Corporate power blesses, not oppresses, the American people
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Why should so many Americans resent and distrust the very institutions that make possible our productivity, pleasure and opportunities? Given the fact that major corporations provide virtually every one of the commodities and comforts we consume, it makes no sense to feel hostile and contemptuous of the corporate organization of the contemporary economy.

As I write these words – and as you read them –we all rely on the products of major companies with increasingly far flung and international operations. Leave aside for a moment the obvious example of the complex combination of brilliantly designed computer hardware and software that allows me to transfer my thoughts to a word processor and broadcast them to the world. I’m also relying on a light fixture above my desk and the bulb to illuminate it and the electricity to drive it, on the books stacked on the filing cabinet behind me, printed and distributed and transported across the country, on the paper and the pens that allowed the scribbled notes and, very significantly, on the ceramic mug filled with steaming coffee based on beans brought from far corners of the globe, then roasted and packaged and finally brewed in the wonderfully efficient coffee maker beneath our kitchen sink. Though “corporation” has become a dirty word to many Americans, successful corporations made possible each of these wonders and blessings and amplifications of our personal power. Without those engines of economic energy, we’d retreat to darkness and frustration and the dead ends of poverty.

The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman used to hold up a common pencil and to ask his students at the University of Chicago to consider the labor and resources that made it possible. At one point, timber workers cut the trees sawmill workers shaped into usable milled wood, while miners drew the graphite from the earth, and others smelted and shaped it into the thin but durable pencil, then encased in the octagonal rod of wood, in turn painted and varnished and stamped, with a milled metal tip (also mined and processed and stamped) connecting it to a pink and functional eraser relying on gum from remote jungles. This miracle of technology and cooperation, in other words, relies on literally hundreds (if not thousands) of workers in different corners of the earth, but then, ultimately, makes its way into your hand at the shockingly, insanely, irrationally low price of --- about ten cents. Consider the amazing efficiency that brings you this versatile and remarkably efficient common writing implement that you take for granted every day. This deceptively simple pencil costs the typical American less than 20 seconds of his time at work. For higher income toilers, you can earn yourself a pencil for a mere second of your effort.

And yet we commonly curse the very rise of corporate power and productivity that puts such wonders into our hands. “Enlightened” commentators, politicians, academics, activists and malcontents of both left and right never tire of deriding for-profit companies as some parasitic alien life form that devours honest toil, crushes creativity, pollutes the environment, and steals power from ordinary Americans.

A few undeniable truths about corporate power in the United States can liberate every day citizens and the society at large from such sour and ungrateful folly.

1) FROM THE DAYS OF EARLIEST SETTLEMENT, AMERICA EMERGED FROM RISK-TAKING AND PROFIT-MAKING CORPORATIONS. The famous colonies at Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay (not to mention Walter Raleigh’s similarly celebrated and tragically unsuccessful settlement of Roanoke) depended on British investors who put up the considerable capital to fund the expensive business of sending “venturers” across the Ocean. Of course, some of these sponsors shared religious ideals with some of the settlers, but they all fervently cherished the (often frustrated) hope of earning a handsome return on their risky investments. Meanwhile, other corporations like the Hudson Bay Company and the British East India Company also played an outside (and sometimes heroic) role in exploring a wilderness continent and establishing a British presence in the New World.

2) THE REVOLUTION RESISTED GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE WITH FREE MARKETS, NOT THE POWER OF BIG BUSINESS. The Stamp Act Protests, the Boston Tea Party and other Colonial challenges to British authority aimed their wrath (and occasional property destruction) not at the traders or merchants who brought their products to New England, but against the government officials who insisted on telling the colonists what they could buy and how much they must pay. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson specifically condemned the king for “imposing taxes on us without our consent” and for sending his tax collectors to interfere with commerce: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.” Any contemporary American who’s faced an IRS audit can relate directly to Jefferson’s complaint. The Declaration also attacked King George for his protectionist export-import policy and “for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.” The Founding Fathers never embraced anti-business attitudes because most of them were themselves ambitious and successful entrepreneurs. George Washington and John Hancock may have been the two richest men in the colonies – with Washington one of the largest land-holders (who loved speculating on frontier real estate) and Hancock the owner of America’s most formidable fleet of merchant ships. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when the Founders laid out the powers of the new Congress and Government in Article 1, section 8, all of the first 8 provisions concern setting up an economic system (“power to lay and collect taxes,” “to establish…uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies,” “to coin money,” and so forth) before the document finally gets around to such relatively trivial matters as setting up courts and raising an army.

3) THE FAMOUS DEPRADATIONS OF THE SO-CALLED “ROBBER BARONS” INVOLVED GOVERNMENTAL, NOT BUSINESS, ABUSES. In his indispensable 1986 book “The Myth of the Robber Barons,” Burton W. Folsom of the University of Pittsburgh makes the important distinction between “political entrepreneurs” and “market entrepreneurs” who played very different roles in the development of the new nation and its economy. The political entrepreneurs WHO manipulated their insider influence relied upon sweetheart deals and special concessions and monopoly power granted by government, rather than their own efficiency and competitive advantages. At the same time, market entrepreneurs (like James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad) refused to entangle themselves with the political process and built their much more successful and durable corporations without favoritism from bureaucrats or officeholders. As Folsom writes of the emerging and crucial steamship industry: “Political entrepreneurship often led to price-fixing, technological stagnation, and the bribing of competitors and politicians. The market entrepreneurs were the innovators and rate-cutters. They had to be to survive against subsidized opponents.” Significantly, all of the most significant economic reform movements from the Jeffersonians at the turn of the nineteenth century up through the Progressives at the turn of twentieth, sought to disentangle government from its involvement in the free market, not to impose to new bureaucratic controls. As the great historian Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama wrote: “The Jacksonian Democrats engaged in a great deal of anti-business rhetoric, but the results of their policies were to remove or reduce governmental interference into private economic activity, and thus to free market entrepreneurs to go about their creative work. The entire nation grew wealthy as a consequence.”

4) THE ERAS OF GREATEST CORPORATE INFLUENCE WEREN’T NIGHTMARISH PERIODS OF OPPRESSION AND RETREAT, BUT RATHER GOLDEN EPOCHS OF PROSPERITY, PROGRESS AND GROWING AMERICAN POWER. While historians and other intellectuals invariably deride the “Gilded Age” following the War Between the States, no generation in world history achieved comparable progress in rapidly raising standards of living, absorbing and assimilating unprecedented waves of immigration, settling the remotest frontier and building a dozen new states and scores of glittering new cities, while establishing the United States for the first time as a world power of the first rank. As the editors of American Heritage Magazine wrote in the introduction to their book, “The Confident Years,” about US life from 1865 to 1914: “It was a period of exuberant growth, in population, industry and world prestige. As the twentieth century opened, American political pundits were convinced that the nation was on an ascending spiral of progress that could end only in something approaching perfection. Even those who saw the inequity between the bright world of privilege and the gray fact of poverty were quite sure that a time was very near when no one would go cold or hungry of ill clothed. These were indeed the Confident Years.” An era of rampant capitalist power, in other words, that saw the emergence of giant corporations that touched the lives of every American, corresponded with the most dynamic and dazzling achievements in our history. Other eras associated with big business also brought unparalleled blessings of peace and prosperity to the nation at large and virtually all of its citizens – such as the 1920’s, where President Coolidge produced snickers from cognoscenti by saying “the business of America is business,” or the 1950’s, when Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson declared (not unreasonably) that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
5) THE RISE OF BIG BUSINESS NEVER IMPOVERISHED AND ALWAYS ENHANCED THE LIVING STANDARDS OF ORDINARY WORKING AMERICANS. In their 1998 book, “The History of the American Economy” Gary Walton and Hugh Rockoff summarize the progress of the working class. From 1820 to 1860, wages grew at a 1.6% annual rate, while the purchasing power of an average worker’s paycheck went up between 60 [SPACE] and 90 percent (depending on the region of the country). Between 1860 and 1890 (that genuinely gilded age) real wages (adjusted for inflation) increased by a staggering 50% in America. The average work week shortened at the same time, so that the real earnings of the Average American worker increased more like 60 percent in just thirty years. As Thomas J. DiLorenzo points out in his illuminating book “How Capitalism Saved America,”: “Capitalism improves the quality of life for the working class not just because it leads to improved wages but also because it produces new, better and cheaper goods…When Henry Ford first started selling automobiles only the relatively wealthy could afford them, but soon enough working-class families were buying his cars.” The efficiency and productivity made possible by corporate organization gave typical Americans a range of choices and an economic power unimaginable for prior generations. As Federal Reserve Board economists Michael Cox and Richard Allen made clear: “A nineteenth century millionaire couldn’t grab a cold drink from the refrigerator. He couldn’t hop into a smooth-riding automobile for a 70-mile-an-hour trip down an interstate highway to the mountains or seashore. He couldn’t call up news, movies, music and sporting events by simply touching the remote control’s buttons. He couldn’t jet north to Toronto, south to Cancun, east to Boston or west to San Francisco in just a few hours. He couldn’t transmit documents to Europe, Asia, or anyplace else in seconds.

