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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 4 March 2001 | Vol. II #33 | ||
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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 4 March 2001 | Vol. II #33 | ||
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"Maybe someday Americans will wake up and realize that taxes are not only excessive, but wrong in principle. And unnecessary -- except for that part of the population that expects to be supported by others." --Joseph Sobran
"Democrats will play the old Washington game of calling reductions in the rate of growth of spending for any program a 'cut'." --Bruce Bartlett
"...[O]nce you abandon morality, everything becomes negotiable and arguable." --Charley Reese
"...[F]reedom is not an unlimited license, an unlimited choice, or an unlimited opportunity. Freedom is first of all a responsibility before the God from whom we come." --Alan Keyes
"Whether one agrees with President George W. Bush's ideas, any reasonable person must admit that it's nice to have a president who says what he means and means what he says." --Charley Reese
"Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." --Ronald Reagan
At this week's meeting of the National Governors Association, Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura was applauded by his colleagues for challenging the central government to fund its mandates. "The federal government mandated special education and at one point agreed to pay 40 percent, but they haven't come close to doing that. I would like to remind the federal government that...all of our states would benefit greatly if the federal government could see fit to help fund the mandates it's given to all of us." We would applaud Mr. Ventura if he could show us where our Constitution authorizes the central government to issue most of its "mandates," much less, fund them.
[ The Federalist ]
"You have to have fiscal restraint in order to achieve the tax plan. You have to reduce the growth in government spending. You have to cut elsewhere. You have to take money from lower-priority programs, pork-barrel spending and programs that have outlived their usefulness to finance the president's initiatives. One cannot put all of the president's initiatives on top of existing federal spending." -- John F. Cogan, a key adviser to Mr. Bush's budget plan.
TCN Comment: From what we have heard coming from the White House we would say that this would be a new revelation to Dubya…. Of course, this line works if he is really claiming all of the standard Democratic socialist programs as "the president's initiatives." It does sound very Clintonian though.
Our biggest complaint about Dubya was always been that he tries to "out-liberal" the Democrats. This budget proposal has been very consistent with that complaint. It is chock-full of funding for unconstitutional socialist welfare programs, expanding both the size and the reach of the federal government.
Doesn't the number of Democrats that are supportive of Dubya's budget run up a red flag for anyone else?
"While ostentatiously pursuing an "investigation" of the Marc Rich pardon (which will lead precisely nowhere), Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has stubbornly refused to indict top Democratic and union officials directly implicated in a money-laundering scheme uncovered by her own office some years ago. In what is now called the Teamsters Swap Scandal, prosecutors working for Mary Jo White won three guilty pleas from top Teamsters aides back in 1997. Two years later, the Teamsters' former political director, William Hamilton, was convicted for his role in the kickback scheme. But for four years now, the Big Kahunas implicated in the money-swap operation have been largely forgotten by White's office. One big fish studiously ignored by Ms. White is the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton pal, Terry McAuliffe."
[ Columnist Ann Coulter ]
"Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul is introducing H. Con. Res. 23, intended to let the world know that President Clinton's last-minute OK of the proposed International Criminal Court should not be taken for U.S. acceptance of the idea or the institution. The White House is saying President Bush does not intend to submit the treaty to the Senate for an up-or-down vote, but Paul feels his effort is necessary because the Vienna Convention, which the U.S. has also not signed, says countries who have signed treaties should behave as though they are in force pending ratification or rejection by appropriate democratic bodies."
[ Peter Roff's "Capital Comment ]
by Steve Washam based on a telling by George Gordon
Some years ago, about 1900, an old trapper from North Dakota hitched up some horses to his Studebaker wagon, packed a few possessions, especially his traps-and drove south.
Several weeks later he stopped in a small town just north of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. It was a Saturday morning-a lazy day-when he walked into the general store. Sitting around the pot-bellied stove were seven or eight of the town's local citizens. The traveler spoke, "Gentlemen, could you direct me to the Okefenokee Swamp?"
