"Apparently, I'm supposed to be more angry about what Mitt Romney does with his money than what Barack Obama does with mine."

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This from a friend and fellow memo reader and should have come out years ago but, no doubt, even had it, and maybe it did, no one cared. Certainly the press and media were more than willing to keep it out of sight. (See 1 below.)

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Gut the Pentagon and then negotiate with Russia, Iran and N Korea after I am elected - an Obama strategy of leading from weakness? (See 2 and 2a below.)
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A friend of mine and fellow memo reader is a great enthusiast of The Darwin Awards and keeps me constantly apprised of the annual winners. I thought I would share them with you.

Politically speaking, they come from both aisles and as he says they do vote.(See 3 below.)

This is an editorial sent to me by another friend and fellow memo reader. It appeared in a newspaper that is Conservative but still mainstream and well respected among investors. who like momentum investing.

Tax a person's productivity, control his health and you pretty much destroy their freedom. Is this what we want for our nation? Is this what we should expect from our president? This is where we are being led all in the spirit of egalitarianism and fairness! Fairness is a cover for what is a dangerous ploy wrapped in a web of delusion

Protecting our freedoms from wanton attacks is one thing but in doing so are certain members of Congress about to destroy them from within?

When GW and Cheney sought legislation against terrorists Liberals, who hated everything they did, were up in arms. Now all we hear is silence from these same sources. What gives?

Wake up Americans and most importantly women, or have you become so somnambulist you are incapable of reasoning? (See 4 and 4a below.)
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Obama takes another ''dive.' (see 5 below.)
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What Norquist suggests is a fact. Tax increases generally trickle down! (See 5 below.)
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I like a lot of people but that does not mean I want them managing my investments and certainly not my country.

In the case of Obama , unlike apparently the vast majority, it should be evident I do not like the president. I believe he lies, I believe he divides, I believe he is totally incompetent and I believe he has an utterly extreme view of what my country is all about, its history and what its future should be.

Worst of all I believe he would do anything to get re-elected and is about doing so! (See 6 below.)
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If rational thinkers are given facts and a chance to see their effect the vote in Wisconsin will be a stinging blow to unions. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)

This is from a former Chicago lawyer now practicing law in Tyler , TX .

This is legit. Checked out at https://www.iardc.org The acronym 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 U.S. 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 (Obama) cited the U.S. 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?
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'Doomsday Clock' of Defense budget cuts nears zero hour

by Hope Hodge

04/16/2012

It’s big. It’s ugly. And it’s probably going to happen.

The first two statements have been reiterated by policy makers and Defense officials since Congress agreed to sequestration, a doomsday clock of budget cuts disproportionately targeting the Defense Department and set to strike midnight at the first of next year. The third has been roundly disavowed by military leaders; but experts are now saying it’s time to prepare for the worst.

To be sure, the facts are grim. Sequestration, the product of failure by a Supercommittee last July to root $1.2 trillion of excess spending out of the U.S. budget, means an automatic round of spending cuts, half of which, or up to $600 billion over the next decade, will fall across the Defense Department. In the best-case scenario, Defense officials would be permitted by the Office of Management and Budget to administer the cuts themselves, choosing the programs they deem appropriate for trimming. In the worst case, the ax will fall across every defense program equally, taking roughly nine percent off the top without regard to consequences.

“You cannot buy three-quarters of a ship or building,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wrote to Senate Armed Services Committee leaders John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter last November, explaining the crippling effects of such a measure. Management leaders generally advocate reducing or abandoning specific activities, rather than invoking across-the-board cuts, which can harm valuable endeavors.

If the hatchet strikes indiscriminately, and at a time that does not regard Defense budget planning, Panetta said the immediate result would be employee furloughs and contract and procurement curtailment; and the end of the decade would see the smallest U.S. Air Force in history in terms of personnel, smallest ground force since 1940, and smallest number of Navy ships since 1915.

A George Mason University scholar, Dr. Stephen S. Fuller, projected on behalf of Aerospace Industries Association that the cuts, compounded with the $500 billion of cuts already taken in the FY 2013 Defense request, would mean the loss of more than one million American jobs and a 25 percent loss of growth.

Moreover, Republican staffers with the House Armed Services Committee projected last September: the Army and the Marine Corps risk dropping 200,000 troops from 2011 levels; the Navy 50 ships or more; and the Air Force nearly 480 fighters, with additional blows to unit technological capability, humanitarian and noncombat missions, and provision for military families and dependents.

