Although I said prior that there is not much that can be really said to help us cope with 9/11, after watching the ceremonies today and listening to discussions on New York public radio, it seems to me that one area that has received little focus, leading up to the 10th anniversary today, has been the perpetrators and their motivations.

Today should well have been predominantly centered on the victims and a celebration of their lives, as it was, but reviewing how such victims came to be, namely at the hands of their murderers, is critical to at least minimize such future atrocities.

For this analysis, history is always the best teacher.

Throughout our country’s history, we have been faced with various foreign and internal threats.  Our founding was the result of the overbearing (to put it kindly) rule of King George III. Then the early 19th century saw us up against the Barbary pirates.  Slavery then consumed several decades of compromise until the matter was finally fully addressed, in the Civil War.  Thereafter, anarchists had their say going into the early 20th century.  It took us some time but we finally entered World War I and helped resolve the conflict, albeit at a high price.  Then, after a lull and false sense of security, including British Prime Minister’s infamous declaration of “Peace in Our Time” when he deferred an inevitable European conflagration, we entered World War II, again at a high price.

As Europe lay in rubble in 1945, the U.S. switched its efforts towards the Cold War and the long-smoldering race issue.  Discrimination was finally legally ended, 170 years too late, in the 1960s.  America grinded on only to see the Cold War officially end in the early 1990s, after many lives lost (i.e. Korea, Vietnam).

For the better part of the second half of the 20th century, Islamic terrorism was simmering and occasionally erupting (terrorist highlight reel: Munich, 1972; Pan Am Flight 103, 1988) after the U.S. recognized and supported the state of Israel in 1948.

Then came 9/11, when all was on the table.

Throughout all conflicts including today’s, there was a loud and ostensibly thinking class of people (read: Liberals) who not only advocated but insisted that non-confrontation (pacifism, neutrality, acquiescence) was the only answer.  Again, a “peace at all costs” position that Prime Minister Chamberlain saw woefully fail with Mssr. Hitler.  They were wrong.  The mindsets of, amongst others, Mr. Hitler, the Barbary Pirates, Uncle Joe Stalin and today’s Islamo-facsists is one of complete conquest, unconditionally.

So the lesson that we can glean from our history is, when faced with evil, as we are today in Islamo-Fascism, confront such immediately as it is not going to go away by itself.  And stick with the endeavour, as we did with the Cold War: commitment has its dividends, if you classify not being destroyed by your enemy as a dividend.

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I have seen many flags awaving at whole and half-staff.  It is heartwarming and undermines my concern that we, as a society, are not cognizant of history and today’s issues we face.

Still, I wonder if, in the name of honoring 9/11 victims, we can perhaps do a bit more than just wave a flag and bite our lips.  The phrase from the movie “An American President” comes to mind: “love your country but hate your countryman.”

Perhaps, after we fold our flags and place them away with reverence, we can make that extra effort to be nice to our fellow countryman, whether on the road, at the office, in the neighborhood, or at the store, which will go much further than all the flag-waving and chest-thumping that any of us can conjure.

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The Duty to Live On

A Life has come

A Life has gone

And ah……what a wonderful life.

But the worst thing we can do

to honor that one

is to not continue our lives

-I.M. Windee

Much has been, is being, and will be, said about 9/11.

In truth, I’m not sure there is anything that can be said to help us better understand and deal with the phenomena.

Perhaps the best way to sum it up is people do bad, if not evil, things in this world and we must realize that and do our best to mitigate, if not prevent, it.

-I.M.Windee

During the Cold War, those in charge of our nuclear arsenal were of the mode “grab your launch key and fasten your safety-belts” should confrontation with the Soviet Union blossom into open hostilities.  It was the admission that an apocalypse was at hand  and there was little control of events occurring other than to throw whatever you had at the adversary.

Last night’s speech to a joint session of Congress by Mr. Obama seemed to betray such a mentality that he has: throw what you have remaining at our economic problems and brace yourself for the blow-back.

The President proposed, by modern (the last 4 years) standards, a relatively modest $447 billion dollar package of spending initiatives and tax cuts.

All of the details are generally a warmed-over version of previously tried non-stimulative attempts to put a small amount of money in the hands of consumers.

Among the leftovers Mr. Obama offered, he called for more than $62 billion in spending to extend unemployment insurance benefits through 2012 and fund programs to alleviate long-term joblessness, $140 billion in infrastructure spending and aid to states, and a cut in the payroll tax for both employers and employees in 2012 which would cost $175 billion.

All of this sounds nice but offers no long-term solution to our economic problems.  Extending unemployment benefits, while seemingly compassionate in many a case, is presumably for a problem that will hopefully be resolved within a year or 2, if not less.  The aid to states also props up profligate states who feed an unsustainable growth of themselves.  The payroll tax cut, which is also temporary, offers no long-term reason for employers to hire and retain workers.

