Gov. Sarah Palin

The independents and Reagan Democrats will rule this election outcome. I think she'll resonate with them - outdoorsy, pragmatic, a good mother, son in the Army, not a friend of the big oil companies - but a proponent of drilling, successful career woman.

She's a good balance for McCain - she brings attributes to the areas that aren't his strongest points. And I think he's trying to go after a big patch of Hillary's supporters by choosing a woman. I think she's a good choice. I hope the swing voters think so, too.

Obama Speech

I watched Obama's speech. Good, effective speech for the masses (irritated me, of course, as he glossed over little details like 'how to pay for all of the promises he's making', and 'no mention of small businessmen or entrepreneurs or salespeople', or that his tax increases on things like capital gains (almost double) will hurt over 50% of American households).

But the size of the crowd in that football stadium and their frenzied nature was scary - it felt like I was watching something primal and unthinking being born. It reminded me of watching some of Hitler's speeches before tens of thousands of Nazi supporters in the old newsreels.

The debates will be the deciding factor for the deciding 'block of voters', I believe.

Empire of Lies ... I'm not alone!

Open letter to Mr. Andrew Klavan (author of Empire of Lies),


I just finished reading Empire of Lies in a day and a half - kept me up till the wee hours 2 nights running (you owe me about 4 hours sleep!). As much as I enjoyed the book for its entertainment value - wow! it just kept winding me tighter and tighter in its grip, like being rolled in barb wire - there was something else more powerful, for me, under the story. I remember reading Peggy Noonan's first book where she speaks of going to work in the Reagan White House as a speech writer. She noticed how many people there had National Review magazine on their coffee tables, and how similar their stories were - how National Review was - in the 60's and early 70's - the first inkling for many conservative minded people that they weren't alone in their beliefs and view of the world. I had a similar feeling while reading this book. Reading Jason Harrow's thoughts of his political view of the world - his struggle with his faith and his gut core belief that all of the political correctness had a stink about it - was like reading excerpts from my own diary or blog.


I'll bet you loved the new Batman. I see similarities between your courage to be a confessed conservative/Christian writer in an industry almost completely hostile to you, and Batman's courage to speak and act in defense of his moral code in the face of sneering sometimes violent opposition of a lie-based culture. I think the fact of the Batman movie's huge success in $$$ and viewership speaks to a thirst in the populace for being told the Truth, that tens of millions of people know on some instinctual level that they are being fed a bowlful of lies from the left-dominated media (or maybe they just dig his suit).


Thank you for having the courage of your convictions.


If I can help in any way, please let me know.

Andrew Klavan website here

From Me to You

Best wishes with your junior year. My junior year was by far my favorite, when I had my feet on the ground, was happy to be where I was and who I was, and was beginning to veer into the direction that my heart and interests were taking me. I pray the same for you.

I believe that everyone who receives extra portions from God has an obligation to acknowledge and utilize at least some/one of those portions. I know you consider me to be biased, and I am. But if I judge OU to be a great football team in 1974, it doesn't mean I'm wrong just because I'm biased and want them to win. Likewise, if I judge you to have multiple extra portions (brains, beauty, athleticism), it doesn't mean I'm wrong just because I'm biased and want you to succeed.

You were a beautiful athlete. I think you stopped short of maximizing your athletic potential/portion, but you've got choices in which portion to maximize and I respect that.

You have extraordinary beauty of face and form (and a good heart that shows through in your smile). These will always be a pleasure to you and your circle. You can still explore the opportunity this beauty affords you in terms of modeling or TV journalism, if you choose. If so, now is the time to take a deep breath and explore that road.

Your third great gift is your intellect. You have an excellent brain, quick and insightful. As it is your third great portion, and you have enjoyed but not taken your first two gifts to their limits, I strongly believe you have an obligation to do so with your intellect. This should be a year in which you recognize that the (necessary and enjoyable) novelty of constantly 'hanging out' and partying and 'laughing it up for hours with friends' needs to be put into proportion to other goals and opportunities. I encourage you to spend some 'quiet time' listening to your inner dreams, believe that they are possible – because they are, and begin to act on the fulfillment of those dreams by charting your own personal “MS” destiny. This is the year that points you in the direction of those dreams. This is the year you begin to make your future.

Know how much I love you, and how proud I am of you. Have a great year.

XOX
Dad
ps – and read some of the books I suggest you read! Trust me to be passing you stuff that will both edify your mind and make your spirit soar. Sometimes it's the message, but sometimes it's the presentation that is the real jewel. I'll trust you to recognize each.
If you want to write, then write! And then rewrite! But also read everything and take from everything you read the jewels hidden there – a message, a truth, a lyrical turn of phrase, the 'just right' image made by the 'just right' combination of words.

