Titanic Fail....

US Army Soldier creates " Ironman " Ammo carrier which allows him to deliver maximum rate of fire to the Bad Guys

Score one for the Iowa National Guard and especially Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski who got creative and solved a problem with his own ingenuity and desire to equip himself and his troops with "what works" - no multi-million dollar contract, no need to sink huge sums of $$$ into studies - This Soldier just thought it up and made it reality. Awesome.

Now the rest of the Army wants this simple piece of kit that will allow a soldier to put the maximum number of rounds down range. The Army needs to get busy and get as many of these as possible to the troops as they need it to take on the Terrorists on the battle field.

Kudos to the Iowa National Guard. Awesome use of the technology Dude !

Paging Jesse Ventura: Iowa Guard Builds Predator-Style Ammo Packs
By Andrew Tarantola, Gizmodo.com October 18, 2011

Remember that scene in the movie Predator, when Jesse Ventura is unleashing his M-134 mini-gun into the forest? It was being fed by an ammo box strapped to his back. Turns out, that wasn’t an actual piece of Army kit, at least until members of the Iowa National Guard created it themselves.

The National Guard division had been recently deployed to a forward operating base in Afghanistan and were issued Mk 48 machine guns when they arrived. The problem was, the belts of ammunition were extremely cumbersome and difficult for the gun’s operator to carry while on foot-patrol. The initial solution of chopping the belts into 50-round lengths and reloading constantly was abandoned after a harrowing 2.5 hour long firefight proved it untenable.

So, Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski welded two ammo boxes atop one another (with the upper case’s bottom removed), lashed them to an all-purpose ALICE pack frame, and mounted the feed chute assembly from a vehicle-mounted CROWS (Common Remote Operating Weapons Station) to the top of it. This allowed the gunner to carry a full load of ammo—500 rounds—unassisted. Even with ammo, the entire system weighed a mere 43 pounds.

The pack, dubbed The Ironman, proved so reliable in combat that Winkowski submitted the design to Army science advisers who also immediately recognized its value. Within 48 days, the Quick Reaction Cell of the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) had created an improved, lighter-weight version of the pack.

As, Dave Roy, a current operations analyst at NSRDEC, explains,

We’ve already gotten email traffic from (one of) our science advisers that everybody in theater wants one of these — and by in theater, he means his specific area of operation, Regional Command East in Afghanistan — because word has spread. That (Iowa National Guard) unit is not the only unit on that FOB. As they’re walking around the FOB with that piece of kit, very senior people are taking a look at it. They recognize it as a game-changer.

While The Ironman is still a prototype at this stage, Roy hopes to have acquisition funding secured by early next year. [US Army]

Photo: 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, Iowa National Guard

Policy on KIA bracelets stokes Marines’ fury

Having spent a significant amount of time on Marine bases in AFGHN & Iraq, I was keen to adapting to the USMC's way of doing things. The first thing you learn is Marines are all about being MARINES first and foremost. There is a certain way to do things and you learn quickly what is allowed and not allowed.

The enclosed story is in line with this but I feel that in this case, the Marine Command structure needs to bend a little. The wearing of KIA bracelets is a sign of respect and reverence for those lost in battle. I agree with the Marine Sgt. who stated “ I came from a unit that lost a lot of men,” said Sgt. Darren Covington. “We wear the bracelets to remember our friends. It shouldn’t be against Marine Corps regulations to remember your buddies ... especially when some guys are walking around here with flashy gold watches.”

SEMPER FI Marine. The command needs to adhere to the credo of SEMPER FI and allow the Marines to wear KIA bracelets. The bracelets ensure that the Marines lost aren't truly gone because they are not forgotten.


Policy on KIA bracelets stokes Marines’ fury
By Greg Jaffe - Washington Post

Memorial bracelets have become a regular reminder that the country is at war. President Obama wears one. Most soldiers wear them.

So do a lot of Marines.

And that has turned into something of a problem.

The Marines have always been among the most persnickety when it comes to their uniforms and their appearance. Recently, the Marine Corps Times, which is not affiliated with the service, noticed that some commanders have been ordering Marines to remove their “KIA bracelets,” which are meant to honor fallen service members.

The reason: The Marine Corps Uniform Regulations specifically prohibits the wearing of most jewelry.

Enforcement of that regulation has been spotty, and Marine non-commissioned officers have tended to allow the bracelets. But the article by the Times – which found plenty of Marines who were told they couldn’t have them – has caused an outcry.

At Quantico last week, home to about 6,700 military personnel, including many who have just returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Marines described their fury over the issue. Some noted that the bracelets are sometimes sold by the spouses of service members to pay for the costs of funerals and the needs of a mourning family.

“I came from a unit that lost a lot of men,” said Sgt. Darren Covington. “We wear the bracelets to remember our friends. It shouldn’t be against Marine Corps regulations to remember your buddies ... especially when some guys are walking around here with flashy gold watches.”

Under Marine Corps Uniform Regulations, jewelry is not permitted, with the exceptions of wedding rings, engagement rings, watches and chains, provided they can be tucked under T-shirts. In 1972, the Navy secretary also carved out a special exemption for POW/MIA bracelets.

The upshot, though, is that Marines technically aren’t allowed to wear the KIA bracelets, even if they are similar to the POW/MIA bracelets.

At Quantico, dubbed the “Crossroads of the Marine Corps,” the issue has hit a nerve among even those who don’t wear the jewelry.

“It's a huge insult,” said one master gunnery sergeant who declined to give his name. “These are our fallen brothers. This is how we show our respect.”

The Marine Corps Uniform Board is revisiting the issue, and the expectation is that Marines will soon be able to wear the bracelets without any concerns about straying from official policy.

“They are working the issue fairly aggressively,” said a Marine Corps official who was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record. “We expect a resolution possibly by the end of the year.”


Staff writer Kevin Sieff contributed to this report.

Obama losing his base - DEM Supporter Mortimer Zuckerman (Boston Properties CEO) tells why he will not support the President's re-election....

Let's take a quick inventory of Mort Zuckerman's beliefs -

1. Democrat - Check
2. Voted for Obama in 2008 - Check
3. Worried about high unemployment - Check
4. Now convinced that Obama has no clue about what he is doing - BIG CHECK

When the President is now regarded by some of his most ardent supporters as failing catastrophically, then you know that those who oppose the President's agenda aren't just about politics, but rather about getting us back on track.

Obama needs to be sent packing in the 2012 election and likely the votes to do so will come from people like Mort Zuckerman, a long-time DEM supporter who sees the utter failure of a out-of-touch and clueless President.

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
OCTOBER 15, 2011
The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire
Wall Street Journal

Real-estate and newspaper mogul Mortimer Zuckerman voted for Obama but began seeing trouble as soon as the stimulus went into the pockets of municipal unions.
By JAMES FREEMAN

'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn't seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.