Almost all voices across the political spectrum are in agreement that the President’s package is anemic, at the very least.  In short, it is a long way from an FDR initiative which is surprising as Mr. Obama believes we are in the greatest economic calamity since the Depression.  This makes one believe that he realizes that he’s thrown everything from the Liberal playbook that he has, and can do no more.

It seems that the President realizes that he has reached the outer limits of his FDR/Keynesian zenith and from here on it is contraction and a defensive posture.

The speech and its ideas, relatively muted for a “hope and change” President, seems to indicate that he, from both a political and governance perspective, is “grabbing his launch key and fastening his safety-belts” for the 2012 election.

-I.M. Windee

Monday morning on NPR saw Cokie Roberts and Steve Inskeep ruminating (hand-wringing?) over the state of the economy and, more pointedly, the lack of jobs.

Aside from the predictable attempt by Ms. Roberts to say that polls display no confidence in both Democrats and Republicans alike, she went on to say “…if people have no confidence in the economy, obviously they don’t buy stuff because they worry that they’re going to run out of cash, they need to hold onto money. It means businesses contract or stay the same, as we saw in the last jobs report. Then it makes recovery much tougher. This is so psychological.”

Yes, Ms. Roberts, psychology has a large part in all human endeavors, especially economic decisions.  But then she went on to say “I went to see Peter Pan for the again – and you know, it’s clap if you believe in Tinkerbell. Well, that’s kind of where we are with the economy. We all sort of need to clap to get it going a lot.”

As Ms. Roberts is generally a Liberal voice which means this is the attitude of the Democrats in the campaign next year, then the Republicans are in much better position for next year’s election, and the country is in far worse shape in the interim, than we all thought.

Expect her Carteresque lamentation of the average American to begin to reverberate throughout all Democrat and Liberal precincts.

For those who may have forgotten, on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave a nationally-televised address in which he identified what he believed to be a “crisis of confidence” among the American people. He went on to state “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. . . It is a crisis of confidence…..too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption…..”

Sound familiar?  It should. President Obama has been subliminally, when not explicitly, humbling our national spirit with such insinuations since inaugurated.

What President Carter, Cokie Roberts, and the rest of the liberal Democrats don’t want to accept is that the psychology of a nation is very much dependent on the actions, or more appropriately, inactions, of government: specifically, how much does government restrain, or not restrain, the economy through taxes and regulation?  This is not Tinkerbell hand-clapping or Dorothy heel-clicking.

Should Mr. Obama choose the futile course of blaming the American Public for his failures, he will have no doubt emulated a player in the transformational Reagan story he has much admired: that of the man Reagan defeated, Jimmy Carter.

-I.M. Windee

President Obama’s call to defer the Environmental Protection Agency’s new, strict standards on ozone emissions is a welcome and long overdue decision for the economy and the country as a whole.  It’s fascinating to think of how the economy would be now had he shown such regulatory restraint starting the day of his inauguration in January 2009; but that could well be for him to ponder starting January 21, 2013.

Nonetheless, Mr. Obama’s decision to reign in his administration from a destructive policy comes at a rather unusual time: yet another lousy jobs report and also only a few months after he refused to lasso another executive fiefdom of his, namely, the Department of Justice.

To refresh our memories, Debra Burlingame, who lost her pilot brother on 9/11 when his plane crashed into the Pentagon, had an exchange with President Barack Obama regarding the DOJ’s plans to file criminal charges against CIA interrogators (since dropped except in 2 cases where fatality occurred), during a meeting with a select group of 9/11 families.  Burlingame asked the President if he would voice his opinion to Holder on the matter of the investigation of the CIA interrogators. She said, “I know that as a former attorney … you can’t tell the AG what to do in an investigation, but these [the interrogators] are unsung heroes….and they have been exonerated in two justice department investigations. But that didn’t satisfy Eric Holder….Would you, in light of what’s happened, speak to him about standing them [the investigating prosecutors] down?”

President Obama allegedly responded that Burlingame is right, that he cannot tell Holder how to conduct his investigation.

Burlingame jumped in, saying, yes but “You can give him your opinion, will you do that?”  Obama said, “No I won’t.” And then he allegedly turned and walked away.

It would appear that Mr. Obama is more than willing to walk away from 9/11 widows who rightly disagree with his policies to defend this country but he dare not walk away from his re-election campaign advisers.

-I.M. Windee

By: I.M. Windee

Today’s jobs report showing that employment growth ground to a halt in August, as sagging consumer confidence discouraged already nervous businesses from hiring, was not your father’s standard labor report: this had historic import as it was the first time since 1945 that the government has reported a net monthly job change of zero.  When you recall the severity of the downturns in the mid-70’s and early 1980’s, you know this is the kind of history in the making that we’d all rather not be a part of.

