On July 11, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced that it had launched “a national advertising campaign as part of a broader effort to showcase the dedication and personal histories of scientists studying climate change.”

I know quite a few climatologists and meteorologists and the [...]]]> The Union of Concerned Propagandists

By Alan Caruba

On July 11, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced that it had launched “a national advertising campaign as part of a broader effort to showcase the dedication and personal histories of scientists studying climate change.”

I know quite a few climatologists and meteorologists and the ones I know have been courageously refuting the global warming fraud for years, even decades. Beyond them, thousands of comparable scientists have signed petitions and statements to the effect that global warming was and is a hoax.

The UCS campaign, however, is “an effort to educate the public about the work scientists undertaken in their efforts to document and understand human-caused global warming.” Excuse me, but there isn’t any human-caused global warming. There isn’t any global warming insofar as the Earth has been cooling for the past decade.

The UCA is part of a broad pushback against the November 2009 revelations that have since become known as “Climategate.” Thousands of leaked emails among a tiny band of rogue scientists, primarily from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Penn State University ripped away their curtain of respectability.

Writing about it in the July 12 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences of the University of Virginia from 1980-2007, characterized the emails as “suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Ken Briffa called ‘a nice, tidy story’ of climate history.”

Michaels, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was being polite when he used the word “suggesting.” The emails between the scientists involved in Climategate were damning evidence that they were engaged in a huge fraud.

That fraud is now been whitewashed by supposedly independent panels reviewing the emails and activities between Penn State’s Prof. Michael Mann, the CRU’s Phil Jones, and Ken Briffa, and others. On May 29, 2008, Jones emailed Prof. Mann under the subject line, “IPCC & FOI” asking him to delete any emails he had had with Briffa regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in order to thwart any Freedom of Information inquiries.

The so-called independent panels, mindful of the millions of dollars in climate change research grant funding that both Jones and Mann had brought in for their respective universities, saw no evil, heard no evil, and read no evil.

As a full-fledged partner in the global warming hoax, back in November 2009 when the emails were leaked, Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist and director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program, was asked by Science Insider what she thought. She declined to be interviewed, but later issued a statement through a spokesperson.

“We expect a high degree of scientific integrity by scientists, whether they be in university labs or federal offices. But what may or may no have happened does not change the science—ice sheets are melting, sea level is rising and the top ten hottest years since 1880 include 2001 through 2008.”

Not so. As reported on July 16 by The Heartland Institute’s James Taylor, “In the Northern Hemisphere, Arctic sea ice is currently 19 percent below the 30-year average. In the South Hemisphere, however, Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record extent, continuing a parent of growth that has been ongoing since NASA launched the NOAA satellite instruments in 1979. The growth in Antarctica is so extensive that the poles as a whole have more total ice than the 30-year average.”

Just what is the Union of Concerned Scientists? According to DiscoverTheNetwork.org, the UCS “is a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization with more than 100,000 members. Seeing its mission as building a ‘cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world”, the UCA takes public stands, purportedly based on scientific research, regarding a variety of political and health-related issues.”

The UCS was founded in 1969 by students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. By 1998, it was assuring the public that American analysts had exaggerated North Korea’s ability to produce nuclear weapons.”

So the UCS is essentially a leftist propagandist organization that is anti-war, anti-nuclear and missile defense, and totally political in its opposition to any Republican administration. Of the signers of a document, “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making”, decrying the Bush administration, “more than half were financial contributors to the Democratic Party, Democratic candidates, or a variety of leftist causes.”

The UCS continues to cling to the view that “Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and practical solutions already at our disposal.”

There is no global warming. The so-called greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, extremely minor factors, play no role in climate change within an atmosphere composed primarily of water vapor.

I suggest a name change. The UCS should call itself the Union of Concerned Propagandists.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

We have been witnesses to a continuing use of class warfare by those in government, abetted by the media and an assortment of special interest groups and individuals. In this essay we will consider the methods they use to establish the terms relating to redistribution of income.  

Utilizing [...]]]> Redistribution of Income
By Ben Cerruti

We have been witnesses to a continuing use of class warfare by those in government, abetted by the media and an assortment of special interest groups and individuals. In this essay we will consider the methods they use to establish the terms relating to redistribution of income.  

Utilizing effective divisive tactics they initially obfuscate their intentions by using the term “wealth” in place of “income” when proposing material changes in the income tax code. Taxing income derived from accumulated wealth does not alter that wealth. They next establish three main category of classes; rich, middle class and poor. If one were to pay close attention, he or she would find that they rather conveniently alter the dividing lines to suit the subject for which they are advocates.

It should be apparent that attempting to establish classes by simplistic definition is ludicrous. Is a person earning $1,000,000 a year in his twenties as rich as one earning the same amount in his or her sixties? The person in their sixties may have had to spend many years working up from under six figure annual income to reach this income level and the person in their twenties may find that in later years his or her income may fall to sub six figure level. A poor person at a young age may become affluent with time and an affluent person may suffer financial reverses that will throw him or her into what is presently considered the poor class.

There are many other factors, such as age, education, marital status, number of dependents, physical capability, race, national prosperity, war or national emergency, that affects the financial status of any person at any given time during their lifetime.

It should be apparent the because of these factors, which for want of a better name we can call dynamic natural demographics, any fair and effective redistribution of income is impossible. The fact is that the use of class to define favors or penalties those in government may dispense is divisive and counter productive. It pits citizen against citizen and serves to only benefit those in government utilizing these tactics.

It would rationally appear more productive for government if their actions would be directed towards supporting the movement of those at the lower end of the income scale, at any given time, up into higher levels of income. How obvious it should be that this result can be effected by more reliance on the overall growth of our national private sector wealth, wherein there is then more to share for every citizen; this rather than limiting growth by draining excessive wealth from the private sector that is then used in non-productive fashions.

Those in government that control these actions that interfere with the manufacturing of private sector wealth, that benefit all in the private sector, do so in the guise of “fairness”. The disingenuous use of this word is more clearly understood when one understands that in this process a substantial portion of the private sector wealth taken by those in government is dispensed to those respective special interests to which favors are owed. This very fact should also dispel that mistaken feeling by some that Government can create private sector wealth better than the private sector itself.

The obvious sometimes has to be explained. It is rather difficult to understand why people whom one would believe are well educated, especially those in the media, would not understand some of the following truths. People who accumulate excess income, unless they bury it or put it under their mattress, must place it back in circulation. They do this either by putting it in the bank, purchasing assets such as real estate, stocks and bonds, or by investing in assets and personnel for their own business. Just the fact that the excess income is in circulation allows for its use by the rest of the private sector to promote increased business, create jobs and overall increased financial wealth.

If this excess income is confiscated through taxes it is not allowed to work to effect this increased private sector prosperity. Again, to explain the obvious, this counter productive action by those in government is only taken to benefit their own personal position and agenda since, in factual truth, it does not provide the beneficial advantage that it professes to those in the private sector. It is necessary to understand that the government bureaucracy does not produce any revenue, it is supported solely by the taxes it collects. It is by its nature inefficient and self serving since those employed in it benefit personally in income and career longevity by its existence and growth.

I hope there are those who read these words who still have hope and faith that there are among us leaders, new or old, that will arise to condemn the use of class warfare by those in government, and in the political arena, to serve their own rather than the interests of the citizens of this country which they disingenuously portray they do.

For months now, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the owner and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, has been writing increasingly desperate pleas for the Obama administration to do something about the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East and the world, [...]]]> U.S. Looks Weak as Iran Flips Off the World

By Alan Caruba

For months now, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the owner and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, has been writing increasingly desperate pleas for the Obama administration to do something about the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East and the world, Iran.

“When Barack Obama became president, Iran had perhaps several thousand centrifuges enriching uranium. Now it may have thousands more,” wrote Zuckerman in the August edition. “What’s at stake here is too menacing for the world to delude itself that Iran will somehow change course. It won’t.”

It must be very frustrating to be a multi-millionaire media mogul and yet unable to do much about an impending disaster other than warn about it. My sense is that it falls on deaf ears at the White House.

Anyone as dense as Obama should not be allowed to be Commander-in-Chief, but he is and, worse for America and all other nations, he likely has no idea of the dangers involved in reducing the nation’s military capabilities at a time when Iran is closing in on becoming a nuclear threat to the Middle East and beyond.

“So, if Iran succeeds,” warns Zuckerman, “it would be seen as a major defeat and open our government to doubts about its power and resolve to shape events in the Middle East. Friends would respond by distancing themselves from Washington; foes would aggressively challenge U.S. policies.”

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, David Kay, the man who led the U.N. inspections after the Persian Gulf War and later led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group following the 2003 invasion, dismantled the Obama administration claims that either economic sanctions or a weapons inspection program in Iran will deter the Iranians. “As a former weapons inspector, I have very bad news: A weapons inspection regime in Iran will not work.”

Don’t look to the United Nations to do anything. “Even after Iran’s 20-year-long clandestine program started to be revealed the IAEA inspectors have had a hard time getting United Nations authority to confront the Islamic Republic.”

“The blunt truth,” said Kay, “is that weapons inspections simply cannot prevent a government in charge of a large country from developing nuclear weapons.” It didn’t even stop a small country, North Korea, from doing so.

Does anyone believe that President Obama will support an Israeli attack on Iran to degrade its ability to complete its goal of acquiring nuclear weapons?

Does anyone know the extent to which the President is trying to reduce the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons? Or the capability of the U.S. Air Force to respond to a threat to the peace anywhere in the world?

The only time this president has shown any “leadership” was in response to criticism by the former head of the forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McCrystal. Meanwhile, the cost cutting in the Pentagon continues relentlessly.

All this reeks of the weakness shown by Great Britain and European leaders in the face of the obvious aggression by Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s.

A January 31, 2008 article in The Economist, “Has Iran Won?” asked, “Who would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies.”