He couldn’t run over to the mall to buy auto-focus cameras, computer games, mountain bikes, or movies on videotape. He couldn’t escape the summer heat in air conditioned comfort. He couldn’t check into a hospital for a coronary bypass to cure a failing heart, get a shot of penicillin to ward off infection, or even take aspirin to relieve a headache.” In this context, jeremiads about the “horrifying” gap between rich and poor miss the point that poor people in America’s 21st century enjoy options and privileges that the wealthy couldn’t claim a hundred years ago. Far from oppressing the working class, the corporate system brought about a vast improvement in purchasing power for all Americans. The 1999 book “Myths of Rich and Poor” by Michael Cox and Richard Alm indicates that a worker in 1900 worked two hours and forty minutes to earn the cost of a three point chicken; in 1999, a mere 24 minutes of toil could buy him the bird. If anything, the growth in rewards for working only accelerated in the last fifty years. In 1950, typical workers put in more than two hours to afford 100 kilowatts of electricity; by 1999, the cost had dropped to fourteen minutes. A three minute coast-to-coast phone call cost 104 minutes of labor in 1950, but by 1999 that was down to two minutes (and it’s no doubt even less today).

6) THE INDUSTRIALIZATION THAT DRIVES PROSPERITY RESCUES RATHER THAN ENSLAVES THE WORKERS IT EMPLOYS. Adam Smith, who defined capitalism more than 200 years ago in “The Wealth of Nations,” described the essence of the system as a series of mutually beneficial agreements: “Give me that which you want, and you shall have this which you want.” This captures the essential fairness and decency of the free-market system, which relies on voluntary associations that enrich both parties. Concerning the process of industrialization, which saw millions of workers engaged in powering the mighty, productive engines of major corporations, the great economic Ludwig van Mises (cited by DiLorenzo) trenchantly observed: “The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.” The same process applies to newly opened factories throughout the developing world today, despite the efforts by “anti-globalist” and “anti-corporate” activists in the United States to obliterate the only jobs that keep suffering millions from a return to misery and destitution.

7) CORPORATIONS DON’T DESERVE BLAME FOR “PUTTING PROFITS OVER PEOPLE,” SINCE PROFITS INEVITABLY BENEFIT PEOPLE. Corporations don’t exist in order to provide welfare for workers, or cheap products for consumers, but rather to earn profits for investors and operators. If they succeed in earning such profits they can provide more jobs at higher pay, and better products at lower cost. If a company fails at bringing in those profits it will shed jobs and provide fewer products – ultimately going out of business altogether. The idea that laborers or customers somehow benefit if a corporation feels squeezed, or facing shrinking profits, remains one of the profoundly illogical legacies of discredited Marxism. In the free market system, the boss Peter can’t benefit long term at the expense of his employee, Paul. They either prosper together or fail together. Increased profitability brings increases in capital that allow increases in productivity – directly and simultaneously rewarding management and labor (not to mention the public at large). Political demagogues who rail against “immoral” or “obscene” profits need courses in remedial economics. For a corporation, only a lack of profitability counts as immoral and going out of business represents the ultimate obscenity.

8) THERE’S NO LOGICAL REASON TO FAVOR SMALL BUSINESSES OVER BIG BUSINESS. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that the public felt more approval of “small business” than of “big corporations” by a ratio of more than three to one. This makes little sense, since virtually every “big business” started out as a small operation before success brought growth, and virtually every small business dreams of getting bigger one day. Not far from my home stands the original Starbucks Coffee stand (still operating) at Seattle’s Pike Place Market: an unprepossessing shop that couldn’t accommodate more than twenty customers at a time. Did that quaint operation do a better job providing coffee to its patrons than today’s multi-billion dollar, globe-straddling colossus? Any coffee connoisseur can certify that one of the major improvements in American life over the past twenty years involves the now universal availability of strong, delicious, gourmet coffee (and innumerable exotic derivatives), as opposed to the watery, flavorless blandness of the old-fashioned “cup of Joe.” Could any sane observer honestly believe that a small business could do a better job than big international companies in providing us with the automobiles and computers and cell phones and medical supplies that do so much to enrich our lives?

9) CORRUPTION IS MORE OF A PROBLEM FOR BIG GOVERNMENT THAN BIG CORPORATIONS. Since the beginning of the 21st Century a series of tawdry and hugely destructive corporate scandals (Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, many more) led the commentariat to conclude that business ethics had been hopelessly compromised and we needed to turn to government for redemption and purification. This assumption ignores the long history of hideous corruption in every endeavor of flawed humanity – including religion, education, charities and, most spectacularly, government itself. Giving government greater power over corporations increases rather than reduces the likelihood of corruption, since so many of the prior business scandals involved existing entanglements of bureaucracy with the free market. When political office holders decide winners and losers in the business world, the temptations for bribery and favoritism become more acute, not less so. Moreover, the public enjoys greater and swifter recourse against an abusive or inefficient corporation than it does against an abusive or inefficient government. The customer can always decline to patronize a business, a product or a service he dislikes, but with a dysfunctional government you’re stuck till the next election – or long after that, in this era of entrenched and immovable bureaucratic power. A determined individual can escape the reach of even the most ubiquitous corporation (yes, even our Seattle neighbors at Microsoft) but the only way to choose for yourself a different national government is to flee the country. Yes, corporate power frequently corrupts government, and government power even more frequently corrupts and warps corporations, but the best way to avoid this mutually destructive influence is to bring about less bureaucratic involvement in the free market, not to insist on more.

Despite all the shortcomings and silliness, bureaucratic bungling and bankruptcies, foreclosures and failures, conniving and corruption, the big corporations that inevitably emerge in free and fair markets continue to perform remarkably well in terms of giving the public what it wants and needs. Our daily lives bear wondrous witness to the amazing achievements and efficiencies of the system. Any honest examination of the past and the present must lead to the conclusion that major corporations in their appropriate pursuit of profit will continue to bless, not oppress, the people of the United States.

Katherine Kersten: What happens when America leaves? Just ask S. Vietnamese

By Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune

Last update: October 10, 2007 – 7:39 PM


The day Saigon fell -- April 30, 1975 -- Lt. Col. Lam Tran gathered his stunned and despondent soldiers and distributed his little money among them.

"My heart broke down," says Tran, who now lives in the Twin Cities. "I told them, 'Go home to your families. Now we must all fend for ourselves.'"

Minutes later, a bone-shattering explosion shook a nearby house. Twenty of his men had detonated their grenades inside and blown themselves to oblivion. "They were so ashamed," recalls Tran. "They knew it didn't have to be this way."

Tran, who led airborne assaults in jungle fighting, had worked closely with U.S. soldiers since the mid-1960s. (Tran asked that his real name be withheld to prevent reprisals against family members still in Vietnam).

But in 1973, the United States withdrew nearly all of its troops from Vietnam, and in December 1974 Congress cut off vital military aid. Five months later, Communist forces overran the country.

Today, Tran watches the U.S. debate over Iraq with an eerie sense of familiarity. Like many of his countrymen here, Tran says he fears for Iraqis if America abandons them -- as it did his nation -- before they are self-sufficient.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have tied their fate to us as soldiers, police officers, translators, security guards or government officials.

While North Vietnam's victory brought fear and privation across the country, South Vietnamese who had worked or cooperated with Americans suffered most. The Hanoi regime imprisoned 1 million people in "re-education camps," where about 165,000 died of malnutrition, abuse or execution.

Prisoners' families also endured severe retaliation. The regime refused to give them ration cards. Many peddled cigarettes or combed through dumps to survive. Their children's education was restricted, and wives were often compelled to marry Communists or become their mistresses. To escape, more than 500,000 desperate "boat people" risked pirate attacks and a watery grave.

Tran lost his freedom, his family and almost his sanity. Initially, authorities told him that he would be in prison for 10 days. He emerged 13 years later, a gray shadow, hollowed out by starvation rations and backbreaking labor.

One experience illustrates his ordeal. During his fourth year in prison, Tran and four fellow inmates bribed a prison guard to get a radio to listen to the Voice of America. After an informer betrayed them, they were sentenced to six months in a "disciplinary lock-up."

