Ike

Ike

73p

53 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

12 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - The Impending U.S. Sig... · 0 replies · +7 points

The Senate should refuse to ratify this treaty. I fully expect that President Obama - or his representative - will sign it as it reads on its face, it advances the radical goal of disarming the people of the United States. At a less visceral level, since the treaty purports to set aside - among other things - the universal human right set out in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Senate ought to refuse ratification.

12 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Trayvon, Texas, and Vo... · 0 replies · +32 points

Back about 1986 or so, I worked as a court reporter for a district court judge here in south Texas. My judge was a famous Texas legislator who had been elected to the bench right after he announced he wasn't going to run again for the Lege. The VRA was up for renewal and Lloyd Doggett came down to visit my judge, expressing his concerns about the possibility that the VRA might not be renewed. My judge said, "Look around the courthouse. See all the Mexican-Americans working here, judges all the way to janitors?" Doggett said he did. My judge continued, "You think we're all going to quit our jobs and stop voting if the VRA doesn't get renewed?" Doggett spluttered a bit and my judge cut him off, by saying, "No, we're still going to vote and still going to hold elected and appointed office no matter whether the VRA is renewed or not. So, let's talk about something important....". That's what I say.

12 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - A Poor Argument Agains... · 1 reply · +7 points

There is no U.S. interest at stake in the Syrian civil war. We're getting into another mini-war (without bothering with any statutory or Constitutional requirements) because President Obama put his foot in his mouth about "red lines" and now he has to do something to be seen to back up those statements else be taken for an utter fool. Claims that the Syrian civil war is going to de-stabilize the Middle East is nonsense; our intervention is more likely to destabilize the region. "The civil war is spilling out into neighboring countries!", while technically true in that there are a large number of civilian refuges living in other nations bordering on Syria, likewise is not a U.S. interest. Let the nations whose borders might be violated deal with it. It is not a time to begin a foreign policy based on presidential ego; too many nations in the past have gotten into that habit and it's a bad one to start and a hard one to break. Why do you think the Founding Fathers (not "Founding Founders") wrote a requirement for a Congressional declaration of war before we could go to war?

12 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - Will the Currency Zomb... · 0 replies · +1 points

Not only, "...sharply limiting the advantages granted to state-owned enterprises...", but sharply limiting the advantages granted to enterprises owned by the cronies of the state, ought to be on that list as well. The whole "help my friends, hurt my enemies" paradigm ought to go out with the morning's trash to the dump.

13 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - Cronyism: Companies li... · 0 replies · +1 points

When you permit the government to choose winners and losers in the marketplace, the companies which survive are those which adopt rent-seeking behaviors, whatever they may be in that time and place. The corruption begins with the idea that the government ought to issue rules and make laws controlling any market. After that, normal human nature will insure that only rent-seekers survive. An underlying cause of our current economic ills is there are no longer any large-sized businesses which do not engage in rent-seeking; in order to benefit the rent-seekers, you must weaken and disadvantage the non-rent-seekers. The only cure is to remove the government's powers to control the economy. But that isn't going to happen, because there is no organized political faction seeking even a moderately free market. I suspect that there is no path from where we are to a free market. The grand American experiment is nearly over. The results show clearly that mankind is unfit to rule itself.

13 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - Blame Income Inequality? · 0 replies · +1 points

Leave everyone alone to find their own way, punishing only the common law crimes committed by violence and fraud and protecting kids from their own (and their parents') ignorance of how the world works, and you will see that each will soon have what he or she has earned. Well, we'll have to stop taking money from some folks and giving it to other folks and stop making laws to protect politicians' political supporters and buddies, but that's the gist of it. Freedom.

13 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Perfect Example of Why... · 0 replies · +2 points

And that makes their findings invalid, right? Just like all funding for the "hole in the ozone layer - sky is falling!" that came from companies with the expiring patents on Freon invalidated that research; right? What is it about the research that invalidates it? No, "ooh, I don't like it and nasty mean people I don't like funded it" isn't an argument against the findings.

13 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - Texas-Size School Choice · 1 reply · +4 points

Like many things in life - alas! - learning begins at home. The gap in grade level performance between minority students - except (notice?) Asians of all economic levels - and white students isn't going to be fixed by more money for schools, private or public. It won't be fixed by anything except minority parents changing their attitudes toward learning, reading, scholarship all those "Anglo things" that no self-respecting Hispanic would want to adopt. Too many years of the "poor me, poor us" song, too many years of being taught that they are victims not people, too many years of blaming "Whitey" or "the gringo".

14 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - Obama Administration C... · 1 reply · +1 points

The United States ought not commit ground, naval or air forces against Syria, under any circumstances. Let Syrians work out their own problems, with or without help from their Arab neighbors. Better late than never, but the U.S. has to stop pretending to have the right, the authority, whatever you wish to call it, which legitimatizes any military actions against nations who have not attacked - literally, not figuratively neither metaphorically attacked - the United States. The whole notion upon which the sovereignty of nations is based consists of each of them being independent of the others. Syria's government is accountable only to Syria's people

14 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - Commencing Liberalism:... · 0 replies · +3 points

And now, deja vu again!, we have a President whose ghost-written 'auto-biography' was written by who? Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of the Weatherman Faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, who else!! Irony is a force which permeates the cosmos more thoroughly and powerfully than does gravity.