seek to better control the average citizens diet and healthcare. As our great leaders have mentioned, obesity is one of many epidemics we have to solve. We never waste a crisis here in the Federal Government and to that end we will be instituting programs to better control food production. Additionally we will heavily tax any business that sells or promotes foods not specifically approved by our committees of experts. It’s to your benefit to help us become deeply involved in the nation’s food supply and distribution systems so we can better control what your fellow citizens actually put in their mouth.
Fortunately, we were able to finally begin the process of resetting the healthcare system in 2009 from a private, profit driven monster to a proper government run and controlled system. The Government Healthcare programs we launched will eventually provide sensible health services to all for free. By limiting the obscene profits that Pharmaceutical, Medical Device and Biotech companies can generate and re-directing those funds to our supporters benefit, we’re able to take a huge leap forward in creating social justice.
Our extremely brilliant planners have many more policies in the works. The nation’s energy supply has long been controlled by greedy capitalist corporations that produced more toxic side effects than benefits. We need you to focus on oil covered birds in the Gulf, the deaths of Coal miners, and the nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island while we jettison the old energy industry. The Federal Government is implementing a breathtaking program, called cap and trade. It is designed to take huge sums of unused profits from these energy producers and taxes from gluttonous consumers, to re-distribute them to our trusted leaders in the new green energy movement. Oil, Coal and Nuclear power are to be cast upon the dustbin of history.
Again – thank you for supporting us in the intervention and re-structuring of the Automotive, Financial, Insurance and Healthcare Industries in the last 18 months. We were elected by you to transform the economy of America in a way that was never envisioned by that small cabal of slave owning, wealthy property owning eccentrics known as the Founding Fathers. Rest assured, even with the howls of the citizenry against us, we will not slow down these progressive policies until our final solutions are fully implemented. Again, thank you for empowering us to be your rulers.

Teach your children well - send them to Texas

2010-06-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

How many of you believe that in the last 25 years, what our schools teach about US History has been altered to fit the whims of the political left? If you agree, you join 60% of Americans who feel the same. To put a sharp point on the issue; many believe that the curriculum for teaching US History in our schools and Universities has been hijacked by the hate America strain of leftist elites. Their notion of "education" consists of presenting an ideologically rigged set of "facts" in the classroom that seek to narrow rather than expand a student's mind.
The State of Texas recently was in the news as the their state school board chose, by a bipartisan 11 – 3 vote, to change their US History textbooks to present a more centric and patriotic view. In the last Texas textbook re-write in 1997, the formerly left of center review panel removed Christmas, the Liberty Bell, Neil Armstrong, Albert Einstein, and reduced teaching about Thomas Edison, Veterans Day, and Independence Day, religious heritage, and more. Compare those changes with the ones just agreed upon in Texas.
- 8th grade students will analyze Abraham Lincoln's ideas about liberty, equality, the Union, and government as contained in his first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address, and contrast them with the ideas contained in confederate leader Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address.
- Causes of the Civil War will be presented in this order: sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery.
- Students are asked to “examine…compare and contrast” the phrase “separation of church and state” to the original wording of the Constitution.
- In high school history, a standard promotes discussion on the “solvency of long term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare”.
Are these controversial concepts?
Critics immediately hit the airwaves with charges that US History had been incorrectly re-written. They alleged that the new textbooks removed Thomas Jefferson from the standards. False - Jefferson is in the standards five times, second in prominence only to George Washington, and the Declaration of Independence he authored appears another 25 times. They argued that slavery was removed and renamed something more flattering. False. Slavery is extensively covered nine times in the new curriculum.
Then the critics accused the board of intentionally diminishing women and minorities. False again. The truth – they added Hillary Clinton, Barbara Jordan, Cesar Chavez, Thurgood Marshall, Dolores Huerta and Sonia Sotomayor to the textbooks. Does this sound like a blackball of the left by the conservatives?

What did our open minded liberal teaching establishment in California do? They passed a law seeking to bar textbooks adhering to Texas’ educational standards from the state. Our bottom of the list California schools chieftains want to indoctrinate us in their aging leftist curriculum. None of this pro-America Texas nonsense will appear here. So here we are – 49th out of 50 in terms of school success – and we are convinced the Texas school board is wrong.

It reminds me of the story from the 80’s movie “Stand and Deliver” about Bolivian born Math teacher Jaime Escalante. He was the teacher who believed and proved he could teach advanced Mathematics to inner city kids at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. He also showed that the education system didn't give a whit about education. His success was opposed by the school authorities, fellow teachers and most aggressively by the teachers unions. His success was so pronounced that often 50 or more kids would cram into his classes. The union forced a contract provision limiting classroom size to 35 students, throwing kids who were for the first time in their life learning math out of the classroom. In 1990 the Unions and the School District stripped Escalante of his chairmanship of the school math department. Escalante retired and went back to his native Bolivia.

My daughter went to San Jose State for a year. She was taught that Texas was stolen from Mexico. She was indoctrinated in Multicultural ethnic studies courses that called America oppressive and actively encouraged mushy headed students to actively fight for "social justice”. That is the new term for government forced re-distribution of wealth, and jailing business people for making a profit.

I have two ancient California textbooks on US History in my library at home. One is from 1936 called The Story of America. The second is from 1961 – West’s Story of our Country. Both of these extol American Exceptionalism. Both of these present a positive view of America, covering the highs and lows of our history in a very uplifting way. Somehow, between then and now, the textbooks we use present a very different view of American History. Today’s California textbooks are heavily tilted to the political left point of view and are far more consistent with the drivel my daughter endured at SJ State.

So here’s to Texas finally correcting a heretofore unopposed slide to the left in their educational system.

Close the Border Mr. President - they're killing us

2010-05-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

I’m sure by now the name Rob Krentz rings no bells for most Americans. Rob Krentz was a rancher in Kingman Arizona, who was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant on his ranch. Like most modern media reports there is much more to the tale than has been told. So…here’s the real story.
Rob and Susan Krentz owned and operated a 35,000 acre cattle ranch near the Mexico border. They constantly dealt with hundreds of illegal aliens crossing their ranch to find work in the surrounding area. The Krentz’s routinely would offer food and water to dehydrated migrants, and were most often repaid by getting their fences cut, cattle shot, fires started and garbage strewn all over their ranch.
To amp up the problem, the Krentz’s and other ranchers in the area had noticed a huge increase in para-military type drug rings entering their ranches. The drug gangs send in a point man with a machine gun in front, followed a half mile behind by armed guards, followed another half mile behind by the drug shipment, followed by more armed guards. The ranchers all knew to stay well away from these drug related death squads invading our southern border, and rely upon their local Sherriff’s or the US Border Patrol.
Just a few weeks before Krentz's murder, another rancher nearby found a huge shipment of drugs on his property. He called the authorities, and they confiscated the drugs, but were unable to stop the gang of illegal’s that came a few days later and viciously beat the rancher and his wife, threatening to kill them if they reported any more drug shipments. The drug smugglers kill anyone who gets in their way and often kill their own drug "mules" who fail to keep up in what Police call human "drug trains".
One week before his murder, Krentz found a similar drug shipment in trucks on his ranch. He reported the drugs and had the Border Patrol and DEA haul the drugs off. No one knows for sure exactly who killed Rob Krentz yet, but on the day of his murder he had radioed to his brother that he had spotted an illegal that looked like he was in trouble so he was on his way to help. Investigators reported that the assailant shot Rob and his dog, and that Krentz was able to drive his ATV away from the shooting site. Krentz was mortally wounded and he soon went into shock, and died. Foot tracks of the killer were identified and followed 20 miles south to the Mexico border by sheriff’s deputies and U.S. Border Patrol trackers.
Is it any wonder Arizona recently passed a much needed enforcement bill to try to stop this cycle of violence? Phoenix had 316 kidnapping cases last year, more than any other town in America, and nearly all of them involved illegal immigrants and drugs. The Federal Government attempts to claim exclusive authority over illegal immigration, yet they do almost nothing to enforce the existing laws. The people of Arizona were sick and tired of waiting on a detached federal bureaucracy that continually ignores the will of the people.

The citizens of Arizona recently passed a statewide law that is identical to the existing federal law. Now both the Federal and State law makes it a crime for a non-citizen to be in the U.S. without government documentation. Under the existing Federal law, legal-resident aliens have been required to carry and show those documents to federal law-enforcement officers since 1940. The core concept of Arizona’s SB 1070 similarly requires immigrants to carry proof of legal status or risk being turned over by state troopers to federal authorities. The new Arizona law specifically bans any racial profiling and only allows inquiry into citizenship status if the person is stopped for some other crime. Every country in the world has this same type of requirement, especially Mexico. Heaven help the poor illegal immigrant from El Salvador who gets caught in Mexico without his proof of legal status.
The squeals from leftists are always the same. They shout racism is the motivation behind any opposition to their agenda, whether it is socialized medicine, nationalizing US corporations or the Arizona immigration reform. They ignore the fact that their own existing federal laws are identical to the Arizona statute. Both Attorney General Holder and DHS head Napolitano loudly criticized the law, never having bothered to actually read it.
Americans overwhelmingly favor legal immigration. We take pride in welcoming new immigrants to our country, and support efforts to assimilate new citizens by encouraging they learn English and American History as the surest path to becoming productive citizens.
What we ask of government is to enforce existing laws and for our borders to be controlled. We were promised a double layer border fence along the entire Mexican border. According to DHS, only 34.3 miles double-layer fencing has been completed along the 1950 mile Southern border. If we had simply constructed the double layer fence Rob Krentz would not have been murdered. When we as Americans begin the debate again on immigration reform, we need to loudly shout at our political class “Finish the Border Fence First, then we’ll debate”.

With Obamacare - Medical Innovation in danger

2010-04-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

Good healthcare is not cheap, and cheap healthcare is not good. The hallmark of the American healthcare system is how we incorporate both leading edge therapies coupled with mass scale manufacturing techniques to increase the quality of care while driving costs down.
The software company I work for deals almost exclusively with life sciences companies. I get to see large and small medical device manufacturers, plus biotech and pharmaceutical firms all over North America. What I can say with steely eyed certainty is we are in the golden age of medical innovation. With equal certainty I can tell you this wave of innovation can be destroyed by the proposed government takeover of the healthcare sector.
Government controlled systems systematically starve the use of new drugs, devices and procedures. The deployment rate by government run healthcare providers of these new life saving technologies is minimal and years behind a market driven system. Why? They deem them too expensive. Cost control, not patient care is the primary driver in government systems. Just ask the Canadians.
Dr. Anne Doig, the president of the Canadian Medical Association, described the Canadian health system as imploding. Waiting times for critical procedures are increasing dramatically. Treatments available in the U.S. are now denied in Canada. That’s why they come to America, with its’ private sector led healthcare system, and they pay for it out of pocket.
The American private sector is humming with a pipeline of soon to be released wonders. I have seen two companies with late stage therapies for Lupus. A friend of mine works for a company that is developing a system that analyzes genetic markers associated with early detection of a dozen different types of cancer. Another is a new non-surgical, removable hearing and communication device designed to imperceptibly transmit sound via the teeth to help people with single-sided deafness.
How about something for your heart? Continuous-Flow Ventricular assist devices are tiny, powerful; 3-ounce med devices that are surgically attached alongside the heart, that quietly and effectively take over the pumping ability of the heart. The technologies I’ve described represent far less than 1 % of the next wave of medical breakthroughs…if we keep the American free enterprise model in place.
Sidney Taurel, the former CEO of the pharma company Eli Lilly said: “America, though hardly free of government intervention ... is the one market where global innovators find the incentive they need to keep pushing the boundaries."
Unfortunately, the health care bills moving through Congress could dramatically curtail medical innovation. Imposing price controls on drugs and treatments, or indirectly forcing their prices down by means of a "public option" or expanded public insurance programs, would reduce the incentive for innovators to develop new treatments.
The innovation pipeline relies on several types of companies to effectively function. The large Pharma and Med Device companies have the raw capital, the mass manufacturing capacity and the wholesale and retail distribution and delivery systems to bring cost effective new medical products to market. The small companies have the agility to develop and manage the clinical trials of thousands of potential new breakthrough technologies. Once these are approved by the FDA and the company can bring its wonder drug or device to market, they are typically bought by the giant companies. This investment cycle is what has produced 95% of all medical innovations in the last 30 years.
Not to leave out the Government, as they try to get in on the innovation pipeline too. The problem with the government led projects is they tend to fund technologies that feel good to the political class. Politically motivated approaches such as human Embryonic stem cell research (hEsc) are darlings of the Government funded research community. Problem is - no therapies have been developed from hEsc research, while dozens of therapies have resulted from the market driven adult stem-cell research. The market rewards success and penalizes failure on its own terms without accounting for political tastes.
The Venture Capital firms and the business community demand a financial reward in the future to risk gobs of capital today. The Scientists that develop the intellectual property that is the heart of the innovation pipeline also rely on financial gain. This industry employs millions of people with high paying jobs in the US, jobs that will continue long after “shovel ready” jobs created by temporary government stimulus money runs out.
Conversely the government people who now want to run our healthcare system are the same jokers that run the Post Office and the "cash for clunkers" program. Do you want these bureaucrats making your families medical choices for you? Remember once we start down the slope towards socialized medicine we cannot go back. The innovative medical treatment you now receive will wither and die, only to be replaced by long waiting lines for rationed services. Instead of advanced diagnosis and treatment options with cutting edge technologies we will be subjected to the dull and aged technologies of yesteryear.
Let the golden age of innovation continue. Don’t let our precious healthcare system be destroyed by Socialized Medicine. Remember Socialist systems of any kind guarantee only one thing - an equal share of misery.

What did that sign say ?

2010-02-23T11:21:00.001-08:00

I am sitting in the Newark NJ airport, trying to catch a flight to beat a monster snowstorm that is now blasting Washington DC. There must have been a global warming conference here in the east today to trigger such a massive snowstorm. That being said – and since I am near comatose after 5 days of internal company meetings I wanted to write a column on oddball signs I have seen over the years that are curious and sometimes hilarious.
Before the signs though I had to pass on something from a menu in a restaurant a friend took me to in Montreal where they summed up the wine selection with the curious phrase ”Our wines leave you with nothing to hope for”.
Menu’s are easy to fix, as are many other public postings so I find the more permanent the mistake the funnier it is. I had a friend whose grocery club card was mistakenly printed as belonging to Mr. Smoth when his name was Smith. I was with him once when the clerk said “thanks for shopping at Safeway Mr. Smoth” and after that everyone called him Mr. Smoth.
In my travels I often spot signs that don’t make much sense. I took my youngest daughter to Australia and we encountered several signs that were yellow diamond road signs warning us of danger. One was a “Please drive with care” sign that then stated the word “Ahead” and pictured three silhouette drawings on it. One was a man on a horse, the second was a Kangaroo hopping and the third was a Wombat that was the same size as the horse.
Another was a sign at a beach that was just the drawing of a man in swim trunks, under the wave line with a giant squid tangled around his legs. We ran from that beach. At the Sydney Zoo we saw a sign that read “Please do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty”
The last Australian oddity was a triangular warning sign that showed a man in a wheelchair on a steep downhill slope rapidly approaching a crocodile with open jaws. Do wheelchair bound people get eaten by Croc’s often enough to warrant a metal warning sign?
On another trip to Italy, I spotted in Florence a sign on a doctor’s office that proclaimed he was a “Specialist in Women and other diseases” – no kidding. Passing thru Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam a sign in an airport lounge read “Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar” – I kidded my Dutch friends about that many times.
In South Africa I took my oldest daughter plains game hunting and while still in the City of Johannesburg we would find that any nice establishment such as a theatre, restaurant or casino had a sign at the entry encouraging guests to check their handguns. There was usually a gun check desk where a nice lady would check your pistol for you while in the establishment. I took several pictures of my daughter as the gun check lady for her facebook page.
In the Pilansburg Game Park in Africa one stone monument read “Don’t feed the Lions” on one side of the marker and then on the reverse it stated “Toilet – Stay in your car”. Must be some bush trick to keep the lions away?
A few signs friends have sent me are equally odd. One from the Chelmsford UK area has a large road sign pointing to the right that tells you how to get to the “Secret Nuclear Bunker” on the A128 road. Another was a warning sign near an electric railway in Newcastle that said “Touching wires causes Instantaneous death + £200 fine” Death should be enough of a punishment, why add a 200 pound fine?
Other head scratching signs such as the one that reads “Parking for drive thru service only” that we saw in Arkansas, or the one on the road from Phoenix to Tucson that reads “Hitchhikers may be escaped Prisoners”. Can’t say my Mom didn’t warn me about hitchhikers but never knew she had a sign made. One in Florida - but should have been in Marin County was a normal yellow diamond sign of a man walking with a separate square yellow sign beneath it with the words ”High Pedestrian Area”
That’s the end of my strange sign collection. Back to hardball conservative politics next column I promise.

What in the World is a Manmade Disaster ?