Tran's isolation cell was barely big enough to lie down in, and had one tiny window. He was shackled. He subsisted on a daily cup of water and ball of boiled flour that guards pushed through the window. His days were spent largely in darkness. "In the morning, you can see your legs like balloons -- if you stand up, you see the fluid trickling down to your feet," he recalled.

After two months, Tran began to go blind. Carried out for his monthly shower, he whispered to friends to ask a doctor, a fellow prisoner, what to do. A note came back: "Eat whatever you can find."

Tran had one choice -- cockroaches. "Every day after that, I enjoy myself," he said. "I look into the latrine and see what's crawling up." Each time he ate a cockroach, he made a mark on the wall with its fluid. At his release, he counted more than 1,600 strokes.

When he finally emerged from his cell, Tran learned that he was the only one of the five who had not gone blind. The cockroaches had saved his eyes, he says, and perhaps his life.

Tran was released from prison in 1988, only to discover that his wife had remarried and fled the country with their two young daughters. In 1994, he made his way to America as a refugee.

Today, "Americans are saying 'enough bloodshed in Iraq,'" says Tran. But few can imagine the nightmare that will follow if we abandon those who have trusted us, he warns.

Are Iraq's jihadists as brutal as South Vietnam's Communist conquerors? They may be worse. When Iraqis hear American politicians threaten to pull the plug, they must shudder at the prospect of rule by men who send suicide bombers to primary schools and video themselves beheading opponents.

Katherine Kersten • kkersten@startribune.com Join the conversation at my blog, Think Again, which can be found at www.startribune.com/thinkagain.

I'm sorry, but...

I'm sorry, but...
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I'm sorry, but...
09/18/2007 | Philistone

Posted on 09/18/2007 9:39:52 AM PDT by Philistone

I'm sorry that your child was killed by a drunk driver, but that doesn't give you the right to pull my car over at random and search me or it.

I'm sorry that your father died of lung cancer at the age of 60, but that doesn't give you the right to tell me I can't smoke in my own house or car.

I'm sorry that your best friend died of a heart-attack after eating nothing but Big Macs all his life, but that doesn't give you the right to tell me that I can't eat fats if I want to.

I'm sorry that you were raised to be squeamish at the sight of blood, but that does not give you the right to force me to eat only vegetables or wear only plant fibers.

I'm sorry that you can't afford health insurance, but that does not give you the right to force me to provide it for you.

I'm sorry that over 150 years ago people with the same color skin as me enslaved people with the same color skin as you, but that doesn't give you the right take the hard-earned efforts of my labor for yourself.

I'm sorry that your homeland is corrupt and your culture has no work ethic, but that doesn't give you the right to come here illegally and burden our schools and emergency rooms with your presence.

I'm sorry that your parents chose to come here illegally, but that doesn't give you the right to force me to fund your college education.

I'm sorry that you find it fashionable to ride your bike to work, but that doesn't give you the right to take away my car.

I'm sorry that your lack of intelligence and attention through high school and college left you fit only for a job as a public school teacher, but that doesn't give you the right to inflict your anger and ideology on my child.

I'm sorry that you are mentally and physically unfit to serve in our nation's Armed Forces, but that does not give you the right to disparage those who are fit and do serve.

I'm sorry that your parents and teachers continually told you that you are unique and special, but you are not.

I'm sorry that the jocks stuffed you in your locker in high school, but that doesn't give you the right to equate my President with Hitler.

I'm sorry that you failed Trigonometry, but that doesn't give you the right to equate Sociology with Engineering

I'm sorry that you are not as attractive as other women, but that does not give you the right to impose your feminist idiocracy on me, my company or my family.

I'm sorry that your nervous system is so exquisitely sensitive that you can be hurt by minute variations in air pressure caused by sound waves, but that doesn't give you the right to determine what I can and can not say.

I'm sorry that your enormous ego coupled with a complete lack of self-esteem, lack of any sense of self-worth and ignorance about how the real world works has led you to becoming a Liberal, but... Well, no buts. I'm not really sorry.

Remember: Anyone who tells you "it's for the children" believes that YOU are a child.
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1 posted on 09/18/2007 9:39:53 AM PDT by Philistone
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To: Philistone

‘I’m sorry that your child was killed by a drunk driver, but that doesn’t give you the right to pull my car over at random and search me or it. ‘

You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one. The others I tend to agree with. But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.

2 posted on 09/18/2007 9:41:39 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: Philistone

In sort you’re just plain sorry.

3 posted on 09/18/2007 9:41:58 AM PDT by usmcobra (I sing Karaoke the way it was meant to be sung, drunk, badly and in Japanese)
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To: traviskicks

ping!!

4 posted on 09/18/2007 9:42:07 AM PDT by bamahead (Few men desire liberty; The majority are satisfied with a just master. -- Sallust)
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To: Philistone

Perfect

5 posted on 09/18/2007 9:42:52 AM PDT by wastedyears (George Orwell was a clairvoyant.)
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To: Philistone
You have named your post “Hillary's World”.
6 posted on 09/18/2007 9:43:21 AM PDT by OKIEDOC (Kalifornia, a red state wannabe. I don't take Ex Lax I just read the New York Times.)
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To: Philistone

This is a sorry thread.....

7 posted on 09/18/2007 9:44:08 AM PDT by caver (Yes, I did crawl out of a hole in the ground.)
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To: usmcobra
In sort you’re just plain sorry.

Or more properly, "In Collate, You're just plain sorry."
8 posted on 09/18/2007 9:44:12 AM PDT by w1andsodidwe (Jimmy Carter allowed radical Islam to get a foothold in Iran.)
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To: Philistone

I’m sorry that life has left you so bitter and angry. That doesn’t mean you I have to wallow around in the anger with you. I choose to make my life the best I can, while ignoring those that disagree with me. Mostly, I choose to not be bitter.

9 posted on 09/18/2007 9:44:18 AM PDT by SoftballMominVA (Never argue with an idiot. He will bring you down to his level and beat you with experience)
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To: Badeye
You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one.

But he does have a right of protection against unreasonable search and/or seizure...
10 posted on 09/18/2007 9:44:42 AM PDT by Snardius
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To: Philistone
I'm sorry that your homeland is corrupt and your culture has no work ethic, but that doesn't give you the right to come here illegally and burden our schools and emergency rooms with your presence.

Amen, FRiend!
11 posted on 09/18/2007 9:44:47 AM PDT by Millee (Tagline free since 10/20/06)
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To: Philistone

Can I print this on another website?

12 posted on 09/18/2007 9:45:04 AM PDT by OCCASparky (Steely-Eyed Killer of the Deep)
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To: Philistone

Well put - too bad it won’t fit on a bumper sticker. Then again, most folks who need to read it don’t have the attention span anyway.

13 posted on 09/18/2007 9:45:35 AM PDT by ProfoundMan (Money is the mother's milk of politics but righteous indignation is the drug of choice.)
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To: Philistone
Nice little synopsis.

Too bad the intended recipients will hear everything before the word "but" and nothing after.
14 posted on 09/18/2007 9:46:07 AM PDT by Madame Dufarge
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To: Philistone

Well-done!!

15 posted on 09/18/2007 9:46:25 AM PDT by Former Dodger ( "Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." --Einstein)
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To: Philistone

“I’m sorry that the jocks stuffed you in your locker in high school, but that doesn’t give you the right to equate my President with Hitler.”

I laughed a the locker part, but it’s the 1A that gives them that right to run their mouths.

16 posted on 09/18/2007 9:46:35 AM PDT by Rb ver. 2.0 (Reunite Gondwanaland!)
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To: Badeye
But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.

Neither is walking down the street.
17 posted on 09/18/2007 9:47:34 AM PDT by ElkGroveDan (Take the wheel, Fred.)
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To: Badeye

“You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one. The others I tend to agree with. But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.”

I think he was talking about unreasonable searches, you know amendment four, not the ‘right’ to drive.

18 posted on 09/18/2007 9:48:12 AM PDT by CJ Wolf (Tagline space for rent. FRmail me for prices and terms and conditions. willing to barter...)
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To: Snardius; Badeye
Kinda’ like that Breathalyzer hidden in the HP’s flashlight?

Sticks it in the window as he says “Good evening folks” followed by “OK, who’s been drinking?”
19 posted on 09/18/2007 9:48:20 AM PDT by PeteB570 (Guns, what real men want for Christmas)
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To: Badeye

Has nothing to do with safety; it’s about the cops “showing” that they’re “doing something”, and about money — getting people on anything they can to generate revenue for the city or town. They could care less about you or your children.

