Ken Nelson

No Private Ryan this time

According to the NY Post the movie “Green Zone” slanders America and our troops.

"Green Zone" isn’t cinema. It’s slander. It will go down in history as one of the most egregiously anti-American movies ever released by a major studio.

So I think I’ll skip it.

When will a Band of Brothers or Sands of Iwo Jima be made for this generation of heroes?

It sucks that Hollywood and our political class hate us so.

BTW: Is it an accident the last patriotic war movie Damon was in was during the Clinton Presidency?  They only love America if they are in charge of it.

No papers!

Lindsey Graham has an idea. So you know you are in trouble – right?

He and Chuck Schumer (another paragon of self-promoting idiocy) want to have a national ID card.   Like so many other politicians they want to ride concern over a valid problem – illegal immigration – to promote an idea they will use to squash freedom and dissent.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

Uhmmm. NO THANKS.

I do not want anything Lindsey Graham or Chuck Schumer think is grand.  A national ID would provide a basis for no privacy and internal movement controls. No thanks!

The ACLU, in one of the good things they do to hide their basic anarchist goal, doesn’t like it:

"It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people’s privacy," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We’re not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We’re also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification."

And neither do I.   Now an “Idiot Identification Card” might be handy. Schumer and Graham would be first in line for such an honor.

You didn’t vote for me? Screw you.

Sportsman generally hate Obama. I’ve never met a serious shooter, fisherman, or ATV rider that didn’t tilt way right or libertarian.

Obama hates them right back and appears ready to give the greenies a big thank you by banning fishing in some waters:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

Never mind that Obama is supposed to be EVERYBODY’s President, not just be for those that donated to him.   No, he listens to the greenies and they want fishing stopped, because, as you know, eco-kooks lay awake at night worried that somebody somewhere is having fun outside.

Given that the scope of this process appears to include a new set of policies for all coastal and inland waters of the United States, the omission of economic considerations is inexcusable."

This is not the only access issue threatening the public’s right to fish, but it definitely is the most serious, according to Chris Horton, national conservation director for BASS.

I’m tired of fighting Obama and his minions and we are only a year into it.   I don’t know why they hate us, and America so, but they do, and I guess we will just have to suck up a little wind and continue to fight back.

What I’m really tired of is having a President I’m sure hates America. How the hell did that happen?

We borrowed money from China to pay for this fabulous piece of work

In World War II the nation borrowed so that we and the world could remain free from tyranny.

Last year we borrowed to fund bad art.

Time to stop that don’t you think?

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

WAY too many red “death of an innocent” flags. Click on the link above to show the interactive map. Then click on flags to see each story.

Our police have always had sociopathic
members, but they didn’t use to have machine guns

A SWAT team pours into a house, encounters a pit bull and a corgi. They claim the pit bull was acting in an uncontrollably aggressive way, so they shot and killed it, they then shot the corgi too. It lived.

Watching this was a 7 year old boy.

The big stash of dope never showed but they did find  a small amount of pot and some paraphernalia needed for personal use.

Now the story gets weird. The SWAT team clearly had bad intelligence. A dog was killed another wounded and a family traumatized.  The right thing to do is take the hash, and walk away. Maybe even say “sorry”. So naturally they charge the father with child endangerment. 

Who was shooting up a house? Who shot a dog protecting its home? In other words, who endangered the kid?  The police did.

Look, I support our police, but not this.  Sounds like this bunch are arrogant and refuse to admit mistakes. Maybe the Dad is a scum, I don’t know. But bad intelligence also included wrong addresses.  And we need cops with humility, not with arrogant armed certainty.

All this stems from a drug war we should not be fighting.

 
Or Privacy SHOULD not be a crime

With Utah just trying, and failing, to do its own Patriot Act for all crimes, I thought it appropriate to look at the Patriot Act, which is up for renewal now.

I’m inclined to not like laws claiming to be patriotic. Nor laws that have names that are really acronyms: Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act

Note that name specifically includes terrorism ONLY.  I do think we need to fight terrorism hard. My main problem with the Patriot Act is that it doesn’t JUST fight terrorism. It also permits intrusive law enforcement techniques for drugs, money laundering, computer crime, border, and crime in general.