2008 Election - Who's the Wolf Slayer?

I hope McCain - who is a mixed bag in my book - wins, because I believe, on balance, that his positions and the actions that will spring from those positions will result in more favorable outcomes for the majority of Americans (especially productive Americans with more pronounced/practiced links to traditional American values that have had pretty good results over the years). If he wins, I hope I'm right.
Sometimes people who prove to be great have a pedigree/resume/track record that suggests that greatness. McCain has a good track record (even for the NY Times) - if he wins I hope he proves the whole sentence to be true.

I hope Obama - also a mixed bag in my book - loses, because I believe, on balance, that his beliefs and the actions that will spring from those positions will result in less favorable outcomes for the majority of Americans (especially productive Americans with more pronounced/practiced links to traditional American values that have had pretty good results over the years). If he wins, I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Sometimes people who prove to be great haven't evidenced any prior actions that would suggest that greatness. Obama certainly fits the last half of that sentence - If he wins, I hope he proves the whole sentence to be true.

How nice if everyone shared that broad perspective. But they don't. Sad.

"The end of history" is apparently not quite here yet, and the world is a seemingly trivial happenstance away from huge danger (as always it has been) from avarish strongmen lusting to exceed their reach and miscalculating that good people will stand by and do nothing. "Gay marriage" or "should social security tax ceiling go up" are trivial issues compared to the dangers lurking from peoples who would love to bring about the crippling of our country and prosperity. To think that is farfetched is to explain away the sound of the wolf at the door. Who better to be at the door when the wolf comes? That is the nut of my calculus.

Crab or Lobster?

The eco-Marxists and their Democrat water carriers would have us do absolutely nothing to solve our energy shortage. Their pie in the sky rhetoric about alternative energy won’t fill the gas tanks of the 100 million plus automobile on the road. Their policies also put us at a tremendous disadvantage against other countries who are much more pragmatic with their energy strategies. Why would any US manufacturer remain in the US for example if they can move halfway around the world and cut their energy bill in half. The eco-extremists are no longer rational and threaten our economic well being for the long term.
Comment by Eric - August 7, 2008 at 9:55 am

I agree with Eric completely, except he is a bit low on the number of cars; there are 250 million cars on the road in the US.
Comment by Ralph F - August 7, 2008 at 10:58 am

Oooh, cat fight!
Comment by JP - August 9, 2008 at 1:21 am

Eric, you need to stop using sloppy language, and unresearched idea.

First, environmentalism and business are not mutually exclusive. For example, in Japan, there is strong government cooperation with companies, and strong regulation. In the car industry, this has HELPED the auto makers of Japan. They were required to invest in fuel-efficiency because of stringent regulations. Now that the companies have been forced to invest in technology in a difficult regulatory environment, they are destroying the American auto makers.

Second, business requires energy. Without regulations on energy, the free market dictates that energy resources will be used without regard to ‘back-end’ costs such as pollution. Also, because profits are paramount, sustainable energy practices must be forced onto industries, unless we want catastrophic ‘market corrections.’ We are fast approaching a resource crunch on Earth. Water. Oil. Uranium. Etc. Without strong regulations, and a sensible transition plan to renewables, we will be in lots of trouble.

Third, the US needs to lead the world. If we are to be a leader, we need to put forth dramatic energy and resource management plans for industry and the rest of the world to follow. US manufacturers are going to feel the pinch, but this is inevitable anyway.

If we do not lead on sustainable technology and regulations, Japan, China, or Europe will. This is going to be the fundamental problem of our time. We either lead or follow. Eric, your uninformed ideas will lead us to either disaster or irrelevancy. Think about it please.

Peace, Freeman
Comment by Joe McFarley - August 9, 2008 at 4:11 am

Joe, Japanese automakers were heavily subsidized by Japanese government. Is this what you propose for American car companies? And to say that Japanese auto companies have been succeeding over American auto companies solely because of Japanese regulatory requirements in technology is, with all due respect, naive and/or misleading. Union healthcare overhead on a Toyota is about $100/car. On a GM product, it’s about $1,800/car. Gee, think that might be a mitigating factor over the course of 100million autos? (by the way, I blame American auto industry management (60%) for most of American auto industry’s woes vs 40% blame to the unions).