20 posted on 09/18/2007 9:48:22 AM PDT by Clock King (Bring the noise!)
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To: Badeye
‘I’m sorry that your child was killed by a drunk driver, but that doesn’t give you the right to pull my car over at random and search me or it. ‘

You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one. The others I tend to agree with. But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.

Under common law you have a right to use your own property. We weakened that right by telling people that driving is a privilege. That still does not give you the right to use that property in an unsafe manner, as in being drunk. Just as the right to bear arms does not give you the right to shoot people.

Using your own car is a common law right we have given up.
21 posted on 09/18/2007 9:48:28 AM PDT by Dominick ("Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought." - JP II)
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To: Badeye

“You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive.”

When you are in possession of a valid license, you damn well DO have the right to drive. Nobody claimed that right was Constitutionally protected one. The Constitution does not grant rights, bud. It protects them.

22 posted on 09/18/2007 9:48:40 AM PDT by L98Fiero (A fool who'll waste his life, God rest his guts.)
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To: Badeye
You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one. The others I tend to agree with. But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.

Regardless, we still have a Constitutional protection from illegal search and seizure. . .
23 posted on 09/18/2007 9:48:55 AM PDT by Filo (Darwin was right!)
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To: Snardius

You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one.
But he does have a right of protection against unreasonable search and/or seizure...

Its not unreasonable, given when it occurs, and the number of dead each year as a direct result of drunk drivers, and the fact that driving is not a right.

24 posted on 09/18/2007 9:49:01 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: ElkGroveDan

But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.
Neither is walking down the street.

Hmmmm.

How many people die from drunk walkers?

25 posted on 09/18/2007 9:50:08 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: Badeye

Your right. Driving is not referred to in the Constitution; neither is abortion.

26 posted on 09/18/2007 9:50:11 AM PDT by mosaicwolf
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To: Badeye
You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one. The others I tend to agree with. But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.

No, but being secured in one's person, possessions, and papers against unreasonable search and seizure is a right. I don't give a damn if the car is on a public road. You don't forfeit your Constitutional rights when you start your car.
27 posted on 09/18/2007 9:50:11 AM PDT by JamesP81
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To: Badeye

He never claimed driving was a right.

28 posted on 09/18/2007 9:50:57 AM PDT by packrat35 (PIMP my Senate. They're all a bunch of whores anyway!)
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To: Philistone
I am sorry that Bush is bringing in so many Muslims to this Christian country. He is Balkanizing the United States. The future does not look bright. The man destroyed the USA.
29 posted on 09/18/2007 9:52:19 AM PDT by GinaLolaB
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To: Philistone
I'm sorry that your lack of intelligence and attention through high school and college left you fit only for a job as a public school teacher

Come on that's overstating things a bit no? There are more than a few public school teachers here.
30 posted on 09/18/2007 9:52:22 AM PDT by Borges
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To: Badeye
How many people die from drunk walkers? You are changing the subject. The question was regarding forms of travel that are specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
31 posted on 09/18/2007 9:52:56 AM PDT by ElkGroveDan (Take the wheel, Fred.)
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To: Badeye
Its not unreasonable, given when it occurs,

If he doesn't have a warrant, or really strong probable cause, it's unreasonable. Random stops and searches are illegal. Period.
32 posted on 09/18/2007 9:53:00 AM PDT by JamesP81
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To: Badeye

“Its not unreasonable, given when it occurs, and the number of dead each year as a direct result of drunk drivers, and the fact that driving is not a right.”

Sorry but you are wrong, when it’s a random stop with no probable cause it’s wrong.

33 posted on 09/18/2007 9:53:16 AM PDT by CJ Wolf (Tagline space for rent. FRmail me for prices and terms and conditions. willing to barter...)
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To: CJ Wolf

“You don’t have a ‘right’ to drive. Sorry, your just wrong about this one. The others I tend to agree with. But driving is not a ‘right’ under any interpretation of the Constitution.”

I think he was talking about unreasonable searches, you know amendment four, not the ‘right’ to drive.

Given the stats related to the percentage of drivers drunk at very specific times (after 11PM any day of the week) its not ‘unreasonable’.

And I think the courts have ruled along this line repeatedly when its been challenged.

Disclaimer; One of my childhood friends, who was to be in my wedding party as an usher was killed by a drunk driver.

While sitting on his COUCH in his LIVING ROOM.

Hence, I’m a bit hardcore about drunk driving. Its my personal belief the third time your caught driving drunk, the state should surgically remove your eyesight to protect the rest of us.

Yes, I know its Draconian. Then again, I held my friends six month old daughter while we buried him...

34 posted on 09/18/2007 9:53:26 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: Froufrou

Ping

35 posted on 09/18/2007 9:54:09 AM PDT by JamesP81
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To: Badeye

Any search without reasonable suspicion that the individual targeted is guilty IS UNREASONABLE. WAYR?

36 posted on 09/18/2007 9:54:12 AM PDT by American_Centurion (No, I don't trust the government to automatically do the right thing.)
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To: Philistone

I have grown sick of the “ its for the children “ crap

because that is all it is, crap

37 posted on 09/18/2007 9:54:20 AM PDT by sure_fine ( • not one to over kill the thought process)
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To: Philistone

For most of a lot of those things, I’m glad.

38 posted on 09/18/2007 9:54:51 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (NYT Headline: Protocols of the Learned Elders of CBS: Fake but Accurate, Experts Say)
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To: Philistone

Excellent points, all of them. I didn’t care for the tone though. Saying, “I’m sorry that, but” 30 times in a row leaves me with the impression that you’re not really sorry, you’re just being sarcastic. I’m not saying that to flame you, it’s just my gut reaction.

39 posted on 09/18/2007 9:55:42 AM PDT by highimpact (Abortion - [n]: human sacrifice at the altar of convenience.)
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To: Philistone

I’m sorry that your husband was killed on the Long Island Railroad by an insane Colin Ferguson, but that doesn’t give you the right to take away my guns and therefore make me as vunerable as your husband was on the train.

40 posted on 09/18/2007 9:56:59 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
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To: JamesP81

Its not unreasonable, given when it occurs,

If he doesn’t have a warrant, or really strong probable cause, it’s unreasonable. Random stops and searches are illegal. Period.

No problem you holding a personal opinion like that. The courts have said otherwise, repeatedly.

I’m happy with those rulings. We kill more in a single year due to idiots driving drunk than we’ve lost since 9/11 in the war...by quite a bit actually.

41 posted on 09/18/2007 9:57:37 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: Philistone
Bush’s father instituted the “war on drugs” therefore suspending all of our rights not to be searched and set up for that matter. The best bet is to get off the streets by 9 pm and stay inside and lap up CNN and eat Chinese wheat glutton and get fat.
42 posted on 09/18/2007 9:58:25 AM PDT by GinaLolaB
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To: Badeye

The number of people who are actually killed by drunk drivers each year is very small. And I am not talking about “alcohol related fatalities.” All this Government hysteria is not justified.

43 posted on 09/18/2007 9:58:31 AM PDT by Enterprise (Those who "betray us" also "Betray U.S." They're called DEMOCRATS!)
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To: CJ Wolf

‘Sorry but you are wrong, when it’s a random stop with no probable cause it’s wrong.’

In your opinion. In the real world, its law thats been affirmed repeatedly.

44 posted on 09/18/2007 9:58:38 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: Badeye

Random searches cannot be reasonable, as there is no probable cause.

And I would argue that driving IS a right, by the way.

45 posted on 09/18/2007 9:58:52 AM PDT by Sloth (You being wrong & me being closed-minded are not mutually exclusive.)
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To: Philistone

I like turtles.

46 posted on 09/18/2007 9:59:45 AM PDT by isom35
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To: Enterprise

‘The number of people who are actually killed by drunk drivers each year is very small.’

Really? Whats the total?

Second question. How many is ‘enough’ for you?

47 posted on 09/18/2007 10:01:00 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: Badeye

One can drink. One can drive. But it’s incredibly stupid to do them at the same time.

48 posted on 09/18/2007 10:01:25 AM PDT by auboy
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To: Sloth

‘Random searches cannot be reasonable, as there is no probable cause.’

I think the statistics available undermine this claim. Just my opinion.

‘And I would argue that driving IS a right, by the way.’

Sorry, thats established fact that it is not a ‘right’ by court precedent.

49 posted on 09/18/2007 10:02:21 AM PDT by Badeye (You know its a kook site when they ban the word 'kook')
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To: highimpact
Excellent points, all of them. I didn’t care for the tone though. Saying, “I’m sorry that, but” 30 times in a row leaves me with the impression that you’re not really sorry, you’re just being sarcastic. I’m not saying that to flame you, it’s just my gut reaction.

