Baby It's Cold Outside

          The thermometer outside my kitchen window read in the mid-20s this morning for the second time this week.  Tomorrow looks like a third.  I really hate this cold. 

          I keep a record of my utility bills, and I see that my last two electricity bills covering the period between 12/23/13 to 2/23/14 show an increase of 25% over the same period last year, 159% over the year before that, and a staggering 333% over the year before that one.  I know it’s been cold, but 333%?

          It occurs to me that huge increases in electricity bills don’t affect everyone equally.  A $160 increase for a family with, say, $4000 a month in household income represents a hit of 4% to the family budget.  For another family living on $2,000 a month, the hit is 8%.  Simple math.  I would venture to say, however, that the hit on the first family is much easier to absorb, relatively speaking, than it is on the family that lives on only $2,000, because the low-income family may already be spending 25% of its income on electricity.  Where is that family going to come up with an extra $160 when it is already living on a much tighter budget?

          According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the cost of electricity has gone up 39% in the last ten years.  How can that be, with all the increases in oil production and the boom in natural gas?  The answer is simple: climate change.

          Here’s how the thinking goes.  The climate is changing (Of course, the climate is changing.  It always has).  Climate change, according to apocalyptic environmentalists, is caused by global warming (Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that, contrary to dire predictions, the temperature of the earth hasn’t increased significantly in 15 years).  And global warming is caused by carbon dioxide (Let’s also ignore that it is absolutely essential to life on this planet, because it is the primary source of the oxygen in the air we breathe.  Not exactly a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry claims it is.).  So we have to curb carbon dioxide emissions, especially from coal-fired plants.   

          Now it so happens that coal is the cheapest source of electrical energy, and it accounts for 40% of electricity production in this country.  But the brown shirts of the EPA want to shut down coal-fired plants. So they have issued regulations to prevent new plants from being built and to make it economically unreasonable for old plants to make the changes necessary to satisfy the new emission standards.  It would be so much better, says the EPA, for coal to be replaced by renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The problem is that the cost of energy produced by solar and air is far greater than the cost of energy generated by the coal it is meant to replace.  And solar and wind cannot produce anywhere near the amount of electricity we need.

          President Obama, whose vision is of a fossil fuel-free earth knew exactly what he was saying when he promised us that the cost of electricity would necessarily skyrocket.  Thank you, Mr. President.  But how are we I going to pay our electricity bills?

Hagel's Bagels

               The news that Defense Secretary Hagel is following lockstep behind President Obama in recommending a limit on military pay raises, higher fees for health-care benefits and less generous housing allowances to prune billions of dollars from the defense budget must really be sitting well with the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect our freedom.

               There is no question that the defense budget is bloated, but not because our troops are getting paid too much.  Some military families, in fact, have so little income they qualify for food stamps.                 There are three areas that could produce enormous savings.  First, we need to close unnecessary bases here and abroad.  The Pentagon is recommending a new round of base closings (BRAC), but it is running into a stone wall in Congress.  Our legislators don’t want to cut anything in their own backyards.  As Representative Joe Courtney, a Democrat from Connecticut who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said, “The general sort of bias against BRAC is very strong in the House.  Added to that, it’s an election year.”  God forbid he should be placing the fiscal welfare of this country above the need to protect his sinecure.     

               Second, we need to end contracts to produce weapons systems that don’t meet operational or cost specifications, or that the military doesn’t need or want.  Here are just three examples.  The new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is so poorly built, it is, according to one test report , “…not expected to be survivable in a hostile environment.”  What?  But the Navy still keeps building them at a cost of $813 million each, up from the original estimate of $220 million.

               Next is the M-1 Abrams tank.   The Army has 2,300 of them with another 3,000 in storage.  It doesn’t need any more of them, but we keep building them.  Why?  Because Ohio legislators don’t want to close the plant that builds them.   It would cost 16,000 jobs and affect 882 suppliers.  This is what Congress considers a jobs program.

