Curtis Dahlgren
From "rainbows in the North" to folly on the Potomac: Random thoughts for Washington
By Curtis Dahlgren
O the games people play now,
Every night and every day now!
— Joe South
MR. PRESIDENT, PLS LISTEN TO YOUR PEOPLE, NOT YOUR "MARXIST PROFESSORS"! As the 111th Congress gathers to finish its dirty work, Decembers always seem full of troubling news. From the Christmas Day bomber, to the Christmas Eve attack on our health, to this week's shooting death of a high school sophomore in a social studies classroom, the dark days of December continue.
There will be a memorial for a Boy Scout who died on Tuesday in a nearby town. That morning I saw something I had never noticed before — a rainbow in the north (right over my adopted hometown). A few minutes later I saw a sheriff's squad speeding toward our local high school — due to a bomb threat written on a wall.
From a Christmas-tree bomb plot in Portland to illegal aliens carrying illegal drugs and/or driving while under the influence, we have "bigger problems," but Congress just voted — I kid you not — to regulate bake sales in the public schools! Not to mention the preoccupation with gay "rights" in the military. And while we dawdle over Iran and North Korea, the TSA fondles GRANDMA at the airport!
There's a bumper sticker on my truck that says, "I miss President Reagan." We learned this week that our Federal Reserve Bank lent billions — probably Trillions — to foreign banks and some domestic banks and companies (including a maker of motor cycles) before and during the "crisis" of September 2008, the 7th anniversary of 9-11, and the anniversary of Krushchev's "we will bury you" speech in New York City.
Here's a pop quiz for you, boys and girls. Who said the following?
"The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. ... They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding."
Was that by Senator DeMint or some other right-winger? No it was by President James Madison — one of those DWAS that the city of Madison is so ashamed of (Dead White Anglo-Saxons). You see, nearly every mistake that governments can make had already been made before the American Revolution, and our Founders tried very, very hard to give us a push in the right direction. But those who hate the Founders want to "transform" the USA in a 180 degree opposite direction — because they think they're so much "smarter"!
ARE THERE "TWO AMERICAS"?
Our problem is not that there are two groups with locked-in opinions; the problem is with half of the politicos being locked in to some really, really stupid ideas. They are professional gripers who think that politics is just a game in which they can defy the will of the People indefinitely. These are the kind of (mostly younger) people who have never had a parent — or a teacher — say "NO, YOU CAN'T."
Then again, some of the too-silent majority say, "We don't want to get involved" (even if they are Christians). Well — an apostle by the name of Peter once wrote, to what was still the Free World of his time, and he said:
"For it is the will of God that by your good conduct you should put ignorance and stupidity to silence" (i.e., stupid speech should be countered with good speech, "using your Freedom." Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons wrote:
"How could so many so many allegedly brilliant people do something so dumb as to gamble the nation's — nay, the world's — financial system on shaky subprime real estate loans to millions of Americans drowning in debt? After all — as Michael Lewis points out in his trenchant book, 'The Big Short' — 'the people who worked on the relevant Goldman Sachs mortgage bond trading desk were all extremely intelligent. They's all done amazingly well in school and had gone to Ivy League universities." [Marinette Eagle-Herald, April 23, 2010]
I ran across a late-2008 Chicago Tribune article, "Paulson Reverses Course on Rescue" by Peter Gosselin and Jim Pussanghera (originally from the L.A. Times):
"WASHINGTON- In a jarring about-face, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday that the Bush administration is dropping the centerpiece of the $700 billion financial rescue package approved by Congress less than two months ago: a plan to buy up troubled mortgage-related securities.
"Instead, Paulson said, the Bush administration plans to use the money for other things, including further efforts to thaw the nation's credit markets. The turnaround by Paulson, who originally dismissed emergency government investments as a recipe for 'failure,' illustrates the extent to which government officials have been flying by the seat of their pants in the deepening economic crisis." [end of excerpt]
RECENTLY, a congresswoman on a key oversight committee was asked "Where did the TARP money go?" and she said that we don't know and, we may NEVER KNOW.
Besides that, we don't know where the current administration's $787 billion "Stimulous" money went either. Some people wonder if most of the "aid" it has doled out hasn't helped the Hyde Park portion of his constituency rather than his "junk yard dog" constituents nearby. Like I said, I miss President Reagan.
Reagan lived on the south side of Chicago too for a while, and he learned economics the hard way, from the bottom UP, which is the best way to learn it. His family was so poor that they made one pot of soup last all week — made from a 5-cent soup bone — and their Sunday dinner was mainly a throw-away liver begged from a local butcher "for the cat" (they didn't have a cat).
"We were probably poor," he used to say. "But we never knew we were poor."
