twayneking

DATELINE: Nov. 6, 2008 ST JOHN'S, Antigua - Antigua's prime minister wants to rename the island's highest mountain peak "Mount Obama" in honor of the U.S. president-elect. "Boggy Peak," as it is currently known, soars more than 1,300 feet over the island's southern point and serves as a transmission site for broadcast and telecommunication providers. It also is a popular hiking spot. Political analyst Avel Grant says the name change could draw more tourists to the island.

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So, I wrote this song....

THE BIG OBAMA MOUNTAIN

 by Tom King

Election Day as the sun went down and the stadium was lighted

The mobs all shout with joy and tears as they interviewed the delighted

"Oh I never thought I'd see this day, on Barak Hussein I'm countin'

I know I won't have to work no more in the Big Obama Mountain

In the Big Obama Mountain it's a land that's fair and bright

Where the handouts grow on bushes and you party every night

Oh the jingling of the keys in the Cadillac Trees

And the mortgage bailout fountains

Where the solar power blinks and the carbon footprint shrinks

In the Big Obama Mountains

In the Big Obama Mountains all the cops guns launch grenades

All dissenters wear 'lectronic tags and all their guns are put away

The radio waves are full of truth, Rush Limbaugh had to go

Oh, I'm bound to go where the party boss shows

Where state service is mandatory you know

In the Big Obama Mountains

In the Big Obama Mountains you don't have to change your socks

Well that's okay since you can buy none since they snapped shut Wal-Marts locks

The bossmen have to tip their hats since the unions took command.

Now our pay is higher and and we can't be fired

If you can find a job when you've all been canned

In the Big Obama Mountain

In the Big Obama Mountain the jails are not for you

But they keep the cells for those that cling to guns and prayer too

There ain't no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks

I'm a goin to stay where you sleep all day

Where they hung the jerk that invented work In the Big Obama Mountains

I'll see you all this coming fall in the Big Obama Mountains

Tuesday, Chuck Schumer made the statement that one of the first things they needed to do in the new Obama Nation was pass the Fairness Doctrine. He said we shouldn't think of it as a freedom of speech issue. Rather, he said, we should think of shutting down Talk Radio as "regulating pornography".

I hear there are plans to expand the "Fairness Doctrine" to include the Internet.

Ya'll liberals have fun talking to yourselves here because, of course, pro-socialist "news" is fair and balanced. Anything which disagrees with the party in power is, of course, unbalanced, provocative and may, in fact, be considered treasonous.

You guys think I'm over-reacting here, but I remember how one-sided the media was when the "Fairness Doctrine" was in play before.

Hussein's going to consolidate his power. He expects us to serve the state - his words. He plans to spread the wealth - his words. He plans to create a 250,000 man internal security force with as much power as the military - again, his words.

All of this frightens me. Thank God they didn't get a filibuster-proof majority. It's time for conservatives to start working on 1992. If the economy is as much further into the dumper as it has come in the two years since the Dems took control of the Congress, we should have an opportunity to knock off both majorities and take back the White House in 2012.

If Republicans don't figure out that running a Democrat won't get them a win, we may have to start a new party to do it!

Till then, I'm going to watch the progress of the Fairness Doctrine. If it passes, I will begin very quickly deleting my blogs, comments and observation on the net. I don't think it will be safe to exercise our freedom of speech anymore.

Good luck out there friends. It's going to get scary!

Simple question.

Did President Bush make up a story about Saddam' wanting to acquire yellowcake uranium for his nuclear program?

Conventional wisdom assumes that he did in order to have an excuse to invade Iraq.

Did Saddam Hussein have any WMD's or materials for making WMD's?

Conventional wisdom says no! Saddam was simply tired of all those pesky weapons inspectors and there really wasn't anything dangerous in Iraq any more.