2010-02-09T14:01:00.000-08:00

The Christmas Day Terrorist attempt proved that a pound of prevention is worth far less than an ounce of cure. What do I mean? The Obama administration seems to believe an army of lawyers is far more powerful than an actual Military Army of soldiers. Evidence ? They immediately turned this terrorist over to a cabal of left wing defense attorneys whose job it is to get the terrorist to say nothing, offer nothing and make sure he’s comfortable, at ease and relaxed for his arraignment and eventual trial.
What we needed right after capturing this vermin is to have the specialists in the Military fully interrogate him as to his terror network connections. Don’t jump to water boarding – that is ridiculous – and off the table with Obama anyway. What we needed is skilled military interrogators that could have found out the names and locations of his and other Yemeni based terror cells. Then we could find and destroy these nests of terrorists before they had a chance to scatter. We could have learned in a few hours of “cure” – the who – what – where & when of the next wave of terror attacks that his Yemeni based Al Qaeda network has been planning.
What did the wunderkind of Washington order? Send in the suits with NYU law school degrees to protect him. Instead of actionable intelligence we have a terrorist who is being treated as if he was nothing more than a US Citizen caught in a stock swindle. He is “Lawyered up” and fully out of reach of the US Military who could actually use the information in his head to protect us.
We were told by Obama’s head of DHS Janet Napolitano that the system worked. That means the system must include passengers spotting and thwarting terrorists when they are about to detonate a bomb. Then after a pounding in the alternative media, she changed her mind. The system had - a day later - fatal flaws that only could be cured by more government. She is now the Wizard of Odd – telling us to pay no attention to the terrorist behind the curtain – that what we have here is an isolated incident – a lone wolf renegade. He was recruited and trained by Al Qaeda and even his own father, a Nigerian diplomat called the US State Department to warn us of his son’s radicalization by a group of terrorists in Yemen. The new improved State Department laughed that report off as if it was generated by talk radio.
The mindset of the Obama administration is that the War on Terror was lost long ago and now they – with their lofty speeches – can produce reconciliation with countries that harbor terrorists. Replace all that nasty war rhetoric with bridge building to nowhere. Add to that winning recipe a September 10th mindset – that terrorism is really a law enforcement issue and you have fully emboldened the terrorists to plan and execute more attacks. They are engaged in a war against us, and we are engaged in a lawsuit against them.
We have now had two strikes by Terrorists on US soil since Obama came to power. One was the Fort Hood shootings and the second is the underwear bomber. I think the American public is now waking to the fact that we are unprotected and is telling the democrats who control everything federally, three strikes and you’re out.
What is the “pound” of prevention I am referring to? We now want to deploy full body scanners at every airport. We already take off most of our clothes now - just to get past security. We are adding thousands of Air Marshalls to sit on planes in case a terrorist boards a plane. We deploy armies of data analysts that constantly comb the conversations of suspected terrorists on cellphones for keywords that could add up to real intelligence. Why not take the actual live terrorist you have in your hands and interrogate him? Can’t do that as his Miranda rights would be trampled upon. What Miranda rights exist for foreign terrorists?
Unless we are willing to return to a War on terror footing as a country, we are going to see wave after wave of these attacks, followed by speeches and lawsuits from our feeble and bloated government. They actually wanted to replace the words “War on Terror” with “manmade disasters”. If you read George Orwell’s 1984 you would recognize this as an example of “Newspeak”. Replace hard words with soft fluffy words and the peasants will go back to sleep. Don’t be fooled by these pre-September 11th charlatans. We need to fight a war, not win a lawsuit.

Happy Holidays - thru the eyes of 3 Religions

2009-12-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

The now ubiquitous greeting of “Happy Holidays” is one that can actually have some meaning, if the significance behind the phrase is actually understood. The Holidays are typically religious ones, so I will focus on three of the world’s great religions, namely Islam, Judaism and Christianity. What do these three have in common? In one word, Abraham - or as our Muslim brethren call him - Ibrahim.
For Jews and Christians we start with the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. Abraham was 99 years old when the Lord appeared to him saying that he and his wife Sarah were to bear a child named Isaac. Isaac would be the child that the Lord established his covenant with, and the promises the Lord made in this covenant to Abraham were significant. Abraham would later be commanded to sacrifice his son, Isaac whom he loved as his side of the covenant. If God, through Abraham’s hand, sacrificed Isaac, then Abraham reasoned that God would raise Isaac from the dead in order to keep his promises to Abraham. On the day of the sacrifice the Lord stayed Abrahams hand in sacrificing his son, and he and his lineage were blessed for their obedience and faith and willingness to sacrifice.
The Lord was cementing three key concepts with all mankind at this point. One is obedience to God’s commandments, the second is the Law of Sacrifice and the third is faith in the Lord’s plan.
Abraham’s older son, was named Ishmael and was 13 at the time of the birth of his brother Isaac. Ishmael was also blessed by the Lord in Genesis and made the head of a great nation thru his offspring of 12 sons. For Muslims, they believe that the son that was to be sacrificed was not Isaac, but rather Ishmael, as he was the first born son of Abraham. In the Islamic scriptures, called the Qur’an, Abraham states in the passage known as Surah 37 “O my son! I have seen in a vision that I offer thee in sacrifice: now see what is thy view!" (The son - Ishmael) said: "O my father! Do as thou art commanded: thou will find me, if Allah so wills, one of the steadfast!" Thus Ishmael was placed on the Altar for sacrifice, and the Lord stayed Abraham’s hand blessing both father and son for obedience, sacrifice and faith.
Thus all Christians, Jews and Muslims trace our religious roots back to father Abraham and the three key spiritual principles revealed in Abrahams sacrifice. So what does this have to do with the phrase “Happy Holidays “?
In December we as Christians celebrate Christmas which is to honor the birth of the Savior of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ. For us Christians, Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice made by our Heavenly Father, offering his only begotten son to pay the ransom for our sins, allowing us to return to his presence one day. The sacrifice Abraham made was a foreshadowing of the sacrifice we feel God made in bringing his son Jesus, to the earth to pay the price for our sins.
For Jews, on December 12th they celebrate Hanukkah – the Hebrew word for dedication that begins on the 25th day of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar. It lasts for eight days beginning at sunset the previous day and is also known as the Festival of Lights.
Hanukkah celebrates the victory (165 BC) of the Maccabees over the Syrian tyrant Antiochus IV and the subsequent reclamation of Jerusalem. According to the Jewish scriptures known as the Talmud, only a one day supply of non-desecrated oil was found in the Temple when the Maccabees prepared it for rededication by removing all Syrian idols. Miraculously, the oil lasted for eight days until oil that was fit for use in the temple could be obtained.
This miracle is commemorated by the lighting of the Hanukkah candles. The candles are placed on the hanukkiyah or menorah, a nine-branch candelabrum. The ninth branch of the menorah holds the shamash, or servant light. This branch is lit first and is used to light a new candle on successive nights. The candle lighting is accompanied by the chanting of blessings. The Jews also believe in the Law of Sacrifice and Hanukkah is a time when they are reminded that God keeps his promises and protects his chosen people. The chosen people are those who trace their lineage to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Islam follows a lunar calendar that is neither in synch nor corrected according to the solar calendar. Therefore, holidays occur at different times each year. On November 27 this year, Eid al-Adha or Feast of Sacrifice was celebrated and is the most important feast of the Muslim calendar. It is a holiday meant to celebrate the conclusion of a Muslim’s annual pilgrimage to Mecca, commonly called the Hajj and is very sacred for believers of Islam. Eid al-Adha lasts for three days and commemorates Ibrahim's (Abraham’s) willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son Ishmael. The feast re-enacts Ibrahim's obedience by sacrificing a cow or ram (the animal sacrifice is more common in Arab lands than the US ) The family eats about a third of the meat and donates the rest to the poor.
So here you have three key religious Holidays, briefly explained that may give the reader some meaning to attach to the often empty phrase we all use “Happy Holidays”.

The Climate Gate Swindle

2009-12-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes, the legendary fictional detective, often criticized Scotland Yard for sloppy and simplistic investigations. He said they “looked for facts that fit their pre-conceived theories” rather than doing proper detective work, which was “looking for theories that fit all the facts”. This describes the current sad state of the once respected Peer Review process that is driving the science behind the Global Warming theory, called Anthropogenic Global Warming –AGW for short.
Here’s what happened…someone either leaked, or hacked the email servers of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in the UK. The CRU is not some backwater group of academics, but the center of the research that has powered the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) reports for the last 18 years. The body of emails between the key researchers details a pattern of scientific deception that rivals Watergate. Hence the name “Climategate” You can check out all of the leaked emails for yourself at this link - http://junkscience.com/FOIA/
The scientific peer review process relies on other scientists critically reviewing the data that has fueled the Global Warming theory, but as we learned this week, the CRU scientists confessed to throwing out most of the raw temperature data on which their theories are founded on. The loss of the data prevents other scientists from checking it to determine whether, in fact, there has been a long-term rise in global temperatures during the past century and a half. The CRU and the UN IPCC’s peer review process turns out to be almost non-existent. Hey, why ruin a good headache?
The second revelation of the leaked documents is how the CRU scientists manipulated the data through their software programs, always arriving at one desired outcome – one that lowers temperatures in the past and "adjusts" recent temperatures upward, in order to convince the UN IPCC of accelerated warming. These e-mails also revealed scientists that are deeply frustrated by planetary temperatures that had stubbornly refused to rise in the last 10 years.
The third and most shocking revelation is how this influential cabal of scientists have silenced any expert that questions their dubious findings by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dared to publish their critics' work, and by ensuring that no dissenting research becomes part of the UN IPCC reports.
So what ? We’re being fleeced. Remember the critical elements of the swindle are “The science is settled” and “drastic action must be taken” by the US immediately to limit carbon emissions, which resulted in the cap-and-tax legislation awaiting debate in the Senate, and the global climate meeting in Copenhagen, where world leaders will attempt to globalize cap-and-tax.
All of this lovely intervention is based on a pyramid scheme of scientific data that is compromised, and definitely not peer reviewed. Of the claimed 2500 scientists that support AGW - how many have properly reviewed the data sets? Very few could have, as the data sets were discarded long ago.
The UN IPCC claims to have reviewed all relevant data and published all of it. Oh yeah, except for the last IPCC compendium on climate science, published in 2007, that left out gobs of peer-reviewed science - “ facts that didn’t fit their theory”. These include articles from the journals Arctic, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Earth Interactions, Geophysical Research Letters, International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Quaternary Research.
Science may be objective; but scientists peddling global warming are not. The main culprits are perhaps the top scientists in the global warming gene pool. Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director, described in a series of emails a ‘trick he employed to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperature trends, as well as discussed attempts to ‘redefine what the peer-review literature is’ to prevent papers that raise questions about AGW from appearing in IPCC reports.
Then there is Penn State's Michael Mann, author of the erroneous “hockey stick” that showed temperatures steady for hundreds of years, then rapidly rising in the late 20th century. Mann agrees with Prof. Jones stating “I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! ".
“Kevin” is Kevin Trenberth, who controversially pushed the UN IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity. He wrote, ‘the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can’t.’
The scientific peer review process has to be re-established as the truly blind scientific study process it once was. All we have here is a little climate science mixed with a hefty load of leftist political science that is faulty, incomplete and manipulated.

Who do you thank at Thanksgiving ?

2009-11-17T11:47:00.000-08:00

Snap - went the spring loaded trap thrower out at the ranch. Crackle went my right arm, specifically the outer forearm bone called the ulna. Pop - we did - over to the hospital to get my arm set. No this is not a beginning of column on the healthcare debate, but rather one that is about Thanksgiving. Note: this column was typed entirely with my left hand – but with the assistance of my right brain.
Let me start by saying I am so thankful for the care I received at the hospital ER. Among cases of H1N1 flu, and assorted other weekend traumas, I was X-Rayed, diagnosed, and patched up in less than 2 hours. This is something every American and many non Americans have access to – the skills and capabilities of the glorious Emergency Room.
This odd break from my normal life caused me to pause and reflect on all the things I have to be thankful for. The first question is who am I thankful to? While not everyone will agree I have to first thank my Heavenly Father. I have this wonderful life because He has allowed me to come to earth to experience mortality and all the attendant lessons it brings first hand. Even painful episodes such as the “night stick fracture” that the Doctor diagnosed, is a great lesson. It reminded me to be much more careful around things that can snap bones. It created another funny story my wife and family can tell about Dad, and who knows; my arm may heal stronger than before.
I also have to thank God for my family. I readily admit that most of the stability and fun we have as a family is in large part due to a great wife and soul mate. My kids have taught me how to overcome normal human selfishness and have enhanced my life in ways no other experience could. These are blessings indeed, whether we recognize them as such or not.
I am so thankful for my Country. I love America and all that goes with it. I have visited over 35 other countries in my travels, and while I readily admit Africa is pure adventure, India is stunningly different and Europe is charming, nothing works like the USA. America is, to me, the best and most vibrant country on the face of the earth and needs to be preserved for the benefit of all mankind. Yes – I also believe that America has a hugely positive role to play in Gods’ plans too.
So, to summarize… God, Family, Country. This phrase may seem quaint and naïve to some but I believe it is the basic recipe for Americas’ incomparable greatness.
The spiritual nature of Thanksgiving though dates back to the Berkeley Plantation in Virginia where the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1619, 12 years after the founding of the Virginia colony at Jamestown.
It was set aside as a day to thank God, and featured only a modest meal at first. It wasn't until two years later, in 1621, that Thanksgiving was expanded to include a banquet by the pilgrims in Massachusetts.
During his first year in office, President George Washington issued a proclamation calling for a day of "public thanksgiving and prayer." Washington understood that a free society had a basic obligation to both thank God and seek His guidance. In his Thanksgiving proclamation, Washington wrote: "It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits and humbly to implore His protection and favor."
During the Civil War, in October 1863, President Abraham Lincoln added to President Washington's initiative and created an annual day of Thanksgiving. Like Washington, Lincoln was determined to emphasize the direct tie between America and the Creator from whom Americans draw their rights. Even in the middle of the great and tragic Civil War, Lincoln focused on the nation's blessings, urging Americans to remember that "no human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”
Even for folks who have no religious or spiritual tradition associated with Thanksgiving, it is a grand time to be thankful. I do want to encourage folks who do revere God to remember Him this Thanksgiving. We have many opportunities as Americans to be grateful and America needs your prayers of Thanksgiving in 2009.

Get ready for a Global Government

2009-11-15T18:51:00.000-08:00

Global – there it is- the latest four letter word. Whenever you hear it you should -1) grab your wallet as it is about to be emptied and 2) get ready to kiss your country’s sovereignty bye-bye. What possible malice could such a seemingly innocuous word as Global conjure up? Sit down, put your heels up and prepare to get furious.
Lord Christopher Monckton of England, who was an advisor on scientific questions to Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the UK, reported recently on a treaty we may consider signing. Ever heard of the Conference of State's parties to the United Nations Convention on climate change? Probably not. They meet every two years and this year, in December it's going to be Copenhagen, Denmark. This year’s little rendezvous is where they plan to push through a climate treaty which would involve the vast transfer of wealth from the west to poorer countries, in the name of what is called reparations for climate debt.
In the draft treaty, what they plan to do is to set up a shiny new and improved world government – yes - the word "Government" actually appears in the treaty. This is not an optional exercise for a country that signs on to this treaty, and there is no mention of such bothersome underpinnings of democracy such as elections, votes, or ballots. What the document describes is there will be a new massive bureaucratic entity created – a Global Governance Entity. This new entity will have three purposes. The first that’s stated is to create a new world government. The second is to affect the transfer or redistribution of wealth from countries like ours to third world countries in reparation for what is described in the treaty as climate debt.
Their claim to our wallets is based on the assertion that we've been creating CO2 in huge quantities. They say we’re altering the climate. Global Governments need money – lot’s of it – and they know they have a friend in Washington. They also know how to play on our greatest weakness, Liberal Guilt. Therefore they say we have to pay, up to 2% of GDP every year to poorer countries.
The third element of this new government will be enforcement. They plan to empower this new global government sufficiently to make Democratic countries hand over their cash, whether they like it or not. Even more ominous, there will be a corresponding series of “technical panels” which will have the right to directly intervene in the economies and in the environment of individual countries over the heads of their elected governments.
The danger of this anti American treaty getting signed has increased since our Dear Leader was given a Nobel Peace Prize, the pledge pin of the sorority that is the international left. With our Congress and the President galloping wildly towards a Cap and Tax bill here, the dangers increase that they will in turn sign on to the Copenhagen Treaty. There is sufficient concern that if Obama signs this - it will be jammed through the US Congress, Chicago style. Once ratified, we become subject to Article VI of the Vienna convention on the interpretation of international treaties. Another obscure document – but a significant one, that spells out how an international treaty can prevail over our Constitution. We can't just walk away from this treaty once it’s signed. The only way out is to get the other countries that benefit from our 2% of GDP transfer to let us out of the treaty. Kind of like getting Vampires to stop drinking blood.
To every oppressive governmental horror story, there is a knight in shining armor. The light of true science has begun to shine on the muddled Global Warming theory. It has recently been shown that the effect of CO2 and all greenhouse gases on temperature globally is less than 1/6th of what the UN IPCC panel says it is. This is the conclusion in a peer reviewed paper published just last month by Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He’s done a detailed 20 year study measuring the amount of outgoing radiation escaping into space, and that amount is supposed to drop dramatically as the temperature warms down here. That's the official theory - because of all the greenhouse gases getting in the way, according to the UN IPCC and also mentioned in Al Gore’s Sci-Fi film. What is actually happening is that nearly all of it is getting out into space just as before. So the warming effect of CO2 over the whole of the next 100 years is established at +1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit, which is negligible.
Dr. Lindzen’s report makes the UN's report on which this treaty is based out of date. So is the Supreme Court's judgment in Massachusetts V. EPA where they said CO2 was a pollutant because it might cause warming. Nobody's dared to argue with his paper as it is based on carefully measured data and the results clobber the previous UN reports which were based almost entirely on computer models. The UN IPCC computer models rely very heavily on extrapolation of a small data set and a lot of guesswork. Dr. Lindzens’ measurement of the comparison between changes in surface temperature and changes in outgoing radiation is the paper that could finally bring this scare to an end. Now if we could just get our President to read it.

The New Counter Culture

2009-10-31T19:14:00.001-07:00

Conservatives have always been a pariah to both the Democrats and to a lesser extent the Republicans, who seem to want to be slightly less liberal democrats. Think of John McCain, Arnold etc. you get the picture. The reality is that Conservatives are adopting tactics of our foes to make news around the world. I call this the new and improved Counter Culture movement.
Counterculture move #1 was the shout heard across the world at President Obama - “you lie” by Congressional Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina. It was aimed at the President during the part of his speech where he claimed Illegal Immigrants will not receive benefits under his healthcare plan. Oddly, in this instance both sides have it right, due to the ambiguity of section 246 in the House healthcare bill HR 3200. The Presidents plan has language to potentially exclude illegal immigrants, but also purposely lacks any verification provisions.

