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Asylum In San Francisco

Posted by Bill Crawford on Friday, July 25, 2008 12:20:53 PM
San Francisco is a "sanctuary city". How do we know? They have a commercial out there that states it to be so, in multiple languages (in case the Danes were worried). They won't cooperate with the Feds, the state of California or the INS. They are special.
 
The campaign is working. The city is attracting all sorts of foriegn matter, most of it Mexican. People who are hard up to establish a career and a life on their own elsewhere have come to call the Golden Gate city a new home.
 
Why does this concern me? San Fran is run by financial wizards who are in the hole for about $338 million this year. California isn't in much better shape. How long will it be before we all are being asked to help bail out these babbling idiots?
 
Segue to New York. The MTA, strapped for funds to a point where it has scheduled TWO upcoming fare increases, has accepted money for a huge pro-Muslim ad campaign to appear in it's subways. This is a city where the last Mayor told Yassir Arafat to take his keister and his money and go somewhere else.
 
And the left wonders anew why we all can't give up our trucks and SUV's and move back to the cities to be more socially responsible citizens. To go back to New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Detroit or Washington D.C.? I'll pass. I choose to live in a part of the country where if the Mayor gets caught smoking crack, he doesn't get re-elected.
 
 
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The New York Times Is A Rag

Posted by Bill Crawford on Friday, July 25, 2008 11:32:45 AM
As is usual in twentieth century history, a Presidential candidate from one of the two major parties submitted an op-ed piece to a major newspaper and had it printed the next day.
 
The other party's candidate submitted a response to the same paper and the editor, David Shipley, returned it for correction, like a deficient high school English composition. Please make it so "it mirrors Obama's"? What could have been wrong? No policy statements? It contained overt criticism of the opponent? Both pieces were littered with policy AND criticism.
 
Welcome to the new world. For those of you who are curious about the history of all this, feel free to reference my blog here from a few months ago, "Media Bias...Normal" (Feb. 1st). It doesn't change anything. The NY Times does not simply take sides with it's editorial page. It takes sides with it's news policy. It takes sides with it's page one, top-of-the-fold articles, news placement and pictures.
 
The Times is a liberal rag. It used to be a great paper that had a liberal bend in the editorial section. This is not a new thing. The gritted teeth that Republicans talk through when referring to the Times could be found in the New Dealers talking about the Chicago Tribune in 1940.
 
The new part of it all is the shakeout in televison and radio we are going through now, going from a handful of stations in both spectrums to hundreds on satellite radio and the internet. A handful means everybody is watching you maintain your objective responsibility. Hundreds means you can say whatever the hell you want and if people don't like it, there are plenty of places to go.
 
McCain shouldn't take this personally. He is just a victim of the new paradigm.
 
 
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Yes, We CAN Drill Our Way Out Of This

Posted by Bill Crawford on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 12:32:28 PM
It seems that the Hatfields and the McCoys of this country will never see eye to eye on our energy problem.
 
The Left is crystal clear on their limits to growth, anti-sprawl agenda. Let's keep the prices where they are, it will force us to invest in cleaner energy sooner. If it isn't there yet, deal with it. Get smaller cars, get out of the exurbs and into the cities, where you can take mass transit.
 
They aren't done there. Despite the fact that the future of alternative energy sources and a cleaner environment has almost universal support politcally, they paint the right (and the "oil man" President) as opposed to all this, and simply focused on more oil and more drilling.
 
That follows the old Hillary methodology. She used to say, "If you want to sell a policy, you have to tell a story. And every story has a villian".
 
Obama is on board with this. His stated concern about our gas prices is that they went up "too quickly", and didn't give us "time to adjust". We are supposed to sit there like frogs on a hot plate, getting used to the hotter water gradually, until we all live in apartments and drive Hondas.
 
The reality is out there, folks: over three quarters of our energy at present is from nuclear or fossil fuel. The best solar panels are only marginally more efficient than they were in 1980. The latest generation of batteries, lithium ion, are a similar story. And the Kennedy's don't want windmills mucking up their Hyannisport scenery.
 