The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision" in Washington and "desperate for strong leadership." Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor's, he wrote, "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country."

His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, "there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country." Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, "The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he's not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing."

We are sitting on the 18th floor of a skyscraper the day after protesters have marched on the homes of other Manhattan billionaires. It may seem odd that most of the targeted rich people had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis. But as Mr. Zuckerman ponders the Occupy Wall Street movement, he concludes that "the door to it was opened by the Obama administration, going after the 'millionaires and billionaires' as if everybody is a millionaire and a billionaire and they didn't earn it. . . . To fan that flame of populist anger I think is very divisive and very dangerous for this country."

This doesn't mean that Mr. Zuckerman opposes the protesters or questions their motives. When pressed, he concedes that the crowd in Lower Manhattan may include some full-time radicals, but he argues that the protesters are people with a legitimate grievance, as the country suffers high unemployment and stagnant middle-class incomes.

It is a subject he has obviously studied at length, and he explains how the real unemployment rate is actually well above the official level of 9.1%, which only measures people who have applied for a job within the previous four weeks. In fact, he says, unemployment has even surged beyond the Department of Labor's "U-6" number of 16.5% that has received increasing attention lately because it includes people who have given up looking for work within the past year, plus people who have been cut back from full-time employees to part-timers.

Mr. Zuckerman says that when you also consider the labor-force participation rate and the so-called "birth-death series" that measures business starts and failures, the real U.S. unemployment rate is now 20%. His voice rising with equal parts anger and sadness, he exclaims, "That's not America!"

It certainly isn't the America that Mr. Zuckerman discovered when he moved south from Canada to study at Wharton and Harvard Law School, graduating from both in the early 1960s. He reports feeling immediately at home and says he never considered returning "because of the sheer openness and energy of life in America."

The U.S. "has fundamentally great qualities," he says. "It's a society that welcomes talent, nourishes talent, admires talent . . . and rewards talent." But he sees "potentially catastrophic" political and fiscal problems. Mr. Zuckerman reports that when he was a young man, 50% of the top quartile of graduates from Canadian universities moved to the U.S. Now, he says, "I don't want my daughter telling me, 'Dad, I want to move back to Canada because that's the land of opportunity.'"

Mr. Zuckerman's bearish outlook since 2006 has been good for his business. That's when he decided that there was a bubble in commercial real estate and his publicly traded real estate investment trust needed to sell some of its office buildings.

'We've had a strategy in our business of trying to have 'A' assets in 'A' locations. I think we had 126 buildings at that point and we came to the conclusion that 16 of them were either A assets in B locations or B assets in A locations, like 280 Park [Avenue in New York]—it was a great address but not a good building. So we sold. We got through 15 of the 16 and we raised in the range of four and a half billion dollars," he says.

Once the downturn began, that cash pile helped him buy some famous properties at depressed prices, such as the General Motors building in New York and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. But he says his firm is still prepared for possible rough economic times ahead. "We're keeping it very liquid," he says, "because I don't know where this is going."

Mr. Zuckerman maintains that America will solve its problems over the long haul—"I am not somebody who's pessimistic about this country. I have had a life that's been better than my fantasies," he says—but he's certainly pessimistic about the current administration. That began shortly after inauguration day in 2009.

At that time he supported Mr. Obama's call for heavy spending on infrastructure. "But if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program," says Mr. Zuckerman, "roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic Party." He adds that "the Republicans understood this" and it diminished the chances for bipartisan legislating.

Then there was health-care reform: "Eighty percent of the country wanted them to get costs under control, not to extend the coverage. They used all their political capital to extend the coverage. I always had the feeling the country looked at that bill and said, 'Well, he may be doing it because he wants to be a transformational president, but I want to get my costs down!'"

Mr. Zuckerman recalls reports of Mr. Obama consulting various historians on the qualities of a transformational president. "But remember, transformations can go up and they can go down."

Now comes the latest fight over Mr. Obama's jobs plan, which has as its centerpiece a tax increase on the wealthy with obvious populist appeal. Mr. Zuckerman supports raising taxes on the rich but says such a proposal cannot be taken seriously unless it's paired with other measures to grow the economy and restrain deficit spending. He also wonders why, if the president wanted to get a plan enacted, he didn't begin with private bipartisan discussions with House and Senate leaders, instead of another address to a joint session of Congress.

"Even if you want to do this to revive your support in the base, to revive your credibility on the issues of the economy and jobs, which has fallen off the table, this isn't going to accomplish it. Another speech from this guy? The country knows this is just another speech. They understand it almost instantaneously, and his numbers have continued to go down for that reason. What the country wanted was some way of coming up with a solution."

The only solution Mr. Zuckerman sees now to juice the economy "is to broaden the tax base and simplify and lower tax [rates]. To me that will be as close to revenue-neutral as you're going to have so it isn't going to be seen as a budget buster." He views GOP candidate Herman Cain's "9-9-9 plan" as a "little bit simple-minded," but he says that a reform that closes loopholes and reduces compliance costs will stimulate both business and consumer spending.

Mr. Zuckerman sees a need for a cooperative effort like that of President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill when they reformed Social Security in 1983. That wasn't a permanent solution, of course, as Social Security needs more significant changes now, but Mr. Zuckerman sees it as a model of bipartisan progress.

Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.

Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. "I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan," says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff's release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.

"Reagan surprised me," says Mr. Zuckerman. "He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts."

'I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him," continues Mr. Zuckerman. "And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don't want to do and to like it. And that's what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That's what this president has lost."

"Democracy does not work without the right leadership," he says later, "and you can't play politics." The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. "The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you're doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country."

Mr. Freeman is assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page.

Straight talk from Senator McCain to the President - “It is time the President came off the campaign trail..."

Straight talk......and spot on. Senator McCain might not always be right about issues, but he will tell you why he believes in an issue, instead of the "BS" we see from the present administration, no matter what the issue.

President Obama has been in " campaign mode " for far too long, and when you add that to the time he has been on the golf course and on multiple vacations, it is little wonder why his performance is dreadful......He is a part-time President who wants all the things that go with the office except the work.

Obama's political goals matter more to the Empty Suit in the White House than the fate of the nation.... and it shows.

McCain to Obama: Get off the campaign trail
POLITICO.COM

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) thinks President Barack Obama is doing too much campaigning and not enough policymaking.

McCain claimed that Obama, his 2008 opponent, was engaging in “demagoguery” on the issue of job creation as he’s traveled the country to pitch his jobs proposal.

“It is time the president came off the campaign trail, sat down and negotiated and talked with us and see areas of common ground,” McCain said Sunday on “State of the Union.”