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 contained a number of reforms to ensure that only “qualified aliens” (which excludes illegal aliens) would be eligible to receive federal public benefits. The three systems that are currently used by 70 other federal programs to verify immigration status and eligibility are called (IEVS) Income Eligibility Verification System - (SAVE) the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system - and the E-Verify system, which confirms an individual is work-authorized in the United States. The best way to protect American taxpayers is to require that everyone who enrolls in the proposed healthcare plan first verify their eligibility using the IEVS and SAVE databases.

What Joe Wilson was shouting about was that the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration had just defeated two measures that would have required using IEVS , SAVE and E-Verify for healthcare benefits. He knew that the lack of verification – the same as used for all these other programs – meant that the plan would allow huge numbers of illegal’s to slip in to the system undetected. This is why he shouted “you lie” to Obama.

Counterculture move #2 is the wild and wooly youtube videos exposing ACORN – the Presidents own Community Organizing group - as the corrupt organization they are. The real issue is not just about ACORN, rather it is why would the Democrats in charge of the Federal Government hand over huge swaths of Census taking, Voter registration and large amounts of FHA home loan authorizations to an obviously corrupt organization?
Here’s what happened… Last Thursday, Sept. 10, a new website called www.BigGovernment.com launched with an exclusive video showing workers at an ACORN office in Baltimore advising two undercover investigative reporters on how to hide their prostitution business under federal tax laws. Not only are the pair very open to the intent of their need for housing to run a prostitution business, but they add that they plan to bring in about a dozen underage girls from El Salvador – that they will use as prostitutes. ACORN is in the business of helping people obtain Federal loans for housing, as well as advisers on how to properly fill out applications, tax forms etc. The advice from the ACORN staffers was shocking. They advised the two to hide the fact that they were Pimps and Prostitutes on any forms, and to list the 13 -15 year old girls from El Salvador as dependants. They showed the two how to successfully game the system by falsifying tax returns and getting federal loans to buy a house that they could use as a brothel for underage prostitutes smuggled in from El Salvador.
The duo, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles started this project thinking they would be thrown out of the ACORN offices, but instead they were embraced. Then they went to ACORN offices in DC, Brooklyn NY and San Bernardino, where they received the same advice –and shockingly – no opposition. In real life, Hannah Giles, 20, isn't a lady of the night. She's a minister's daughter studying journalism at Florida International University, and James E. O'Keefe, 25, a Fordham MBA student from New Jersey, isn't a pimp so much as a provocateur -- determined to expose what he sees as the hypocrisies and moral lapses of liberals by employing their own tactics against them.
The tie in to our new President is that Obama worked for Acorn in the past, and Acorn worked for Obama in the past election by running massive voter registration efforts. ACORN is also under Federal prosecution for falsifying voter registrations in Florida, but that’s another story. That doesn't mean the president is implicated in wrongdoing, but it suggests that as more corruption surfaces in ACORN, the more embarrassing it is for him. If the Justice Department fails to prosecute, it invariably would raise suspicions of political favoritism.
So there are two big stories of how the Conservative Grassroots is transforming into a Counter Culture Movement of the New Millennium. Out goes the silent majority label and onward to the vocal and visible majority status.

Government Cheese - Government Healthcare

2009-10-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

“Don’t get sick after June” This is the operative phrase for Native Americans that currently receive “Obama care” through Indian Health Services. Yes, Native Americans have socialized medicine right now. Why June? The program runs out of funding by June and the ability to serve patients after that point are severely limited. Heavy rationing of services, tests, access to medical diagnostics etc. is a common malady of the HIS, but it ramps up severely on most reservations after June.
Well at least we have the dynamic model of the NIH - National Institute of Health in the UK to rely on as a model of how a public option will really work – right? Yes we do. If you need knee replacement surgery, you have an average wait time of 12 months. For cataract surgery, 8 months and hip replacement 14 months. Why? Hard core rationing of any expensive care by the NIH is the only way to keep the system afloat. The fact that UK tax rates are almost twice what ours are, and the NIH is the single largest item in the UK’s budget still produces a Healthcare system that is horribly inefficient and seems to hope that people die before they need any expensive care.
I am like most of you. I get my healthcare through my work. I pay half of the monthly premium myself, and have to wrestle with the insurance company all the time to get them to pay the bills. I do not like that aspect of the current system either. That being said, the current health system is not a free market system at all. As a consumer of a healthcare product - I don’t know or care what the cost of my doctor visit is, what emergency room care costs or what any recommended actions the primary care physician prescribes costs at all. No other service or product we consume is so free from price scrutiny by the consumer.
Our problem is getting the care done quickly, by the best Doctors, and keeping our out of pocket cost to a minimum. The Medical providers care about the costs as they have to get the insurance company to reimburse them at a rate where they can make a profit and cover the costs of their business.
In reality though, the Insurance companies are the main force preventing huge cost increases. While we all seem to revile Insurance companies, they are the only reason the whole thing has not collapsed or turned into a program for just the very rich.
Enter the wisdom of President Obama when he said the following at the Portsmouth town hall meeting, on how private insurance companies can compete with the government:
“If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining -- meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do -- then I think private insurers should be able to compete.”
What ? All Government programs are not self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be free of the IRS and the tax code. The only reason for any government service is to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all.

The “Public Option” proposed by the Democrats, that purports to fairly compete with the private sector does not have to make a profit as Insurance companies do. It will only be a matter of time until they drive the Insurance companies out of business leaving only one payer – the Federal Government. When private companies do this to each other they call in the Anti Trust lawyers, as “price dumping” destroys competition unfairly.
Then he said the following, once the teleprompter stopped working: “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” Problems at the Post Office?
The only way the post office can stay in business is its government subsidy. The USPS lost $2.4 billion in the quarter ended in June and projects a net loss of $7 billion in fiscal 2009.
Ahh, the soothing tones of our President who speaks so well. Just focus on the vision of long lines and interminable waits.
What he did conjure up is the clear vision of a system that has one goal, an equal share of misery. He has failed repeatedly to explain how the government will provide more health care for less money. He has failed to explain why increased demand for medical services without an increase in supply won’t lead to rationing by government bureaucrats. And he has failed to explain why a Medicare-like model is desirable when Medicare itself is going broke.

Air Travel is less than glamorous

2009-10-31T19:01:00.001-07:00

Love-Hate – This describes my relationship with commercial travel on airplanes. Actually it would have to be hate-love as the dominant emoticon is not love. Sure, I love getting from one place to another in hours instead of days or weeks. Yes I am still amazed that lift + thrust overcome drag and gravity. But love is fleet of foot when applied to travel.
Sitting on this flight from SFO to Baltimore, will produce an admittedly jaded description of a day in the life of a frequent traveler. I start the day doing a little mental “pre-flight checklist”. What time is the flight ? 3 pm…OK so if I leave the house at exactly 1:15 it takes 60 minutes to get to the airport. I can bumble shoe-less through security in 15 minutes. Did I get a rental car, hotel, and did I pack the clothing that I’ll need? Check.
30 minutes before I have to leave, creative avoidance takes hold of my mind. I can make one last conference call or maybe knock out those 50 emails I skipped over this morning. 10 minutes left till I walk the green mile to my car and drive to the airport. Hey wait. My wife said she thought the dimmer switch in the hallway smoked last time she used it…I have plenty of time left to change that out.
Shoot, now it’s 1:30 - I better jam to the flight. I drive as if my windshield is on fire and only speeds over 75 can extinguish the flames. I get to the airport, park, and start the frequent travelers aerobic walk to find the vintage TV screens with barely discernable numbers indicating the gate the flight is leaving from. Always – it is at the end of some concourse that is just across the next county line.
Once at the gate, you gotta look cool, must appear busy, so I check all 4 emails on my handheld and it’s time to board. As we board the flying cigar tube passengers fight to claim the overhead luggage space. There’s more elbows and shoving than Church Basketball to get that precious real estate under your luggage. The flight attendants always ask you to stow one piece of luggage under the seat in front of you, grinning maliciously - knowing to do this means you have to keep your legs folded – calves to thighs for 5 hours.
The in-flight takeoff video has this make believe movie about attendants fluffing pillows, helping you adjust your seat and serving you as if you were a valued customer. Smiles and space await these fairy tale passengers, who smile back and doze peacefully between 4 course meals.
As the video ends, we return to Dante’s inferno. The trolls in airline uniforms walk the aisle with a strut that belies their prison guard training. They bark commands to the newly arrived prisoners…I mean passengers… seatbelts – turn that phone off, not airplane mode you clod, OFF and I mean it, Achtung !
Sitting in this glorious coach seat brings me back to memories of my youth. Very early youth, like my original birthday, as the seats are designed to keep you in the fetal position, aka “full and upright position for takeoff and landing”. Why is the back of the seat curved so that my posture is permanently cast into the stoop shouldered elderly Osteoporosis patient’s position?
Lucky for me I have someone in front of me who thinks I need a head support, as he has cleverly laid his seat back to place it directly under my chin. The armrest cushions are made of some brake-pad hard material and the non-adjustable reading light is pointing to the North Star. The meal tray, or as I call it, the sloping plastic drink spiller, is laughing at me…taunting me to try and set a laptop on its slick back. I am reminded why they’re called laptops and can attribute that same descriptor to my Coke and bag of what-cha-ma-call-its. Sure, the bag says pretzels but the taste says salted newspaper.
I endure the remainder of the uncomfortable flight watching a 1950’s black and white movie about WW2 destruction in Europe, complete with sad violin music playing on the headset. It’s as if the airline is subliminally telling us – “so you think this flight is bad?” Magically the evil spell is broken as we land. The business class passengers are let off the barge first and then us “coachies” are paroled and allowed to exit.
The final words from our captors are “Thank you for flying and come again”. Watch them closely though as there are sharp teeth behind those smiles.

The Government Gets it right too sometimes !

2009-10-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

This is a really rare column from The American Tune. It is in praise of Government ! I was stunned when I read that the Angels Camp bypass was completed nine months early, and under budget. This almost never happens in the world of big projects, whether funded publicly or privately. I had to add my small voice of congratulations to Caltrans, and especially the three Counties involved for not only cooperating but for actually making such a big project come to life.
My belief is that there is a small cabal of super accomplished Caltrans Project Managers out there that deserve the lion’s share of the applause. Managing a massive multi year project such as this is anything but straightforward. You have not only government red tape to cut through, but landowners who change their mind on the right of way and on the terms of land acquisition deals mid stream. Add to that a host of environmental busybodies, OSHA regulators and scads of other regulatory commissions all silently stalking the Projects’ Success.
Consider the effect of one change in design. Let’s take that part of the highway extension that goes across Murphy’s grade road and over the meadow east of the High School. Suppose the engineers realize the cross winds are stronger than originally thought in the planning process. They set their field laptops a whirring and determine that they need a higher grade steel for the supports, and the rock content of the concrete needs to be changed. The ripple effect changes the entire timeline of the project, causing re-scheduling of dozens of critical path activities; causing lots of delays and possible hair loss for the project managers. You can add a month or two of extra effort easily when engineering changes appear. And appear they do on these projects.
Then imagine if the Sierra Muerte Club “finds” an endangered millipede or discovers the possible habitat of the spotted darter snail-owl. Ouch ! Mysterious beings in tie-dye t-shirts carefully hidden under official looking jackets start hanging around the project office. Yes Martha – you can stop a CAT D9 dozer with a 120 pound bearded Bolshevik from the environmental movement. New studies need to be ordered, the entire project may be suspended. Hundreds of sub contractors that have scheduled time, material and personnel to work on the project are put in limbo awaiting the outcome of a study by parties indifferent to the project timeline, and cost.
Then consider the byzantine nature of the funding for this Highway extension. Three Counties with varying degrees of financial difficulties of their own had to pony up large amounts of highway funds that could have easily been re-cycled on other roads projects. Enormous amounts of cash needed to complete the project is supposed to be coming from Sacramento. Yes, that Sacramento. The one where the State overshot a $120 billion budget by a mere $40 billion. I can imagine the Project managers anxiously firing off vouchers to get cash in from Sacramento, and hearing – hey, what’s with the long face ? We got truckloads of IOU’s we can send your way !
In my little world of funding and building software companies it’s like finding out your Venture Capitalist was actually Bernie Madoff, a week before payroll is due.
Big construction projects are often notoriously under funded and the time estimates are laughably short, as a way of getting the thing sold to the investors and local community. This was not the case here. The folks that put together this project plan did a really outstanding job of looking through a murky veil of time and cost estimates to assemble a very plausible plan. I’m sure this project had the usual bit of padding in time and cost, but that is normal as an offset against the scads of unknown problems that are bound to appear like ghostly apparitions during the project rollout. Whoever did the estimates on project cost and time had to be really good at their work.
Likewise the project managers that deal with taming time and matter unknown have to be singled out as heroes of the community. I have to believe they are now in high demand for the management of dozens of other “shovel ready” projects still looming out in the ether. Please let these folks run those projects, and not the jokers from Washington.
Here’s to a fantastic accomplishment in really difficult times. Yes, the Caltrans folks and everyone associated with this project deserves a big round of applause. Bringing in a huge project such as this, under time and under budget is something to applaud, even for us Conservatives.

The Nanny State advances

2009-07-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

July 4 2009 may well be remembered as America’s final celebration of Independence Day. That’s because July 4 2010 will have to be recognized as the official surrender of American Independence and will forever be known as Dependence Day.
Consider three ill winds that are changing classic American Independence to slovenly American dependence on the government.
1) The Government Seizing Control of the Economy
2) The landslide erosion of Private Property Rights
3) Taxation beyond control
Let me briefly describe each one.
1) The government in the last 6 months has made an astonishing dash towards socialism. Don’t believe me ? Ask Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister. He said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”. He then added, “In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.”
Putin’s final comments at Davos Switzerland just two months ago were the most disturbing. “Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors, and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.”
Yet - shift radically to the State we merrily go. Our Government has nationalized two of the three US automobile companies, GM and Chrysler. We are on the precipice of nationalizing our entire Health Care system, and with the Cap and Tax (Trade) legislation being rammed through congress unread; we will nationalize our energy sector as well. Add to that the TARP funding with the spider web of strings attached to the financial sector and you have a full one third of our formerly private economy, now owned or controlled by the Government.
2) “Who needs stinking private property rights” shouts our government. Just ask Mike and Michelle Nemee about their alleged Private Property rights. Here is a local family looking to bring a very potentially profitable business, and great employment opportunities to the County. They have met the most unbelievable resistance to their Golf Course and Hotel. There may remain open issues such as balancing underground aquifer tables etc. but the Nemees have met every one of hundreds of demands head on by addressing them one by one, yet they still are in legal limbo. There are scores of other developers and business people who will never set foot in Calaveras County to fund businesses because of this debacle. Private property rights are being steadily eroded by government fiat. The other slice of the knife comes from over-burdensome “environmental studies” that seek to strip property rights away from the individual and award them to governmental entities.
3) Tax the rich – feed the poor, till there are no rich no more! Prophetic words sung by the band Ten Years After in the 60’s rocker “I’d love to change the World” are being played out before our eyes. If you really understood the level of debt all of us have unwillingly signed on to – just to fund the last six months worth of government borrowing you would be shocked. Without realizing it, you now have a second mortgage. To put it in perspective, every time the government spends $90 billion that translates to $1,000 per taxpayer. The TARP funds are about $2 trillion or $22,000 per taxpayer. The Cap and Tax scheme is pegged to cost over $1 trillion and Nationalized Health Care about $2.5 trillion, so add another $38,000 to your family debt, or about $60,000 each and every taxpayer, young or old is soon to be saddled with, not counting interest. Add 30 years of interest we will have to pay to the Chinese Government and you have at least taken on a $100,000 second mortgage on a “property” with no value.
When did you explicitly agree to another $100,000 of your money to be spent ? Was it when you voted for change ?
This is a tipping point in American History, where we have to decide do we slouch our way to socialism where getting ahead in life is impossible, or do we stop the slide to government control of every aspect of our lives? You decide this July 4th, do you want to celebrate Independence Day or Dependence Day ?

Fathers Day Celebrates Fatherhood

2009-06-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, June 21 is our day to honor Fathers. I have to stand up and publicly honor my own Father first.
My Dad was a Nebraska born and raised man who really was a City guy, living on a farm. Both he and his brother became professionals, my Dad an Attorney and my uncle a Doctor. During WW2 both left the farm for good. My dad enlisted in the Army, learned how to fly a plane, but became part of the Army Judge Advocates office. They transferred him to San Francisco at the now defunct Army base called the Presidio. This is where he met my Mother and they were married in 1952.
Recalling the many lessons I took away from my Dad one stands out above all. That one lesson is “Men work”. This simple lesson was acted out in his daily behavior as he got up early, commuted on the train to San Francisco and came home late. If he was sick, he worked. When fellow attorneys and Judges would tempt him to go off to Tahoe or other diversions, he worked.
The reverse corollary was also enforced. If you don’t work as a man, you are simply not much of a man. I know this sounds harsh in today’s overly effeminate society, but I still adhere to rule number one, that men work. He made sure I understood that if you take money from the State, the County or the Federal Government, you better be working for them, or make that period very, very short. Men in his day would never seek welfare payments, and they made sure their son’s would not either.
This comes at a time in our history when many homes are marked by absentee fathers, as the Welfare state has attempted to take the place of the Father. The media seem to constantly be beating up on fatherhood in general. How many movies or TV shows have Fathers who resemble something responsible, loving and manly? To what extent does such treatment pervert our son's developing attitudes about the men they are expected to become? What are we teaching our daughters - that there's no real hope or need to marry a strong, reliable man of character? Timeless messages about the wisdom of fathers in shows like 'Father Knows Best' have disappeared. They just aren't politically correct. Most of our kids are being raised in an anti-male culture that spews the mantra of radical feminism.
My family has the reverse rule set. My wife made sure I understood that when I married her, being a good father was critical not only to our potential children but to her as well. My wife made me a much better father by helping me understand how fathers are so critical to the development of children. Especially girl children. I learned while raising my girls that spending time with them was really important, and making more money was not important.
I also learned the simple truth is that most women are better persons when they have a good man to rely on. I am sure some readers don’t believe this, but I do. We need to let our boys know that one of the greatest contributions they can make as adults is to be strong fathers who are committed to their families.
The big goals in life for men boil down to two. Being a good husband and a good father. Work accomplishments may make the world take notice, but to me that is only a means to an end. I work to support my family and a huge part of my mindset - and most fathers I know – is to ask ourselves continually “are we doing enough to raise our kids properly?”
Here is what my favorite President, Ronald Reagan said about Fathers.