We subsidized ethanol production to the point where it sucked enough grain off the food market to start the UN bleating about starving Africans. We will soon reach a tipping point where the drive to start drilling here will be too great to block.
 
Al Gore has his great plans, which, like all the Left, calls for keeping the prices where they are, in order to drive conservation and alternatives. And if they don't become feasible for ten years, suck it up, America.
 
That's the plan? That's your best shot, Al? You were VP for eight years. You never carped when gas was $1 a gallon in 1998. You were in a position to do something then, but, like now, all you do is talk. And then hop on your Lear jet to talk somewhere else.
 
There are ceramic-metal alloy engine blocks coming that will allow cars to run without cooling syatems, saving at least a quarter ton from driving weight. When they show up, when the first solar panel with 40% energy conversion shows up, don't hold your breath waiting for this conservative to protest their apparance. Even if gas is down to $1.80 a gallon at the time.
 
Nuts.
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Obama's Off Limits List

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, July 14, 2008 9:48:14 PM
What is it they say? Journalism is literature in a hurry. I often get ideas for things at times when development is not an option, so it ends up on my non-time stamped index cards. I've been told there is a Limbaugh monologue out there on this subject. And two or three people invented the telephone, but Bell got his to the Patent Office first.
 
So call me a plagiarist, but this must be said. I'm getting pretty damned tired of the parameters of conversation that Obama is trying to muzzle us all with.
 
The July 4th speech was pretty clever. After taking a few moments to honor McCain's service to the country, he declared BOTH of the candidate's patriotism off limits. So we can't talk about his flag pin or his patriotism.
 
We can't talk about his wife. We can't talk about his ancestors. We can't talk about his Preacher. We can't talk about his religion, because that's code for us labeling him as some sort of closet Muslim.
 
We can't talk about his friends, no matter how wacky and reprehensible they are. We can't talk about the guy facing prison time who sold him his house and property at such an amazing price.
 
We can't talk about his middle name. And we certainly can't talk about race, which he bounces back and forth between being past and obsessing about how others are using it against him.
 
Which leads this former New Yorker to one question: Obama, who the hell died and left you in charge?
 
This is where the rubber meets the road for John McCain. Lee Atwater would not put up with this crap. Neither would Karl Rove. Or James Carville. I certainly won't. If McCain loses this election because he allows this arrogant s**t to walk over him, there will be hell to pay later- for both of them.
 
 
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The All Star Game

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, July 14, 2008 9:19:29 PM
The All Star Game, like just about everything else in baseball, manages to be some sort of mush despite the marvelous sport it is at it's center.
 
The unbridled competition it once was turned into some sort of little league show in the last decade, with the managers striving to get every last player in before the lights went out. This is why a few years ago, they had to call it a tie and go home- Joe Torre ran out of players and the game wasn't over.
 
So now they decide the  World Series home advantage with the All Star game. Jeez, do they ever need a real Commisioner, to slap the owners and players in the head when they leave their common sense home.
 
But, I digress. The star of this game is the stadium that you all need to get one last look at. Soak in the history. Revel in the excellence this team brought to the game for so many years.
 
Mind you, history abounds in baseball. There is plenty to take in within the ivy walls of Wrigley in Chicago. But there is also a century of heartbreaking failure, the longest run in organized sports.
 
There is a flush of recent dynasty in Fenway in Boston, but while the Yankees of Gerigh and Dimaggio were setting the professional standard, Ted Williams was in charge of a country club. If Ted weren't coming up in the bottom of the inning, he wouldn't even come back to the dugout. He would drop his glove and amble to the ice cream shop across the street, coming back to left field after his minions recorded three outs.
 
I know Yankee Stadium was rebuilt and changed in the 1970's. But it still has grass in right field where the greatest player who ever was patrolled. Take it in while you can. Before they jack the prices to the point where only bond traders can get season tickets. I guess they are doing that because you don't have to walk past the prison anymore to get from the subway to the gates.
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Tony Snow, Class Act

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, July 14, 2008 8:49:36 PM
Tony Snow was an inveterate husband and father who happened to be a pretty damned good broadcaster. He was a man who never lost track of his priorities.
 