Nevertheless, in the era long before food stamps and Pell Grants, Reagan made his way through college as an economics major at a small school in Eureka, Illinois. When he ran for President, he was running on his own ideas, and the Eastern liberals and Republican/Whig country-clubbers were terrified by Reagan's ["voodoo"] economics.
"Status quo is Latin for the mess we're in," said Ronnie, but his "voodoo" worked, and to this day he is revered by many conservative Democrats more than by the liberal Republicans who participated in the "stop Reagan" movement.
I recently wrote that economics is "5 percent money and 95 percent psychology." To put it more precisely, economics is 10% money and 90% FAITH (consumer confidence, partly, but also including religious faith). It certainly requires more religious faith to start a business these days than to rely on a government check that could bounce anyway.
"If the very old will remember, the very young will listen." — Native American proverb
I well remember the recession of the late 70s and very early 80s, because I moved from Wisconsin to Wyoming in order to stay employed. If I got any unemployment checks at all, it was only for a couple of weeks. [I spent most of my career climbing trees like a monkey, but I got paid better than the monkeys because I didn't have any opposable toes.] Anyway, despite history revisionists on the Left in academe, Reaganomics was successful.
Now if I were to be asked if I want the current President to succeed or "fail," I would say that the question is moot. Because his definitions of success and failure are unclear (and not the same as the People's, that's for sure). He even says that "jihad has many different definitions."
Concerning economics, the professors he hung out with in college keep saying that they want the USA to be "more like Europe," so the question really is, "IS EUROPE SUCCEEDING?"
THE ANSWER IS NO, and the American people therefore don't want to be "more like Europe." Union "holidays," wild spending on "benefits" and subsidies didn't work. Massive immigration and massive deficits didn't "work." I've heard that unemployment rates in Europe range from 20 percent to the 50-to-70 percent range in Ireland. Michael Savage says that instead of a potato famine, Europe has "a famine of good government."
This week ending 12/04, 2010 was a week of great "revelations": 1) The Fed's report regarding loans to banks in Europe starting in 2008, and 2) the Internet leaks of 250,000 Top Secret diplomatic documents. The former was an interesting and "useful" revelation, but the latter could have consequences of such monumental proportions that I don't even want to name the name of the Internet "leaker" site. [It rhymes with the name of the baseball player Rickie Weeks, so I will refer to it from now on as the LickieWeak's website.]
Remember MAD magazine's "Spy vs. spy" cartoons? Who woulda thunk that one of the spies would turn out to be Hillary Clinton, eh?
CONCLUSIONS ANYONE?
I hate to dampen the spirit of the "holidays," but let's review some recent news items:
- The ObamaCare bill is so bad that the administration has granted more than 110 "waivers" from the law.
- The administration has again ruled off-shore drilling off-limits in the eastern Gulf and the Atlantic.
- Both off-shore and ANWR drilling is off-limits in Alaska, even as gasoline tops $3 a gallon.
- Unemployment just rose "officially" to 9.8 percent.
- Unless the Bush era tax rates are extended, like NOW, a married middle-class couple could be paying an extra $420 a month or so for the next six months at least.
- Hourly government workers average $28.64 per hour, $10 an hour more than in the private sector.
- Federal bureaucrats average almost twice as much, considering benefits, as private salaried employees.
- The amount of EPA spending has risen 130 percent since Oboma took office.
Even the apolitical Clark Howard has to say that most politicians don't understand economics. I think this would be a good spot for a Hillary Clinton quotation: "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this Administration somehow you're not patriotic."
That was a pre-2009 quote, and here's one that goes back even further:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President . . right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public." — Theodore Roosevelt
In conclusion, the only thing I have to say about that is this: Since taking office, the Prez has given something like 75 speeches abroad (mostly criticizing America), and only 14 in states won my John McCain (and most of those in union halls or on university campuses), so whose side is he on anyway?
P.S. Dedicated to Samuel, the Marinette, Wisconsin teenager who killed himself this week: his motives are unknown, but I purposely wrote a long column today. I did it to help suggest some theories for those who ask "why" a kid at that age could be depressed. DUH. Think — he was a "social studies" student at a time in which all the foundations of society are being shaken, and our grandkids' future is being mortgaged.
Early reports are that he had friends and hadn't been "bullied," but he was a Boy Scout, and there is ongoing social and legal persecution of the Boy Scouts of America.
ENOUGH SAID?
PPS: We live north of the 45th parallel, so we're closer to the North Pole than the equator. I've only lived up here for about 8 years, which is why I guess I've never noticed a rainbow in the north before. You see, even at mid-morning the sun is low in the southeastern sky, which is how a light drizzle could produce the rainbow in the north-northwest.
I just wanted to leave you with a positive thought. More to come.