“Our fathers bear an awesome responsibility -- one that they shoulder willingly and fulfill with a love that asks no recompense. By turns both gentle and firm, our fathers guide us along the path from infancy to adulthood. We embody their joy, pain and sacrifice, and inherit memories more cherished than any possession. On Father's Day each year, we express formally a love and gratitude whose roots go deeper than conscious memory can recite. It is only fitting that we have this special day to pay tribute to those men -- our natural fathers, adoptive fathers and foster fathers -- who deserve our deepest respect and devotion. It is equally fitting, as we recall the ancient and loving command to honor our fathers, that we resolve to do so by becoming ourselves parents and citizens who are worthy of honor."

Water Water everywhere and not a drop to drink

2009-06-16T17:31:00.000-07:00

The overwhelming amount of chatter on “Water boarding “as an enhanced interrogation technique piqued my interest in the subject. I wanted to find out what exactly water boarding is so I went to YouTube and watched a video of such a session. A famous magazine writer named Christopher Hitchens underwent the technique as part of a hit piece by Vanity Fair that made the case to their readership that water boarding is torture. ( google “Hitchens YouTube water boarding”) The video is actually very instructive and not horrifying to watch. ( seriously ! ) What I learned is that water boarding is not at all what I thought it was.
The subject is strapped to an elevated board platform, on their back. They are hooded, and a towel is placed over their face. The purpose of the session is of course to get bad guys to spill actionable intelligence information, not drown them. As such the subjects have the ability to immediately stop the session by dropping a metal cylinder in their hand, or by saying a code word, such as “Red”
Water from a 1 gallon milk container is poured on the towel and the effect is to simulate something between suffocation and drowning. Definitely not a pleasant experience. It is meant to scare the wits out of the subject causing them to reveal terrorist plans to the interrogator, not to kill, maim, or cause any permanent physical harm to the subject. As a side note, when the news came out that we had done this technique to only 3 specific subjects, but one subject had it done 83 times, I thought that number of “sessions” seemed a bit much. What I learned is each pour of water is counted as one “session”. Watch the video and judge for yourself. The "enhanced" techniques include not only water-boarding but sleep deprivation, subjection to cold and long periods of standing and some slapping.

The debate about this subject is a very classically American argument. On one side – harsh interrogation techniques such as water boarding are considered disgusting but necessary to break terrorists into exposing their terror plots. The position this group holds is that the intelligence data gathered was key to exposing several post 9-11 plots such as a Los Angeles based terror action designed to kill tens of thousands of Americans. That specific plot was revealed by a key Al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, during one session, and subsequently stopped by the FBI.
The actionable intelligence they received from these 3 high value suspects is well documented, but not yet public. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, America has not suffered another violent terrorist episode on its soil. That is not in dispute. The former vice president Dick Cheney believes these tough interrogations and other aggressive anti-terror moves were the cornerstones of the shield.
The other side of the argument says that any form of enhanced interrogation is un-American and terribly wrong. We are a civilized society that has laws, values and obligations to the rest of the world to reject any form of interrogation that can be considered as torture. America is the beacon of Freedom and Liberty to the rest of the world that is largely dominated by governments run by thuggish dictators. Any hint of our Government sanctioning interrogations even close to torture reduces us to the equivalent of those 3rd world Dictators. Their other claim is that these techniques do not even work, and that the data gathered is suspect as to its veracity. Their belief is that whenever we harshly punish terror suspects dozens more rise to the Jihad cause, the equivalent of a modern day Hydra.
The Obama administration recently released classified interrogation memos but did not release the follow-up reports detailing what was gleaned by water boarding. This administration has now pulled water boarding across the line from legal to illegal. The new harsh interrogation methods now consist of handing the detainee an iPod full of Obama speeches, and forcing them to watch. Just ask the Queen of England.
I am one who believes that the only good defense against terrorists is a very strong offence. As we move forward let’s hope our new administration doesn’t go the way of Jimmy Carter, doing the weakest, wimpiest move at every turn. If we are hit again by the jihadists, we may need a stronger response than threats of endless lawsuits against terror suspects.

Dog Movies are the Best Movies

2009-05-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

I am on a flight from San Francisco to New Jersey and I’m actually tearing up. I am not a victim of airline food, or extreme leg pain that accompanies most coach flights. Rather I am watching the in flight movie, Marley and me.
This is a story about an average American family that chronicles their life from marriage thru their third child, yet centers around the family dog, Marley. The dog is a yellow Labrador, and is one of those rambunctious dogs that constantly acts out all the anti-social things some hyperactive dogs do. Yellow labs are the poster pups for friendly canines, so no one in his family or in the audience can feel anything but fondness for the star of the show.
I am not much of a movie aficionado either. I try to avoid chick flicks but catch a lot of them on flights I take to and fro. To show my typical sensitivity to maudlin plots, I groaned constantly in “He’s not that into you”, which I agreed to see without thinking or research. However, my favorite “feel good movie of the year” is “Taken” where bad guys are really bad, desperately need killing and get slaughtered by the good guy, in droves throughout this delightful romp. I can’t wait for Taken to be turned into a Broadway play.
That being said, Marley and me is a movie that touched this viewer emotionally. I thought, why would a silly movie cause this reaction?
It is definitely because I am a dog person. My wife on the other hand is a cat person, and my daughters are hybrids, meaning they are totally engrossed with dogs and cats. This domestic animal craze that envelops our home is a bit hard to explain to non pet people. I insist letting our giant schnauzer Cleopatra sleep on the family room couch, even though she occupies 2 ½ peoples worth of couch space. My wife has a set routine with the big male cat where he has to be petted in bed for 15 minutes at 11 pm every night before he can go to sleep. We think he has “feline rain man syndrome” as he also insists on watching Judge Wapner at 7 pm. My daughters dote so much on the female kitty that she has developed a “princess condition”. The female cat rules the upstairs, and the male cat the downstairs.
This un-disciplined approach to pets means we are very vulnerable to our pets reaching end of life. Even other people’s pets, in movies cause sympathetic pain. The movie takes the lives of the family and the family dog through ups and downs, certainty and doubt, rich and poor. The dog eventually grows old and after two stomach torsions is put down and buried in the yard.
I am absorbed into the movie recalling my own dog’s two big health scares. One was where she ate some rubber chunk in the yard and the damage only surfaced on a Sunday at 4 pm. This is where I discovered that Emergency veterinarians are on a whole different pay scale than normal Vets.
The second such event, also on the Sabbath day was stomach torsion that brought her to deaths door. The Vet was able to do surgery, flip the stomach back to its normal position and stitch it to my dog’s ribs, thus securing it against other flips. I had to explain to my daughters that 4 years of college were now going to have to be done in 3 years.
My sister who lives in Texas is also a hopeless animal lover. She has three little dogs and I love hearing about their lives as part of my sister’s family tales. She took in a rescue dog that had seizures and no one wanted. She was devastated when that dog passed away, but I can say with absolute certainty, that dog had the best 6 months of his life with my sister. She has another little dog named Shorty that always seems to be smiling in every picture.
My parents were no better either. They both came from farms in the Midwest so should have had a normal view of domestic animal life, but no. They too were animal people that adored everything about our childhood pets.
Why do we form such deep attachments to our pets? I cannot explain it logically, as it is a mixture of emotions and some mixture of spirituality that forms this bond. All I know is it is a liability when I see dog movies on planes. I sure hope I never have to watch Old Yeller in public...

Tea for two party system

2009-04-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

The nationwide Tea parties we saw on April 15 are significant when you consider what they are meant to represent. First we have to review the original Boston Tea Party to understand the comparison.
The American colonists were then, as now, viewed as a great source of Tax money. King George III of England had run up a huge deficit by fighting the French and Indian wars. To pay for this they passed the Stamp Act in 1765, and the Townsend Acts in 1767.

The colonies refused to pay the taxes claiming they had no obligation to fund a foreign British Government in which they had no representation. In response, the British Parliament retracted the taxes with the exception of a duty on imported tea - a demonstration of Parliament's ability and right to tax the colonies. They reduced the duty the colonies would have to pay for the imported tea. The Americans would now get their tea at a cheaper price than ever before.
However, if the colonies paid the duty tax on the imported tea they would be acknowledging Parliament's right to tax them. The colonists were not fooled by Parliament's ploy. When the East India Company sent shipments of tea to Philadelphia and New York the ships were not allowed to land.
In Boston, the arrival of three tea ships ignited a furious reaction. The crisis came to a head on December 16, 1773 when as many as 7,000 agitated locals milled about the wharf where the ships were docked. A citizens meeting at the Old South Meeting House that morning resolved that the tea ships should leave the harbor without payment of any duty. The British Collector of Customs refused to allow the ships to leave without payment of the duty, producing a stalemate.
That evening a group of about 200 men, assembled on a near-by hill. Whopping tax-war chants, the crowd marched two-by-two to the wharf, descended upon the three ships and dumped their offending cargos of tea into the harbor waters.
Most colonists applauded the action while the reaction in London was swift and vehement. In March 1774 Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts which among other measures closed the Port of Boston. The fuse that led directly to the explosion of American independence was lit.
Let’s forward our story to 2009. American Conservatives are the force behind the Tax Day Tea parties. The overall feeling is we have just taken on 4,000 Billion dollars of new debt, without any representation. The Obama administration is going to have to pay for all these wild spending programs somehow. Taxes must be raised, collected and wherever present, dissent must be stifled.
Do you really believe we can add trillions in new spending - triple our debt - and still give a tax cut to 95% of Americans as they claim?
The taxation that is coming is going to cripple the average middle class taxpayer. We have not felt the slightest breeze of this storm yet, but it is out there. The first pass will be a reduction in your ability to deduct almost everything. Home mortgage deductions, charitable contributions to your Church, medical deductions, etc. will have to be eliminated. Tax rates will have to rise, and not by a little, but by a lot.
The only way to escape these taxes is to quit working or go underground by insisting on unreported cash or barter for payment. Google “The Laffer Curve” as it is the key to understanding the reality of what’s about to happen. When tax rates rise, people stop working or go underground. Economist Arthur Laffer described the phenomenon that a 100% tax and a 0% tax collect the same amount of money, i.e. nothing. When the government discovers they are collecting far less due to higher rates, the whole debt spiral we have entered could cause a collapse of our currency and even further tank our economy.
The Tea parties are a warning shot to all of us to remind us we have strength in numbers. You have to understand, Conservatives hate protesting anything in such a public way. We detest the rent-a-mob tactics of the left and want to have nothing to do with them feeling they are phony and useless. That being said, to get 350,000 conservatives to actually organize and show up at these events is amazing. They are the 1% of the iceberg that is showing.
The tax storm is just on the horizon and many Americans are going to switch their votes to support the small government, low tax policy of whatever political party chooses to seriously adopt such a platform.

AIG Bonuses were earned and should be paid

2009-03-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

The unintended consequence of voting on something as ill defined as “change” is that we now need fences on both the Mexican and the Canadian Borders to keep US Business people from fleeing the US ! If you think the Democrats plan to impose a 90% tax on these AIG bonuses is a limited, one-time event, then you might also believe that Fidel Castro is a benevolent, misunderstood scamp.
The Obamunists have begun their version of the French revolution, by inciting the true believers to threaten AIG executives at their homes. Why ? They accepted their contractually guaranteed bonuses, that were overtly written into the Democrats stimulus plan. Treasury secretary Tim Geithner (D) and Senator Chris Dodd (D), both architects of the Obama bailout plan and stimulus bill made sure these bonuses were included in the (incorrectly labeled) stimulus plan.
When the public went berserk over paying bonuses to AIG these men developed selective amnesia as to how or why they had included these in the stimulus plan. The reality of these bonuses is obscured in the heated rhetoric. AIG, like many big companies has pockets of good business and pockets of bad business. Most of the bonuses being paid are essentially commissions, and were to be paid to managers who had very profitable business units within AIG. These large insurance and financial institutions have highly leveraged compensation plans for executives and managers, where managers get a base salary that is actually pretty small and if they make the revenue and profit numbers within that discrete unit, they can make huge money in the form of an annual bonus. If they miss their numbers they eat dog food.
The executives of the AIG sectors that were failing, and killing AIG were not in the bonus pool, and those executives made very little during 2008. Overall, AIG was a financial disaster, and in my mind should have been allowed to fail, file bankruptcy, clean out the incompetent management and re-build under normal bankruptcy protections. If AIG had filed for bankruptcy, these profitable business unit bonuses would have still been paid under bankruptcy law as they are a contractual obligation of AIG.
What we did instead is to insert the clueless hand of the Federal Government into this business, and essentially nationalize AIG, meaning it changed from a private company to a Government entity when it accepted 170 billion of TARP funds. The problem is, since the Government has no idea of how to run a private business, they overlay the government mentality of wage and price controls, onto a private company that has to survive in a free market system. The Socialistic impulses of the Obamunists were shown when Senator Schumer (D) announced using the Tax system and the IRS to punish these AIG employees by creating a very special 90% tax on selected people inside AIG.
When we give the Federal Government the right to selectively punish private individuals with targeted confiscation of their earnings we are opening Pandora’s box. As the months go by we will hear of many more individuals getting the heavy hand of Government reaching into their bank accounts. I talked with friends who work for Wells Fargo, and another of JP Morgan – Chase. They were notified that this 90% tax could apply to any company that accepted TARP money. These folks received a small performance bonus a couple months ago, for making a profit in 2008, which may be subject to this new unconstitutional tax. Now we’re talking tens of thousands of unsuspecting mid level managers of Financial firms who may be receiving a tax bill that is purely political and unjustified.
Congress knew about the AIG bonuses months ago. They only feigned ignorance with mock shock and disgust when the public outcry began. If we as a nation want to make private companies think and act like the government we are in for one heck of a downturn. The private sector runs on earnings and profits. The Government ALSO runs on earnings and profits as the Federal Government feeds off the private sector.
I believe we need to pick a side. Are you on the side of private enterprise, private property and personal liberty coupled with personal responsibility ? Or are you on the side of Government control of businesses, wages, prices and essentially every other decision we make in life ? As a lifelong Republican I was sickened by the big government Republican-ism of the last 8 years. We now are seeing even bigger government Democrat-ism that seeks to indebt us irrevocably to the Chinese with gargantuan spending programs that are not likely to relieve the recession.
We are also creating huge pressure for higher and higher taxes on everything. I suspect we will soon see a national sales tax in addition to our income tax. So much money is being vacuumed out of private citizens bank accounts and yet there is no real uproar, yet. Again –pick a side, lower taxes and less government intrusion or more taxes and much more government control of all that you do.

You could be a Victim too !

2009-03-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

Don’t miss out ! You too can line up for a grab bag of goodies that are absolutely free. No effort required, and almost everyone will qualify. Imagine the opportunity of financial gain and promotions at work. You can, for free, enlist herds of attorneys to punish anyone who doesn’t support you.
Welcome to the victims club. Official victims, all have a state sponsored apparatus to advance their claims and prosecute their enemies. The victims club assigns women, ethnic minority members, gay, lesbian and transgendered people, and disabled people to its membership, even if they refuse. They are represented by various Equal Opportunities Commissions, Commissions for Racial Equality, and Disability Rights groups. You also have at your disposal various labor and civil rights lobbyists and legal teams ready to fight the battle of putting you in the driver’s seat.

Think of the possibilities. Even if you were not lucky enough to be born a victim, you can still join the club and glean all the aforementioned benefits. Did you spill coffee on yourself and get burned? Probably the restaurant made the coffee too hot. Did the doctor fail to heal you? Cha Ching ! You’ve just entered the medical lottery by suing the Doctor. Besides, their malpractice insurance company will probably settle out of court.
Did you fail at a work assignment? Probably there were circumstances that made it difficult for you to succeed in the first place. Not to mention the oppressive demeanor and probable prejudice of your boss, who needs to pay and pay big. Residential renters are oppressed by landlords, employees by business owners, students by teachers and the list goes on forever.
We have unfortunately slouched our way into becoming a nation of victims. “Victim-ocracy” undermines our democracy because people are no longer considered equal under the law. Victimhood is a political status that is sought after because of the advantages of preferential treatment in the workplace. Add to that the possibility of using free legal power to silence any critics and grease the skids for financial compensation. The reality is that to be classified as a victim is to be given a special political status, which in many cases has no connection with real hardship or oppression.
When you add together all the various victims groups, you discover that they are the majority. While many of you are likely to reject any assigned victimhood status, the friendly federal and state government that knows all, has assigned you to a victims group anyway. Look at the following percentages; Women (51%) , all Ethnic Minorities combined (24.2%), Age 62 or older (14.7%). Source: The 2000 US Census.
Sure some folks are double or triple victims, but when you add the various groups together and sort out the duplicates, the victims come close to 70% of the population. I have to say that the small group of oppressors must be extremely efficient to accommodate all these victims.
My opinion is that we need to reserve victim status to the truly oppressed. The notion of “Mass Victimhood” dilutes our natural compassion and desire to help those in actual need to such an extent, we risk passing over the folks that do deserve our attention and need our help.

