Unintended Consequences

    The law of unintended consequences is in full swing. 
    Some classic examples: the more we increase welfare, the less likely its beneficiaries will become productive members of society; the more the government increases taxes, the less people have to spend, thereby slowing the economy; the more we seek to protect domestic industries with tariffs, the more expensive the goods we buy become; the more we choose not to kill the enemy where he lives, the more likely he will come here to kill us.

    Close to home, recent studies show that prescriptions for effective but addictive painkillers like oxycodone and hydrocodone have led to increased deaths from heroin overdoses. Patients too often turn to cheap and available heroin when they can no longer afford the high costs of those prescription drugs. The numbers are staggering: 10,574 deaths from heroin overdoses in 2014, an increase of 22 percent from the previous year.

    States that have legalized marijuana now find that the pot industry uses up so much electricity, it has stretched power grids to the limit. Colorado growers consume power equivalent to 35,000 homes; in California, 1 million homes. Not only do these operations send a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the projected increase in demand for electricity will have to come from the burning of coal, environmentalists' Enemy No.1.

    Would anyone like to guess what the unintended consequences will be if either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump becomes president of the United States?

Not Qualified

Note:  This is the text of a letter to our local newspaper about Joseph Hoffler, a big fan of Obama and a frequent critic of mine.  I never respond to my critics in the press, but in his case I had to make an exception.

    Joseph Hoffler wants to be a County Commissioner. I applaud his willingness to serve this community, just as I honor his military service to this country. The question now is not about his willingness to serve, but about his qualifications.

     I have never met Mr. Hoffler, so I can't claim to know him personally. But I can infer a great deal about him from his frequent letters to the editor of this newspaper.

     In all his writings Mr. Hoffler has been a steadfast, even obsequious supporter of President Obama. He has praised ObamaCare by citing the number of enrollments as a proof of success, this in spite of that number falling far below expectations, not to mention the disastrous roll-out, the failures of so many state exchanges, the ballooning premiums and deductibles, and the millions in losses by insurance companies, all of which have resulted in an overwhelmingly negative opinion of the program.

    Mr. Hoffler has credited Mr. Obama for the falling gas prices. This, as Bob Bose pointed out in a rebuttal, is laughable. President Obama has been an obdurate opponent of fossil fuels, preferring to waste billions on renewable energy sources that fit his climate change agenda. He deserves no credit whatsoever for low fuel prices.

    Mr. Hoffler also does not seem to object to the president's destructive economic policies, his job-killing regulations, his unconstitutional executive orders, and his failure to enforce the law on illegal immigration.

    Even scarier, Mr. Hoffler does not agree with 80% of Americans who think that Obama's foreign policy of weakness and appeasement poses a grave threat to the security of our country. Incredibly, Mr. Hoffler still blames Bush for the rise and spread of Islamic terrorism.

     In view of all this, I question Mr. Hoffler's ability to make critical judgments based on facts rather than ideological bias. Joseph W. Hoffler (Lt Col, USAF-ret., as he never fails to remind us) may have been a competent officer, but military service does not inoculate him from error, nor is it a cure for his ignorance.

Not My Constitution

    It has come down to this: Is it time for this country to abandon the Constitution and replace it with ad hoc solutions? This question is pitting liberals and conservatives against each other on the most consequential issues of our times.

    Every elected official is sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. But it seems that many politicians utter these solemn words while muttering under their breaths, “except when the Constitution doesn't serve my purposes.”

    We have seen the denigration of constitutional principles from both sides of the ideological spectrum. When Donald Trump says he wants to close mosques and prevent all Muslims from entering this country, he is ignoring essential provisions of the First Amendment. When Hillary Clinton vows to write tax and gun-control regulations that circumvent the legislative authority bestowed on Congress, she is in fact promising to violate the Constitution. But of course both Trump and Clinton are taking their cue from the Master.

    After Barack Obama repeated over twenty times that he did not have the authority to overrule or ignore Congress, he proceeded to do just that routinely on immigration, on ObamaCare, on the Iranian agreement, and on climate regulations. When he did not inform Congress before releasing five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for Sergeant Burgdal, he broke the law. But so what? What are the consequences?

    It is one thing for Obama to break the law, but it is quite another for him to brazenly act with confidence that he will not be held accountable. It is not so much the Constitution that he is violating, but the very moral fabric of our democracy. He may sanctimoniously lecture us about “the values we all share,” but his actions make him, in my eyes, is a traitor to those values.

San Bernadino

    The shootings in San Bernadino produced intense media coverage followed by a flood of comments and opinions from all corners of the political spectrum.

    As expected, we got knee-jerk reactions from the anti-gun lobby, with President Obama leading the pack. The screams for more gun control ignored the fact that California has the strictest gun laws in the nation. No matter how loud the screams, no gun-control laws would have prevented the carnage.

    Then there were those, like the president, who would have preferred the killings to be seen as an act of workplace violence; the word terrorism did not fit their political agenda. Even when the FBI stated that this had indeed been an act of terrorism, no one on the left qualified it as Islamic terrorism, in spite of the evidence that one of the shooters had pledged her allegiance to ISIS before spaying bullets into a room full of innocent people. And now we have growing evidence of an overseas Islamic banking and training connection as well.

    In his speech to the nation on Sunday evening, the president did not admit to discounting intelligence reports on the growing threat of Islamic terrorism, nor did he tell us he was revising his strategy for fighting the enemy. On the contrary, he offered nothing new: no more boots on the ground, no arming the Kurds, no change in the ineffective air war's rules of engagement. Let's remember that this president recently said revealingly, “I'm not interested in posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning.”

    The president, however, did spend an inordinate amount of time warning us not to discriminate against Muslims, echoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch's earlier anti-constitutional vow to prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech.

    I'm glad at least that he didn't remind us that the greatest threat facing the world today is climate change.