1/21/2008 Monday, Conservatively Speaking
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he commentariat says South Carolina is not as important as it once was – heretofore always forecasting the Presidential nominees – so Saturday’s Republican primary, while important was more a spring board for the Florida primary on January 29th than the harbinger it once was. Nevertheless it was a big win for the Lazarus-like McCain that staggered Huckabee and wounded Romney and terminally so, Thompson. Thompson has been branded McCain’s cat’s paw and while that seems fallacious he should drop out as Duncan Hunter did Saturday.
Romney’s expected win in NEVADA was like a BIG COLLEGE beating a division three school’s team. His loses in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina seem to have nailed his coffin shut except that his checkbook still gaps open.
Hillary Clinton won Nevada popular vote as predicted in most polls which could give her a pop in South Carolina. Obama got 13 delegates to Hillary’s 12 due to Nevada contortions so maybe it was a draw. If Obama doesn’t beat her in South Carolina next weekend — she seems destined. Next week’s Democrat South Carolina primary would be a very important win for Obama, and a nomination winning upset for Clinton. Edwards got a miserable 4% of the Nevada vote and it’s hard to see his resurrection but he’ll likely spend every taxpayer matching dime he can get his hands on to salve his gargantuan ego.
Pundits bemoaning the Reagan coalition’s sundering misjudge Hillary Clinton as a unifying force for Republicans and cure for Democrat and Independent anomie sufferers. Both party’s nominations remain a mare’s nest.
Wags are saying the only thing that will keep NEW YORK CITY MAYOR BLOOMBERG from running for President is if he is hand cuffed to the hot water heater in the New York City mayor’s mansion basement. We shall see.
In 1876 Samuel J. Tilden, the Democrat candidate, got 4,285,992 votes and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes 4,033,768 but Tilden lacked one undisputed electoral vote to carry a clear majority of the electoral college due to shenanigans on both sides. To resolve it Congress refused its duty to vote but appointed an Electoral Commission that eventually voted 8 to 7 along party lines and picked Republican Hayes in the classic smoke-filled room. Democrats fumed and fussed and cut deals known as the Compromise of 1877 most notably to remove federal troops from the South ending the post-civil war Reconstruction era.
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riday John McCain had a seven point lead over Mitt Romney in California’s Republican Presidential Primary. Hillary Clinton’s lead in California has shrunk to 5% over Obama. In Florida, four top Republican candidates are essentially tied for the lead. Obama leads Clinton in South Carolina and trails her in Florida. That’s changing hourly.
The Feds want to give Americans some of their own money back to stimulate the economy. You gotta’ wonder if they hadn’t taken that money in the first place the economy likely would be better off and wouldn’t need stimulation.
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he CIA says members of al-Qaeda and allies of radical Pakistani tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were responsible for last month’s assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and that they also stand behind a new wave of violence threatening Pakistan’s stability. It is likely Scotland Yard will conclude similar things. Both are pointing away from any involvement by Pakistan’s President Musharraf. This week there has been heavy fighting along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Pakistan forces report nearly 100 insurgents have been killed including members of al-Qaeda. There has been a surge in violence throughout Pakistan since Bhutto’s murder but these incidents are the most severe cross border clashes yet.
Democrat voters are split sharply along race lines. Obama leads among blacks by 66-16 while Hillary is ahead among whites by 41-27. The overall head to head is 37-30 in favor of Hillary a Rasmussen poll found last week.
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XPELLED is what some describe as “one of the most important movies to come out in 100 years” because it discusses “Where did we come from? How did we get here?” Observer and commentator Ben Stein combines his unusual style to focus on answers and describe academic persecution of those who dare think about and speak about creationism and intelligent design. He warns those with a stake in the ivory tower not to watch this movie lest they be discovered and attacked by secularist who would ruin their careers. It opens in February. See a provocative clip at http://www.expelledthemovie
“Citizen McCaw” is a new movie that over bills itself as “the story of an epic struggle for the soul of journalism.” It will debut in Santa Barbara on March 7 at the ARLINGTON THEATER in downtown Santa Barbara at 7:30 PM. The film, I am told, can not be described as a documentary because it describes only one view of the battle at the Santa Barbara News Press between owner Wendy McCaw and some newsroom employees.
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alifornia Propositions 94-95-96-97 on the February 5th ballot are based on “compacts” that were automatically approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs without review because the compacts, called Indian 
Gaming Agreements, got “lost” for 80-days triggering an automatic approval in 45-days as the law requires.