The truth, it turns our is somewhat different. In a July 5, 2008 story in the Associated Press and printed in the archives of none other than MSNBC and CBS ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334 ) is this delightful story that got zero coverage in the media. Had it been a story about how Bill Clinton had saved the free world by bombing a Sudanese aspirin factory, it would have been top news for a week. Instead they buried it.

So what's the story? The United States in June 2008 removed 3500 barrels (that's 550 metric tons for those of you who are counting) of yellowcake uranium from a secret storage facility in Iraq.

Why did the President keep it a secret when telling about it would have helped him politically?

Well, they couldn't get it our of Iraq because no one wanted it transported through their country. So we kept it's existence secret till we moved it out so that terrorists in Iraq wouldn't know it was there and attempt to take it.

There are a couple of conclusions you sorta have to come to.

1. Saddam did have materials for weapons of mass destruction. Stick yellowcake in a SCUD and blow it up and voila' you have what's known in the terrorist world as a "dirty bomb" - the holy grail of Al Quaeda. Boy howdy would they have loved having this one.

2. George W. Bush was right about the danger posed by Saddam. He had at the very least the capacity to produce dirty bombs. Anyone believe he wouldn't have developed (or at least tried to develop) actual nukes if we'd simply left him alone for the past 5 years? Anyone believe he wouldn't have shared that sort of stuff with the same terrorists that his own former ministers claim he had dealings with? Remember he was paying cash rewards to the families of terrorists who blew themselves up in Israel.

Now, the same guys that have repeatedly said, "Bush lied" and there were no "WMD's" even after 550 TONS of proof showed up in Canada last summer want to be elected to run the country. They say, "Iran is only a little bitty country and not a threat." They say, "If we just reduce our military so that we're no longer a threat, then the world will love us again." Want to bet whether or not they are right?

The same guys that for the past 8 years have been saying that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were in splendid shape and told Presiden Bush that we didn't need to do anything about the subprime mortgage problems when he warned them about it want you to give them a whole bunch of money and supreme power to "fix" the economy.

The same guys that have been in control of the Congress for almost 2 years, during which time, the U.S. economy has taken a nose dive into the dumpster, want you to give them a super majority and the White House so they can really fix things up!

ARE YOU PEOPLE NUTS! These people are not your friends. I'm not sure they're even real people. I'm not sure but I think wherever they came from, there were pods involved....

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

I'm an independent (not so-called, but the genuine article). I'm conservative. I vote for people who suit me. For years I voted for Ralph Hall when he was a Democrat. I voted for Louis Gohmert who now has our district and he's a Republican.

An independent isn't necessarily a moderate. An Independent is one that has no formal party affiliation. The Republican leadership lost my loyalty some time ago.

I was accused of spewing "far-right talking points". I wasn't aware of what those are. I must have missed that secret meeting. Actually, I call 'em as I see 'em.

The mainstream media leans left - no question. I had to look at a lot of journalism schools to find one that would give me a degree. The profs were by and large open Marxists in most of them. You learn early that if you're a conservative Christian your grades will suffer unless you parrot the socialist claptrap your professors spout. As a result, graduates of such programs are trained to believe in socialism and to report from that bias.

There's no such thing as an unbiased reporter, only honest and dishonest ones. News is like the scientific process. You start with a hypothesis and try to support it. Because news is soft data, not like the hard data of science, news can be molded to fit a thesis and so news leans towards the belief system of the news reporter. The reporter inevitably starts with a hypothesis that fits his or her own belief system. Look at the difference between how John Stossel and Charlie Gibson report news. Can't be helped. They come from two different places.

Harry Nilson once wrote a little operetta called "The Point".

In it there's a man made of rocks and he tells the hero, Oblio, this, "You see what you wanna see and you hear what you wanna hear, dig?"

That was a very wise observation. Liberals obviously see the world through a paradigm that recognizes certain beliefs and values. So do I. We've just got different values that's all, so we see things differently.

