Republicans like wars fought by the military. Backing wars like these butches up even the gay Republicans. Democrats like social wars. This makes them feel better about their natural penchant for stealing money from those of us who produce. The tactics used to fight wars are usually the same: throw a lot of money at it; hire contractors to help senior officials strategize; and have political leadership promise utopian results.
What bakes my noodle is that politicians use that tactic for their pet project war, but they harangue other politicians for using that same tactic for wars that are not one of their pet projects. Namely, Democrat Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana (a mentor to President Obama no Foreign Policy) has complained that both the military and civilian missions were “proceeding without a clear definition of success.” Moreover, that “We could make progress for decades on security, on employment, good governance, women’s rights,” he said, without ever reaching “a satisfying conclusion.”
But has that stopped Congress from pulling the plug of the War on Poverty or AIDS or drugs or the Homeless or Racism or Sexism or Ageism or bloated wind bags who populate Capitol Hill? Nope. These folks just want to keep spending. But how much are they spending on these wars-with-no-end?
The War on Poverty started with a $1 Billion chunk of cash…in 1964. They got $2 Billion the next year. Since that time, the U.S. government has spent $9 Trillion (yep, that’s a T) on the War on Poverty. Why are there still thousands of people standing in line at the soup kitchen each night?
The War on AIDS has cost the U.S. about $2 billion a year (on average) for the past 25 years. That’s $50 billion, and I still have to hear about AIDS babies on TV hospital dramas as if they are as prevalent as ever. It just ain’t so.
The War on Drugs, first declared by Nixon, then championed by Reagan (one of his very few faults), is a money drain. Between all three levels of government, we spend over $50 billion A YEAR on the War on Drugs. That’s about $20 billion a year (on average) for the past, oh, 35 years, for a grand total of $700 Billion. I still have pot-smoking slackers who live next door to me, and the cops don’t do anything about it.
I won’t detail each of these wars, mostly because I don’t want to do the research, but let’s just take these three: Poverty, AIDS, and Drugs. They have cost the US Taxpayer just under $10 Trillion (yep, that’s still a T) over the past 45 years. That’s over $222B a year so that I can watch TV shows with AIDS babies that only exist on TV (except for a few backwards countries in Africa), see lines at the soup kitchen all year round, and have stoners living next door. At least for the $1 Trillion we’ve spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (at a yearly cost of $100B a year – less than half of the three social wars detailed), I got 9 years of no planes being flown into buildings and a ton of new military gadgetry that will last for years.
So why is Senator Lugar so upset about not being able to reach a “satisfying conclusion” to the wars overseas when he would rather just keep throwing good money after bad for his social wars that are equally without “satisfying conclusion?”

H/T to my boy Prophet for the link on this one.

So I read the article below and thought to myself “self, I wonder how this will end up turning out, but I am sure it won’t be good”.

UMM has interests beyond the building of mosques. One of them deals with children’s activities – violence-based children’s activities.

Jawala Scouts or the Jawala Scout Youth Leadership Program, an Islamic paramilitary boys group, was incorporated in Philadelphia in August 2005.

Read the whole story at….

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/07/13/philadelphia’s-islamist-boy-scouts/

I’m not sure why the Republican Party so set against my ever joining common cause with them, but here goes reason number 2,345:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele may be misremembering exactly how and when the Afghanistan war began.
At a Republican Party fundraiser in Connecticut on Thursday, Steele declared that the war in Afghanistan “was a war of Obama’s choosing” that America had not “actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in,” in a response to an attendee’s question about the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal — which Steele called “very comical.”
“The McChrystal incident, to me, was very comical. And I think it’s a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this Administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan,” said Steele. “Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
“It was one of those, one of those areas of the total board of foreign policy ["in the Middle East"? -- Note: The audio is not quite clear in this section.] that we would be in the background, sort of shaping the changes that were necessary in Afghanistan as opposed to directly engaging troops,” Steele continued. “But it was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.”
TPM

Mike…..Mike….Have you forgotten the grammatically challenged swaggering CinC who executed the invasion and ‘land war’ in 2001…then turned away to pursue an unrelated military adventure in 2003? Have you forgotten all of the pretend patriotic bluster when anyone came close to questioning the strategies for both? Way to go in illustrating how intellectually stunted your party is to keep you on as head mouthpiece. I mean, we all expect political hacks to lie, deceive and bloviate, but you’ve taken dishonesty to a new level. Bravo….