Some of the old-timers looked at him like he was crazy. "You must be a stranger in these parts," they said. "I am. I'm from North Dakota," said the stranger. "In the Okefenokee Swamp are thousands of wild hogs," one old man explained. "A man who goes into the swamp by himself asks to die!" He lifted up his leg. "I lost half my leg here, to the pigs of the swamp." Another old fellow said, "Look at the cuts on me; look at my arm bit off!"
"Those pigs have been free since the Revolution, eating snakes and rooting out roots and fending for themselves for over a hundred years. They're wild and they're dangerous. You can't trap them. No man dare go into the swamp by himself." Every man nodded his head in agreement.
The old trapper said, "Thank you so much for the warning. Now could you direct me to the swamp?" They said, "Well, yeah, it's due south-straight down the road." But they begged the stranger not to go, because they knew he'd meet a terrible fate. He said, "Sell me ten sacks of corn, and help me load them into the wagon." And they did.
Then the old trapper bid them farewell and drove on down the road. The townsfolk thought they'd never see him again. Two weeks later the man came back. He pulled up to the general store, got down off the wagon, walked in and bought ten more sacks of corn. After loading it up he went back down the road toward the swamp.
Two weeks later he returned and, again, bought ten sacks of corn. This went on for a month. And then two months, and three. Every week or two the old trapper would come into town on a Saturday morning, load up ten sacks of corn and drive off south into the swamp.
The stranger soon became a legend in the little village and the subject of much speculation. People wondered what kind of devil had possessed this man, that he could go into the Okefenokee by himself and not be consumed by the wild and free hogs. One morning the man came into town as usual. Everyone thought he wanted more corn. He got off the wagon and went into the store where the usual group of men were gathered around the stove. He took off his gloves. "Gentlemen," he said, "I need to hire about ten or fifteen wagons. I need twenty or thirty men. I have six thousand hogs out in the swamp, penned up, and they're all hungry. I've got to get them to market right away."
"You've WHAT in the swamp?" asked the storekeeper, incredulously. "I have six thousand hogs penned up. They haven't eaten for two or three days, and they'll starve if I don't get back there to feed and take care of them." One of the old-timers said, "You mean you've captured the wild hogs of the Okefenokee?" "That's right."
"How did you do that? What did you do?" the men urged, breathlessly. One of them exclaimed, "But I lost my arm!" "I lost my brother!" cried another. "I lost my leg to those wild boars!" chimed a third. The trapper said, "Well, the first week I went in there they were wild all right. They hid in the undergrowth and wouldn't come out. I dared not get off the wagon. So I spread corn along behind the wagon. Every day I'd spread a sack of corn. "The old pigs would have nothing to do with it. But the younger pigs decided that it was easier to eat free corn than it was to root out roots and catch snakes. So the very young began to eat the corn first.
"I did this every day. Pretty soon, even the old pigs decided that it was easier to eat free corn, after all, they were all free; they were not penned up. They could run off in any direction they wanted at any time. "The next thing was to get them used to eating in the same place all the time. So, I selected a clearing, and I started putting the corn in the clearing." At first they wouldn't come to the clearing. It was too far. It was too open. It was a nuisance to them.
"But the very young decided that it was easier to take the corn in the clearing than it was to root out roots and catch their own snakes. And not long thereafter, the older pigs also decided that it was easier to come to the clearing every day. "And so the pigs learned to come to the clearing every day to get their free corn. They could still subsidize their diet with roots and snakes and whatever else they wanted. After all, they were all free. They could run in any direction at any time. There were no bounds upon them.
"The next step was to get them used to fence posts. So I put fence posts all the way around the clearing. I put them in the underbrush so that they wouldn't get suspicious or upset, after all, they were just sticks sticking up out of the ground, like the trees and the brush. The corn was there every day. It was easy to walk in between the posts, get the corn, and walk back out. "This went on for a week or two. Shortly they became very used to walking into the clearing, getting the free corn, and walking back out through the fence posts.
