Just so you don't get behind, here's your semi regular dose of Jacoby.  This particular topic has even come up here on this blog so here is Jacoby's take on it.

THE DOMINANT CLINTON
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe

Sunday, January 27, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     On the day a new president is inaugurated, the outgoing president traditionally keeps a low profile, slipping away quietly after the swearing-in and leaving the spotlight to his successor. Not Bill Clinton. His first order of post-presidential business on Jan. 20, 2001, was a 90-minute rally at Andrews Air Force Base, complete with honor guard and a 21-gun salute.

     "I left the White House, but I'm still here!" Clinton exultantly told the crowd. "We're not going anywhere!"

     Like most Americans, I was ready for the tawdry and tiring psychodrama that was the Clinton administration to finally be over. But something told me he wasn't being rhetorical.

     "He means it," I wrote at the time. "He *isn't* going anywhere. Yes, he packed his bags, zipped his pants, and turned the White House keys over to the new tenants -- but he's still here. There are more grotesqueries to come from our ex-president. There will be more truth-twisting, more money-grubbing, more scandal. Even out of office, he will find seamy new ways to degrade the presidency. Just wait."

     So here we are, seven years and one week later, and what do you know -- Clinton is back in the news, his angry rants and political attacks casting a shadow over the presidential campaign. Once again the only elected president to face an impeachment trial is generating waves of outrage and dismay. A Rip Van Winkle newly awakened from 10 years of slumber wouldn't be surprised to find Clinton under fire for spreading falsehoods and behaving disreputably. But he might do a double-take upon discovering that Clinton's critics now aren't Republicans. They are fellow Democrats and liberals recoiling from his attacks on Senator Barack Obama, who has had the effrontery to challenge Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.

     Last week, Clinton was blasted by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, an Obama supporter, for taking "glib cheap shots" that are "beneath the dignity of a former president." He was excoriated by Ed Schultz, the nation's top liberal radio talk host, for "lying about Barack Obama's record" and "embarrassing" the Democratic Party. Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who has endorsed Obama, warned that Clinton's "overt distortions" were "not presidential" and could "destroy the party" if not checked.

     A past chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party charged the Clintons with practicing the "politics of deception" and likened the former president to Lee Atwater, a Republican operative who became infamous for his ruthless political warfare.

     "The Clintons play dirty when they feel threatened," wrote William Greider in a scathing piece for The Nation, a leading journal of the left. "The recent roughing-up of Barack Obama was in the trademark style of the Clinton years in the White House. High-minded and self-important on the surface, smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard to the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four more years. The thought makes me queasy."

     What a pity that liberals and Democrats weren't as plainspoken about the Clintons' shamelessness and dishonesty back in the 1990s. In fairness, a few were: Former senator Bob Kerrey famously characterized Bill Clinton as "an unusually good liar -- unusually good," and Jesse Jackson once described him as "immune to shame," someone who at the core consisted of "absolutely nothing . . . nothing but an appetite.” But far too often the Clintons' habits of mendacity, anger, and self-pity, their constant blame-shifting, their stop-at-nothing pursuit of power were excused or minimized by the left.

     America's political culture might never have grown so embittered if Democrats then had been a little more outraged by the Clintons' lack of ethics and a little less zealous about demonizing those who criticized them.

     If recent weeks have made one thing clear, it is that the current Clinton campaign is as much about returning Bill to the White House as about making Hillary president.

     Bill Clinton's angry outbursts, his lack of self-control, his overpowering presence in the public arena are surely a preview of what a Clinton Restoration would be like. Hillary might be the president, but Bill would still be, as he has always been, the dominant Clinton. To whom would he be answerable in a second Clinton administration? Not to the woman whose political career is a derivative of his, that's for sure.

     Hillary likes to claim she is "running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling," but with Bill back in the White House, would it ever be clear just where the lines of authority really ran? What could possibly check and balance the extraconstitutional power of a presidential spouse who was also a former president? Anytime he wants it, Bill Clinton can have the spotlight. In a revived Clinton presidency, would he be content to remain in his wife's shadow? Or would she continue -- as she continues even now -- to be in his?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe.)

http://info.org.il/irreleva...