               Then there’s the C-27J Spartan cargo aircraft.  Every new plane that was built went directly to an Arizona boneyard.  The Air Force didn’t need them, but Congress insisted on spending money it had budgeted for them.  I visited this boneyard a few years ago.  The planes stored there, including the C-27J, are not dead; they can be recalled into service at any time: 4,400 of them with a value of $35 billion.  This taxpayer was very impressed.

               Third, we should pare down the bureaucracy in a Pentagon that is bloated with redundant administrative staff.  There are about 31,000 people working in the Pentagon these days.  You would think that this would be a good place to cut costs.  But these people are so essential that the size of the Pentagon’s vast oversight organizations grew by 15% from 2010 to 2012 according to the Federal Times.

               If Secretary Hagel thinks that reducing military pay and benefits is the way to go, then he should lead the way and cut his first.

Don Quixote to the Rescue

          A question often asked by critics of Hillary Clinton is, “Can you name just one positive thing she accomplished in her four years as U.S. Secretary of State?”  The best her supporters can offer in reply is some fatuous claim such as, “She fostered goodwill.”  The sad fact is that, for all her globe-hopping, she has very little to be proud of.  And she surely doesn’t like to be reminded of her culpability in the Benghazi scandal.

          Now John Kerry, her successor, is determined not to leave a legacy of failure when his tenure is over.  He is out to build a monument to himself.  But John Kerry has a problem, a simple one: he’s an idiot.  Worse, he’s a pompous idiot who sees himself as the messianic champion of the world.  He’s the Don Quixote of diplomats tilting impotently at windmills in Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Iran. 

          Undeterred by his lack of success in lessening tensions or resolving conflicts in the Middle East, our Man from La Mancha has now ridden his skinny horse to Asia to fight other imaginary enemies: global warming and climate change.

          In a recent speech Kerry showed himself to be the master of apocalyptic hyperbole.  He said climate change is a threat to the world that ranks as high as terrorism.   To press his point he added that climate change is perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.  A lot worse, I suppose, than the threat of nuclear annihilation.

          The irony is that Kerry chose to deliver his speech in Indonesia, the country with the greatest number of active volcanoes in the world, and this after an eruption of Mt. Kelud disrupted his air travel.  Of course, Kerry failed to mention that volcanoes are the worst natural air pollutants on our planet.  The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, for example, sent 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which climatologists estimate caused the surface of the earth to cool for three years by as much as 1.3 degrees.

          Kerry insists on the unanimity of scientific opinion regarding global warming, yet even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted, based on the evidence, that scientific models have overestimated the effects of greenhouse gases on global warming, and that there is little evidence to suggest that climate change caused by man has had much to do with the duration of droughts or the intensity of hurricanes.  In spite of IPCC’s dire predictions, the earth’s temperature has risen a minuscule 0.1 degrees Celsius since 1990.  If CO2 emissions have been causing global warming, why, ask doubters like the Wall Street Journal, hasn’t the globe been warming?

          President Obama has been quick to denigrate people who disagree with him on climate change as “flat-earthers.”  To his way of thinking, that’s enough to justify asking for a $1 billion climate change “resilience fund.”  Why not.  After all, we can believe the president.  He never lies.  And neither does Don Quixote.  

Guilt by Association

          I’m always on the lookout for a clever turn of phrase.  I found one today in a Wall Street Journal article by Richard Brookhiser.  We are all familiar with the expression “guilt by association.”  Well, in writing about our 16^th president, Brookhiser said that “Lincoln wanted to wrap himself in the founders’ aura—gilt by association.”  This immediately got me to thinking about our current president.

          Who have been President Obama’s associates?  Going back to his formative years in Hawaii, we know that he was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist.  In Columbia (where he enrolled fraudulently as a foreign student) he studied Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven who proposed a strategy for the destruction of capitalism.  He adopted community organizing tactics from radical leftist Saul Alinsky.  He befriended Bill Ayers, former leader of the Weather Underground.  He listened to sermons from Jeremiah Wright, the notorious America hater.  Is this gilt by association or guilt by association?

