This Is Not Leadership

As the United States of America continues to drift, many Americans still seem perplexed that after two-and-a-half years, Barack Obama is a walking contradiction. He cannot seem to lead; he can only follow and dictate. He has no policies, only vague concepts and Marxist ideology. He starts wars and calls them something else. He simultaneously makes Congress responsible and yet irrelevant. He refuses to be held accountable for anything. It's all still Bush's fault, you know.

One of Obama’s last official acts as a United States Senator, before winning the 2008 presidential race, was to vote, along with his opponent, Sen. John McCain, for more than $700 billion in bailout money for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), a slush fund for big banks and insurance companies.

He came into office dictating that Congress pass a bill authorizing another slush fund of nearly $900 billion. He called this one a “stimulus package.” He gave vague lip service to “shovel-ready jobs,” which he has since admitted were not as shovel-ready as he had led the American people to believe. But he really didn’t specify the items for which this massive pile of borrowed cash would be used. He simply demanded that Congress authorize it and have it ready for his signature as soon as possible after he took the oath of office. He used part of it to prop up two bankrupt car companies so they would not have to lay off union workers (the only workers he seems to care about). Much of it has gone to infuse faltering state governments with ready cash, which is to say that it went to save the jobs of public sector union members.

He shook down BP, demanding cash from the oil giant to create yet another slush fund as the price for the sin of polluting the Gulf of Mexico. Does anyone have any idea where that $20 billion went? Certainly not to the hard-hit businesses along the Gulf Coast who were supposed to get it.

He demanded a massive health care bureaucracy, but he provided no specifics at all as to what he wanted it to do, who he wanted it to cover or how he wanted to finance it. He left those decisions up to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and his other toadies in Congress. They created a bloated, unworkable monstrosity that now bears his name: Obamacare.

He and his party cannot pass a budget. He has spent more borrowed money than all of his predecessors combined, yet he is trying to convince the American people that he is a deficit cutter. Then he demands that the national debt ceiling be raised and warns of economic calamity if he doesn’t get his way. His actions are reminiscent of the story of the son who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan!

House Speaker John Boehner has said that dealing with this president is like negotiating with a bowl of Jell-O. That is because he has no intention of cutting spending. Barack Obama’s inclination is to raise taxes and spend more money, period. Ronald Reagan once compared the federal government to a newborn baby: an insatiable appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. That, in a nutshell, is Barack Obama.

If this is leadership, we desperately need to redefine the term. Barack Obama is a dictator, not a leader. He demands. He demagogues. He sputters. He dictates. And then he follows those he has bullied. But then what did any of us expect from a community organizer who was still voting “present” in the state legislature just four short years before he was handed the most powerful position in the world?
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Doug Patton describes himself as a recovering political speechwriter who agrees with himself much more often than not. Now working as a freelance writer, his weekly columns of sage political analysis are published the world over by legions of discerning bloggers, courageous webmasters and open-minded newspaper editors. Astute supporters and inane detractors alike are encouraged to e-mail him with their pithy comments at dougpatton@cox.net

Hope & Change

Ephesians 1:7

Today's Scripture
Romans 8:31

In Christ we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.

Suggested Bible Reading
Ephesians 1:7

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

"For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered."

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Man Takes Viagra, Wears Sweatpants for TSA Pat Down

"Sir, thank you for cooperating with TSA regulations, but this is the 6th time you've been through security. You really don't need to come back here anymore."

NASHVILLE INT’L AIRPORT — A Wyoming man walked through a TSA checkpoint with a raging erection on Tuesday, daring TSA officers and even fellow passengers to give him an invasive pat down.

“I’m next,” Warren Kelvin, 34, screamed as he pushed to the front of the security line. According to TSA officials, Kelvin had ingested two Viagra and wore sweatpants without boxers for his Southwest flight from Nashville to Phoenix.

“I thought he was carrying a baton in his pants,” said Amanda Watershed, second shift supervisor of the A Terminal at Nashville International Airport. “Nope… That was his penis.”

Even though TSA officials allowed Kelvin to initially pass through security without the controversial pat down, the passenger on more than one occasion got back in line until he felt that he had been thoroughly inspected. Kelvin finally got the invasive pat down by 38-year-old officer Duncan Allbright after 80 minutes and four trips through security.