The answer is that it’s easy when nations display the same gutless response of earlier generations and the weakness of the present administration.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

PR Week publishes monthly editions in addition to its other news services and the July issue is devoted to “The most powerful people in PR.” All industries have their major players, so there is nothing surprising that public relations would also have its heavy hitters, but [...]]]> Public Relations and the World

By Alan Caruba

PR Week publishes monthly editions in addition to its other news services and the July issue is devoted to “The most powerful people in PR.” All industries have their major players, so there is nothing surprising that public relations would also have its heavy hitters, but there are some interesting insights to be gleaned from the list of the twenty-five chosen.

I have plied the magic arts and crafts of public relations since the 1970s when I gave up the notion of ever making a decent living as a journalist. Journalism offers tons of ego satisfaction, but the pay was bad back then and, by comparison with other professions, not much better today.

The major players are, not surprisingly, the ones in charge of projecting and protecting a corporate “image”, otherwise known as perception. Number one on the list is Katie Cotton, the VP of worldwide corporate communications for Apple. She is teamed with Steve Jobs its cofounder and CEO because, together, they are the dynamic due of PR for a company that is testimony to American innovation and enterprise. It’s a very good choice.

Corporate PR folk on the list include Leslie Dach, VP for Wal-Mart; Jon Iwata, VP for IBM; Ed Skyler, Executive VP for Citigroup; Sally Susman, Senior VP for Pfizer; Chris Hassell fpr Procter & Gamble; Gary Sheffer, VP for GE; Bill Margaritis, VP for FedEx; Rachel Whetstone, VP for Google, Julie Hamp, Senior VP for PepsiCo; and Teri Everett, SVP of News Corporation.

One thing should particularly be obvious and which continues throughout the list is the role of women at very high levels, even if men continue to dominate these positions. Of particular interest is the inclusion of Stephanie Cutter among the “most powerful” as an Assistant to the President for Special Projects. That is president as in President of the United States of America. While Robert Gibbs is in the spotlight as Obama’s spokesperson, Cutter played an essential role in his campaign and now in his administration.

Of the top twenty-five named, nine were women. That’s progress.

Among the other “power principals”, there are the expected CEOs of major agencies such as Richard Edelman of Edelman; Harris Diamond, CEO of Shandwick Worldwide; Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, Paul Taaffe, CEO of Hill & Knowlton; and Margery Kraus, CEO of APCO Worldwide. It is worth noting that these public relations firms operate on a global basis.

In a recent public television documentary on George P. Schultz who served in many top posts, including Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan, he noted that while people think cabinet members have a lot of power, their primary power is the ability to persuade people to support their policies. I cite this because the U.S. government employs a small army of “communications” people whose job is to marshal support. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. probably has more PR agencies per square mile than any other city in the nation.

Persuasion is the cash crop of public relations and perhaps the most interesting new trend is the creation of a whole new breed of PR folk whose expertise is in “social media” which is to say PR focused on using websites like Facebook, My Space, and Twitter to spread the message. There’s a lot of outreach to influential bloggers as well. The emergence of the Internet has been one of the major changes affecting the profession.

Time was if a PR guy or gal “placed” a story with the wire services or a major newspaper such as The New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, or a news magazine like Newsweek or Time that was sufficient to affect events. The loss of numerous daily newspapers and the shriveling of others have altered that dynamic. The news magazines are in their death throes.

A major contributor to this is the loss of credibility these news dynamos have brought upon themselves by pushing hoaxes such as global warming or in giving unexamined support to political agendas depending on who was in office. Investigative reporting is virtually a thing of the past as news organizations trim their staffs to the bare minimum.

The recent virtual black-out on news about the New Black Panthers and the failure of the Department of Justice to pursue voter tampering charges is yet another reason fewer and fewer television viewers turn to the network news shows for, well, news.

The rise of conservative talk radio speaks to the fact that a majority of Americans self-identify as politically conservative. The popularity of leading news and opinion websites that serve this audience is testimony to the power of public opinion.

Meanwhile the PR power players, in corporations, trade associations, special interest organizations, and in agencies, are hard at work seeking to influence public opinion.

Ultimately, however, it comes down to the quality of products and services, the actions taken by government, and the state of the economy that determines what the public thinks and does.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

I felt like this back in the days when the Watergate scandal slowly, painfully unraveled, revealing the most appalling stupidity and criminality emanating from the Oval Office. From the night when the burglars were arrested in the Democrat Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972 to the [...]]]> NASA’s Mission to the Muslims

By Alan Caruba

I felt like this back in the days when the Watergate scandal slowly, painfully unraveled, revealing the most appalling stupidity and criminality emanating from the Oval Office. From the night when the burglars were arrested in the Democrat Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972 to the day Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Americans were forced to witness and endure something unthinkable.

The news that NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, had been dispatched to the Middle East to fulfill what he said was its “foremost” mission, “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science…and math and engineering” was so appallingly stupid that it defied any legitimate reason for NASA to exist.

The other mission objectives Barack Obama charged Bolden with were to “re-inspire children to want to get into science and math” and to “expand our international relationships.”

You need a bit of history to lend some clarity to this. NASA was the direct result of the Cold War scare when the Russians put Sputnik into orbit over the Earth in October 1957, thereby demonstrating they had missiles powerful enough to launch a nuclear attack on the nation. It galvanized the U.S. government into passing the National Defense Education Act in order to get more young Americans to go into the fields of science and math, and it prompted the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the purpose of demonstrating American scientists and engineers could create bigger and better missiles.

Muslims had nothing to do with it then and nothing to do with it now.

In February, President Obama proposed that NASA abandon its Constellation program. As the New York Times reported at the time, it would involve abandoning “the rockets and spacecraft that NASA has been working on for the past four years to replace space shuttles.” It would impose a mandate “that any future exploration program will be an international collaboration”, not an American one.

NASA made news again in mid-June when it was announced that Obama’s amended budget request would slash $100 million from its operating funds in order to “spur economic growth and job creation along Florida’s Space Coast and other affected regions.” According to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this somehow “revitalizes NASA and transitions to new opportunities in the space industry and beyond.” How many NASA engineers and scientists will now transition to jobs at Disneyworld?

Islam has not been “hijacked” by the likes of Osama bin Laden. Islam has always been about the conquest of the world and its greatest “scientific” breakthroughs since the 1980s have been the development of truck bombs and suicide bombers who have attacked targets from Bali to London, Madrid to Manhattan.

Obama’s Cairo speech on June 4, 2009 was filled with the kind of lies that portray Islam as a peaceful religion and one responsible for all manner of scientific breakthroughs from the invention of the magnetic compass to the printing of books.

Neither is true. What is true is that the Chinese had developed the compass and Islam had resisted printing books for a thousand years following its rise after 632AD.

Those under the oppression of Islam did not contribute to or experience the rise of science and the arts as both were rejected as un-Islamic. Many forms of music, for example, were banned in Islam. While the West was producing Galileo, Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus, Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Albert Einstein, not one single scholar of comparable stature was produced in the Islamic world.

Contrary to Obama’s mission to reach out to Muslims, they “reached out” to the West and, in America on September 11, 2001, destroyed the Twin Towers and attacked the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 victims.

Typical of the arrogance of Islam is the proposal to build a mosque within a block of ground zero in New York City!

Building mosques over sites held sacred to non-Muslims is an long tradition of Islam, from the mosque built over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to the countless other mosques in converted Christian churches, Buddhist and Hindu temples, as a demonstration of their intention to replace Western and Asian religions.

Permitting the building of the proposed New York mosque would signal submission to Islam.

Perverting and defunding NASA’s mission is evidence of Obama’s commitment to Islam.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

“Important” events happened recently to two women.  The relative attention paid and press coverage about the two tells a lot about where we are as a nation, and it isn’t good.  The two women are Lindsay Lohan and Pam Murphy. All of you know that Lindsay Lohan is a [...]]]> A Tale of Two Women

“Important” events happened recently to two women.  The relative attention paid and press coverage about the two tells a lot about where we are as a nation, and it isn’t good.  The two women are Lindsay Lohan and Pam Murphy.
All of you know that Lindsay Lohan is a spoiled, self-centered, self-destructive twit who was just sentenced to 90 days in jail for multiple instances of contempt of court.  But how many of you know who Pam Murphy was?  Let’s not always see the same hands.
Pam Murphy was the widow of Audie Murphy, the most decorated US soldier from WW II.  Here is how an article in Veterans Today on 10 April, 2010, described her:
“After Audie died, they all became her boys. Every last one of them.
“Any soldier or Marine who walked into the Sepulveda VA hospital and care center in the last 35 years got the VIP treatment from Pam Murphy.
 
“The widow of Audie Murphy – the most decorated soldier in World War II – would walk the hallways with her clipboard in hand making sure her boys got to see a specialist or doctor — STAT. If they didn’t, watch out.
 
“Her boys weren’t Medal of Honor recipients or movie stars like Audie, but that didn’t matter to Pam. They had served their country. That was good enough for her.
 
“She never called a veteran by his first name. It was always ‘Mister.’ Respect came with the job.”
 
“ ‘Nobody could cut through VA red tape faster than Mrs. Murphy,’ said veteran Stephen Sherman, speaking for thousands of veterans she befriended over the years.
 
“ ‘Many times I watched her march a veteran who had been waiting more than an hour right into the doctor’s office. She was even reprimanded a few times, but it didn’t matter to Mrs. Murphy.’
 
