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In an interview, a San Diego Assistant Port Director Al Hallor confirmed that nasty stuff has been found coming into the country. I guess this really comes as no surprise; the surprise is that we don’t hear about it more. One day we may get complete disclosure on all of the potential disasters that have been put down because of the diligence of people like Al.

One thing about this story that really makes you wonder is why the major networks haven’t picked up on it. I heard about it on a talk radio show tonight, and the host — no fan of President Obama’s — says it has to do with the mainstream media outlets being in the tank for Obama and not wanting him to look bad. I don’t buy that; the successes of Homeland Security (in spite of Janet Napolitano’s denial about the southern border) ought to be feathers in Obama’s cap. If anything, the silence on the issue is being purposely kept quiet to keep people from freaking out. Like Kay said in Men in Black, “A person is smart; people are dumb panicky dangerous animals…”

This is rich;

… former Vice President Al Gore on Monday said he made a mistake in supporting corn-based ethanol while he was in office, admitting he was more interested in farm votes for his presidential run than what was best for the environment.

Wonder when he’ll ‘fess up & admit that he was similarly “misguided” in his ranting about Global Warming Climate Change. I won’t be holding my breath waiting for it.

The President of The United States of America is going to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Mythbusters. Hmmmm… Could they be trying to figure out whether the ballooning national debt really creates jobs outside of the Federal bureaucracy? Or maybe they’ll delve into the mystery behind Barack Obama’s dwindling poll numbers.

Actually, the show featuring the President is entitled ‘Archimedes Solar Ray,’ which will test the Greek myth about Archimedes defeating a Roman fleet of ship using mirrors to direct & concentrate the sun’s rays. His appearance on the show is part of a larger emphasis to promote science and math education. Coinciding with the show’s Decmber 8 air date, the White House will host the winners of several science and math competitions, from the Intel Science and Engineering Fair to the Team America Rocketry Challenge. While the President’s intellect is allegedly quite impressive, he’s a lawyer; the only geek creds he has are related to his Crackberry addiction. I wonder how many kids will be inspired to work harder for a career in science by his little dog & pony show.

It seems to me that the President is spending a lot of time on television appearances like this lately; Mythbusters, Jon Stewart, The View, the 2010 Teen Choice Awards, Anderson Cooper, Conan O’Brien, David Letterman… Some might argue that it’s a good way to get his message to a lot of people, but doesn’t it diminish the office somewhat? Prime example; his bowling comment during his appearance on Jay Leno last year. Not a banner moment for the Presidency, but none of his other appearances seem to help his approval ratings either. Maybe they are helping, and he’s thinking how much worse it could be if he hadn’t been on TV.

Over the last few years, I’ve heard rumors that the politicians in Washington might make a grab at our personal 401k accounts to help stave off the coming entitlement crisis, but I had no idea it might be coming so soon.

Democrats in the Senate on Thursday held a recess hearing covering a taxpayer bailout of union pensions and a plan to seize private 401(k) plans to more “fairly” distribute taxpayer-funded pensions to everyone.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee heard from hand-picked witnesses advocating the infamous “Guaranteed Retirement Account” (GRA) authored by Theresa Guilarducci…

In a nutshell, under the GRA system government would seize private 401(k) accounts, setting up an additional 5% mandatory payroll tax to dole out a “fair” pension to everyone using that confiscated money coupled with the mandated contributions. This would, of course, be a sister government ponzi scheme working in tandem with Social Security, the primary purpose being to give big government politicians additional taxpayer funds to raid to pay for their out-of-control spending.

Am I the only one who has a problem with the government being in charge of my health care and my retirement income? I mean, we hear all the time about how much health care costs as people age; how long will it take for a bureaucrat to figure out that if health issues in elderly patients are neglected long enough, the patients die and the double burden of pension payments and healthcare suddenly disappears.

It’ll be interesting to see how next month’s elections shake out, and whether the Democrats try to ram stuff like this through in the lame duck session to follow. Very interesting.

The President, in the middle of a speech on the importance of education, says, “We cannot sustain…” Guess “we can’t sustain” a firm hold on the Presidential Seal. Could this be a sign?

These things don’t happen without reason. How long before the rest of the wheels end up in the ditch?

Last weekend, Senator Harry Reid – D, released a statement saying that there will be no vote on extending the Bush tax cuts until late November — after the mid-term elections.

“The reality is, we will not pass what needs to be passed to change this either in the Senate or the House before the election,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate.

You know, if those tax cuts are such terrible things and are ‘costing’ the country so much in revenue, then repealing them should be a no-brainer for the Democrats with their solid majorities in Congress and a supportive White House. But I guess Harry is at least smart enough to know that with so many Democrats seeking reelection following 18 months of dwindling polling support, he and Nancy Pelosi would have a heck of a time rallying their people to pull the plug on the Tax Cuts For The Wealthy™.

There; I gave him credit for being smart.

This is a slightly scary proposition.

The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

Would anybody be surprised if this was tried on our shores? Give the Democrats another two years with their current majority reign rule, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit, especially with Obama still in office.