          Lincoln also said that public opinion is everything.  It would seem that Obama learned this lesson well, as he has made a career of traveling around the country wooing, shaping, and educating public opinion.  He has never stopped campaigning, and the mainstream media never misses a chance to show him making speeches while surrounded with fawning sycophants who buy into his false promises and applaud his serial mendacities. 

          From the Oval Office he signs a health care law with great ceremony, shamelessly insensitive to the deplorable fact that it was passed in Congress on a purely partisan vote and in the face of public disapproval.  Now that the law’s demonstrable flaws are surfacing on a daily basis, he doesn’t hesitate to rewrite it, ignoring all the while the extra-constitutional nature of his actions.

          President Obama swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the law.  Instead, he brandishes a pen and proclaims his intention to bypass Congress, to use his executive authority to ignore the parts of the law he doesn’t like, and to write new ones as he sees fit. 

          Constitutional professor Jonathan Turley, a liberal who happens to agree with the president’s policies, tells us we are seeing a very dangerous shift of gravity within our system, a system created by our founders to protect us from authoritarian power and to protect civil liberties from abuse.  They would be horrified, he says, to see the concentration of power in one branch.  Turley sees the president’s claim of the right to basically rewrite, ignore, or negate federal law as the path to authoritarianism.  I would call it the road to tyranny.  His mentors, teachers, and radical associates would be proud.

The Russian Lie

          To borrow a classic malapropism:  If my father were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave.  Dad was a passionate anti-Communist.  Posted to several countries in his two decades in the Foreign Service, he witnessed and struggled against the Evil Empire, long before Ronald Reagan called it that.

          The USSR is gone now and so is the Communism that enslaved Eastern Europe.  But, while Russia may not be the great power it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this does not stop Vladimir Putin from trying to re-establish Russia’s dominance over its former territories and beyond.  The former KGB operative remembers how powerful Russia once was and sees no reason why it can’t reclaim its standing as a super power.  If he could see the resurgence of his old enemies, Dad would no doubt proclaim, “They’re back!”

          We must not forget that today’s Russia is the inheritor of a history of tyranny that enslaved its neighbors and murdered its own people on a horrific scale.  Accordingly, we must see the opening ceremonies in Sochi celebrating Russia’s glorious history as a gross distortion and a massive lie.  How can any country take pride in the unimaginable scale of misery imposed by Stalin, the tens of millions deliberately starved in Ukraine, the millions more frozen to death in Siberian gulags.  Russia can celebrate its literature and its music, as well as the courage of its people through many centuries of suffering at the hands of invaders.  But it cannot celebrate its history of despotism and soul-crushing inhumanity.

          I have nothing but disgust for Meredith Vieira, the abysmally ignorant American commentator at the Winter Olympics who lamented the demise of the Soviet Union as “a bittersweet moment.”  Perhaps she would enjoy riding bareback behind Putin as he gallops to Russia’s final victory over a country that tolerates such pathetic nonsense. 

The Paradox of Welfare

               A paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself, yet is true.  My favorite paradox comes from the English writer G.K. Chesterton who took the old adage “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” and turned it on its ear with, “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”  I’m reminded of this whenever I make a poor shot on the golf course or hit a clunker on the piano.

               In a recent Wall Street Journal article Congressman Paul Ryan wrote about a paradox in the War on Poverty.  What he said essentially is that the more money we give to the poor, the greater the chance they will remain poor.  He was referring to the multitude of well-intended welfare programs that seek to remedy poverty, but end up having a depressing effect on the upward mobility of the poor.

                Simply put, the poorer you are, the more government assistance you get, but the more you earn, the less assistance you get.  Why is this bad?  Because our means-tested anti-poverty programs work against those who try to earn their way out of poverty.  Why, for instance, have so many unemployed able-bodied people dropped out of the job market altogether?  Because for many of them the net benefit of re-entering the job market is as little of 20% or less of their salary.  That’s not much of an incentive to go back to work.  And it shouldn’t surprise anybody to see a single mother with a passel of kids choosing to stay at home rather than looking for a job that might jeopardize some of her government subsidies for housing, utilities, transportation, health care, and food stamps. 

