Seen any stimulus money?

They are really throwing money around nowadays.

Thanks, Uncle Sam, I guess. He’s sending me 250 bucks this spring, apparently because I‘m on Social Security. As part of his stimulus package, will it stimulate me? Not sure, but I don’t plan to return it even though the Treasury is more in the red than I am and needs it more.

That’s on top of what Uncle Sam sent me and Carole Lee last spring, $1,200. Considering the speed at which America keeps going deeper into debt, we’re unlikely to get anything else next spring. It’s probably just as well; we don‘t want to become supplicants rather than citizens.
Even so, we might be able to take advantage of the “cash for clunkers” program. If I sell my old car for a new one with better gas mileage, under the proposed law the Treasury will send me a check for over $4,000.

Honestly now, have you ever heard of programs and payments so downright loony? I haven’t. Why should my wife and I get a red cent from the government?

Actually it’s going to be the other way around. The new energy tax bill that’s advancing will cost us plenty. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will raise the American family9 9s taxes by $1,600 a year.

Why for? To fight global warming, which most people now believe is nonexistent. Indiana’s governor claims the CO2-cutting proposal would double electricity bills there and lower the temperature by less than half a degree in half a century.
It is all such nonsense. And come to think of it, there’s much more, right here. I hear that Stafford public schools are getting some of that stimulus money, and will use it to hire more teachers and pay more for current ones. I guess the teachers are shovel ready.

And speaking of education, there’s to be $10 billion spent on putting even four-year-olds in classrooms. Not that they’ll learn anything, but it will free moms to go back to work.
Health care is another urgent priority. No telling how much we’ll have to pay to satisfy Washington’s insatiable appetite for fixing things that ain’t broke, while ignoring what they’ll cost.

Wait, there’s more. An Associated Press analysis of the first $19 billion in new transportation spending shows that communities most in need of jobs are least likely to benefit.

To get more of the goodies for the county, here’s an idea. Maybe Stafford should support relocating the Guantanamo detainees to Quantico. Surely there will be some bribe money paid to adjoining counties like ours to persuade us to go along with that nutty idea. Except--it is simply outrageous.

Captured terrorists at Guantanamo, when it closes as President Obama has ordered, might be transferred to the brig at Quantico Marine Corps Base. That is terrible because these thugs are the same as those who flew the airliner into the Pentagon, killing many, including two Aquia Harbour women, Martha Reszke and Marian Serva. Marian lived across the street from me. And now just a few miles away, the feds are fixing to bed and board and coddle the same kinds of savages who killed her and other northern Virginians. What an insult! It’s as bad as building a prison for them where the Twin Towers once stood.
　
Above, I referred to the Guantanamo thugs as detainees. It’s part of the government’s debasing of clear language. Surely you’ve heard that the government wants to refer now to “climate change,” and not global warming. “Change” is supposedly better because the world isn’t warming anymore. Besides, it would also fit if a new ice age were suddenly to dawn before we spend another ton of money against warming and instead must combat cooling, a much more harmful condition.

But our Congress people are too busy to notice. Here’s Ralph Nader, criticizing the cap-and-trade climate bill: “It’s not going to work. It’s too complex. It’s too easily manipulated politically.” He’s right. And check this co mmentary from George Will: “The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption”

Regardless, big businesses seem to be going along with the proliferation of global warming euphemisms. Entergy has an ad in Forbes magazine, saying it intends to develop opportunities for “climate stewardship.” Wow.

Last fall, most voters chose Obama because he represented change. Now we’re getting it, up close and personal. How’s it feel?

Will the GOP retake Richmond?

　
So I drive a Town Car, live in a gated community, and vote Republican. What’s not to like about that? What’s more, we Virginians next fall get to start turning our fine state red again, like God always meant it to be.

True, the Democrats have won the governor’s race in two straight elections, fair and square. But now it’s the Republicans’ turn.

Back in 1970, Linwood Holton finally broke the Democrats’ death grip on Virginia’s top office that had held for the 20th century. Then came two other GOP winners, followed by three straight Democrat governors (Robb, Baliles and Wilder). Then voters chose the GOP for two terms (Allen and Gilmore) and then two Dems (Warner and Kaine).
Frankly, I got the biggest gubernatorial kicks out of Doug Wilder and Jim Gilmore. What ch aracters they were. If Virginians survived them, we’ll survive anybody, for sure.