And in action most of the uses of the law have NOT been for terrorism. Not just most, nearly all.  For instance, of the 763 sneak and peak warrants used in 2008 only 3 were used for anti-terrorism. 65 percent were used for drug enforcement. And that leaves about 34% for “other” crimes.

I do not support fishing expeditions, like the BLANKET requests  for records on all customers of a number of Las Vegas businesses.

I do not support imprisoning over 200 people under this act for petty crimes committed on airliners. They weren’t terrorists.

This is so like government to use fear of one thing to spur invasive activity in another.

So, in a nutshell, I favor renewing a modified Patriot Act, limited to JUST terrorism.

Frankly, I think the law hasn’t helped anti-terrorism much and I’d be happy to see it die if that was what was needed to kill the non-terrorism stuff in it.

But if we can start over and craft a simple bill FOCUSED on terrorism and not containing every wish list the Federal law enforcement bureaucracy wants to use against citizens, then I’d support it.

Lacking that, I’d just as soon say sayonara to the PATRIOT Act and hello to the POTO (Prevention of Terrorism Only) Act.

SEIU is also exempt from anti-trust rules. How about changing that?

The House voted to remove antitrust exemptions that health insurance companies have.

I’m not sure, exactly, how the exemption helps companies that are largely state based. The industry claims removing it won’t matter a whole lot.

I’ve got two problems with this. The first is that I don’t like Congress aiming at a particular industry, especially when they largely have political aims not the merit of the actual proposal as their goal.

The second problem is that the anti-trust exemptions unions have causes far more havoc in the economy.  Why not just get rid of anti-trust exemptions – period???

Well, we know that the Democrats don’t do anything for the country as a whole, they operate for their constituencies – unions, unproductive, bought off minorities, and terrorists.  And we know that the Republicans are too stupid, or timid, or both, to fight for the country.

What a bunch of maroons we have “leading us”. We probably deserve the thumping the next decade is going to give us. 

Hatch as he voted for the bill.

Utah’s Palpatine like Senator Hatch voted for the Senate “jobs” bill. Which is really just more failed “stimulus” but they call it “jobs” and suckered Orrin in.

His soul long gone to D.C. I suppose we should expect silliness like this from Hatch.  I just wish watching him lose his soul wasn’t so darned expensive.

 
20 weeks per child at my expense

In Europe they are making employers pay women employees who get pregnant for 20 weeks at FULL pay.

I’m all in favor of kids, but I’d prefer to pay for the results of work not pleasure.

 
Old boss, new boss, same boss

Italy just jailed – JAILED – 3 Google executives for not deleting promptly enough a video of a crime committed by others and posted to Google Video by others.

The three were sentenced to six months in jail after being convicted of invasion of privacy, the judge said. A fourth executive was found not guilty.

Apparently the Italy hasn’t moved from from its Fascist days.

This, btw, is what you can expect in “liberal” or “progressive” countries. The US heads there too.

Millions of laws trying to “perfect” society can be as oppressive as one bully trying to do the same.

My daughter and I discussed colleges this morning. She said Harvard, maybe. Or Yale. I told her… hmmm I’ve never met anybody dumb from MIT, CalTech or Stanford. I’ve met plenty of idiots from Harvard. And I’ve known a few people from Yale, they all seemed smart, but few seemed trustworthy.  We agreed that the colleges just enhanced whatever showed up and then got on to other topics.

But case in point arrived a little later today as I perused a blog by Greg Mankiw, a professor of Economics at Harvard. He seems a nice and smart fellow that I’m sure is an excellent teacher. I read his blog regularly.  But I notice that sometimes he pulls bone head things out of the sky. For instance, he has an obsession with Pigouvian taxes, ignoring that taxing negative externalities just shifts the problem to defining negative externalities!

But I digress.

I’m going to take issue with his recommendations for Conservatives on Obama’s Fiscal Commission.

He maintains that since tax raises are “inevitable” that Conservatives should be willing to give on them and get other stuff in return.