© Curtis Dahlgren
December 5, 2010
O the games people play now,
Every night and every day now!
— Joe South
MR. PRESIDENT, PLS LISTEN TO YOUR PEOPLE, NOT YOUR "MARXIST PROFESSORS"! As the 111th Congress gathers to finish its dirty work, Decembers always seem full of troubling news. From the Christmas Day bomber, to the Christmas Eve attack on our health, to this week's shooting death of a high school sophomore in a social studies classroom, the dark days of December continue.
There will be a memorial for a Boy Scout who died on Tuesday in a nearby town. That morning I saw something I had never noticed before — a rainbow in the north (right over my adopted hometown). A few minutes later I saw a sheriff's squad speeding toward our local high school — due to a bomb threat written on a wall.
From a Christmas-tree bomb plot in Portland to illegal aliens carrying illegal drugs and/or driving while under the influence, we have "bigger problems," but Congress just voted — I kid you not — to regulate bake sales in the public schools! Not to mention the preoccupation with gay "rights" in the military. And while we dawdle over Iran and North Korea, the TSA fondles GRANDMA at the airport!
There's a bumper sticker on my truck that says, "I miss President Reagan." We learned this week that our Federal Reserve Bank lent billions — probably Trillions — to foreign banks and some domestic banks and companies (including a maker of motor cycles) before and during the "crisis" of September 2008, the 7th anniversary of 9-11, and the anniversary of Krushchev's "we will bury you" speech in New York City.
Here's a pop quiz for you, boys and girls. Who said the following?
"The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. ... They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding."
Was that by Senator DeMint or some other right-winger? No it was by President James Madison — one of those DWAS that the city of Madison is so ashamed of (Dead White Anglo-Saxons). You see, nearly every mistake that governments can make had already been made before the American Revolution, and our Founders tried very, very hard to give us a push in the right direction. But those who hate the Founders want to "transform" the USA in a 180 degree opposite direction — because they think they're so much "smarter"!
ARE THERE "TWO AMERICAS"?
Our problem is not that there are two groups with locked-in opinions; the problem is with half of the politicos being locked in to some really, really stupid ideas. They are professional gripers who think that politics is just a game in which they can defy the will of the People indefinitely. These are the kind of (mostly younger) people who have never had a parent — or a teacher — say "NO, YOU CAN'T."
Then again, some of the too-silent majority say, "We don't want to get involved" (even if they are Christians). Well — an apostle by the name of Peter once wrote, to what was still the Free World of his time, and he said:
"For it is the will of God that by your good conduct you should put ignorance and stupidity to silence" (i.e., stupid speech should be countered with good speech, "using your Freedom." Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons wrote:
"How could so many so many allegedly brilliant people do something so dumb as to gamble the nation's — nay, the world's — financial system on shaky subprime real estate loans to millions of Americans drowning in debt? After all — as Michael Lewis points out in his trenchant book, 'The Big Short' — 'the people who worked on the relevant Goldman Sachs mortgage bond trading desk were all extremely intelligent. They's all done amazingly well in school and had gone to Ivy League universities." [Marinette Eagle-Herald, April 23, 2010]
I ran across a late-2008 Chicago Tribune article, "Paulson Reverses Course on Rescue" by Peter Gosselin and Jim Pussanghera (originally from the L.A. Times):
"WASHINGTON- In a jarring about-face, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday that the Bush administration is dropping the centerpiece of the $700 billion financial rescue package approved by Congress less than two months ago: a plan to buy up troubled mortgage-related securities.
"Instead, Paulson said, the Bush administration plans to use the money for other things, including further efforts to thaw the nation's credit markets. The turnaround by Paulson, who originally dismissed emergency government investments as a recipe for 'failure,' illustrates the extent to which government officials have been flying by the seat of their pants in the deepening economic crisis." [end of excerpt]
RECENTLY, a congresswoman on a key oversight committee was asked "Where did the TARP money go?" and she said that we don't know and, we may NEVER KNOW.
Besides that, we don't know where the current administration's $787 billion "Stimulous" money went either. Some people wonder if most of the "aid" it has doled out hasn't helped the Hyde Park portion of his constituency rather than his "junk yard dog" constituents nearby. Like I said, I miss President Reagan.
Reagan lived on the south side of Chicago too for a while, and he learned economics the hard way, from the bottom UP, which is the best way to learn it. His family was so poor that they made one pot of soup last all week — made from a 5-cent soup bone — and their Sunday dinner was mainly a throw-away liver begged from a local butcher "for the cat" (they didn't have a cat).
"We were probably poor," he used to say. "But we never knew we were poor."