I’ve always voted Republican. And this time, how could I do otherwise in the governor‘s race? Aside from a major age difference, GOP candidate Bob McDonnell and I both had fathers who served in the military; we played football in high school, got ROTC commissions in college, lived in northern Virginia and Chicago, and named our first daughters Jeanine (his) and Jeanenne (mine).

Bob served in the military for over two decades. His Jeanine has served in the Army, in Baghdad. As for his Democratic opponents who scrambled for the nomination to run against him, their combined military service: Zero.

As a state representative in Richmond, McDonnell won several “legislator of the year” awards before becoming Attorney General in 2006. He has seen 83 of his 94 legislative proposals become law. This remarkable conservative has been pro-life, anti-union card check, and has proposed strong measures against teen gangs statewide.

Few legislators can duplicate his track record of involvement and success.”--Tidewater’s Virginian-Pilot.

Further, in their liveliest nominating convention in years, state Republicans in Richmond last weekend chose their slate for the fall race: McDonnell for Governor, Bill Bolling for Lt. Governor, and Ken Cuccinelli for Attorney General.

One problem. The Dems last fall turned Virginia blue for the first time in modern history, electing President Obama handily. They’re not about to give up the governor’s mansion without a fight. They consider Virginia a crucial state in keeping national control--White House, Senate, House, Government Motors, etc.

So who are they going to run against McDonnell? Terry McCauliffe, a former hack for Bill Clinton who has never won public office, is said to be leading two other candidates with real credentials. They are Brian Moran who served 20 years as a local prosecutor and in the Virginia House and Creigh Deeds who has been in the Virginia House and Senate for 17 years. The Dems decide on June 9.

The brash New Yorker who’s had virtually no ties to Virginia is nevertheless expert at raising money. However, former Gov. Wilder, who has not endorsed in this contest, has warned that, “If McAuliffe gets the nomination, there will be a formation of Virginians For McDonnell,” a coalition of Democrats and independents--according to Real Clear Politics.

Net: Virginia’s GOP, recently left for dead, ain’t.

We hate smokers but love drunks

　
Need it happen every spring? Graduation means celebration. That means booze That means death for young people.

Blame our love of the highs that alcohol can bring. It’s trendy, and for sports lovers, well, beer is always great, So youngsters die in cars driven by drunks, and we resolve to do something about it, but mostly don’t.

Exception: Stafford Supervisor Mark Dudenhefer has focused on teen drivers and car safety. His daughter Emily died in 2004 in a car crash in Stafford. He was instrumental in getting last fall’s road bond referendum passed, and points to no teen deaths last year in Stafford from auto accidents.

Regardless, we hear of efforts to lower the drinking age and to let bars stay open later. A new area nightspot caters to college kids until 2:30 a.m. on weekends.

Falling too often on deaf ears are the warnings by Mothers Against Drunken Driving. They claim to have saved some 300,000 lives since 1980 by supporting such measures as sobriety checkpoint stops and ignition interlocks for convicted drunk drivers. MADD notes there were 129 alcohol-related car crashes in Stafford in 2007.

Nevertheless, you may think I’m just another tee-totaler. Wrong. I drink. I got drunk as a teenager and later. Back when the Redskins played in big games, my son and I would toast with a highball each time Washington scored.. Things did get out of hand when Doug Williams threw four touchdown passes in the second quarter in a huge Super Bowl win over Denver.

That was then. Now I have come to realize something paradoxical.
While we pass laws to snuff out smoking for its health-destroying effects, lately trying to tax cigarettes into oblivion and ban them from all public places, we virtually ignore alcohol despite its far greater destructive power.

Anti-tobacco campaigns have erased most smoking on the TV and movie screens, while films still depict drinking as something cool and fun. Oh yeah? It wasn’t much fun in Stafford this March when over 60 were convicted on drunk-driving charges.