If budget reductions are restricted primarily to major acquisitions, as may happen if DoD is given its head, the outcome is still damaging, said American Enterprise Institute scholar Mackenzie Eaglen, who has written extensively about military readiness and Defense budget issues.

Following the Clinton administration’s Procurement holiday in the 1990s, the military finds itself in real need of new equipment, much of which may face cancellation if current acquisition and procurement programs are diced or eliminated, Eaglen said. “If you ask me, for the last three years, the Obama Defense budgets have raised the acquisition accounts disproportionately,” Eaglen said. “The cut in the program side now is tending to hurt programs that are safety nets to bridge the military for the next conflict.”

President Barack Obama set the trend with his first budget proposal in 2009, proposing that over $8 billion in cuts, or half of overall budget reductions, come from a Defense Department that was waging two wars and would soon embark on a massive troop surge in Afghanistan.

Travis Korson, a spokesman for the nonprofit For the Common Defense, said hope remains among the experts that Congress will tackle sequestration during the November lame duck session, perhaps seizing on one of the proposed solutions: passage of bills in the House and Senate that would divert cuts from DoD, phasing out 10 percent of federal workers over the next decade instead; or considering the budget of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), which recently cleared the House and spares Defense of sequestration while restoring additional funding.

The first option, however, appears hopelessly partisan, without a single Democratic co-sponsor in the Senate or House; and the second, the Ryan Budget, is not expected to pass the Senate. Obama has publicly made clear his intentions to veto any Republican attempt to avoid the sequester.

A director at the Center for Defense Information, Winslow Wheeler, was less optimistic that any solution would be found.

“I regard sequestration as virtually inevitable. We’re going to hear lots of noise, and I don’t expect anything to happen,” he said. “People think the lame duck Congress will transform itself into a rational bunch of statesmen. I don’t see that happening at all.”

“Hope springs eternal, contrary to all headlines, that the Big Deal can be made,” Eaglen said. “There’s really so much (in sequestration) for everyone to hate.”

2a)Obama's Smart Diplomacy Disaster
By Victor Volsky

In flowing robes of white, his eyes raised heavenward, his arms extended outward, Barack Obama enters the lions' den of world politics roiling with animosity and tensions. Upon beholding the unearthly figure, the commotion ceases; entranced, the warring multitudes listen to the magic sounds issuing from his mouth. He says, "I come not to bring a sword, but to bring peace." No one can help falling under the spell of his magnetic personality; no one can resist the power of his sublime eloquence (some, overcome by emotion, faint). Gradually, the noise dies down; the belligerents lay down their weapons, hold hands, and in unison sing Kumbaya. As the oceans recede and the planet heals, peace finally comes to the long-suffering world, and grateful mankind loudly praises Obama the Peacemaker, Obama the Savior, Obama the Great.

Such visions of his future diplomatic triumphs were dancing in Barack Obama's head as the newly elected president settled down in the White House. Three-plus years later, however, reality has proven a little different. Alas, it's a lot colder in the real world than the denizens of the fever swamps of the left can imagine. Let's go through some of this administration's "achievements" in foreign policy.

Item: Iraq. Obama inherited from his predecessor a winning hand: the war won and over, the schedule of U.S. troop withdrawal in place; the Status of Forces Agreement hammered out in principle, with only a few details to be worked out related to a limited contingent of U.S. troops to be left behind as insurance. But whether by design or through incompetence, Obama procrastinated endlessly until the Iraqis lost their patience, and the talks broke down over the issue of immunity of U.S. forces from Iraqi prosecution. According to Obama, the United States would be moving into a new phase of the relationship with Iraq -- an equal partnership between two sovereign nations based on mutual respect. "This will be a strong and enduring partnership," he said.

Fat chance. The Iraqis realize that they have been cast adrift by the U.S. and are desperately looking for ways to survive in a very tough neighborhood. The odds are that now that Iraq has been abandoned by the U.S., she will descend into chaos and civil war, with the likely outcome a breakup of the country and colonization of its southern part by Iran. (But maybe it was unavoidable. The Democrats had been so used to pummeling President Bush for his Iraq policy that the very name of that country has become a pejorative, and as soon as they had a chance, they would just drop the "bad" war like a hot potato.) All the winnings of the past decade thrown to the wind; all American blood and treasure expended in an effort to build up a stable and relatively democratic Iraq wasted. What a magnificent foreign policy achievement!