Several years ago I hired a plumber to fix old iron sewer pipes under our 1940’s era home. The man that arrived was in his 70’s and had a noticeable limp from Polio. He struggled to shake my hand, yet he crawled under the house, sawed out those nasty iron sewer pipes, and fixed everything in 4 hours. Almost ashamed to have an older man do this work for me, my heart went out to him but he did not require nor expect my sympathy. He was a proud plumbing professional, and after he scrawled out his invoice, we paid him and he was off to the next job.

This man could have signed up to at least 3 victims groups, yet he like so many of his generation saw life as a natural struggle and was proud to be able to make an honest living. He would have been angry to be labeled a victim. This is the American attitude that I embrace. The more people that refuse to participate in the self defeating world of Victimhood the stronger we will be as a nation.

America has always been a country of opportunity and Americans are recognized as uniquely able to overcome any obstacle. We pride ourselves as being problem solvers. Americans have advanced the health, wealth and well being of the entire planet based on this attitude. We are not victims nor are we oppressors. We are a generous, hard working and a giving people that will hopefully continue to inspire the rest of the world.

The Public University Systems Failures

2009-02-10T12:31:00.001-08:00

The public University system in America is clownishly out of step with what the actual economy needs. If you think I am picking on Colleges you’re right. Our society needs the Universities to produce gobs of nurses, physicians, accountants and engineers and yet when you enroll your kids you find all the valuable classes in job producing majors are so impacted; only seniors can attend freshman level required classes. If you want to take 4 years of garbage political science, or social re-engineering classes they have wagon loads of those available. To add injury to insult you have to pay dearly for this obsolete educational offering.
Imagine you are a manufacturer who has 20 years of standing orders for product A, but refuses to produce it in favor of product X which no one wants. This company would be out of business, broke and deservedly so. The warehouse full of useless product would be hauled to the dump. This same scenario exists in our University system today yet the defenders of doom protect the decayed Universities as if they are exempt from the laws supply and demand.
I am ready to wash my hands of the University level public education system after being a lifelong supporter of it. The socialists who run the teachers unions and the curriculum have made our public Universities into a useless joke of a system. Third world students have more useful skills after graduating from a 2 year school in Pakistan that our kids get from the California University system. That’s why employers hire the foreigners and tell our kids to go get a real education before applying to their company again.
We have been told if you get a college degree the world is your oyster. Turns out the average degree is more than likely the surest path to a minimum wage job. Give me more welders, sheet rockers, painters, plumbers, electricians and less liberal arts graduates. I had a friend of mine asking if I knew anyone who wanted to take a job as a beginner steelworker. The job started at $65k a year, located in Oakland. Pay increases came with added skills and yet they had a hard time finding young folks to even apply.
The economy needs technical specialists, engineers, and medical professionals who think out of the box, speak English well, and want to work long hours. The Universities churn out boatloads of unqualified graduates who expect high pay, and short easy hours. These new “workers” have been taught that the businesses they seek a paycheck from are evil, and that they should grab everything they can get from these greedy business owners.
I wish I could play the diatribe against America and business my daughter recorded at San Jose State University the other day. Even the most ardent liberal would cringe at the hatred of America this lowlife “professor” spewed to a class full of cowering students afraid to speak, or defend their country, fearing they would be flunked by this anti-champion of free speech. I have had to inoculate my kids against these Hate America leftist professors by teaching them to regard them as pathetic hoaxes and to mock them at every turn. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Welcome to the new counter culture.
Not to say there is no new money for schools in our stimulus package. But it comes in the form of rewards for the same goofs who have driven our schools to ruin in the first place. I asked a pal of mine who is a conservative professor turned business owner why the system is so upside down. He said it was a combination of leftist ideologues that run the education establishment and a desire to get students through the system at the very lowest cost. A lecture hall with 250 kids listening to useless drivel is very cheap to produce. An anatomy laboratory with a cadaver for nursing students is more pricey. Cut the latter, more of the former. This same scenario plays out every day at our Universities in all sorts of majors.
Mr. President, if you want to make a change that will help the average family, take a huge sharp knife and a pair of brass knuckles to the Education establishment. Bring in the business community to help design a curriculum that produces graduates they long to hire right out of school. Invest in 2 year trade schools that teach our kids a set of construction skills that they can make a living at for 40 years. Pay the teachers who over produce more than the average and fire the under producers. The world needs minimum wage workers too, but rather than having our bright kids who just graduated from College do that work let the teachers who cannot teach flip the burgers.

Hunting helps both Hunters and Hunted

2009-01-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

If you were asked what is the most dangerous wild animal in the US what would be your reply ? The Alaskan Grizzly Bear ? The Mountain Lion ? Florida Gators ? Rocky Mountain spotted Tick ? Turns out it is the noble and Disney-esque Whitetail Deer. Yes, Bambi kills hundreds of Americans each year. Deer/Vehicle collisions kill ten times more people each year than sharks, bears, cougars and gators combined. In fact Deer /Vehicle collisions kill more people than all commercial plane, bus and train collisions too.
Whitetail deer have become one of the most successful game species in history. Their populations skyrocketed when they were transplanted from Minnesota and Wisconsin to every other deer starved community coast to coast. The natural check on deer populations are predators that don’t exist in most urban areas. The deer population is estimated by game managers to greatly exceed the numbers that were here in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Currently, they number somewhere around 30 million animals.
Enter the hero of our little story, the Deer Hunter. Deer hunters annually provide hundreds of millions of dollars for wildlife management programs. Their hunting license fees, deer tag fees, taxes and fees on guns and ammo are a primary funding source for Game Managers, and wildlife biologists. Hunters are licensed by the State Fish and Wildlife Department to harvest only the excess population of deer.
Hunting helps in other ways too. Deer are grazers, similar to cattle and when deer populations exceed the carrying capacity of their range, food sources end up over grazed and can trigger a host of environmental bad hair days. Hunters keep herds within the ranges capacity and in well managed areas you will see a bloom in plant diversity and less erosion. You’ll also see more songbirds and small game animals as they have needed cover, and you won’t see a browse line where everything is eaten up to the 5 foot level. Deer hunting is “incentive based environmentalism” meaning hunters pay to hunt and the net effect benefits the entire ecosystem, not just the deer herds.
Where hunting isn’t allowed these areas cannot control their game populations. Consider the Rocky Mountain National Parks un-hunted herd of Elk. It was so over populated it was destroying its habitat. The Park services first pass at a solution was to hire night shooters with silenced rifles to thin out the herd by taking 700 elk per year. The cost was a staggering $860,000. They decided to allow hunters to buy Elk tags and the Elk herd were thinned to the proper level, and the Park Service had a surplus from the program.
The New Jersey Audubon Society discovered that the whitetail deer population in their wildlife refuges had over browsed the songbirds nesting cover. Song bird populations plummeted. For the first time in their 100 year history the Audubon Society called on the State to bring in hunters to reduce the deer population.
The tale of two-faced cities revolves around Princeton, New Jersey. This University town is on the surface an anti-hunting, politically correct township that has a huge deer population problem. What did they do? They trapped and sterilized hundreds of Bucks, at a cost of close to $600 per animal. They tried deer birth control, darting the Does with a drug called PZP –porcine zona pellucida as a sterilization agent. The cost was $800 per animal and after spending close to a million dollars, with no success, they decided to bring in night hunters with silenced rifles. The hunting program worked and was done at a cost less than $50 per animal. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, Princeton could effectively support about 400 deer, but had 1600 animals. The odd twist was the same people that constantly called in to complain about the deer eating their gardens were also the same people opposed to actually solving the problem with hunters.
Then the fireworks started. A group of 150 protestors stormed the City Council meetings chanting slogans, waving handwritten signs…you know the drill. The Mayor offered to stop the program if the protestors would fund the alternative program themselves, and the crowd slowly dissipated. Two years later the deer herd is healthy, and the townspeople stopped whining too.
The next time you see a fellow in camouflage clothing, carrying a rifle in the hills, try to remember that he is one card carrying member of the stewards of wildlife. Hunters are Conservationists and want to preserve wilderness for both human enjoyment as well as safeguard these wild places as sanctuaries for all wildlife.

Moral Relativism Column

2008-12-17T13:40:00.001-08:00

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the U.S. in 1831 and wrote Democracy in America, a two-volume study of the American people and our political institutions. He compared totalitarianism with democracy and stated that “In dictatorial regimes, despotism strikes the body: the dissenter is tortured into silence, but in democratic regimes that have succumbed to corruption, despotism ignores the body and strikes at the soul”. This is the very point we have arrived at in our nation. Our souls have been told to shut up and go away in the name of the latest fad of political correctness.
A recent Zogby poll related that in American universities 75% of college professors currently teach that there is no such thing as right and wrong. Rather, they treat the questions of good and evil as relative to "individual values and cultural diversity." The problem with this is that they see the world not as it is, but as they want it to be. Annoying questions about moral absolutes and unacceptable behavior are usually left unanswered.
Moral relativism is the view that ethical standards, morality, and positions of right or wrong are culturally based and therefore subject to a person's individual choice. We can all decide what is right for ourselves. You decide what's right for you, and I'll decide what's right for me. Moral relativism says, "It's true for me, if I believe it."
So goes the subject of Gay Marriage. We are told that these standards of old are no longer needed. The new cultural elites have redefined all of this stodgy moralistic thinking into six easy words: “If it feels good, do it.” The fact is in America over 85% of Marriages are performed as Religious Marriages. This means that the Marriage is between the Man, the Woman and their God. The essence of re-defining marriage from one man and one woman to any two carbon based entities is our latest fad. The liberal cultural elites want to take God out of Marriage permanently.
People marry for many reasons, legal, social and economic stability; the formation of a family unit; to have and to educate and nurture children; legitimizing sexual relations; public declaration of love or to obtain citizenship. Marriage has traditionally been supported by Governments as a way of safeguarding the values which are most likely to meet children's needs and protect their interests. Today’s culture places the needs of children way down the list, far behind the desires of the adults when it comes to marriage.
The truth is that every child needs and deserves the love and life lessons from a mother and a father. A family led by a father and a mother is the best environment for children—the place where children gain their identity, learn discipline and moral education that are essential for their full development. Families are the institution which most effectively teach the civic virtues of honesty, loyalty, trust, self sacrifice, personal responsibility, and respect for others. Not the state or our government schools. The family is an irreplaceable foundation for long-term social responsibility. Gay marriages by definition will only provide one genders influence on children. Men are not Mothers, Women are not Fathers.
There are many who wish to completely change society to one where all traces of religion and morality are burned at the altar of Secular humanism. Is this the America we want? One where God is a four letter word? In his September 19, 1796 Farewell Address to the nation, George Washington stated: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars?"
The Left wants a world where there are no rules, no morality, and little personal responsibility. In a morally relativistic world, those people who do have beliefs or morals must be held as the enemy. How many of you feel that in today’s society what was once considered good is now bad, and what was always considered bad is now labeled good? To accomplish this, the Liberal elites must seek to undermine traditional values and the status quo.
Secular Humanism, Evolution and moral relativism all go hand-in-hand, for they all teach that life is accidental, without meaning or purpose. Therefore, anything you do is OK, because it ultimately doesn't matter. If you believe we are created in the image of God, moral relativism cannot work. Creation implies a Creator. All things created are subject to a set of laws, whether natural or divine.
William McGuffey, author of the McGuffey's Readers, which were the mainstay of America's public school system from 1836 till the 1920's, wrote: "Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man."
We stand at this threshold as we ponder California’s Proposition 8. Do we want to reaffirm that Marriage, the most basic construct of our society, and the traditional family are really ready to be dissolved for the expedient laws of political correctness? You get to choose on November 4th.

Darwinian Evolution Theory has holes

2008-12-17T13:37:00.000-08:00

Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species was published in 1859. It’s generally accepted as sound Science that Darwinian evolution is the operating system to biological diversity on earth. Have you ever heard of the multiple serious challenges to Darwinian Evolution? Probably not, as any scientific dissent is heavily stifled.
In a completely scientific sense there are holes in Darwin’s theory that introduce real debate. Here are a few of the topics of contention I picked up from a really great, but complex book called Darwin’s Black Box by Lehigh University Biochemistry professor Michael Behe.
One challenge is that while we may understand how complex biological systems operate, we have no idea how they came to be. The second is that there are biological mechanisms such as blood clotting, ciliated cells and the immune system that are so complex they defy the Darwinian model of step by step evolution. This phenomenon is called “irreducible complexity” by the dissenting scientific community. The third is a re-examination of the fossil record, which is purported to have almost no evidence of macro-evolutionary transitional life forms. I had to re-learn that ”Micro-evolution” is adaptation within a species, such as finches getting longer beaks during a drought, or bacterium developing defenses against antibiotics. “Macro-evolution” is where one species morphs into another, such as a fish evolving into a frog, and is a necessary construct of Darwinian evolution.
Let’s look at the first query. How did life come from non-life? At Cal Poly, I was taught that science had already solved this little problem. University of Chicago scientist Stanley Miller had hypothesized that if he could re-create the early earth’s atmosphere of methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen and add a large dose of electricity, he could simulate the conditions that propelled non-life to become life. Problem was, he didn’t exactly accomplish that, but what he did discover was that he could create more complex chemical combinations, known as amino acids. Scientists cheered the world over. Add in a spoonful of unknown natural processes that guided amino acids to come together to form proteins, and tah-dah! The materials for making the machines of life were deemed to be present and plentiful on the early earth. Miller then added the theory that proteins would somehow need to have been trapped inside cell like membranes and eventually the first self replicating cell would be born. Whew ! – But professor, how did life come from non-life?
A prominent researcher Klaus Dose summed it up this way. “40 years of experimentation in the origins of life in chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the enormity of the problem, but no solutions. What we have is that 40 years of intense experimentation and research has led to a unified answer… We don’t know”
Then there is the concept Behe brings up called irreducible complexity. His argument is that at the molecular level the interdependencies of the parts of life’s systems are so complicated that they could not have evolved step by step. To use the example of the Human eye, Darwin explained the anatomical structures of eyes, trying to draw a line from a light sensitive spot in a simple organism through a cluster of these cells in a depression with a gelatinous covering to a sophisticated eye with a lens. The limitations of the 1800’s didn’t allow Darwin to comprehend the Biochemical impossibility of connecting these structures that Behe details in his book. Each of the anatomical steps that Darwin thought were so simple, actually involve staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with evolutionary rhetoric. Behe takes 4 examples, the blood clotting mechanism, the ciliated cell, a cells’ internal transport mechanism, and the immune system and shows how biochemically Darwin’s theory breaks down at the cellular and biochemical level.
The final argument centers on how the Fossil record holds little evidence or clues how one species evolved into another. Think about it, there should be scads of remnants of half bird - half bats and every other trans-species evolutionary creature, right? The fossil record is amazingly devoid of any of these macro evolutionary beings remains. The fossil record also shows a huge simultaneous emergence of lots of new species in one era, called The Cambrian Explosion, where everything seemed to appear at once. This is the stuff of Darwinian nightmares, but there it is. No gradual morphing from pre-historic Toad to Teddy Kennedy is to be found in the fossil record, albeit the logic of such an ancestral chain. All in all Darwin’s Black Box is an intelligent challenge to one of the most stringent orthodoxies of our era.

The Mortgage Crisis

2008-12-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

I finally figured out why the mortgage fueled real estate crisis happened on what seemed to be my 20th trip back from New Delhi, India. You see, I was part of a team who had convinced Indian Investors to invest in the US, in “rolling up” several Mortgage Software Companies. By jumping into a business where we mapped software to fit every aspect of the whole Mortgage Industry I had a bird’s eye view of the Mortgage meltdown. Here’s what I learned was really going on.
Let’s start this sad tale by relating how Mortgages were created when many of us were buying our first home. We went to our local Bank or Savings & Loan and filled out a Mortgage application. We were asked basic questions such as how much money do you earn, how much you have in your asset column, and how much do you owe to other creditors. The rules were straightforward. You had to have 20% of the price of the home to put down. The lender calculated the”PITI” payment (principle, interest, taxes and insurance) and that sum had to be no more than 33% of your income. The home’s value had to be checked by a professional appraiser, and then you could buy a home. The Bank that loaned the money would collect the payments on the loan for all 30 years, so they were pretty strict who they loaned to.
In the last 10 - 15 years this simple financial contract changed to a very complex multi-tiered transaction. Today you start the loan process with Mortgage Brokers or Website’s, where you can instantly shop rates, points & credit restrictions, then click thru to a lender. Loan originators make money from the upfront interest, or points charged on a loan. In the wild days of 2002 – 2006 originators earned big money by selling what are called subprime loans. If you had really bad credit, they loved you, as they could charge you a fee of 5% (5 points) of the loan amount and add a full percentage point or two to the loan rate. The Institution that funded that loan, let’s say “Bank of The Lost Souls” would take your loan, process the first six payments, and sell that sucker to the mysterious cabal of investors known as the “secondary market” . The secondary market buys blocks of hundreds of mortgages in a big package. Lastly, there is another group called Servicers who collect the payments for a fee. The system evolved to fund more loans than ever before and with semi-reasonable controls. That is, until the Sharks smelled blood.
Enter the Wall Street crowd, who, running perilously short on diamond studded chauffeurs caps, decided to jump into the Mortgage business and teach the rubes a thing or two. They created the concept of “Securitized Mortgage Funds” which were huge blocks of mortgages, both good and bad bought from the secondary market. They began to sell these as high yielding stock funds to all of us. This fueled the demand for subprime loans like never before. Artificially high demand coupled with huge commissions on subprime paper meant brokers pushed loans to people who could not pay them back. The concept of loan qualification was almost lost in this mortgage rodeo. You could get a 100% loan on a property that appraised for more than the sales price. Buyers could have just defaulted on two other loans and erase that problem by paying 4 points upfront and two percent higher on the loan rate. The secondary market securitized by Wall Street (instead of conservative old Fannie Mae)took all this bad paper and rolled it into a Mortgage fund, as the high priced risky loans were needed to make their mortgage fund s seem more investible.
I went to Washington DC in 2006 to meet with Fannie Mae, to present a software backbone for their new subprime Mortgage business. Folks - Fannie Mae is the most conservative Mortgage underwriter in the US - who in the past would NEVER guarantee a subprime loan. Fannie Mae was forced into underwriting the worst, most risky loans because Wall Street demanded it. A few weeks ago The Feds had to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they were getting their heads handed to them by the mortgage crisis.
When normal financial sanity hit, the Mortgage Industry just melted down. We were left with homes where average folks owed more on their home than it was worth. Faced with huge losses, the Lenders had to soak up every rate hike they could get. With variable rate loans and rising interest rates Lenders raised existing variable loan rates every 6 months, hoping to offset their bad subprime loans. The poor borrowers saw their payments double in three years on a home that was going down in value, and many abandoned their homes, making the whole cycle deepen.
I honestly believe that this mess was largely fueled by the Wall Street gang. The pressure for more profits from risky financial instruments overrode common sense controls. This accelerated the mortgage industry meltdown and is pummeling the average American big time. This is one crisis where we all got fleeced by Wall Street.

