Wednesday, January 23, 2006

A new writing on the secret plan to shaft sportsfishing interests for ten more years is posted here; a new writing on the just-released and previously-secret plan to shaft the Klamath farmers is posted here.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

    The Belmont Club reports that "10 Federal penitentiaries have admitted that they are unable to screen the thousands of pieces of mail that convicted terrorists send and receive because they lack the budget to hire translators".  

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

45 years ago in Cuba . . .

"Where are the PLANES?" kept crackling over the invasion ships' radios. That was their commander, Pepe San Roman, roaring into his radio from the beachhead between artillery concussions. Soviet howitzers were pounding 2,000 rounds into the desperately embattled men (and boys). "Send planes or we CAN'T LAST!" San Roman yelled while watching the Russian tanks close in, his ammo deplete and his casualties pile up.

The pleas made it to Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke in Washington, D.C., who conveyed them in person to his commander in chief.

JFK was in a white tux and tails that fateful night of April 18, 1961, having just emerged from an elegant Beltway ball. For the closing act of the glittering occasion Jackie and her charming beau had spun around the dance floor, to the claps, coos and titters of the delighted guests. In the new president's honor, the band had struck up the Broadway smash "Mr. Wonderful."

"Two planes, Mr. President!" Burke sputtered into his commander in chief's face. The fighting admiral was livid, pleading for permission to allow just two of his jets to blaze off the carrier deck and support those desperately embattled freedom fighters on that shrinking beachhead.

"Burke, we can't get involved in this," replied Mr. Wonderful.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

I met Deb Anderson at a candidates' forum last night.  She is running for State Superintendent of Education, and actually understands that the real crisis in Oregon's educational system is curriculum and instruction, not funding.  Amazing, a candidate who tells the truth on education!

On a sadder note, America's state of dhimmitude advances, as South Park is not allowed to air a caricature of Mohammed.  View the censored sequence here.

Thursday, March 29, 2006

The Portland Tribune has joined the Oregonian in the quaint practice of lauding a local "commie 'o the week".  This week they profile Jeff Miller, a social studies teacher who is becoming the president of the Portland teachers' union.  The pictures in the Tribune provide powerful evidence that Mr. Miller has been indoctrinating his students in what used to be recognized as Communist principles, such as the that "property rights" are somehow different than, and inferior to, "human rights":

The ability to own property to better one's financial condition is, of course, one of the most important human rights, albeit not one that commies agree with. We also see him pushing the general views of the Left (e.g., the blue bumper sticker "you cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war"):

Also published was a picture of the bumper sticker:  "UNIONS:  The Anti-Theft Device for Working People".  Oregon is doomed when its largest school system teaches that property rights and capitalism are the moral equivalent of theft, and Oregon's newspapers print the evidence that this is going on without even remarking on it.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The Sunday Oregonian reports that benefit expenditures to school employees in Oregon total $17,684 per full-time staff member, which ranked first nationally and is 11 percent higher than second-place Wisconsin.  

Friday, March 17, 2006

Further news of a government out of control:

A USA Today analysis of 25 major government programs found that enrollment increased an average of 17% in the programs from 2000 to 2005. The nation's population grew 5% during that time. It was the largest five year expansion of the federal safety net since the Great Society created programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960's. Spending on these social programs was $1.3 trillion in 2005, up an inflation-adjusted 22% since 2000 and accounting for more than half of federal spending.

Friday, December 9, 2005

From the Depressing if True column:

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

It turns out Judge Bork wasn't an "original intent" guy after all:

The Chairman [Senator Biden]: ... Would you be willing for this committee to identify the “dozens of cases” that you think should be reconsidered?

Judge Bork: ... So there is, in fact, a recognition on my part that stare decisis or the theory of precedent is important. In fact, I would say to you that anybody who believes in original intention as the means of interpreting the Constitution has to have a theory of precedent, because this Nation has grown in ways that do not comport with the intentions of the people who wrote the Constitution -- the commerce clause is one example -- and it is simply too late to go back and tear that up.

I cite to you the Legal Tender cases. These are extreme examples admittedly. Scholarship suggests that the framers intended to prohibit paper money. Any judge who today thought he would go back to the original intent really ought to be accompanied by a guardian rather than be sitting on the bench. [Emphasis supplied.]

The Chairman: I couldn't agree with you more, Judge ... .\

It is too bad that Americans will probably never understand how the Legal Tender cases set the stage for our present economic peril.

Friday, November 11, 2005

More Leftist pork from the Republicans:  today's Wall Street Journal reports that

"The recently passed highway bill establishes a first-ever office of bicycle advocacy inside the Transportation Department."

It's not enough to build a bridge to nowhere.  Now we have to Federalize building bike lanes to nowhere, which I already drive by every day . . . 

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that 

Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell . . .  led most of her party and seven Republicans in arguing that drilling in Alaska would only feed the nation's "dangerous oil addiction."

