Defund NPR

A letter to NPR Management

1. When are you going to fire Terry Gross for her constant and recurring passive aggressive attacks on Christianity and Judaism?

2. When are you going to fire Nina Totenberg for her vile health wishes on people she doesn't politically agree with?

Consider this mail one of more than 387 calling for their ouster.

Now that the vitriol is out of the way I really don't think they should be fired.

It is ok with me if they hate conservatives or Christians as publicly as they do. Just not with my money funding their agenda.

For you to fire someone because they admit to some discomfort and have the healthy approach of self critically analyzing their own thoughts is reprehensible on your part. More significantly that you would do so in part because they are willing to engage in a discourse with ideological opponents proves that your organization is a small minded pseudo-intellectual propaganda source.

An organization that is this ideologically monolithic has no right to receive public funding.

Why the economy still sucks

From the LA Times the Whitehouse is advocating the repeal of part of the health care act.

If you multiply this by a thousand times you can easily see why small business have not started hiring. At this point in the normal economic cycle we should be seeing steady growth and have already turned the corner. We don't because the burdens on the real job creators is simply too great.

Just the Truth - National Security

Republicans interred terrorists in Cuba in a time of war

Democrats interred Japanese and German American Citizens in America in a time of war

Just the truth - Racism

Republicans freed the slaves

Democrats started the KKK

An open letter to the President

Mr. President

Stop blaming your failures on others. I have been at two events dealing with the health care debacle that is occurring. I am not a radical. I am not a racist. I am not an "evil monger". I am not a sheep to follow others blindly. I have not been given a script to read and no one has helped me find my way to these events. Certainly no one has offered to bus me anywhere or printed out signs for me. Fear is not my primary motivation. I am most certainly not bearing false witness. You and your counterparts may be saying these things to create a cloud of doubt or you may honestly believe what you are saying but if you honestly believe that what is occurring is an artificial construct of your political enemies then you truly do not understand the depth of loss of trust in you that is happening.

Many of us voted for you and almost all of us supported you for a while as our President. My neighborhood voted overwhelmingly for you. That would not happen right now. That loss of trust is happening and it is very real.

I and many others who have been persistently trying to politely voice concern and ask questions simply want an honest discussion that occurs over a long enough time period to get the facts out. Instead we are demonized, ignored, and in some cases physically attacked for daring to ask those questions.

In every event I have seen video of, the initial questions were quite polite. It was not until the people were ignored, talked down to or verbally accosted by the reps or their lackeys that things became more tense. At this point your "punching back twice as hard" has caused people to stop turning the other cheek. Even in those scenarios the only escalation is verbal and remarkably mild verbal in comparison to the political discourse of the last few decades (and certainly the last 9 years).

We are not the stupid sheep that we are being made out to be. I know very well that the end of life consultations are not intended as a "death panel" but I also know that they could become exactly that in function if mandated. I realize that the cost of medicare is at the point that it will soon become insolvent but I am not convinced that the way to solve that government induced failure is to impose similar government controls and concepts to the entirety of the rest of health care and to every single citizen of this country.

Fear is not driving us. Knowledgeable concern is driving us. The hubris of trying to forcibly alter (or take over bureaucratic control of) a fifth of our economy in two months without real debate or even one clearly written bill is driving us.

It is not a "Hope" issue it is a "Trust" issue. I do not want to have to hope that I can trust the government.

I am mostly happy with my healthcare. If I wasn't I could always find different care. I am ok with the government trying to find ways to expand the coverage base for the uninsured that want it. I think it is disingenuous to say that the uninsured do not get care though. I would be very OK if the government limited lawyers from specious lawsuits against sound medical practices. I would find it acceptable if the government removed barriers preventing me from having choice in private insurance but I do not want a government option. I believe that more people will "fall through the cracks" in a government system than in the system we currently have.

I am not naive. I know that any government option will eventually force out all of the other options. It will not do this because of fair competition or because it is better. It will do this because it has seemingly endless pockets and can operate at a loss. Seemingly endless because the real cost will be shifted. It will occur in higher taxes. It will occur in the form of inflation as the government prints money to cover shortfalls. It will occur in lower wages because businesses will either be taxed or regulated. It will occur in higher unemployment because thousands of small businesses will have to offset personal tax costs (taxing incomes over $250K). It will occur in reduced care to "less productive" society members (even if they paid their fair dues before). It will also force others out because as part of the government it will eventually regulate out competition. It will create a monopoly. The only thing worse than a monopoly is a government monopoly.

I think that 15% of our economy is worth 6 to 9 months of deliberation and not a hasty political cram.

I respect you and my government. I respect you and my government significantly more than most others respected the previous administration.

I am loosing that respect though. It is difficult to respect people who do not appear to respect me. People who are prejudging based on appearances, racial groupings and socioeconomic status.


Respectfully,

Jim C

PS - I am completely aware that your staff will likely censor this from you but on the off chance you do read it I would certainly be willing to buy you a beer to talk about it.

Mortgage - Doddgate = more homeless

Look if we remove the risk and impact on mortgage companies of defaulted loans the result will be more defaults and therefore foreclosures. The result of congress bailing out the mortgage companies will be more foreclosures not less because they will have less incentive to negotiate with borrowers who are on the line.

This holds especially true in variable rate loans where the borrower is able to make initial payments but the increased payments are out of reach. In these cases neither the borrower or the lender should have made the agreement in the first place but if you remove the downside of the default from the vendor why would they ever entertain the idea of negotiating with someone who was making payments earlier.

This article misses the point in the end but I agree with the bailout point. Government involvement is exacerbating the problem and it isn't a solution.

This makes Doddgate even worse. Dodd's FOA status might lead directly to more people getting kicked out of their houses.

We need to make it clear to Congress and the Senate that they need to be very careful about how they walk when it comes to solutions that take away one side of the bargaining position. In this case our side.

TNR Beauchamp - NEI ?

I have been following the Beauchamp TNR storry for a while and while it disgusts me I haven't had much to say that many others are not already saying more effectively.

This morning I read this post at that I found via instapundit.

I was quite surprised to see the NEI as one of their advertisers.

I have cross linked with the NEI blog a number of times and am a regular reader of TNR online. Believe me when I say that it is unlikely that ardent readers of TNR are unlikely to support NEI's goals of increasing the acceptance of nuclear power. It seems their advertising budget would be better spent in less hostile venues.

Do I have a fundamental misunderstanding of either of the organizations? Or could this be a case of the Yankee picking algorithm planted adds and equating them with direct advertisement? An understandable mistake but still possibly a mistake. If so we might want to be judicious in approaching the advertisers or laying blame.

Was this in the paper publication or did it only appear on their site?

In any case I agree with the general need to press TNR to stop presenting lies targeting the military.

Iraq

"This war cannot yet be dissected because it still lives– wounded, angry, thrashing on the table, but alive. We can only hack into it, diagnose it, treat it, knowing each attempt at a cure affects the pulse. Doing nothing causes tachycardia. Much of what afflicts Iraq was here before America was born. But when we elected to perform surgery on this sick land, we used hacksaws and sledgehammers, and took an already sick patient and hacked off some parts while pulverizing others."

"Meanwhile, there are stadiums full of people shouting at the doctors, threatening to fire them or revoke their licenses, or at the very least to cut off the lights mid-surgery."

"For far too long our media and government have failed to fully inform us–even to the point of lying–about Iraq. I came to this ill-begotten war searching for people who knew the truth and would tell it."


Read the whole thing it is worth it regardless of which side you fall on.

"I would not want to be taken prisoner by people who entertain themselves by burning puppies to death."

That's a quote from this post at Classical Values.

I have to agree with it and will go quite a bit further. I have been following Balko's tracking of these incidents and the tragedies related to SWAT raids for quite some time but they had become numbing to me.

Like a lot of blog topics you see it over and over again until interest wains. Of course in this case that reaction is horrible. These are human beings (and in the dogs case humans property [and friends]) that are being killed or harmed in these false or stupidly incorrect raids. Unfortunately I was pretty numb to them. I would check Balko out periodically but what can you really do?

This weekend I saw something that woke me up to it again (at least for a little while) I was watching a COPS type show on the Dallas SWAT team and what I saw appalled me. The show was glorifying it and clearly playing up the "hero" factor but I saw a bunch of nearly juvenile thugs. There were three raids in the show for all three put together they must have gotten almost a pound of marijuana and a dozen or so crack rocks. To clear the obviously massive amount of illicit material from the streets they literally pulled the side of two houses off and destroyed the doors and windows of the third. The tear gassed and held children (3 to 7 year olds) at gun point and clubbed clearly disoriented (but not resisting) people of many ages.

I'll admit they found some drugs in each house but the amount in each case makes me believe it is far more likely that it was the family's teen that had it than any trafficking.

So these people's houses were destroyed, the children traumatized, the parents beaten, machine guns shoved into their heads, professional lives probably ruined (can you imagine explaining why you need time off for something like this) because their teenager had a few cigarettes worth of illegal drugs.

The culmination of the show was them using a .50 cal rifle to take out the engine block of a hijacked semi. This one was a little bit closer to acceptable to me because of the fact that there was definitely an armed and dangerous person on board but I couldn't help but thinking this was a needless action. Where was the semi going to go to? It couldn't possibly outrun the police and it was being driven by a sane person (even though she was at gun point). Which is more likely to make the hijacker freak out and kill the driver? Running out of gas after a 4 hour cooling down time or being shot at with a .50 cal sniper rifle from the back of an armored personnel carrier? Well? At least they didn't shoot her dog when it jumped out of the cab.

Don't get me wrong I am all for police being able to defend themselves and even aggressively pursuing potential culprits. I am not a drug legalization freak either. They are increadably harmful (even weed) and need to stay illegal. I think that police need to be given a great amount of leeway in how they deal with threats. I also think they need to do everything in their power to deescalate and there has to be some accountability. This is triply true in the case of mistaken identity.

In my job I can get fired and in the case of SoX possibly sent to jail for unknowingly making a mistake. Are you telling me a demonstrably innocent person can get killed and the police involved don't get any scrutiny at all? Or only a few days suspension. I am sorry that is just unacceptable.

I am also of the opinion that it isn't always directly the officer's fault. Someone running the department created the environment where these things can happen. In the case of accidental deaths in forced entry of the wrong address the police chief should be at least as culpable as the CEO of a mismanaged company.

This is just wrong.

I Support Democracy in Iraq

I have been stewing on this post for quite a while. Everybody knows I shed my "just blogging on info security and process control" take a while ago basically because I don't need this site to support a business and I get bored talking about work even in my off time. So that hasn't stopped me. What has stopped me is that a good chunk of my readers are in a community that leans pretty liberal and the default liberal take on this stand might cost me what little patronage I have. As I thought about it though I realized that this assumption is pretty dumb. For one I am not giving everyone credit for their ability to dispassionately assess the implications and not blindly react and for another item I am overlooking the possibility that many might agree with me.

So simply put I Support Democracy in Iraq.


And at Classical Values





I probably take a bit of a different approach than the sites linked above but I still support it.

Regardless of the reason we entered the war. Regardless of whether it was right or the result of stupidity, negligence, disinformation or outright lies. What matters is that we (and several other countries) took actions that resulted in the destruction of infrastructure as well as political and social stability. One can argue whether that was good or bad all day but the end point is that

We Took Action.

Taking action and initiative results in assuming responsibility.

We have a responsibility to the people of Iraq to other countries in the region and ultimately to the world to ensure what stability and humanity that we can. Anything else is selfish and shortsighted.

So at this point the question becomes - Would stability and the human welfare of the people of Iraq be better served if we removed military presence or maintained it?

I don't think that the answer to that is as simple as either side would have you believe.

Most of the violence right now is Iraqi on Iraqi so it is naive to assume that will stop because we withdraw our troops. Likewise it is almost certain that our troops presence in many places serves as either a source of resentment or at the least as a target of existing resentment.

There are two extreme possible results of a troop withdrawal and draw down.




One extreme is that there is a intense civil war followed by a Pol Pot type ethnic cleansing in which hundreds of thousands of people (possibly millions) are maimed, tortured and killed and certainly millions are displaced. The violence spreads into neighboring states and results in a large scale regional upheaval that results in significant unrest and possibly violence in European and Asian Muslim populations.



The other possible extreme is that now that the American (and British because I doubt they will be willing to fill a gap left by us) antagonist is gone all of the factions sit around a campfire and sing Kumbiya.


Obviously the first is far more likely than the latter.


The most likely outcome is probably an extended civil war with hundreds of thousands of casualties ending with a Balkanized Iraq with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish Quasi-States possibly the the Shia being absorbed by Iran (in effect if not in fact) and the Kurdish State causing significant problems in Turkey (for right or wrong).


I say that we have a responsibility to ensure that Iraq turns out closer to Germany than Vietnam.


We have a responsibility based on having taken action.


We choose whether we "win" or "loose" this one based on our actions. In the long run we are perfectly capable of achieving any outcome unless we choose to accept a lesser one.


As for me. I choose to support democracy in Iraq.

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