He was, by all accounts, devoid of ego. Many anecdotes passed on this weekend involved him treating the storyteller equally when they were nobody as well as when they were what the reporters call a "get".
 
He was a breath of fresh air as White House spokesman, because he challenged the premises of many questions before answering, often offering a chance for the questioner to rephrase. This was something that was long overdue.
 
During one press session, he said, "Can we all step back for a minute to realize how fortunate we are? Look at where we come to work every day." That says it all. Rest in peace, Tony. Our prayers are with your young family.
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Stop Global Warming?

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:30:13 PM
There is a fun website out there called StopGlobalWarming.com. This is the one that advertises themself with the choice of "Stop Global Warming" or "Put your head in the sand" on billboards. As if disagreement with them were possible!
 
When you go to their site, they have an intriguing link called "The Science". Being a doubter of exactly that, it led me right to the heart of the issue.
 
It was an exposition on the effects of ice melt, a treatise on the effects of colder water in the Atlantic stream leading to the Carribean and the like.
 
Nothing about the establishment of human causation vs. natural elements in the creating of hydrocarbons. Nothing about the cause and effect and error analysis involving the hydrocarbons being directly responsible (and how much) for temperature increases.
 
I e-mailed them, asking for some numbers from their troposhperic computer modelling. No response yet.
 
Pardon me if I don't hold my breath waiting.
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Rush's New Contract

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:29:38 PM
Rush Limbaugh maintained his posture in the top tax bracket with his new Alex Rodriguez style, ten year contract. Even the Yankee's Third Baseman didn't get eight figures up front.
 
If the Fairness Doctrine gets reinstated, Rush will be locked into the new limitations on terrestrial radio, and he will suffer through each and every one of the stations that carry him finding six hours of Al Franken and his pals to counter him and the equal number that carry Sean Hannity. There will be enough station managers who tire of it and go to a music format to create some pain in Limbaugh's world.
 
Rush is not ignorant of this. I think he is taking the easy gamble that, like the fates of the vaunted Democrat "Six in 2006" agenda, nothing will come of the effort to resurrect. He knows that Reid and Pelosi couldn't find their butts with both hands on a sunny day, hence their 9% approval rating in the Rasmussen poll.
 
All hail the hard working Congress! Even Gingrich didn't have the cajones to call an empty Senate chamber to order and close it five minutes later every day, in order to prevent a President from making recess appointments.
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Iran Does It Again

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:28:27 PM
Just when one party here is busy getting out the message that our presence in the Middle East is as expensive as it is unnecessary, Iran defies all the UN sanctions and starts test firing medium range missiles all around.
 
Like an old friend of mine likes to say, these people never miss an opportunity....to miss an opportunity.
 
These people are at war with us. They know it. Too many people here are just not getting that yet.
 
They want to elect Obama and give us all a fresh start on a "surge of diplomacy". The leadership in Teheran show all the signs of somebody who is happy to stay the course even if it means no refined fuel, food or jobs for the citizens that "elect" them.
 
For the early part of the 1930's Winston Churchill's Parliament rantings about the Nazis were regarded as overblown posturing. When he turned out to be right, they lined up behind him in a snappy way all at once.
 
Of course, they dumped him as soon as it looked like the war was won. I think we are at the same "hinge of history" that he talked about. It's too bad that things will have to get worse before we finally act. I guess the safeguards of democracy are always going to be a limitation on war, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. It just means that people like me are going to have to push everybody else to act, so when the tipping point is reached, we will be that much better prepared for it.
 
Meanwhile, you will have to excuse my crocodile tears when Obama bristles at the comparisons of him to Neville Chamberlain.
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G-8 Protester Madness

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:27:09 PM
There is a limits to growth, anti-sprawl crowd that follow these summits around, and think they will advance their cause by dressing like it is laundry day at the trailer park and creating all sorts of havoc.
 
A few years ago, they got so bad on a Presidential visit to Portland that the city has the Secret Service nickname of "Little Beirut".
 
They rail against all form of global business and trade, lacing it over with some sort of environmental hubris. They don't even try to layer it over with some sort of 'bring the jobs back to us' populism.
 
