The Ramble for 5/11/11

Suffield,CT— I’m currently waiting for a trailer to get offloaded so I can continue on Mendon, MA.  While waiting, I did manage to download a few pics that I took of my truck after it’s bath on Monday. Here’s a couple of them. Cleans up nicely, doesn’t it?

Yes, I know, I’m crowing a little, but it’s amazing what a few weeks worth of spare time will do. I’ve got some plans to spruce things up a bit more, but I’m already getting compliments over it on the road.

Looking around:

• I’ve discovered a new application for my Palm Pre, called TuneIn, which allows me to not only tune in most radio stations that are tied to the internet regardless of where they are, but also to tie onto podcasts of all the biggies. I now have about all the listening I can take, and since I have unlimited net access on the phone, I can stream all day long if I like.
• THE EPA again… Speaking of radio, I made mention of this on the Midnight Radio network about a week ago.
  

  How important are jobs to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? Not very, according to recent testimony from EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. After Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., asked whether an EPA economic analysis of new coal ash regulations took into account potential job losses, Stanislaus replied: “Not directly, no.” Gardner then followed up: “Is it standard procedure for an economic analysis to ignore the impact on jobs?” Stanislaus could only manage the following in return: “Well I can get back to you on the specific details of how we do economic analysis.” It has been over three weeks since that exchange, yet Stanislaus has yet to answer Gardner’s question satisfactorily.

  Anyone who thinks he will actually answer the question is most likely a progressive. And on the show that night, Eric Harley made the point that this is exactly in keeping with this administration, despite the repeated promises of being the ‘most transparent administration in history”.  How many years did it take Obama to cough up a birth certificate? THe measurement of this administration is not in it’s words, but with it’s action, and the results of it’s actions. It’s as Feredoso says, today:

  At a time of economic stringency, Obama would be doing everything in his power to allow the private sector to create jobs. He says he is. In his weekly radio address last Saturday, he told Americans: “Not a day that goes by that I’m not focused on your jobs, your hopes and your dreams.” But you can’t focus on what you don’t measure. How can the Obama administration claim to be promoting job creation when the EPA isn’t even analyzing what effect its regulations will have on jobs?

  The EPA needs to be stopped and stopped cold. Eliminated. And right now. Don’t tell me that we go from where we are to burning rivers in 30 seconds or less or that without the EPA and the damage it causes we’d still be there. That, my friends, is fear mongering nonsense fed to us by big government types who don’t care about jobs. Like, Obama, for example. Let’s see… double digit unemployment, double digit inflation, and Obama& Co want to strangle business all the more with Save the Planet nonsense?  We need to excise this monster once and for all. Our economy depends on it.

• NO, JOHNBOY…. Asad never WAS a reformer. Not even close. And that you had him tagged as such and worse, tried to direct our foriegn policy as if he ever WAS a reformer, only tags you as a bigger idiot than I made you for. Good, God, people, this man tried to be President. Can you imagine the foreign policy disaster as a result of a President John Kerry? OK, we have a worse situation now, with Obama, I grant you, but not by much.
• More Job-killing Liberalism:Over at the Daily Caller, Brett McMahon notes today:
  

  Recently, the NLRB filed a complaint to stop Boeing from completing a new aircraft assembly plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state and one that is generally friendly to business. The reason? Obama’s labor board says the company shouldn’t be free to operate in its interests, despite having faced years of costly strikes by militant unionized employees in Washington State.

  Now, you may not work in an airplane factory and it’s even less likely that you own an aircraft company. But the federal government’s attempt to tell one company which states it can and cannot do business in is a threat to the free enterprise system that has been the fertile soil of this nation’s economic strength for decades.

  Now remember where I’ve been saying look at the actions not the words of this administration?  Tell me about how this doesn’t kill jobs. Go ahead. I’ve long been of the reflected on the fact that Unions kill jobs, economies and so on.  Here’s yet another example of that.  And guess who backs the Unions? Yep… Obama. The fact was and remains that this administration has been about killing off free enterprise in this country…and with a look at the state of the economy under it’s watch, doing a damn good job of it, too.

• Welcome to reality, Mike. Over at Pajamas Media (Where I really have to get to writing again)  Mike Ledeen finally grasps what I’ve been saying all along, and much to his credit he’ll put it in words for all to see. That takes courage, Mike.
  

  I have sadly and reluctantly come to the conclusion that there may well be circumstances in which we may have to do terrible things in order to prevail, and perhaps even to survive.

  Correct. And you know the difference between Ledeen and Obama on this score? Ledeen will admit it’s needed at times. Obama outlawed it, despite taking credit for an assassination we were only able to pull off because of intel gathered by it.

  Look, this stuff is never easy, but at least let me make this simple for you. War is the absence of civility and of law. Talking about the concept of a “lawful war” is like talking about freeze dried water. There’s no such thing nor given the nature of things could there ever be. Moreover, our laws only get to survive, if we both win the war, and survive the effort. Thereby an irony; the only way for our laws our values, our culture to survive, is to be ready at all times to step outside them to wage war on those who choose to wage war on US and win against them decisively, by whatever means necessary.  That’s something the left will never understand. Then again, they aren’t too keen on this country and it’s culture being defended anyway, as a rule. Maybe there’s a connection there, ya think?

Bye-bye binny, from New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The adult sons of Osama bin Laden have lashed out at President Obama over their father’s death, accusing the United States of violating its basic legal principles by killing an unarmed man, shooting his family members and disposing of his body in the sea.

The statement said the family was asking why the leader of Al Qaeda “was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world.” Citing the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the statement questioned “the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated,” but the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were ignored.

Legal reax, from Charles Stimson, National Review:

Bin Laden declared war on the United States twice in the 1990s. As the leader of al-Qaeda, he was responsible for September 11, 2001, and numerous other terrorist attacks. By joining in war against the U.S., bin Laden acted to ensure that the law governing police or human-rights law wouldn’t be applicable to his fate.

The late binny Laden had no problem trying to kill our elected leaders, to wit the intended target of  Flight Ninety Three, either the White House or the Capital.    Sadly for the late biiny,  are SEALS are better shots.

Christopher Hitchens on Norm Chumsky, Slate:

The professor’s pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.

The man can still write.

Thought for the Day, Thomas Sowell  RCP:

Many Third World countries have turned out so many people with diplomas, but without meaningful skills, that “the educated unemployed” became a cliche among people who study such countries. This has not only become a personal problem for those individuals who have been educated, or half-educated, without acquiring any ability to fulfill their rising expectations, it has become a major economic and political problem for these countries.

Education is experience condensed in time.  Credentialing which does not impart real experience id merely a waste of otherwise good money.

Irony noted, Rochester Now:

Former Rochester anti-violence advocate Joyce E. “Joy” Powell was found guilty of second-degree murder this morning by an Orleans County jury .

Powell, 49, is currently serving a 16-year prison term for a prior conviction on burglary and assault charges.

She was convicted today of the murder of John Rutledge, 37, of Rochester, who was found dead in a ditch on the side of Sawyer Road in Carlton, Orleans County, on June 6, 1992. He had been shot several times.

[…]

In 2007, she was convicted for an October 2006 incident in which a woman was beaten in her Copeland Street home, pepper-sprayed and tossed through a front window. The woman suffered a fractured spine and lacerated spleen.

