I say drill

This is a letter I sent to Greta Van Susteren 11/27/10:

Dear Greta,


The way the guest you were hosting the evening of Thanksgiving day was expressing himself seemed to indicate that he was not only against drilling for oil in ANWAR but everywhere else in the U. S. and that we have the means right now to eschew any need to use oil for our energy needs. The most optimistic forecast I've heard about that day coming about is that it is still decades away.

I wish I could do more than just imagine how well off we'd be if we could get past the radical environmentalists and those that want to placate them.  If we could make use of the rich supply of oil we have in almost all areas of the U. S. and offshore until renewable sources are developed for our energy needs we could not only have what we need instead of being reliant on foreign hostile nations but would be competitors on the world market. For one thing, our debt to China could be paid off by this generation instead of passing it on to our children. By making the price attractive enough to be taking it from us they could be paying for it by crediting it to our debt. The down side to that of course, if it is a down side, is that the price of a barrel of oil would soon be back down to fifteen dollars a barrel instead of the current price of over eighty dollars.  But with the revival of the economy we'd be able to go the rest of the way paying them with hard currency.

A program I was watching not too long ago that might have been a National Geographic production indicated that not only are the caribous increasing in number in the Arctic but they are nesting along the raised pipelines that are bringing oil to the lower 48. They were showing a bear walking the pipeline like it was a more comfortable walkway for where he wanted to go.  I wonder if the most endangered among us are not the caribous and bear but the lifestyle of the U. S. homo sapien.

Mistakes of the Great Depression Repeated

The adage, "Those who do not learn from the mistakes in history are doomed to repeat them," is now being being played out once again. There's an excellent article written by the syndicated columnist, Amity Shlaes, in the Hillsdale College publication Imprimus, September 2010 issue, about all the mistakes that were being made in the depression of the "thirties" that are now being made once again.


Here is an excerpt from the article:

Regarding monetary policy, it is clear that there wasn't enough money in the early 1930s. So Roosevelt was not wrong in trying to reflate. But, though his general idea was right, the discretionary aspect of his policy was terrifying. As Henry Morgenthau reports in his diaries, prices were set by the president personally. FDR took the U. S. off the gold standard in April 1933 and by summer he was setting the gold price every morning from his bed. Morgenthau reports that at one point the president ordered the gold price up 21 cents. Why 21, Morgenthau asked. Roosevelt replied, because it's 3 x 7, and three is a lucky number. "If anyone knew how we set the gold price," Morgenthau wrote in his diary, "they would be frightened."

Discretionary policies aimed at cleaning up Wall Street were destructive as well. The New Dealers attacked the wealthy as "money changers" and "Princes of Property." In 1937, after his re-election, Roosevelt delivered an inaugural address in which he described government as an instrument of "unimagined power which should be used to "fashion a higher order of things." This caused business to freeze in its tracks. Companies went on what Roosevelt himself resentfully termed a "capital strike."

.....Consider the case of Alfred Lee Loomis, who had the kind of mind that could contribute significantly to Gross Domestic Product and job creation. During the First World War, he had improved the design of firearms for the U. S. Army. In the 1920s he became wealthy through his work in investment banking. He moved in a crowd that was developing a new form of utility company that might finally be able to marshal the capital to bring electricity to the American South. But when Loomis saw that the Roosevelt administration was hauling utilities executives down to Washington for hearings, he shut down his business, retreated to his Tudor house, and ran a kind of private think tank for his own benefit.

The link to the entire article:

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010&month=09

Airport scanners

On Wednesday 11/17/10 a guest on the Glenn Beck program said that George Soros owns 11,000 shares of the stock in the company that manufactures the scanners that are now being used at the airports. Interesting - another example of how great it is to have friends in high places.

Lawyers???

An electronic letter I received:


From: theur4@netzero.com
Sent: 10/24/2010 7:51:28 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: FW: Attorney Obama?

Your obedient servant
Pvt. A.C. Theurer

In GOD we trust &
One Nation under GOD
GOD bless America


---------- Forwarded Message ----------

Here's some interesting stuff. Check out the accuracy for yourself....

THE LAWYER OBAMA, WHAT A JOKE

[Ed. note on the Ed. note: this is from a former Chicago lawyer now practicing law in Tyler, TX]

[Ed. note: This is legit. I checked it out myself at https://www.iardc.org Stands for Illinois Attorney Registration And Disciplinary Committee. It�s the official arm of lawyer discipline in Illinois; and they are very strict and mean as hell. (Talk about irony!) Even I, at the advanced age of almost 65, maintain (at the cost of approximately $600/year) my law license that I worked so hard and long to earn.]


Big surprise !!!

Former Constitutional Law Lecturer and US President Makes Up Constitutional Quotes During State Of The Union (SOTU) Address.

Consider this:

1. President Barack Obama, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, is no longer a �lawyer�. He surrendered his license back in 2008 in order to escape charges he lied on his bar application.

A �Voluntary Surrender� is not something where you decide �Gee, a license is not really something I need anymore, is it?� and forget to renew your license. No, a �Voluntary Surrender� is something you do when you�ve been accused of something, and you �voluntarily surrender� your license five seconds before the state suspends you.