The "dangerous addiction" I see is that of the voters of Washington to dim-witted female senators.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

We're from the government, and we're here to help you (hurricane evacuation):

"We had patients throwing up. It was very ugly," said Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith, who blamed delays on the Transportation Security Administration, which insisted every wheelchair-bound passenger be checked with a metal-detector.

Once upon a time, Americans would have tarred and feathered officials like these.  Now they are sheep.

Thursday, September 8, 2005

An article linking Katrina damage to environmentalist litigation that gummed up the Corps of Engineers' ability to protect New Orleans can be found here.  Don't hold your breath waiting for the papers to cover this angle.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Another great quote, from "One Nation Under Therapy," by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel:

American children badly need moral clarity. But our education establishment is too uneasy about the idea of moral judgment to meet this elementary need. Feelings of helplessness and disorientation are thoroughly, even compulsively, canvassed, elicited, discussed, and promoted; by contrast, feelings of moral indignation and condemnation are deflected and downplayed. This leaves children defenseless, clueless and unprepared to meet real and grave threats to their own and the nation's future.

Friday, April 8, 2005

Riveting quote of the month, from Transportation Secretary Mineta's testimony before the 9/11 Commission:

"There was a young man who had come in and said to the Vice President, 'The plane is 50 miles out.  The plane is 30 miles out.'  And when it got down to, 'The plane is ten miles out,' the young man said to the Vice President, 'Do the orders still stand?'  And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, 'Of course the orders still stand.  Have you heard anything to the contrary?' Well at the time I didn't know what that all meant.  And --"

Question of the month:  what were the orders?

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

More News from the Front in the war the elites are making us lose:

". . . there have been at least three documented reports in the last month of captured insurgents stating that female interrogators are not effective because they do not threaten or intimidate the prisoners.

"Last spring, in a story on Iraq headlined, "U.S. losing 'hearts, minds,'" WND reported that the Army was switching to kinder, gentler interrogation tactics of Iraqi detainees. This was before several U.S. guards at a Baghdad prison recently were criminally charged with abusing detainees.

"At that time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq put limits on harsh questioning tactics. Sanchez passed around a memo saying interrogators could use no harsh techniques – no "Mutt-n-Jeff" approaches or any "pride-and-ego-down" approaches – without his permission, said the official, who asked not to be identified."

Monday, January 17, 2005

Muslim terror slaying in New Jersey:  Christian family butchered "like cows".  How much on this will we see in the media?

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Today we learn that President Bush will nominate Michael Chertoff to run the Homeland Security Department.  Chertoff's sordid history constitutes further proof that there is only one party in Washington, the gangster party.

Monday, January 10, 2005

"Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?  Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason?" (Ovid)

We are now in a darker age, where no one cares who dares call it treason, and spying by foreign powers mysteriously goes unpunished.  On Friday, another Chinese spy walked free.    

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

9/11 conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Pentagon was not really hit by a Boeing 757 because the hole appears to be too small and there is not enough wreckage.  Someone has put together an excellent photo essay debunking that claim, with a hyperlink to a very interesting computer simulation by folks at Purdue (warning:  46 Mb mpeg file).  I still think that the planes alone didn't bring down Building 7, though.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

A rant from my favorite economic commentator:

"Fannie Mae was originally set up to help poor people buy houses. Remember the phrase “poor people” because it is important. Instead, Fannie Mae has grown like the government cancer that it truly is, and is now so big that it is now one of the top two or three biggest corporations in the whole freaking country!

"And not only that, but it is an absolute, total, colossal freaking failure at its mission. Their job was, to refresh your memory, to help a few poor people buy some cheap house, probably something out near where I live, as I seem to depress property values wherever I go and only very poor, very desperate people with literally no place else to go would even think of living near me. Homeownership was supposed to give these poor people a cuddly feeling of security, but which evaporated as soon as they learned that they had to fix anything that broke, and they couldn’t just call up the landlord and yell at him to fix things anymore.

"Instead, and I say this with that look on my face that means “I can’t believe my freaking ears when I hear it or my eyes when I read it”, Fannie Mae has actually driven up the price of housing to the point where not only can the POOR not qualify for a loan to buy a house anymore, but in some places not even the freaking middle class can afford to buy a house anymore, either! And why can’t these people afford to buy a house? Because housing prices have been going up in price at double-digit inflation rates for years now, thanks to Fannie Mae"

Monday, December 27, 2004

A Chinese scholar observed, "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."

Thursday, December 23, 2004

After more than a year's hiatus, a new News from the Front will be coming soon.  I have very little hope left that reason will ever prevail in Northwest natural resource management, but some things are so outrageous they stir even my depressed soul to put pen to paper.

Thursday, December 9, 2004

From this morning's Wall Street Journal,

"More than one friend of the President's has also mentioned to us in the last few months that there really isn't a genuine free-market conservative left among the senior White House staff."

Wednesday, December 8, 2004

Best site for following the attempted theft of the Washington State gubernatorial race:  www.soundpolitics.com.