Us curmudgeons are hard to shock

Kiddie Kollege Komandos*, from 13WHAM (Rochester, NY)

Gates, N.Y. – Two toddlers walked out of a Lyell Avenue daycare Friday afternoon and were found wandering a neighborhood by themselves.

Gates Police said Kiddie Kollege daycare workers put the children down for a nap.

They discovered two 2-year-old children were missing, then went looking for them

Exclusive interview,must cite:

When this reporter interviewed the apparent ringleader of  the gang, one Tom S.  he was said he was leaded for Injun Joe’s Island.   Meanwhile his partner, one Huckleberry F. said that read men don’t wear nappies and don’t need no stinking naps.   The two reported planning to raft down the Genesee to Elmira.

[*]  Gotta give Morris Dees something on which to nibble.

Fairfield, CT– I’m parked for the night along I95 with a load bound for Windsor Locks,CT. From there, I’ll be headed to Albany, and then to Syracuse and home tomorrow. Just a quick Ramble since I do need to sleep… I’m up at 4am to make all this happen.

• Border Fence: Obama’s “Mission Completed”? You KNOW the White House will be silent on this.
• Who doesn’t care?
  

  President Obama doesn’t seem to have even peered out his Air Force One window to view the swelling Mississippi, a minimal show of interest for which George W. Bush was pilloried when he took a peak at the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At least Bush bothered to look. 

  Obama is traveling today OVER the devastation being wrought by the Mississippi in order to get to events in Texas, where he will rally his Hispanic supporters with a speech on immigration in El Paso and then head to the Lone Star state’s liberal bastion of Austin for two fundraisers.

  Welcome to hope, and change. Like what you see, America?

Gutsy Call? United States has permission to take Usame bin Laden in Pakistan, from Declan Walsh, Guardian (UK):

Osama bin Laden mission agreed in secret 10 years ago by US and PakistanUS forces were given permission to conduct unilateral raid inside Pakistan if they knew where Bin Laden was hiding, officials say

The deal was struck between Pervez Musharraf and George Bush in 2001 and renewed during the ‘transition to democracy’ – a six-month period from February 2008 when Musharraf was still president but a civilian government had been elected. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week’s raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned

Prior permission from Pakistan explain why were willing to have the SEAL on the ground for a full forty minutes inside a virtual armed camp.

Obami all wet on KSM, Obami tries to explain why killing an unarmed Usama bin Laden is good, but getting KSH’s head wet somehow evil, from Matt Lewis, Daily Caller, video:

How to explain Dumbo’s tanking poll numbers, is it racism, from Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald::

In assessing bigotry, then, one learns to judge actions over words. And the actions of many Americans have screamed their discomfort with the idea that a black man is now the man. A computer abstract of his birth certificate, a perfectly ordinary document that satisfies passport requirements of the U.S. State Department does not satisfy Donald Trump? Give me a break.

Some have suggested that Obama’s opponents — like George W. Bush’s — are simply out to delegitimize his presidency. Wrong. They are actually out to delegitimize him.

It is  not necessary to refute Pitts premise that we a nation of bigots.   May attitude is what it is.  If Pitts wants to endeavor to prove that this attitude is free from his particular biases,  more power to him.  I simply say that not necessary to invoke racism to disapprove of the maybe the most uneducated president in our nation’s history.     Obama is simply incompetent, not to mention arrogant and lazy, from J.R. Dunn, American Thinker:

The gas crisis is something that, in its impact on the daily life of voters, should have a serious effect on Obama’s chances in 2012.  So you’d expect some effort at a solution on his part.  But look as long and hard as you like — that is something you will not find.

What you will find is an insistence from Obama and all concerned that there’s nothing to be done, that oil prices are a product of forces beyond the control of even the messiah, that “we can’t drill our way out of the problem.”  This is nonsense.  Faced with the same predicament in 2008, George W. Bush brought oil prices down simply by announcing that new drilling areas would be opened up.  Prices dropped, an outcome that Obama would have us believe is impossible.

Obama is not a man smart enough to understand the consequences of his own action.   The Obami have waged a wer against both oil companies and domestic oil production, yet profess befuddlement with the ever continuing increase in gasoline prices.

Mountaintop, PA– I’m here at the Quaker Oats facility in Mountaintop.  After weeks of rain, we’ve got some serious sunshine, and it’s a welcome thing. We’ll see middle 60’s around here today. I’ll be in New Jersey, tonight.

A glorious view from Mountaintop, PA (Drill for full size)

Got the truck washed this morning, it looks wonderful. Things with the truck continue to come together and I’m nothing but pleased. I took Friday off, which allowed the wrenches to spend some quality time with it, and they managed to get lots working that wasn’t. Bloody miracle workers those guys… And I got to spend some quality time with Donna, in the bargain, which is something I’ve not had much chance to do of late. We had a whole weekend together, which is something that is of a premium with this job.

We got to spend some time with my Mom, as well, being Mother’s day. All in all a fine weekend, and I’m refreshed and ready to go.

Looking around:

• Betrayed? I doubt it: In The Daily Mail yesterday:
  

  Osama Bin Laden’s deputy led U.S. troops to the Al Qaeda leader’s hideout so he could take over the terrorist group, it was claimed today.

  Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, who has been touted widely as the man who will succeed Bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, turned his back on his terrorist leader following a prolonged power struggle, according to a Saudi newspaper.

  The plot to get rid of Bin Laden began when Zawahiri’s faction persuaded bin Laden to leave the protection of the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

  If true, it would seem that Zawahiri played US intelligence like a fiddle. But I’m unsure if that’s the end of it.  UBL, didn’t strike me as someone who would let such betrayal go on. Moreover,  Zawahiri doesn’t sound like the kind of animal who would… or even could… plan such a coup. He’s simply neither that smart nor that bold. As such,  I begin to get the uneasy feeling that Zawahiri may have been acting at UBL’s direction. It sounds strange, and I grant you, it’s pure conjecture. But think on this; It all fits… perhaps even a little too well.  Look, gang, we’ve known for several years, now, that UBL has had health issues. kidney problems, at least.  Probably, good deal more.  Such things never get better with the passage of time, they invariably tend to get worse.  Particularly once one gets to dialysis, which has been rumored to be UBL’s situation.

  So now think; What does a leader faced with the situation do?  He not only sets himself up as a martyr , but manages to expose the level of US intel gathering, as well as the people involved with it, sets Zawahiri up as the new leader of AlQuieda, and goes out on top of his game, hero to Islamic extremists everywhere.  I don’t suggest that this is precisely what happened, I merely lay it out as a possibility.

  If it’s true, our intelligence services and particularly the White House were played as inept fools.  No shock for that since  the mishandling of the information , and the number of various, constantly shifting scenarios concocted by the White House to cover someone’s backside on this one, of themselves seem to suggest a serious ineptitude on the part of the Obama White House. That vision would seem to be directly online with them falling for a plan  of AQ, UBL and Zawahiri, et al.  And that would seem to me to make killing UBL a pariahic victory…. Hmmm?

  Here’s the sad part; If my guess is correct here, we’ll probably never know.  At least, not for years. Certainly not while Obama is in the White House and the Democrats remain in power in the Senate.

  Ohhhh and yes… Of course the other possibility (and one that seems more likely to me given the history of the thing)  is that the Saudis have reasons of their own to spread the idea that UBL was betrayed. And the reasons behind that, I can’t speculate on just now without more info.

• Stacked deck: And would they pick just now to play this ruse on the US? The same reason the Pakastanis figured they could get away with hiding UBL.  The great Mark Steyn:
  

  The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well – elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match.