Well there may have been just the slightest tad bit of sarcasm in there... ;-)
50 posted on 09/18/2007 10:02:33 AM PDT by Philistone (Your existence as a non-believer offends the Prophet(MPBUH).)
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September 13, 2007, 5:00 a.m.

Keep ’Em Out
Higher education has been oversold.

By George Leef

In one of his New York Times columns earlier this year, David Brooks lamented that “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.” Brooks, like many spokesmen for the higher-education establishment, worries that the United States is falling behind in the international race for brainpower.

That is why we keep hearing politicians talk about the need to stimulate a higher rate of college attendance and completion. We’re in a global “knowledge economy,” and whereas America used to be tops in the percentage of workers with college degrees, we have now fallen behind a number of other nations. At a big education conference I attended back in February, former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt called this situation “scary.”

Sorry, scaremongers, but there is nothing to worry about. If anything, America now puts too many students into college, and we certainly don’t need any new subsidies to get more there.

Here are my reasons for holding that contrarian view.

First, it isn’t true that the economy is undergoing some dramatic shift to “knowledge work” that can only be performed by people who have college educations. When we hear that more and more jobs “require” a college degree, that isn’t because most of them are so technically demanding that an intelligent high school graduate couldn’t learn to do the work. Rather, what it means is that more employers are using educational credentials as a screening mechanism. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield write in their book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, “the United States has become the most rigidly credentialized society in the world. A B.A. is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four.”

Second, the needless pressure to get educational credentials draws a large number of academically weak and intellectually disengaged students into college. All they want is the piece of paper that gets them past the screening. Most schools have quietly lowered their academic standards so that such students will stay happy and remain enrolled. Consequently, they seldom learn much — many employers complain that college graduates they hire can’t even write a coherent sentence — but most eventually get their degrees.

Third, due to the overselling of higher education, we find substantial numbers of college graduates taking “high school” jobs like retail sales. It’s not that there is anything wrong with well-educated clerks or truck drivers, but to a great extent college is no longer about providing a solid, rounded education. The courses that once were the pillars of the curriculum, such as history, literature, philosophy, and fine arts, have been watered down and are usually optional. Sadly, college education is now generally sold as a stepping stone to good employment rather than as an intellectually broadening experience. Sometimes it manages to do both, but often it does neither.

Fourth, it’s a mistake to assume that the traditional college setting is the best or only way for people to learn the things they need to know in order to become successful workers. On-the-job training, self-directed studies, and courses taken with a particular end in mind (such as those offered in fields like accounting or finance at proprietary schools) usually lead to much more educational gain than do courses taken just because they fill degree requirements.

“But wait,” I hear readers saying, “isn’t it true that people with college degrees earn far more than people with only high-school diplomas?”

That is true on average — an average composed to a large degree of very bright and ambitious people who would be successful with or without a college degree, and also of people who earned their degrees decades ago when the curriculum and academic standards were more rigorous. It simply doesn’t follow that every person we might lure into college today is going to enjoy a great boost in lifetime earnings just because he manages to stick it out through enough courses to graduate. The sad reality is that we now find many young people who have spent years in college and have piled up sizeable debts serving up Starbucks coffee or delivering pizza for Papa John’s.

A perennial trope among politicians is that more education will make everyone better off. Having a more efficient educational system — one that taught the three Rs well in eight years rather than poorly in 16 — would indeed be a benefit. Simply putting a higher percentage of our young people into college, however, makes just as much sense as spreading more fertilizer on a field that’s already been over-fertilized.

— George Leef is the director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and a blogger at NRO’s “Phi Beta Cons.”
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGY0NmY3MzMzOWU1NDZmYmE0MTE0NGJkZGVmYzNiZWU=

Lest we forget that freedom is not free and that you CAN'T get something for nothing:


No 'Health Care'?
By Thomas Sowell
September 4, 2007

During the first 30 years of my life, I had no health insurance. Neither did a lot of other people, back in those days.

During those 30 years, I had a broken arm, a broken jaw, a badly injured shoulder, and miscellaneous other medical problems. To say that my income was below average during those years would be a euphemism.

How did I manage? The same way everybody else managed: I went to doctors and I paid them directly, instead of paying indirectly through taxes.

This was all before politicians gave us the idea that the things we could not afford individually we could somehow afford collectively through the magic of government.

When my jaw was broken, I was treated in an emergency room and was given a bill for $50 -- which was like a king's ransom to me at the time, 1949. But I paid it off in installments over a period of months.

Like most young people, I was lucky enough not to have any heavy-duty medical expenses that would have required major operations or a long hospital stay.

That is still true for most young people today, which is why many people in their twenties do not choose to pay for medical insurance, even when they can afford it.

They know that, in an emergency, they can always go to an emergency room. And today the idea that you ought to pay for that out of your own pocket is considered almost quaint in some quarters.

It is not uncommon -- especially in California, with its large illegal immigrant population -- for hospitals to have to shut down because so few people pay for the emergency room care they receive.

There are, of course, people with huge medical bills that they cannot possibly pay. Believe it or not, that also happened back before the modern welfare state.

Some hospitals -- whether public or private -- could absorb such costs, with the help of donors. There were people with polio living in iron lungs, which is why rich and poor alike gave money to the March of Dimes.

But that is very different from hospitals being stiffed every day by emergency room users whose only emergency is that they want to keep their money to spend on fun, instead of on doctors.

The biggest of the big lies in the "health care" hype is that a lack of insurance means a lack of medical care. The second biggest lie is that health care and medical care are the same thing.

Doctors cannot stop you from ruining your health in a hundred different ways, so statistics on everything from infant mortality to AIDS are not proof of a need for government to take over medical treatment.

Few people show the slightest interest in what has actually happened in countries with government-controlled medical care.

We are apparently supposed to follow those countries' example without asking about the months that people in those countries spend on waiting lists for medical treatments that Americans get just by picking up a phone and making an appointment.

It is amazing how many people seem uninterested in such things as why so many doctors in Britain are from Third World countries with lower medical standards -- or why people from Canada come to the United States for medical treatment that they could get cheaper at home.

Government price controls on pharmaceutical drugs are more of the same illusion of something for nothing.

People who are urging us to follow other countries that control the prices of medications seem uninterested in the fact that those countries depend on the United States to create new drugs, after they destroyed incentives to do so in their own countries.

Since it takes more than a decade to create a new drug, a politician can be elected president by hyping price controls on drugs, spend eight years in the White House, and be living in retirement before people start to notice that we no longer get the kinds of new medications that successively conquered deadly diseases in the past.

---------

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

--------------------

Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

For those of you Bush haters let me refresh your memory about the real criminal and liar in the White House; X42:


The Progressive Review

This list was compiled at the end of the Clinton administration. It was last partially updated in 2000

Our Clinton Scandal Index

The Clintons, to adapt a line from Dr. Johnson, were not only corrupt, they were the cause of corruption in others. Yet seldom in America have so many come to excuse so much mendacity and malfeasance as during the Clinton years. Here are some of the facts that have been buried.

RECORDS SET

- The only president ever impeached on grounds of personal malfeasance
- Most number of convictions and guilty pleas by friends and associates*
- Most number of cabinet officials to come under criminal investigation
- Most number of witnesses to flee country or refuse to testify
- Most number of witnesses to die suddenly
- First president sued for sexual harassment.
- First president accused of rape.
- First first lady to come under criminal investigation
- Largest criminal plea agreement in an illegal campaign contribution case
- First president to establish a legal defense fund.
- First president to be held in contempt of court
- Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions
- Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions from abroad
- First president disbarred from the US Supreme Court and a state court

* According to our best information, 40 government officials were indicted or convicted in the wake of Watergate. A reader computes that there was a total of 31 Reagan era convictions, including 14 because of Iran-Contra and 16 in the Department of Housing & Urban Development scandal. 47 individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine were convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes with 33 of these occurring during the Clinton administration itself. There were in addition 61 indictments or misdemeanor charges. 14 persons were imprisoned. A key difference between the Clinton story and earlier ones was the number of criminals with whom he was associated before entering the White House.

Using a far looser standard that included resignations, David R. Simon and D. Stanley Eitzen in Elite Deviance, say that 138 appointees of the Reagan administration either resigned under an ethical cloud or were criminally indicted. Curiously Haynes Johnson uses the same figure but with a different standard in “Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years: “By the end of his term, 138 administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever.”