And pleeeeeeze folks.  Check with www.snopes.com before sending out any heart wrenching, outlandish, over the top emails.

But first..watch the video..it's a crack up.

Here is an interesting article about what an illegal immigrant (his description) who made something of himself despite his beginnings.

http://www.rd.com/content/i...

WHAT WOULD REAGAN SAY?

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, January 20, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     Running for president on a third-party ticket in 1968, George Wallace famously claimed that there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic nominees. Would anyone tuning in this year's crop of candidates say the same thing?

     Consider some recent sound bites:

• "You said we would fight for every job! You said that we would fight to get health care for all Americans! You said we'd fight to secure our border! You said we'd fight for us to be able to get lower taxes for middle-income Americans!" 
• "Guess what they're doing in Washington: They're worrying, because they realize, the lobbyists and the politicians realize, that America now understands that Washington is broken. And we're going to do something about it." 
• "Washington told us that they'd get us better health care and better education -- but they haven't. Washington told us they'd get us a tax break for the middle-income Americans -- but they haven't." 

     You don't have to be a political junkie to recognize those as specimens of populist Democratic boilerplate, right? The only challenge is to match each quotation to the Democratic candidate who said it.

     Except that no Democrat uttered those words. The three big-government platitudes above were taken from Republican Mitt Romney's Michigan primary victory speech on Tuesday.

     No one is surprised when Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards insists that it's the federal government's responsibility to "get us better health care and better education." Coming from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the claim that the Bush tax cuts shortchanged middle-income Americans is all too familiar. But from a Republican like Romney, who casts himself as the truest, most Reaganesque conservative in the GOP field?

     Romney's message used to be one of unabashed small-government conservatism: "Government is simply too big. State government is too big. The federal government is too big. It's spending too much." Those words still appear on his website, but there was nothing like them in his remarks last week. He told his supporters that Washington is broken and needs to be fixed -- which is decidedly not the same as saying it needs to be shrunk. Romney used to boast of the hundreds of spending line-items he vetoed as Massachusetts governor; "I like vetoes," he told audiences. But these days he's singing from a different hymnal.

     To be sure, Romney is hardly the only Republican candidate to distance himself from the gospel of less-intrusive, less-expensive government. Certainly no one would confuse Mike Huckabee -- who as Arkansas' governor raised taxes, hiked spending, and expanded state regulation -- with Barry Goldwater, the original "Mr. Conservative." And the man who succeeded Goldwater in the Senate, John McCain, is guilty of such big-government abominations as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and opposing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

     But it is Romney whose pitch has shifted the most as he (again) seems to be reinventing himself, this time as a government planner with more faith in the power of top-down federal intervention than in the innovations and efficiencies of the free market.

     In Detroit last week, Romney vowed to resurrect the moribund US auto industry - which has been declining for decades -- with massive corporate welfare and other government largesse. He derided as "baloney" McCain's blunt reality check that many auto manufacturing jobs are gone for good. He condemned "the absence of a federal policy designed to strengthen the US automotive sector," sounding for all the world as if he just stepped out of some 1970s statist time warp. He promised "a fivefold increase -- from $4 billion to $20 billion -- in our national investment in energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive technology." He called for "a Manhattan-style project, an Apollo-style project" to achieve that ever-beckoning chimera, energy independence.

     Whatever else it might be, this is not fiscal conservatism.

     "If I'm president of this country, I will roll up my sleeves in the first 100 days I'm in office, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, congressional, and state leaders, and together we will develop a plan to rebuild America's automotive leadership," Romney now says. "Washington should not be a benefactor, but it can and must be a partner."

     It must? That sure wasn't the Gipper's view.