“ ‘Only her boys mattered. She was our angel.’ ”
 
For that whole article, go here: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/04/16/pam-murphy-widow-of-actor-audie-murphy-was-veterans-friend-and-advocate/
 
The simple truth is that Pam Murphy did more for her “boys,” and through them for all of America, before lunch on any day of her 90 years, than Lindsay Lohan did for anyone, anytime.  And yet, Lohan’s sniveling before the judge got wall-to-wall press coverage, but the death of a great and dedicated woman passed almost unnoticed.
Consider how much better our press would be, our nation would be, our lives would be, if the life of Pam Murphy had been covered and celebrated like the Lohan court hearing.  And the contrary is true, what if the Lohan hearing had been covered in a few lines back in the papers next to the pet obituaries?
I spend much of my time reading about the Framers, their lives, their philosophies, their times, and their works.  Occasionally people say to me, “Those were unique times.  We couldn’t find a collection of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and so on, today.”  To that I answer, yes we can. 
But we can’t find them where the originals were found, in Congress.  Can anyone recite the names of the current leaders of Congress alongside of the leaders of Congress when the Declaration of Independence was passed and signed, without sardonic tears?
Yet, here is proof that America still generates leaders of the vision and caliber of the Framers, and of Pam Murphy.  These are three Americans I’ve had the privilege of knowing and working with over the years.  I’ll match any and all of them up with any of the Framers, beginning with John and Abigail Adams.  See if you agree:
Dr. Thomas Sowell.  The late Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick.  The late Dr. Milton Friedman.  If any of these names are unfamiliar to you, I won’t attempt to explain such extraordinary people in a sentence or two.  Look them up.  Get into their writings.  See whether you agree that people of the quality of the Framers yet live and work among us.
Then ask why our press is filled with trivialities, and void of the greatness that America actually possesses.  That’s what I thought of this week, when I contemplated the vast gulf between Lindsay Lohan and Pam Murphy, this week.

About the Author: John Armor practiced before the Supreme Court for 33 years. John_Armor@aya,yale.edu His latest book, to appear in September, is on Thomas Paine. www.TheseAreTheTimes.us
 

John Armor, Esq.
Box 243, 421 Kettle Rock Road
Highlands, NC  28741
828.200-0320
John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
www.TheseAreTheTimes.us

Saying that as a black woman conjures up a lot of feelings, jokes and anger. But not for me. Once a young friend chastised me for cutting my hair. She told me everyone was trying to grow some and here I destroying mine. My response was “It’s [...]]]> My hair is not my shining glory.

Saying that as a black woman conjures up a lot of feelings, jokes and anger. But not for me. Once a young friend chastised me for cutting my hair. She told me everyone was trying to grow some and here I destroying mine. My response was “It’s only hair and it will grow back”. It was something she didn’t understand because for ages black women have wanted the hair they claim God didn’t give them. I know why, I understand why but I think now is the time to get over it. It is time for a major hair change in this country.

Historically the black hair thing started out as a racial problem. Blacks were slaves and considered inferior in everything from looks to intelligence. The Emancipation Proclamation may have removed physical shackles but not the mental ones left on both sides. It was hard for whites to see blacks as equal because they did not look like them. It was hard for blacks to get a job or have a good life because they didn’t look white. Looking white was the way to have the ‘good life’ in the United States. And the good life could only come with those who struggled to have good hair or have women and children with good hair.

I grew up a victim of this intolerance. When my mother deemed me old enough I was sent to a hairdresser to get my thick kinky hair ‘straightened’ with a hot comb, an invention credited to Madame C. J. Walker. I hated sitting in the beauty shop waiting for them to get to my hair. Because I was a child they did my hair last, or as least that’s’ what they said. As I grew older I realized it was the thickness of my hair that caused beauticians to scoff and raise the price. I didn’t have that ‘good hair’. I have what I termed ‘miscegented hair’.  Every race of my ancestors appears on my head. When I wanted to get an Afro I had a hard time because my hair was not consistently curly or kinky. I had to have my hair extremely short to accomplish a natural or roll up the often too straight front and hope it was stay curled to mimic the rest of my tight locks.

Hey let’s call it what it was- nappy. Don’t really know where that term comes from but many older black women consider it the other ‘n’ word. We all knew that nappy hair would not get you a job. So black men cut their hair short and black women tried to have flowing tresses like white women or at least have hair in the same condition as white women. It went beyond Madame Walker’s hot comb. It became perms which originally burned the scalp but softened the curl in the hair to make it look white. Then there was the Jeri-Curl phenom. This was a two prong process of straightening the hair and then re-curling it into shining and non-kinky tendrils. When that didn’t work there was always, and still is, hair extensions, the process of adding real of fake hair to one’s own to achieve certain looks and styles. Many believe this is what made the late Farrah Fawcet have such a great mane- it wasn’t all hers. I don’t know about that but I understand that many Hollywood lovelies of all races use extensions to fill out their hair look.

Unfortunately this created a new black hair issue.

Black hair salons and the products used to take care of black hair are thriving businesses. Most black hair salons are owned by people of color. There are still a few black owned hair care product companies, but most of the major hair and cosmetic companies have gotten in on the deal with products for women of color. If you get a chance take a look at the Chris Rock documentary “Good Hair”. While Mr. Rock tells the story of the black hair situation in the black community he offers no solutions or answers. One question he raises is why don’t black people own more of their own businesses?

It used to be that we couldn’t get loans to buy the needed property and goods. It is one of those things held over from the early days of black freedom and the continuing wave of racism in this nation. It wasn’t that people were being turned down because of race. They weren’t allowed to apply because of race. My mother was one of the first accountants to get a Small Business Loan for one of her clients when the laws changed. There was, and still is, a continuance of redlining in neighborhoods and other forms of racism that stops blacks from achieving the goal of being their own master. Master is the term I meant to use. As far back as my parents’ college days the term ‘slave’ was used to talk about jobs, especially those with unequal pay. Places where one works and is made to feel less than an accepted employee are still called ‘plantations’. The people who slave at these plantations are often the same ones who fight for equal rights on the job without any fanfare.

What does this all have to do with black hair? Check this out.

A few weeks back a fairly well off black woman in my community decided she wanted to open up a different kind of hair salon. She wanted it to have a swanky upscale feel using only the best products and the best hair for extensions or what we call weaves. She would also offer massage therapy on site and several types of manicures and pedicures. She had the space, she knew she had the clientele she even had top hair dressers with years of experience in the field. Everything looked like a go until she made contacts with the suppliers of the hair, hair products and nail products. The suppliers are usually Koreans and the Koreans she associated with told her they would not supply any products unless she gave them a cut of her profits.

It wasn’t enough that she was going to have to buy everything she needed from them and their sources but they wanted a share of her profits. Otherwise she would not be able to do anything she wanted.

It makes me wonder about all the hair salons in this city and in this country. Was this an individual case of greed based on a racial need or is it across the board? When I heard about it the first thing that came to mind was protesting, the way we did in the 60s and 70s and got results. But this time the protest would be extremely difficult. It would mean black women giving up all other looks but one- the natural.

It is hard to imagine the number of issues that would be sparked by such a drastic change. We would have to look at ourselves as we are without any nods to a so-called predominate race. Women who had perceived themselves as unattractive because they could not grow long tendrils would have to learn to love what they saw in the mirror: a beautiful woman a mixed heritage with hair that spoke the same.

It would change the face of fashion, which often excludes black models, not for their hair but for their ample figures. If no black woman in this country donned a wig, a weave, used a perm or a straightening comb the distinction and pride of a race would easily be understood. Would there still be the fear instilled in the 60s when Afros meant the wearer was militant? Time would tell but white people have been wearing their hair ‘natural’ ever since they brought slaves to this country. Why can’t the descendants of slaves do the same?

The answer is the melting pot. This country is not ready for the ingredients in the pot to be darkened. They are still trying to lighten it up. And that means lightening up brown people to blend with the mixture. Those out there trying to get jobs in this messed up economy will tell you they are still made to feel that white is right. Embracing the black heritage is one thing. Embracing naturally black hair is another.

I have gone on about this issue fair longer than I should have but it is irksome to me. This thing about black hair runs deeper than sewn in weaves and is thicker than my hair in its natural state. I know several women who have gone natural or have dreds because they feel that is natural. I’m still debating that issue in my mind. But the majority of black women are attached to long hair and dreams of it. It still means a better life, a better job, even a better man. Black people cannot be raised to positions of great power in this nation looking like their black ancestors. President Obama’s hair is cut short, his wife’s is a perm. And remember what happened last summer when their oldest daughter went natural? Several people, most of them white, said it was inappropriate for the child of a head of state.

This is the initial problem: a country not ready for a hair change. And that, people, creates a real black hair problem no matter what way you look at it.

I confess I always look forward to July Fourth because it carries with it memories of my parents who proudly displayed the flag on every holiday and of the full day of celebration by my hometown that began with races in the morning by the [...]]]> God and Governance in the USA

By Alan Caruba

I confess I always look forward to July Fourth because it carries with it memories of my parents who proudly displayed the flag on every holiday and of the full day of celebration by my hometown that began with races in the morning by the various grades of school kids, baking and other contests, a circus and a concert in the afternoon and early evening, concluded with a grand display of fireworks at night.

My parents were both first generation Americans and their parents understood what the American Dream was because they had lived it. They had endured hard times and good, and were fiercely patriotic.

They would have been mystified and angered to hear the talk of the “separation of church and state” to justify thwarting the acknowledgement that God is at the very center of the nation’s creation. The Constitution does not speak of separation. It says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The Founders were well aware of the torments and injustices of the “old world” in which there were state religions and woe to those who were not members thereof. They were not anti-religion. They were against formal alliances between the state and a particular religion.

Atheists and secularists fail to acknowledge that “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.”

The belief in God and the right to worship Him as one wished literally accounts for the first brave journeys to the land that would become colonies and then an independent nation. The Pilgrims came in search of the freedom to worship as they wished.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed, Samuel Adams wrote, “We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and…from the rising to the setting sun, may His Kingdom come.”

When the fifty-six men from the thirteen colonies first gathered in Philadelphia on September 7, 1774 as a sitting Congress, there was a suggestion that the meeting begin with prayer. The motion was initially opposed, not because the delegates did not believe in God, but because they represented various religious backgrounds. There were Episcopalians, Quakers, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.