It is those once missing compacts that California voters will vote on February 5th that would allow tens of thousands of new slot machines to be added to the four casinos and the Indian tribes will pay California part of their new profits from those added slot machines.
But, the issue now is that if voters turn down the compacts the tribes involved might claim the federal government’s approval trumps voter wishes and voters will be rendered moot if not mute. The Bureau of Indian Affairs says it is “embarrassed.” Opponents are having a first class conniption fit and calling for a full FBI investigation and prosecution of any wrong doing.
The Sacramento Bee reports the president of the California NAACP has been paid more than $40,000 in consulting fees — and the NAACP itself has received $60,000 — from the coalition of Indian tribes at the same time the civil rights group has endorsed Propositions 94-95-96-97 pushed by its tribal benefactors.
The U. S. Pacific Naval Command says the U. S. S. KITTY HAWK aircraft carrier and its task force did NOT have final permission from China before it tried to enter Hong Kong harbor and was turned away over the Thanksgiving holiday. That preceded a confrontation between the KITTY HAWK task force and a Chinese Navy destroyer and submarine and the Straits of Formosa that could easily have resulting in a shooting incident.
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early a third of antidepressant drug studies are never published says the New England Journal of Medicine and nearly all of the unpublished show that the drug being tested did not work. In some of the studies that are published, unfavorable results have been recast to make the medicine appear more effective than it really is, said the research team led by Erick Turner of the Oregon Health & Science University. Of 74 drugs studied 36 had negative results but only 3 of those were published while all positive studies were.
For example, of the seven negative studies done on GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, five were never published. There were five studies for Pfizer’s Zoloft, but the three showing the drug to be ineffective were not published. A fourth study, ruled questionable by the FDA, was written and published to make it appear that the drug worked. Despite negative results the drugs are promoted and marketed, and antidepressants are among the most prescribed drugs – even if they do not work.
Dr. Ronald Dworkin’s book “Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class” says “Doctors are now medicating unhappiness” as if it were a disease when what they should do was make life changes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in visits to doctors and hospitals in 2005. Of those, 118 million were for antidepressants, and the next largest number was 113 million for blood pressure. Doctors who take money and gifts from drug companies have been shown to prescribe more of their benefactors drugs, and sometimes questionably so.
Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were all in California Thursday. Hillary stopped at the University of California Santa Barbara Thursday night to a thousand fawning faculty members and students. California is the mother load of Democrat convention delegates when it holds its Primary February 5th. In last week’s LA Times poll she leads 2nd place Obama 47-31% and Edwards 10%.
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Chicago area man paid $69.95 to enroll his pet cat in a health plan at a local animal hospital plus a $16.95 monthly fee. But, when the cat died the nation’s largest chain of veterinary facilities demanded he continue to pay the monthly fee for the dead cat’s health saying he’d signed up for a year. The media got hold of the story and the veterinary chain is now getting ten million dollars a month in bad press for outright stupidity.
Russia has said 82 tons of nuclear fuel would be delivered to Iran by late February 2008. They said this would enable initial operations of the Bushehr nuclear reactor by August in cooperation with the Russian prime contractor, the state-owned Atomostroiexport. Iran and Russia have also been negotiating a multi-billion-dollar deal that would include combat helicopters and engines for fighter-jets.
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l Qaida has generated insurgency cells comprised of Saudi veterans of the war against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Saudi Arabia has arrested hundreds of suspected Al Qaida operatives over the last four months. They said some of the suspects provided information of an Al Qaida campaign to recruit from among the thousands of Saudi fighters in Iraq. The Internet has become a major tool of Al Qaida for recruitment and indoctrination. They said the Internet enables Al Qaida to recruit from anywhere in the world and thus avoid government crackdowns.
U.S. officials report terrorist web sites are calling for using forest fires as weapons against “crusader” nations, in what may explain some recent wildfires in places like southern California and Greece. A statement, in Arabic, said that “summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad.” The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to “start forest fires.”
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ural Franklin County, in southwestern Virginia is only about 4-hours by car south of Washington DC, calls itself the “moonshine capital of the world,” a slogan seen on billboards and T-shirts and even at a moonshine exhibit on the campus of a local Methodist college. Since the 1790s – during the so-called Whisky Rebellion — federal tax collectors and moonshiners have been at war. The “rebellion” started with President George Washington levying an 11½ cent per gallon tax on liquor – it’s now $13.50 on a 100 proof (50% alcohol) gallon. Liquor is taxed on its alcohol content or proof (80 proof means 40% alcohol content) and rise steeply as the proof increases comprising much of the cost of a bottle of beer, wine or liquor – so untaxed moonshine can be a lot cheaper.