Item: Afghanistan. National security has traditionally been the Democrats' Achilles heel. So during the 2004 election campaign they came up with a clever ploy: while lambasting the U.S. military presence in Iraq, they would point to the war in Afghanistan as the right one. This would allow the Democrats to burnish their security credentials while mercilessly criticizing George Bush's military policy with impunity. In 2008, Candidate Obama picked up the strategy and ran with it. On the stump he repeatedly denounced the "wrong" war in Iraq and demanded an expansion of the "good" war in Afghanistan.

Obama apparently figured that he would have no problem wiggling out of his commitment once he became president. He would pretend to be serious about victory in Afghanistan while making it clear to the Taliban that he had no intention of winning the war. So Obama gave the go-ahead to a surge in Afghanistan but provided his commanders on the ground with far fewer forces than they needed to do the job. And in the same breath he declared his intention to withdraw all U.S. forces by a date certain, giving the enemy a clear indication that all they needed to do was sit tight and wait out the Americans and their allies. He obviously counted on the Taliban to acquiesce in his plan and play possum until after the election.

But he doesn't understand the mindset of the Muslim radicals. They see the world in stark Manichaean terms: the weak and the strong. In their eyes, compromise is a sign of weakness to be exploited to the hilt. They are in no mood to accommodate Obama's wishes. They aspire to rout the enemy, to humiliate America, which would immeasurably enhance their stature in the third world as victors over the two greatest powers in the world -- first the Soviet Union, and now the U.S. That's why hostilities in Afghanistan do not abate and why casualties continue to mount even though the Taliban don't need to do anything to win, for Obama has already telegraphed his capitulation to them.

Item: Iran. Obama inherited the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions from his predecessor. But Bush was hamstrung by Democratic moles in the U.S. intelligence community who conducted a successful disinformation campaign to convince the public that Iran had long given up its plans to acquire nuclear weapons. For his part, Obama has none of the handicap. But blithely confident of his powers of persuasion, Obama was sure that if he could only engage the Iranians and entice them into face-to-face negotiations, he would overpower them with the force of his personality and eloquence. In consequence, they would see the error of their ways, disavow their intransigence, and join the family of nations. So to avoid antagonizing his would-be negotiating partners, he sat out the mass demonstrations in Iran in the summer of 2009, when a few words of support for the Iranian protesters might have gone a long way toward toppling the mullahs' suddenly shaky regime. Again, Obama's naiveté blew up in his face and earned him much disdain from the Iranian leaders (see the mindset of the third world above). And now his Iran policy has been reduced to deterring, by hook or by crook, Israel from attacking the Iranian nuclear projects so as not to damage his reelection chances.

Item: Arab Spring. When anti-government riots broke out in Egypt, Barack Obama rushed into the breach and, displaying a sure instinct for wrong choices, proceeded to push President Mubarak out. No matter that for three decades Mubarak had kept the peace with Israel, the cornerstone of relative stability in the Middle East. No matter that Mubarak had been a consistent ally of the U.S. against Soviet communists and later on against Islamist terrorists. Thanks in some measure to Obama, Egypt is now firmly in the talons of the Muslim Brotherhood and on the cusp of going Islamist. The Egyptian Parliament has already declared Israel Enemy Number One. How's that for a diplomatic triumph?

Item: Libya. For some inscrutable reason, Obama was gung-ho to overthrow Libyan dictator Gaddafi. Gaddafi certainly was not a boy scout, but was he any worse than, say, Syria's Assad? A few years back, Gaddafi, scared out of his wits by Saddam Hussein's demise, decided to make peace with the Americans. He turned his nuclear weapons program over to the U.S. and rendered us significant assistance in the War on Terror. Yet, in spite of geopolitical considerations, Obama put on his war paint and sallied forth to overthrow the dastardly colonel. He declared that he couldn't live with his conscience were the massacre in Libya permitted to go on unchecked. Yet his conscience was apparently untroubled in the face of killings on an incomparably larger scale going on in Syria. Thus, Gaddafi is gone -- and so is Libya as a unitary nation; the country is in the throes of free-for-all civil war and has virtually ceased to exist. Is this what Obama wanted? Does it serve U.S. national interests?