Samuel Adams stood to address the assembly. “I am no bigot. I could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue.” He suggested that an Episcopalian clergyman, Jacob Duche, fit that description and that he be asked to read prayers to the Congress the following morning. The motion was seconded and passed.

In a book by Toby Mac and Michael Tait, “Under God”, they note that “A paid minister, whose salary has been paid by taxpayers since 1789, opens every session of Congress with prayer.”

On December 4, 1800, just weeks after moving into the newly opened Capitol Building, it became a home to religious services. Senator John Quincy Adams recorded in his diary, “Religious service is usually performed on Sundays at the Treasury office and at the Capitol. I went both forenoon and afternoon to the Treasury.”

Among the many interesting facts and stories they cite is one about the Washington Monument that is topped with an aluminum cap upon which two words are etched, Laus Deo, meaning praise to God and, within the cornerstone, laid on July 4, 1848, rests the Holy Bible, presented by the Bible Society.

Let those who would cast out God, would cast out the religion of the Founding Fathers and tolerance for those seeking freedom under God be rebuked. They are strangers to what it means to say, “I am an American.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s greatest contribution to the war in Afghanistan may turn out to be forcing everyone to focus on it. The real news there this week was not Gen. McChrystal’s epic faux pas and dismissal but [...]]]> McChrystal Forces Us to Focus

Now Petraeus owes us a candid assessment of the Afghan effort.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s greatest contribution to the war in Afghanistan may turn out to be forcing everyone to focus on it. The real news there this week was not Gen. McChrystal’s epic faux pas and dismissal but that 12 soldiers were killed on June 7-8, including five Americans by a roadside bomb, making that “the deadliest 24 hour period this year,” as The Economist noted. Insurgency-related violence was up by 87% in the six months prior to March. Agence France-Presse reported Thursday that NATO forces are experiencing their deadliest month ever.

There have been signal moments in this war since its inception, and we are in the middle of one now.

It has gone on almost nine years. It began rightly, legitimately. On 9/11 we had been attacked, essentially, from Afghanistan, harborer of terrorists. We invaded and toppled the Taliban with dispatch, courage and even, for all our woundedness, brio. We all have unforgettable pictures in our minds. One of mine is the grainy footage of a U.S. cavalry charge, with local tribesman, against a Taliban stronghold. It left me cheering. You too, I bet.

But Washington soon took its eye off the ball, turning its focus and fervor to invading Iraq. Over the years, the problems in Afghanistan mounted. In 2009, amid a growing air of crisis, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates sacked the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan—institutional Army, maybe a little old-style. He was replaced by Gen. McChrystal—special forces background, black ops, an agile and resourceful snake eater. “Politicians love the mystique of these guys,” said a general this week. Snake eaters know it, and wind up being even more colorful, reveling in their ethos of bucking the system.

Last August, Gen. McChrystal produced, and someone leaked, a 66-page report warning of “mission failure.” More troops and new strategy were needed. The strategy, counterinsurgency, was adopted. That was a signal moment within a signal moment, for at the same time the president committed 30,000 more troops and set a deadline for departure, July 2011. The mission on the ground was expanded—counterinsurgency, also known as COIN, is nation building, and nation building is time- and troop-intensive—but the timeline for success was truncated.

COIN is a humane strategy not lacking in shrewdness: Don’t treat the people of a sovereign nation as if they just wandered across your battlefield. Instead, befriend them, consult them, build schools, give them an investment in peace. Only America, and God bless it, would try to take the hell out of war. But the new strategy involved lawyering up, requiring troops to receive permission before they hit targets. Some now-famous cases make clear this has endangered soldiers and damaged morale.

The Afghan government, on which COIN’s success hinges, is corrupt and unstable. That is their political context. But are we fully appreciating the political context of the war at home, in America?

The left doesn’t like this war and will only grow more opposed to it. The center sees that it has gone on longer than Vietnam, and “we’ve seen that movie before.” We’re in an economic crisis; can we afford this war? The right is probably going to start to peel off, not Washington policy intellectuals but people on the ground in America. There are many reasons for this. Their sons and nephews have come back from repeat tours full of doubts as to the possibility of victory, “whatever that is,” as we all now say. There is the brute political fact that the war is now President Obama’s. The blindly partisan will be only too happy to let him stew in it.

Republican leaders such as John McCain are stalwart: This war can be won. But there’s a sense when you watch Mr. McCain that he’s very much speaking for Mr. McCain, and McCainism. Republicans respect this attitude: “Never give in.” But people can respect what they choose not to follow. The other day Sen. Lindsey Graham, in ostensibly supportive remarks, said that Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. McChrystal’s replacement, “is our only hope.” If he can’t pull it out, “nobody can.” That’s not all that optimistic a statement.

The U.S. military is overstretched in every way, including emotionally and psychologically. The biggest takeaway from a week at U.S. Army War College in 2008 was the exhaustion of the officers. They are tired from repeat deployments, and their families are stretched to the limit, with children reaching 12 and 13 without a father at home.

The president himself is in a parlous position with regard to support, which means with regard to his ability to persuade, to be believed, to be followed. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows more people disapprove of Mr. Obama’s job performance than approve.

When he ran for president, Mr. Obama blasted Iraq but called Afghanistan the “good war.” This was in line with public opinion, and as a young Democratic progressive who hadn’t served in the military, he had to kick away from the old tie-dyed-hippie-lefty-peacenik hangover that dogs the Democratic Party to this day, even as heartless-warlike-bigot-in-plaid-golf-shorts dogs the Republicans. In 2009 he ordered a top-to-bottom review of Afghanistan. In his valuable and deeply reported book “The Promise,” Jonathan Alter offers new information on the review. A reader gets the sense it is meant to be reassuring—they’re doing a lot of thinking over there!—but for me it was not. The president seems to have thought government experts had answers, or rather reliable and comprehensive information that could be weighed and fully understood. But in Washington, agency analysts and experts don’t have answers, really. They have product. They have factoids. They have free-floating data. They have dots in a pointillist picture, but they’re not artists, they’re dot-makers.

More crucially, the president asked policy makers, in Mr. Alter’s words, “If the Taliban took Kabul and controlled Afghanistan, could it link up with Pakistan’s Taliban and threaten command and control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons?” The answer: Quite possibly yes. Mr. Alter: “Early on, the President eliminated withdrawal (from Afghanistan) as an option, in part because of a new classified study on what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if the Islamabad government fell to the Taliban.”

That is always the heart-stopper in any conversation about Afghanistan, terrorists and Pakistan’s nukes. But the ins and outs of this question—what we know, for instance, about the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, and its connections to terrorists—are not fully discussed. Which means a primary argument in the president’s arsenal is denied him.

It is within the context of all this mess that—well, Gen. Petraeus a week and a half ago, in giving Senate testimony on Afghanistan, appeared to faint. And Gen. McChrystal suicide-bombed his career. One of Gen. McChrystal’s aides, in the Rolling Stone interview, said that if Americans “started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”

Maybe we should find out. Gen. Petraeus’s confirmation hearings are set for next week. He is a careful man, but this is no time for discretion. What is needed now is a deep, even startling, even brute candor. The country can take it. It’s taken two wars. So can Gen. Petraeus. He can’t be fired because both his predecessors were, and because he’s Petraeus. In that sense he’s fireproof. Which is not what he’ll care about. He cares about doing what he can to make America safer in the world. That means being frank about a war that can be prosecuted only if the American people support it. They have focused. They’re ready to hear.

In “Act of Creation”, a 2003 book by Stephen C. Schlesinger tells the story of how the United Nations was established.. At one point he writes that “The first person of any importance noted was Alger Hiss, the acting secretary general of the United Nations, originally appointed [...]]]> The UN’s New Scams

By Alan Caruba

In “Act of Creation”, a 2003 book by Stephen C. Schlesinger tells the story of how the United Nations was established.. At one point he writes that “The first person of any importance noted was Alger Hiss, the acting secretary general of the United Nations, originally appointed to that post on the recommendation of President Roosevelt and Secretary Stetinius.”

Hiss would later be revealed to be a communist agent of the Soviet Union, one of many in the Roosevelt administration. In 1950 Hiss went to jail for perjury, denying his guilt to the end.

All this and more became known with the publication of the Venona documents, a record of secret communications with Soviet spymasters that had been intercepted by U.S. counterintelligence during World War Two.

I cite this so you will understand that Roosevelt’s pet project, the founding of a new international organization, was largely shaped by communists within his administration. A previous effort, the League of Nations, advocated by President Woodrow Wilson after World War One, failed to deter World War Two.

The UN, through its International Atomic Energy Agency, has provided cover and time for Iran to create nuclear weapons, thus setting in motion a war that defies imagination.

A Global Government

Since its beginning, the United Nations has been all about establishing a global government. The inroads against individual national sovereignty have never ceased, pieced together in a fabric of international treaties that, in the case of the U.S., supercede our Constitution when signed.

Since its creation, it has vastly increased its authority through a whole series of agencies devoted to the environment, health, refugees, the seas, urbanization, and a host of other issues. A treaty about the world’s seas limits military action, mining rights, and other aspects of international law that Americans take for granted. It is waiting on approval in the U.S. Senate.

The U.N.’s Small Arms Treaty would nullify the Constitution’s Second Amendment right of citizens to bear arms while prohibiting firearm and ammunition manufacturers from selling to the public, any transfer of firearm ownership, and require U.S. citizens to deliver any firearm they own to the local government for collection and destruction.

In the last century governments worldwide have been responsible for the murder of an estimated 262 million of their citizens even when some had small arms. Most, however, were defenseless.

Most Americans are by now familiar with the UN’s Environmental Program that has been at the heart of the “global warming” hoax. It was based entirely on falsified computer models whose primary source was the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain and even U.S. government agencies such as NOAA.