“Even after we let him pass through he kept walking out of the terminal and getting back in line,” said Watershed. “Finally, Duncan had to bite the bullet for everyone and do a thorough screening of him in a private [security] room.”

Allbright, a 14-year veteran of airport security, announced his retirement shortly after Kelvin boarded the plane. “I’m going home to take a shower and make love to my wife,” said Allbright as he got into his car. “This job isn’t for me. I’ve suddenly lost my passion for touching strangers.”

U.S Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano dismissed concerns that more TSA officers would quit or that more travelers would take similar measures to get their “jollies”. “I am hoping this is an isolated incident. If flights were a lot cheaper, I could see more people doing this,” said Napolitano, “but with the cost of airplane fuel rising, I don’t think $560 roundtrip is a bargain price to get fondled.”

Calls to TSA headquarters went unanswered, as everyone there is just exhausted.

By Garrett Baldwin

The January 2010 earthquake leveled nearly 100,000 buildings in Haiti.

Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds.

Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed, and when discussed, widely misunderstood. Take the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, which released 600 million times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The ensuing partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactor prompted international hysteria about nuclear power, but few seemed to realize that a far deadlier threat had been averted. As seismologist Roger Bilham has aptly put it, houses in seismically active zones are the world’s unrecognized weapons of mass destruction—and Japan’s WMDs didn’t go off. Its buildings—at least those that weren’t swept away by the accompanying tsunami, a force of nature against which we are still largely helpless—remained standing, and the people inside survived.

That so few buildings collapsed in the earthquake was a human triumph of the first order. It showed that countries can make great progress in seismic risk mitigation; in the Kobe earthquake of 1995, 200,000 buildings collapsed. But cities around the world seem happy to ignore the earthquake threat—one that is only growing as the cities themselves get bigger and bigger.

In January 2010, an earthquake struck Haiti and destroyed nearly 100,000 buildings. Hospitals, schools, government buildings, jails, hotels, churches, whole neighborhoods—all crumbled, entombing everyone inside. After the quake, I received an e-mail from a scholar of international relations. “It’s odd that earthquakes tend to occur frequently in countries that can least afford them,” she wrote.

You could only write such a sentence if you had never given the matter much thought. It isn’t odd; in fact, it isn’t true. Mother Nature doesn’t have it in for the poor. Rather, earthquakes come to our attention only when they are disasters, and they are disasters only when they strike dense urban areas full of badly made buildings. Last year, there were a number of earthquakes larger than the one that leveled Port-au-Prince, but they didn’t make the news because they happened in the middle of nowhere. California’s Loma Prieta quake, the “World Series earthquake” of 1989, was as big as the one in Port-au-Prince. It killed so few people by comparison—only 63—because San Francisco’s buildings and infrastructure were well designed and strong.

In the wake of the Kobe quake, Japanese engineers took extensive measures to reinforce buildings and infrastructure. They installed rubber blocks under bridges. They spaced buildings farther apart to prevent domino-style tumbling. They introduced extra bracing, base isolation pads, hydraulic shock absorbers. A minute before the March earthquake, automatic seismic monitoring systems sent warnings to Japanese cell phones. Elevators glided obediently to the nearest floor and opened. Surgeries were halted. Videos from Tokyo show skyscrapers swaying gracefully, like cornstalks in the wind. Not one collapsed.

Like wise, the aftershock that struck Christchurch, New Zealand, this past February was deadly, but the astonishing part of that story isn’t that several of the city’s buildings collapsed; it’s that most of them did not. The peak ground acceleration—a measurement of how much the ground shakes—was immense, one of the highest ever recorded. Something like that would have flattened most cities. New Zealand’s strict and well-enforced building codes saved Christchurch from annihilation.

But many of the world’s biggest cities are built more like Port-au-Prince than like Christchurch, and many are at massive seismic risk. Eight of the world’s ten biggest cities are built on fault lines. There is a reason for this: people like to live near water and fertile ground. Over the millennia, seismic activity creates coasts, valleys that channel water, temperate microclimates. The human mind doesn’t work on geologic time, so people rarely ask themselves how exactly these attractions came into being.