Sad to say, I’ve seen alcohol’s problems up close and personal, beyond those Redskins celebrations. While I once was hooked on cigarettes, one can survive them more easily. I’m living longer because I ended my three packs of Pall Malls a day at age 35. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t be collecting on Social Security, putting the retiree program deeper in the hole.
But cigarettes don’t wreck marriages and families and kill motorists. Booze and beer do. They kill, and not only on the highway. An aunt died before age 35 of alcoholism. So did my wife’s father, before age 60. As a drunk driver he had killed a man. My daughter’sbest teen friend died in a drunk driver’s crash in Falls Church. Alcohol has ruined the marriages of young relatives. It killed a friend’s husband driving drunk on U.S. 1. The consequences are devastating.
Such stories often fail to impress the young. As a teen in church, I used to laugh to myself on Pledge Sundays back in my old home town in Texas. Staunch members stood and proudly took the abstinence pledge. The night before, some had belted down a few at the country club. Back in those days, my town was officially dry for beer and booze but reportedly had one of the country’s highest rates of alcoholism.
My acquaintance with alcoholism is fortunately limited. But one movie I saw in my twenties certainly made me resolve never to go there. “Days of Wine and Roses” was a heart-wrenching film with Jack Lemmon becoming an alcoholic and then shaking it, but introducing his wife Lee Remick to drinking, and then she couldn’t.

How to survive alcoholism? It must be very difficult, although there are helpful AA chapters nationwide. In Stafford, they meet at the American Legion hall and at Aquia Episcopal, St. Peter’s Lutheran, and Mount Ararat Baptist churches.

It’s surely worth the effort.

For, as friend Frank Withrow has written, “,,,we live in the most amazing of times the world has ever known...We are blessed with wonders beyond belief.”

But booze can ruin it all for you and yours. So admit the problem, get help and stick around to see the Redskins again in the Super Bowl.

Lots of higher taxes ahead

Brace yourself. We’re fixing to get clobbered with higher taxes on lots of things. Why? Lots of reasons. Two stand out.

First, the recession is producing much less revenue for the federal government. The economic slump dropped the take by 34 percent in April from a year ago, officials say.

Second, the globe is getting cooler. So taxes will rise? Yes, as I will explain in a minute.

Further, we home owners in Stafford surely will face higher real estate taxes, since they have remained about steady this year, while the county’s costs have continued upward. My own tax bill is nearly identical to last year’s. But even if my property’s reassessment next year (as required) shows no rise, I expect the supervisors will have to raise the rates to match the county’s expenditures---even though a mitigating factor is that Stafford is among the top 10 U.S. counties with the lowest unemployment, about 5.4 percent.

Now as promised, here’s why taxes, especially on energy, will rise even as the globe cools. It’s because Congress is rushing to get its huge new carbon tax law passed before everyone notices it’s getting cooler, and before most of us realize that cutting CO2 will do nothing to control the weather.

But why the hurry in Congress? They must strike while the iron is still hot. Otherwise, another cooling year passes and more folks realize that we’re not to blame for climate change.
Why we’re not? Here’s a Jim-dandy reason: the sun.

According to Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "...there are very few sunspots." Their appearance runs in 11-year cycles...“[t]his is the quietest (fewest sunspots) we have had in almost a century." That means a cooler planet.
Another reason we’re in for a cool spell, claims geologist Don Easterbrook: “Cool water in the Pacific extends from the equator all the way up the west coast of North America into the Gulf of Alaska [and it] isn’t going to change...the earth is in for global cooling for the next 2-3 decades...”
So no wonder Congress is going hell for leather to get the energy tax law passed. All sorts of deals are being made to keep constituent groups on board.

One that makes you want to throw up is the ethanol lobby. First they tried to get the government to mandate an increase in ethanol content from 10 to 15 percent in gasoline mixtures, even though gas burns better. And after getting imported ethanol banned, they are fighting to be exempted from EPA standards that label corn ethanol a major carbon emitter. They threaten to kill the whole energy tax bill unless EPA is forced to back down.
Great. And let’s support Obama's energy adviser who wants all the world’s roofs to be painted white to slow global warming--except in North Dakota?

Of course, I’ll contribute soon enough by resting in a cold, cold grave, and not in any global-warming hell, praise be.

"Miranda Rights" Now Read to Terrorists On Battlefield

Yesterday the Weekly Standard wrote:

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.

Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal – read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.

If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”

That effort, which elevates the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and diminishes the role of intelligence and military officials, was described in a May 28 Los Angeles Times article.


The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the "global justice" initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.


...But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy. “When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the 'right to remain silent,’” says Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation--lawyering up.”

According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are advising detainees to do. “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”

Rogers adds: “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”

One thing is clear, though. A detainee who is not talking cannot provide information about future attacks. Had Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had a lawyer, Tenet wrote, “I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.” (All emphases added.)

From the Weekly Standard at http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/06/miranda_rights_for_terrorists.asp

Posted by Stephen F. Hayes on June 10, 2009 02:05 PM