In November 2009, thousands of leaked emails between the CRU and fellow conspirators in the U.S. revealed that they were doing everything in their power to prevent the release of their data bases while also denying the publication of data that debunked their machinations in formerly respected science journals.

Biodiversity, the New Scare

Seeing the collapse of “global warming” as an instrument to destroy industrialization by claiming the Earth was threatened by carbon dioxide emissions (a gas that is essential to the growth of all vegetation on the planet), the environmental conspirators in the UN have come up with a new global scare campaign; the claim that species and forests, et cetera, are disappearing so fast that the case for saving them is “more powerful than climate change.”

Elements of the UN report were made known on its annual International Day for Biodiversity in May. In a Washington Times commentary, E. Calvin Beisner identified this as a “familiar green tactic known as ‘science by press release.’” The thrust of this new global scam is an attack on the global economic system in order to put it under the control of the United Nations.

Get ready to hear from every direction that the rate of species extinction is now anywhere from one thousand to ten thousand times faster than ever before and, like “climate change” it is going to be blamed on human beings and their evil economic system. It will, of course, be based on computer models!

The United States has already fallen prey to the bogus “endangered species” racket, having passed a law in 1973 to protect them. Its true purpose is to stop any development, any agricultural activity, and any access to energy resources.

The Endangered Species Act is the reason the federal government now routinely shuts off irrigation water to farmers, ruining their farms and lives while driving up the cost of the crops they would otherwise be providing.

It is a splendid way for environmentalists to undermine the nation’s economy and security.

The United Nations has proven to be, not merely a huge failure regarding its mission to end war, but an international institution that has long since metastasized into a relentless quest for global government and, with it, the subjugation of humanity.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

While standing in line at the bank last week, I overheard a 20-something employee talking to his boomer colleague about a concert he had attended over the weekend. “It was bad-ass!” he exclaimed, loud enough for the entire line of waiting customers [...]]]> IMITATION ISN’T ALWAYS FLATTERING:
Lessons From The Land Of Youth And Cool

While standing in line at the bank last week, I overheard a 20-something employee talking to his boomer colleague about a concert he had attended over the weekend. “It was bad-ass!” he exclaimed, loud enough for the entire line of waiting customers to hear. I couldn’t believe my ears when the decades-older banker replied, “Yeah, my weekend was bad-ass, too!”

In fact, my reaction to this conversation was so negative that I thought about it and talked about it for days. Okay, maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t feel comfortable having my money handled by anyone who—while within earshot of customers—describes his weekend as “bad-ass.” Could it be that I trust only silver-haired prep-school patricians who steer clear of slang to protect my savings? My intellect reasoned that a banker who uses the term “bad-ass” could be just as stalwart in his duties. Could it be that I, a resident of the “Socialist Republic of Berkeley,” might be more conservative than I’d like to admit? As I wrestled with all of this, a simple truth emerged: young or old, I don’t want a “bad-ass” banker!

In early times, when the younger generation entered the workforce, they emulated their elders in speech, dress, and behavior. But the tables have turned and the older generations are now copying the younger ones in a desperate attempt to remain youthful, cool, and cutting edge. All around me I hear Boomers and Gen X’ers imitating the slang and diction of their younger counterparts. A few months ago, I listened to a panel of women professionals who sounded more like Southern California valley girls than experts. The problem was simple: upward inflection. The panelists turned each statement into a question by raising their pitch at the end of every sentence, which made their speech sing-songy—often adding, “Right?” when they finished saying something. The panelists sounded unsure of themselves, as if they were seeking approval, rather than coming across as confident and in command.

Lately I’ve been catching myself sprinkling “ya know” between my sentences, as though I’m asking my listener for agreement or approval (which, by the way, I’m really not). Yuk! And, yes, I’m also guilty of overusing the most unlikable and misused word in the English language. Like, ya know which word I’m, like, talking about, right?

Obviously, Millennials, Gen Y’ers, Gen X’ers, and Boomers all have plenty to offer in the workplace. The younger generations bring tech saviness, energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm. The older generations provide invaluable job skills, long-term client relationships, life experience, and historical perspective. But when it comes to language usage and habits of speech, we would all be better off if the younger folks emulated their older colleagues instead of the other way around. Regardless of your age or the industry in which you are employed, here are some tips for making the workplace a little less “bad-ass” and a bit more dignified the next time you communicate:

KICK THE LIKE HABIT
This habit might seem impossible to shake, but don’t worry! With greater self-awareness and practice you can start sounding like the expert you really are. Many of us have had to work hard to shake off an accent (in my case, a cheese-steak thick Philadelphia accent), so believe me when I tell you that kicking the “like” habit is also doable. I suggest taping yourself describing a conversation (you can do this privately or with a friend), then replay and notice how often you insert “like” into your sentences. Pinpoint where you use misuse the word: Is it when you’re quoting someone? When you’re thinking or needing to pause? Is it a way for you to fill the silence? If it’s the latter, try speaking more slowly and deliberately. Using pauses, deep breaths, and imagining that you are talking to someone who speaks little English can help you slow down and shake the “like” habit. For more ideas on how to, like, stop saying “like,” check out this great wikihow article.

GET RID OF UPWARD INFLECTION
Upward inflection, just like gross misuse of the word “like,” can be detrimental to careers—sufferers may not be taken seriously or may be seen as lacking the necessary confidence to climb the workplace ladder. First, read a few declarative sentences into a tape recorder. Listen to hear if you are saying them as a statement of fact or as a question. If you sound like you are asking a question, then you are upward inflecting at the end of the sentence. To change your speech patterns, say out loud, “I need to convince them of this!” and then immediately repeat the sentence to practice downward intonation. For example, people with an upward inflection habit will take a statement like, “This is a good budget!” and say it as though they were asking a question, “This is a good budget?” Repeat your statement several times until you can say it without the question mark.

BE SENSITIVE WHEN USING SLANG
Adjusting your communication style so that each audience will understand and relate to you is what I call “chameleon communication.” For example, a rampant texter probably doesn’t email his grandmother using the same abbreviations and emoticons used when texting friends. Instead, he uses expressions she will understand. Apply this same logic to the workplace—coworkers and clients from different generations may not know what certain slang words mean or might find them offensive. Listen to yourself carefully. If you use words like “bad-ass” or “awesome” or “dude” at work, make some speech adjustments—like, fast!

USE PROPER SPELLING AND GRAMMAR
The popularity of texting and instant messaging has made us all a little lackadaisical when it comes to writing complete, grammatically-correct sentences. And too many of us have become lazy, relying on spell check to catch mistakes instead of proofing our missives. But your spell checker doesn’t catch common spelling errors like writing “they’re” when you mean “their” or “here” when you mean “hear.” The bottom line is this: If you use abbreviations, emoticons, and misspellings in your workplace communication, you will appear unprofessional. Unless you are using a commonly accepted professional abbreviation, spell the word out. Make certain to proof all your written communication, and for really important documents, proof several times or ask a colleague to look over the copy for spelling and grammar mistakes. For younger folks who are new the workplace, attempting to imitate the writing tone of more experienced colleagues can be helpful in shaping your own communication style.

Peggy Klaus, President of Klaus & Associates

You may have seen Peggy Klaus on Nightline, the Today Show, and 20/20 or read her advice in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Newsweek, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and O magazine. You may know her as the “brag lady” or—as one newspaper called her—a “bragologist” because of her popular book, BRAG! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It (Hachette Books Group, Hardcover 2003, Paperback 2004). Or you may know Klaus for the soft skills savvy she promotes in her second tome, The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They’d Learned Sooner (Collins, January 2008).

For more than a decade Klaus has provided communication and leadership training programs, keynotes, and executive coaching at leading corporations and organizations worldwide. Her client list reads like a who’s who of Fortune 500 companies, including firms such as JP Morgan Chase, MasterCard, Computer Associates, Chevron Corporation, Deloitte, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, The National Football League, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, American Express, Mattel, Booz Allen Hamilton, Kaiser Permanente, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, among others. She also has served as a lecturer at Harvard University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

With advanced degrees in drama, speech, and theatre from London’s Royal Academy of Music and the Drama Studio, Klaus began her career as an actor and classical singer. She then moved to Hollywood to become a producer, director, and coach who worked with actors, comedians, musicians, and broadcast news talent for productions at Paramount Studios, Warner Brothers, ABC, CBS, and NBC TV, among others.

When she is not coaching, training, lecturing, making television appearances, or giving keynotes in the US, Europe, and Asia, Klaus can be found in Berkeley, California, where she lives with her husband.

Taxes [...]]]> Bring Back Prohibition!

By Alan Caruba

That’s right. Bring back Prohibition. It was such a success, right? Oh sure, it led to the development of organized crime, everyone ignored it, and it took a Constitutional amendment to get rid of it, but it did save so many from the evils of demon rum—not!

Taxes on things people enjoy are generally called “sin” taxes. They are an easy way to raise revenue and politicians who break most of the Ten Commandments love to impose them.

I would love to see Congress try to pass a massive tax on chocolate. How long do you think it would take for a Chocolate Tea Party to get organized, on buses, and down to the Capitol steps wielding pitchforks?

But wait, eating chocolate in any shape, manner or form has health implications. At a time when we are all being hectored for being too fat, chocolate is a major contributor to that trend. It’s said to give the younger set zits and, of course, it runs up their dentist bills like crazy. Never mind that it tastes good! It’s bad for you and should be taxed and taxed and then taxed some more!

This is, of course, the “reasoning” behind the long campaign to stamp out smoking in America. It is, we’re told, “for your own good.” If we had to give up everything we enjoy for our own good, we’d—all together now—bring back Prohibition!

Before I continue, in the interest of full disclosure, I smoke cigars. I have smoked them since I was in my twenties and I am now in my seventies. My father, who passed away in his early nineties, smoked a pipe from his youth. Second-hand smoke had no apparent affect on my mother who passed away at age 98.

