HERE is another great article on the subject

Jun 28, 6:42 AM (ET)

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN
(AP) – Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered Thursday on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad, while a parked car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital’s busy outdoor bus stations, police said.

The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The bodies – all men aged 20 to 40 years old – had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Link for full article.
———–

Background
Iraq in turmoil
More

BAGHDAD, June 30 (Reuters) – Media reports attributed to Iraqi police of 20 decapitated bodies found south of Baghdad this week were untrue and may have been planted by insurgents to provoke revenge attacks, the U.S. military said on Saturday.

“Coalition and Iraqi officials began investigating to determine if the reports were true. Ultimately it was concluded the reports were false,” the military said in a statement.

Local police, speaking off the record, said on Thursday that the bodies had been found dumped on the banks of the Tigris River near Salman Pak, about 30 km (19 miles) south of Baghdad.

But the Iraqi Interior Ministry later said that a team sent to the location with U.S. forces had found nothing.

“(Insurgents) are known for purposefully providing false information to the media to incite violence and revenge killings, and they may well have been the source of this misinformation,” the military said.

Link for full article.

Give me a break. The MSM will believe any bad news they get from anonymous sources. Makes it hard to understand who’s side they are on – but we’ve really known that for some time.

Click here for a good dissection of of this series of events from a respected blog. (leave it to bloggers to discover -

“For the second time in less than year, the Associated Press seems to have run a story of a horrific massacre involving 20 or more people, using police officers not assigned to the area as their primary sources. For the second time in less than a year, it appears that there is no physical evidence that so much as a single person has died.”

There’s more than numbers for those who want to understand

Link to Iraq the Model Blog

It’s almost July now, and General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will present their report about the situation in Iraq, military and political, at some point in September.

I don’t know what parameters the two men are going to list statistics for in their report but I expect it to show the results of fighting al-Qaeda and other armed groups in numbers, the progress in building the ISF in numbers, also in numbers and of course the report would include the progress, if any, that our political leaders will have made by the time.

I think what matters more than the way of presentation would be how the data in the report is going to be read and afterwards interpreted into attitudes and actions.

One thing I hope the decision-makers and the media do when they read the report is to not isolate the war in Iraq from the war on terror and al-Qaeda as a whole, and at the same time put in mind the difference between war and nation-building. The latter takes much more time than winning a military conflict but requires different tools.

The results so far have been astounding, and please allow me to say that I’m proud of the change in attitude many of my fellow Iraqis are showing. Even if numbers don’t suggest so because the change is happening but it will take time-perhaps beyond September-before this change will show in numbers.

A nation is not a corporation and when we deal with a nation we are dealing with a society; a mass of people with ever changing hearts and minds and that’s why numbers alone can’t be enough to assess the situation—thoughtful insight and looking at the bigger image are also required.

For over a year the media and many officials were spooking us with the exaggerated ghost of civil war. I wonder what they have to say now! I think their silence is more telling than anything they would’ve said.

Iraqis are awakening, one very telling example can be seen in the ongoing operation in Diyala; members of the 1920 revolution brigades, once bitter enemies of the US military and Iraqi government are now assisting US and Iraqi military in fighting al-Qaeda even though the majority of the Iraqi soldiers and officers are Shia.

If the change in exclusively Sunni Anbar is good then the change in Diyala is good beyond words.

Another great example that I have personally been in touch with is taking place in a place outside Baghdad. Maybe you remember the story I told you about the area where members of our tribe live. For months unfortunate bloodletting was going on between the tribes, militias and al-Qaeda terrorists in which most of the victims were no more than innocent farmers.

Last week I learned from relatives that two groups of tribes have separately formed two “battalions” of several hundred young tribesmen each; not to fight the other sect or the US or Iraqi forces but to fight al-Qaeda. Even better this step has been taken in cooperation with the authorities in the region and the arrangement will ultimately lead to turning many of those tribal fighters into legitimate law enforcement personnel.

Despite such examples of many promising changes, we have to remain realistic and not overlook the rest of challenges. Uniting against al-Qaeda and even defeating it is not enough to solve all of Iraq’s problems and the greater challenge of nation-building still lies ahead.

However, I expect and hope the world to show some gratitude to the Iraqis and Americans who fought, suffered, bled and died ridding the world of thousands of al-Qaeda terrorists, each one of whom could have been capable of murdering as many innocent people as their fellow terrorists did in New York, London or the many cities across the world that paid a high price simply because they don’t approve of the ways of those extremists.