The fiscal commission is giving the Democrats something of very high value: political cover for a major tax hike.  If Republicans are going to give them that, they should get something very big in return.  If the conservatives on the commission could achieve my five goals above, it might be a deal worth talking about.

Let me stipulate that Professor Mankiw is probably smarter than me. He knows more about economics than me.  But… I’m going to disagree with him vehemently on this Commission.  It isn’t, really, an economics issue. It is a will issue. I have it. Our politicians need it.  Perhaps Professor Mankiw and I basically disagree that injecting will into our politicians is doable.

My view on this commission:

• He assumes that “conservatives” will be on it. Alan Simpson may be a Republican, but he isn’t a conservative.  He is a career politician, a creature of D.C., with a propensity to spend, and he made lots of crappy deals in the Senate with liberals. He is on it because he has shown a propensity to be rolled before.  Which leads me to my next point…
• That he is on the commission means he has already been rolled. This Commission is cover for a group that wants to raise taxes. We need not provide them any. Make them do it themselves and take full public pride in doing so.
• I also disagree that we can’t cut spending enough to cut the deficit. Most spending in the deficit is new THIS YEAR. Clearly we don’t need it. As to the remainder…  I could easily cut a Trillion dollars out of our budget. EASILY.
• Eliminate TARP and Stimulus spending.
• shift social security age forward, index to life expectancy.
• Eliminate Dept of Education
• Eliminate Dept of Energy
• Eliminate Dept of Commerce
• Eliminate SBA
• Cut Dept of State by 30% (it is up 40% in recent budgets)
• CUT all other departments, including DoD back to 2008 levels

There did it. Wasn’t too hard. And I didn’t raise taxes.  And you know what… if you do the above and we still have a deficit, go ahead and raise taxes.

As to this commission… there will always be Republicans stupid, or dishonest, enough to help Democrats raise taxes.  That is why the Tea Party must succeed in changing almost completely the mindset of those in Congress.

I hope we can do it.

Oh… and as to tax increases… I’d take my chances on a sovereign default rather be targeted by more tax increases.  I’ll probably do okay after the fall.  I’m not so sure about Harvard professors.

This would have been more direct, but possibly less effective

Jeffrey Friedman says our banks failed because laws put in place by our social-democracy aren’t any smarter than a central planner might have been:

What I am calling social democracy is, in its form, very different from socialism. Under social democracy, laws and regulations are issued piecemeal, as flexible responses to the side effects of progress — social and economic problems — as they arise, one by one. (Thus the official name: progressivism.) The case-by-case approach is supposed to be the height of pragmatism. But in substance, there is a striking similarity between social democracy and the most utopian socialism. Whether through piecemeal regulation or central planning, both systems share the conceit that modern societies are so legible that the causes of their problems yield easily to inspection. Social democracy rests on the premise that when something goes wrong, somebody — whether the voter, the legislator, or the specialist regulator — will know what to do about it. This is less ambitious than the premise that central planners will know what to do about everything all at once, but it is no different in principle.

Read the whole thing and you will understand that we face the same problems, only magnified, after the recent years bout of regulation and “fixes”.

 
Sorry Vegas, have some of Ken’s money

Obama showers $1.5 billion dollars on Las Vegas to offset his stupid gaffes on travel to Vegas.  How fun it must be to spend other people’s money!

Now people that bought houses they couldn’t afford will get my money. Money I could have used to buy a larger house, or an extra investment house, but now will go to those who weren’t so wise with their money.

It gets old – this war on the productive, earnest and careful citizens.

About $10 bucks at Wal-Mart

Everything Obama touches turns to crap. Even the simple process of weatherstripping a home.

ABC News reports that the General Accountability Office will declare today that the Energy Department has fallen woefully behind — about 98.5% behind — the 593,000 homes it initially predicted would be weatherized in the Recovery Act’s very first, very chilly year.

But no matter how little gets done the government bureacracy has to be paid, so they’ve spent $522 million dollars to do just 9,100 homes – at a amazing value price of just $57,362 per home.

BTW: The reason it goes to crap when Obama touches it is that he touches it with GOVERNMENT.