The “science” behind second-hand smoke is the typical bogus exaggeration that got DDT banned. Since 1972, malaria has claimed the lives of an estimated forty million people worldwide.

To punish smokers because there are some diseases associated with it is manifestly unfair when one considers that over-eating can be just as hazardous to one’s health and, of course, drinking too much is a major cause of death.

Just about anything one does to excess can be harmful. The real question is whether the government has any mandate to interfere with personal lifestyle decisions. The answer is, it doesn’t.

It is smokers who are routinely punished financially for the enjoyment of cigars, cigarettes or pipe tobacco. It used to cost me around $140 a month for two boxes of Casa Blanca’s, hand-rolled cigars from the Dominican Republic. It now costs over $200 a month. That’s obscene.

Only government could get away with forcing up the price in that matter. These days it is intended to close the gap in bloated state budgets. In New York State, the latest tax proposal on cigarettes would increase the cost to about $10 per pack!

The problem is that neither the federal, nor the state budgets ever seem to get smaller, leaner. The entire nation is on the brink of bankruptcy and, apparently, taxing smokers seems to be one of the preferred solutions.

With the exception of those states whose constitutions require balanced budgets, most of the fifty states are in such deep debt that the federal government must print money and send it to them in box cars to help pay for all the unfunded mandates that have been imposed on them, along with the cost of their contracts with civil service unions whose pensions and health care benefits dwarf those employed in the private sector.

There’s currently a House bill, H.R. 4439, the Tobacco Parity Act of 2010 that would raise taxes on pipe tobacco. It would raise it 775%!!!! The tax would increase from $2.83 per pound to $24.78 per pound! That, too, is obscene.

Prohibition demonstrated that, if you raise the price of a certain good or service beyond a certain point, people will find a way to procure it more cheaply. They will cross state lines, purchase over the Internet, or seek a black market outlet. One of the favorite ways of financing domestic terrorism that Islamists found has been trafficking in out-of-state cigarettes.

This is so manifestly nuts that it can only hasten the day when a Fair Tax, one based on purchases as opposed to income, must become the law of the land. Making life expensive for everyone who wants to smoke, drink or fill up their gas tank is surely going to reach a point of a massive blowback from taxpayers because it is manifestly unfair and unjust.

Here’s how irrational raising taxes on tobacco use is. The increased tax is supposed to reduce the number of smokers. Thus, we’re told, the raising of taxes is intended to reduce the number of people from whom the higher taxes can be squeezed. This is the same insane illogical thinking that justifies raising gasoline taxes in order, we’re told, to force people to use public transit.

It never happens. It is a fantasy. It is a modern form of the inquisition.

The only thing this deliberate injustice achieves is the destruction of any motivation to earn more or to invest one’s earnings. It exists to secure more revenue for government programs, giveaways, of which there is no end. It is a formula for the destruction of the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The president is starting to look snakebit. He’s starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t Mr. Carter’s fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the [...]]]> A Snakebit President

Americans want leaders on whom the sun shines.

The president is starting to look snakebit. He’s starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t Mr. Carter’s fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in “Pippin,” the Broadway show of Carter’s era, who spoke of “the rule that every general knows by heart, that it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.” Mr. Carter’s opposite was Bill Clinton, on whom fortune smiled with eight years of relative peace and a worldwide economic boom. What misfortune Mr. Clinton experienced he mostly created himself. History didn’t impose it.

But Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president. They want presidents on whom the sun shines.

It isn’t Mr. Obama’s fault that an oil rig blew in the Gulf and a gusher resulted. He already had two wars and the great recession. But the lack of adequate federal government response appropriately redounds on him. In a Wall Street Journal investigation published Thursday, reporters Jeffrey Ball and Jonathan Weisman wrote the federal government at first moved quickly, but soon “faltered.” “The federal government, which under the law is in charge of fighting large spills, had to make things up as it went along.” It hadn’t anticipated a spill this big. The first weekend in May, when water was rough, contractors hired by BP to lay boom “mostly stayed ashore,” according to a local official. “Shrimpers took matters into their own hands, laying 18,000 feet of boom,” compared to about 4,000 feet by BP’s contractors.

The administration’s failure to take impressive action after the spill dinged its reputation for competence. The president’s failure to turn things around Tuesday night with a speech damaged his reputation as a man whose rhetorical powers are such that he can turn things around with a speech. He lessened his own mystique. Reaction among his usual supporters was, in the words of Time’s Mark Halperin, “fierce, unforeseen disappointment.” Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post called the speech “profoundly underwhelming,” a “feeble call to action.” Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich called the speech “vapid.” Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times said the president looked “awkward and robotic.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann famously said “It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days.” Chris Matthews scored “a lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue ribbon talk.” Mr. Olbermann, on Mr. Obama’s well-written peroration: “It’s nice but, again, how? Where was the ‘how’ in this speech when the nation is crying out for ‘how’?”

The right didn’t like the speech either.

As for the center, Nielsen reported that 32 million people watched the speech, as compared to 48 million viewers that watched the State of the Union. Ronald Reagan once said you should never confuse the reviews with the box office. This was the box office voting with its clickers.

No reason to join the pile on, but some small points. Two growing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others “experts in academia” on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the “small people” in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.

And when speaking of why proper precautions and safety measures were not in place, the president sternly declared, “I want to know why.” But two months in he should know. And he should be telling us. Such empty sternness is . . . empty.

Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they’re told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don’t look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker.”

The president could move his hands because he was not holding a hard copy of his speech. Normally presidents have had a printed copy of the speech in their hands or on the desk, in case the teleprompter freezes or fails. Mr. Obama’s desk was shiny and empty. A White House aide says the director of Oval Office operations had a hard copy just off camera, and was following along as the president spoke so that if the prompter broke he’d be able to give it to the president at the spot he left off.

But that would look a little startling, an arm suddenly darting into the frame to hand the president a script. And the pages could fall. If one were in the mood for a cheap metaphor one would say this is an example of the White House’s tendency not to anticipate trouble.

There is still a sense about Mr. Obama that he needs George W. Bush in order to give his presidency full shape and meaning. In this he is like Jimmy Carter, who needed Richard Nixon, or rather the Watergate scandal, which made him president. Mr. Carter needed Richard Nixon standing in the corner looking like he’d spent the night sleeping in his suit as it hangs in the closet. The image is from Joe McGinnis’s “The Selling of the President, 1968.” Mr. Carter needed to be able to point at Nixon and say, “I’m not him. He dirty, me clean. You hate him, like me.” Carter’s presidency was given coherence and meaning by Nixon, Watergate, and without it that presidency seemed formless. Mr. Obama, in the same way, needs Mr. Bush standing in the corner like Boo Radley, saying “Let’s invade something!” But Mr. Bush is wisely back home in Texas finishing a book, and the president never sounds weaker than when he suggests his predicament is all his predecessor’s fault.

Mr. Obama needs Mr. Bush in the corner and doesn’t have him. That’s part of why he looks so alone out there.

And seems so snakebit, so at the mercy of forces. When you’re snakebit you get some sympathy, and some will come. With all the president’s woe there will be some counter-reaction among commentators, journalists and others. There will likely be among the Democratic leadership, too. “Love him or not he’s what we’ve got, and he’s what we have for the next two years. Help the guy, cool the criticism, punch back for him.” But it’s also true that among Democrats—and others—when the talk turns to the presidency it turns more and more to Hillary Clinton. “We may have made a mistake. She would have been better.” Sooner or later the secretary of state is going to come under fairly consistent pressure to begin to consider 2012. A hunch: She won’t really want to. Because she has enjoyed being loyal. She didn’t only prove to others she could be loyal, a team player. She proved it to herself. And it has only added to her luster.

As for the president, the great question is what you do when you start to feel snakebit. Maybe he’ll start to doubt his own moves and instincts. Maybe not. Jimmy Carter didn’t. He fought hard for re-election in 1980, and until near the end thought he’d win. He trusted the American people, and in an odd way he trusted his luck.

President Obama is one of the most articulate we have had in that office. His ability to deliver a speech or a short talk such as his first from the Oval Office Tuesday evening is impressive. He knows how to deliver an address.

What he [...]]]> Obama Asks America to Commit Suicide

By Alan Caruba

President Obama is one of the most articulate we have had in that office. His ability to deliver a speech or a short talk such as his first from the Oval Office Tuesday evening is impressive. He knows how to deliver an address.

What he doesn’t know or doesn’t care about is the difference between the truth and a lie.

His fifteen-minute address was the piling on of one lie after another regarding America’s use of energy and its needs for the future.

It is a lie to say America is “addicted” to “fossil fuels.” Oil is not a fossil fuel. It is not the result of dead dinosaurs. It is created deep in the bowels of the planet. There is an abundance of oil, but with the wealth it creates there is also massive corruption in many of the nations that possess it.

We are no more addicted to oil than we are addicted to oxygen. This extraordinary mineral is a part of every aspect of our lives; used to create plastic, used in pharmaceuticals, used for the asphalt that pave our highways, and used as the fuel for our cars, trucks, and for countless other applications.

Oil is not “finite” as the president suggested. There is no end of oil.

There are, however, tremendous challenges and costs to find it, drill for it, transport it, and refine it. It is an industry that requires huge amounts of money to discover new reservoirs of oil and even more to acquire it. It involves tremendous risk as well. Oil companies that hit too many dry wells are no longer in business.

The president cited China as a nation pursuing “clean energy”, but the president said nothing of the new coal-fired plants to generate electricity that China has been opening every week in recent years and will continue to do in the years ahead. The president did not mention that China is literally drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Cuba. Like every modern nation, China needs oil.

America needs oil, but the policies of previous administrations from the 1970s onward have stymied production, shut down existing wells, driven oil companies to seek it anywhere but here!