So you want to move some dirt...

2008-12-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

I remember watching a film at Cal Poly in an Agriculture class that was made by Caterpillar Tractor. It was fascinating. They showed two bulldozers driving side by side with a chain that had links the size of railroad track between them in a U formation. They were clearing a field of scrub trees and anything else that stood in their way. Then they showed these huge excavators digging swimming pools in three scoops. They even had a big loader that could lift a car in its bucket. I have been mesmerized by the power and ingenuity of hydraulic powered heavy equipment ever since.
I attended a meeting in Philadelphia one day and have no idea what it was about even though I sat there for 2 hours. Why? Outside the window they were tearing down some slum of a building with heavy equipment. This crane had a wrecking ball on the end of a huge cable. They would slam the ball into the concrete building and a whole wall would collapse. Then a giant excavator would clamp on a portion of the roof and a fallen wall, tearing it from the foundation, and deposit it in a waiting truck. It was a very unfair contest. The wrecking ball versus a 70 slide power point presentation, I mean .
When my neighbor at the ranch tempted me with a used Caterpillar Backhoe, I jumped at the chance to enter the world of heavy equipment. He showed me the controls, warned me about tipping it over, gave me a lot of safety tips and I rode off into the backhoe sunset. My first duty was to clear out a patch of buck brush. I lowered the loader bucket and drove into the brush, ripping out several at once. After a few hours I had cleared an acre of brush. I then went up the hill and discovered that these things are really heavy as I sank the backhoe up to its axles in muddy ground. Being a neophyte in the world of heavy equipment I began to wonder what in the world could tow a backhoe out of the mud. The thing weighs more than my barn, so I jumped off, shut it down and walked over to my neighbors’ house to ask him. He reminded me that the hydraulic backhoe arm could essentially lift me out of my hole of shame, and deposit me a few feet to the right. Sure enough that worked like a charm and I slunk my way back to the barn to park old Yeller and wait for a few more rain free days before using the hoe again.
The world of hydraulic equipment has been adapted to do every conceivable job known to man. Need to shred metal file cabinets ? Slant drill a mile deep in the gulf of Mexico ? Our emergency crews use the jaws of life to hydraulically pry apart a smashed car to rescue the occupants.
I live in the technology world where we employ machines to simulate a lot of fast thinking, but not to do anything even remotely physical. Wander around a typical software company and you see folks that are designed for heavy thinking not heavy lifting. When you show up on a construction site, the people and machinery are designed to do a lot of difficult work quickly.
I am sure you’ve noticed the extension of highway 4 in Angels Camp. I bet there are a lot of us tech folks who would gladly spend our vacation days free of charge working on that project if we could run a Caltrans Bulldozer, Moto-grader or Loader. Not sure an army of tecchies would offset the cost of training and blunders but if Caltrans ever gets cash strapped….
A couple times a year we bring groups of Bay Area teens up to the ranch to ride ATV’s and dirt bikes and take a few digs with the backhoe. Of all the “events” the one kids brag about the most is running the backhoe. We have them dig a hole with the backhoe and fill it in with the front end loader. Everyone is shocked how easy it is to move a few tons of mother earth.

Sure, the folks that run heavy equipment for a living are scratching their heads, wondering what all the fuss is about. But to us non heavy equipment types the allure of these mega machines is inescapable, and will always capture our imaginations far more than what we face daily at work, i.e.… the next 1000 emails.

The Sad Ballad of Compean and Ramos

2008-12-17T12:32:00.000-08:00

I want to introduce you to two American political prisoners. Meet US Border Control Agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos. Here’s their sad story. These two agents spotted an illegal alien drug smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, driving a van that was loaded with 743 lbs of marijuana, on American soil. A high speed pursuit continued for a period of time and when Davila stopped, he got out of the van and ran for the Mexican border, stopping briefly to pivot and raise his arm toward the agents. Agent Compean claims that Davila pointed a shiny object - what appeared to be a gun toward him.
Compean opened fire and Ramos, seeing that a fellow agent was exchanging gunfire with a suspect, opened fire as well. After the agents fired, Davila, apparently unhurt, turned and ran back across the Mexican border and escaped in an awaiting van.
The suspect was shot in the buttocks but was treated in Mexico and has no lingering problems from the shooting. The lasting damage is to the two agents. Two weeks later, Johnny Sutton, the U.S. Attorney for that part of Texas, ordered a full-scale investigation of the two agents Compean and Ramos.
You know you’re dealing with a political arrest when you send in two SWAT teams from The Department of Homeland Security to stage a lights and cameras arrest at each house. These are two fellow Law enforcement agents! You could send them an email to appear at the federal court the next day with a near 100% certainty they would show up. Why send SWAT teams?
To top it off, Sutton's office gave the drug smuggler immunity in order to prosecute the two agents. Ramos and Compean were given terms of 11 and 12 years respectively on their convictions for shooting an illegal alien drug smuggler.
A major argument used by the prosecution during the trial was that our government has a policy forbidding agents from chasing suspected drug smugglers without first getting permission from supervisors. Sounds like the Drug Smugglers wrote the Government Policy Manuals; as such a policy is in effect a no arrest policy. The departmental procedures say when Davila started to run for the Mexican border, Compean and Ramos should have stopped and radioed a superior and asked for permission to pursue him.
Some of the jurors believed Ramos and Compean were not guilty and after the trial, two jurors gave sworn statements that they had been pressured to render a guilty verdict. They did not understand that a hung jury was possible. They later confided to the defense lawyer that the jury foreman told them the judge had said all jurors had to agree on the verdict, that it had to be unanimous. Believing those instructions, at least three jurors changed their vote from not guilty to guilty.
The agents were serving their nation in a war zone along our southern border. The fact is Mexico remains the primary corridor for drugs entering the United States. Mexico is the principal source of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into this country. Mexican traffickers continue to dominate drug distribution in the United States, controlling most of the primary distribution centers. We should be giving these guys a medal for staring down the ultra violent drug cartels, but instead we imprison them for doing job and protecting our country.
This grandstanding US Attorney Sutton then ordered that the drug smuggler be given a special VISA which allowed him access to come and go across the border. He was later arrested again by other Border Patrol Agents with another truckload of marijuana.
US Attorney Sutton gave amnesty to a drug smuggler but relentlessly pursued Compean and Ramos. He charged them with Causing Serious Bodily Harm, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Discharge of a Firearm in Relation to a Crime of Violence, and violation of the illegal dope dealer's civil rights. Conviction on the firearms charge carries a mandatory ten-year sentence but no one ever thought it would be used against a law enforcement officer who was engaged in the commission of their duty. Can you say persecution rather than prosecution?
What can we do? As this is the Presidential Pardon Season we can personally plea with President Bush to pardon these two men. They do not deserve to be in Federal Prison or have their lifestyle wrecked. The message to criminals is clear: you will be treated with respect and free legal advice. The message to Law enforcement professionals is equally clear. You will be prosecuted ruthlessly if you don’t follow the 440 page procedure manual flawlessly. It’s Law enforcement that keeps us safe, not the US Attorney’s office. The message we need to send to Washington NOW is pardon Ramos and Compean immediately.

Finally the Supreme Court rules for the people

2008-08-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing to me that we needed the US Supreme Court to declare out loud what a majority of Americans already knew. The right to keep and bear firearms is a guaranteed individual right as stated in the second amendment to the US Constitution. Why was such a huge part of the population dazed and confused, convinced that the Bill of Rights, which goes to great lengths to address our individual rights, had one – and one only –“States Rights” amendment designed to allow states to maintain Militias ?

The Supremes finally made it known that they support us as individuals in this case. We now have continuity from our founding fathers to our present day leaders on the second amendment. Consider the words of Thomas Jefferson.

· " The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed"

· " No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms (within his own lands or tenements)."

" The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Two more, that are also to the point

· George Washington’s simple assertion that “A free people ought to be armed”

· Benjamin Franklin’s great statement on “mob-ocracy” - “Democracy is two wolves and lamb voting on what to eat for lunch, liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote”

In our day we have the brilliant Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia. This one statement was music to most Americans. "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home”

The ladies in my household know how to properly handle rifles, pistols and shotguns. They are 120 pound females, but it is that .357 magnum handgun that makes them equal to the 280 pound crack head that may want to mess with them. They are not afraid to be left alone, and if some suspicious character shows up at the door, they call the police first before ever resorting to firearm based self defense. But, if some lowlife insists on entering the home before the police arrive, they will be met with a telltale click, a verbal warning, and then a very fast case of lead poisoning. This is the most individual right I know of, to allow my daughters and wife to protect themselves.

The Supreme Court case, D.C. v Heller was about the constitutionality of a total ban on the ownership of handguns. The DC gun ban, like most of our other 275,000 restrictive gun laws, are thrust on an unwilling citizenry in the name of greater public safety. The reality was though, that the law never made a dent in the city's gun crime. D.C. still ranks among the most dangerous places in America. At least now, the Supreme Court has acknowledged the constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to protect their own lives when the police can't respond immediately.

If the mere presence of legally owned guns caused shootings as liberals claim, then it follows where there are lots of legal guns there must be lots of shootings. The nationwide crime statistics tell a vastly different story though. Shootings are much more frequent and numerous where there are fewer legal guns.

The one consistent thread in all areas where there are high gun deaths is the presence of gang and illicit drug activity. Not surprisingly, communities that pass laws to disarm the general populace have the highest rate of gang and drug activity, and the highest percentage of murders.

The low point in this decision was the fact that four of the Justices voted to continue to infringe our individual rights spelled out in the 2^nd amendment. All four in the minority said that the right is clearly an individual right and not a collective right, but still needs lots of government infringement. The reality is though; we were one vote away from being stripped of one of our key individual rights.

My final thought is that all of the other rights stated in the Bill of Rights would be very easy to take away from us if the second amendment went away. So even if you are an anti-gun activist, your right to protest is held secure by a wise Supreme Court, and the backing of 200 million legal gun owners in the United States who ensure your rights remain intact

Activist Judges rob us all

2008-08-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court of California ( many of them Republican appointees ) decided two weeks ago that their Constitutional role as interpreters of laws was insufficient. The Majority on the Court, like so much of the liberal apparatchik in California declared the voters be damned. In effect, they said “We will decide what is best for you little citizens. Go back to your pedestrian tax creating jobs, while we create a liberal utopia”

What did they do? They found “rights” in our State Constitution that do not exist, allowing the invalidation of not only hundreds of years of legal precedence, but the total invalidation of Proposition 22, codified as Civil Code section 308.5. The proposition was approved in 2000 by 52 of California’s 58 counties and 61.4% of the voters. Calaveras, Tuolumne, Amador and Stanislaus Counties approved this measure by an average of 73.5%.

Proposition 22 was exactly 14 words long: ‘Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.’ The very convoluted Supreme Court decision is 121 pages long. Yes, I read it all the way through, and it is the strongest non-narcotic sleeping aid I have ever experienced.

The California Supreme Court though, has no constitutional right to “legislate from the bench” Only the Legislature through the passage of bills or the people through the initiative process can make new laws. Consider that the California Constitution states “The powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial. Persons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others except as permitted by this Constitution”

The reality is the California Constitution says nothing about any rights of same-sex couples to marry. On the contrary, as even the majority conceded, our original Constitution, effective from the moment of statehood, affirmed that marriage was between partners of the opposite sex. Statutes enacted at the state’s first legislative session confirmed this assumption, which has continued to the present day.

The California Supreme Court declared in 1952’s DeBurgh v. DeBurgh “The family is the basic unit of our society, the center of the personal affections that ennoble and enrich

Human life. It channels biological drives that might otherwise become socially destructive; it ensures the care and education of children in a stable environment; it establishes continuity from one generation to another; it nurtures and develops the individual initiative that distinguishes a free people. Since the family is the core of our society, the law seeks to foster and preserve marriage.”

The first run at gay marriage came in 1971 when our oh-so politically correct legislators decided to eliminate references to “male” and “female”. They created a new marriage definition that stated “any unmarried person of the age of 18 years or upwards, and not otherwise disqualified is capable of consenting to and consummating marriage.” Gay activists seized upon this as an opportunity to show up in various county clerks’ offices in California requesting marriage licenses. When the Legislature realized their oversight it was quickly corrected, and the definition of marriage was again reaffirmed explicitly as between a man and a woman.

To accommodate gay couples that want to be legally identified as in a committed long term relationship California enacted comprehensive domestic partnership legislation. These laws allow a same-sex couple to enter into a legal relationship that affords the couple all of the same substantive legal benefits and privileges of married couples. It also imposes upon them all of the same legal obligations and duties that California law imposes upon married couples. Here is that statute. “Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.”

To quote an argument forwarded by Justice J. Baxter of the California Supreme Court in this case…”The bans on incestuous and polygamous marriages are ancient and deep rooted, and as the majority suggests, they are supported by strong considerations of social policy. Our society abhors such relationships, and the notion that our laws could not forever prohibit them seems preposterous. Yet here, the majority overturns, in abrupt fashion, an initiative statute confirming the equally deep rooted assumption that marriage is a union of partners of the opposite sex. The majority does so by relying on its own assessment of contemporary community values, and by inserting in our Constitution an expanded definition of the right to

Marry that contravenes express statutory law. That approach creates the opportunity for further judicial extension of this perceived constitutional right into dangerous territory. Who can say that, in ten, fifteen, or twenty years, an activist court might not rely on the majority’s analysis to conclude, on the basis of a perceived evolution in community values, that the
laws prohibiting polygamous and incestuous marriages were no longer constitutionally justified?

I believe that the people of California made their decision clear in Prop 22. In November there will be a chance to again vote on an initiative to define marriage, in our State Constitution as between one man and one woman. But, until we rid ourselves of Judges who ignore the will of the people our votes are essentially meaningless.

The Death of the Emergency Room

2008-08-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Death of the Emergency Room

If your local Emergency Room at the local Hospital went broke and closed – would you worry? That is what has happened to 84 California Emergency & Trauma Centers in the last 12 years, and is likely to accelerate even more. Why? Our Emergency Rooms are being stalked by a deadly predator…the Un-funded Government Mandate. Our elected officials join hands and chant, then pass new laws without regard to who will pay for the conformity to their law. This is called an un-funded mandate.

While EMTALA is not exactly a household name, nor a slogan for t-shirts and coffee cups, it stands for the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985. What this lovely little piece of Federal Legislation does is compel hospitals and especially emergency departments (EDs or ER’s to you and I) to treat anyone, with any “emergency” who shows up regardless of their ability to pay for the services. This is not only folks who have no health coverage but a huge number of illegal aliens too, who routinely use the ER’s as their free clinics. EMTALA is an unfunded federal mandate.

EMTALA requires every ER to treat anyone with an emergency cough, emergency headache, emergency heart attack, emergency drug addiction or alcohol binge, emergency auto wreck, emergency mental problem, ( the list is practically endless) whether the recipient is here legally, or has any ability to pay. The fact is that the definition of an “emergency” is mandated to be vague enough to include almost any condition. Any patient coming to a hospital requesting care must also be treated until ready for discharge, or stabilized sufficiently to be transported to another facility. The Government backs up its bark with a nasty bite, in the form of stiff fines and penalties on any physician or hospital refusing to treat any “emergency” patient, even if the hospital or physician has declared the patient’s illness or injury non-emergency. This is a huge Strike One for Hospitals.

Imagine you own a clothing store, and the feds declare clothing to be a “universal right” of every citizen. They then decide that anyone who shows up in ratty clothing is to be given new clothing, regardless of their ability to pay. You, as a private business owner, have to provide anyone who comes through your door, with a fresh set of clothing, that you had to pay cash for from your wholesale supplier, and the reality is you cannot charge every third customer anything at all. That is what EMTALA does to our local ER’s.

You have two choices; one is to raise the prices on the clothing you sell to the other two thirds of your customers, even when these customers keep asking why the cost of clothing has risen so dramatically, or when the customers cannot afford to buy from you any longer, you have to close your doors for good. That is precisely what happened to 84 big ER’s and trauma centers in our State in the last 12 years.

Add to that, two more unfunded state level mandates, the new nurse-to-patient ratio law, and a another law requiring the retrofitting of hospital buildings to meet seismic standards.

The nurse to patient ratio law states that hospitals have a minimum number of nurses to cover patients, differing by area in the hospital. In emergency and trauma departments, a 1:1 nurse to patient ratio is required, and in Critical Care and Intensive care as well as Labor and Delivery, a 1:2 ratio. It’s rumored that many areas were understaffed with Registered Nurses in the past which prompted this law. Problem is, there is a huge nursing shortage now, and this new law only exacerbates the problem. What do Hospitals do? Hire as many Registered Nurses as possible to comply and sub contract with even more expensive contract nurses for the rest. This of course adds a huge cost to the ER and Hospital, without any way for them to charge more for these additional staff. Strict interpretation of the law requires these ratios to be maintained “at all times” and makes this law almost impossible to obey. This is “strike two” for the ER’s.

Seismic retrofits are hugely expensive for Hospitals and represent another unfunded mandate that is essentially “strike three” for our Hospital Emergency rooms in many cases.