Here's my filter:

1. Evil people exist in this world. They want to have power over me to tell me what to do. Sometimes they use money to exercise power, sometimes government, sometimes physical force. These are bad people and should be resisted at all costs. They do not care whether they harm me or not, only whether they get their own way. They believe that "Might is Right"

2. Everyone has a touch of evil. Some resist it, some embrace it. Humans cannot be good on their own hook. The goodness of people is in direct relation to the closeness of their relationship to their creator. All good people are on a journey. They make mistakes, but they keep on trying to do right. They care whether they harm me or not. They believe that "Might should serve Right". Only God can change the human heart.

3. You should treat others the way you want to be treated. This is a voluntary choice. No amount of coercion can force you to do this. You might pretend to do it for fear of retribution, but such fear only impairs your journey toward becoming a better person. It does not help you to become better, kinder or more thoughtful.

4. People should be free. To interfere with the fundamental rights of a human being are wrong. We may disapprove, but we should not interfere unless the person's freedom interferes with the freedom of another. This is why we do not tolerate murder, theft and molestation.

5. Our fundamental rights include Life, Liberty, Property, the Pursuit of Happiness, Religion, Speech, Assembly, Commerce and Self-governance. These are sacrosanct. It is not the place of government to tell me what I can say, where I can worship, how I worship, with whom I can trade, what I can own, what I eat or drink or what clothes I wear so long as my freedom does not take away the freedom of another.

6. The most efficient form of government is the town square where I can make my voice heard on an equal footing with any other man or woman. My town mayor will visit with me. I can run down to the city hall for council meetings. Larger congregations of government exist only to build roads, protect us from enemies and insure our safety, freedom and security. They should be as simple and as small as possible to effectively perform their task. Central planning sucks. It always results in people losing their liberty, lives and property. Government is not your Mama! You want that, move home!

7. Public service is a privilege, not a career. When a person has lived in the world long enough, it is appropriate that he or she take part in helping to govern it for the greater good. These public servants should take their place upon the stage for a time and then leave gracefully. It is wrong and dangerous to cling to power for longer than needed to leave your legacy upon history. Leave the world better than you found it.

8. Paperwork is evil and should be kept to a minimum so as not to interfere with commerce, good works or life in general. Satan is an accountant.

9. There are dark forces at work in the world that will bring the world to a very bad end. Jesus is coming to rescue us in time to avoid that calamity. This colors my view of the world. It does not mean that I believe I can tell whether you are going to hell or something like that. It only means I can tell whether I'm trying to get to heaven.

10. If my belief in God or any system of religious thought causes you to feel that I somehow think I'm better than you, that's okay. I can't help that and I'm unwilling to change my beliefs to make you not feel guilty. Get over it. If you have the right to do as you do, I have the same right.

11. I may believe in a set of political beliefs and may exercise my vote as I wish. I may express my opinion and vote accordingly. You have the right to win the election, so long as your victory doesn't result in the loss of my freedoms outlined above.

12. People say what they mean. Listen carefully and believe them. Don't impose your own ideology upon them. If they say they hate you and will "bury you", believe them and act accordingly. Defend those who are weaker than you, but do not take away their freedom in the process just because their freedom somehow offends you or is inconvenient for you.

These are things I've learned in this life. It makes me think differently from people who are liberals. I've never heard one explain the liberal paradigm on the blogs. Karl Marx did a pretty good job, though. He basically said everybody should be the same, that things should be taken from those who have an abundance and given by force to those who do not and that forced benevolence of this sort would make for a happier world. Of course, we'd all have to give up our perceived freedom in exchange for a "managed" life in which central planners would tell us how to best live, work and believe so that instead of the state serving the people, the people would serve the state.

This thinking frightens me. I would not long survive such a world.

Tom

A famous quote attributed variously to a distinguished assortment of politicians and humorists goes like this, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics!" We're all a little suspicious of statistics, but most of us believe in them a little more than we'd like to admit.