Instead, he devoted the thrust of his address to tell Americans they must “embrace a clean energy future”, must “transition away” from so-called fossil fuels, and that the nation must, in fact, “accelerate” that effort.

The president is lying. There is no “clean energy future” when he talks of solar and wind energy.

Neither solar or wind can begin to compete with oil, coal and natural gas. If they were viable, the government would not have to plunder the national treasury to provide them with subsidies, requiring that they be included as a source by utilities.

Together, after many years of propaganda, they only provide about three percent of the nation’s energy requirements. They will never provide enough because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. Every wind and solar farm must be backed up by a traditional plant, be it coal-fired, nuclear, natural gas or hydroelectric.

Instead, this administration has declared war on the most abundant source of energy we have in America, coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Coal provides fifty percent of our electricity and it could provide even more; a source that could last for centuries, except that the Obama administration is doing everything it can to thwart the building of new coal-fired plants, to shut down coal mining operations.

If Americans continue to believe this president’s lies, if we continue to believe decades of lies by environmental organizations, many of whom have been the happy recipients of oil industry largess and support, and if we abandon the very sources of energy on which our entire economy and way of life depends, this president will have led America off the cliff.

President Obama is asking America to commit suicide.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

I have a friend of over twenty-five years who I watched build a single idea for a business into one that, at one time, was taking in a million dollars a year. Then the Internet came along, followed by the 2008 financial crisis.

After a [...]]]> The Decline and Fall of Everybody

By Alan Caruba

I have a friend of over twenty-five years who I watched build a single idea for a business into one that, at one time, was taking in a million dollars a year. Then the Internet came along, followed by the 2008 financial crisis.

After a reasonable period of agonizing, my friend sat down and put the numbers on the page. They added up to firing all his employees and not renewing the lease on the office in which he’d been since the mid-1980s. Tech savvy, his business has gone “virtual.” As he put it, “I will make sales from my cell phone.”

Now take my friend, the classic entrepreneur and small business owner, and multiply him by thousands across the fruited plains and purple mountains majesty. Not only has the economy crashed, thanks to the latest “bubble” of bad housing mortgages, but it happened just in time to ensure that Barack Obama who never owned a business, met a payroll, or worried about selling anything other than himself was elected president.

Next on the list of burst bubbles will be all the “green” technology and “clean energy” companies into which the government has been pumping billions in subsidies for wind and solar power, grants for research on biofuels, electric cars, and all the other “green” projects the public continues to be told represent a bright new world.

Why would anyone think that a “community organizer”, academic, and briefly a working lawyer, could know or even be brought up to speed fast enough to know what to avoid and what needs to be done to put people back to work or help small to medium businesses? The answer is he couldn’t and he wouldn’t and he didn’t.

Obama’s most basic instincts are a liberal distrust of “big business”, “Wall Street”, and anyone else involved in shaping and making the economy. This is particularly true since his political rise has been fueled by millions from unions. He is their man. They own him. He is beholden to a number of other special interests, but that is where his heart is. That is where he looked for and received campaign funds, campaign manpower, and votes.

Once in office, he set about reversing the slow and well-deserved decline of unions that, while having a long-ago past history of correcting working conditions, are now totally parasitic no matter whether it is the auto or any other industry, or whether it is in the public service sector where they toil as government workers, teachers, and others whose work rules, health benefits, and pensions have contributed to the insolvency of most states and cities.

They and the nation’s other blood-suckers, the lawyers, are Obama’s chosen constituency and everybody else can just plain go to hell or shut up and take a government-issued check for a return on taxes you may not have paid (40% do not pay taxes these days), your food stamps debit card, or any of the other government handouts that keep people docile and unproductive. Don’t worry, when your unemployment benefits run out, Congress will just extend them.

The problem is that Congress and the nation are just flat broke. At some point all the borrowing will stop because those doing the lending will decide they are not seeing any real return on their investments in U.S. Treasury notes.

The problem is that one of the wonders of globalization is that when one country goes belly up, it affects all the rest. Sooner or later the whole global network of central banks is likely to run out of money with which to bail out one another. Then what?

My friend will run his business as best he can in an economy where his customer base has increasingly reached the same point that whole nations will. They will have to decide where to spend what little money they have.

This is going to become an increasingly difficult decision when Obama and the Congress raise taxes at the worst possible time, thus sucking anywhere from 40% to 60% or more out of the pockets of the middle class, the entrepreneurs, the managers, the professionals. If they own homes as many do, they will cease to have any equity and prove hard to sell.

So it will be the decline and fall of everybody other than the millionaires who can afford the lawyers and accountants to show them how to pay less taxes than a chimney sweep or bus driver.

My friend is sounding a lot more relaxed these days. He is no longer responsible for all the costs involved with hiring, paying, or firing anyone. He no longer has to meet the rent on his office. Even so, he has discovered a whole new layer of reporting to the IRS regarding his venders and must in turn provide data to those who continue to use his services. American businesses, large, medium and small are strangling on government regulation and taxation.

There is a ripple effect here. It begins with the laid-off former employees who cannot find new jobs. It includes the owner of the office building who has space he cannot rent to a new business enterprise. It includes a copier machine lease allowed to lapse. As he put it, he can walk down the block from where he lives and use printing and delivery services. For list maintenance and other IT services, there’s always the vendor in Bangalore, India.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

by Bob Grant

The spill in the gulf is killing the fish,

To destroy all of us some others wish.

The stocks are all down and banks seem to fail,

We fear for our travel on planes or on rail.

The globe is now warming or all just a [...]]]> When I Choose a Book

by Bob Grant

The spill in the gulf is killing the fish,

To destroy all of us some others wish.

The stocks are all down and banks seem to fail,

We fear for our travel on planes or on rail.

The globe is now warming or all just a scam,

Is Congress for us or don’t give a damn?

No cure for some ills that strikes any time,

The news is all filled with mayhem and crime.

Our borders are busting with unwanted guests,

Our cities are crawling with rodents and pests.

When I Choose a Book – my money I’m spending,

I look at the back – I crave happy endings.

While we all are now familiar with Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar’s remark about keeping the government’s boot on the neck of BP, one of the most remarkable aspects of the oil spill drama has been the near absence of Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of [...]]]> The Invisible Dr. Chu

By Alan Caruba

While we all are now familiar with Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar’s remark about keeping the government’s boot on the neck of BP, one of the most remarkable aspects of the oil spill drama has been the near absence of Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

Other than an appearance MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the Nobel Prize laureate for physics has not been the designated spokesman for the Obama administration. That job has fallen to Carol Browner, the energy and environment advisor to the president. One might think the man overseeing the Department of Energy might logically also be addressing the oil spill, but no.

Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that Secretary Chu has been double-dipped in all the environmental lies about global warming and no one has told him that the Earth has been cooling for the past decade or that a huge batch of leaked emails is evidence of massive data tampering to support the global warming hoax.

Well, he has a lot on his plate. It’s hard to be Secretary of Energy when you pretty much hate most hydrocarbons, coal, oil and natural gas, blaming them and the six billion people on Earth for generating the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the Earth’s average mean temperature is one of those details he’s overlooked.

As Secretary Chu was saying back in September 2008, “Coal is my worst nightmare.” Well, if your resume sported the fact that you headed up the “Helios Project” (named for the Sun) when you were working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focusing on biofuels, you too might take a dim view of the other sources that represent the energies everybody uses.

Before the BP oil spill accident, Secretary Chu was unhappy that the United States was dependent on oil (like every other nation on Earth.) The Secretary said that “most proven reserves…are now off-shore. It will cost more to extract from tar sands and (there would be) more CO2 emissions.” Earth to Dr. Chu! There’s millions of barrels of oil in Alaska, but it is off limits for fear a caribou might be harmed.

The Secretary of Energy is no big fan of nuclear power either. He cites waste problems, but apparently is unaware that the huge billion-dollar depository, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, was abandoned by the Obama administration despite having been built specifically for storing nuclear waste.

It’s more like wasting money than nuclear waste, but the United States Recovery Act, the ill-famed stimulus act, allocated $80 billion to research and use of “clean” energy such as wind and solar, and to “efficiency.” The problem is that, without a dependable supply of electricity, all the efficiency in the world will not make much difference if the lights go out.

Perhaps it’s not a good idea to send out Secretary Chu to discuss the oil spill. As reported in the May 27, 2009 edition of The Times (UK), at the opening of the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, he suggested that painting the world’s roofs, roads and pavements white would be a great way to cut carbon emissions. They would “reflect up to 80% of the sunlight that falls on them.” He added that “a global initiative” would be a way to save us from global warming.

Only there is no global warming, carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the climate, and one rig out of more than three hundred in the Gulf has sprung a leak. Ironically, years ago when he was an academic at University of California-Berkeley, he received a winning bid for a $500 million grant funded by BP to study something or other.

Too many years ago than I want to recall, I was the publications director for a major northeastern institute of technology. It was filled with engineers who actually know how to make things work, build bridges, fix oil leaks and such. There were also some brilliant physicists on the faculty. The latter had trouble parking their cars between the yellow lines and other mundane tasks.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

I have a few enduring Memorial Day memories. Most involve my Dad who never served in the military, being too young for the First World War and too old for the Second twenty years later.

Even so, there was never a Memorial Day in Maplewood, NJ when we [...]]]> Memorial Day Memories

By Alan Caruba

I have a few enduring Memorial Day memories. Most involve my Dad who never served in the military, being too young for the First World War and too old for the Second twenty years later.

Even so, there was never a Memorial Day in Maplewood, NJ when we did not go down to the park, also named Memorial, and watch the veterans, the police and fire units, the Boy and Girl Scouts, and the high school band march to the grassy area where town officials would give speeches about the fallen heroes. Little Maplewood had its share that had served in all of the nation’s wars.