After all, in their view of the world, it seems that it all belongs to them anyway… Tax cuts “cost the government.” Reducing taxes is something the government “can’t afford” to do. “A rebate” is what is given to those who pay no taxes at all after confiscatory tax rates are applied to another group. Complaining about high taxes is labeled as “selfishness.” Lower taxes cause deficits. Increasing the national debt by a few trillion dollars is justified by counting fictitious “jobs created or saved.” Campaign promises of “tax cuts for 95% of the population” result in the shrinking of our paychecks.

Here’s another good article from American Thinker yesterday…

There are two hypotheses, at least. One is the standard story of the government-as-savior crowd. TARP and other bailouts fixed the financial crisis and Obama’s stimulus stopped the economic recession that resulted. Without either one, things would have been worse, much worse.

Here is another hypothesis. We had a recession, just like the other ten times since World War II. As in every other such case, this recession would have ended in about a year if government had done nothing in particular. But this time, the extra costs and uncertainties caused by government “fixes” in fact prolonged and deepened this recession and threatened a double dip or stalling out of economic activity.

Neither hypothesis can be “proved,” since all we know is what government did and what happened. We do not know what might have happened had we done something else.

But here is my take. The times we let government do the most to “fix” a recession, meaning the Great Depression and our current Great Recession, were the very times the economy did the worst. When government let things more or less alone, the economy recovered fairly quickly and with minimal damage.

We also have the academic studies by, of all people, Christina Romer, Obama’s initial chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, that say fiscal policies (e.g. government spending or “stimuli”) did not get us out of the Great Depression or any of our postwar recessions.

The analogy is bleeding a patient. If the doctors bleed a patient and he gets better, they take credit. If the patient gets worse, the doctors say he was not bled enough.

…

I think, at this point, we have enough evidence for both bleeding as a medical cure and fiscal stimulus as an economic cure that we can stop killing patients by bleeding them to death.

We have two good pieces of advice in such matters, one from Hippocrates and the other from our space program. Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm.” Our space program’s rule of flight control was “If you don’t know what to, don’t do anything.”

I think we need people in Washington, DC, who follow the advice in that last paragraph. Lots of them.

Today is the 223rd anniversary of the signing of our Constitution; Constitution Day. Time to read up, again & see what our Founders had in mind for us at the outset, and how it applies to us today.

“… it tells you the whole story in just three words: We The People.”
—
Ronald Reagan

While watching the news a few nights ago KELO showed some clips from a debate between the three candidates for South Dakota’s lone US House of Representatives seat. In it, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin made a pretty outlandish statement about the country’s mounting debt load…

We have to make some hard decisions to sustain and strengthen this recovery and the economy, because if we don’t it makes it that much harder to dig out of this mountain of debt that has been accumulated over nine years…

Wow. First off, what recovery? And that “mountain of debt that’s been accumulated over nine years” comment had to be crafted by her handlers as a sly way for her to cast the blame for the debt on George W. Bush. Stephanie tries hard to come across as a moderate Democrat, and seems to do a good job walking that line, but comments like this only serve to show that she’s just as interested in placating the left-wing fringe.

Most people like to tie changes in the National Debt around the neck of the President who happens to be in office at the time, but the fact of the matter is that it takes more than a President to drive up the debt or bring it down. Congress writes the bills that drive the budget, and they are also guilty of adding a multitude of unrelated amendments to bills to get their pet projects funded. The Senate and House leadership is just as culpable for the ballooning federal debt as any President, so let’s take a look at who has been running the show for the last nine years…

Over the last nine years — the time frame chosen by Stephanie in her comment — the national debt has increased by about $9 trillion (the graph above includes the estimated debt that will likely accumulate in the next four months of 2010). George W. Bush was in office for a little over seven of those nine years, and in his two terms the national debt grew by about $4.3 trillion. By the end of 2010 Barack Obama will have been in office a mere two years, but the debt will have grown another $4.4 trillion by that time.

But a what most Congressional incumbents seem to think is inconsequential is that Congress has been under Democrat control for much of that time as well, and the sharpest increases in national debt have occurred during the tenures of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

This is in no way giving a pass to the Republicans; they were spending like drunken sailors during the Bush years and squandered what was a golden opportunity to show the leftists that governing on solid fiscal conservative principles could do.

The stigma built by Obama and the Democrat leadership in Congress over the last several years is an albatross around Stephanie’s neck, and her polling numbers in this race show she is having a tough time distancing herself from that stigma. To give credit where credit is due, she has voted against some of the legislation that has built up that “mountain of debt” and is less popular here in South Dakota, but I would bet money that her votes weren’t cast before getting the approval of Nancy Pelosi after the Democrats made sure they had enough votes to get their way.

Challenger Kristi Noem is leading in the polls, 51% to 42%, and I would hazard to guess that has less to do with anything Kristi or Stephanie have said or done in this campaign. What I can’t get over is how the Democrats — and the media — just can’t get over blaming Bush for everything that’s wrong with the country today.

Numbers source.