Item: Russia. No sooner had Obama come to power than he sacrificed the U.S. plans to build missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic to shoot down Iranian missiles on the altar of improved relations with Putin's Russia. Throwing two of America's most faithful allies under the bus was meant as a goodwill gesture to the Russians, who knew full well that those bases were no threat to their security. But why not try to wrest unilateral concessions from the appeasement-minded new U.S. president? Putin pocketed the gift but showed no inclination to reciprocate (that same pesky disdain for weakness). And now the Russian leaders are gleefully sabotaging U.S. attempts to mobilize the world against Iran, while whipping up anti-American hysteria at home. Yet Obama promises them still more concessions in his second term. Here we have a negotiating partner the Russians could only see in their dreams.

Item: Israel. For decades the U.S. stood resolutely with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States in this strategically crucial region. Until Obama. Like all his predecessors in the White House, he dreamed of engineering a peaceful solution in the Middle East so he could go down in history as a peacemaker extraordinaire. But he decided to go about it by siding with the Palestinians and pressuring Israel. Israelis are not stupid or blind. In a recent poll, only 4 percent of them said they consider Obama a friend of their nation. Israel has every reason to be wary of Obama's second term, when he would not be restrained by the fear of a voter backlash. And so do the Arab allies of the U.S., who have watched the Obama administration sell out its best friend in the region and drawn appropriate conclusions relative to their own future. Small wonder that Obama's rating in the Arab world has been plumbing unprecedented depths.

In short, Obama's international credentials have been every bit as poor as his domestic political and economic record. His plummeting popularity all over the world -- from the Middle East to Latin America -- is evidence enough of how disastrous his foreign policy has been. And even though the New York Times proclaimed Obama to be "the strongest foreign-policy Democrat in recent memory" and breathlessly disclosed that he was champing at the bit to do battle with Mitt Romney in the arena of diplomacy, the presumptive Republican nominee need have no fear of the coming fight. Indeed, he should look forward to it.

2b)Mr. President, It's All of the Above

By Christopher Chantrill

Even MSNBC reckons that the president had a bad week. The bad-hair week, according to Chuck Todd, included the "tax-fairness issue" over the weekend, the stock market loss on Monday, the rallying round Romney after the Santorum exit, the Rosen flap, and then a local reporter asking the president about jet-set vacations while the America people suffer. The president blamed the "Secret Service and Air Force One" for that. The malfeasance of federal employees and the cost of fuel compel the president to travel.

And now it looks like the establishment commentariat is turning on the Buffett Rule. It's a gimmick, they say.

The Obama campaign problems go beyond the tone-deaf community-organizer politics on the stupid Buffett Rule, the Rosen flap, and the naughty boys at the Secret Service. It's all of the above -- and then some. It's the stupid stimulus, which is turning into a real bust now that all those female schoolteachers are losing their jobs. It's the corrupt green energy swamp, where the latest scandal has green corporate officers loaning themselves the company green. It's the war on Big Oil, just as we are entering a new era of fossil-fuel exploration. It's the death sentence on Big Coal just as coal is getting priced out of the market by fracking natural gas. It's the utter stupidity of ObamaCare when everyone knows it's going to raise health care costs.

How many issues can you get wrong in four years, Mr. President? Are you going for the Guinness Book of Records?

Chuck Todd didn't mention the Trayvon Martin case and the unjust overcharging of accused murderer George Zimmerman. I don't know whose brilliant idea this was, whether the Justice Brothers' or the Obama campaign's, but it contains nothing but land mines for the president. What does it say to the white working class if they can't defend their neighborhoods against teenage hoodies without permission from Reverend Al Sharpton? What does it say to Latinos when it seems that the Democrats will always side with blacks against "white Hispanics"? The president and his people are sending a message to independent voters that they'd better not put a foot wrong on race, or their lives will be ruined like George Zimmerman's.

Here's where I think the Obamis make their blunder. They don't understand that left-wing community-organizer politics is as fake as a $3 bill. The left-wing rent-a-mob tactics, courtesy of Saul Alinsky, work well as media melodramas -- shabby little shockers, each starring activists, the media, the helpless victim, and a hapless local politician. But the president is president of all the people. Did Henry V complain before Harfleur about the stingy London bankers who wouldn't pony up their fair share? Not a bit of it. He rallied his troops for the supreme sacrifice, because that's what leaders do.

Instead of inspiration, all we get is confusion. Read how Fred Barnes parses the president's plan for economic growth:

Obama didn't suggest, much less propose, a single incentive or spur to private investment, yet he insisted "we continue to make investments in growth today." These consist solely of government-funded jobs, such as "putting some of our construction workers back to work" and "helping states to rehire teachers." ... Restoring "huge cuts in state and local government" is "part of the challenge we have in terms of growth."