               Now we have ObamaCare actually encouraging people to cut their hours or drop out of the workforce  so they can qualify for healthcare subsidies.  Incredibly, leftists like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid praise this as a way for low-income workers to break their “job-lock” and gain the liberty to “follow their passion.”  Wonderful.  Now we can have more poets, surfers, and social parasites to support with our tax dollars.

               Lyndon Johnson officially launched the War on Poverty 50 years ago, but trillions of dollars later nothing has changed: we still have 47 million Americans living below the poverty line today.  A myopic Washington thinks it can solve the problem by throwing more and more money at it; but all it has to show for its generosity is a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor.  We have to change the way we take care of the most unfortunate among us without condemning them to a cycle of poverty from which they can never escape.      

               We need to resolve this paradox.  The richest country in the world must do better.

               

Decline and Fall of the American Empire

            My sister Louise, who lives in Atlanta, sent me a series of quotes from Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian most noted for his “You might be a redneck” jokes.  These new quotes, however, are not a laughing matter, as they point to the deterioration in our nation’s values.   Here’s a sample:     

            “If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government regulation and intrusion, while not working is rewarded with Food Stamps, WIC checks, Medicaid benefits, subsidized housing, and free cell phones — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.”

            My response to Foxworthy’s observations was a simple question: “Where the hell is this country going?” 

            Louise replied, “Into the history books as a wonderful example of how great a country can be, but one that eventually failed because the people became immoral, corrupt, greedy, ignorant and self-indulgent.  Ancient Rome revisited.  We are fortunate to have lived during America's golden age but unfortunate to live to see its decline.  Maybe in the future another country will rise up and thrive on the principles that made ours great.  Let's hope its founders learn from our mistakes. But human nature being what it is, the cycle will probably repeat itself.  Countries and empires rise and fall.  The forces of chaos and entropy are always vying against civilization.  It's frightening to contemplate what will happen in the not too distant future when all the evil and barbaric countries that envy, hate and resent us have nuclear weapons.  If I sound gloomy, it's because I am.  And very, very sad.”

            I share my sister’s sadness.  Critics of the point of view I often express in this newspaper accuse me of being unfair and too negative as I cast blame on Congress and this Administration for our country’s decline.  But I am not alone.  The latest polls reflect the public’s loss of confidence in our lawmakers’ ability to solve our problems, and, more pointedly, in President Obama’s veracity and trustworthiness in leading this nation both here and abroad. 

            Our increasingly secular, permissive, and hedonistic society surely mirrors the corruption that led to the fall of Rome.  We may boast that ours is the longest-lasting democracy in history. But it is rotting from within.  Our founders freed us from tyranny, but never imagined that the independence they bequeathed to us carried the seeds of its own destruction.  How sad they would be to see what is happening to this great country.

            We should all be sad.

Roger Staubach

               My daily routine starts out with a cup of coffee and The Virginian-Pilot.  I read every section and finish with celebrity birthdays on the very last page of the paper.  On February 5^th the celebrities included five actors/actresses and one country singer.  Conspicuously absent from this group was one birthday celebrant whose career has outshone all of the others put together.  On that day Roger Staubach turned 72.

               Roger Staubach needs to be remembered and celebrated.  His personal qualities enabled him to achieve a life of accomplishment as an All-American in every way.  His first notable success was as the Heisman Trophy quarterback who led Navy to a 9-1 record and a No. 2 national ranking in 1963.   After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1964, he spent the next four years fulfilling his commitment to the Navy, including volunteering to fight in Vietnam, even though his color-blindness could have gotten him a desk job.

               Drafted by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and playing for them from 1969 to 1979, he took his team to five Super Bowls, winning two and earning the MVP award in Super Bowl VI.  He was selected to six Pro Bowls and is a member of the NFL’s Hall of Fame.  At retirement he had achieved the second-highest-passer rating of all time, behind only Otto Graham.