  

  Mark Steyn

  Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed that one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly.  Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

  Well, exactly. And I submit that the current occupant of the White House is exactly why Pakistan correctly got that impression. But Steyn as usual goes on from there:

  Bin Laden famously said that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they naturally prefer the strong horse. Putting a bullet through his eye is a good way of letting him know which role he’s consigned to. But the strong horse/weak horse routine is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting “when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later.” The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf’s I’m-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he’d been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if they didn’t get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it.

  …
  (Compare that to now as…)…our troops are running around Afghanistan “winning hearts and minds” and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they’ve spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the UN, the EU, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in the “Facebook revolutions” of “the Arab spring,” the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden’s goal – the submission of the Western world to Islam – but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.

  Now, of course much of that train of thought should and will disappear should we actually get someone into the White House . with the stones to deal with such matters correctly. And here’s a clue; That’s not Obama. But… and here’s the key…Nor is it any other Democrat or Centrist establishment Republican.

• Civilian Trials for terorists, but not for UBL? I asked a few days ago, Isn’t Obama’s Execution of UBL, a Rejection of Civilian Trials for Terrorists? … and f course was beset by a number of lefties who as a matter of routine miss the points being made. Let me be clear, here; I echo Lee Smith in this:
  

  To fret over bin Laden’s end, to lament the killing of an American enemy, identifies you as something other than a friend of the United States.

  And, yes, I’m very much aware of what that implies in terms of foreign relations. The point, however, is that all bomb ahead card is back on his campaign promises because of something that Democrats very seldom allow for in their world view, and progressives less often than that;  Reality.  The reality is that terrorism cannot be dealt with in civilian courts effectively.  That was proven when Clinton tried it after the first WTC attack  and the attacks not only continued but escalated.   Reality: Such things cannot be dealt with simply by hauling the individual off to the slam after making sure that his stone age religious requirements are dealt with.  There is one way you deal with such animals.  You kill them.  End of story.  This goes directly to what Marc Steyn was talking about earlier, when he mentioned how gloriously ineffective the “hearts and minds” tour of our military is.   If you can’t get your mind around that concept, you’re probably a progressive.

  One of those progressives happens to be our very own attorney general, Eric Holder, who Andy McCarthy notes:

  chose to file an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, the al-Qaeda terrorist sent to our country by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a post-9/11 second wave of attacks.

  

  Andy McCarthy

  In the brief, Holder argued that a commander-in-chief lacks the constitutional authority to do what his boss, the current commander-in-chief, has just done: determine the parameters of the battlefield. By Holder’s lights — at least when the president is not named Obama — an al-Qaeda terrorist must be treated as a criminal defendant, not an enemy combatant, unless he is encountered on a traditional battlefield.

  It would be useful if staffers at congressional oversight hearings passed around copies of Holder’s Padilla brief. It is a comprehensive attack on Bush counterterrorism, an enthusiastic endorsement of the law-enforcement approach in vogue during the Clinton era (when Holder was deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who also signed on to the Padilla brief). This might explain why Holder sometimes has difficulty answering seemingly easy questions. That’s what happened this week, when the Senate Judiciary Committee quizzed the attorney general on the lawfulness of the U.S. military’s targeted killing of bin Laden.

  That issue is something that this administration dares not address.  Nor, apparently, its supporters.  Those who have been following the thread over at Outside the Beltway, will know very well of what I speak.

  Consider, please; if Obama and company really believed that tripe they been feeding us about the war on terror, they could have easily and at any time,ordered the military to transfer all prisoners held at GITMO, and for that matter all of the rendition prisons around the world as well, to military prisons in the U.S., and there wouldn’t have been thing one that any other branch of government could do about it. Further, in the more recent case of the killing of UBL, make no mistake… That mission against UBL left no doubt that it was all about killing the animal, not capturing it and putting it on a civilian trial. Remember,  UBL was unarmed.  Since I find it difficult to believe that Seal Team Six who are assumptively all in fine shape, could not at their will subdue a sickly old man who was unarmed instead of killing him.  The only conclusion to draw all was that he was intentionally assassinated.  Mind you, I have as I say absolutely no problem with that order being given, (assuming my guess above is incorrect) .  It was the right thing to do. That said, though, we have to consider the context in which the order was given.

  There’s but one conclusion to draw…that we have is an administration working in direct conflict with its own pre- election positions. They know it, too, which is precisely why they’re so silent on the matter.
  Again, let me be clear… the killing of UBL was very much the correct thing to do.  The reason this administration refuses to address that point just now, is rather simple.  The reality runs in direct conflict with their stated positions, and their leftist-progressive mantra. The importance of exposing this internal conflict in their lack of thinking, cannot, I think, be overemphasized.

• Job creation vs the “greens” (Reds):
  

  Private sector hiring, including a big jump in the retail sector, boosted overall nonfarm payrolls by 244,000, the largest increase in 11 months, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists had expected a gain of only 186,000.

  Well, all well and good, if you accept the word of NBC as gospel. But let’s look a little deeper and put this
  in perspective:

  Recently there has been a surge in cherry picked employment charts highlighting that the Obama administration has done a great job in rescuing the economy. The premise goes: after dropping to as much as 700K+ jobs lost per month, the administration has managed to pull off a miraculous recovery and now we are riding on a wave of 8 consecutive “private jobs” beats in a row. This argument is so shallow we won’t even bother with it.

  Perhaps the “economists” who espouse this theory will be so kind in their next iteration of their charts to overlay the monthly US debt issuance side by side with the jobs number. Because you see if you drown the economy in unrepayable debt, while using transfer payments to fund the digging of trenches by every man, woman and child who makes up the labor pool, then yes – you may get 0%, or even negative, unemployment overnight. Will it bankrupt the country (even faster)? Why, of course.  But whoever said those who discuss politics subjectively ever care about the long-term implications of reality.

  So in the vein of sharing pretty charts, here is one: we show job losses since the beginning of the Recession (excluding for the impact of census hiring), juxtaposed to the natural growth rate of the Labor Pool (and not the artificial one, which according to the BLS is the same now as it was a year ago).

  We discover that i) 7.6 Million absolute jobs have been lost since the beginning of the Recession; ii) that a record 10.5 Million jobs (and you won’t find this statistic anywhere), have been lost when factoring in for the natural growth of the Labor Pool of 90-100K a month (we use the lower estimate, which also happens to be the CBO’s estimate), and that iii) assuming we expect to return to the jobs baseline level as of December 2007 (or an unemployment rate of 5%) by the end of Obama’s second term (and we make the big assumption there will be a second term), Obama needs to create 230,000 jobs each and every month consecutively from September through November 2016 in order for the total jobs lost to be put back into the labor force, and that iv) an optimistic (if more realistic) projection of jobs returning to the work force means the return the baseline will occur in 2019, some 7 years after the start of the last recession.

  Now, note the passage about an unpayable debt, which Obama has massively added to since this article was written…. and also that the number of total unemployed has risen dramatically since the time it was written.

  Victor Davis Hanson puts a face on this:

  Here in Fresno County, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, the official unemployment rate in February to March ranged between 18.1 and 18.8 percent. I suspect it is higher in the poorer southwestern portions, especially near my hometown of Selma, about two miles from my farm.

  Since 2000 we have both lost jobs and gained people, and the per capita household income is about 65% of California’s average, the average home price about half the state norm.