Mr. President: a word to the wise. That Clinton-era wheeze of cut-and-paste "investment" in "programs" is way past its sell-by date.

We know why the Obamis seem confused. It's because they are confused. They confidently implemented all the programs that liberals have been advocating for decades and sat back waiting for the applause. Instead, they got raspberries. Their liberal ideas are all played out.

The big social programs are failing. They are failing because they violate the Hayek Rule, that government just doesn't have the bandwidth to do complex tasks, and the Thatcher Rule, that eventually socialists "run out of other peoples' money." This is not rocket science. It's not even North Korean rocket science.

Then there are the cunning wedge issues by which liberals inject naked fear into their base, to keep blacks or Hispanics or women or gays on the liberal plantation. The trouble is that the Romney campaign seems ready to neutralize them, if the exemplary execution on the Rosen flap is any indication.

As usual, Dick Cheney had the last word. President Obama "has been an unmitigated disaster for the country," he mildly suggested.

Hey, it's not the president's fault. When he first sat down in the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, he checked "all of the above" on the Democrat Party platform, just as his advisers advised. How was he to know that every single idea was a complete dud?

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.

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3) It's with great pleasure that I announce...it's that time again. The Darwin Awards are out! These Annual Honours are given to the persons who did the human gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way.

You may recall that last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out.

This year's winner was a genuine Rocket Scientist...no jive! Read on...and remember that each and every one of these is a true story. The nominees were:

Semi-finalist #1

A young Canadian man, searching for a way of getting drunk cheaply because he had no money with which to buy alcohol, mixed gasoline with milk. Not surprisingly, this concoction made him ill, and he vomited into the fireplace in his house. The resulting explosion and fire burned his house down, killing both he and his sister.

Semi-finalist #2

Three Brazilian men were flying in a light aircraft at low altitude when another plane approached. It appears that they decided to moon the occupants of the other plane, but lost control of their own aircraft and crashed. They were all found dead in the wreckage with their pants around their ankles.

Semi-finalist #3

A 22-year-old Reston , VA man was found dead after he tried to use octopus straps to bungee jump off a 70-foot rail road trestle. Fairfax County police said Eric Barcia, a fast-food worker, taped a bunch of these straps together, wrapped an end around one foot, anchored the other end to the trestle at Lake Accotink Park, jumped and hit the pavement. Warren Carmichael, a police spokesman, said investigators think Barcia was alone because his car was found nearby. "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the concrete," Carmichael said. Police say the apparent cause of death was "Major trauma."

Semi-finalist #4

A man in Alabama died from numerous rattlesnake bites. It seems that he and a friend were playing a game of catch, using the rattlesnake as a ball. The friend - no doubt a future Darwin Awards candidate - was hospitalized, but lived.

Semi-finalist #5

Employees in a medium-sized warehouse in west Texas noticed the smell of a gas leak. Sensibly, management evacuated the building, extinguishing all potential sources of ignition; lights, power, etc. After the building had been evacuated, two technicians from the gas company were dispatched. Upon entering the building, they found they had difficulty navigating in the dark. To their frustration, none of the lights worked. Witnesses later described the sight of one of the technicians reaching into his pocket and retrieving an object that resembled a cigarette lighter. Upon operation of the lighter-like object, the gas in the warehouse exploded, sending pieces of it up to three miles away. Nothing was found of the technicians, but the lighter was virtually untouched by the explosion. The technician suspected of causing the blast had never been thought of as ''especially bright'' by his peers.

And now the winner of this year's Darwin Award; as always, awarded posthumously;

THE 2011 WINNER!

Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smouldering metal embedded in the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.

Police investigators finally pieced together the mystery. An amateur rocket scientist had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off...actually a solid-fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra 'push' for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. He attached the JATO unit to the car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO!

The facts as best could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit the JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site. This was established by the scorched and melted asphalt at that location.

The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an additional 20-25 seconds.

The driver, and soon-to-be pilot, would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for dog fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, causing him to become irrelevant for the remainder of the event.

However, the automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles (15-20 seconds) before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at a height of 125 feet, leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock. Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable.

Epilogue: It has been calculated that this moron attained a ground speed of approximately 420-mph, though much of his voyage was not actually on the ground.

Really.....we couldn't make this stuff up. People like these are all around us. They have kids and they vote... (that is the really bad part).

