"Let them eat.....nothing..."

Starvation is a better alternative than unregulated food distribution. Do you find this idea as asinine as I do? If so, than you too are at odds with the government of Houston Texas that recently stopped a grassroots operation led by Bobby Herring and his wife Bethany that fed between 60-120 homeless people per night.

The article is located here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7381016.html

According to Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Kathy Barton, starvation would be preferable to unregulated food distribution [in this case also done without a permit] because “poor people are the most vulnerable to food borne illness and also are the least likely to have access to healthcare.”

In typical government fashion, this mandate ignores the real world results of ending this distribution; apparently not taking into consideration the fact that these 60 to 120 hungry people per night will not be able to simply decide to stop eating entirely and may end up consuming far less healthy options that could be scavenged from back alleys or dumpsters in the area.

This is just the sort of power play that proves that government, at all levels, believes that they are [and should remain] the sole arbiter of all assistance of any sort in this world; that they do not care about the results of their actions, only about their ability to control all aspects of our lives. That we have now seen legislated out of business a charitable effort and watched starvation be put in its place shows just how far down the wrong path this country has gone.

The question is whether we will ever get the nerve to turn around and head back in the right direction.

The NYT and the rich world of ignorance...

On January 4, 2011, in an editorial on the Opinion Pages of the New York Times, readers are treated to something that we rarely get to experience: a full-out display of ignorance and fundamental misinterpretation of how the world works.

In the editorial “Pomp and Little Circumstance,” readers are told that reading the Constitution on the house floor is a “presumptuous and self-righteous act” rather than a message to everyone that those we have elected to create laws should be familiar with those rules that constrain them. The writer goes on to pathetically attempt to bring race into the question by stating [with an implied nod and wink to those who, like him, incorrectly believe that the Constitution specifies race in Article1, Section2, Paragraph3 of the Constitution] “Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.” One must wonder whether it is commonplace for this author to thinks solely of African –Americans in terms of slavery.

Next, the reader is treated to this bit of tripe: “There is a similar air of vacuous fundamentalism in requiring that every bill cite the Constitutional power given to Congress to enact it” and that “it is the judiciary that ultimately decides when a law in unconstitutional, not the transitory occupant of the speaker’s chair.”

It is interesting here to see how the thought process of the writer [and I use this term very loosely here] works. For this writer, it would appear that we would only be living in a perfect world if those representatives we have elected to create federal laws were as ignorant as he of the constraints that are imposed on them by the Constitution and to make any law they desire in hopes that, if they overstep their bounds, the Supreme Court will be there to make things right.

This belief, in addition to being odiously simplistic, is akin to telling your teenagers to drive as fast as she wants and as wildly as she wants when she gets her driver’s license because the Police are there to determine if she is doing anything wrong; it is akin to having a pharmacist give you the key to the pharmacy and telling you to take drugs until you feel better and that a doctor will determine if you have done things correctly after you are through.

This belief is so irrational that it borders on the insane.

It is of little wonder that the circulation of the New York Times is down nearly 10% from 2009 to 2010. With giants of the mind such as the author of this editorial, I have little doubt that they will be able to increase this percentage in 2011….

Dashing through the.....press room?

Because I have been away from the computer for a while during the Christmas break, I haven’t had the chance to comment on the bizarre press conference given by President Obama and Clinton on December 10^th.

You may remember that the President stated that his “number one priority… [was] making sure that the middle class families don’t see their tax rates go up January 1.” I actually posted an article about this a short time ago questioning exactly how true this statement was. Thanks to President Obama’s press conference on December 10^th, I think we are now able to see that nothing short of eggnog would keep the President from achieving his number one goal.

That’s right, while he clearly can be distracted by the promise of shiny tinsel and cookies shaped like little acorns, he cannot be kept from running to a former President to do some of the heavy lifting for him while he runs off with the wife to lift a few glasses of champagne.

We now have to wonder what other wonderful things might be possible in this country if President Obama spent more time at parties while others did his job.