  

  Victor Davis Hanson

  In some sense, all the ideas that are born on the Berkeley or Stanford campus, in the CSU and UC education, political science, and sociology departments, and among the bureaus in Sacramento are reified in places like Selma — open borders, therapeutic education curricula, massive government transfers and subsidies, big government, and intrusive regulation. Together that has created the sort of utopia that a Bay Area consultant, politico, or professor dreams of, but would never live near. Again, we in California have become the most and least free of peoples — the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.

  Oh, it gets better:

  I often ask business people on the coast why there are not more industries in places like Selma other than agricultural related work that is locale specific. I would sum up their responses as something like the following: Our workforce does not have the educational and linguistic skills to justify, in global terms, the amount of wages and benefits necessary to employ them, hence jobs are mostly in service and government. Software engineering, computers, or Silicon Valley-like industry are out the question. But apparently so are large manufacturing jobs, despite an abundant workforce. As I understand employers, they seem to suggest that steel pipe, electrical wire, or radios would not be better manufactured or fabricated here, and yet still cost two to three times more than a counterpart assembled abroad.

  In addition, they believe that the state government would look upon any employer of a large industry not as a partner that would alleviate unemployment and lessen county expenditures, but more or less a sort of target to regulate, advise, lecture, and chastise, both to justify the expanding government regulatory work force and to achieve a fuzzy sort of social justice. There are, of course, large plants and businesses here, but hardly enough to absorb the thousands entering the work force.

  The result is about one in five adults is not working in the traditional and formal sense. A morning drive through these valley towns confirms anecdotally what statistics suggest: hundreds, no, thousands, are not employed. Construction is almost nonexistent. Agriculture is recovering, but environmentally driven water cut-offs on the West Side (250,000 acres), increasing mechanization, and past poor prices have combined to reduce by tens of thousands once plentiful farm jobs.

  We live in one of the most blessed climates in the world, without major floods, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes. The soil is unmatched. The Sierra and its rich snowpack loom immediately to the east with all its recreational, hydroelectric, and timber wealth; we are but three hours from either San Francisco or Los Angeles. And yet this is now one of the most impoverished areas in the United States, statistically in many categories of income, education, and employment well behind Appalachia.

  That’s the direct result of leftist policies… just now being pushed by Obama… and the fact is, that from any even nearly objective viewpoint, those policies are resulting in our not even breaking even in Job creation. They are in fact making things worse, not better.   Such policies never will make things better since as history proves, Socialism is failure. It’s been shown time after time and the left refuses to believe it. We need look no further than our own constantly swelling unemployment rolls.

  This blight is what results from massive government spending, and an insistence on “green” which in reality is the new “red”. Socialist policy, in short.  Those policies of the precise reason that we’re in this situation we’re in, make no mistake about it.

  I tell you true… The only way that’s going to turn around is to remove those responsible for said policies are cut administrative and seem to think the EPA is our friend.  To the point where the EPA now has powers which even Congress can’t question.  I’ve been saying for a long time, my friends, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  That there are consequences for the kind of feel good policies that we’ve been chasing for a long time.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that when no pain that price.  It also shouldn’t surprise us that the last still can’t get its arms around that fact, even while the country drowns itself in a sea of unemployment and debt… cannot bring itself to understand that it’s own policies are the proximate cause of that unemployment and that debt.
  Further reading

  It’s time to eliminate the EPA, and it’s supporters in the seats of power. It’s time to worry more about creating jobs than those jobs being ‘green’. It’s time to stop worrying about the planet. The goals of the enviro-whack-job left are in direct conflict with the goal of getting and keeping our economy moving.
  Listen to George speak to the point:

MoDo gets it.  How bloody obvious is the War on Terror when even Maureen Dowd gets it, from New York Times:

I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy.

I want memory, and justice, and revenge.

When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

I don’t normally have much use for the redheaded version of Katie Couric, but when MoDo is right,  I will give her credit.

The Obami don’t get it,  Wesley Pruden, Washington Times:

What a roller coaster ride: Osama bin Laden engaged the SEALs in a firefight. Well, no, actually, it turns out he didn’t. But he did seize a woman, probably one of his wives, to use as a human shield. Uh, well, actually he didn’t do that, either. But he was armed, we know that for sure. Ummm, no, not really. OK, but we’re positive that woman was killed. Uh, not exactly. But we definitely, positively, absolutely know that Osama is dead. We have the photographs to prove it and the public can see them. Er, no, not quite. The president has them but you can’t see them. Everybody will just have to take his word for it.

That won’t happen, either. There was a time when everybody took a president’s word for everything. But nobody trusts the government on anything anymore. Lies have withered public patience. Too bad, Mr. President,

The Obami can’t keep there story straight.  Personally, I am waiting for the Tom Clancy book.  And you?

Neither does Chomsky,  William Teach, Pirates Cove:

Noam Chomsky Has His Osama’s Dead Liberal Talking Points Down Pat

Can we assume that Noam Chomsky will NOT be voting for Obama again?

Amusing Google search of the day, Norm Chumpski.

Neither does Charles, video:

Hat tip:  [not so] Nice Deb.

A quickie in the morning, from Rochester Now:

A suspected bank robber was apprehended just moments after he allegedly robbed an Irondequoit bank this morning.

Police say John K. Sabuncu, 44, of Rochester, walked into First Niagara Bank at 1000 East Ridge Road in Irondequoit at 9:55 this morning and handed a bank employee a note demanding money and saying he had a weapon.

Irondequoit police Sgt. Todd Fitzsimmons said Sabuncu was given an undetermined amount of cash and left in a car. At 10:03, Fitzsimmons said, a Rochester police officer pulled Sabuncu’s car over on Phelps Street in the city and arrested him.

What took you so officer?

Me at OTB just now:

Consider the scenario of capturing UBL alive.
The administration is faced with a choice;

They can either…

a) Go through the process of a civilian trial because that was what they wanted to employ for all terror suspects, giving, as I’ve en saying all along, a platform for alQueida to expound on and promote it’s agenda

b) They could react realistically, do a military trial, thus rejecting their own mantra.

In either case, they’d have a focal point for other terrorist acts in his support. Exactly what BHO cannot afford in his polling numbers at the moment… more attacks within these united States.

And guess what? Ordering the killing of UBL is a total rejection of the idea that a civilian trial is effective against terrorism… Put another way, BHO has already rejected his own mantra.

Update: Seems I’m not the only one who has noticed.

Why Dumbo will be a one term President, from Jedediah Bila, Daily Caller:

(3) As reported by The Hill this week, “The high gas prices limited gross domestic product growth in the first quarter, and have taken a bite out of jobs . . . The biggest drag on the economy, Zandi [Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics] says, are gas prices, which have basically wiped out any benefit for middle-class families from the payroll tax cut included as part of December’s deal to extend the Bush tax rates.”

How will the Obama administration — which has repeatedly stood in the way of domestic drilling permits while financing oil exploration off Brazil, has sided with the EPA’s job-crippling over-regulation, and has refused to access our God-given resources in places like ANWR — fare with the voting public as gas prices continue to rise? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Also, recall that a March IBD/TIPP poll found that Americans support drilling in territorial waters by a 67%-29% margin and in ANWR by a 54%-40% margin

Barack Obama, b/k/a Dumbo, has a deep seated irrational hatred of oil companies.   I’d think he would wage war on oil even if it cost hie re-election, from New York Times:

With gasoline prices still hovering above $4 a gallon, President Obama renewed his call on Friday to close tax loopholes for large oil companies, declaring, “If you’re already paying them at the gas pump, we don’t need to pay them through the tax code.”