I learned a little something about statistics during my brief tenure in two graduate schools and the big thing was that for a study to be valid you have to have an accurate sample. The closer you get to creating a sample of survey respondents that accurately reflects the same makeup as whatever group of folks you want to discover something about, the better your results.

One way to do that is to use another set of statistics to guide you in choosing your sample. Polls of registered voters, for instance, select participants that reflect the proportions of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who actually registered to vote. In other words if 49% of registered voters in South Carolina are Democrats, 38% are Republicans and 13% unaffiliated, then the pollster doing a survey of registered voters would pick a thousand or so voters and make sure he had 49% Dems, 38% Republicans and 13% Independents if he wanted his study to be accurate.

This year, that's a problem because a lot of Republicans registered as Democrats! If you go by voter registration, you're not going to get a true picture of the registered voters because a bunch of "Democrats" aren't really Democrats and have no intention of voting for Barry.

During the primaries, the infamous "Operation Chaos" skewed the registrations significantly in a lot of so-called battleground states. Rush Limbaugh's campaign to keep Hillary Clinton in the race by having Republicans cross over and vote in the Democratic primary, resulted in hundreds of thousands of Republicans registering to vote as Democrats. Since the primaries are over, most have never bothered to change their registration back. They don't need to to vote for McCain.

The only problem is that voter registration now shows an inordinately high number of registered Democrats on the books and pollsters use those numbers to determine how they sample their pre-election polls.

So, when the pollsters choose a sampling of registered voters, they select for an artificially large number of Democrats based on how voters registered for the primaries in areas where Operation Chaos took place. This could account for Obama's having such a tenacious lead. I suspect a blind sample of voters might show significantly different results.

At any rate, polls based on likely or registered voters should be suspect. They very likely have a sampling that has too many Democrats in it. The poll results are therefore going to inevitably lean toward Obama. This could mean a nasty surprise for pollsters in November, but only if the polls themselves don't discourage conservatives from voting because it looks hopeless for McCain and Palin.

This year of all years, DON'T BELIEVE THE POLLS. I'm betting they're skewed because Operation Chaos gave us a false distribution of Democrats and Republicans among registered voters.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

When I restarted my Dish Network subscription yesterday, I got a big surprise. I have a new channel.

The OBAMA Channel!

All Obama, all the time.

Wowee, Zowee! Just what I wanted. All Obama, All the time.

I looked through the channels for the McCain Channel.

No luck.

Now there's a friggin' surprise.

Anybody need any more evidence that the media is in the tank for Obama.

I wanted to see the new satirical movie, "An American Carol" this weekend. In the whole area, there was only one screen showing it. It started late. The young man at the desk acted like I was buying tickets to a kitten juggling exposition or puppy torture.

It was funny. I feel sorry for the actors. Their careers are probably over. The director's brother disavowed him completely.

Anybody feel like we're being railroaded here. Here's a guy that a lot of conservatives think may be the anti-christ and there's hardly a negative word said about him in the mainstream media - the talk radio guys and a couple of conservative TV shows take shots, but that's not likely to survive Obama's inauguration.

Can you say, "Fairness Doctrine". It's fixing to get ugly out there. This is like 1860 all over again.

Now I know how the Polish felt when they listened to Neville Chamberlain on the radio blathering on about "Peace in our time" while the Nazis rolled across the border in their big gray tanks.

I plan to join the Resistance!

Tom

REUTERS - Dateline Tokyo: Following the problems in the US sub-prime lending market and the run on Lehman's in the US and HBOS in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan.

Reports indicate the Japanese banking crisis shows no signs of improving. If anything, it's getting worse. Following last week's news that Origami Bank had folded, it was today learned that Sumo Bank has gone belly up. Bonsai Bank plans to cut back some of its branches. Karaoke Bank is up for sale and its employees are having to sing for their supper. Shares in Kamikaze Bank have nose-dived and 500 jobs at Karate Bank will be chopped. Analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank and staff there fear they may get a raw deal.