The answers are as complex as the problems, but if we can alter the uninsured problem even a little it may relieve the financial pressures on our local Hospitals enough to avoid closing. Beware the unfunded mandate from the Government, as it has radically disastrous consequences for all of us.

No War between True Science and Religion

2008-08-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

Is there really a war between Science and Religion? In many people’s mind the two are polar opposites. You must choose one or the other. I truly believe that true religion and true science are not at odds. Keep in mind this is the editorial page, not the news page and this is only my opinion…but pull up a chair and have a short read.

Ever hear the phrase “flat earther”? It is a derisive term, often hurled by those looking to elevate scientific thought over religious thought. It ‘s a reference to supposedly religious people who claimed the earth was flat even though scientists of the day had deemed it round, implying that scientific knowledge was hobbled for centuries during the Christian era. According to the myth, science only re-emerged during the renaissance, when science purportedly overruled religion.

The big problem is… it’s not true. Very few of the medieval scholars or clerics doubted the earth was round. Jeffrey Russell, a professor in the UC system wrote a book in 1991 on the subject named "Inventing the Flat Earth". He says that during the first 15 centuries of the Christian era, only five known clerics questioned the round globe. He stated flatly that “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century forward believed the earth was flat” Where did this myth come from then?

It is mainly from a fictional work by author Washington Irving, the creator of Rip Van Winkle. He penned a fictitious book about the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus. In this book, he fantasized a confrontation at the University in Salamanca in 1491, pitting Columbus against an array of professors, friars and dignitaries of the Church. In the fictional drama, Columbus pleads the case of the world being round against the scoffs and scorns of the Church and the cowed professors, who argue it to be flat. Historians, such as Samuel Morison describe Irving’s account as pure fantasy, calling it “misleading and mischievous nonsense”. There were objections raised at the real Salamanca hearings; mainly that Columbus had misjudged distances by a considerable margin, but none on the grounds that the Earth was flat.

Another battle in the Science vs. Religion arena was centered on a fellow named Nicholas Copernicus. Copernicus was a canon of a Catholic cathedral in Poland, and studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the Catholic University of Bologna. It was here that his professor presented a challenge to the belief that the earth was the center of our solar system. Copernicus wrote his thesis that the planets revolved around the Sun, and the theory was supported by Pope Leo X at the time. Some of the leaders of the Christian reformation, namely Martin Luther and John Calvin doubted his thesis, but neither cleric made any attempt at repressing the theory.

The doubters were in the scientific community, namely Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer, and later Johannes Kepler who believed that the other planets did orbit the Sun, which in turn all orbited the Earth!

Before the twentieth century few scientists saw any conflict between science and religion. Pioneering geneticist Gregor Mendel was a monk and Louis Pasteur was a devout Catholic. The electrifying names of Andre-Marie Apere (amps), Alessandro Volta (volts), were very religious. Isaac Newton, Max Planck and Albert Einstein were also religious men.

In the modern world Francis S. Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project is a practicing Christian. He wrote a book "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."

Today we see supposed skirmishes in the areas of Darwinian Macro Evolution, stem cell research and human cloning. Then there is the alternate universe where science and religion are transposed – manmade Global Warming. If you ever hear the phrase, “The Science is settled” you can be sure those words were uttered by a “true to the global warming faith” politician, not a scientist.

Science and Religion are two separate schools of thought. I don’t believe humans discern spiritual promptings through empirical means. We cannot mathematically derive, nor produce through lab analysis supreme beings. Although, I do remember using prayer a lot before Biochemistry finals at University, but that is a different matter.

Likewise we cannot lean on Religion to replace Science. The realities of carbon dating, DNA analysis and other scientific discoveries should not pose any threat to religious people. Almost all religions I know of are very aware that there is much yet to be revealed to mankind. Some of it will come through spiritual means, and some of it will come from our scientists.

Religious folks should not shy away from Science, but rather strive to understand the facts behind a particular scientific theory. Likewise, Scientists should not allow scientific theory to cause them to stray from their spiritual beliefs. As the decades progress, I believe Science and Religion will likely prove to be much more in synch than anyone supposes.

Mans best Friend

2008-07-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

Dogs do rule

I recently went on a business appointment, dressed in a suit and tie, and the fellow I was visiting had his Belgian Shepherd in the office with him. I am so fond of dogs that I immediately dropped to a squat and the pup came over to greet me. I had not stopped to think how I must have looked to him - quite un-professional, but like most dog lovers, my critical mind shut down and my dog brain took over. After a few minutes I brushed the hair off my pant leg and sleeves and we got back to business. We ended up talking about our favorite dogs over the years and how they had been real members of our families, instead of just pets.

As a kid on the peninsula, I pestered my parents incessantly to allow me to get a dog. After many lectures on who would feed, clean up after, walk and play with this potential new dog, I convinced them that I would do anything, even mow the lawns for free to get a dog. My folks, being pet lovers themselves, found a Golden Lab puppy, brought me along to retrieve him from the breeder. I spent most of my waking hours with that dog. He followed me to friends’ homes, was my constant companion, and I even used to crawl into his doghouse with him for hours on end. Yes, I have a Dog problem, I admit it, but it is hard to shake.

For the first 12 years of our marriage, we were Bloodhound people. We trained two of the three hounds to man trail and these dogs were incredible. We had neighborhood kids who wanted to see if these legendary bloodhounds could track them, and would take off on the most exaggerated course through fields and streams to avoid detection. The Bloodhounds always found them, and even amazed me.

My current dog is a Giant Schnauzer, and she sees me as a litter mate I think. I take her to the ranch where she can do all the activities that City Dogs are discouraged from doing, namely swimming in the creeks and ponds, running free off the leash, and digging up the ground squirrel holes hoping to get a quick snack.

My wife directs me to the to watch the show called “The Dog Whisperer”, in hopes I will see our dog as a wild, unruly beast, that needs much stricter limits. I naturally see the dog in the Mary Poppins mode, i.e. “practically perfect in every way”. I do admit though that I may have a huge blind spot, so have agreed to watch the show. If you have ever trained dogs, much of what Cesar Millan, aka, the Dog Whisperer, says is really useful.

His basic premise is that dogs are hard wired to be part of a pack. Wild dogs survive in strong, stable, and organized packs, where every member knows its place and follows the rules established by the pack leader. His claim is that the pack instinct is the most overlooked aspect of raising dogs today. He also asserts that a human family can be as suitable substitute for a dog’s pack, but the human must be the pack leader. His approach to discipline is with a constant calm assertive nature. The dog’s don’t get threatened, but they understand their place in the pack. He maintains that dog’s need a fair amount of exercise, and discipline, defined boundaries, and then affection.

He warns against trying to treat dog’s as humans, as he explains that the result is usually anti-social behavior of the dog, to people or other dogs.

The show is a hit because he takes some really unruly dogs that exhibit very bad behavior that the owners cannot seem to correct, and in the space of a few hours time he has effectively established himself as the pack leader and corrected the bad habits. He also sometimes has to take the dogs away from their homes and insert them in his own dog pack, which is a group of about 10 dogs where his dogs re-establish with the errant dog what the pack mentality is all about. Good show, worth watching and great for us dog people.

If you have a desire to add a new pet to your life, make sure you check out the Calaveras Animal Shelter in San Andreas. They have a great adoption program and some of the healthiest, friendliest pets are found in Animal Shelters.

Income Disparity

2008-07-13T18:01:00.000-07:00

Kevin Wychopen and I decided to jointly write two views on the same issue once in a while, and chose the topic of Income Disparity for today’s columns, hence the similar titles.

A great old comedy skit about driving said we view drivers in cars that speed by us as maniacs, and others that drive slow and block us, as idiots. I honestly think that subconsciously many people apply this same logic to income and wealth. Those who make a lot more than we do are somehow either crooked, or greedy and selfish, and those that make less than us are unfortunate victims of these rich crazies, and need to have the system re-distribute cash from the “haves” to the “have-nots”.

Moreover, if this obsession with income disparities is to be something more than mere hand-wringing or gnashing of teeth, obviously the point is that somebody ought to “do something” to change what you don’t understand.

Usually that means that the government — politicians — should impose policies based on your ignorance of what is going on. Can you imagine anything more dangerous than allowing politicians to decide how much money each of us can earn?

Of course, such political control of incomes is usually advocated only to deal with “the rich.” But, when income taxes were imposed in the early 20th century, they applied only to “the rich” and they took a very small percentage of their income.

Once the floodgates are opened to this kind of political power, however, we have seen with the income taxes that they not only spread far beyond “the rich,” they took a serious share of even middle class incomes.

Moreover, the income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them — and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right.

If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn’t have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?

Incidentally, it took a constitutional amendment to enable the federal government to impose an income tax. The people who wrote the Constitution were wise enough to understand what a dangerous thing it would be to allow government to take money from people just because those people had it.

Unfortunately, “progressives” were foolish enough, or envious enough, to single out “the rich” for a process that would inevitably spread across society and become insatiable in its demands.

Today’s “progressives” want to expand political control of incomes even more. They call it “social justice” but you could call it Rumpelstiltskin and it would still mean politicians deciding how much money each of us can be allowed to have.

It is also worth noting that the people who are said to be earning “obscene” amounts of money are usually corporate executives. There is no such outrage whipped up when Hollywood movie stars make some multiple of what most corporate executives make.

This is social or ideological bias added to envy and ignorance. It makes quite a witches’ brew on which to base national policy.

Lofty talk about “social justice” or “fairness” boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income — and are far more dangerous.

Current economic policies are bad, the Administration is bad, corporations are bad, America -- pretty bad -- but the European social democracies, really, really good!

The demise of the American middle class has been greatly exagerrated.

This doesn't mean the middle class isn't shrinking. In fact, from 1979 to 2004, Rose calculates, the percentage of households in the "middle class" category -- those with incomes of $30,000 to $90,000 -- fell to 39 from 47 percent. But it would be hard to describe that as bad news when the proportion of well-off households -- those with incomes of more than $90,000 -- rose by nearly nine percentage points. During the same time frame, the percentage of households that were poor or near-poor remained about the same...[snip]

It is also a myth that the Great American Jobs Machine is producing mostly lousy, low-paying service jobs. Rose simplifies the government data by putting all jobs in three categories: "elite" jobs, encompassing managers and professionals; "good jobs," such as those held by supervisors, skilled blue-collar workers, craft workers, police, firefighters and clerical workers; and "less skilled" jobs, such as those held by unskilled machine operators, laborers, sales clerks and waiters. Looking at it that way, it turns out that the number of lousy, low-skilled jobs has been on a long, steady decline since 1979, while the number of "elite" jobs has been growing steadily. The number of "good" jobs has declined marginally as skilled office work has replaced skilled factory work.

Which, we would argue, just reinforces the case for better education, training and basic seriousness of purpose. Knock off the bread and circuses and do your trigonometry.

Pay for performance and merit pay have become popular in the manufacturing world to incentivize increased output, and if done correctly, quality and innovation. In the lean manufacturing arena we believe that pay must also be tied to team and organizational performance.

More traditional organizations continue to provide annual cost of living adjustment increases, however those are like a drug. Employees become effectively addicted, performance often decreases, and as the Detroit Three have found out, you end up paying more than your competitors for an equal labor quantity. COLA is also like a self-fulfilling prophecy in that as you increase pay, you increase buying power, which increases demand, which increases inflation... which increases the cost of living.

Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution blog had an interesting post this morning telling us of a study that links pay for performance with wage inequality. The income gap and reduction of the middle class have become a political hot button lately, although some of the facts about income inequality and the resulting tax consequences run counter to prevailing wisdom.

In effect the study from the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that pay for performance has significantly contributed to wage inequality by boosting the income of the most productive while incomes of less productive workers, and those not in a pay for performance program, remain stagnant.

An increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonuses, commissions, or piece-rates. We find that compensation in performance-pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed and unobserved productive characteristics of workers. Moreover, the growing incidence of performance-pay can explain 24 percent of the growth in the variance of wages, and accounts for nearly all of the top-end (above the 80th percentile) growth in wage dispersion.

I had never thought of pay for performance being a contributor to this widening gap, and 24 percent is pretty significant. Many on a certain end of the political spectrum want to reduce the gap by reigning in income growth on the high side. Perhaps this study shows that that policy is misguided and would hurt productivity and performance, and instead we should reduce the gap by increasing income growth on the low side through wider use of pay for performance.

As Tyler concludes, "For me the puzzle is why the world held back so much on bonus pay for so long." Well, partially because bonus pay without true ties to performance is counterproductive and has been abused. But with true performance goals it can be very powerful, and a win-win that increases productivity and quality as well as personal income.

Gun Control - take 1

2008-07-13T17:54:00.001-07:00

Gun Control

The debate on Gun control is more about citizen control than control of a piece of wood and metal. Simply put, fingers pull triggers, triggers don’t pull fingers. If we focus on arresting and punishing the “fingers” that pull triggers illegally, instead of illegally banning firearms ( i.e. “triggers” ) we will have much safer communities. Conservatives seek to control the criminals that use firearms in the commission of a crime, the left wants to reduce or eliminate the private ownership of firearms, in hopes that this reduces crime. Statistics consistently show though, that more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens equals less crime.

Every Communist and Totalitarian government known to mankind in the last hundred years had a hard core Gun Control policy, banning citizens from owning firearms. They promised law and order if citizens just relinquished their firearms, but the scenario that played out was that an unarmed populace was very easy to control, and unable to resist the real intents of these regimes. Why would we even think of following their lead as freedom loving Americans ?

Ronald Reagan said: “The gun has been called the great equalizer, meaning that a small person with a gun is equal to a large person, but it is a great equalizer in another way, too. It insures that the people are the equal of their government whenever that government forgets that it is servant and not master of the governed. When the British forgot that concept, they got a revolution. And, as a result, we Americans got a Constitution; a Constitution that, as those who wrote it were determined, would keep men free. If we give up part of that Constitution we give up part of our freedom and increase the chance that we will lose it all. I am not ready to take that risk. I believe that the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms must not be infringed upon if liberty in America is to survive.”

This debate is very current as the Supreme Court is now scheduled to decide whether the District of Columbia can legally ban their citizens from owning handguns. This is a case that will provide the most in-depth examination of the constitutional right to "keep and bear arms" in nearly 70 years. In March of this year, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for DC struck down DC’s restriction on gun ownership, finding that they are violating the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment either prohibits the government from infringing on the individual rights of citizens to keep and bear arms, or it restricts the government from infringing on the rights of the states to maintain armed militias.

I just was watching the Nightly News discuss this very case tonight, and they declared that the intent of the second amendment was quite unclear when it was made part of the Constitution. Unclear to these newscasters perhaps, but to the founding fathers of America, who wrote the Second Amendment, the meaning was abundantly clear.

Thomas Jefferson noted, "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

The principal author of the federalist papers, James Madison, wrote in No. 46, "The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any...."

Alexander Hamilton was equally unambiguous on the importance of arms to a republic, writing in Federalist No. 28, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense...."

Justice Joseph Story, appointed to the Supreme Court by James Madison, wrote, "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."

In other words, the right of the people to bear arms is the most essential of the rights enumerated in our Constitution, because it ensures the preservation of all other rights.

2008-07-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

Why Christmas Matters

Warning: this column contains overt religious messages. Those who are offended by Christianity might want to avoid reading further.

I cannot believe that any mention of Christmas, or the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Christ, would require a warning similar to a cigarette pack. It seems though, that there is a very small but vocal minority that has skin so thin, it can be paper-cut to the bone with a page out of the Bible.

Let me try to make the case of why Christmas is more than just another holiday. Christianity is the largest religion worldwide, with roughly 2.1 billion adherents. In America today, the number of people who, self identify as Christians to census takers is 224,457,000 people, or about 75 % of the US population. Yes, this includes everyone, from full time clergy to folks who only attend Church once in a while, but consider themselves Christian. To us Christians, Christmas and Easter are the two most significant religious events, Christmas celebrating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and Easter celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, where he was able to overcome death and fulfill his mission on Earth as the Savior of mankind.

When I was young I remember what I think was the Catholic Church running a campaign that simply stated “Keep Christ in Christmas”. This simple message is as important today as we seem to be driving the real meaning of Christmas out of the Christmas season. It is a religious holiday, not a secular winter festival, not a key performance metric for retailers, not a combination of all other important non-Christian religious holidays that occur in December. It is meant to be a time when we, as Christians, get on our knees in prayer and thank our Heavenly Father for his providing a Savior for mankind, thus allowing a way for all of us to return to his presence.

Americans are incredibly tolerant people, and we have incorporated the secular winter holiday take on Christmas, in the form of Santa Claus, Reindeer, Christmas consumerism, Christmas parties and a host of other activities. Not to take away anything from the fun and merriment of the season, but since 75 % of us identify ourselves as Christians, we may want to tie our celebrations back to the real meaning of Christmas. We should perhaps be teaching our children, in both words and in actions, that we are celebrating the birth of the central figure of our Religion and that the meaning of gift giving is meant to represent our Heavenly Fathers gift to mankind of his only begotten son, Jesus, as the Messiah.

The Founding Fathers, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, made clear that they welcomed into the public sphere the broad principles expressed in the Judeo Christian Bible. They affirmed and reaffirmed a societal need to live with the cognizance of a Creator, God. They wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights derive not from the government or state but from God himself when they announced a political philosophy that "We hold these truths to be self-evident…. that men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

I recently traveled to Washington DC for work, and had a few hours to sightsee. I noticed on a walk through the monuments of the Capitol, many carved inscriptions by US Presidents proclaiming God and morality as cornerstones for the nation’s survival. Unlike so many other countries, ours is a nation comfortable with the notion of an Almighty. It is evidenced by the invocation of His guidance and favor repeatedly in orations delivered by our leaders. Yet, as a counterpoint, I know of no leader who wants to impose a Theocracy in place of our democratically elected form of representative Government, or restrain the first amendments freedom of religion clause.