[…]

Mr. Obama offered a familiar list of incentives to draw people away from gas-guzzling vehicles, including a $75 tax rebate for those who buy electric vehicles. And he reiterated his goal that the federal government’s vast fleet of vehicles use fuel-efficient, clean-energy technologies by 2015.

Obama was against  before he was for them.   Obama is not against subsidies, just the ones of which he does not personally approve.   Raising taxes on oil producers will not lower the price of gasoline.

Captains of incompetence, from Ace:

The thing that Obama had no role in crafting, only authorizing — the planning of the military strike — went beautifully. (With the exception of a mechanical glitch downing a stealth copter.)

The thing that Obama had a primary role in crafting — the PR and reportage about the military’s spectacular raid — has been nothing but glitches, walkbacks, mistatements, blown opportunities, and — this is now becoming a pattern with Obama — screwing up everything so badly and so… oddly that people begin doubting the most basic facts reported to them.

Geronimo, gasoline is at four dollars a gallon and headed for five,and theses putzes are investigating military code names, from Matthew Jaffe, ABC News:

The Senate Indian Affairs committee will hold a hearing Thursday on racist Native American stereotypes, a hearing that will now also address the Osama bin Laden mission and the code-name Geronimo.

While the hearing was scheduled before the mission, a committee aide today said the linking of the name Geronimo with the world’s most wanted man is “inappropriate” and can have a “devastating” impact on kids.

Look guys, just call the next targeted perp Bill Ayers before you blow him away.  Carry on.

Dumbo stumbles,  post bin Laden mistakes,  from Mark Halperin, Times.

Fight like a girl, Professor Condi Rice educates Lawrence O’Donnell, all the while letting Larry the Asshat be the only one doing any shouting, video:

Hat tip:   Nice Deb.

Stacy’s victory lap, Robert Stacy McCain has been in Herman Cain’s corner and feels vindicated by Cain”s depart performance, from Other McCain:

Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining, sources say.

CBS News was also stunned by Cain’s focus-group win. I don’t know why this seems so shocking to some people. As Cain’s spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael has been saying for weeks, “When people meet Herman, they like Herman.”

Unlike the Obami’s always changing story line to the bin Laden raid, Stacy has been consistently in Cain’s corner.

Life Slices, tidbits from the real world, off-line.

Sonya: If you don’t want to do it all the time,never do it even once.  Universal advice for how to deal with dogs, children and men.

POTUS owes CIA an apology, from Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post:

Now, it turns out that the very CIA interrogators whose lives Obama turned upside down played a critical role in what the president rightly calls “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.”

It is time for a public apology.

U.S officials have acknowledged that the key piece of intelligence that led the CIA to bin Laden — information on the al-Qaeda leader’s principal courier — came from detainees in CIA custody. According to a senior administration official,

More, Leon Panetta with Brian Williams, text:

WASHINGTON — Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.

“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.

video:

Hat tip: Nice Deb.

Miss Andrea Sullivan objects, from Daily Beast:

It tells you a couple of things: first, there is no clear evidence that torturing prisoners played any role in this successful operation; second, that this fact threatens the only narrative politically standing between these war criminals and prosecution under the Geneva Conventions. No wonder they are worried. And no wonder they have persuaded one of their primary outlets, the New York Times, to make this trivial issue in this astonishing Obama success a front-page story.

How dare the Director of  the Central Intelligence Agency argue intelligence gathering with the World’s foremost expert on the uterus.   Reminded that Miss Sullivan also declared herself and expert on Sarah Palin’s uterus, and loudly denied that Mrs. Palln was not  the mother of her own son.  Time to go back on your medications Miss Sullivan.

Dumbo hatches another conspiracy theory, Barack Obama’s stubborn refusal to respond to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign demands to see his long form birth certificate, gave birth to the birther theory.  Now, Obama is refusing to provide evidence which would put tp ress Mr. Sheehan’s theory that Usama bin Laden is still alive, from Kimberly Dozier and Erica Werner

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama said Wednesday he’s decided not to release death photos of terrorist Osama bin Laden because their graphic nature could incite violence and create national security risks for the United States.

“There’s no doubt we killed Osama bin Laden,” the president said in an interview with CBS News, and there was no need to release the photographs or gloat. “There’s no need to spike the football,” he said.

Everybody makes mistakes.  Smart people don’t keep repeating the same ones.

And another,  both Eric and I have discussed the story that Leon Panetta and not President Barack Obama ordered the strike on Usama bin Laden.   While this picture is far from conclusive,  it does nothing to establish the White House post raid spin that Obama was in charge.   Note the President in neither in a commanding position,  or has a commanding posture.    If anybody looks to be in charge, it is Mrs. Clinton.   All Obama needs is the popcorn.

Hat tip photo:  Socyberty.

Human Rights Watch cries foul, from, Washington Times, via Daily Caller:

The executive director of Human Rights Watch is criticizing the United States for killing terrorist leader Osama bin Laden without due process.

Kenneth Roth opined on bin Laden’s death via his Twitter account (@KenRoth), taking aim at comments made by the U.N.’s secretary-general: “Ban Ki-moon wrong on #Osama bin Laden: It’s not “justice” for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction”.

So sorry but the late Usama bin Laden was a legitimate target, the late Usama bin Laden declared war of the United States.  That fact alone made him, a commander-in-chief of al Qaeda a legitimate target of war, to wit command and control.

Had not patriotic American heroes regained control of Flight Ninety-Three, it appears destined for either the Capital or White House.

Kearny,NJ– I’m currently taking a break while my truck gets loaded, having driven down to Hicksville,LI  from Rochester,NY last night.   The truck was serviced yesterday, and I’m told lost more will be repaired on my day off on Friday. From here, I head back for Rochester, and home. I’m off on Friday for a day with my wife. Here’s a quick shot of the truck in the dock here at Kearny.

Looking around:

• Doin’ The Bump.. or not, maybe…:Frankly there are not many people who I’ve spoken with who take the polling bump Obama’s getting very seriously.  The biggest issues Obama has with approval ratings are with domestic policy and the socialist beent thereof. Obamacare is still loudly and nearly universally panned by the folks I speak with, for example. In short, Obama’s numbers were not dropping because of our not killing BinLaden, and based on the folks I talk to and their reactions, I suppose and expect we’re not going to see a turn around in that drop in response to him being taken out. Limbaugh on his program yesterday, seems to agree, saying in part:
  

  

  Rush Limbaugh

  Rasmussen says they’re not gonna be much of a bump. Even F. Chuck Todd, NBC, says there isn’t gonna be a bump; maybe there aren’t bumps anymore.

  A caller to his program points out:

  CALLER: I have questions for those who are calling this gentleman who cloaks himself in the presidency of the United States and the leader of the free world ……. Where this person has been for the last three months. We have Texas burning to the ground. It was at that time. Wheat, corn, other crops destroyed. We’ve had flooding all up the Mississippi, through the Ohio Valley. Prior to this horrible tornadic activity of the E4 and E5s in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, 18 counties in my own state… Now, I’m far removed from the damage. I’m in Piedmont, North Carolina. But 18 counties of my fellow North Carolinians have been destroyed. Destroyed! Not a word. No boots on the ground from the leader and his Missus in North Carolina.