UPI - Dateline Edinburgh: BANKING CRISIS SPREADS TO IRELAND & SCOTLAND. Financial experts in Ireland report that another consequence of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis is that the debt load for Dublin Bank is triplin'. In related news, Limerick Savings & Loan director Peter Nan was indicted yesterday, charged with removing a whole bucket of money from the vault. Prosecutors say, "Nantucket!" A disappointing third quarter earnings report for Clancy Brothers Ltd. is expected to be released tomorrow. The firm has set high earnings goals, but experts believe they won't "Makem". Officials at Riverdance Mortgage & Trust stated Flately - "We've been stomped!"

On the other side of the Irish Sea, bank examiners report this week that the Bank of Scotland has indeed lost their shorts.

AP News Flash: Caracas - The Venezuelan Petroleum Group is in the tank. Denver - The Cripple Creek Savings Bank is now up the creek - some authorities say without a paddle in a chicken wire canoe. Ontario, Canada - The Bank of Nantucket has kicked the bucket. London - The London Market, recently characterized by market watchers in Britain as a "little piggie" stumbled today and ran all the way home. Market chairman T.L. Pigg, could not be reached for comment, but in a written statement from his home in Luton, stated "Wee, wee, wee!" Edinburgh, Scotland - McDonald Medical & Pharmaceutical Industries today announced that it has "bought the farm". McDonald senior partners claimed the problem was "Here a quack, there a quack, Everywhere a quack, quack."

As a former semi-professional career counselor, it’s about time I weighed in on the subject of how to prepare for the coming financial catastrophe that is hanging over our heads in the coming decade. As my contribution, I’ve come up with a list of 10 smart career moves that are sure to help you weather the coming storm. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Pitchfork and Torch Manufacturing and Sales â€' The law of supply and demand. That’s all I’m saying.
2. Unemployment application processor â€' Can’t have too many of those. Be sure to get a conceal and carry permit, however. Things could get hairy.
3. Yard Painting Professional - This is a new career track I recently became aware of. Banks are hiring these guys to paint the yards green in neighborhoods where all or most of the houses have been repossessed to prevent the neighborhoods from looking bad in case they actually sell some of these $300,000 turkeys. Yard painting lasts about 3 months and if you get enough of them you could be secure till the end of the crisis.
4. Elected Official â€' Invest in some yard signs, make a lot of promises you know you can’t keep and you could have yourself a secure job for the next 4 years so long as you don’t mess up and actually do anything while in office. There is some risk of being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by angry mobs of taxpayers, but if you hedge your bets by cornering the pitchfork and torch concession, you can even make that a profitable experience.
5. Multi-billionaire â€' This one’s a no-brainer. Simply start with a couple or three billion dollars and try not to spend it all before your stock portfolio disappears.
6. Cayman Islands charter pilot â€' Corporate magnates will always need access to their money, especially in uncertain financial times. You’d be surprised how many will charter your plane or boat just to go down and make sure it’s still sitting there in the vault. It makes them feel secure.
7. Head of Major Quasi-Governmental Agency, Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the Senate/House Banking Committees - Apparently you can’t be fined , fired or prosecuted for anything you do in these positions. Great work if you can get it.
8. Soup Kitchen Operator â€' Keeps you busy and those that still have money contribute heavily to these organizations to keep the masses semi-content (at least to keep them from playing with pitchforks and torches).
9. Bank Repossession Officer â€' Again lots of work, you will not be popular but you’ll be busy. I recommend you start heavy anti-depressants on your first day on the job and pack heat.
10. Irish Step Dancer â€' Okay, there’s probably not going to be a lot of money in it, but it’s a heck of a way to work out your frustrations and it really makes your butt look tight.

Remember you're looking for steady employment that works with the times, not against them. Remember no matter how crappy your job, as long as you've got garden space, a porch and a banjo, you're gonna be all right.