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4)IBD is hardly a radical rag that extremists receive in brown envelopes; it is a respected part of the main stream media that you can buy at the local post office. In that light, it is quite unusual to see the very strong statements in this editorial. Perhaps it is because of a growing frustration by some that political correctness has kept so many from saying what they really believe, i.e. that our country may be headed on a very dangerous course.

ObamaCare Vs. LeninCare: U.S. Copies Soviets

04/13/2012

When Vladimir I. Lenin sought to remake Russian society into a "proletariats' paradise," he targeted three sectors for control: health care, banking and education. Sound familiar?

Of these three, however, Lenin viewed socialized medicine as the "keystone" to building his socialist utopia.

The Bolshevik leader told the Russian people everybody would be able to afford going to the doctor, not just the "greedy rich." He also claimed centralized control of the medical industry would "reduce costs" and end the "waste" from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" in a competitive market.

In 1918, the USSR became the first nation to promise "free" universal health-care coverage. Fifteen years later, major flaws appeared in its grand social experiment, even to Western observers who for the most part romanticized it.

"Monetary motives have almost entirely ceased to operate in medical practice in Soviet Russia," observed a pair of sympathetic physicians from America and Britain who traveled to Russia in 1933.

As a result, "there still exists a great shortage of physicians and hospitals," they wrote in their report, "Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia." "Drugs are almost fabulously dear and scarce."

"Overworked doctors" couldn't handle the flood of new patients. A bloated new medical bureaucracy, led by the People's Commissar of Public Health, only worsened delays in treatment.

"The dissatisfied patients objected to the many formalities before they were allowed to see a doctor at the public clinic, and to the fact that the intervals before they saw him again were excessive," the 1933 report said.

"Other complaints have been of lack of hospital beds when needed."

It was not uncommon for patients to die while waiting in line to be admitted.

Rationing became necessary. Elderly patients were often turned away from care. Death panels appointed by the health commissar decided their fate.

"This committee decides as to patients needing treatment at a rest home or a sanatorium," the Western doctors wrote in their report.

As bad as Soviet medicine was, it was anything but "free."

"Most workers and their families receive free medical treatment as insured persons," the report said. "But the funds for this treatment do not come from insurance funds, but from general taxation."

This is how President Obama intends to pay for his own universal health-care plan, which will subsidize some 28 million uninsured and underinsured Americans through tax hikes on the rich.

In a little-noticed 2009 speech, Obama vowed to demolish "structural inequalities" in America and rebuild the economy on three new "pillars" — socialized medicine, banking and higher education.

"My administration is working hard," he told the NAACP at its 100th anniversary conference in New York, "to lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity that will put opportunity within the reach of not just African-Americans, but all Americans. Of every race. Of every creed. From every region of the country."

Obama continued: "One pillar of this new foundation is health insurance for everybody."

He promised to create a medical system that not only closes "health-care disparities," but "cuts costs and makes quality health coverage affordable for all."

ObamaCare creates some 160 new federal agencies and offices overseen by the Health and Human Services Department, which will control a handful of large insurance companies operating like public utilities.

Like Lenin, Obama plans to ration care, especially for the elderly.

A key part of his massive new health bureaucracy is a Soviet-style panel that has received little press attention — the Independent Payment Advisory Board. IPAB is not a household name. But, barring repeal by a Republican administration, it will be.

IPAB is a rationing body made up of health bureaucrats appointed by Obama.

Unaccountable to Congress, these commissars will make life or death decisions about the care of elderly, such as whether or not to continue dialysis or chemotherapy.

Their cost-saving recommendations, which are binding and cannot be overruled, go into effect starting in 2014. Cutting costs through rationing is now more critical than ever, as ObamaCare is already over budget. In its first decade, it will cost twice as much — more than $2 trillion — as first projected, according to a new Congressional Budget Office study.

Russians suffered through 70 years of Lenincare. By the end of the century, the USSR was infamous for having one of the worst health-care systems in the world. The horror stories are legion: surgeries performed without anesthesia; patients poisoned by bad hospital food, HIV spread through dirty needles; rampant abortions; and the highest infant-mortality rate in the industrialized world.

Obama is no Lenin. But he, too, thinks the state can provide medical care more equitably and less expensively than the "selfish," profit-oriented free market.

This sounds so altruistic. But as the Foundation for Economic Education's Anna Ebeling — born, raised and educated in the USSR — recently warned: "Let us remind ourselves that in the Soviet Union the road to medical-care hell was paved with the same good intentions."