George Washington had to send militia into western Pennsylvania to quell rioting and violence against the “revenooers” as federal agents were and are called. Moonshine is named after 18th-century bootleggers who smuggled brandy off the British coast by the light of the moon. The U. S. Prohibition of Alcohol (1920-1933) created a huge wave of illegal stills and liquor smuggling participated in by some of America’s first families – for instance: the Kennedy family scion made a fortune smuggled Scotch whisky.
According to an article in the Washington Post this week despite raids by an alphabet soup of government agencies moonshining is increasing and the District of Columbia and Baltimore are prime destinations for the untaxed and unlicensed booze. Critics of moonshine cite evidence that “moonshine has been found to contain lead, pesticides and other dangerous substances.”
Safety is an issue but enforcement is mostly about money with the federal government collecting $9 billion in taxes in 2005. State taxes vary widely. Taxes on alcohol have not kept pace with inflation because it is unpopular to raise the tax on beer, wine and liquor. But, as tax revenues fall government bureaucrats at every level are looking hard at every possible way to collect more money rather than right-size government or risk reducing their own take.
No one knows who first swigged an alcoholic beverage but the discovery of late Stone Age beer jugs has established the fact that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period (cir. 10,000 B.C.). It’s likely that as soon as drinking alcohol started its prohibition by one means of another began.
The first half of the 20th century saw periods of prohibition of alcoholic beverages in several countries: 1900 to 1948 in Prince Edward Island, and for shorter periods in other locations in Canada; 1914 to 1925 in Russia and the Soviet Union; 1915 to 1922 in Iceland (though beer was still prohibited until 1989); 1916 to 1927 in Norway (wine and beer also included in 1917); 1919 in Hungary (in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, March 21 to August 1; called szesztilalom) and 1919 to 1932 in Finland (called kieltolaki) and 1920-1933 in the U. S.
No alcohol prohibition effort has ever been successfully sustained.
There will be no asteroid collision on Mars say NASA scientists who have reduced the odds of a hit to 1 in 100,000. A collision was being watched for on January 30th but the football field sized rock will miss Mars at 3,000 to 16,000 miles distance. Hundreds of thousands of objects from pebbles to a few giant 500 km across monsters circle the Sun just outside Mars’ orbit in the asteroid belt. If you combined all of them they would form one object about 1,000 miles across.
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o be thrown into the “Clink” means to be put in jail. The Clink was one of England’s oldest gaols (prisons) located just outside London since the 13th century. It was south of the river in the Liberty of Clink district under the rule of the Bishop of Winchester (brother of then King Stephen) and so outside the pale or power of the City of London and therefore could make its own rules.
It had a fearsome reputation for torture of the worst imagining, i.e., boiling in oil; breaking on the rack and wheel, standing in icy water until a prisoner’s feet rotted. Only by paying bribes could one escape such treatment. It was an enormous source of income for the Church. The Clink was finally destroyed in the Gordon riots of 1780 and on its foundation a museum stands today.
A mysterious person, called the Poe Toaster, made his annual birthday visit to the grave of Edgar Allen Poe in Baltimore leaving three red roses and a half bottle of cognac while somehow evading 150 watchers who had gathered outside the cemetery. January 19th was the anniversary of the author’s birth in 1809. Poe died in a tavern at age 40 on Oct. 7, 1849.
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n a ruling that could possibly lead to a statewide precedent, a Riverside judge has thrown out a discrimination lawsuit filed by two girls who were kicked out of a privately funded Christian high school for having a lesbian relationship. The “Riverside Press-Enterprise” reports Judge Gloria Trask ruled that state civil-rights law which bans sexual orientation discrimination in business settings does not apply to California Lutheran High School in Wildomar. The Superior Court decision regarding privately funded religious schools is not binding on other state courts, but legal experts say it could become binding if it is upheld by an appeals court. The homosexual girls are expected to appeal.
FINALLY. “It’s one thing to dangle fuzzy dice from a rear view mirror, but decorating a trailer hitch with a large pair of rubber testicles might be a bit much in Virginia. State Delegate Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying replicas of testicles on vehicles, calling it a safety issue because it could distract other drivers.” - Associated Press, 1/15/08
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