McCain – who helped introduce the Senate Republicans’ jobs plan – instead called for more regularly relief and tax reform that would lower rates and close tax loopholes.

The " Non-Denial Denial " on the withdrawl from IRAQ

History repeats itself.....the withdrawal from Iraq was expected as the strain on the military is untenable,and now with active combat troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Uganda (really ?) and Yemen, we need the resources elsewhere....all this from Mr. Hopey-Changey in the White House...how's that working out for you??

Due to the need to send limited resources elsewhere,we are once again encountering the phenomena known as "The Non-Denial Denial "

To wit: " Non-denial denial" is a phrase that became popular in the wake of the Watergate scandal, referring to an equivocal denial, particularly one made by an official to the press."

READ between the lines here as US reacts to stories released stating we are bugging out of Iraq ASAP...This has become the primary MO of the present administration -

Deny, deny, deny....Oh well, you caught us doing it so we might as well fess up....

----------------------------------------------------------------

U.S.: Still weighing troop withdrawal from Iraq
By Christopher Hinton, MarketWatch

10/17/11

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Pentagon is denying a weekend report that the U.S. has decided to remove nearly all of its forces from Iraq by the end of the year.

Obama administration officials have considered leaving up to 5,000 troops in the country to train security forces, a strategy that may now have more support in the wake of U.S. allegations that Iran plotted to assassinate a Saudi ambassador.

Iranian power has expanded since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and American officials worry the Shiite nation could undermine regional U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“Suggestions that a final decision has been reached about our training relationship with the Iraqi government are wrong,” Pentagon press secretary George Little said. “Those discussions are ongoing.”

On Saturday, the Associated Press, citing an anonymous White House official, said all American forces would leave Iraq leave except for about 160 troops attached to the U.S. Embassy.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama said the U.S. would apply the “toughest sanctions” yet against Iran for the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador.

Democratic leaders in the Senate want Obama to specifically target Iran’s central bank, which would potentially block Iran from the global financial system and make it difficult for the country to clear billions of dollars of oil sales every month, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Close to 40,000 Americans are expected to leave Iraq before the end of the year as the U.S. wraps up combat operations, the AP said. Keeping American troops in the country for a longer period has been a divisive subject for Iraqi leaders.

Christopher Hinton is a reporter for MarketWatch based in New York

ikarma....for Steve Jobs

What goes around comes around....

Help the US Marines Bring " Bill " Home

Marines have a soft spot for dogs, especially when they find one in need of help. In this case, it was the only surviving pup of a litter of 6 found in Afghanistan. I have enclosed the website address if you are able to donate and help them.

Bravo Zulu and SEMPER FI to these Marines for making the effort to bring " Bill " home.

Please go to their website to donate -

http://www.getbilltotheball.org/


TOUGH PUP: Houston-based Marines found Bill while on patrol in Afghanistan, the lone survivor of a litter of six.

Pup adopted by Marines bound for Houston ball
By RENÉE C. LEE, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

An orphaned puppy turned Marine mascot soon will make his way from Afghanistan to the United States to be reunited with his platoon - just in time for the Marine Corps ball in November.

Bill, a mutt, was rescued by the Houston-based 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, while 3rd Platoon, Alpha Company, was on patrol. He was the lone survivor of a litter of six puppies when the reservists adopted him July 13.

Bill was just 9 days old. His eyes were still shut.

Marine Reserve Sgt. Jon Staffen made it his mission to raise the necessary funds to bring Bill to Staffen's home in Dayton, in Liberty County. Staffen and his platoon returned to Houston on Saturday after a seven-month combat tour.

Staffen said he and the other Marines kept Bill in a box that had held ready-to-eat meals, and had a 24-hour rotation to care for and feed the frail pup. They used a medical syringe and the finger of a plastic glove to feed him cow's milk, the sergeant said.

"It was really comical at times," Staffen admitted. "We got caught up in taking care of him. Here we are, Marine grunts, cheering when he took his first steps."

They didn't want to leave Bill behind at the end of their deployment, but there were military rules against taking him home.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan offered to help them out, and flew the dog via military air to Kabul, where he's been staying in a rescue shelter.

Staffen said he has raised more than the $3,500 he'll need to get Bill to the United States. He's now working on Bill's travel arrangements.

The goal is to get the dog transported in time for the Nov. 5 ball in Houston, where Bill is expected to be the guest of honor.

renee.lee@chron.com

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park, The Red Sox are in a sad state.....

NY Yankee fans and others who wish the Red Sox ill must be in full "schadenfreude" mode today....Their wishes have come true as the Red Sox have run one of the most storied and successful baseball operations right up on the rocks.

Theo - Gone. Tito - Gone. The Clubhouse - in full mutiny mode. Ownership - looking as ineffective as the lunkheads in Washington, DC.

This is NOT where we were supposed to be as we had the "best & the brightest" in place, fully funded and capable of ensuring success. Obviously, the big priced help on and off the field were all about themselves and not devoted to the team, the fans or the game.

Sad to say, but these choppy seas that the Red Sox are on show no sign of easing. The winter of our discontent is in place and it will take more than PR to get things back to even close to where they need to be. Red Sox Nation are a tough bunch but no one likes being treated this way by a club that has been given undying devotion by the fans. The RED SOX need to earn back our respect as what they have shown us is not the signs of the team we deserve.

2012 was supposed to be a celebration but right now, it looks like it will be a year of lowered expectations and a tarnished team. I can only hope that something will change under a new GM & Coach. Time to clean house and get back on track.


Wind of change
By Dan Shaughnessy
Boston Globe Columnist / October 13, 2011

It’s back to the bad old days over on Yawkey Way. The Red Sox of 2011 are the Red Sox of Buddy LeRoux and Haywood Sullivan - doofus co-owners wrestling on the carpet of their Fenway Park offices back in 1983. They are the Red Sox of Tom Yawkey and his chorus line of drunken employees finishing out of the money from the 1930s through the ’60s.

There are so many things wrong with the Sox at this hour, it’s difficult to know where to start. The manager is gone, the general manager is gone, the owners are in hiding, and the players are a loathsome lot totally unworthy of the money and adulation they receive.

Theo Epstein’s gone. It was a seismic event when he quit in 2005. This time, his departure is lost in the mix as the Sox go from freefall to nuclear fallout. The Fenway lawn is scorched earth.

Did we ever think the vaunted “new’’ owners would make Frank McCourt look good?

Apologies are in order, all around. John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino need to come out of hiding and say they are sorry for this embarrassment.

Ditto for the cowardly ballplayers. Instead of blasting a reporter (“where’d you get this number?’’), phony captain Jason Varitek needs to explain how the ballplayers in the clubhouse abandoned their professionalism on his watch. Jon Lester, Josh Beckett, and John Lackey need to drop the bad-ass act (none of them returned calls from Bob Hohler before his explosive story in Wednesday’s Globe) and apologize to fans for their disrespect of the manager and the franchise. Put down the long-necks and the Double Down sandwiches and tell the fans you are sorry.

But why would they? They are joyless and enabled. We learn from Hohler’s story that when players complained about having to play a day-night doubleheader, out-of-touch Sox owners gave them $300 headphones and a night on Henry’s yacht.

Pathetic.

The worst collapse in the history of baseball wasn’t enough shame for this crew. They had to take on the persona of entitled rock stars who flip off the fans and demand only red M&Ms in their dressing room.

John Henry and friends have lived a charmed existence since buying the ball club in December of 2001. They have won a couple of World Series and made Fenway Park a tourist destination on a par with the Bunker Hill Monument and Old Ironsides. They sold their baseball souls to sell a few Fenway bricks and boost the ratings of their hideous network.

Now we’ve all had enough with Roush Racing and Liverpool soccer. Yankee fans never had to worry about George Steinbrenner taking his eyes off the prize in the interest of building ships.

Try this on with your pink hat: On the final night of the regular season, while the Sox were playing in Baltimore, fighting for their playoff lives, virtual ads during the baseball broadcast reminded you to watch Liverpool-Wolverhampton the next day at 4 p.m. That’s the same time that the Sox would have been playing their one-game playoff against Tampa Bay on TBS.

Got that? On Thursday, Sept. 29, at 4 p.m., the geniuses at NESN wanted you to watch soccer - instead of a one-game playoff involving the Red Sox.

Consistent with this insult, NESN the next day cut away from analysis of a postmortem press conference featuring Terry Francona and Theo Epstein (remember them?) at Fenway. While NESN rival Comcast went knee-deep into analysis, the Sox flagship TV station went to soccer.

Wow.

And now we have nothing from the owners since the night Francona was fired - unless you count the Baghdad Bob hour they granted to their flagship radio station that was simulcast on their own television network. There was plenty of talk about “shelf life’’ that day. Lucchino finished a lot of Henry’s sentences.

Can anyone blame Epstein for wanting to get away from this? Any chance he was encouraged to look elsewhere? I know one thing: Sox fans won’t be happy to see the ball club lose the still-under-contract-Theo in exchange for more cash for Henry. What happened to getting Matt Garza? Or couldn’t the Sox have at least made the Cubs take Lackey in a package deal with the beleaguered GM?

When Epstein quit in 2005, there was much anguish in Red Sox Nation. This time the departure gets lost in the avalanche of negativity that washes over the franchise. It’s, “Thanks for playing, Theo. We’ll think of you every time Carl Crawford strikes out for the next six years.’’

The rebuilding of the brand can begin only when Epstein is officially gone. The Sox need to name Ben Cherington GM, then go about the business of regaining the fans’ trust. It would be nice if they’d hire a strong-willed field manager, but we fear they’re going to go with a no-name who’ll carry out the orders of Carmine the Computer, Tom Tippett, and Bill James.

The Sox expected to spend this winter preparing for the glorious 100th celebration of Fenway Park. Instead they are picking up pieces of their broken brand as they prepare to raise the third-place banner and celebrate Fenway’s centennial on April 20, 2012.

Maybe it’s time to show real fans that you are back in the business of baseball and junk “Sweet Caroline’’ in the middle of the eighth.

Bad times never seemed so bad.

America deserves better - Obama's obsessive need to apologize to the world....

OBAMA just doesn't get it. His warped view of what's right, proper and true for America is so far off track it defies reason.

The editorial board of Investor's Business Daily hits the nail on the head. We are seeing how clueless our present President is on a daily basis and regardless of what the White House puts out, President Obama needs to be sent packing in the upcoming election.

He just doesn't get it and we have allowed this charlatan to embarrass us on the world stage. How anyone can support him at this juncture also defies description.

America deserves better and we need to ensure that we never allow such an empty suit like him to ever lead our country astray ever again. This is not as much an issue of DEMS vs. GOP as much as it is about ensuring that the President understands that our country has nothing to apologize for to anyone. We are the leader of the free world and a beacon of hope to all who seek freedom from oppression. Period.

Apologies Not Accepted
Investro's Business Daily
Posted 10/11/2011

Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one?

The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama's State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaida propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to "express its condolences" to his family.

Khan, a right-hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with Awlaki in an airstrike in Yemen on Sept. 30. We apologized for killing a terrorist before he could help kill any more of us.

It's yet another part of the world apology tour that began with Obama taking the oath of office to protect and defend the United States and its Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, something he immediately felt sorry for.

One stop on his tour was Prague in August 2009. There he spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," ignoring that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure.

Another stop on the tour was in Japan, where Obama in November 2009 bowed to the emperor, something no American president had ever done. It could have been worse if plans to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima to apologize for winning the war with the atom bombs had come to pass.

A heretofore secret cable dated Sept. 3, 2009, was recently released by WikiLeaks. Sent to Secretary of State Clinton, it reported Japan's Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling U.S. Ambassador John Roos that "the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a 'nonstarter.'"

The Japanese feared the apology would be exploited by anti-nuclear groups and those opposed to the defensive alliance between Japan and the U.S.

Whatever Tokyo's motive, Obama's motive was to once again apologize for defending freedom, this time for winning with devastating finality the war Japan started.

While Obama envisions a world without nuclear weapons, and moves steadily toward unilateral disarmament of our nuclear arsenal, we envision a world without tyrants and thugs willing to use them against us. We do not fear nuclear weapons in the hands of Britain or France, countries that share our love of freedom and democracy.

It was not all that clear in August 1945 that Japan was ready to surrender. Okinawa, where 101,000 Japanese and 24,000 Americans died, was a clear indication of the fanatical resistance to come in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. That resistance ended only when Tokyo became convinced there would soon be nothing to defend.

Nuclear weapons in the right hands ended the violence of World War II. In the right hands, they kept Western Europe free and helped win the Cold War. And the fact that they'd been used made it less likely they would ever be used again.

The world that Imperial Japan envisioned was quite different than the one we now enjoy. That regime's dream was of an imperial rising sun blistering the globe. Good thing they saw a rising sun of a quite different sort, the fulfillment of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamato's prophecy after Dec. 7, 1941: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

President Obama fails to realize that being the leader of the Free World, the last best hope for mankind, means never having to say you're sorry.

Avoiding him like the Plague.....

DEMS are avoiding Obama like the Plague. The idiot Governor of Massachusetts is his best friend so the President will be hanging around here but it seems as the last thing DEMS anywhere else want is a picture of them standing side-by-side with the CHUMP who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as he is proven to be a ineffective and unpopular President. And rightly so based on how poor he has done in the position.

IF he was a CEO in the private sector, he would have been let go a year or more ago....we are stuck with him until January 2013.....ugh.

The down side is the GOP has no real shining stars to offer and in the end, any other POL could not be worse than the poser we have right now.


US Democrats wary of their unpopular president
2011-10-11 By Reuters

WASHINGTON - Four years ago, Senator Claire McCaskill was one of Barack Obama's biggest boosters in his presidential campaign.

But when he recently visited her state of Missouri, she did not have time to join him.

Many of McCaskill's fellow Democrats in Congress may also decide they are too busy to be with Obama, whose approval rating of about 40 percent as the economy struggles threatens to be a drag on their own reelection chances next year.

"You may see a number of Democrats say 'Sorry, I have a scheduling conflict,'" said a senior Democratic lawmaker.

Democrats face a big decision about whether to stand by their man in the November 2012 elections.

Many, particularly those in difficult campaigns like McCaskill, are tempted to keep their distance.

But others figure they can survive any anti-Obama backlash in their predominantly Democratic states. And they want to help their party's top star and fundraiser defeat whoever the Republicans throw at him.

More importantly, Democrats believe their best shot at retaining the Senate and taking back the House of Representatives is to help Obama rally and win a second term.

"If the president does well, we will do well," said Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts.

"I don't know what others will do but I say we need to run as a team," said Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, facing a tough reelection race in Ohio. "Let's look ahead."

House Democrat Jim Moran of Virginia said: "The question is how vigorously we embrace him in terms of going the extra mile to get our people to knock on doors."

"I think we will. But the passionate idealism that we were gripped with when he was first elected has dissipated a little bit."

Some Democrats believe Obama has lost so much of his "hope and change" magic that they intend to stay away. That is particularly true if they are from a traditionally Republican or swing state, like West Virginia, hard hit by the weak economy that dogs Obama.

"In West Virginia, politics is not a team sport -- meaning hang on and do the best for yourself," said the state's first-term Democratic senator, Joe Manchin.

WILL DEMOCRATS DUCK OBAMA?

Unpopular presidents traditionally hurt their party in Congress.

Voter discontent with Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1994 and with Republican President George W. Bush in 2006 were key to their parties losing control of the House and Senate those years.

It's too early to know how many Democrats will duck Obama in 2012. But it could be at least a few dozen, analysts say.

The number may rise or fall in line with how his approval rating, now at 42 percent, and the US jobless rate, at 9.1 percent, move between now and Election Day.

A top Democratic aide, noting polls show most voters like Obama even though they do not approve of his job performance, said: "If his approval rating tops 50 percent and the economy improves, a lot of Democrats will want to be seen with the president."

But congressional Democrats are upset, even angry, with Obama right now.

They complain he has not consulted them, he moved toward the political right after Republicans won the House in the 2010 election and often has not distinguished between them and Republicans in blasting an even more unpopular Congress.

"There's a lot of resentment," one Democratic lawmaker said. "We are the ones who have put our necks on the line for him."

Ethan Siegal of The Washington Exchange, a private firm that tracks Washington for institutional investors, downplays tension between Obama and congressional Democrats.

"A political party is like a family. Some days you get along. Some days you don't. But you're still family," Siegal said. "The challenge for Obama is to gin up Democrats and get them to really want to go out there and campaign for him."

Back on Capitol Hill, Democrat McGovern said: "Every time I look at the Republican alternatives, my enthusiasm for Obama gets stronger and stronger and stronger. God Almighty, the Republicans are awful."

To the relief of Democrats, Obama recently got feistier. He took on Republicans with a populist $447 billion jobs package that he wants to fund largely with tax hikes on the rich.

Liberal Democrats want to see if he keeps fighting.

Dozens of Democrats, primarily House moderates, kept their distance from Obama in the 2010 election dominated by a near double-digit jobless rate. But most lost anyway in a Republican tidal wave aided by the Tea Party movement.

There are now about two dozen moderate Democrats left in the House. Most are expected to stay away from Obama next year. Currently, a half dozen or so of what will be 33 Senate Democratic nominees are likely to campaign without Obama.

McCaskill was an early backer of Obama in 2008. Yet with her state seen as leaning Republican, she stayed in Washington when Obama made a campaign visit to Missouri on Oct. 4.

Republicans ran an ad mocking McCaskill for declining to join the president. The spot showed her endorsing him with the words "Our economy needs Barack Obama as president."

McCaskill said she could not go back to Missouri because of a scheduling conflict and dismissed criticism as unfounded.

"People making a big deal of this is silly," McCaskill said. "They don't know me very well if they think I'm going to run away from the president. I'm not."

One of her Democratic colleagues sounded skeptical.

"If Obama's approval rating was at 70 percent, she would have been there in a heartbeat," the lawmaker said.

Problems with Solar Energy - Panels fail at an alarming rate....

This is NOT good news. The use of Solar Energy was supposed to make clean energy available to all and now the info on the life expectancy of solar panels show that they will not last long enough to make them a worthwhile investment. By the time you have paid for the system, the panels have degraded to be all but unusable.

At present, Wind Energy still seems to be the best alternative for those with usable wind. "Clean Energy" is needed but it has to be reliable and something that doesn't leave the consumer in the dark after a few years. The next jump in the technology will hopefully develop a more reliable type of panel that will stand up to the elements.

Solar Panels Don't Work. And No One Knows.
By Ray Burgess - AOL ENERGY

Published: October 7, 2011

Solar panels do not work that well. Often far below expectations.

And few know it. Not the owners who depend on power. Not the bankers who finance it. Not the brokers who insure it.

And not the government agencies who subsidize it.

There I said it: The nasty little secret of the solar business. And I said it right at a time when we who believe in solar are under public scrutiny like never before.

But if we who love solar and alternative energy do not put our house in order, those who believe solar is some kind of government-funded shell-game will do it for us. This would be a disaster for our country.

So let's talk.

If you listen to the mostly-Chinese manufacturers, solar panels work great. They can be expected to degrade about 0.5% a year. So that is how we build the economic models to finance, insure and subsidize the larger solar systems.

In the real world, we are just starting to find out how bogus many of those predictions are. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that panels can degrade as much as 4.5% a year. Or more. Put that in your pro forma and see what your banker and insurance agent -- or Congressman -- say about that.

The latest issue of the leading industry trade journal Photovoltaics International, asks the question: "What is the real quality of the products I am buying?"

Short answer: Nobody knows. In Italy last year, "they discovered that after one year in the field, over 90% of the (solar panels) from a one megawatt project began to delaminate and ended up on the ground."

Delaminate: Scientific talk for falling apart. And these panels had all the standard certifications.

In Australia, a leading newspaper called bad solar equipment a "ticking time bomb." PV Magazine recently reported on a German conference where speakers wondered why quality in the photovoltaic industry has yet to reach its epitome." That is a polite way of asking 'when is it going to start?'

As much as we do not know about the problems with solar components before installation, we know even less about how solar panels perform after. That is because until recently we only knew what a system of 10,000 panels was doing all together, not separately. But all the action takes place at the panel level. And if you know nothing about that, you are flying blind.

In 2009, Google found that after it cleaned its panels, energy doubled. Eight months later, it cleaned them again, and energy went up 37%.

Afterward, Google figured out how much they know about what was really happening with its system. Almost nothing.

On slide 14 of a July 2009 report on its solar panels, Google Senior Product Manager Winnie Lam wrote:

"It would be difficult to detect manufacturer defects or accidental damage by data analysis alone, unless the damage impacts >~20% of the solar panels in that building."

Translation: Google knew when the panels were on and off, and that is about it.

Now Google is just about the smartest group of people in the world. So I am not picking on them. Just the opposite: I am congratulating them for figuring out what they knew about their own solar panels. Not much.

Solar production in the field can go bad for dozens and dozens of reasons: An errant golf ball. A passing flock of geese. Bullets. Leaves. Shadows. Dirt. And of course the plain old mechanical breakdowns listed above.

If a leaf or bird dropping prevents the sun from hitting part of your solar array, that knocks out solar production in an area 36 times the obstruction.

In Google's case, a nearby farm was kicking up dirt from plowing at intermittent intervals. Google figured out that it did not make much sense to say 'clean the panels twice a year,' because the correct answer is clean the panels, or fix the panels, when they need it.

They just had no way of knowing when they needed it. That is because until recently, panel level monitors have not been available for larger systems. Now they are.

Today, large system owners are able to know when their systems need cleaning, when they need to replace panels, and which ones to replace.

The stakes are huge.

Increasing production by 1% can increase profits by 10%. So better management pays off very quickly.

And best of all, you don't have your college interns reminding you that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Because now you can.

Ray Burgess is President & CEO of Solar Power Technologies, a Texas-based solar monitoring company that has developed a wireless mesh network to collect data from solar systems

Senator Scott Brown has the support of Massachusetts Voters - Elizabeth Warren (and her pal Nancy Pelosi), not so much...

Massachusetts Senator Scott brown has been taking heat from the DEMS due to something that started on the Democratic Primary Debate. I don't feel it is worth rehashing here as it amounted to two off hand remarks, one made by Warren, and a response Brown made to a radio station DJ's inquiry. The media blew it up and if you weighed the importance of this pair of remarks to the real issues ( jobs, economy, etc.), this issue is laughable.

Well Rep. Nancy Pelosi decided to weigh in.

As a Massachusetts voter, I can say without a doubt that Nancy Pelosi can stick to her own business before she tries to say anything about anyone else. Her credibility is a shallow as water on a flat rock. Americans gave her a clear message on what they thought about her "whacky" ideas of what is needed in America.

Senator Scott Brown was elected because even the citizen of Massachusetts are sick of the LIBS version of America and all it represents. While Elizabeth Warren has supporters, she'll find that Senator Brown has more here because he represents the real needs of the citizens of Massachusetts. Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard elitist and has no idea what the average family in Massachusetts is facing these days.

Senator Brown is a decorated Veteran and has served his nation. That alone makes him highly suited for the position of US Senator as we need more Veterans in Congress.

Senator Scott Brown, you have our support & votes. Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi and the other LIBS, you can't leave the stage quick enough as you don't have a clue.


Pelosi says senator's comment 'disrespectful to women'
CNN Political Unit
(CNN) -– House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that comments made by Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown about a Democratic rival showed a “disrespect for women.”

Brown made the remarks Thursday, when asked about candidate Elizabeth Warren’s statement that she had “kept her clothes on” while paying for college. Warren was making reference to a nearly nude 1982 Cosmopolitan magazine photo shoot that Brown did to earn money at age 22.

When asked about the comment during a radio interview with WZLX in Boston, Brown said only, "Thank God.”

Pelosi said Sunday on the ABC program “This Week” that the comment was disrespectful.

“The response you just gave, 'Thank God,' really, I thought spoke volumes about how clueless Senator Brown is,” Pelosi said. “It really spoke volumes about, really, disrespect for women that he may not even realize. I bet you he'd like to take that comment back.”

Pelosi acknowledged that the comment was likely meant to be a joke, but maintained that it was still revealing of Brown’s character.

“I hope it's joke-y. And if it is, then hopefully he will take that comment back. But women know. They hear a comment like that, it tells you a lot about somebody,” Pelosi said

" Bad policies. Bad process. Bad politics." - A warning from California for the rest of the nation

There's an old saying, “As California goes, so goes the nation.”

Rep. Tom McClintock (R) of California makes an ardent case why the Nation should NOT follow California. He compares the 2nd term of an Obama Adminstration to the path that California State Government has taken and the parallels are striking.

While no one is thrilled with the GOP's meager offering of candidates, the idea of anyone wanting four more years of incompetant stupidity from the present administration is ludicrious. The President has blundered in all areas where we needed a Leader and got a lack luster neophyte.

Our nation will need a new leader and a new direction to get back to where we should be. The sooner the better.

A Second Term for Obama Would Make the United States Go as California Has Gone
By Rep. Tom McClintock (R) - 4th District California

Note: Congressman Tom McClintock delivered the following speech to the Council for National Policy:

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer.

Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like.

Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country.

Of course, in spite of all of its problems, California is still one of the best places in the country to build a successful small business. All you have to do is start with a successful large business.

Laugh if you will, but as you whistle past this cemetery, do heed the medieval epitaph: “Remember man as you walk by, as you are now so once was I; as I am now so you will be.”

Mark that well, because if we lose this struggle for the future of our country, you too someday will live in a California – only without the nice climate.

Bad policies. Bad process. Bad politics. Those are the three acts in a Greek tragedy that tell the tale of how, in the span of a single generation, the most prosperous and golden state in the nation became an economic basket case.

When my parents came to California in the 1960’s looking for a better future, they found it here. The state government consumed about half of what it does today after adjusting for both inflation and population. HALF. We had the finest highway system in the world and the finest public school system in the country. California offered a FREE university education to every Californian who wanted one. We produced water and electricity so cheaply that some communities didn’t bother to meter the stuff. Our unemployment rate consistently ran well below the national rate and our diversified economy was nearly recession-proof.

One thing – and one thing only – changed in those years: public policy. The political Left gradually gained dominance over California’s government and has imposed a disastrous agenda of radical and retrograde policies that have destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted.

The Census bureau has reported for the better part of the decade that California is undergoing the biggest population exodus in its history, with many fleeing to such garden spots as Nevada, Arizona and Texas. Think about that. California is blessed with the most equitable climate in the entire Western Hemisphere; it has the most bountiful resources anywhere in the continental United States; it is poised on the Pacific Rim in a position to dominate world trade for the next century, and yet people are finding a better place to live and work and raise their families in the middle of the Nevada Nuclear Test Range.

I submit to you that no conceivable act of God could wreak such devastation. Only acts of government can do that. And they have.

We conservatives espouse principles of individual liberty, free markets, constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, the protection of natural rights – not out of some slavish devotion to ideology, but because all human experience has shown these principles to be the most certain means to achieve a prosperous and happy society. If you want to see the opposite of that – come to California.

James Madison said the trickiest question the Constitutional convention confronted was how to oblige a government to control itself. History records not a single example of a nation that spent, borrowed and taxed its way to prosperity; but it offers us many, many examples of nations that spent and borrowed and taxed their way to economic ruin and bankruptcy. And history is screaming this warning at us: that nations that bankrupt themselves aren’t around very long, because before you can provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty – you have to be able to pay for it.

California may not have invented deficit spending but we certainly refined it into a science. Before the crash of 2008, when California was taking in more money than ever in its history, it was already running a nine billion dollar deficit, under a Republican governor elected on the pledge to “cut up the credit cards.”

Federal spending increased 26 percent in the last three years literally consuming and squandering the wealth of the nation at the worst possible time. Yet consider this: from July of 2005 to July of 2008, California increased its spending by 31 percent, under a Republican governor elected on the pledge to “stop the crazy deficit spending”. You can see how well that’s worked for us.

If stimulus spending, massive deficits and burgeoning government bureaucracies were the path to economic prosperity, California should be leading the nation from the top rather than from the bottom. After we lost the nation’s triple-A credit rating this summer specifically because of chronic deficit spending, it should surprise no one that California suffers the lowest bond rating in the nation for precisely the same reason.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our regulatory burdens are also years ahead of the rest of the nation – we’ve had our own version of Cap and Trade on the books for five years now, and even though the bulk of these restrictions yet to take effect, investors make decisions every day anticipating their impact.

This has already proven utterly devastating to energy generation, cargo and passenger transportation, cement production, construction, wine making, agriculture and manufacturing. When he signed this legislation, Gov. Schwarzenegger promised that this would produce a cornucopia of new green jobs.

How’s that working out? Up until the autumn of 2006, California’s unemployment rate tracked fairly steadily with the national unemployment numbers. But beginning in that quarter, California’s unemployment rate moved steadily beyond the national numbers. Today it stands at 12.1 percent – three full points above the national rate. You can’t blame the national economy for that – you have to find something specific to California that occurred in the autumn of 2006 to explain this divergence. I submit that the only significant event in that period was the signing of AB 32.

And I should note that although we’ve devastated California’s once recession-proof economy with these ridiculous regulations, the Earth stubbornly continues to warm and cool as it has for billions of years.

I mentioned water and electricity so cheap that some communities didn’t meter the stuff. There’s a reason for that: California had embarked on an aggressive program of hydroelectric and nuclear power construction that promised an era of clean, cheap and abundant electricity. But beginning with the first “small is beautiful” administration of Jerry Brown, these programs were abandoned in favor of “green energy.” We now have the most stringent renewable energy requirements in the nation.

Which helps explain why California is the home to such stunning green energy success stories as Solyndra. We have among the highest electricity prices in the continental United States. We have the lowest per-capita electricity consumption in the nation as well. And every day, our government spends part of our sky-high electricity bills to lecture us to conserve more.

We completed our last major dam in 1979. Last year, environmentalists diverted 200 billion gallons of water from central valley agriculture for the enjoyment and amusement of the Delta Smelt – a three-inch long minnow that has become the environmental left’s pet cause. This single action destroyed thousands of jobs and laid waste to a half million acres of the most fertile farmland in America. It is no coincidence that four of the ten metropolitan areas suffering the highest unemployment rate in the country are all in California’s Central Valley.

Meanwhile, up north on the Klamath River, California has found a new partnership with the Obama administration as they proceed to tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams capable of producing 155 megawatts of the cleanest and cheapest electricity on the planet — enough to power 155,000 homes. This is due, we are told, to the decline of the salmon population. The Iron Gate Fish Hatchery on the Klamath produces 5 million salmon smolts each year – 17,000 of which return as fully-grown adults to spawn – but they don’t include them in the population count. To add insult to insanity, when the Iron Gate Dam is destroyed, we will lose the Iron Gate Fish Hatchery.

We have the most aggressive mass transit program in the country – although we have not added significant capacity to our highway system in a generation. Californians consistently pay among the highest taxes per gallon of gasoline in the country and yet make among the lowest per capita expenditures on our roads. And what a surprise: we also have among the highest congestion rates in the country.

We have the largest population of illegal aliens in the country, consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion in direct state expenditures. A few years ago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff reported that fully 25 percent of the jail inmates were illegal aliens. For years, California has provided in-state tuition for illegal aliens at the expense of California taxpayers – and with the signing of the California Dream Act four days ago, they will also have access to taxpayer-financed grants. Meanwhile, CSU has increased tuition 22 percent in just two years.

I’ve noticed a few of you on your cell phones no doubt checking to be sure that your return reservations are confirmed.

But I need to remind you that the Obama administration is pursuing exactly the same policies nationally – and so far with the same results. When you step off the plane back in your home state, just remember that all your plane trip will buy you is a couple of years if we lose the fight in 2012.

The second act of this morality tale is how bad process accommodated and amplified bad policy.

The Left loves to throw the term “dysfunctional” at our governing institutions. In the last week, the Democratic governor of North Carolina seriously opined that we ought to postpone congressional elections so that congressmen would “do the right thing.” Peter Orzag this week wrote of wanting to shift even more decision-making from our elected representatives to elitist boards appointed by our betters.

We have reached this point not because of a failure of our republican institutions, but because of a failure to respect those institutions.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Again, California is a pioneer, but the rest of the country is fast catching up. In the 1960’s, California’s legislature was respected throughout the country as the model for others to follow. It was professional, it respected process, and it worked. It did a few things, but it did them exceedingly well. It left local schools, local governments and local revenues in local hands. But beginning in the 1970’s this began to break down.

The humility that kept Sacramento from sticking its nose into the business of local governments gave way to the hubris that the state knew better what was important to local communities than those communities themselves. The appalling breakdown of federalist principles at the national level now geometrically compounds this problem.

But at the core of this breakdown was the abandonment of our basic republican structure of government – and it began right here.

Our parliamentary institutions have evolved over centuries to distill diverse viewpoints to a common direction within constitutional boundaries. When this process is applied, it works extremely well.

For a quarter of a century, I watched as these brilliant checks and balances that had produced reasonably punctual and reasonably balanced budgets for over a century, and nurtured the most prosperous economy in the nation, were gradually abandoned in the name of liberal efficiency.

Slowly, inexorably, decision-making that had been done broadly and independently by the two houses of the legislature — involving the active participation of every elected representative — was usurped by an extra-constitutional abomination called the “Big Five.”

See if any of this sounds familiar: The “Big Five” is essentially a super-committee that meets behind closed doors outside the scrutiny of the public, sidelining the legislature, short-circuiting the independent judgment of the two houses, and then in the eleventh hour drops its decision into the laps of the legislature for a take-it–or-leave it vote that cannot even be amended.

I know I don’t have to connect the dots for anybody here. Ladies and gentlemen, it does not work. California’s plague of chronically late and chronically unbalanced budgets coincides quite clearly with the disintegration of the legislative process and the replacement of parliamentary institutions with handpicked super-committees.

Which brings me to the third act of this Greek Tragedy – bad politics.

Last November, while the rest of the country was celebrating historic Republican gains (including a shift of 63 U.S. House Seats, six U.S. Senate Seats, 680 state legislative seats, 19 state legislatures and six governors), the statewide Republican ticket in California – despite massively outspending the Democrats in the best Republican year since 1938 – lost every statewide race and even lost ground in the state legislature.

Republicans nationally now hold more state legislative seats than in any year since 1928. In California, they hold fewer than at any time since 1978!

That is not because the voting population of California has lost its collective mind and it is not because the state is divinely ordained to be run by morons.

It happened because Dick Armey is right: “When we act like us we win, and when we act like them we lose.”

Republicans lost the 2006 and 2008 elections not because voters abandoned Republican principles, but because they looked at the Republicans and concluded that the Republicans had abandoned Republican principles.

During the Bush years, Republicans had increased federal spending at twice the rate of Bill Clinton; they left our borders wide open; they approved the biggest increase in entitlement spending since the Great Society and that turned record budget surpluses into record deficits to launch this brave new era of stimulus spending.

I last visited with the CNP in Washington in May of 2009. What a depressing meeting that was! Obama enjoyed 66 percent public approval. The week before, a conference of self-appointed Republican leaders had concluded that “we had to put the Reagan era behind us” and we had to be “mindful and respectful that the other side has something and that we have nothing and you can’t beat something with nothing.” (I won’t mention names, but his initials were Jeb Bush.)

Thank God House Republicans didn’t take that approach.

In the aftermath of that debacle, House Republican leaders resolved to restore traditional Republican principles as the policy and political focus of the party and they achieved something no one at the time thought possible: they united House Republicans as a determined voice of opposition to the Left and they rallied the American people.

Republicans rediscovered why we were Republicans, and Republican leaders rediscovered Reagan’s advice to paint our positions in bold colors and not hide them in pale pastels.

The result was one of the most dramatic watershed elections in American history.

California Republicans did exactly the opposite, and ended up replaying the disaster of 2008 while the rest of the country was enjoying one of the greatest Republican landslides ever recorded.

In California, the Democrats attacked Republicans for imposing the biggest state tax increase in American history. The Democrats attacked Republicans for obstructing pension reform to protect the prison guards union. These attacks had the unfortunate element of being true.

Meanwhile, the Republican ticket attacked Arizona’s immigration law. Republicans attacked the Proposition that would have stopped AB 32 – California’s version of Cap and Trade.

The sad truth is that we were more like the Democrats than the Democrats.

A few days after the election, a Republican leader whose mission in life has been to redefine the Republican Party in the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger said he just couldn’t explain the results.

I can. We didn’t need to redefine our principles. We needed to return to them. House Republicans did. California Republicans did not. Any questions?

Great parties are built upon great principles and they are judged by their devotion to those principles. Since its inception, the central principle of the Republican Party can be summed up in a single word, Freedom.

The closer we have hewn to that principle, the better we have done. The farther we have strayed from that principle, the worse we have done.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned the nation that two incompatible and irreconcilable philosophies, freedom and slavery, competed for our future and reminded us that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” “I do not believe the house will fall,” he said, “but I do believe that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Today two incompatible and irreconcilable philosophies — freedom and socialism — compete for our nation’s future and the stage is set for one of the greatest debates in the history of the American Republic.

We are winning that debate. But we have to stand firm.

What has happened to California and now is threatening our country is the inevitable consequence of bad policy, bad process and bad politics – and the good news is, that’s all within our power as a people to change.

I believe that if Californians rediscover these self-evident truths, Jerry Brown will be to California what Barack Obama has been to the rest of the country – a giant wake-up call. And if Americans rally behind these truths, together, we will write the next great chapter of the American Republic: that just when it looked like America would fade into history as just another failed socialist state, this generation of Americans rediscovered, revived and restored those uniquely American principles of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, rallied under a bold banner held high by the traditional party of freedom, and from that moment America began her next great era of expansion, prosperity and influence.

Tom McClintock is the U.S. Representative for California's 4th congressional district

Banning service dogs is NOT a solution....

Liberty Mutual posted this story on their website and asked the reader to be the judge.

The City of Indianapolis made two poor decisions. Like schools banning peanut butter, the employees should be told to limit the food with paprika and handle it carefully, not have to have it banned as if they are unable to handle the responsibility of handling food correctly.

Allowing Emily Kysel to have a service dog to help her was a good decision. To ban her service dog but no one else's is a 2nd mistake. Her service dog is as needed as others.

I feel there are better solutions than banning things from the workforce. Banning things never produced a solution. It is better to place the responsibility in the hands of those who are on your staff, and support those who need additional assistance.

In this case, the employer, The City of Indianapolis made poor decisions and employees suffered for those decisions.

Be the Judge: Banning Service Dogs
by Kathy McManus / Liberty Mutual

Emily Kysel has a potentially fatal allergy to paprika. The 24-year-old Indianapolis city worker nearly died five years ago from eating chili, and since then, The New York Times reports, “her allergy has sent her to the emergency room five times and caused her to jab herself with an anti-allergy injection 11 times, sometimes from just inhaling paprika nearby.”

Kysel’s boss banned co-workers from eating any foods containing paprika—like buffalo wings-- at their desks. Her family helped her buy a $10,000 allergy-detection service dog that alerts her to the presence of paprika by jumping on her. But the first day she took the golden retriever to work, a co-worker with an allergy to dogs suffered an asthma attack. Kysel’s boss then banned the dog.

Kysel contends that the city of Indianapolis has treated her unfairly by barring her service dog while allowing blind employees to use theirs. She has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a case The Times says “raises tough questions about how to balance the sometimes clashing interests of co-workers with disabilities.”

You be the judge: what’s the most ethical way to settle this case? Should one person’s allergy outweigh another’s??