4a)New bill making its way through Congress allows government to snoop on private data

By Jason Koebler

CISPA Bill Isn't SOPA, But Still Attacks Constitutional Rights

)Congress' latest attempt at a bill that affects the way people use the Internet has many scared, with some calling the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is "worse than SOPA," the bill that caused widespread Internet outrage and blackouts before ultimately being shelved. Experts say the danger level associated with CISPA depends on the answer to one question: Which Constitution amendment do you care about more, the First or the Fourth?

While the Stop Online Piracy Act dealt with censoring sites that illegally hosted copyrighted content, CISPA is designed to help companies fight cyber crime--potentially in exchange for helping the federal government spy on users.

"It's a completely different issue [than SOPA]," says Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "This is about government monitoring. [SOPA] is about the First amendment, [CISPA] is about the Fourth, but they both take a legitimate problem and try to tackle it with an overbroad solution."

CISPA's main goal, according to sponsoring Reps. Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, is as follows: Foreign governments and independent hackers are stealing information from American corporations all the time, costing the companies billions of dollars. The government knows how to stop these attacks and wants to help out private companies, but the current law doesn't allow them to share classified information with private companies. CISPA would open that pipeline, but it would be a two way street--the way the bill is written, companies can share users' information with the government if they sense a "cyber threat."

In a conference call with reporters, Rogers and Ruppersberger repeatedly said that companies wouldn't be required to share information with the federal government.

"The government cannot require companies to give the government E-mails and that type of information, and it is voluntary," Ruppersberger said. "This is not surveillance. Companies can give back information about an attack as it pertains to a threat or vulnerability of a system or a network, but only as it relates to national security."

That gives some experts pause--it's overly broad, according

toDempsey.

The bill doesn't technically require companies to share data with the government, but it also doesn't require the government to share cybersecurity secrets with the companies.

"The government can say 'You want our secret sauce, give us all your data, if you play ball with us, we'll play ball with you,'" Dempsey says, although an amendment to the bill is meant to discourage required data trades. "Once [CISPA] removes the legal barriers, it becomes harder for companies to resist those inducements, which can lead them to do things they're uncomfortable with [like sharing data.]"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says CISPA could lead to "backdoor wiretaps" and would "give companies a free pass to monitor and collect communications ... [and] ship that data wholesale to the government or anyone else provided they claim it was for 'cybersecurity purposes.'"

CISPA has wide support in the House--more than 100 members have signed on, and a vote is expected later this month. Companies such as AT&T, Verizon,Facebook, Microsoft and IBM have voiced their support of the bill.

Dempsey says those companies want help from the government in repelling attacks, and want to be able to share their own cybersecurity techniques and vulnerabilities with each other, but are likely not considering the company-to-government sharing that might be essentially required to receive the bill's benefits.

"I think those companies thought [giving information to the government] is essentially a meaningless provision, because they're not required to share," he says. "But I think there's all sorts of incentives the government can use to leverage that form of sharing."

For its part, it's no secret the government wants more leeway to get information about users. A February story by The Washington Post revealed that the National Security Administration has lobbied the White House for "unprecedented government monitoring of routine civilian Internet activity," but were rebuffed because of privacy concerns.

Rogers said that the data shared between companies and the government is unlikely to be "content driven" and that "it's really zeros and ones" being shared--not personal E-mails or Facebook messages. But concerned Internet users say the bill needs to be more defined. The Congressmen sponsoring the bill champion the fact that it's just 13 pages long, but its clauses have plenty of interpretations.

"Congress should take steps to improve cyber security defenses, but it has to realize it has to be more careful and cautious," Dempsey says. "People really do care deeply about not having the government control the Internet, and the government intrusion into the technology is really the overarching issue."

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5)Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives

Barack Obama made an uncharacteristic error, more akin to those of his predecessor George W Bush, by referring to the Falkland Islands as the Maldives.

Barack Obama made a gaffe more associated with predecessor George W Bush Photo: Getty Images

By Jonathan Gilbert in Buenos Aires

President Obama erred during a speech at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when attempting to call the disputed archipelago by its Spanish name.

Instead of saying Malvinas, however, Mr Obama referred to the islands as the Maldives, a group of 26 atolls off that lie off the South coast of India.

The Maldives were a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965 and the site of a UK airbase for nearly 20 years.

Cristina Kirchner, the Argentine president, has renewed her country's sovereignty claim to the Falklands in the build-up to the 30th anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the islands, which triggered the Falklands War, on April 2.

She has accused David Cameron of maintaining a "colonial enclave" in the South Atlantic and taken Argentina's claim to the U.N.