  RUSH: Well —

  CALLER: Not only that, he brings up this birth certificate thing and then says he has more important issues we should be addressing. He says that before the tornadic activity.

  RUSH: Well, he was playing golf. Playing golf.

  CALLER: Beg your pardon?

  RUSH: Playing golf. He was playing golf.

  CALLER: Well, not only that, he was also out at the Facebook crowd —

  RUSH: Well, that’s true.

  CALLER: — at $35,000 plus a plate.

  RUSH: You’re absolutely right. They had to drag him off the golf course to the Situation Room. He only played nine holes. He had to go to the Situation Room.

  BREAK TRANSCRIPT

  RUSH: CNN, you can tell they’re disappointed with the release of their latest poll. Obama got a one-point bump in his approval number, up to 52% from 51% because of the death and the kill operation for Osama Bin Laden. One-point bump.

  Well, there’s a reason there. What approval Obama gets has never been based on fact. Facts changing, then, are not going to drive his polling significantly one way or the other. Unless, that is,  he ventures outside the leftist mantra… and thereby hangs a point I think needs be made, here.

  Consider what we have here. We have a Nobel Peace Prize winner… (exactly why did he get that award, again? )… invading another country with a military force, no consulting with the UN, no consulting even with the country invaded, and carrying out as assassination. More, the information used to find and kill UBL was gathered by people, techniques, and agencies that Obama actively campaigned against, and ultimately outlawed.

  According to a whole stream of reports on the matter it was a combination of enhanced interrogations at GITMO as well as secret prisons around the world. Add to that the telephone and e-mail intercepts, warrantless wiretap, and so on… in fact just about everything Obama and his party were so vehemently against, were used to make Bin Laden dead.

  Leon Panetta confirms this, by the way, in case you Obamites are going to try to tell us that it didn’t happen. (BBCT Jim Treacher)

  Brian Williams: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?

  

  Leon Panetta

  Leon Panetta: You know, Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees, but we also had information from other sources as well. So it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

  Williams: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

  Panetta: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were — you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

  Williams: So, final point, one final time: enhanced interrogation techniques, which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years, that includes waterboarding.

  Panetta: That’s correct.

  Remember, gang….Obama campaigned against these to gather support from the far left.So after lecturing us about this, he goes ahead and uses what he campaigns against and has the hutzpah to take credit for it?  Does anyone imagine that these points wont come back to haunt him with his leftist base?

  Moreover, we have now a situation where we have little to none of the intel gathering ability we did when the info used against UBL was gathered, left, so arguably we are now more vulnerable to an attack than we were before. AlQuieda, after all isn’t dead merely because UBL is… a point which Obama himself admits.

• Speaking of Panetta, what’s the rumbling I’m hearing suggesting that Panetta and not Obama, gave the orders? It  would certainly seem to explain the while thing a lot better.  Obama hasn’t the balls for such things.
• Oh and did you see that Eric Holder, the Atty General was asked if he’d have called for a military trialfir UBL had he been taken alive? Unsuprisingly Holder ducked the question because it would involve him admitting he’s dead wrong on such matters.
• Treacher adds:
  

  The Daily Mail is reporting that it took Obama 16 hours to decide to kill Bin Laden.  I don’t know whether that’s true, but if it is, I’m reluctant to judge him too harshly. After all, he was very busy writing Trump jokes.

  Indeed, and playing golf as Limbaugh’s caller pointed out.

Question Mr. President, from Ann Althouse:

So… was bin Laden shot because he resisted — the official story — or because a live, captured bin Laden would have torn the Obama administration apart?

More over, did the White House send the noted liar John Brennan to lie about the details of bin Laden death to provide cover story for bin Laden being shot and not captured, from Michelle:

So Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports that White House officials are walking back key details disclosed by Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan at his bin Laden briefing yesterday.

The administration account has now been “modified.” You know all that sensational stuff about bin Laden having a gun and using one of his wives as a human shield? Never mind

Were the Obami trying to kill bin Laden, or just keep him out of Eric Holder’s hands?

Did Obama even want bin Laden killed?   Pam Geller links a story which suggest Usama bin Laden was not taken out by POTUS (President of the United States) but rather by a government coup, from Atlas Shrugs:

A reluctant American president who was ultimately overridden by senior military and intelligence officials to finally take out terrorist Osama Bin Laden…

If the above report is correct, and  I am not saying it is, then President Obama is covering up a coup.  So who is running the country?

Is al Qaeda an arm of Pakistan intelligence? From Jay Tea, Wizbang:

The discovery that Osama Bin Laden’s hideout was in a suburb of Pakistan’s capitol, in a neighborhood filled with military retirees, across the street from a police station, and half a mile from Pakistan’s West Point strains credibility beyond the breaking point. It is simply not plausible that the Pakistanis had no idea Bin Laden was there, and had been there for years. And that raises a lot of questions that many people simply didn’t want to even consider for so long.

No shit Sherlock, the classic economist Thomas Sowell put his finger on why business are unwilling to lend money, from RCP:

The policies of this administration make it risky to lend money, with Washington politicians coming up with one reason after another why borrowers shouldn’t have to pay it back when it is due, or perhaps not pay it all back at all. That’s called “loan modification” or various other fancy names for welching on debts. Is it surprising that lenders have become reluctant to lend?

White House not reading this blog,  Eric I am hurt.   A small town paper makes a negative inference with respect to FLOTUS, the Fat Lady of the United States a cease and desist from the White House,  but so far no cease and desist requests for my references to FlOTUS, from Doug Powers @  Michelle Malkin:

A small, local news outlet with a name like “Pleasanton Weekly” doesn’t sound very threatening, but according to an email sent to the Daily Caller, the publication has some journalistic teeth that the White House thought needed to be filed down — specifically, the choppers that made Michelle Obama come across as snooty

Then maybe they should.

edit (DavidL)   Inserted not.

Usama bin Laden passes, the speech the President should have given, in total:

“Nothing personal, just business.   Bravo Zulu gentlemen.”

Bin Laden wasn’t the problem.  His passing will not the solution.

Bin Laden round-up, Aaron Worthing, Patterico’s Pontifications.

Joy in the City, scenes of unabashed happiness in the streets of New York City, from Ryan Brenizer.

Cowboy presidency, from Adam Goldman, Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Officials say CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons developed the first strands of information that ultimately led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

[…]

The news is sure to reignite debate over whether the now-closed interrogation and detention program was successful. Former president George W. Bush authorized the CIA to use the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history. President Barack Obama closed the prison system.

Robert Stacy McCain, Other McCain:

One of my pet peeves is when people criticize “journalists” when what they actually mean to criticize are “people on TV.” It is the latter category of TV news that so often inspires contempt for “the media” — an attitude I generally share, except for the fact that I’ve been a professional journalist for 25 years, having begun my newspaper career at a 6,000-circulation Georgia weekly in 1986

Stacy is one of the best reporters on the Internet   Go rattle his tip jar.

Harford,PA Today I’m at the Flying J truck stop in Harford, along I-81. I ran from Rochester, down to Carlisle PA and am currently running up toward Albany.