And this should come as no surprise to anyone, not least of which Liberals whose Great Society redux from 2009 to 2011 is finally showing its full reach; and we may only be at the very beginning of a lost economic decade.

The Obama/Pelosi Juggernaut that slammed into U.S. Business (and the economy) was both wide and deep.  To name a few weapons from their anti-business arsenal: foot-dragging on foreign-trade agreements, a virtual moratorium on new deep-water drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico, over a trillion dollar deficit that takes money out of the economy for wealth-producing (read: job-creating) uses, strangulating new financial industry regulations that only enrich government bureaucrats and lawyers, a massive and harmful reallocation of resources within the healthcare industry and perhaps worst of all, an endless drumbeat against American Business and “the rich” who are the ones that have the capital to grow the economy and hire people. It is no wonder that confidence, at all levels of the economy from the line worker to the boardroom, is down.  After all, we’re just following our leader who sees so much wrong with our society and when he’s not lamenting about the perceived inequities of our economy, he’s sweeping and clearing segments or players in it.

And as Candidate Obama in 2008 admired Ronald Reagan as a “transformational president” and conveyed that he too would like to be transformational as president, it is clear that he is following through with such goal except he’s doing it opposite to Mr. Reagan: instead of presiding over the creation of millions of jobs like the Gipper did, Mr. Obama will be overseeing millions of jobs that were not created because of his policies.

A “transformational president,” indeed.

Mother Nature, almost as much as intrusive government, is a force to be reckoned with and perhaps humanity will never be a match for either.  Which is why we can be grateful that she chose not to thrust the torrent of her full force in Tuesday’s U.S. East Coast earthquake. There are no reported casualties and little damage.

The quake was not immaterial, though: 5.8 on the Richter scale, it qualifies as a “moderate” earthquake that can cause major damage to poorly constructed buildings over small regions and slight damage to well-designed buildings, as it did in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

And to place such in perspective, the 1960 Agadir earthquake in Morocco with a magnitude of 5.7, killed around 15,000 people (about a third of the city’s population at the time) and injured another 12,000 with at least 35,000 people left homeless.

Even today, in many parts of the globe, this earthquake would have caused widespread injury, death and homelessness.  It is  easy for us Americans to forget that we still live in a world where, in many parts, even a train derailment can destroy dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.

So why is this country so fortunate?  The answer is quite simple: American prosperity.  This country’s ability to build strong  structures that can withstand epic natural disasters like the 1989 World Series Earthquake (63 reported deaths) or even Hurricane Katrina (under 2,000 reported deaths) is the direct result of our wealth-producing (read: private industry) segment of society that can at least mitigate the devastating effects of various natural disasters.  And when they do occur, we can rebuild quicker than any other society in this world.

Yes, building codes as mandated by government play a part, but if there weren’t the resources (wealth) to adhere to such codes, government requirements would mean nothing.

This fact that a prosperous society, created and supported by free markets, is the best defense against the furies of Mother Nature and other worldly ills, is something that can’t be forgotten especially as national policy has and is being created based upon the premise that “the rich” and capitalism in general are unbridled sources of most social, environmental and  economic ills that we face.

-I.M. Windee

As new Republican Candidates march to the front lines to take on Barack Obama for the 2012 Presidential election, there is a pattern that the opposition, namely Democrats and especially Liberals, have been adopting: dismiss the candidate as mad, out of touch with reality, or all of the above.  This goes beyond the good old days of campaign slogans and criticizing the opponent’s stances.  Now, Liberals do not even look at what the candidate is saying, or has done, but lurch immediately to her or his mental state; which is often consigned to advanced stages of Bellevue Psychiatric Ward.

Think about it: Sarah Palin in 2008 was skewered as ignorant, looney and other mental maladies for having not been able to field in many cases “gotcha” questions from the media, although admittedly she clearly was not adequately prepared for a highly hostile media and political environment.

Then the 2012 Presidential election cycle rolled around (as soon as the 2008 election results were final that night) and thereafter Michele Bachman came along.  Ms. Bachman may not ultimately win the Republican nomination nor deserve to, but she clearly has some solid messages worth hearing on taxes and the role of government in our lives.

Yet, even conservative bastions have taken to question Ms. Bachman (as well as the Tea Party) with comments like she’s a “canny politician” as if being a successful politician, and leader, does not allow you to be canny (President Lincoln, we are re-evaluating your place in history).

And it leaves the intriguing question of how many major Republican female candidates can the mainstream Democratic party trash before it is no longer known as being sensitive to women and their issues (anyone remember “The Year of the Woman”?)