Full disclosure…….I am a devout Agnostic. I have not been hit over the head, had an epiphany, been saved or witnessed a miracle that could not be explained. I want there to be an afterlife, but blind faith removed from the above experiences just smacks of hedging ones bets. Rather shallow and transparent to a god. That being said, I have been exposed to and educate myself on matters of religion. And as such, I believe that religion based divisiveness is part of the current political problem in our nation. I fully support the right and freedom to worship as you please or not at all…..but government must be secular in order to administer fairly to all of her citizens. That doesn’t mean that laws based on Judeo-Christian tenets are incompatible with secular law…..but theocracy is utterly incompatible with free will and liberty. The line must be found in the middle.

That is clearly not enough for many people. So my question is this: what tenet of secular law [the US Constitution] prohibits or restricts the right and ability to practice the worship of a faith? Is faith a deep personal relationship with ones creator…or is it a badge to wear, or recruitment contest?

My point being, I have zero problems with a deeply faithful person holding elected office, but it doesn’t make me feel any more secure that the person in question holds themselves accountable to an invisible, unprovable deity. I believe it to be a sad state of affairs that no national candidate is likely to garner money or votes if they are not seen as sufficiently faithful, no matter how adept of a leader they may be.

An elected official should be held accountable to those who placed him/her in that office. Additionally, being of faith certainly hasn’t kept those from committing the litany of ethical, moral or criminal transgressions.

The gist of my problem is the seemingly uncontrollable desire to codify and criminalize consensual acts between adults, based on theology [or rather man's interpretation of such]. Gambling, prostitution, sodomy, adultery, fornication, cohabitation, alcohol purchase on Sundays, abortion…[the list goes on]….can be debated fairly in regards to possible detriments to society; but to argue for or codify these based on biblical law, doesn’t make any sense….unless we live in a theocracy. I cannot understand the need to rule others based on a personal religious belief, and still maintain that one stands for individual liberty and freedoms. They can intertwine, but are not always compatible.

Don’t forget that much of what we thought throughout human history had to be attributed to god, because we simply didn’t know any better. I believe that an intellectual evolution in this regard is an inevitable part of the process. As science explains the things on our world, faith is going to lose some adherents.

Morality is subjective; faith is not universal; and faith is not always compatible with individual rights and liberty. The simple illustration of that fact is that when speaking of Christian tenets, many people either desire or don’t mind being governed by them. Replace Christian with XXXX religion and you get an entirely different paradigm. At the risk of sounding Vulcan, governing by a belief in something unprovable is illogical. The beauty of our secular system….the Constitution, is that nobody is forced to believe or disbelieve. Nobody is restricted in living their lives strictly by the religious tome of their choice, as long as they do not harm, steal or restrict the liberty of others.

Now, one may  argue that mankind may be reduced to its lowest common denominator if not guided by a faith…I think that our ability to craft effective secular law refutes that. I think that one would have to admit that we have witnessed that lowest common denominator throughout history because of religion as much as because of a lack of it. If secular law prohibits and punishes for offenses that are also offenses against god, then we should be in agreement. If offenses are to be punished because they are against biblical law [or rather man's interpretation], but do no harm to other citizens, that is tyranny. Possibly tyranny of the majority, but tyranny nonetheless.

And there’s the evil of governance based on religious morals. It’s about control. In my experience, [and apologies if this shoe doesn't fit whomever is reading this] those who pursue dismantling the separation of religion and government [or church and state if you will] desire to impose their beliefs on the rest of society. It’s not enough for them to live their lives as adherent to a religious tome as they see fit….they want to codify their morals, often based on nothing more than ‘beliefs’.

Society should always have some regulation to insure the safety of its citizens. And secular law is not always perfectly applied, but it retains the opportunity to come closest to that goal. Religion based governance is inherently and invasive subjective. Coinciding with that is the fact that the scale of ‘right and wrong’ is vast and slippery compared with secular law. One can run the gamut from allowing Christian nativity scenes on the courthouse lawn to outlawing strip clubs, criminalizing oral sex and mandatory prayer in public school.