Odd thing, though: forget ancient history. Just compare it to 1975. More people live above the poverty line now than ever. Less people live under authoritarian rule than ever. Is this happening because their annual salaries are rising, or because they are getting better drugs?
 
Even stranger is that all the predictions circa 1975 of this crowd regarding arable land, fossil fuels and population growth have turned out to be palpable bulls**t. How long will this record be out there before somebody in the mainstream press notices that most of these people are living their lives with their heads up their butt?
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Bill Clinton's Progeny

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:26:32 PM
I flew back from visiting relatives in New York recently, back to home in North Carolina.
 
Waiting for a connecting flight, I sat near a few Obama campaign workers. They spent some time going over schedules and logistics, and then went into some banter that started with an article in that Sunday's Washington Post Style section. It compared the candidates to Hollywood stars, concentrating on Obama and Will Smith and McCain and John Wayne.
 
It was an entertaining article that tried to be complimentary to both. The Obama staffers went on at length about McCain being ancient and doddering and how John Wayne was too good for him.
 
It was rude and surly. They showed me the same generational disrespect that did so much damage to Clinton and his ilk over the years.
 
When I sat next to two of them on the short plane flight, I introduced myself as a McCain volunteer, hoping they would lose both nationally and in the state they were headed for- but it was nice to meet them. They seemed surpised at first by the lack of animosity, but soon corrected themselves, as most humans do when faced with kindness.
 
Of course they disagreed with my premises and analysis on how close this election will be- in Electoral votes and in fund raising. That is the other odd thing- the Obama people are convinced they are going to run away with this thing. They seem to be riding the wave of Obama's enthusiasm and oratory and translating it into a modern version of the French knowing they were going to trash the Kaiser in 1914- crushing the superior German armaments with their elan and esprit de corps.
 
I hope for their candidate's sake that they grow up a bit this fall. He can't afford for them not to.
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Obama And His Thin Skin

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:25:16 PM
I can't get over how this guy is supposed to be so comfortable within himself, but these moments keep popping up where he seems to unload something boiling inside.
 
Before Bill Clinton lost his White House staff or his campaign workers, he left the bristling, 'I am offended' remarks to the War Room people- he being left to stick a flag in the high ground and keep it there.
 
Obama decided that Independence Day weekend was to be a symposium on patriotism. A wonderful idea in itself. He spent some time honoring McCain and (cleverly) declaring the subject off limits for both of them. Mistake one was then to go into another spiel about his 'alternative' patriotism. The bigger mistake two was to meander into the subject of how the world was percieving his own patriotism. He wants to create a world that goes beyond Boomers, and he falls into the Boomer manhole of self-centered angst.
 
Not that I care. The left has been at it for over a decade into turning their softness on national security into a personal attack on their patriotism. Until recently, it was a subject I never brought up.
 
Until this war. This is the first full-blown shooting war of my adult life, and there is a lot at stake. We have troops in the field, and their butts are on the line. At home, we have a political party who want to do anything they can to end this war, including threatening to pull the funding for all of it, ala the Vietnam Congress in 1975.
 
You can talk of your love of country all you want. If you have a house built, and you follow it up by shooting buckshot into the siding and telling the builders you ain't paying them, I'm going to question your sanity. If the state of things that you advocate threatens my children, I'm going to question your patriotism. I don't give a rat's a** if you like it or not.
 
Peace may be patriotic, but surrender is not.
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The GOP Handicap

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 03, 2008 10:09:50 AM
In the ungodly glow of the happenings of Election Night, 1994, I was the only one who had a bad thing to say.
 
We will have to work harder than Democrats to maintain a majority, I said, because conservatives have a life outside of Washington.
 
With most Democrats, government is practically a religion. The use and promotion of government as a positive force is their life. Harold Ford in twenty years will be Ted Kennedy. Kennedy in another ten will be Robert Byrd. Democrats keep going to the floor and voting until their oxygen tanks and their heart medicine aren't enough to allow them out.
 