The odds of more Haiti-scale destruction are growing by the day because the world is urbanizing. Two hundred years ago, Peking was the only city in the world with a population of a million people. Today, almost 500 cities are that big, and many are much bigger. That explains why the number of earthquake-caused deaths during the first decade of this century (471,015) was more than four times greater than the number during the previous decade, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center. If the fatality trend continues upward—and it will, because the urbanization trend is continuing upward, as is the trend of housing migrant populations in death traps—it won’t be long before we see a headline announcing 1 million dead in massive earthquake. Indeed, we’ll be lucky not to see it in our lifetimes.

China Agrees To Erase Portion Of U.S. Debt

China Agrees To Erase Portion Of U.S. Debt If Americans Dress Up In Costumes And Perform Silly Dance For Them

BEIJING—In what it's describing as a magnanimous gesture toward an economy in decline, the Chinese government announced Monday it would forgive a portion of the staggering U.S. dept, if Americans agreed to dress up in costumes and perform silly dances for their amusement.

With his nation holding $1.16 trillion in federal bonds and the U.S. showing no signs of ending its dependence on foreign credit, President Hu Jintao told reporters that allowing Americans to ease their fiscal burden in proportion to the number and quality of colorful dance numbers they perform is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both countries. MORE

Hooray for the Casey Anthony Jurors

Nancy Grace is livid. She had been shilling for months for a conviction of Casey Anthony for allegedly murdering her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, and now the jury has acquitted Anthony of murder charges. What's a gal like Nasty Nancy to do?

Perhaps the first thing that Nasty Nancy should do is to read the laws of this country, and learn the standards that supposedly exist for conviction. Even though Nasty Nancy's standards for conviction are simple – an accusation automatically means one is guilty – the legal standard actually is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

(One must remember that Nasty Nancy during the Duke Lacrosse Case, in which she automatically declared the lacrosse players guilty of gang rape, actually tried to claim that the legal presumption of innocence was a creation of Hitler's Germany. I'm serious.)

During the trial of Casey Anthony, the prosecution managed to establish what people already knew:

The skeletal remains found were those of Caylee and there was duct tape sticking to her skull;
Casey lied to the police about a number of things;
Casey denied murdering her daughter;
Casey was not a person of the highest character.
Some of those things are damning indictments if a woman applies for the Mother of the Year Award or is trying to be a role model to young women. I would hope that none of my daughters turns out to be like Casey Anthony.


However, having a bad character does not mean one is a murderer. If that were so, then Washington, D.C., would be the murder capital of the world. (Come to think of it, not long ago, D.C. WAS the murder capital of the world, and it is true that bad character abounds in that city. Nonetheless, my original point stands.)

Seizing on the duct tape, prosecutors then claimed that Casey smothered her child with it in order to get rid of her so that she could be a Big Party Animal. The problem was that they had no idea if the child were smothered with duct tape or not, none. They were engaging in conjecture, and any jury that takes its job seriously is not going to convict on the basis of a pretty loose conjecture.

Now, had Casey's DNA been found on the duct tape, that might have demonstrated a connection to the prosecution's narrative, but, alas, they found nothing of the sort. What they had was a little girl's skeletal remains and a mother of less-than-savory character.

In the end, the jury did convict Casey Anthony of the obvious: she lied to the police. The crimes are misdemeanors, and the maximum she could get if the sentences for each of the four counts are run consecutively is four years, and she already has been jailed for three. Thus, whatever time she will spend in jail almost is over.

I predict that in the coming days, Nasty Nancy will be hounding the jurors and doing everything but demanding that lynch mobs burn down the jurors' houses. Certainly, the Usual Suspects in the media will denounce what they see as a wrongful acquittal.

Yet, what I see is a jury that did its job. Prosecutors demanded that jurors engage in speculation, and the jurors refused to do that, and I applaud them for their integrity. Maybe Casey Anthony did murder her daughter, but the prosecution never proved it, and jurors are supposed to acquit when that happens. And it happened.

July 7, 2011

Luke 15:11-32

Enduring Love

Suggested Bible Reading

Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, 'How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands."' So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his slaves, 'Quickly, bring out a robe--the best one--and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate.

"Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, 'Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.' Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, 'Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!' Then the father said to him, 'Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.'"