I summarize by contending that more faith in the citizenry isn’t a bad thing, as long as it remains a personal relationship and not a political crusade. I did not think I had, nor did I ever intend to paint all believers with the same brush, but the offenders are out there, and are active in politics. This I believe aids the decline of critical thought and patriotic activism just as much as globalism, progressivism or other lemming-like attitudes of many of our brethren.

Sec of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, says that our southern border is as safe as it’s ever been. (I guess not much.) She also says that we should gauge the success along the border by looking at the “the numbers.” There is less violence on the American side of the border; there are more seizures of drugs, guns, and bad guys.
This is the same argument being used in Afghanistan and which is under fire from skeptics around the world. We are probably measuring the wrong things. Pick some new metrics, folks. It doesn’t matter if you are seizing a million more tons of weed each year as it tries to cross the border if there is an aggregate 15 more million tons crossing each year. To equate it to the little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dam is a farce. It’s more like the oil gushing out of that hole in the Gulf. I’m sure you’ve heard of it by now.
What Madame Napolitano is saying is that we are conducting a counterinsurgency war along our own border. I think that it’s likely to have the same “success” as the one in Afghanistan.
Folks, we went about this the wrong way. I was one of those patriotic basterds (intentional misspelling) who eagerly ran into Iraq in early 2003 to quell the evil Saddam, but looking back (hello, Monday-Morning Quarterback) I can see that we needed to secure our own borders before reaching out. Let’s set it against a more medieval backdrop. If an invading horde destroys a tower in your castle but leaves (or dies) before being able to inflict more damage, your first inclination as a ruler is not to go attack the enemy, it’s to rebuild the tower and reinforce your defenses. Only after you’ve reinforced your defenses (build a wall, dig a moat, get a few dozen pit bulls), do you strike out at the enemy, especially one for which you have little intel and even less understanding of their culture.
So, we should’ve built the wall along Mexico and at least strung some chicken-wire along the Canadian border. Then we should’ve taken all those road “workers” standing around while you drive past to dig the moat. Then we should’ve co-opted every thug in the inner-city for the use of their pit bulls. At that point (and only at that point) should we have struck out at the enemy on their own lands.

When it comes to being tough on criminals and giving them the proper justice they deserve after carrying out horrific crimes. Bravo Utah, you are giving Texas a run for its money.

A death row inmate who had used a gun to fatally shoot two men suffered the same fate Friday morning as he was executed by a team of marksmen — the first time Utah used the firing squad to carry out a death sentence in 14 years.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/06/17/utah-man-facing-firing-squad-execution-early-friday-moved-observation-cell

H/T to SK for sending this editorial to me.

So last night I suffered through the President’s latest attempt to turn a crisis into an omnibus bill. He excelled at painting BP as the Sheriff of Nottingham and he as Robin Hood in pinstripe. He deftly called on his fiddlers three (Ray Mabus, Dr. Steven Chu, and Michael Bromwich) to bring him his bowl and his pipe from which he would smoke the whacky-tabacky that makes him just feel more…Presidential. These fiddlers, in addition to the grand fiddler (ADM Thad Allen), would figure out how to stop the spill, assign appropriate blame, cut chceks accordingly, and plan for a rosy future with no oil in the gulf — and strangely enough with no jobs or commerce of any kind either. Obama wants to take the Gulf Coast back to a condition years before the oil spill. Eons actually. By including environmentalists and conservationists in Ray Mabus’ team, we can be sure that the goal will be to eliminate all evidence of human interaction with the Gulf and its surroundings.

But as Obama’s chill wind evaporated and I changed the channel to the Biography channel, I watched, rapt, at Sam Walton’s rise to prominence. I watched as a man with humble roots and a dream brought discount goods to the masses. I watched as he fought two cancers (ultimately losing to one) to create the largest retail business on the planet, on the basis of bringing inexpensive goods to the masses. He didn’t get rich on the backs of the poor. He brought lower prices to the poor and middle class, and they loved him for it. Sam Walton didn’t hand out rebate checks so people could buy any expensive goods they wanted, he brought them goods of similar quality but at discount prices.

That’s really all we want our government to do: bring us the quality American lifestyle at a discount. We’ll be happy to spend our own money on it. We don’t need you (government) to charge us exhorbitant prices and then hand us a rebate check. We don’t need you to think for us. Just sit back and give us the freedom to choose as we will.

Obama could take a bit of advice from ol’ dead Sam.

Pure Genius: