No more Twinkies :(

Thanks liberals. Somehow the military or rich Republicans will be blamed.

The cost of Defense

I admit that I am a Cold War baby. I was born in the 70′s, my father worked as a defense contractor. He met my mother when he was in the Air Force.

But what has the military done for the rest of us?

• The very existence of this Wiki was made possible via the US Department of Defense wanting to create a way for people to gain access to powerful research computers they were geographically separated from—for both purely scientific/academic and military projects. Incidentally, it also protected the flow of information between military installations from attacks (up to and including nuclear weapons). This is what became the Internet. (The World Wide Web and the hypertext system, while still vital, was a civilian thing)
• Your sat-nav. NAVSTAR GPS, developed for the US military and made available for public use after the KAL 007 shoot-down.
• Supersonic flight—first done by the US Air Force.
• The Moon Landings—military-trained pilots. Of the 12 men to walk on the Moon, only one (Harrison Schmidt) had never been a member of the US Armed Forces. Of the remaining 11, only the first (Neil Armstrong) was directly employed by NASA: Armstrong was a retired Navy test pilot, while the remaining 10 were still active-duty Air Force and Navy pilots (4 Air Force, 6 Navy).
• US Space Exploration in general—the Titan space launchers were originally for Superior Firepower.
• Antibiotics. In order to keep troops healthy, the US Military developed a way to mass produce penicillin in World War II to ensure every soldier would have access to some.
• Nylon—originally created for parachutes. Or rather, originally created for women’s stockings, which used the silk needed for parachutes at the beginning of World War II; old stockings were turned into parachutes. And then they ran out of old silk stockings and started making the parachutes out of old nylon stockings and whatever other nylon they could get their hands on. Women held stocking drives to support the war effort.
• Duct tape—originally created as a waterproof packing tape for supply crates being carried ashore in amphibious landings. In the military duct tape is colored olive drab instead of silver, and nicknamed “mile a minute tape” or “ninety mile an hour tape.”
• In response to large natural disasters around the world, when the US sends aid, the first responders are usually the military, who have the logistical capacity to quickly move a lot of supplies and medical personnel, often to territory that doesn’t lend itself easily to conventional civilian transportation due to limitations of local infrastructure (pre-existing limitations or those caused by the disasters themselves). Entire naval battle groups have been rerouted to provide aid, occasionally even as the disaster is in progress.
  On the internet an anecdote exists of a supposed conference listing some of the capabilities of aircraft carriers in disaster situations, including on-board hospitals, cafeterias designed to feed thousands and the ability to both provide electricity to shore based facilities, and provide a landing point for rescue aircraft.

…

• One of the benefits of joining the US military since WWII is having your college paid for by the Montgomery GI bill. One can also get a scholarship by joining the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, essentially a college level cadet program that leads into a military career as an officer). In addition, each service offers the ability to gain college credit, and in some cases having a degree is a requirement for promotion even for the enlisted. In America joining the military to get an education is a fairly common motivation, helping to make the military an institution of society in many parts of the US.

– TVTropes: “Yanks With Tanks”

“There is no National Defense Service Medal for veterans of the Cold War. What were America’s GIs up to? They went on alert when Egypt claimed the Suez Canal in 1956. They manned missile silos in North Dakota and piloted B-52s aimed at Soviet targets. They crewed nuclear-armed submarines and drove tanks in the Fulda Gap between West and East Germany. Some of what they did is still secret.”
–”A Cold Shoulder for Cold-War Vets“, By BARRY NEWMAN, WSJ.com (via XBradTC)

So out come these idiots from George Mason University:

In 2010, the United States government spent more on national defense ($738.8 billion) than it did
at the height of the Cold War spending in 1986 ($572 billion), when the U.S. was competing in
an arms race against the then superpower U.S.S.R.
…
Once the U.S. embarked upon the path of permanent war, starting with World War II, the result was a permanent war economy. The permanent war economy continuously draws resources into the military sector at the expense of the private economy, even in times of peace. We explore the overlooked costs of this process. The permanent war economy does not just transfer resources from the private economy, but also distorts and undermines the market process which is ultimately responsible for improvements in standards of living.

What? What technology has been suppressed? What has been held back?

Let’s look at the budget:

Yea, less than a quarter even if you add in the “generous” pensions vets get from the Dept. Of Veterans Affairs. Here, here, here and here I destroy the left’s favorite arguments about the military:

1. We don’t need a draft.
2. Pay is not generous.
3. The military is smaller today that it was during the cold war.
4. There is no need to “reform” pay.

What we have here is a failure to adjust for inflation. “1986 ($572 billion)” becomes 1,2 trillion in 2012. 2010′s $738.8 billion becomes $349.9 billion in 1986 dollars. The military is smaller and cheaper than during the cold war.

I suspect that the left hates the military and some want to side with our enemies. The only country that had a military-industrial complex that broke it was the former USSR. A command economy sucks because it has to choose guns over butter. Like North Korea:

North Korea fights global warming!

The “report” from Thomas K. Duncan and Christopher J. Coyne i long on sweeping lefty generalizations and short of specifics(And if TvTropes can call out their bullcrap…). The “military-industrial” complex was a term Eisenhower(R) used to refer to Kennedy(D) and his fear that Kennedy would spend more on defense. Then Vietnam happened under LBJ, man walked on the moon and the DoD had huge growth. I’m stationed on an air base expanded and built upon during the Kennedy era.

I sense bad things for those of us in the service, since this is catnip to the left.

Artist vs Warriors

A long time ago, a friend of mine had a theory about presidents he called “The Artist vs. The Warrior.

The Artist is that friendly face on the TeeVee saying that he’ll fix our problems and he cares.

The Warrior says that he is up to the challenge and will face our enemies.

The Artist talks about America’s past greatness.

The Warrior says we are a great nation.

The Artist makes promises.

The Warrior talks about action and follows through.

American voted on Nov 6th. They voted for the Artist.

Yes American, you want more gov’ment cheese.

As someone is fond of saying, something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

Those getting bennies and free stuff will be pitted against those who have to pay for it. Class warfare and the race card will continue to be played. There is no war on women, there is a war on our way of life. The Media is in the tank for those in power.

But we’ll keep fighting. We love our country and don’t fear the hate, the slander or the lying media.

The Artist is a liar. Most of them promise more than they can deliver. The myth of “fairness”, that America is hostile to people who aren’t rich & white. Some pastors may “damn” America as some professors lie to their students, but main street still believes in the land of the free.

If the GOP is so in love with being in power that they are putting candidates who are no better than the Democrats, they need to go. Have we not learned from the Randy Cunningham scandals? From Jerry Fallwell? That Todd Akin is a flaming moron?

We will rebuild. You, leftie thinking “four more years of free stuff”, you own this mess. You drove us off the fiscal cliff.

Thanks, we’ll remember next November.

Bankrupt

First Detroit, then California, New York (almost) and now the party itself:

The official Federal Election Committee reports for September are out, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s DNC is a complete wreck. The Democrats ended September with cash on hand of $4.6 million, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $82.6 million.

That’s nearly an 18-to-1 cash advantage for Republicans.
– RNC Trounces DNC in Fundraising as Democrat Party Goes Bankrupt (theOtherMcCain.com)

It’s always someone else’s problem. New York was “ungovernable” in the 60′s, 70′s and the 80′s. Detroit lost the autoindustry etc. The common factor was liberals in charge.

Voters put them in office on a platform of “share the wealth” and “stick it to the rich/stand up for the little guy”. The truth is that liberals/Democrats don’t care about the little guy. Corporate cronyism (Like the Hollywood Tax Cuts and loans to failing “green” companies), bad regulations and high taxes drove many cities and now at least one state into a state of shock. It’s not surprising that the Democratic Party is in bad shape financially. You can’t party like a rock star and not pay for it.

If the left loses in November expect the usual suspects to get the blame. Oh the Tea Party and it’s billionaire friends (never mind that many billlionares sent money to the DNC). Foxnews manipulated the public (never mind that cable news and most traditional media’s veiewership is down). Somehow Bush will get some blame.

It’s telling that Newsweek magazine, who said “We’re all Socialists Now” will cease it’s print edition in the new year. The liberal mouthpiece is so unloved that it will share the internet with the very right wing blogs the MSM once derided.

In a perfect world the Democratic part would fade into history, replaced by some new party. They would join the Green Party, the American Communist Party and other groups on the fringe of American politics. That won’t happen for a long time, despite having the left wing lunatics running the asylum. But this should sober up many on the left. Their class warfare socialism message is for sale, but no one’s buying.

UPDATE: Thanks Mr. McCain!

The liberal narrative

Liberals have a strange way of viewing the world:

• Ron Fournier’s article on Romney playing the “race card” may be completely made up. (Brietbart)
• “Deterrence” didn’t work for the USSR, but will work for some reason on Iran. (Charles Krauthammer, Wasington Post)
• It’s okay to call a black Republican Mia Love ‘dirty, worthless whore’ and ‘House Nigger.’, violent protestors are ‘peaceful’(Instapundit) and MSNBC can’t find black conservatives. (Instapundit)
• Many common expressions are somehow racist/sexist (Michelle Malkin)
• “Did we mention that Mitt Romney is rich?” (Know your Meme)
• “Hey, how come these Republicans aren’t talking about Todd Akin or offshore tax havens?”(HotAir)

As so it beings. The left is losing it’s mind as it’s confronted with reality. Maybe the voters are tired of not having jobs. Maybe the fading “Hope and Change” posters just aren’t enough.

There will be anger and protests. The “unbiased” media will stay in the tank for the left. There will be shitty movies and stupid actors.

Don’t panic! The key is for conservatives (the real reality based community) to stay on message. Let the lefties dress up in stupid costumes, parade fake veterans and riot. We have a party and a ticket that will fix what’s wrong. But we have to vote them into office. The left is good at shrieking when it can’t get it’s way. We need to be better than that. Gaffes will happen, it’s still a long way to November. But we have a candidate, a plan and a platform.

The left has it’s dog whistles. They bitterly cling to Bush, even though he’s been out of office for 3 1/2 years.

How’s that hopey changey thing now?

A civics lesson for the left:

Why the electoral college? Zo and Whittle take us to school:

Chew on this: The year isn’t even over yet.

Tasty links and a power to the people.

1. Lefties may not stop after the President tells them to clam down.
2. Gee thanks, Emergency Services to Suffer Under ObamaCare
3. When you make a hero,make sure your “hero” is sane.
4. Really lefties,really?
5. Hey CNN, this ain’t the garden of Eden, this ain’t thesummer of love.
6. Michelle Malkin, you are right again.
7. Can the Air Force avoid the1990′s
8. Don Surber is right on targetand Glenn Reynolds puts out firedoglake.

They want to believe

Charles Krauthammer on the Democrats health care proposal:

The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.
…
The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Then do health care the right way — one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness, and inefficiency.

First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures, and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do.

We hear the endless droning of the MSM on how the US healthcare system is so unfair. We must give insurance to everyone! We must make it fair! Universal coverage!

Of course ask how this will be paid for and when you get past the usually soak the rich argument (and counter that taxing the “rich” who even begin to pay for “universal coverage”) and be prepared to hear crickets chirping.

Even Howard Dean admist that Republicans are right to try and kill this bill. Polls show that most are happy with the current health care.

Great Britain tired “universal coverage” and they are reaping what they sowed: Lower standards, “Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership”.

If conservatives are accused of being heartless, liberals seem to revile in how much they appear to care. Wages too low? Raise the minimum wage. Despite what that does to the poor Social problems? SPEND! and SPEND MORE! Until the bill comes due and your state’s credit rating takes a hit. And taxes won’t help.

Caring is isn’t half the battle, it’s barely the start of the battle (unless you’re fighting a villain from a Saturday morning cartoon). We’ve had to endure decades of “caring” and “social welfare” until we spend more on entitlements than anything else. We listen to lawyers who say they “care” and now our laws are a hopeless jumble. Bad case laws, junk administrative law and regulations and junk statutes that line the pockets of big law firms. All for huge cash rewards that barely trickle down to the injured parties.

It’s time for rational thinking to take over. It’s time for less caring and more problem solving. We can solve this mess with out taxes, with out employing armies of lawyers. Government is not your parent, your caretaker or you doctor. It is raw naked force. The ax, the jail cell, the audit. Once people realize that they’ll stop clamroing for universial health care pipe dreams and start working on solutions.

knowledge is power!

Bringing the 9/11 plotters to the US: Galacticly Stupid

Ah, justice. A matter for the courts right? Well if you jaywalk, crash your car while drunk or murder your lover yes.
But if you are the mastermind of a plot to kill 3,000+ innocent people in another country thousands of miles away and you are a danger to that country still, the courts may be in over their heads.

Tell that to the left and their drool supporters in the press. (h/t: Michelle Malkin)

Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, an Obama administration official said Friday.

The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning.

The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Terrorists hate our laws. They hide behind them to exploit the loopholes and clueless lefties that support them. Terrorism is NOT and never has been a criminal matter. It’s survival of the country, of the people. They want to kill as many Americans as possible.

If KSM is found innocent in the trial, does he go free? Why him? Others are getting military tribunals?

If the wacky anti-GITMO lefties are still not satisfied what then?

Are some in the administration playing politics with national security?
(h/t: Ace o’ Spades)

The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department’s obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the “reckoning” that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring “torture” and “war crimes” indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama’s base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.
….
Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can’t help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc.,

That’s the real danger. National secrets exposed to defendants who want to destroy America, an international left that wants to drag the US government into pointless court cases. Both want to “prove” that any US actions in defense of the country and American citizens are “war crimes.” The results may come back to bite us.

What most people don’t get is that the Geneva Conventions do not cover “enemy combatants” that:

• hide in the civilian population
• do not wear uniforms or carry ID cards
• “Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.” Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions</li>

We should have executed these clowns when we had the chance.

Dumbth: Liberals and the War on Terror

“See – we have a problem,” Matthews said. “How do we know when someone like Hasan is going to make his move and do we know he’s an Islamist until he’s made his move? He makes a phone call or whatever, according to Reuters right now. Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda. Is that the point at which you say, ‘This guy is dangerous?’ That’s not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?”
–
Newsbusters: “Matthews on Ft. Hood Suspect Warning Signal: ‘That’s Not a Crime to Call al Qaeda, Is It?’”

By Jeff Poor, November 9, 2009 – 21:11 ET

YES it is a crime to all a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.

We had Naomi Wolf claiming that Sara Palin “falsely linked al Qaeda to 9/11.”, when she wasn’t afraid of a military coup taht never happened.

Reason number #102938 I don’t miss college is people like Wolf and Mathews. They love lefty politics and see the world in Marx colored glasses.

“While the Obamas host a Halloween Party outside the White House for military families, peace activists will also don costumes and call on Obama to oppose the surge in Afghanistan and end the wars… The activists will be dressed as zombie soldiers, ghosts of war victims, a monstrous Obama’s Afghanistein and more.
–Big Government: “Obama Ally Code Pink Targets Children of Military Families for Psychological Abuse“

Have these people no shame? No decency? At long last, someone needs to ask these idiots “Have you no shame?”. FYI: Code Pink was/is a major donor to the Democratic Party.

20 years ago this week the Berlin Wall came down.

No mention of Ronald Regan, US forces in West Germany or the aid America gave to freedom.

The popular myth is that the wall kind of toppled over by itself, with a little push from people power. That of course ignores not only the prior 44 years of Cold War … interspersed with several hot ones that cost us tens of thousands of American lives … it also ignores the massive military buildup of the 1980s, the encouragement of liberation movements behind the Iron Curtain, the tough engagement with old-school Soviet leaders and, not least, the cordial engagement with a Soviet leader who realized it was time to throw in the towel. An atmosphere was finally created in which people felt like the could challenge the wretched, murdeorus regime with impunity, and they did.

…
Here’s Ross Douthat at NYT, who was not yet 10 when that happened, not only thinks the wall was shoved over by German flower children…

” Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle.
Never has so great a revolution been accomplished so swiftly and so peacefully, by ordinary men and women rather than utopians with guns.”

–
VEE Day, Jules Crittenden

And now we have Militant Islamic terror[tm], trying to kill us. Many in this country are in deep denial.

Former Navy SEAL Richard Marcinko, in his first book, criticized President Regan for seeing terrorism through the cold war. He felt it was more of chaos vs. order. I think it’s more good vs. evil. Terrorists are not the poor downtrodden masses or innocent people swept up in the war on terror. They are thugs and hatemongers pure and simple.

The Stazi killed many Germans, they funded the Red Brigades to kidnap and kill more. One President dared their soviet master to tare down the wall they hid behind.

Why can’t the left do the same today?