We as Americans strive to be tolerant of all religions and faiths, and seek to accommodate even the secular non-religious citizenry who do not celebrate any of the religious aspects of Christmas. What we ask in return, is for these same folks to understand the significance that Christmas is first and foremost, a deeply spiritual celebration for Christians. So as we all go about our Christmas activities, basking in the warmth of our family gatherings, our frenzied shopping and our winter sports (hopefully, if the snow falls) we need to remember that there is a “reason for the season”.

Let's Burn our Food Column

2008-05-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of just eating Corn, so I’m going with the latest fad and starting to burn corn based fuel in my car. Sure it takes a gallon and a half of some other kind of fuel to make a gallon of corn ethanol. Yes, it takes 450 pounds of Corn to make a SUV tank full of ethanol, enough corn to feed me for a year. OK, it is 30% less efficient than gasoline, but it makes the farmers in Iowa and the hippies in Berkley happy, so what the heck…make that bowl of cereal into a few drops of fuel.

Corn based ethanol is expensive. It is in fact so costly that it wouldn't make it in any free market. When our brilliant Congress decides to go into the “fuel business” they enact major ethanol subsidies, about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is really a tax on consumers. Oops, it’s a double tax… one in the form of ethanol subsidies and another in the form of handouts to corn farmers. When we look past the charts and graphs, to how all this really works we notice that corn must be grown, fertilized, harvested and trucked to ethanol producers, all of which are fuel-using activities. It takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol, and if our total annual corn output were converted to ethanol production, it would only reduce gasoline consumption by 10 or 12 percent.

But wait, there’s more. Our Imperial Congress says we need less reliance on oil and greater use of bio-fuels. We have heard that Brazilian ethanol, produced from sugar cane, is far more energy efficient, cleaner and cheaper to produce. Congress will have none of that. When no one is watching they impose a stiff tariff of 54 cents a gallon, on ethanol from Brazil. “Free markets ? Not on our election year watch” say the Legislators.

Ethanol production has driven up the price of corn-fed livestock 30 %. Basic foods such as beef, chicken and dairy products, and products made from corn, such as cereals, are rapidly rising. Government mandated demand for corn has driven up other grain prices, such as soybeans and wheat as farmers switch to the Corn business. Most farmers though are not benefitting from the high prices. They are just like the rest of us, suffering from higher costs for fuel, fertilizer, seed, herbicide and pesticides. Even farmers who own their land are suffering as the valuation of their land has risen so high that property taxes are increasing at an alarming rate. Not all states have a Prop 13 type tax system that controls the rate of tax increases.

But what about the ends justifying the means ? Ethanol does not burn as efficiently as pure gasoline in our car engines, as it has a much lower Octane Rating than gasoline. When ethanol is added to gasoline it requires higher Octane hydrocarbons have to be substituted in the gasoline to offset the lowering of the Octane Rating caused by the ethanol. This raises the cost of the gasoline, and the ethanol still lowers the power, combustion efficiency, and overall engine efficiency.

Ethanol also contains water that distillation cannot remove. As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol. The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge. These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines.

What needs to be done is to force the government to get out of the energy business entirely. Let the free markets work, and increase our extraction and refining capacity.

Say, what if we did something useful, like actually building new refineries? Or drill for oil in ANWAR ? We have not built a new refinery or Nuclear Plant in 30 years. Let’s uncap all the wells capped in the 80s’, drill for Natural Gas, build Hydroelectric power, build more nuclear generation plants. Why don’t we do something that unleashes the power of mass manufacturing, like standardizing on one grade of gasoline ? Hybrid cars are a glimmer of hope, but even Toyota has said that their hybrid cars do not break even unless gas reaches $5.00 per gallon and assumes continued massive government tax breaks and subsidies.

The demand for energy is not going to go backwards in our lifetimes, but the answer is not corn based ethanol with all its subsidies, payoffs and inherent drawbacks and inefficiencies.

The Funny reports in the Sheriff's Log

2008-05-10T20:49:00.001-07:00

I love reading the Enterprise. I know that sounds like a shameless plug, but compared to the mass produced Associated Press based newspapers we read everywhere else, it has that hometown, handmade feel to it. I am like a lot of readers in that I read the front section first, then the sports section, see what the editorials have to say, and look at real estate ads to see what other folks homes are selling for. I really like Kevin Wychopen’s column as it reminds me of why I like Calaveras so much. He seems to have that honest discussion in his mind going on about issues of the day. Don Urbanus too has a fun way of looking at daily life, and I read Molly’s horsing around column, Williams fishing column, Rick’s Golfing tips and The Tao of life by Jeremy Malamed. All unique and all charming in their own way.

But my favorite part of the paper is the Sherriff’s log. My wife and I scour it tirelessly looking for some of the really odd calls that the Sheriffs seem to get. In one sense I am amazed that people actually call these in, but here they are. I am going to repeat some of my favorites, not meaning to hurt anyone that may have been involved or to diminish the seriousness of the calls, but dang, these are too funny to not repeat.( My comments are italicized in the brackets)

Here are three trespassing calls: 9:46 am Copperopolis – Reporting party believes subjects come into her house and eat all her food when she is not there – ( the crime spree continues:) 10:34 am Rancho Calaveras – Trespassers in a subject’s garage. Went in while the homeowner was asleep and scattered their laundry all over the place – (and by the afternoon, the trespassers are fed, their clothes are cleaned, but they realize they have to get their car back) 1:46 pm San Andreas – Someone keeps taking reporting party’s car at night and brings it back in the morning. She writes down her mileage -

Or, how about these under the heading of what guys do when you’re not looking: 7:08 pm Valley Springs – Man with bald head is driving a go-cart across Hwy 26. Almost caused reporting party to have an accident ( bald guys do have more fun ) 10:36 am Mountain Ranch – Report of Drunk males shopping – gone on arrival. (not only has the extremely rare covey of shopping males been spotted, but their female partners had to get them drunk to force their shopping trip on them )

Now for my Father of the year award, check this one out: 10:48 am Murphy’s – Subject wants to make a report. Father awakened him before noon and sent him out apartment hunting in his pajamas

Now the dogs of Calaveras are not missing any tricks either: 8:52 am Mokelumne Hill – Dogs coming into the Church uninvited and bothering the patrons. Animal services contacted. ( Doesn’t that Church sign say everyone’s welcome ? ) 11:49 am West Point – Dog locked itself in the car while driver was out of the vehicle; the dog unlocked the car in 15 minutes before Calfire arrived. ( atta boy, save me the $150 unlock charge, good boy )

Now for the “Let the Meth do the talking” file … 3:44 am Valley Springs – Reporting party has a creepy feeling. Say’s it’s like when a cat get’s nervous and their tail fluffs up. Feels like someone may be in the area that shouldn’t be ( what you say Willis ? ) 7:37 pm San Andreas – Male subject in a verbal argument with a telephone pole – ( The pole won – it gave him the silent treatment ) or this one…11:52 am Copperopolis – Woman reports a “budda-budda-budda” noise. It’s been going on for a couple of days and has been making her crazy. Requests a drive through ( Maam, step back into the living room and turn off the Harley )

This one reminds me of a lot of my pals, normally nice guys until… 1:29 am San Andreas – Report of yelling and screaming and things breaking. Deputies discover a Church Basketball game in progress.

Here is a sweet one: 2:59 pm Copperopolis – Child dialed 911 to report that “Daddy was vacuuming for Mommy” –

I want to thank the Calaveras Sheriff’s office for being there for all of us whenever we need them, and for their fabulous log reports.

Che Guevara - A ruthless killer

2008-05-10T19:09:00.000-07:00

A young boy of 14 stood in the courtyard of a government building, falsely accused of treasonous crimes against the state. Without the bother of a trial, or the protection of laws, he was publicly executed, shot in the head by a murderous Doctor. No, not the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele but rather Hollywood leftist icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The boys’ stunned family stood nearby, watching and awaiting the same fate. Che’s face is famous. You see it emblazoned on T shirts and posters in University dorm rooms across America. He is idolized by rockers such as Rage against the Machine, models wear Che bikini’s, he’s on beer labels, bandannas, key rings, Zippo lighters even desk clocks. Scads of actors and actresses wear Che’s image as a symbol of their commitment to the club of the “radical chic”. Most of the devotees of the cult of Guevara know little about him or what he actually stood for.

The real Che Guevara was far from romantic, but rather a maniacal Stalinist murderer. Che was born in Argentina to a Cuban aristocratic family. He had a comfortable upbringing, becoming a doctor before leaving home to join a communist revolution in Guatemala in 1952. Jacobo Arbenz, a leftist army officer, became President of Guatemala, and for his first act of Communist largesse, nationalized the property of the United Fruit Company, as well as the land of the local big ranchers and farmers. Che was caught up in enthusiasm for this experiment in 'socialism' and he wrote: “I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated".

Guevara cut and ran from Guatemala to Mexico when a US backed invasion force smashed the Arbenz regime in 1954. Here he joined up with other Cuban exiles that surrounded Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. In 1956, Che and 80 other members of the July 26 Movement founded by Fidel Castro had landed in Cuba to carry on a guerrilla campaign against the US backed dictator Batista. Che’s first execution was carried out against a suspected informer. He wrote: "I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain". With Castro’s victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro was put in charge of building up the states control over the people. He set out to purge the army of suspected Batista supporters and for those that survived the purges, he sent to Soviet style re-education classes. Che took it upon himself to be the supreme prosecutor, and ordered the executions of 550 Cuban soldiers in the first few months. Here’s a cold-blooded murderer who executed hundreds without a trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an “unnecessary bourgeois detail.” Che believed that revolutionaries must become cold-killing machines motivated by pure hate. He would stay up till dawn signing death warrants for innocent men, and his office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions. Odd how today his T-shirts adorn people who oppose capital punishment. Secret graves and crude boxes with bullet-riddled corpses delivered to ashen-faced loved ones – that’s the real Che legacy.

Here’s the documented body count of Che Guevara. 14 executed by Che in the Sierra Maestra during the anti-Batista guerrilla struggle (1957-1958): 23 executed in Santa Clara at Che’s orders in only two days (January 1-3, 1959): 164 executed at La Cabaña Fortress prison at Che Guevara’s orders. Email me, and I will send you the documentation of these murders by Che. The people are listed, name after name by the Truth Recovery Archive of Cuba. There is even a “new improved” Che poster, but this one is made up with the faces of 180 of his documented victims.

Che was the main link, indeed the architect, of the increasingly closer relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. The nuclear missile deal which almost resulted in a nuclear war in 1962 was engineered at the Cuban end by Che. When the Russians backed down in the face of US threats, Che was furious and said that if he had been in charge of the missiles, he would have fired them off. In December 1964, Che Guevara traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the U.N. He also appeared to a fawning press corps at the New York Times and again on the CBS Sunday news program Face the Nation. The champagne corks popped in Cuban-American households in October 1967 when Bolivian Soldiers and U.S. Special Forces tracked down the murderous Che Guevara in Bolivia. When he whimpered to his captors in Bolivia, “Don’t shoot – I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” he had a point. Then he got a major dose of his own medicine. The picture of the slain Che Guevara is the second most famous picture of one of Hollywood’s favorite killers.

My April Fools Day Column 2008

2008-05-10T19:04:00.001-07:00

In July of this year several California communities will adopt new Feline Confinement laws, aka “Cat Leash Laws” and other new restrictive pet ownership mandates.

The new regulations, targeted to be expanded to many rural counties, such as Calaveras, seek to restrict the family cat to inside the home unless the cat is on a leash. The reasons for instituting these laws are attributed to State legislators fears that native songbirds, small reptiles and rodents are being decimated by free roaming feline hunters. Some local representatives are also concerned that the costs of rescuing stray tabbies from trees have skyrocketed, leaving local cat rescue budgets exhausted.

The laws have been explained in several easy to read pamphlets that are being distributed en masse to unaware citizens a month or more before the laws take effect.

In reading one of these pamphlets “The Cat Walk” the local officials give sage advice on the best way to take fluffy or Mr. Whiskers out for a walk. “Cats love leash time when accompanied by their owners through local neighborhoods. Simple commands such as heel and sit are easily learned when spoken in a soft voice to your cat”.

Additionally, cat owners are encouraged to record and playback their voiced instructions daily to their cat. They claim that if cats hear you asking them to sit, stay, or roll over for a few hours each day, obedience training can be a snap. They also instruct how to organize neighborhood meetings where cat owners can share their training best practices in a group setting. The brochure even claims that several communities have created “Kitty Rodeos” where pets and owners compete to showcase their cats “on leash skills”.

The Cat Walk adds; “Our neighborhoods will be much more secure when loose felines are controlled with a collar and leash. Cat leashes and collars are to be made out of lightweight materials. Avoid using bicycle chains, heavy towing rope or security cables as these can be dangerous to your pet” The new statutes require leashes have a quick release clasp so animals that escape with the leash still attached can avoid choking if snagged.

Another of these brochures is cleverly named “Cats in the Cradle“. It contains claims by one purported expert Dr. Jack Russell. “In an orderly society free roaming felines need to be constrained. Cat owners are encouraged to use leashes when cats go to the bathroom outdoors, attend sporting events, or go on camping trips”. They describe the best method for walking a cat on a busy sidewalk is to actually carry it in a baby stroller. This leaflet also discourages allowing your cat to stop to climb trees or scratch on a neighbors pant leg.

Promoters of the new laws clashed recently with cat owners and breeders in Sacramento. Legislators met protestors in a sand box session where the fur flew, with pet owners taking swipes at the real need for such a law.

There was a failed sister resolution to the leash law, for rural communities. Nicknamed the “Cat Herders Act”, it was designed to force rural and suburban homes with more than 5 cats, to purchase a cat herding permit. Promoters felt that the lost art of herding cats may need to be re-introduced to modern society. However, portions of this proposed law were found to be in conflict with the “California Free Range Cat Act of 1988” and were effectively buried under a mound of potential litigation.

Another unrelated pet law that has been in the works for some time is the “Fish Owners Omnibus Legal Statute”. It requires fish owners to purchase a California Fish Owners license, similar to a dog license. Newly developed technology allows the insertion of a micro transmitter the size of a grain of sand painlessly in the fatty area just behind the fish’s dorsal fin. The transmitter carries both the owners and the fish’s identity and license information. This technology will be made available to pet stores and local police departments so fish owners can get their existing fish licensed. “The tracking of pet fish illegally flushed into public waste systems, or released into our local waterways can finally be accomplished”, claims fish licensing expert Getta Leyefe.

We welcome the ever increasing reach of our State Government into our daily affairs. I hope these common sense pet laws are quickly adopted and spread to the rest of the Golden State. In the words of our State Senate & Assembly “The Government that governs best, governs everything” (April Fools)

Support Your Local Sheriff Column

2008-05-10T17:34:00.001-07:00

On a recent afternoon, three young men in their late teens were hanging out in front of a shopping center in San Jose. They looked like any other urban kids, but to another group of 20 something’s they looked like great targets.

A car pulled up and the passenger rose up and leveled a sawed off pump shotgun and started shooting slugs, which are projectiles about the size of your thumb. He fired at one of the three kids, hitting him in the back of the neck, blowing out the lower half of the kids face; shot the second kid, hitting him in the left side of his face, instantly killing him. The third kid ran, but was trying to climb a fence when the slug hit his left hand, blowing it off at the wrist. The shooters drove off, and when the police and ambulance’s arrived, an all too familiar scenario played out.

Though there were literally dozens of witnesses, no one seemed to know anything at all. They would not admit to seeing these three shootings and only wanted to be released from being questioned by the Police. The kid who lost his left hand, refused to say anything at all. Why ? They believed that a death threat from those same shooters was their fate if they cooperated with the police. They are now trapped in a neighborhood that is lawless and extremely dangerous. This same neighborhood was a place of open fields and fruit orchards when I was a kid in the 70’s. The homes were built, and purchased by normal, average families in the 80’s and the shopping center was built in the 90’s. Only in the last 10 years did this neighborhood turn into a crazed gang infested wasteland.

It all happened very quickly, once the citizens stopped supporting the Police.Could this scenario play out in our beloved Calaveras County ? Ask our Police and Sheriff’s departments if this is a possibility. They will tell you that gang related activity is already here, albeit in a less virulent form, but could easily accelerate if we do nothing about it. This is not the type of crime problem we can solve easily. Self defense is almost impossible when these armed gangs move in and take over. Without tough street cops who are adequately trained and equipped to take on these thugs, we are at risk of seeing our hometowns taken over by criminal gangs.I cannot stress the importance of listening closely to the suggestions of the Law Enforcement community. It is rare that they come to us for help, but when they do, we must be ready to respond.

Keeping our communities’ safe and gang free is a partnership between the Police and the citizenry. We need to provide serious support; not only in the form of money, but more importantly we need to be alert to crime as it is in the making. Local law enforcement agencies can educate us on what to look for, and how to respond. When we see mysterious comings and goings at that house down the street, we need to notify the Sheriff’s office. When our kids tell us about drug dealers at their schools, we need to let the police know. When we see gang graffiti and signs of gang activity we need to report it to law enforcement. Without our stepping up to be the eyes and ears for law enforcement we cannot help them be effective in protecting our communities. In short, we can become the silent accomplices of these criminal gangs, by simply doing nothing.That neighborhood in San Jose saw three of its teens gunned down, in broad daylight. If one brave citizen would have simply stepped forward with the facts, giving a brief description of the shooters car, or the assailants themselves, the Police might have been able to find and arrest these murderers.

Instead, they stood silently by, paralyzed by the fear that they could be next. Their ability to fight back against the gangs is destroyed, taken away by years of careless inactivity. How many times did they choose to not get involved when the crimes were small ? Now these people live in a gangland nightmare, full of fear and plodding along in quiet desperation. If we don’t want this same fate to befall us, we need to support our local Law Enforcement fully and completely. They are that thin blue line that stands between the safety and peace we enjoy today, and the murder and mayhem of that unfortunate San Jose neighborhood