Conservatives look at government more as some sort of necessary evil that has to be reigned in. They do it for a while, and they go back to their life, which isn't D.C. That was Bob Dole's problem with his party: he was a Senator from Kansas, but he seemed to live in his Watergate suite all year. He was a Washington creature.
 
This is why term limits was a concept that wasn't allowed to surface until the Gingrich crowd came to town. The Republicans are the only ones who believe in it.
 
The end result is that the Republicans have to win an extra dozen seats every year, because of the ones their own members open up because they are tired of the Washington treadmill. There is another GOP majority in the offing, but it will take a lot of things coming together again to make it happen.
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The "Fairness" Doctrine

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 03, 2008 9:57:03 AM
It would seem that the Democrats are getting serious about exhuming the Fairness Doctrine. I understand that they gave Mario Cuomo every chance to be Rush Limbaugh's alter ego in radio, and they certainly threw all they could at Air America. All for naught.
 
Meanwhile, Neilsen counts the viewers at MSNBC with an abacus. Why is this? I don't care, and I don't choose to ponder.
 
When Reagan was faced with signing off the Doctrine in 1987, many conservatives appealed to him, saying they were going to lose their only shot at appearing in certain venues. His response was that if you needed to be mandated to stay on the air, your ideas weren't strong enough. That was a mensch in action.
 
Without the dictum of alternate viewpoints, the next great medium took off- talk radio. Rush was simply the first talent in place to take advantage of it.
 
In the world that followed, the conservatives of America dumped the old media, and hooked onto the only place they could find their viewpoint uttered publicly. Talk radio became a conservative bastion. Ther blogosphere started out as one, too.
 
Here is the rub: if the Fairness Doctrine gets reinstated, the liberals are still married to the old world: network television, the newsweeklies and the major urban newspapers. The conservative world would dump AM radio in a heartbeat, and go immediately to sat-radio. If the Doctrine gets signed into existence, buy all the Sirius and XM stock you can, because their subscriber base will explode in a matter of weeks.
 
That is the funny thing about this issue. The target (conservatives) will have no compunction about moving to other ground, it being available already. The intended protectees (liberals) will be married to a world where a million potential lawsuits await- imagine the litigation to actually get NPR to place half of it's airtime to the likes of G. Gordon Liddy.
 
Not that I would listen to NPR at that point. But I'd love to see them tied up in court. Hell, it's a better use of my tax money than some of the things they spend it on now.
 
Redi and Pelosi, be careful what you wish for. It's a brave new world.
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We Really Do Have A Second Amendment

Posted by Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 28, 2008 1:27:23 PM
It's a sign of our times that the Second Amendment finally got to a Supreme Court test. One hundred years ago or more, the existence and interpretation of that Amendment would be taken the same as they would at the writing of the Federalist Papers.
 
Those who would re-interpret the Second Amendment usually find one of two attack patterns. The first spends an inordinate amount of time centering on the "militia" reference, trying to re-evaluate the whole thing based on that being the operative phrase (the refutation of which was at the core of Scalia's majority reasoning). The second pattern involves simply trying to create a modern interpretation using a "larger context", which was the core of the Supreme Court dissent. "Larger context" usually means that one thinks one's contemporary viewpoint trumps the originalist intentions.
 
Being an originalist myself, what do I think the Second Amendment is all about? It's hard to get past the Federalist Papers without being beat in the head that the problem being addressed there was tyranny. British tyranny, to be precise, but using the Constitution to circumvent the potential problem of tyranny from our own government down the road.
 
The naivete of those who don't follow along with this today are those who either don't think such a recurrence is possible here, or that it is an antiquated notion.
 
I think the core of the Amendment is not so much that the citizenry is armed. It is certainly not about hunting. Home defense is closer to reality, but not defense against private intrusion. I don't think we have had a quarter millenium of uninterrupted transfer of power because we are unusually nice people, or because there is something in our drinking water.
 
It is because at all times in our history, as a whole, the citizenry is better armed than the state.
 
In the 1950's, there were Rabbinical scholars consumed with hypotheticals that went along the lines of: what may have been different if, when the Nazis went to clear the Jews out of the ghettos of Poland, there was a person with a gun behind every other door?
 
The answer to that question is right here in America.
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