Regarding energy renewables and green technologies, I say YES! But I also say drill, drill, drill. ANWR is a speck on the map, but can be drilled (as can offshore drilling and shale formations in the continental US) and billions of oil extracted to help Americans transition and develop to new forms of energy. To deny Americans their own natural resources is criminal, and just plain dumb. Pelosi and her posse would demand that we run full tilt to a destination 10 miles away, but simultaneously deny us the oxygen needed to breathe while we run. A rational two-pronged effort is needed (fat chance of that in the current hysteria that passes for political discourse today)- drill and extract ALL the oil and natural gas we possible can (Alaska, intercontinental shelves, and shale) while at the same time implementing a cohesive coordinated energy plan of attack to develop and make technically and economically feasible new and emerging forms of clean energy. We have to do the second prong eventually, but we can’t do it (we can’t afford it, and we won’t have the time necessary to do it) without also doing the first prong. And don’t tell me that more oil is not the answer - it IS the immediate answer (the same way that the answer to not having enough wheat is to grow/find more wheat), and buys us the time and money to come up with the next answer/combination of answers.

Just too much either/or thinking in today’s world. In the immortal words of Coleman the butler in Trading Places, “Why not both?”
Comment by Larry Seale - August 11, 2008 at 10:04 pm

Go American 4 x 100meter swimmers!!!

What an incredible effort by our relay team to run down and catch the mouthy French team in the last inch!!! 8/100 of a second never felt so good!

Would Ma-'dem' Like Some Crow with that Yellow Cake?

How hard must it have been for President Bush to keep his mouth shut for years amidst all the verbal abuse and character assassination he suffered over 'not finding any WMD', therefore he must have lied. I'm sure all good hearted Democrats that have screamed bloody murder about 'Bush lied, kids died' and the like, when confronted with 550 tons of Hussein's yellow cake uranium (in a country that has no nuclear energy), will feel compelled to at least say a private apology to President Bush for the character assassination over his motives for going in against Saddam. At least I hope they will.

yellowcake

and the story from CNN, no less ....

Tangentially, how embarrassing for all the people who rallied around Mr. Wilson and trumpeted his story (now completely discredited by the Senate panel that investigated it) about the Bush Admin manufacturing the story about Saddam trying to acquire yellowcake from Niger ... how will they and Mr. Wilson (the US embassy janitor) explain this yellowcake away, on top of the Senate report from 2004? ...
Wilson lied ... hmmm

As is usually the case, time tells all (just ask John Edwards for confirmation of that principle).

OBonfire of the Vanity

In Vanity Fair (March 2008) there is a long background article about Barack Obama. There is a quote from Obama in there that captures his essence, and should tell thinking voters all they need to know about his suitability to be President.

Talking about his basketball playing days, Barack says "I had an overtly black game, behind-the-back passes, and wasn't particularly concerned about fundamentals."

The question is, do you want to vote for a guy that isn't concerned about fundamentals? Personally, I want all of my professionals to be concerned with fundamentals - my doctor, my lawyer, my accountant, my mechanic, my architect, the school crossing guard, my policemen, my firemen, my military, AND my president. Is there anyone who doesn't want his/her doctor to be concerned about fundamentals (both in medical school and in practice after medical school)? Is the choice of President any less critical than the choice of a doctor or a mechanic?

ANWR - Mecca for the godless

$50,000,000,000 (that's billion with a 'B') leaves our country every MONTH to foreign countries for oil. We've got gazillions of natural and national resources (oil in ANWR, oil in shale in Green River Project in Colorado, we are the Saudi Arabia of coal, nuclear energy technology) but we're sending 50-BILLION-DOLLARS-PER-MONTH outside our borders.

On the surface, it's a surprising state of affairs, given that 70% of the American people want us to find and use more of OUR resources. So why aren't we developing our own resources, and keeping that money - and the economic multiplier effect it would have - here? Environmental Nazism.

The Environmentalists - the godless worshipers of the pagan god Mother Earth - do not want us to find and develop our energy resources. Period. No cost to the American people is too great - in the thinking of the Environmentalist mind - to change the Environmentalist position (they do not have loyalty to Americans. They are One-Worlders who consider themselves to be the stewards of the planet). ANWR - sitting on what we KNOW to be an ocean of oil - has become the Holy City of Environmentalism. They have thrown down their Jihad gloves on this little speck of the planet. The drilling platform in ANWR that is needed to extract energy independence for Americans is roughly the size of the convention center in Indianapolis, while the pristine wilderness up there that would be untouched is the size of the state of Indiana. Yet the Environmentalists would sacrifice your prosperity to prevent this tiny spot (that is owned by the American people) from being used to help us. Americans are having to wipe out their savings, cut back on activities and clothes for their kids, losing their jobs, and all so that the EnviroNazies can lay our suffering as an offering at the altar of the pagan god Mother Earth.