STARR-RAY INVESTIGATION

- Number of Starr-Ray investigation convictions or guilty pleas (including one governor, one associate attorney general and two Clinton business partners): 14
- Number of Clinton Cabinet members who came under criminal investigation: 5
- Number of Reagan cabinet members who came under criminal investigation: 4
- Number of top officials jailed in the Teapot Dome Scandal: 3

CRIME STATS

- Number of individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes: 47
- Number of these convictions during Clinton’s presidency: 33
- Number of indictments/misdemeanor charges: 61
- Number of congressional witnesses who have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, fled the country to avoid testifying, or (in the case of foreign witnesses) refused to be interviewed: 122

SMALTZ INVESTIGATION

- Guilty pleas and convictions obtained by Donald Smaltz in cases involving charges of bribery and fraud against former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and associated individuals and businesses: 15
- Acquitted or overturned cases (including Espy): 6
- Fines and penalties assessed: $11.5 million
- Amount Tyson Food paid in fines and court costs: $6 million

CAMPAIGN FINANCE INVESTIGATION

- As of June 2000, the Justice Department listed 25 people indicted and 19 convicted because of the 1996 Clinton-Gore fundraising scandals.
- According to the House Committee on Government Reform in September 2000, 79 House and Senate witnesses asserted the Fifth Amendment in the course of investigations into Gore’s last fundraising campaign.
-James Riady entered a plea agreement to pay an $8.5 million fine for campaign finance crimes. This was a record under campaign finance laws.

CLINTON MACHINE CRIMES FOR WHICH CONVICTIONS WERE OBTAINED

Drug trafficking (3), racketeering, extortion, bribery (4), tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement (2), fraud (12), conspiracy (5), fraudulent loans, illegal gifts (1), illegal campaign contributions (5), money laundering (6), perjury, obstruction of justice.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

- Number of independent counsel inquiries since the 1978 law was passed: 19
- Number that have produced indictments: 7
- Number that produced more convictions than the Starr investigation: 1
- Median length of investigations that led to convictions: 44 months
- Length of Starr-Ray investigation: 69 months.
- Total cost of the Starr investigation (3/00) $52 million
- Total cost of the Iran-Contra investigation: $48.5 million
- Total cost to taxpayers of the Madison Guarantee failure: $73 million

OTHER MATTERS INVESTIGATED BY SPECIAL PROSECUTORS AND CONGRESS, OR REPORTED IN THE MEDIA

Bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury, intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses, obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug abuse, improper acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, improper futures trading, murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, inviting drug traffickers, foreign agents and participants in organized crime to the White House.

ARKANSAS ALTZHEIMER’S

Number of times that Clinton figures who testified in court or before Congress said that they didn’t remember, didn’t know, or something similar.

Bill Kennedy 116
Harold Ickes 148
Ricki Seidman 160
Bruce Lindsey 161
Bill Burton 191
Mark Gearan 221
Mack McLarty 233
Neil Egglseston 250
Hillary Clinton 250
John Podesta 264
Jennifer O’Connor 343
Dwight Holton 348
Patsy Thomasson 420
Jeff Eller 697

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES: In the portions of President Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition that have been made public in the Paula Jones case, his memory failed him 267 times. This is a list of his answers and how many times he gave each one.

I don’t remember - 71
I don’t know - 62
I’m not sure - 17
I have no idea - 10
I don’t believe so - 9
I don’t recall - 8
I don’t think so - 8
I don’t have any specific recollection - 6
I have no recollection - 4
Not to my knowledge - 4
I just don’t remember - 4
I don’t believe - 4
I have no specific recollection - 3
I might have - 3
I don’t have any recollection of that - 2 I don’t have a specific memory - 2
I don’t have any memory of that - 2
I just can’t say - 2
I have no direct knowledge of that - 2
I don’t have any idea - 2
Not that I recall - 2
I don’t believe I did - 2
I can’t remember - 2
I can’t say - 2
I do not remember doing so - 2
Not that I remember - 2
I’m not aware - 1
I honestly don’t know - 1
I don’t believe that I did - 1
I’m fairly sure - 1
I have no other recollection - 1
I’m not positive - 1
I certainly don’t think so - 1
I don’t really remember - 1
I would have no way of remembering that - 1
That’s what I believe happened - 1
To my knowledge, no - 1
To the best of my knowledge - 1
To the best of my memory - 1
I honestly don’t recall - 1
I honestly don’t remember - 1
That’s all I know - 1
I don’t have an independent recollection of that - 1
I don’t actually have an independent memory of that - 1
As far as I know - 1
I don’t believe I ever did that - 1
That’s all I know about that - 1
I’m just not sure - 1
Nothing that I remember - 1
I simply don’t know - 1
I would have no idea - 1
I don’t know anything about that - 1
I don’t have any direct knowledge of that - 1
I just don’t know - 1
I really don’t know - 1
I can’t deny that, I just — I have no memory of that at all - 1

ARKANSAS SUDDEN DEATH SYNDROME

- Number of persons in the Clinton machine orbit who are alleged to have committed suicide: 9
- Number known to have been murdered: 12
- Number who died in plane crashes: 6
- Number who died in single car automobile accidents: 3
- Number of one-person sking fatalities: 1
- Number of key witnesses who have died of heart attacks while in federal custody under questionable circumstances: 1
- Number of unexplained deaths: 4
- Total suspicious deaths: 46
- Number of northern Mafia killings during peak years of 1968-78: 30
- Number of Dixie Mafia killings during same period: 156

It is important in considering these fatal incidents to bear in mind the following:

The fact that anomalies need to be investigated further carries no presumption of how a death actually occurred, only that there remain serious questions that require answers.

The possibility of foul play must be taken seriously in a major criminal conspiracy in which over two score individuals and firms have been convicted and over 100 witnesses have pled the Fifth Amendment or fled the country.

If foul play did occur in any of these cases, that fact by itself does not carry the presumption that the the Clinton machine was involved. Given the footprints of organized crime, drug trade, foreign espionage, and intelligence agencies on the trail of the Clinton story, such a assumption would not be warranted. It is also well to keep in mind the classic prohibition era movie in which the corrupt poitician’s job was not to engage in illegal acts but to avoid noticing them.
ARKANSAS MONEY MANAGEMENT

- Amount of an alleged electronic transfer from the Arkansas Development Financial Authority to a bank in the Cayman Islands during 1980s: $50 million
- Grand Cayman’s population: 18,000
- Number of commercial banks: 570
- Number of bank regulators: 1
- Amount Arkansas state pension fund invested in high-risk repos in the mid-80s in one purchase in April 1985: $52 million through the Worthen Bank.
- Number of days thereafter that the state’s brokerage firm went belly up: 3
- Amount Arkansas pension fund dropped overnight as a result: 15%
- Percent of Worthen bank that Mochtar Riady bought over the next four months to bail out the bank and the then governor, Bill Clinton: 40%.
- Percent of purchasers from the Clintons and McDougals of resort lots who lost the land because of the sleazy financing provisions: over 50%

THE MEDIA

- Number of journalists covering Whitewater who have been fired, transferred off the beat, resigned or otherwise gotten into trouble because of their work on the scandals (Doug Frantz, Jim Wooten, Richard Behar, Christopher Ruddy, Michael Isikoff, David Eisenstadt, Yinh Chan, Jonathan Broder, James R. Norman, Zoh Hieronimus): 10

FRIENDS OF BILL

- Number of times John Huang took the 5th Amendment in answer to questions during a Judicial Watch deposition: 1,000
- Visits made to the White House by investigation subjects Johnny Chung, James Riady, John Huang, and Charlie Trie. 160
- Number of campaign contributors who got overnights at the White House in the two years before the 1996 election: 577
- Number of members of Thomas Boggs’s law firm who have held top positions in the Clinton administration. 18
- Number of times John Huang was briefed by CIA: 37
- Number of calls Huang made from Commerce Department to Lippo banks: 261
- Number of intelligence reports Huang read while at Commerce Department: 500

UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA

- FBI files misappropriated by the White House: c. 900
- Estimated number of witnesses quoted in FBI files misappropriated by the White House: 18,000
- Number of witnesses who developed medical problems at critical points in Clinton scandals investigation (Tucker, Hale, both McDougals, Lindsey): 5
- Problem areas listed in a memo by Clinton’s own lawyer in preparation for the president’s defense: 40
- Number of witnesses and critics of Clinton subjected to IRS audit: 45
- Number of names placed in a White House secret database without the knowledge of those named: c. 200,000
- Number of women involved with Clinton who claim to have been physically threatened (Sally Perdue, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Juantia Broaddrick): 6
- Number of men involved in the Clinton scandals who have been beaten up or claimed to have been intimidated: 10

THE HIDDEN ELECTION

USA Today calls it “the hidden election,” in which nearly 7,000 state legislative seats are decided with only minimal media and public attention. But there was an important national story here: evidence of the disaster that Bill Clinton was for the Democratic Party. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Democrats held a 1,542 seat lead in the state bodies in 1990. As of 1998 that lead had shrunk to 288. That’s a loss of over 1,200 state legislative seats, nearly all of them under Clinton. Across the US, the Democrats controled only 65 more state senate seats than the Republicans.