Nevertheless, in the era long before food stamps and Pell Grants, Reagan made his way through college as an economics major at a small school in Eureka, Illinois. When he ran for President, he was running on his own ideas, and the Eastern liberals and Republican/Whig country-clubbers were terrified by Reagan's ["voodoo"] economics.
"Status quo is Latin for the mess we're in," said Ronnie, but his "voodoo" worked, and to this day he is revered by many conservative Democrats more than by the liberal Republicans who participated in the "stop Reagan" movement.
I recently wrote that economics is "5 percent money and 95 percent psychology." To put it more precisely, economics is 10% money and 90% FAITH (consumer confidence, partly, but also including religious faith). It certainly requires more religious faith to start a business these days than to rely on a government check that could bounce anyway.
"If the very old will remember, the very young will listen." — Native American proverb
I well remember the recession of the late 70s and very early 80s, because I moved from Wisconsin to Wyoming in order to stay employed. If I got any unemployment checks at all, it was only for a couple of weeks. [I spent most of my career climbing trees like a monkey, but I got paid better than the monkeys because I didn't have any opposable toes.] Anyway, despite history revisionists on the Left in academe, Reaganomics was successful.
Now if I were to be asked if I want the current President to succeed or "fail," I would say that the question is moot. Because his definitions of success and failure are unclear (and not the same as the People's, that's for sure). He even says that "jihad has many different definitions."
Concerning economics, the professors he hung out with in college keep saying that they want the USA to be "more like Europe," so the question really is, "IS EUROPE SUCCEEDING?"
THE ANSWER IS NO, and the American people therefore don't want to be "more like Europe." Union "holidays," wild spending on "benefits" and subsidies didn't work. Massive immigration and massive deficits didn't "work." I've heard that unemployment rates in Europe range from 20 percent to the 50-to-70 percent range in Ireland. Michael Savage says that instead of a potato famine, Europe has "a famine of good government."
This week ending 12/04, 2010 was a week of great "revelations": 1) The Fed's report regarding loans to banks in Europe starting in 2008, and 2) the Internet leaks of 250,000 Top Secret diplomatic documents. The former was an interesting and "useful" revelation, but the latter could have consequences of such monumental proportions that I don't even want to name the name of the Internet "leaker" site. [It rhymes with the name of the baseball player Rickie Weeks, so I will refer to it from now on as the LickieWeak's website.]
Remember MAD magazine's "Spy vs. spy" cartoons? Who woulda thunk that one of the spies would turn out to be Hillary Clinton, eh?
CONCLUSIONS ANYONE?
I hate to dampen the spirit of the "holidays," but let's review some recent news items:
- The ObamaCare bill is so bad that the administration has granted more than 110 "waivers" from the law.
- The administration has again ruled off-shore drilling off-limits in the eastern Gulf and the Atlantic.
- Both off-shore and ANWR drilling is off-limits in Alaska, even as gasoline tops $3 a gallon.
- Unemployment just rose "officially" to 9.8 percent.
- Unless the Bush era tax rates are extended, like NOW, a married middle-class couple could be paying an extra $420 a month or so for the next six months at least.
- Hourly government workers average $28.64 per hour, $10 an hour more than in the private sector.
- Federal bureaucrats average almost twice as much, considering benefits, as private salaried employees.
- The amount of EPA spending has risen 130 percent since Oboma took office.
Even the apolitical Clark Howard has to say that most politicians don't understand economics. I think this would be a good spot for a Hillary Clinton quotation: "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this Administration somehow you're not patriotic."
That was a pre-2009 quote, and here's one that goes back even further:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President . . right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public." — Theodore Roosevelt
In conclusion, the only thing I have to say about that is this: Since taking office, the Prez has given something like 75 speeches abroad (mostly criticizing America), and only 14 in states won my John McCain (and most of those in union halls or on university campuses), so whose side is he on anyway?
P.S. Dedicated to Samuel, the Marinette, Wisconsin teenager who killed himself this week: his motives are unknown, but I purposely wrote a long column today. I did it to help suggest some theories for those who ask "why" a kid at that age could be depressed. DUH. Think — he was a "social studies" student at a time in which all the foundations of society are being shaken, and our grandkids' future is being mortgaged.
Early reports are that he had friends and hadn't been "bullied," but he was a Boy Scout, and there is ongoing social and legal persecution of the Boy Scouts of America.
ENOUGH SAID?
PPS: We live north of the 45th parallel, so we're closer to the North Pole than the equator. I've only lived up here for about 8 years, which is why I guess I've never noticed a rainbow in the north before. You see, even at mid-morning the sun is low in the southeastern sky, which is how a light drizzle could produce the rainbow in the north-northwest.
I just wanted to leave you with a positive thought. More to come.
© Curtis Dahlgren
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(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