"The next step was to put one rail down at the bottom. I also left a few openings, so that the older, fatter pigs could walk through the openings and the younger pigs could easily jump over just one rail, after all, it was no real threat to their freedom or independence-they could always jump over the rail and flee in any direction at any time.
"Now I decided that I wouldn't feed them every day. I began to feed them every other day. On the days I didn't feed them, the pigs still gathered in the clearing. They squealed, and they grunted, and they begged and pleaded with me to feed them-but I only fed them every other day. Then I put a second rail around the posts. "Now the pigs became more and more desperate for food. Because now they were no longer used to going out and digging their own roots and finding their own food, they now needed me. They needed my corn every other day." "So I trained them that I would feed them every day if they came in through a gate and I put up a third rail around the fence. "But it was still no great threat to their freedom, because there were several gates and they could run in and out at will.
"Finally I put up the fourth rail. Then I closed all the gates but one, and I fed them very, very well." "Yesterday I closed the last gate and today I need you to help me take these pigs to market."
The price of free corn. The parable of the pigs has a serious moral lesson. This story is about federal money being used to bait, trap and enslave a once free and independent people. Federal welfare, in its myriad forms, has reduced not only individuals to a state of dependency; state and local governments are also on the fast track to elimination, due to their functions being subverted by the command and control structures of federal "revenue sharing" programs.
Please copy this parable and send it to all of your state and local elected leaders and other concerned citizens.
Tell them: "Just say NO to federal corn." The bacon you save may be your own.
Like cavalry riding to our rescue, the federal government is once again protecting us from a threat that many of us are blissfully unaware of in our homes.
Our top-loading washing machines.
Amidst the fevered chaos of Mr. Clinton's late night pizza and pardoning party, he apparently got his priorities straight when he signed an executive order deeming that we citizens shall, within a seven year time limit, phase out all offending top-loaders and replace them with superior, more expensive and less threatening front-loading washers.
The Federal Register doesn't lie.
Yes, from the central planners who gave us low water consumption flushing toilets (the ones we need to flush seven times to do the same thing those old fashioned water guzzlers did on the first try) comes this latest righteous advance in the federal War on Home Appliances.
As expected, certain segments of the Chronic Whining Class will find fault (or possibly no reason on earth) for this executive mandate. So be it. The federal visionaries who came up this idea undoubtedly have hit the sweat tents and foreseen the blessings for all humankind that will issue forth by dictating what manner of washing machine we shall own.
Federal Utopia is in the details, is it not? The mandate to replace our top-loading units with progressive front-loaders must be vital to our survival as a nation. Even for global survival I should think. Somehow. Would the president of the United States have signed an executive order if it were not so?
It's a given that no federal omelet like this can be made without breaking a few home appliance eggs. So, in order to give this EO some teeth, I foresee some essential actions our central planners will need to take:
One can only imagine the greater good that could have been accomplished if Mr. Clinton hadn't developed writer's cramp at 2 a.m. on Jan. 20, 2001.
What would he have done about those power-sucking, brownout-inducing four-slot toasters? And can't a nation as technologically advanced as ours come up with a low-power electric razor? Maybe a wind-up model? Better yet, why not outlaw shaving completely? The road to Federal Utopia is littered with half measures.
The bottom line is whoever is appointed home appliance czar will have their work cut out for them. A mandate here, a mandate there, all in a day's work. Pretty soon the burden of making any decisions for ourselves will be lifted from our shoulders.
What a relief. Frees up time to do laundry.
Now, what about all those dryers? Perhaps a Passive Solar Power Linear-Supported Personal Apparel Dehydrating Act is in order. Give 'em time.
[ Richard Wagenvoord. WND Letter to the Editor ]
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