Further, in 1992, the Democrats controlled 17 more state legislatures than the Republicans. After 1998, the Republicans controlled one more than the Democrats. Not only was this a loss of 9 legislatures under Clinton, but it was the first time since 1954 that the GOP had controlled more state legislatures than the Democrats (they tied in 1968).

Here’s what happened to the Democrats under Clinton, based on our latest figures:

- GOP seats gained in House since Clinton became president: 48
- GOP seats gained in Senate since Clinton became president: 8
- GOP governorships gained since Clinton became president: 11
- GOP state legislative seats gained since Clinton became president: 1,254
as of 1998
- State legislatures taken over by GOP since Clinton became president: 9
- Democrat officeholders who have become Republicans since Clinton became
president: 439 as of 1998
- Republican officeholders who have become Democrats since Clinton became president: 3

THE CLINTON LEGACY: LONELY VOICES

Here are some of the all too rare public officials, reporters, and others who spoke truth to the dismally corrupt power of Bill and Hill Clinton’s political machine — some at risk to their careers, others at risk to their lives. A few points to note:

- Those corporatist media reporters who attempted to report the story often found themselves muzzled; some even lost their jobs. The only major dailies that consistently handled the story well were the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

- Nobody on this list has gotten rich and many you may not have even heard of. Taking on the Clintons typically has not been a happy or rewarding experience. At least ten reporters were fired, transferred off their beats, resigned, or otherwise got into trouble because of their work on the scandals.

- Contrary to the popular impression, the politics of those listed ranges from the left to the right, and from the ideological to the independent.

PUBLIC OFFICIALS

MIGUEL RODRIGUEZ was a prosecutor on the staff of Kenneth Starr. His attempts to uncover the truth in the Vincent Foster death case were repeatedly foiled and he was the subject of planted stories undermining his credibility and implying that he was unstable. Rodriguez eventually resigned.

JEAN DUFFEY: Head of a joint federal-county drug task force in Arkansas. Her first instructions from her boss: “Jean, you are not to use the drug task force to investigate any public official.” Duffey’s work, however, led deep into the heart of the Dixie Mafia, including members of the Clinton machine and the investigation of the so-called “train deaths.” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports that when she produced a star witness who could testify to Clinton’s involvement with cocaine, the local prosecuting attorney, Dan Harmon issued a subpoena for all the task force records, including “the incriminating files on his own activities. If Duffey had complied it would have exposed 30 witnesses and her confidential informants to violent retributions. She refused.” Harmon issued a warrant for her arrest and friendly cops told her that there was a $50,000 price on her head. She eventually fled to Texas. The once-untouchable Harmon was later convicted of racketeering, extortion and drug dealing.

BILL DUNCAN: An IRS investigator in Arkansas who drafted some 30 federal indictments of Arkansas figures on money laundering and other charges. Clinton biographer Roger Morris quotes a source who reviewed the evidence: “Those indictments were a real slam dunk if there ever was one.” The cases were suppressed, many in the name of “national security.” Duncan was never called to testify. Other IRS agents and state police disavowed Duncan and turned on him. Said one source, “Somebody outside ordered it shut down and the walls went up.”

RUSSELL WELCH: An Arkansas state police detective working with Duncan. Welch developed a 35-volume, 3,000 page archive on drug and money laundering operations at Mena. His investigation was so compromised that a high state police official even let one of the targets of the probe look through the file. At one point, Welch was sprayed in the face with poison, later identified by the Center for Disease Control as anthrax. He would write in his diary, “I feel like I live in Russia, waiting for the secret police to pounce down. A government has gotten out of control. Men find themselves in positions of power and suddenly crimes become legal.” Welch is no longer with the state police.

DAN SMALTZ: Smaltz did an outstanding job investigating and prosecuting charges involving illegal payoffs to Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, yet was treated with disparaging and highly inaccurate reporting by the likes of the David Broder and the NY Times. Espy was acquitted under a law that made it necessary to not only prove that he accepted gratuities but that he did something specific in return. On the other hand, Tyson Foods copped a plea in the same case, paying $6 million in fines and serving four years’ probation. The charge: that Tyson had illegally offered Espy $12,000 in airplane rides, football tickets and other payoffs. In the Espy investigation, Smaltz obtained 15 convictions and collected over $11 million in fines and civil penalties. Offenses for which convictions were obtained included false statements, concealing money from prohibited sources, illegal gratuities, illegal contributions, falsifying records, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering, and illegal receipt of USDA subsidies. In addition, Janet Reno blocked Smaltz from pursuing leads aimed at allegations of major drug trafficking in Arkansas and payoffs to the then governor of the state, WJ Clinton. Espy had become Ag secretary only after being flown to Arkansas to get the approval of chicken king Don Tyson.

DAVID SCHIPPERS was House impeachment counsel and a Chicago Democrat. He did a highly creditable job but since he didn’t fit the right-wing conspiracy theory, the Clintonista media downplayed his work. Thus most Americans don’t know that he told Newsmax, “Let me tell you, if we had a chance to put on a case, I would have put live witnesses before the committee. But the House leadership, and I’m not talking about Henry Hyde, they just killed us as far as time was concerned. I begged them to let me take it into this year. Then I screamed for witnesses before the Senate. But there was nothing anybody could do to get those Senators to show any courage. They told us essentially, you’re not going to get 67 votes so why are you wasting our time.” Schippers also said that while a number of representatives had looked at additional evidence kept under seal in a nearby House building, not a single senator did.

JOHN CLARKE: When Patrick Knowlton stopped to relieve himself in Ft. Marcy Park 70 minutes before the discovery of Vince Foster’s body, he saw things that got him into deep trouble. His interview statements were falsified and prior to testifying he claims he was overtly harassed by more than a score of men in a classic witness intimidation technique. In some cases there were witnesses. John Clarke was his dogged lawyer in the witness intimidation case that was largely ignored by the media, even when the three-judge panel overseeing the Starr investigation permitted Knowlton to append a 20 page addendum to the Starr Report.

OTHER

THE ARKANSAS COMMITTEE: What would later be known as the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy actually began on the left - as a group of progressive students at the University of Arkansas had formed the Arkansas Committee to look into Mena, drugs, money laundering, and Arkansas politics. This committee was the source of some of the important early Clinton stories including those published in the Progressive Review.

CLINTON ADMINISTRATION SCANDALS E-LIST: Moderated by Ray Heizer, this list was subject to all the idiosyncrasies of Internet bulletin boards, but nonetheless proved invaluable to researchers and journalists.

JOURNALISTS

JERRY SEPER of the Washington Times was far and away the best beat reporter of the story, handling it week after week in the best tradition of investigative journalism. If other reporters had followed Seper’s lead, the history of the Clintons’ machine might have been quite different.

AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD of the London Telegraph did a remarkable job of digging into some of the seamiest tales from Arkansas and the Clinton past. Other early arrivals on the scene were Alexander Cockburn and Jeff Gerth.

CHRISTOPHER RUDDY, among other fine reports on the Clinton scandals, did the best job laying out the facts in the Vince Foster death case.

ROGER MORRIS AND SALLY DENTON wrote a major expose of events at Mena, but at the last moment the Washington Post’s brass ordered the story killed. It was published by Penthouse and later included in Morris’ “Partners in Power,” the best biography of the Clintons.

OTHERS who helped get parts of the story out included reporters Philip Weiss, Carl Limbacher, Wes Phelan, David Bresnahan, William Sammon, Liza Myers, Mara Leveritt, Matt Drudge, Jim Ridgeway, Nat Hentoff, Michael Isikoff, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Kelly. Also independent investigator Hugh Sprunt and former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich.

SAM SMITH of the Progressive Review wrote the first book (Shadows of Hope, University of Indiana Press, 1994) deconstructing the Clinton myth. The Review provided extensive coverage of the topic.

THREAT MONITOR
Finding malware on your Windows box (using the command line)

Ed Skoudis
08.16.2007
Rating: -4.62- (out of 5)


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I hope that headline doesn't scare you. A lot of people shun the Windows command line in favor of more complicated graphical user interfaces. But when it comes to investigating malware infections, various command-line tools can be incredibly helpful, since GUI-based tools can't always do the job.

Listen to Ed Skoudis's tip
Download Ed's command line tricks to your PC or favorite MP3 player.