Even as a child I understood my Father’s pride in his nation and in those who had fought to protect its liberty. Later, when I was in the military my other memory was marching through downtown Columbus, Georgia during the Memorial Day parades.

It is a different kind of holiday from Fourth of July. It’s about remembrance. It is focused on those whom Lincoln said gave their last full measure of devotion to their nation.

It is a sober holiday, but it is also a day for picnics and barbecues. In a way, those who died are honored by the mundane activities in which we engage on a day dedicated to their memory. They would have done the same had they lived.

What strikes me most is the way, then and now, so many young men enlisted to fight our wars. Others accepted conscription and fought bravely too. What is so very different is today’s all-volunteer military. Nobody has to sign up for duty, but they do.

The demarcation line came in the 1970s when Americans, seeing the carnage of war in Vietnam on their nightly television news, watching the casualty numbers grow, gradually came together to protest year after year until the conflict ended.

While we have great pride in our military, regarding it more highly than other element of our government, Americans have become detached from the bloodletting of war. They are fought at great distances. Mostly, Americans are highly resistant to any losses in battle despite the records in past wars of literally thousands of casualties. Those were wars we needed to win.

The news lately was of the one thousandth casualty in Afghanistan. We have been there since shortly after 9/11. We lose 40,000 people to death on our highways every year; more by far than the totals of those we have lost in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It doesn’t make it any less painful for their families, but in the long battle for freedom, it is a remarkably small price to pay and the extraordinary part is that there are still heroes willing to pay the price.

Plato said it best. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, [...]]]>

He Was Supposed to Be Competent

The spill is a disaster for the president and his political philosophy.

I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.

The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there cannot solve.

And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public’s fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don’t get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.

In his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened language—”catastrophe,” etc.—but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who won’t see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have been, “I will not be defensive, I will not give them a resentful soundbite.” But his strategic problem was that he’d already lost the battle. If the well was plugged tomorrow, the damage will already have been done.

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as, say, Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP, or trust it.

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls?

What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama’s standing with Democrats. They don’t love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go badly—they are going to start to peel off. The political operative James Carville, the most vocal and influential of the president’s Gulf critics, signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He did it through the passion of his denunciations.

The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It’s not good to have a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety, that the leader of “the indispensable nation” be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.

Mr. Obama himself, when running for president, made much of Bush administration distraction and detachment during Katrina. Now the Republican Party will, understandably, go to town on Mr. Obama’s having gone before this week only once to the gulf, and the fund-raiser in San Francisco that seemed to take precedence, and the EPA chief who decided to cancel a New York fund-raiser only after the press reported that she planned to attend.

But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

]]> http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/2010/05/he-was-supposed-to-be-competent/feed/ 1 http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/2010/05/obamas-news-conference-blah-blah-blah/ http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/2010/05/obamas-news-conference-blah-blah-blah/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 11:47:56 +0000 Alan Caruba http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/?p=15281

5/27/10 – The President, after a lapse of 309 days, held a news conference Thursday. It came shortly after news that earlier in the day the director of the Mineral Management Service, Elizabeth Birnbaum, had either resigned or been fired. Obama professed to not know [...]]]> Obama’s News Conference: Blah, Blah, Blah

By Alan Caruba

5/27/10 – The President, after a lapse of 309 days, held a news conference Thursday. It came shortly after news that earlier in the day the director of the Mineral Management Service, Elizabeth Birnbaum, had either resigned or been fired. Obama professed to not know the circumstances. Yeah. Sure.

What we do know is that Obama’s method of dealing with a news conference is to talk each question to death. In addition, he makes sure that we all know that, no matter what the problem under discussion, it was all George W. Bush’s fault.

Watching Obama’s head swivel back and forth between the TelePromters as he read his opening prepared statement for the first fifteen minutes or so was mildly comical and it occurred to me that he has become a real life parody of a Saturday Night Live parody, the latter of which is at least entertaining.

The press conference was devoted largely to blaming oil company, British Petroleum, for the mess while, at the same time, saying that “BP is acting at our direction.” This is known as having it both ways. Somehow, knowing that the federal government is in charge is not all that reassuring. And, of course, the real problem began “under the previous administration.”

The president then used one of his snore-inducing answers to segue to the usual blather about a “clean energy” economy. This is pure fiction. America and the rest of the advanced nations of the world depend entirely on oil, natural gas, and coal. Long after all of us and our grandchildren are dead these hydrocarbons will still be used.

By then, however, Obama’s nonsense about clean energy jobs will have been long forgotten. They don’t exist now and they will not until the last drop of oil is extracted, the last cubic meter of natural gas, and the last lump of coal is dug from the ground. Wind and solar energy is largely a huge fraud based on the even bigger fraud of “climate change.”

And of course the President took the opportunity to push the legislation before the Senate that would put the federal government in charge of who gets energy, how much they get, and how much they will pay for it. Using the bogus claim that carbon dioxide is a threat to human life the EPA is currently trying to gain control all energy use. Cap-and-Trade, a huge tax, would destroy what little hope is left for the economy to recover.

The highlight of the conference for me was when the insane old crone, Helen Thomas, asked about Afghanistan after Obama had seemingly exhausted the subject (and the audience) on the topic of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.

Later questions dealt with the Arizona law and the White House criticism of it and border security. Obama used them to push amnesty for illegal aliens without actually saying amnesty. Meanwhile, more and more states are fashioning their own version of the Arizona bill in lieu of the federal government’s failure to stop illegal aliens. Amnesty is a strictly Democrat “answer” to the problem.

Responding to a question about the oil spill, the President earlier had said, “I intend to use the full force of the government to protect our fellow citizens” on the southern state borders affected by the spill. One could only wish that he had the same resolve regarding the thousands of illegal Mexicans and “others” that continue to pour across.

The issue of a possible White House bribe to a candidate to drop out of the Pennsylvania primary race got danced away with the usual assurances from what we were told was going to be the most transparent White House ever.

I feared for my sanity after an hour and stopped watching and listening.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

by Tyree Harris

One of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned was that if you really want to solve a problem, you must start at the origins of it. Rather than spending time wrestling with the effects of a bigger issue, one should focus on the source of hardship, [...]]]> U.S. problems rooted in poverty

by Tyree Harris

One of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned was that if you really want to solve a problem, you must start at the origins of it. Rather than spending time wrestling with the effects of a bigger issue, one should focus on the source of hardship, and that will usually eliminate any resulting side issues.

Apparently, America skipped school the day that lesson was taught.

We live in a nation with high incarceration rates, high obesity rates, drug problems and questionable high school curriculums. America has dedicated countless funds, bills and infomercials to ending all these issues, but the problems seem to be going nowhere.

Why? Because they are just the results of something larger: poverty.

Poverty brews mis-education

Raggedy books. Prison-style windows. Unheated buildings. Teachers more concerned with discipline than academics. All of these are common sights in America’s inner-city schools. Because these areas are low-income, with not as much tax money and neighborhood support going to their schools, they often have outdated books and a piteous curriculum with limited advanced placement courses, little emphasis on higher education and overfilled classes.

Suburban schools don’t feel these same effects — just ask anyone who went to Lake Oswego, or anyone who went to a suburban school in Baltimore, Md. According to a 2008 report from CBS News, 81.5 percent of the public school students in Baltimore’s suburbs graduate, compared to just 34.6 within Baltimore’s inner-city schools.

Ouch.

Because people are living in poor areas, they are much less likely to graduate (17 of the nation’s 50 largest cities had graduation rates lower than 50 percent). Poverty has a direct relationship to poor education, because of our schools’ dependency on regional taxation and neighborhood support. If your area cannot afford to pour a lot of tax money into schools and extra curricular programs — too bad. All our nation has to say then is, “Good luck earning your GED.”

Poverty leads to crime and incarceration

From great poverty arises great desperation. As we saw, many inner-city children were never taught to appreciate an education, and in turn, weren’t granted the necessary skills to succeed in society.

No money, no school and endless pressure to survive create a perfect storm for a life of crime.

America has the highest rate of intentional gun deaths in the world — not coincidentally, America also has the worst distribution of wealth amongst industrialized nations, and one of the highest poverty rates.

The formula is clear: High poverty plus high needs equals high crime rate.

Understand that I do not support any type of drug distribution, violent crime or illegal behavior of this nature. But if I am ever hungry, jobless and have children to feed, there isn’t much I wouldn’t do to make those ends meet. Sure, it’s easy for us, sitting in this academic fantasy world, to sit on our high horses and speak lowly upon what some people do to survive in poverty-stricken areas; but you know, if you grew up the way some of those kids grew up, maybe you’d be able to understand.

Our nation continues to fight crime and drug distribution with stiffening laws, a hypocritical death sentence and even a “war on drugs.” But a war on poverty would have far greater effects on reducing our crime rate than any of the current methods of crime prevention.

And to think, they wouldn’t have to send 2 million Americans behind bars in the process.

Poverty is not earned. It is ascribed.

Because of poverty, you are more likely to be both malnourished and obese, to be robbed and convicted of robbery, and to be caught both selling and using drugs. When you are poor, you have the highest potential to be the criminal and victim — and this award is ascribed to us at birth.

According to heartsandminds.org, one in four children lives below the official poverty line. That means one in four children is at a higher risk of all the previously mentioned issues by birth right. Combine that with a culmination of studies that indicate that when you are born poor, you most likely will stay poor, and a horrible truth is realized. One in four of all American children are at a very high risk of falling victim to all of our greatest social problems, just because they were born into certain families and certain areas.

Completely unfair, and directly contradicting the romanticized dreams of the American way.

A fat, dumb nation

The issue of poverty is the single greatest problem in our society, yet it is cast aside and overshadowed by its more visible aftermath. Nothing can be solved without the understanding of origins. If America cannot pull together and fight poverty as a nation, it will continue to grow more obese, more stupid and more violent.

To cure poverty is to cure America.