     "What is euphemistically called government-corporate 'partnership' is just government coercion, political favoritism, collectivist industrial policy, and old-fashioned federal boondoggles nicely wrapped up in a bright-colored ribbon," President Reagan declared emphatically in 1988. "It doesn't work." Far more effective, he had learned, was when Washington "cut taxes, spending, and regulation, and got government out of the way and let free people create new jobs and businesses."

     Not a dime's worth of difference between the parties? Well, no, I wouldn't go that far. But it would be nice if Republicans who claim to be Reaganesque conservatives occasionally paused to ask themselves: What would Reagan say?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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larger view

Another Piece Of Bakersfield Skyline Gone

I was driving downtown last week and the first thing I noticed was that something was missing on 18^th Street.  The Far East Sign, one of the last of the old Bakersfield landmarks left....was gone.

One by one our colorful past is slowly disappearing and all we have left of our city are some pictures in a box.

It may be progress but sometimes I just don’t like progress.  And I say that while stomping my foot.

THE LANCET’S OUTLANDISH EXAGGERATION

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, January 13, 2008

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http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     Few medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister's principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey's Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

     So naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

     Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000. Iraq Body Count, a nonpartisan anti-war group that maintains a public database of the war’s victims, tallied some 45,000 Iraqi dead.  If The Lancet's number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the 2½ years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran.

     President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: "I don't consider it a credible report." Tony Blair's spokesman also brushed it off as "not . . . anywhere near accurate."

     But the media played it up, for the most part unquestioningly. "One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion," blared a front-page headline in the Guardian, a leading British paper. CNN.com's story began: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the US-led invasion, a new study reports." The CBS Evening News announced "a new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.... 655,000 Iraqis -- 2.5 percent of the entire population -- have died as a consequence of the war."

     Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR's Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, "Right before the election you're making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it's not politically motivated." Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: "There's no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers."

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     But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

     In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study's authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of "data-heaping" -- that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

     "They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication," Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

     Bad as the study's methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

Ø      Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, "spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004."

Ø      Coauthors Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the Iraq war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election. Roberts, a self-described "advocate" committed to "ending the war," even sought the Democratic nomination for New York's 24th Congressional District. "It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top," he told National Journal.

Ø      Lancet editor Richard Horton "also makes no secret of his leftist politics," Munro and Cannon write. At a September 2006 rally, he publicly denounced "this axis of Anglo-American imperialism" for causing "millions of people . . . to die in poverty and disease." Under Horton, The Lancet has increasingly been accused of shoddiness and sensationalism. In 2005, 30 leading British scientists blasted Horton's "desperate headline-seeking" and charged him with running "badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories."

     The claim that the US-led invasion of Iraq had triggered a slaughter of almost Rwandan proportions was a gross and outlandish exaggeration; it should have been greeted with extreme skepticism.  But because it served the interests of those eager to discredit the war as a moral catastrophe, common-sense standards were ignored. "In our view,” the Baltimore Sun editorialized, “the Hopkins study stands until someone knocks it down.”

     Now someone has, devastatingly. But will the debunking be trumpeted as loudly and clearly as the original report? Don't hold your breath.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

I found this in an old Readers Digest and the article is dated 1995.  I really related to it and thought I’d share it.

Condensed from Arizona Highways by Gene Perret.

Waiter From Hell

Remember when eating out was a relaxing experience?  Someone else cooked for you, served you, and cleaned up after you.  All you had to do wad chew, swallow, and pay.  No longer, though.  Today you feel like a laboratory rat who has to struggle through a maze every time it wants a chunk of cheese.

“Good Evening” the maitre d’ said.  “Table for four?”  “Yes, thank you.”

“Smoking or non?”

“Non smoking.”

“Would you prefer to dine indoors or outdoors this evening?”

“I guess indoors would be good.” 

“Very will sir” he said.  “Would you like to be seated in the main dining room, the enclosed patio, or our lovely atrium?”  “Uh, let me see…..uh…”    “I can give you a table with a lovely view in our lovely solarium.”

“I think the solarium would be lovely” I said.  We followed him there.