2. Michelle Obama �voluntarily surrendered� her law license in 1993.

3. So, we have the first black President and First Lady � who don�t actually have licenses to practice law. Facts.

Source: http://jdlong.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/pres-barack-obama-editor-of-the-Harvard-law-review-has-no-law-license/

4. A senior lecturer is one thing... A fully ranked law professor is another. Barack Obama was NOT a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago .

5. The University of Chicago released a statement in March, 2008 saying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) �served as a professor� in the law school�but that is a title Obama, who taught courses there part-time, never held, a spokesman for the school confirmed in 2008.

6. �He did not hold the title of professor of law,� said Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law .

Source: http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/03/sweet_obama_did_hold_the_title.html ;

7. The former Constitutional senior lecturer cited the US Constitution the other night during his State of the Union Address. Unfortunately, the quote he cited was from the Declaration of Independence � not the Constitution.

8. The B-Cast posted the video: http://www.breitbart.tv/did-obama-confuse-the-constitution-with-the-declaration-of-independence/

9. Free Republic: In the State of the Union Address, President Obama said: �We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal�.

10. Um, wrong citing, wrong founding document there Champ, I mean Mr. President. By the way, the promises are not a notion, our founders named them unalienable rights. The document is our Declaration of Independence and it reads:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

11. And this is the same guy who lectured the Supreme Court moments later in the same speech???

When you are a phoney it's hard to keep facts straight.

Another excerpt

Another excerpt in this link entitled, "God, Guts and Sarah Palin:"

http://barbaricthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/08/alaskan-fisherman.html

For 30 years, Exxon held a lease to do exploratory drilling at a place called Point Thompson. They made excuses the entire time why they couldn’t start drilling. In truth they were holding it like an investment. No governor for 30 years could make them get started. This summer, she told them she was revoking their lease and kicking them out. They protested and threatened court action. She shrugged and reminded them that she knew the way to the court house. Alaska won again.

Sarah Palin by Dewey Whetsell

A synopsis of an article by Dewey Whetsell about Sarah Palin:

Democrats forget when Palin was the darling of the Democrats because as soon as Palin took the Governor's office away from a fellow Republican and tough SOB, Frank Murkowski, she tore into the Republican's "Corrupt Bastards Club" CBC and sent them packing. Many of them are now residing in State housing and wearing orange jump suits. The Democrats reacted by skipping around the yard, throwing confetti and singing, "La La La La" (well, you know how they are). Name another Governor in this country that has ever done anything similar.

The entire article:

http://barbaricthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/08/alaskan-fisherman.html

Unemployment Insurance Vs. Work

Unemployment Insurance Vs. Work


Coincidental with making a mental note for a post for my blogsite as I waited in a coffee shop for my flight to Newark at Frankfurt Airport 8/10/10, was to pick up that day's issue of the Wall Street Journal left on my table by someone and read an article that dealt with the very thing I was thinking about. It dealt with the firms that were struggling to hire and finding it difficult to fill vacancies. Many of the positions required specialized skills that the companies were willing to train new hirees for free of charge.

An excerpt from the article reads, "Since the economy bottomed out in mid 2009 the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires.... The disparity is most notable in manufacturing which has had among the highest increases in openings. But it is also appearing in other areas such as business services, education and health care.

"If the job market were working normally - that is, if openings were getting filled as they usually do - the U.S. should have about five million more gainfully employed people than it does, estimates David Altig, Research Director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That would correspond to an employment rate of 6.8% instead of 9.5%."

Would all this be happening if unemployment benefits that are now being offered for two years and will probably expand further under this current nanny administration if the people receiving them are content to stay on these "paid vacations" instead taking the jobs that are available???

There's a Dunkin' Donuts in my hometown who has had its "Now Hiring" shingle out for months. That job, of course, could not possibly compete with unemployment insurance. I've seen several trailer trucks on the road with signs on the back mentioning that the company is offering employment and that they are willing to train free of charge.

Entitlements, if not properly administered, can be like drugs. Everyone needs a "leg up" once in awhile but if help is too extravagant and to the point where people are disincentivized to take employment when it's available it can lead to the demise of the nation. Every Republic in history went under, primarily because its people became consumers rather than producers.

Don't Blame Bush

Don't blame Bush


October 5, 2010

The article this link leads to in the Washington Examiner is saying the very things I've been prodding the talk show commentators to get across to their listeners about from the first time I heard Obama blaming Bush for about the economy. Maybe we'll be getting an additional message out about something that is as equally important. Hasn't anyone paid any attention to what the assault on our economy - and the world's - the oil producing countries did in 2008 when they drove the price of their oil to the peak of $147 a barrel? This broke the budget of every household that was already living on the edge. It also put a strain on every industry - most directly the trucking and airline companies. Our economy was moving along very nicely until then. Who do we have to blame for not being energy independent when we could have been? Not the Republicans.

ht://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Obama-shouldn_t-blame-Bush-for-recession-766732-102351574.html

Lifespan of a Republic

 This article was e-mailed to me and is on the Internet. I added commentary.

Lifespan of a Republic:

About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage."

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million; Bush: 143 million;

Square miles of land won by: Gore: 580,000; Bush: 2,427,000

States won by: Gore: 19 Bush: 29

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore: 13.2 Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off government welfare..."

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

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