The internal struggle for power in Iraq will not end by pacifying al-Qaeda or the militias. It will continue in different forms until we have the correct legislations and institutions that can prevent bloodshed by facilitating peaceful sharing of power and treasure in a way that every individual or group get what they deserve, no more and no less. It goes without saying that these legislations and institutions will need an impartial, competent force to be able to function efficiently.

The impact of successful military operations, aside from people’s direct safety, will not be visible immediately when it comes to the aspects of daily life in areas like economy, social life, education, etc. and here comes the role of true political reforms at all levels, from holding local elections to choose new and representative district and city councils to amending the general elections law to allow voters to choose their representatives directly instead of the current slate system. It might be also a good idea to adjust the federalism law to allow turning each province into an individual region within the federal state to avoid the sensitivities that could arise from forming regions on sectarian and/or ethnic basis.

Right there is where we will still need help from the world; not with more soldiers and tanks but with good will, compassion and thoughtful advice and guidance.

Posted by Omar

Gloom and Doom in A Sunny Day
By Emily Yoffe / Washington Post
Monday, June 25, 2007; A19

Link to article 

It was a mild January evening, and people had filled the restaurant’s outdoor patio. As our group walked past the tables, one of my friends said, “This terrifies me.” I don’t know if she was reassured later by the chilly April, but we are all supposed to be terrified of the weather now.

In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore tells us that unless drastic global changes are made, our cities will be inundated and those of us who haven’t drowned will face a world wracked by cataclysmic weather and swarming with pestilence. One of his devotees, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming out with his own environmental horror movie warning of human extinction if we continue living as we are. This would have a negative effect on the box office, but extinction might be preferable to the future Gore envisions.

I, however, refuse to see the apocalypse in every balmy day. And I think it’s wrong to let our children believe they’ll be swept away before they get a chance to fret about college admissions. An article in The Post this spring described children anxious, sleepless and tearful about the end; one 9-year-old said she worried about global warming “because I don’t want to die.”

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change. Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

And a recent New York Times profile of Gore tells that we are to be flooded with “An Inconvenient Truth.” It is going to be shown in schools; book versions for children and young adults and a children’s television show are planned. The global Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 are expected to raise millions, going to a three-year public relations effort, headed by Gore, to deluge us with bad news.

All this is not to say that it’s not getting warmer and that curbing our profligate environmental ways is not a commendable and necessary goal. But perhaps this movement is sowing the seeds of its own destruction — even as it believes the human species has sown its own. There must be a limit to how many calamitous films, books and television shows we, and our children, can absorb.

It doesn’t seem sustainable to expect people to remain terrified by such a disinterested, often benign — it was so nice eating out on the patio! — and even unpredictable enemy. (I understand we’re the enemy, but the executioner is the weather.) Recall that the experts told us last year would be a record-setting hurricane season, but the series of Katrinas never materialized.

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: “NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer.” But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it’s supposed to be a sign I’m in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I’m oddly reassured. We’ve seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

It’s also hard to believe assertions that the science on the future of our climate is settled when climate scientists can’t agree about the present — or the past (there is contention about the dates, causes and even the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed). Now, Gore and others say that Katrina was a product of global warming and that we can expect more and bigger storms. But there is actually brisk scientific debate over the role global warming plays — if any — in the creation of hurricanes.

A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last month, looking at 5,000 years of Atlantic hurricanes, found “large and dramatic fluctuations in hurricane activity, with long stretches of frequent strikes punctuated by lulls that lasted many centuries” — with the stormier periods occurring during cooler ocean temperatures. But talking about Earth’s constant, and still inexplicable, climate changes and cycles is not useful if you’re trying to shock.

In his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” Gore denounces what he sees as today’s politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion — any such campaign — is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It’s about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

Emily Yoffe is a contributing writer to Slate.com. Her e-mail address is emilyyoffe@hotmail.com.

 

THIS JUST IN :::sigh::: when will the hysteria stop?

Truth be told, climate changes are just that – changes in climate.

 

NYTimes Article Link

June 22, 2007

In Aiding Poor, Edwards Built Bridge to 2008

By LESLIE WAYNE

John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff.

Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was Mr. Edwards himself, tax filings show.

A spokesman for Mr. Edwards defended the center yesterday as a legitimate tool against poverty.