“Now, would you prefer a new overlooking the golf course, the sunset on the lake, or the majestic mountains to the west?”

“Whatever you recommend,” I said.  Let him make a decision for a change, I thought.

He sat us by a window facing the golf course, the lake or the mountains.  I couldn’t tell which because it was dark outside.

Then a young man better dressed and better looking than any of us presented himself at our table,  “Good evening, my name is Paul, and I’ll be your waiter this evening.  Would you like a few minutes before I take your order?”

“No” I said, “I’m just a meat and potatoes guy, so I’ll have the filet mignon and a baked potato.”

“Soup or salad?”

“Salad”

“We have a mixed green salad, hearts of palm, or a very fine endive salad with baby shrimp.”

“Just a mixed green salad, okay?”

“Whatever you say sir,  dressing?”

I didn’t want to make another decision.  “Whatever you’ve got will be fine.”

“We have creamy Italian, blue cheese, vinaigrette, Thousand Island, honey Dijon, ranch….”

“Just bring me one.  Surprise me.”

“Creamy Italian is our house specialty.  Would that be all right sir?”

“Yeah.”  I was curt.  I was done with civility.

“And your baked potato?”

I knew what was coming.  “I don’t want anything on it.”

“No butter ,  No sour cream?”

“No”

“No chives?”

 “No!  Don’t you understand English?” I shouted.  “I don’t want anything on it.   Just bring me a baked potato and a steak.”

“Would you prefer the six, eight, or 12 ounce steak, sir?”

“Whatever.”

“Would you like that rare, medium rare, medium, medium will, or well done?  Or, if you prefer, we can butterfly it for you.”

“Pauly boy,” I said. “You are really starting to get me steamed.”

“Which brings up the vegetables, sir.  Would you like steamed broccoli, creamed corn, sautéed zucchini, diced carrots….”

That did it.  I threw my napkin to the floor, stood up, put my face right in his arrogant kisser and said “How would you like to settle this outside?”

“Fine with me sir, would you prefer the parking lot, the side alley or the street in front of the restaurant?”

“I prefer right here,” I said and sucker punched him.

He ducked, then countered with a left hook right under my eye.  It was the first time all night he hadn’t offered me a selection.  I collapsed semiconscious in to my chair, as someone in authority rushed over and berated Pauly.

I felt my tie being loosened, my collar unbuttoned, hands slapping my face.   When I regained my senses, I saw the very concerned maitre d’ right in front of my nose.  He apologized and offered to buy me a drink, call the paramedics- whichever I wanted.

“No, no” I said.  “I’ll be all right just bring me a glass of water.”

A dear person sent this to me today and I just sat and smiled.  I hope it brings a smile to your face too.  Enjoy.

http://cardfountain.com/eca...

http://www.gratitudecampaig...

Tomorrow a soldier, Sgt. Benjamin Brian Portell will be laid to rest here in Bakersfield.  He made the ultimate sacrifice giving his life in the service of his country.   I read where his mother said he believed in what he was doing. 

It's difficult to put my thoughts into words without a great deal of emotion but the coincidence is striking as tomorrow is the day Sgt. Joe Regusci, my newest grandson, is scheduled to return to Germany, and then Kuwait, and ultimately Iraq for a fouth tour. 

Two families tied by a bond and yet they've never met.  One grieving the loss of a son even while speaking of their pride in him....One knowing the sadness and fear of another separation from the man she has chosen to spend her life with as he risks his life once again.

My heart goes out to the family of the fallen young soldier.  I can't even imagine the pain and suffering they must feel right now, but I pray for peace and strength for all who love him.

Godspeed Sgt. Portell.  You live on in the hearts of your loved ones.

Godspeed Sgt. Regusci.  I pray you come home safe.

http://www.bakersfield.com/...

Wonder what happened to the older custom of using Lake Ming?  And an ice service donated ice to make it colder?  Insanity.  Brrrr...I'm cold just looking at the pictures.