Stopped for the night

I got the antennas fixed on the truck last week, and so was able to take the emergency spare, that I’d put up, down.  It turns out, that this truck uses a rather unique splitter arrangement, which feeds both the CB antenna leads and the AM/FM/WX radio through the CB antennas mounted on the mirror. the result is far less sticking up in the the air, though there are some other problems with come up with it.  I had taken the truck to a radio shop, to get the CB antenna lead repaired, having broken it the week before.  As it turned out, over the years since this truck has been in service, both of the antennas had also broken.  I replaced them with some rather inexpensive Shakespeare whips, and they work fine.  I went cheaper here because really, the performance isn’t that mush less and breaking one isn’t the end of the world, given the price. The CB works as well as it ever did on the single spare antenna, and the AM/FM/WX now works surprisingly well. I’ve been able to hear NYC stations in the daytime and what they ahve to say about the BinLaden thing, which I’ll gt to.

I have a few new bumps and scratches that I’ll want to take care of, but we’ll he ‘re coming up on the summer months, anyway, and I suspect I will have some time to solve those issues when I bring it home to detail it in my driveway.  One big issue right now is getting the paint matched.  As you can see the blue is fairly unique.  I am surprised at the support that I’m getting from the ownership in that effort.  And to say the very least, pleased. They seem pleased ‘m making the effort to keep the truck looking good.

The next major repair effort is to get the APU fully functional.  The generator, at the moment, needs replacement; I don’t have my AC power (110v) working.   I have arranged to take this coming Friday, the sixth, off.  That will give the wrenches a chance to see what the problem is and try to repair it. That will be a massive help, since it will allow me to use the microwave and the coffee pot that I have installed in the truck over a month ago, and haven’t had the chance to use yet.  At the very least it’ll save me a pile of change on food.

The leather seat is starting to show signs of wear, this seams are starting to let go.  I’ve got to see if I can find a sewing kit to deal with that problem.  I’d really rather not change over to a cloth seat at this point. Management isn’t likely to go to the premium leather seating as a replacement.   For one thing, I like the leather, secondly I like the multiple adjustable nature in this seat, which is one of the major features to the truck, in my point of view.  Keeps my back from getting too far out of whack.

I got new pillow cases last week, the entire interior of the truck is done in various shades of tan so I got maroon cases which work very nicely with the colors the truck already has.

The only other problem that I’ve been having with this truck, is its tendency to backfire when running around 1200 to 1300 RPM, under a load. The head wrench, whom I have endless respect for advises me that I really shouldn’t be running it down that far in the range, and yet every spec sheet I can find has a tour curve that peaks at 1300.  I’m sure I’ll get a handle on it, eventually.  For now, I simply keep the RPM ove 1300, and it seems happy enough.  In the meantime, I must say I’m enjoying this very powerful and very comfortable truck.  Once I get it details, I’ll post some pictures of the interior.

Looking around:

• More thoughts on BinLaden: I see they buried him at sea.. Suits me. Bury the bastard on land and you’ve got an instant Martyr site. Who needs that nonsense? Personally, I rather wish he got wrapped up and buried with a few hundredweight of pig poop. Reynolds raises an interesting point about Human Rights and this case. Personally, I don’t much care if BinLaden’s rights got violated, but it does raise a basic question, I guess.
• Addendum: (More Yet) Passing strange that we’ve not seen any mention on the part of our government to the point that Bin Laden’s followers might react with violence. It seems logical that they would, yet the White House is mum on the subject. Can it be that they don’t want any negatives in the public mind for fear of losing whatever electoral momentum this event gives the Obamites?
• GITMO WORKS: Getting Obama took intel gathered from Gitmo detainees. And the other more secret prisons around the world, of course.  You remember, the ones Sullivan was wetting his pants over. Gee, I hope Obama and his supporters are happy now about the information they claimed they didn’t want. Remember, they promised to close the place? Funny how that supposedly moral streak disappeared. Maybe it was simply a talking point?
• I WONDER…. I wonder if the people who spent such time promoting Obama’s Nobel peace prize, are happy he carried out a successful assassination?  So much for the chant on how violence never works and the left could never support it, huh?
• WHERE IS THE OBAMA LEFT ON THIS? The L.A. Times is reporting yesterday,
  

  “A Syrian military source says President Bashar Assad’s security forces have been ordered to quell the uprising in Dara ‘even if this means that the city is to be burned down.’ Tanks destroy a mosque, witnesses say, and at least four people are killed.”

  So where are the cries from the white house about human rights?  Where are the cries from the rank and file leftists on the same score?  Where indeed are the calls for the U.S. to respond, based on what is claimed we went into places like Libya for? Please observe closely, the places that we’ve gone into, and the places we have not, since Obama came to power. You’ll notice if you observe closely, Libya as an example is not as prone to supporting radical Muslim ideology as is Syria.  that’s a pattern that can be observed in every action in the Middle East of late.  And why have there been a number of forced regime changes with this White House at the other end of the puppet strings.And yet the silence coming from those who claimed that Bush was nation building, is incredible. Bruce addresses this, yesterday… a good read. David Thompson adds his two cents, saying

  “Let’s face it, why would a man who has only been a community organizer, adjunct law professor, state legislator, and very briefly a senator with a bad attendance record have a real feel for international affairs? The fact that he is an ideologue and arrogant even by the usual standards of politicians and presidents makes things worse.”

  The problem here, is that this is part of a pattern that I’ve made note of previously.  I’m sorry to disagree with Roger, who I respect greatly, but I can draw no other conclusion than that out diminished status in the world and our conditions at home are put upon us as a matter of intent.

  

  The Donald

• Trump:No, I’m not interested in him being president of these United States. First of all, he hasn’t the temperament for it.  On the other hand he has been extraordinarily useful the past few months.  I submit to you Trump has actually hurt Obama, more than Obama is willing to admit.  He was able to do so, because he is willing to operate without worry about retribution from the mainstream press.  The establishment Republicans, suffer from a kind of knee jerk reaction when the press kits critical of them.  Trump , for whatever else he is, has been willing to take the advice I’ve been offering mainstream Republicans for a long time; ignore the press. The press is never going to be anything but leftist, and will never be convinced to not support leftist politicians. The spectacular case of press bias, wherein we see a supposedly independent White House press corps, willing to help and indeed coordinate response to attacks on Obama and his White House, from his most vocal challenger.  The trick is to bypass the leftsists in the press and present your logic directly to the people.
• 300 dead, 1700 injured: Where is FEMA, for three days? Funny how the questions that got asked about Bush  and his response to such disasters, don’t get even a peep out of the press here, given the tornadoes across the south and the devastation from them.

• Want more proof that Obama and his minions are liars? Here you go.

• John Hinderaker, today:
  

  

  John Hinderaker

  “The legal profession was once one of the pillars of the Republican Party, but that began to change when people figured out that endless government regulation is good for the law business. Now, while there are plenty of conservative lawyers, like us, the profession as a whole definitely tilts to the left.”

  Well, that’s true.  But the connection is somewhat more direct than that.  Someone who is a lawyer, operates under the baseline belief that government and the laws that spring from it are the end all and be all.  The only thing that separates us from animals.  The only chance humanity has to both survive and grow.  If that were true, they wouldn’t devote their lives to the law.  The facts, of course, are rather different.  But think about the willingness of the establishment GOP who it should be set are mostly lawyers also, to inflict more government upon we the people.  Does not stand to reason that someone who has dedicated their lives to law and government, would be more inclined to be of the mindset that more government is good? I think without realizing it,  John has stumbled onto a major point in our recovery from an over large and over powerful government.