The organization became a big part of a shadow political apparatus for Mr. Edwards after his defeat as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004 and before the start of his presidential bid this time around. Its officers were members of his political staff, and it helped pay for his nearly constant travel, including to early primary states.

While Mr. Edwards said the organization’s purpose was “making the eradication of poverty the cause of this generation,” its federal filings say it financed “retreats and seminars” with foreign policy experts on Iraq and national security issues. Unlike the scholarship charity, donations to it were not tax deductible, and, significantly, it did not have to disclose its donors — as political action committees and other political fund-raising vehicles do — and there were no limits on the size of individual donations.

Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, set out to keep his political options open by promoting issues he cared about, like poverty.

“He wanted to learn, travel and be in a position to be a viable candidate,” said J. Edwin Turlington, a Raleigh lawyer who was the manager of Mr. Edward’s 2003 presidential exploratory committee. “He had the ability to raise money to fund his activities. He had a vision, and he knew it would take money.”

Mr. Edwards mixed policy and politics in a way that allowed his supporters to donate to the causes he believed in — and to the organizations he had set up. He also set up two political action committees, something commonly done by politicians thinking of running for president.

But it was his use of a tax-exempt organization to finance his travel and employ people connected to his past and current campaigns that went beyond what most other prospective candidates have done before pursuing national office. And according to experts on nonprofit foundations, Mr. Edwards pushed at the boundaries of how far such organizations can venture into the political realm. Such entities, which are regulated under Section 501C-4 of the tax code, can engage in advocacy but cannot make partisan political activities their primary purpose without risking loss of their tax-exempt status.

Because the organization is not required to disclose its donors — and the campaign declined to do so — it is not clear whether those who gave money to it did so understanding that they were supporting Mr. Edwards’s political viability as much or more than they were giving money to combat poverty.

The money paid Mr. Edwards’s expenses while he walked picket lines and met with Wall Street executives. He gave speeches, hired consultants, attacked the Bush administration and developed an online following. He led minimum-wage initiatives in five states, went frequently to Iowa, and appeared on television programs. He traveled to China, India, Brussels, Uganda and Russia, and met with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his likely successor, Gordon Brown, at 10 Downing Street.

“He was not a U.S. senator; he had no office,” said Ferrel Guillory, a political program director at the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. “So he set up a series of entities to finance his travel, to finance a political shop and to finance an issue shop. It all adds up to a remarkable feat of keeping a presidential candidacy alive without any of the traditional bases for it.”

Mr. Edwards depended for his activities in large part on donations from supporters. In addition to the two nonprofit organizations, he created a leadership political action committee and a 527 “soft money” organization that also shared the same name: the OneAmerica Committee. These two committees each allowed donors to give more than the $2,300 per person limit in a presidential primary or general election, and, in some cases, to give in unlimited amounts.

From 2005, when he established them, through 2006, the committee and the soft money organization raised $2.7 million, most of which paid for travel and other activities that helped Mr. Edwards maintain his profile.

“It’s a permanent campaign,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group based in Washington. “It’s about shaking every money tree possible and finding every means to finance a permanent campaign. It’s like having different checking accounts, with different rules, and the goal of keeping your name and agenda in the public eye.”

The two foundations and the two political committees all shared an address in Washington and jointly raised around $4 million. Most donations to the political committees came from his core supporters, trial lawyers and unions, and in one case from an anonymous donor, who gave $250,000. Many donations ranged from less than $10,000 to $50,000. For example, Boyd Tinsley, the violinist and backup singer for the Dave Matthews Band, gave $50,000, as did the Service Employees International Union, whose organizing efforts Mr. Edwards has supported.

The Edwards campaign defended the activities of the nonprofit.

“One of the Center for Promise and Opportunity’s main goals was to raise awareness about poverty and engage people to fight it,” Jonathan Prince, deputy campaign manager, said yesterday. “Of course, it sent Senator Edwards around the country to do this. How else could we have engaged tens of thousands of college students or sent 700 young people to help rebuild New Orleans? It’s patently absurd to suggest there’s anything wrong with an organization designed to raise awareness about poverty actually working to raise awareness about poverty.”

“Of course, some of the people who worked for Senator Edwards in the government and on his campaign continued to work with him to fight poverty and send young people to college,” he added. “Perish the thought: people involved in politics actually trying to improve peoples’ lives.”

Mr. Edwards also developed mutually beneficial relationships with public and private institutions. He founded the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, which provided him with a platform. In return, he raised $3 million to sustain it. He was hired by the Fortress Investment Group, a New York hedge fund, to “develop investment opportunities,” according to a 2005 Fortress news release. That led to meetings with such people as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; Henry Kravis, founder of KKR, one of Wall Street’s most successful investment funds; and the chief executives of General Electric, Citigroup, Coca-Cola and DaimlerChrysler.

“Fortress became a vehicle for foreign travel,” Mr. Turlington said, “but it was also a way to spend more time with sophisticated financial people.”

The Edwards campaign declined to disclose the amounts raised or spent by the two similarly-named nonprofit agencies — the Center for Promise and Opportunity and the Center for Promise and Opportunity Foundation — since their 2005 tax filings, which are the most recent to have been filed.

The Center for Promise and Opportunity Foundation, which started with $70,000 in 2005, gave out $300,000 in college scholarships in 2006, said Pamela Garland, the executive director of the College for Everyone Program that is part of the foundation. The center, often praised for helping poor students in Greene County, N.C., get into college, is on track to give out $476,000 this year, Ms. Garland said.

Mr. Edwards broke his ties to that charity once he announced his candidacy for president. “It’s really just me now,” said Ms. Garland, who began her job last May. She credited Mr. Edwards with devising the program, raising the money and speaking to high school students, using his own up-from-poverty story to inspire them.

At the same time, the larger nonprofit group had a more politically active agenda. Its directors included Mr. Turlington, the Raleigh lawyer; Miles Lackey, Mr. Edwards’s former chief of staff; Alexis Bar, his former political scheduler; and David Ginsberg, Mr. Edwards’s current deputy campaign manager.

The $1.3 million the group raised and spent in 2005 paid for travel, including Mr. Edwards’s “Opportunity Rocks” tour of 10 college campuses, consultants and a Web operation. In addition, some $540,000 went for the “exploration of new ideas,” according to tax filings.

Nonprofit groups can engage in political activities and not endanger their tax-exempt status so long as those activities are not its primary purpose. But the line between a bona fide charity and a political campaign is often fuzzy, said Marcus S. Owens, a Washington lawyer who headed the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees nonprofit agencies.

“I can’t say that what Mr. Edwards did was wrong,” Mr. Owens said. “But he was working right up to the line. Who knows whether he stepped or stumbled over it. But he was close enough that if a wind was blowing hard, he’d fall over it.”

Of the explicitly political entities, Mr. Edwards’ OneAmerica Committee 527 organization allowed donors to give without limitations. The money was transferred to his leadership political action committee. Leadership committees were initially created to allow prominent politicians to raise money for distribution to needy office-seekers. But Mr. Edwards spent the entire $2.7 million he raised for OneAmerica, including $532,000 raised by the 527, on himself, an increasingly common trend among politicians.

June 20, 2007

Bill Gates Needs an Econ Course

By John Stossel
Link here

Dropping out of college didn’t stop Bill Gates from making tons of money, but it kept him from classes where he might have learned about the beauty of spontaneous market processes.

Never mind. I forgot that he attended Harvard. He might not have learned about markets after all.

Gates spoke at Harvard recently, urging graduating students to take on the “world’s deepest inequities [including] world hunger … the scarcity of clean water … children who die from diseases we can cure”. All of us want those problems solved, and through their charitable foundation, Gates and his wife, Melinda, have certainly put their money where their mouths are. But Gates seems unaware that these problems can’t be eliminated in the simplistic way he advocates.

He told the grads, “The market did not reward saving the lives of these children [in poor countries], and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.”What is Gates talking about?

Can he name one poor country that permits the free market to operate? The problem is not that the market doesn’t make it profitable to save lives — it most certainly does. The problem is that Third World countries have overbearing, corrupt governments that are obstacles to private property and freedom. That’s why the children’s parents have no voice or power.

Poor people in the West and in East Asia lifted themselves out of poverty by relying largely on the unplanned market process. That process — countless individuals pursuing their own interests by trading with one another — is, as Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek put it, a “discovery procedure.” Through the price system and free competition, it clarifies tradeoffs of scarce resources, generates the lowest-cost solutions, and provides feedback about success and failure through profit and loss.

This spontaneous order is far better at “saving the lives of these children.”

Maybe the Gates Foundation’s private charity will work wonders, but more government-to-government subsidies won’t do the trick. The trillions spent in foreign aid have little to show for it. As William Easterly writes in “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” “Economic development happens, not through aid, but through the homegrown efforts of entrepreneurs and social and political reformers. While the West was agonizing over a few tens of billion dollars in aid, the citizens of India and China raised their own incomes by $715 billion by their own efforts in free markets”.

At Harvard, Gates said, “We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism — if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.”

He misses the point. Gates faults the free market for problems caused by governments. What constricts the reach of the free market is the state. Gates seems oblivious to all the ways that governments here and abroad cripple enterprise. In poor countries, corrupt bureaucracies smother entrepreneurship while enriching cronies. The lack of formal property rights and stable law keeps average people from accumulating capital. So the poor stay poor. That’s what causes “scarcity of clean water” and kills “children who die from diseases we can cure.”

Gates said, “We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.”

He should know that for spending to better reflect people’s values, governments must butt out. Politicians are notoriously bad at improving the lot of their populations. What they are good at is confiscating money and spending it the way they want it spent. It’s only when governments do less, and tax people less, that people are free to earn and keep their own money. Only then does their money really “reflect their values.”

You want poor countries to get rich, Bill Gates? Work for free-market reform.

Go HERE to read a good article about Rudy’s visit to Iowa today. I will not cover the same ground, so please read the linked article for background.

Click HERE to see the details from the power point presentation of Rudy’s fiscal discussion points.

The presentation started almost an hour late (about 11:30), which bothered me. I couldn’t tell or didn’t pay attention to see if it bothered the crowd that I would estimate at over 300, not the 200 that the linked article referenced.

A lot of the National Rudy Team was there – I counted about 5 times as many staffers buzzing around as the last time he was in Des Moines, about 10 of them college aged kids dressed nicely. When I went out to the HDQs about 3pm, it was bustling with the look of a work in progress war room.

This may sound odd, but Rudy’s talk reminded me of a play I loved – viewing it several times in development and production – it was about Christmas Past. Songs, stories, poems, the backstory about “The Night Before Christmas”… When it was over you were surprised but wanted to hear more.

Rudy’s talk today was more of an Econ 201 class than a political speech and that is what I like about the guy.

A friend (Luis) says: A bad politician points to a problem and says: “Look, there’s a problem.”

A good politician points to the same problem and says: “Look, there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.”

A leader looks at the problem and says: “Look there’s a problem, I’ve faced that problem before. I fixed it then, and I will fix it again. This is how.”
Rudy is a Leader.

Rudy started his talk by mentioning what’s going on in the National Legislature over the last months – irresponsible earmarks embedded in bills. Rudy wants the earmark sponsor written into the bill and not submitted until there is a OMB estimate of cost for consideration.

There are typically 10s of thousands of earmarks each year submitted for approval – pet projects by legislators. Since this congress was seated in January 2007 (not even a full 6 months yet) there have been 32,000 earmarks submitted. Not 32 HUNDRED 32 THOUSAND. THAT is not the congress the Democrats promised in their reform movement that swept them into control of both houses. [although it may explain their dismal approval rating]

This entire talk was on commitment # 3 -

I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending.

“It’s not a Problem to be solved, it’s a Culture that must be changed.”

“We need to restore fiscal discipline end wasteful government spending in Washington,” Giuliani said. “…It’s one of the major things that I think has to be done.” According to Giuliani, 42 percent of federal workers will retire over the next decade and, if he’s elected president, Giuliani would propose that half those jobs not be refilled. That would be a decrease of 21 Billion dollars in salaries in 2017. We can do that through automation of processes, or identifying process that have already been automated. The Federal government is sluggish and not responsive to today’s needs.

“This congress wants to reverse the tax cuts, with no regard to the impact it will have on investments in this economy.”

“A great example is the Death Tax. You know what that is right? Inheritance tax. The worst tax there is because you’re taxed twice. Worse yet, it hurts most, those whose investments aren’t fluid – like business and property owners.”

In 2009 the Death Tax is set at 45% [see chart below]

2001 $675,000 55%
2002 $1 million 50%
2003 $1 million 49%
2004 $1.5 million 48%
2005 $1.5 million 47%
2006 $2 million 46%
2007 $2 million 45%
2008 $2 million 45%
2009 $3.5 million 45%
2010 repealed 0%
2011 $1 million 55%

Rudy joked that it would be wise to remain healthy in 2010, or certainly be nice to your kids if you ended up on a ventilator – there is ONE year (2010) where there is no death tax. But then in 2011 it goes back to 55%!

With a family business or farm it doesn’t take much to go over the million dollar mark – it’s just not right. It’s just plain stupid.

He talked about the 19th century that saw the beginning of the Industrial Bureaucracy and we’ve not adjusted what has become a bloated Bureaucracy. After the additional Bureaucracy added primarily by FDR then LBJ – we are long overdue in overhauling how government runs.

Positive thinking creates positive mindsets creates positive results. This is a small example but he talked about changing the name of the Welfare Office when he was Mayor. It is now called the Job Center.

“Large Government restrains business”

He went through 5-7 slides in a professorial manner, clicking through the slides himself. A link to the discussion points on the joinrudy website is at the top of this post.

One slide I do remember said that government should be run like business. Capital Budgets and Operating Budgets. It’s ok to pass on to our children those costs they will benefit from (building, etc) but not annual operating costs.

The Government is not built to be accountable. “You can’t be made accountable for things that are not measured.” Or so says Rudy [sounds like my boss!] – so there will be measurements instituted on effectiveness or ineffectiveness of programs.

Each program enacted will have a sunset date and be reviewed for effectiveness. If it is not providing greater value than its cost it will be scrapped. period. [ HAS he been talking to my boss? seriously. ]

We must do this because we now live in a global economy. “Everything is viewed in a competitive light”. We can’t say it’s ok because it’s American, because it’s us – we have to find ways of producing more with less – in government as well as business. Everyone else is and they’ll clean our clocks if we don’t [ok some of those are my words].

“We must reduce the burden that the government puts on the Private Sector and allow the Private Sector to thrive.”

Democrats add additional layers of Bureaucracy to government, increasing the tax burden on citizens and businesses to pay for the additional laywers, then complain that businesses outsource work. Where is the advantage NOT to outsource in that scenario, in that global economy?

He also talked about needing the Line Item Veto as President. (partially related to the Earmark issue noted earlier)

Finally he spoke about how much he loved America and how great a country it is. People are cutting us down but at the same time people still want to come to America. We need to stand tall, the world needs us to stand tall.

We can do this together.

I would like to be your next President.

I am asking for your support.

Thank you for your time.

God Bless America.

The Mayor and Maggie Tinsman of Davenport after the talk.

more on his presentation here

Coach Hoeppner died yesterday. Thoughts and Prayers to his family.   A good man and a fine coach. He will be missed.   read more here and here.

 

Park Ridge, Ill. — “The Big Ten Conference, along with our institutions, coaches and student-athletes, are greatly saddened by the passing of Terry Hoeppner,” said Big Ten Commissioner James E. Delany,

“In his time in Bloomington, we came to know Terry as a great leader of young men and an important member of the Big Ten coaching community. He will be truly missed and our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife, Jane, and his children and grandchildren along with the entire Indiana University family.”

Wow, I can’t believe it’s June 20th already. Just got back from seeing Rudy in Des Moines, but before I post about that I was catching up with the news.

To be filed under “things that make you go hummmmmm…..”

This deserves a quick eye roll….

Best of the Web Today – June 20, 2007

By JAMES TARANTO
The Grass Is Always Greener
“Six long-held captives at Guantánamo were sent home, two to Tunisia and four to Yemen, the Pentagon said Tuesday, swiftly drawing denunciations from human rights groups,” the Miami Herald reports:

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York identified one of the Tunisians as detainee Abdullah bin Omar, 51, and said his return “put him at grave risk for torture and abuse.” . . .

Human Rights Watch also raised concerns. “Most of the detainees desperately want to go home. But there are a small number who are at such grave risk of torture that they would rather stay in Guantánamo,” said Jennifer Daskal, advocacy director in Washington. . . . She urged the Pentagon to establish a “transparent process for this small set of detainees to raise fears of torture and have their claims evaluated, before the U.S. government sends people back to a fate worse than Guantánamo.”

A fate worse than Guantanamo? Who knew there was such a thing? Sad to say, after all the “human rights” groups’ complaints about “torture” at Guantanamo, no one can take them seriously when they warn about the real thing. Didn’t Jennifer Faskal’s parents ever read her the story of the boy who cried wolf?