But Mrs Kirchner left the summit – attended by North, South and Central American nations – earlier than expected last night as Colombian press reported she was unhappy that a declaration of support for the Argentine claim to the British-controlled territory was not included in the summit's final document, which went unsigned after the USA and Canada used their vetoes.

Mrs Kirchner, to whom the Mercosur trade-bloc and the Union of South American Nations had previously confirmed their support in the diplomatic dispute over the islands, was seeking further backing from the Americas.

During the summit, she said Cartagena was an ideal place to talk about the Falklands since the wall that surrounds the city's historic centre was built by the Spanish crown to protect it from "English pirates".

Mrs Kirchner also reprimanded Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian president, for failing to mention the islands in his speech.

In his address, Mr Obama maintained the USA's stance of neutrality over the Falklands, saying he wanted to ensure good relations with both Argentina and Britain.

"This is something in which we would not typically intervene," he said, adding that there should be dialogue between the UK and Argentina even though the Coalition refuses to negotiate sovereignty of the Falklands with Mrs Kirchner's government.

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6)Grover G. Norquist: Trickle-Down Taxation

Americans know that politicians are getting elected by promising to tax only the rich and then going after the middle class

By Grover Norquist

In his 1984 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Walter Mondale announced that if elected president he would raise taxes. He lost the electoral college 525 to 13, carrying only the District of Columbia and his home state of Minnesota.

Since then the two Democrats who won the presidency have promised that to pay for larger government they would only raise taxes on "the rich." Bill Clinton defined the rich as the top 2% of income earners.

In Sept. 2008, candidate Barack Obama said: "I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

In 1980, Ronald Reagan zeroed in on the incompetence of Jimmy Carter, a good and decent man. That should be Mitt Romney's strategy in 2012.

How likable is Barack Obama?

Very likable, it seems, at least in contrast to his GOP rival. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released a few days ago, Americans by a more than 2-to-1 ratio say the president is more "friendly and likable" than Mitt Romney.

Many Republicans, and especially conservatives, can find these numbers hard to credit. Some note that the poll sampling favors Democrats and thus artificially inflates the president's numbers. Still others have come to dislike President Obama so much that it makes them suspicious when they read numbers indicating they are in the minority.

The focus on likability is a mistake. It's a mistake, first, for Democrats if they believe likability will be enough for Mr. Obama to win re-election come November. It's even more of a mistake for those Republicans who believe that the only way to defeat the president is to get fellow Americans to dislike him as much as they do.

Property tax bills fall as Scott Walker's reforms start to kick in.

The public employee unions and other liberals are confident that Wisconsin voters will turn out Governor Scott Walker in a recall election later this year, but not so fast. That may turn out to be as wrong as some of their other predictions as Badger State taxpayers start to see tangible benefits from Mr. Walker's reforms—such as the first decline in statewide property taxes in a dozen years.

On Monday Mr. Walker's office released new data that show the property tax bill for the median home fell by 0.4% in 2011, as reported by Wisconsin's municipalities. Property taxes, which are the state's largest revenue source and mainly fund K-12 schools, have risen every year since 1998—by 43% overall. The state budget office estimates that the typical homeowner's bill would be some $700 higher without Mr. Walker's collective-bargaining overhaul and budget cuts.

The median home value did fall in 2011, by about 2.3%, which no doubt influenced the slight downward trend. But then values also fell in 2009 and 2010, by similar amounts, and the state's take from the average taxpayer still climbed by 2.1% and 1.5%, respectively. In absolute terms homeowners won't see large dollar benefits year over year, but any hold-the-line tax respite is both rare and welcome in this age of ever-expanding government.

The real gains will grow as local school districts continue repairing and rationalizing their budgets using the tools Mr. Walker gave them. Those include the ability to renegotiate perk-filled teacher contracts and requiring government workers to contribute more than 0% to their pensions. A year ago amid their sit-ins and other protests, the unions said such policies would lead to the decline and fall of civilization, but the only things that are falling are tax collections.

The political lesson is that attempts to modernize government are always controversial, but support usually builds over time as the public comes to appreciate the benefits of structural change that tames the drivers of a status quo that includes ever-higher spending and taxes. The Wisconsin recall donnybrook in June will test whether voters value their own bottom lines more than the political power of unions.

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Middle East and Other Musings

Monday, April 16, 2012

It Should Be Self Evident- Unlike The Majority - I Do Not Like Obama!