• RACISM, Thy name be Sherri Shepherd. This is beyond the pale. I suggest to you that what we have here is someone basing their entire being on race. And yes I’m quite aware that kind of thing is exactly how Obama got elected.
• Carter Redux? I have often drawn the comparison between the current occupant of the White House and Jimmy Carter, saying that Carter no longer holds the title of the worst president ever.  In Glenn Reynolds takes this one step further:
  

  

  Glenn Reynolds

  People on the right have been comparing President Obama with Jimmy Carter for a while now: The rise from nowhere via inexplicable press adulation, the smarmy moralizing, the excessive faith in his own abilities, the tendency of everything he touches to turn to crap — all seem eerily reminiscent of the Carter presidency.

  But now it’s people on the left who are saying the same thing. Trouble is, at this point a Carter rerun is probably a best-case scenario.

  the sad fact is, he’s probably right. But he points out something, that I’ve pointed out several times in the past, and misidentifies the problem.

  First, Obama doesn’t rely on rational description to persuade the American people, but rather on his — now seemingly shrunken — oratorical skills, without regard to substance.

  The real problem of courses that Obama simply cannot rely on rational description to push his agenda, because his agenda defies rational description.  He knows damned well that if he ever told the American people repeatedly what his religion to is, it would never fly.  At one point the president during his campaign sat down with the San Francisco chronicle and suggested that $6.00 a gallon gasoline might not be a bad idea.  Certainly, had he put this on his talking points list, as opposed to mentioning it merely once, Obama would not have been elected, and probably wouldn’t even have gotten nominated by his fellow leftists.  Yet, here we are.  Glenn is absolutely correct, however, when he points out:

  Obama is worse in another way. Though Carter had a mean streak, he was not prone to divide and name-call in the way that Obama has done. From his remarks about bitter clingers to his administration’s increasing willingness to call any criticism racist, Obama’s administration has been far more divisive than Carter’s.

  Likewise, the Obama administration has shown a thuggish streak, involving everything from “jokes” about Internal Revenue Service audits to the recent National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing’s factory move from a unionized plant in Washington state to a plant in South Carolina where workers had voted to go nonunion… that was not so pronounced under Carter. Call it the difference between Plains and Chicago.

  No, say rather that Obama is more of a kind with Lenin than is Carter.  As Glenn says:

  Carter looked hapless in the face of high energy prices, but Obama actually seems pleased: He announced early on that his policies would necessarily cause electricity prices to “skyrocket,” and his recent town-hall response to a man who complained about the cost of his commute was a suggestion that the man trade his car in and buy a hybrid.

  To Carter, higher energy prices were an insoluble problem; to Obama, they’re a tool to encourage Americans to live more constrained lives — and perhaps to buy a Chevy Volt from the bailed-out General Motors.

  it’s interesting that he should come up with that response, Obama.  One of the major excuses for not drilling now is that the pump price solution will not occur for a couple of years, given the curve of time between exploration and actual production from new oil wells.

  What Obama doesn’t say, is that the cost of this supposedly green technology has us in a situation where the savings returns don’t happen for several years down the road, in the case of many vehicles as many as fifteen years down the road.  In the case of the electric car which is able affable effort at best, what Obama also doesn’t say is that it will do nothing but increased our dependence on nuclear power.  We certainly don’t have the online capacity in our electric all systems now to support the kind of growth in “zero emissions” vehicles that Obama would like to see.  So maybe we should ask the people over in Japan whether not we should depend more heavily on nuclear power.  A point, which I note the mainstream press ignores entirely.  Gee, big surprise, that.

  In the meanwhile, I note that diesel prices are approaching $4.60 a gallon in some areas.  And again I raise the question , “Does anybody think that these increases in prices are going to be reflected in higher prices for goods and services at the consumer level?”  Gee, that will really help the recovery, don’t you think?

Nice Deb on Harry Alford:

Harry Alford is the president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and he’s a lot of fun to listen to. (You may remember his acrimonious confrontation with Barbara Boxer, at a Senate Hearing in 2009.

Alford has nothing good to say about Obama, (who he calls a Marxist). He admits to voting for Obama because he was black and because he fell for the hope and change rhetoric. Now, he says support for Obama is waning in the black community, and he predicts that Obama will get only 35% of the black vote in the next election.

video:

Hat tip: [no so] Nice Deb.

How dumb is Dumbo? We as nation need to learn that liberals are unable to judge intellect.   After all they thought that Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore, John “French” Kerry and  Barack “Dumbo” Obama were all brilliant, or at least they told us such     Clarice Feldman weighs in the  public’s love  affair with Dim Won ‘s  supposed intellect, from American Thinke:

I was astonished that few of these people knew anything about Obama’s failures in his one prior job — getting the asbestos out of Altgeld Gardens — and his singular executive endeavor, managing (at terrorist Bill Ayers’ recommendation) millions of dollars from the Annenberg Foundation.  Nor had they any notion of the thin record in support of the claim that he was truly brilliant.  It was, to be blunt, enough that he was cool, black, had a degrees from Columbia and Harvard, talked the talk, and was a blank slate upon whom they could project all their fantasies of a highly intelligent, post-racial, post-partisan leader who would just fix up everything for them.  (In case you missed the story of Obama the major media hid, Bill Whittle has nicely summarized it in this video.)

White House correspondents dinner, video:

Hat tip and reax: William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection:

By contrast, Obama used his appearance as a chance, in a setting where he would be unchallenged, to take cheap shots at Donald Trump, Fox News and several Republicans in the audience.  The “jokes” were not funny, and Obama came across as unpresidential:

Obama is petty and vain man, who do little to hide  his animus.   Smart people dispose of gnats by swatting them.   In contrast, Obama turns a gnat like L. Donald into a elephant.

Glenn Reynolds reax:

You don’t punish Donald Trump by giving him attention. A more experienced politician would know that. Nor is building Trump up good for Obama — Trump has actually hurt him more than all the others combined. Because, you know, Trump has actually been willing to criticize him without being afraid of the Big Media retribution.

Donald responds to the Obama treatment, from Laura Donovan,  Daily Caller:

“I really understood what I was getting into, I didn’t know that I’d be virtually the sole focus, I guess when you’re leading in most of the polls that tends to happen,” Trump said. “I had no idea it would be to that extent, where you know, it was just joke after joke after joke. It was almost like, is there anyone else they could talk about? So in a certain way I was honored, but you know again the economy is having such a, it’s going through such a traumatic period, I was thinking to myself, it just seems inappropriate.”

If as Obama alleges he believes that the birther issue is a distraction, then why does he, Obama, keep drawing attention to it?

Usama BinLaden is reportedly dead tonight, and apparently the US has his body.

He was killed in action against a mansion outside Islamabad, according to reports.

Good news, certainly, but we need to consider this carefully.

First, a man who dies in a mansion isn’t a martyr.  Sorry,  he’s just not.

There’s another point to be made. He was driven out of both Iraq and  Afghanistan, and the US stayed. BinLaden’s AlQuieda  made Iraq their stand… their battleground, and lost.  Same in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, thereby, had already lost.

This caps all of it, of course, but let’s recall, please, George W Bush who kept us on the ground in those places. There’s the true victory.

Let’s also give Obama’s people credit, for using drone attacks in Afghanistan. This is something I’ve long supported, even though most of Obama’s base was not.  I have my doubts, that, seeing we have his body, this was purely a drone attack; we’d have to have had boots on thr ground to obtain his body and thereby the proof of our success in the attack.

And do you suppose the timing of the announcement had anything to do with Obama pre-emting Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice?

I’ll have more thoughts in tomorrow’s Ramble.