And then there is Rick Perry who entered the race last week and whom the opposition is now swarming.  The question about the jobs he created in Texas is a valid one, and presumably one he will fare well on.  But inevitably when the substance of the debate is no longer of value, as it never is to Liberals, they will turn to ephemeral issues, like Governor Perry’s penchant for public displays of religion.   Again, credible conservative voices did no favors characterizing his “muscular religiosity.”  The country is in tough economic straits, thanks in large part to President Obama’s wrong and non response to our problems (to play on the phrase “if you break it, you own it”; if you buy it, you must fix it [which the President hasn't]).  Whether Mr. Perry has gone to or will go to religious revivals means nothing to the average voter compared to whether they will hear about such if they are employed or unemployed.

Thus, if there can be one bit of advice that the Republican Presidential candidates should follow, it is this:  it’s the substance, stupid!

-I.M. Windee

This publication is intended to provide ideas, and hopefully the seeds to at least some solutions, in the ongoing debates we have over issues we face together as a society.  We do not expect to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” Far greater minds than ours have done such before us and continue to do so.

What we intend to do is further provide ideas to the discussions that we have today of various social, political and other issues.  We will offer alternatives but realize they may not always be solutions.  However, in this time where the method of debate is to silence the opponent, through various means, it is important to not cower from rigorous debate; to not be shamed by catcalls of non-patriotism, unfounded accusations of calls to violence, concern only for ourselves or other innuendo.  This country was formed by individuals who did stand “athwart history, yelling Stop!” against tyranny.  As it worked so well over 200 years ago and has continued to do so, there is no  reason to change the gameplan.

We here at The Daily Yap realize that while we will not rise to the level of The Minutemen, we hope we will at least fulfill our own capacity to help make society a better place, through ideas and discussion.

As we have completed the first decade of the second “American Century”, we face challenges like the war on Islamo-Facsism which would put the human soul itself into bondage just as communism (R.I.P.) did only 20 years ago.  But as we have from our inception, this country maintains its commitment to liberty and freedom.

Whatever may be said about this page, we hope it will be noted that we appealed to your sense of reason, fairness and desire to leave behind a better place than you found it. That we asked, and you responded, to think of issues from all angles before making a judgment, which these days are lurched into all too often.

And as always, our hope for you is that you will appreciate that you are able to debate and discuss differing viewpoints, whether online, at the town hall meeting or amongst friends, which is far different from many oppressive countries in this world.

As we are seeing with the revolutions in the Middle East, the desire for individual freedom is not just an American trait but one shared by the human spirit all over.

May you never forget your obligation to help direct this country through discourse and ultimately the ballot box.

I hope you will not only enjoy reading The Daily Yap but partake in such by submitting articles for publication as well as letters for response.

Regards,

I.M. Windee

By: I.M. Windee

So the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion issued by both Clinton and George H.W. Bush appointees, has determined, to little shock if not agreement by all, that there are constitutional issues with the ObamaCare mandates.

Much has been and will be said about the argument of whether the highly elastic interpretative approach in the last several decades of the commerce clause gives congress the power to impose its edicts for people to affirmatively act in a certain way. As someone who believes the constitution affords no more power to any branch of federal government than what it explicitly states and the rest should be sorted out at the ballot box, I take great comfort in having former Chief Justice John Marshall in my corner.
Liberals, who advocate that a vaporous and expansive constitutional “penumbra” zone exists which allows whatever their agenda seeks, will have to hope that the spirit of the Warren   Court will rule the day when ObamaCare goes before the high court sometime next year. But seemingly overlooked, aside from the commerce clause and state’s rights arguments, is the vaunted Liberals’ right to privacy.

By way of jurisprudence history, in 1965, an individual named Griswold challenged a Connecticut law which made it a criminal offense for a married couple to buy contraceptives. In the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down this Connecticut law, holding that the Constitution actually created substantive rights which were so “fundamental to the principles of liberty” that they could not be restricted by government. There is no explicit mention of privacy in the U.S. Constitution but that creative and industrious Court declared that the other rights in the Constitution contained a “penumbra” of implied rights, and the general right to privacy was determined to be one of these rights.

As predicted at the time of the Griswold ruling, abortion would boomerang very quickly behind as a case of whether such right existed, and it did. In Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Supreme Court further extended such privacy right to create a limited right to have an abortion.

Almost 4 decades of intellectual and unintellectual debate have since occurred over that decision, but it still exists as the “law of
the land.”

So, at the risk of using Liberals arguments against them, if the “right to privacy” exists on whether or not to have a child, doesn’t such right exist on whether or not to have medical insurance?

ObamaCare would prove its worth just to see Liberals argue against themselves on this.