The EnviroNazies, and their stooges the Democratic Party congressmen, have kept us from creating and pursuing a comprehensive energy plan; they want not only to not allow Americans access to our own oil, they want prices to rise to crippling levels, so that other energy technologies will look more affordable by comparison. It's a completely artificially-created price picture, though. And of course, as Margaret Thatcher so succinctly put it - "The facts of life are conservative."

The irony is that the very thing that they have sought and dreamt of so fervently - crippling oil and gas prices - will turn out to be the thing that exposes their intellectual and patriotic nakedness. The American people correctly 'get it' that the right thing to do is to extract and use our own natural resouces, for our benefit, and concurrently pursue a comprehensive energy plan to develop complimentary and accelerating technologies for the future.

The U.S. Civil War of 2008

Norman Podhoretz discusses, in a recent series of dialogues at www.nationalreview.com, the Civil War of Ideas (or world views, if you will) that exists in the U.S. with regards to, among other things, the true nature of our struggle (and solutions for) with Islamo-fascism.

Not surprisingly, William Buckley identified it as far back as 1975, when speaking of the Left's attempts to pigeonhole Solzhenitsyn as a member of the 'conservative right', so as to marginalize him. Buckley gets to it in the last paragraph (here)...
"What Solzhenitsyn is of course proving is that the deep resources of humanity lie in for the most part in the conservative community. This is despicable (sarcasm here). Because conservatives, by and large, do not believe in the shifting standards of right and wrong which, for instance, can bring a Barbara Tuchman, a James Reston, or a John Kenneth Galbraith to travel to mainland China and report back their boundless enthusiasm for the work of Mao Tse-tung..."

BULLSEYE! The real Civil War issue is not about what to do about the millions of Islamic terrorists and sympathizers, but rather WHAT THINK YE OF GOD? The Left wishes to marginalize and then remove GOD (and all of those pesky Absolute Truths and Standards) so that right and wrong become a mere matter of opinion to be defined by each person. Therefore no judgment. Therefore no consequence.

And it is a two-pronged attack - one from within, against God in our institutions and traditions, and the second is in the Left's slavish promotion of open borders. A traditional America nation-state has always stood as a bulwark against the designs of the one-worlders, the UN fawners. And so ... the attempt to dilute and dissolve the nation-state; indeed, how can Rome remain Rome after the barbarians are loosed inside the gate?

Would real men please stand up?

Manny Ramirez the baseball player .... what a whining, spoiled, arrogant 3-year old. To see him whine and piss and moan about how he's under appreciated and deserves more money, and wah wah wah. And he really shows himself to be a bottom dweller by loafing down to first on ground balls - how completely disrespectful of his teammates, who are trying to win games. It's traitorous. He's just the latest example of spoiled babies posing as professional athletes. But like a 3-year-old throwing a tantrum in the restaurant or the store, most of the irritations of others should be reserved for the parents, for allowing the appalling behavior to begin with. And so it is with professional sports - the majority of people's ire should be reserved for the owners - those spineless modern-day substitutes for real men. Any owner who claims to be a 'man' (and I mean that not in a gender sense, but in a John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart sense) needs to take control of his/her spoiled, arrogant, me-me-me athletes. No more whining to the press without consequences. No more 'dogging it' on the field to show a player's displeasure with management. An owner should give his manager complete authority and backing to run his team LIKE A REAL TEAM - 'one for all' and 'all for all'. Any self respecting manager should let his team know in no uncertain terms that any player not giving 100% effort will be fined heavily on the first offense, and benched indefinitely on the second offense (including for the rest of the season). No exceptions - no regard to 'contract status', 'pennant race' - no exceptions. If making good on this promise costs the owner a pennant and $20,000,000 ... so what? It can't ALL be about money, at the expense of principle and just plain insisting that things be done the right way.

Of course, the 3-year-olds would then test this stance by acting out, but if the manager follows through and makes good his promise/threat, then you would quickly see a sea-change in the behavior of pro athletes and how they conduct themselves. The majority of sports fans in this country are hungry and desperate for this - just as, after 4 years of the the simpering display of dishrag ineffectual handwringing of President Carter, millions of citizens responded to Ronald Reagan grabbing the microphone in 1980 by bolting upright and thinking to themselves "now there's a man".