               The most interesting bit of trivia concerning Staubach is the “Hail Mary pass.”  He coined the term after completing a last-second 50-yard bomb to Drew Pearson to win a playoff game against Minnesota in 1975.  In fact, last-minute drives were his trademark, as “Captain Comeback” led the Cowboys to 23 career game-winning drives in the fourth quarter.

               Staubach’s post-football career was anything but trivial.   In 1977 he founded The Staubach Company, a real-estate firm.  Without going into any of the details of the company’s remarkable success, it is enough to mention that it sold in 2008 for $613 million.

               Sometime back in the early 80’s I was walking along 57^th Street in New York when I spied Roger Staubach coming the other way.  I let him pass, but I wish I had stopped him to shake his hand.

Liberals and Conservatives

               For all their professed compassion for the poor, which is not a bad thing, it occurs to me that the raison d’ȇtre of liberals, the one thing that motivates them at every turn, is the need to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.  

               Think about it.  Liberals tell us and our kids what’s good and what’s not good to eat.  Fiber in, trans fats out; whole grains and veggies in, genetically modified foods out.  How dare we serve pizza and french fries in the school cafeteria!

               Liberals wave the banner of political correctness to control free speech, and cry racism, sexism, and discrimination when anyone dares to criticize their favored groups.  They want to ban guns, but will not address the social ills that lead to gun violence.  They will not enforce immigration laws or support tort reform.  They champion a woman’s right to choose, while denying the unborn the right to life. 

               A federal government dominated by liberals tells us we must burn ethanol with our gasoline and ditch our incandescent light bulbs.  It tells schools what to teach and power plants what to burn.  It closes cigar bars, but pronounces that smoking weed is no worse than alcohol.  It dictates the hours truckers may drive and fines drivers not wearing seat belts.  It puts 1.6-gallon tanks in our toilets and, if it could, solar panels on every roof.  It prefers smelts and spotted owls to people.  And, of course, it tells us what health insurance policies we can buy and what doctors we can visit.

               ObamaCare is the ultimate proof of the bankruptcy of liberal ideology.  It not only dictates the coverage we must have, it denies us the right to choose not to have any at all.  Under the sacred mantra of ”equality,”  it claims the right to adjust the burden of health care through subsidies, while it illegally exempts big business, unions, and Congress from specific provisions of the law.  And it promises to use taxpayer funds to make insurance companies whole if the consequences of the ACA’s catastrophic implementation should make their participation unprofitable.

               Liberals excoriate the wealthy and despise the successful.  They burden businesses with unnecessary rules and mountains of paperwork, while ignoring their negative effect on job creation.  They justify confiscatory taxation to remedy income inequality, oblivious to the damage this does to the economy.  They create new entitlements and welfare programs, because they believe that poverty can be remedied by the redistribution of wealth. 

               Our nanny state tries to govern every aspect of our existence with thousands upon thousands of pages of new regulations every year.  Transportation, housing, energy, commerce, education, agriculture, health care, labor, homeland security --  no part of our lives remains untouched.....A czar for every department, a finger in every pie.

               I do not impugn the sincerity or integrity of liberals, and I think it’s fair to say that liberals may not support every position I have ascribed to them here.  But to the extent that they do, I simply don’t agree with them.  I find them misguided and, worse, destructive of a free society.

               We conservatives, on the other hand, value freedom above all.  We believe that American ingenuity flourishing under a system of free enterprise, a system free of government intrusion and coercion, can achieve great success, as it has in the past.  We believe that Individual responsibility and self-reliance are superior to dependence on government and the cult of victimization.   And, while we admit that capitalism has its flaws, we believe that it sure works better than Socialism.            

               We Americans did not proclaim our independence from an oppressive monarchy in 1776 only to be shackled by an even more oppressive system of our own making.  We can fix this economy, we can create jobs, we can reduce the debt, we can give people the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.  If the government will just get out of the way.