First off, invoke a command prompt. Go to Start --> Run and type in 'cmd.exe.' Putting '.exe' at the end of the entry is important; it is a far safer way of bringing up a command prompt. To trick users, a malicious program might purposely be called 'cmd.com,' and in such a case, the malware would run if just 'cmd' were typed. Thus, go ahead and type 'cmd.exe' instead.

'netstat'
Next, with a command prompt going, run the netstat command and take a gander at the listening ports on your systems. A lot of people know that 'netstat –na' can provide a list of TCP and UDP ports on the machine. Adding an 'o' to the command arguments can reveal the process ID of each process using a port. And, starting with XP SP2, an added 'b' flag will show the EXE name using each port, along with the dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that it has loaded to communicate with the network. Beware of the 'b,' however. The function can chew up some serious CPU time, tying up between 60% and 100% of your processor for up to a minute.

But, wait, there is more. Suppose you want to look at port usage and see how it changes over time. Adding a space and then an integer to that netstat command, as in "netstat –nao 1", will run the command with a frequency equivalent to the integer, in this case, for every one second. The display will be dumped on the screen continuously, as shown below.

[NAO]

For more information
In our Intrusion Defense School, learn other ways to catch Windows malware.

How good is Windows Vista virus protection? Peter H. Gregory explains.

Learn how certain antimalware tools use the command line to update on demand.

Of course, to sift for malware that uses TCP and UDP ports, you need an idea of what a system's normal port usage should be. To research the ports that are in use on a box, try searching for specific ports in Google. Also, Microsoft has a list of common ports that are used by both Windows clients and servers . You can also research ports associated with both Microsoft and third-party applications, as well as official port assignment lists.

If an unusual TCP or UDP port is found to be in use, you might want to do a Google search. Use a "site:" directive that is associated with an antivirus company like Symantec, Sophos, or McAfee. The sites may have a write-up about malware that uses the given port. Here's an example of a helpful search query:

site:symantec.com tcp port 4444.

'reg'
A write-up from the antivirus vendor may give further insight into any registry keys that the malware may have altered. To query these registry keys at the command line, use the reg command. Even if the antivirus Web site doesn't provide any registry keys to look for, you may want to research the most common registry keys altered by malware: keys associated with system startup and user logon. Commonly known as the "run" registry keys, the reg command can help display their values at the command line. Please note that a lot of legitimate software activates itself using these keys. After running the command, you will discover items under these registry keys. Again, a few Google searches for what is displayed will help separate legitimate settings from malware.

C:\> reg query HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
C:\> reg query HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Runonce
C:\> reg query HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Runonce

I'd recommend running the commands an additional time, replacing HKLM with HKCU. The substitution will find user-centric auto-start registry keys, instead of just the system-wide settings under HKLM.

'dir'
It's also smart to check out the autostart folder for any unexpected programs starting from there. Run the familiar old dir command, using /A to display files with or without any attributes set, as well as hidden and unhidden files.

C:\> dir /A "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"

'net users' and 'localgroup administrators'
Some malware adds an account to the local machine. Therefore, it's important to run the command 'net users,' which checks for accounts defined on the system. Also, because some bots add an account to the local administrators group, make sure to run "localgroup administrators," which should check out this particular group's membership. Do you know all of the people in your administrators group? The figure below shows some sample output.

[localadministrators]

'tasklist /svc'
There is one more vital area to analyze: running processes. On Windows XP Professional, the tasklist command can provide a wealth of information. By itself, it shows running processes, their process ID numbers and memory usage. But running 'tasklist /svc' reveals all of the services running out of each process, as shown below. This provides more to search for when researching whether the investigated system may be infected with evil programs. In particular, the svchost.exe processes are usually quite busy, running many services. Spyware sometimes inserts additional services into these processes or others to monitor or control a machine surreptitiously.

[tasklist]

In the end, this handful of commands can provide deeper insight into the configuration of a Windows machine. But practice makes perfect. Spend time analyzing clean systems, so that you grow familiar with what is on a "normal" Windows machine. Then, you can become more sensitive to the weird stuff that malware may inject. With some preparation and practice, command-line skills will significantly improve your understanding of Windows machines and prepare you to battle boldly in the fight against malware.

About the author:
Ed Skoudis is a SANS instructor and a founder and senior security consultant with Intelguardians, a Washington, DC-based information security consulting firm. His expertise includes hacker attacks and defenses, the information security industry and computer privacy issues. In addition to Counter Hack Reloaded, Ed is also the author of Malware: Fighting Malicious Code. He was also awarded 2004, 2005 and 2006 Microsoft MVP awards for Windows Server Security, and is an alumnus of the Honeynet Project. As an expert on SearchSecurity.com, Ed answers your questions related to information security threats.

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After Iraq
By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Send an email to Thomas Sowell
"And then what?" That is the question which should be asked of those who are demanding that we pull out of Iraq now.

No candid answer should be expected from cynical politicians like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who have their bets riding big time on an American defeat in Iraq, as their ticket to winning the 2008 elections.


People examine the wreckage of a vehicle damaged when a suicide bomber detonated a truck wired with explosives near a Kurdish political party's offices, followed by two other car bomb blasts, in the northern city of Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 16, 2007. The coordinated attack, believed to be the deadliest in Kirkuk since the four-year Iraq conflict began, killed more than 80 people and wounded more than 150, police said. (AP Photo/Yahya Ahmed)
Related Media:
VIDEO: Halting Progress in Iraq; House Pushes Pullout
VIDEO: Bush Briefed on 'Grass Roots' Effort in Iraq

But that question should be answered by those who honestly and sincerely think that a troop pullout is the answer to the Iraq problem. What do they think will happen if we do?

That question is studiously avoided by those in politics and the media who urge pulling out.

Those who deal in talking points may believe, or claim to believe, that there will be no further repercussions. But those who have to confront the real world know that pulling out now is a formula for a bigger disaster than anything that has already happened in Iraq.

Should American troops stay in Iraq indefinitely?

Nobody has ever wanted that. Our whole history shows that American troops have repeatedly pulled out of countries around the world when wars ended and enough order was restored to turn the country over to its own people.

The political conflict today is between people who think that pulling out should depend on conditions in Iraq, as those conditions unfold, rather than on arbitrary timetables created by politicians with no military experience, and with a time horizon that extends no further than the 2008 elections.

Those who say that the Iraq war has nothing to do with the war on terror seem not to notice that the terrorists themselves obviously think otherwise.

Terrorists are pouring men and military equipment into Iraq, with the help of Iran, and using suicide bombers there for some reason.

Terrorists recognize the high stakes in the outcome of this war, even if growing numbers of people over here refuse to.

To drive the United States out of Iraq would be a huge victory for the terrorists, attracting both recruits and support from around the world, and causing countries around the world to reconsider their ties to the United States.

International cooperation is essential to thwarting and disrupting terrorist activities, through such things as intelligence sharing among nations and clampdowns on the international money flows that finance terrorist activities. continued...
But how many countries will continue to cooperate with the United States when they know that the terrorists are in this for the long haul, while the U.S. can abandon them to their fate at any moment, whenever it becomes politically expedient at home?

Terrorist or Iranian control of Iraq would give them enormous leverage with other countries in the Middle East, putting control of the oil that is the lifeblood of Western economies in the hands of implacable and ruthless enemies.


People examine the wreckage of a vehicle damaged when a suicide bomber detonated a truck wired with explosives near a Kurdish political party's offices, followed by two other car bomb blasts, in the northern city of Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 16, 2007. The coordinated attack, believed to be the deadliest in Kirkuk since the four-year Iraq conflict began, killed more than 80 people and wounded more than 150, police said. (AP Photo/Yahya Ahmed)
Related Media:
VIDEO: Halting Progress in Iraq; House Pushes Pullout
VIDEO: Bush Briefed on 'Grass Roots' Effort in Iraq

With more resources to finance more international terrorism, does anyone think the terrorists will spare the United States?

Much has been made of how long we have already stayed in Iraq, the casualties, and the mistakes that have been made. But both deaths and mistakes have always been inseparable from war.

As for how long we have been in Iraq, the cost of a war is not measured in time. It is measured in lives lost.

While our media are impatiently waiting for the 4,000th American death in Iraq that they can trumpet, and rub our noses in -- in the name of "honoring the troops" -- we need to understand that casualty rates in Iraq are low, as wars go.

If and when that 4,000th American death in Iraq is reached, we need to recall that more Marines than that were lost taking one island in the Pacific during World War II.

During the Civil War, more than twice as many Union soldiers as that were killed -- in one day -- at the battle of Shiloh, and again at Gettysburg.

The "war on terror" is a misleading phrase. It is the terrorists' war against us -- and it is not something that we can unilaterally call off. Our only choice is where to fight it, over there or over here.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.