WhackyNation

Leaning Straight Up has given WhackyNation the Thinking Blogger award.

When you get receive the award you should likewise honor 5 blogs that make you think.

So, here are Whacky’s 5 blog picks for the Thinking Blogger Award (see rules below):

1. Leaning Straight Up (a reciprocal)
2. Max Redline
3. Jim Miller
4. David Postman
5. Perri Nelson

Congratulations, you won a Thinking Blogger Award:

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Congrats everyone and thanks again to Leaning Straight Up who honored me.

Hat tip to MaxRedLine.

Watching this made me think I wasn’t nuts after all.  And it gave me a good chuckle, too.

If Gore can’t beat the Clinton-controlled machine inside the Democrat Party maybe he could win a plurality as a third party Greener.  We could have a three-way: Giuliani-Clinton-Gore in 2008.   Crazier things have happened.  And we know Gore, for sure, is moonbat crazy.

And, as I think about it: If it did come about, a three-way race would put the the Left Coast in play for the Republicans.

My wife and I are victims of identify theft, and we are both angry over government’s failure to catch the thief for one thing and to prevent such thefts from happening in the first place. We know that there are thousands of citizens out there who have suffered the same thievery that we have, and it’s time we all join in demanding that federal and local governments do something about it.

We know what that “something” is, and we want to define it clearly, as we hope others will do, as well. In our case, someone, somewhere obtained the number on our American Express card and somehow managed to use our name and our card number to make several purchases and persuade sales clerks or bank clerks to accept the name and number without double-checking them to make certain the thief was the card owner.

As a result, our next billing from American Express and the Bank of America indicated purchases of several hundred dollars for items we didn’t buy. Since we use our credit card to pay for many purchases and services, we have no idea who the culprit may be and where the culprit saw our name and card number and swiped them.

My point in all this is that we are the innocent victims of the thief. It is the store or agency accepting a name and number without demanding proof of card ownership that should have to pay for the amounts charged by the thief, not us.  To illustrate our point, let’s suppose that the thief, John Brown, found our name and number on, say, the expense slip we signed at a restaurant or sporting-goods store.

Brown then went to a clothing store and purchased a suit and a topcoat, then produced not a legitimate credit card but simply a credit-card number and a name — not his name but the name of the real card holder. The salesman or clerk accepts the name and card number but fails to ask for the original credit card itself — nor any proof that the buyer is, indeed, the true owner of the card and the name.

Others who have been victimized as we have say that the case I have just referred to is the same or approximately the same as the identity theft that happened to them. Multiply that by the thousands or even millions of identity-theft victims in the U.S. and one can easily understand the problem — and realize that the only way to stop it is the way I have suggested.

Congress and state legislatures should adopt laws asserting that those stores, services, or agencies that fail to demand legitimate credit cards and proof of ownership should have to pay for the money lost, as a result, not the person whose credit-card number and name have been stolen by a crafty thief.

In fact, I would go at least one step further in the crafting of such legislation. I would make it part of the law that all credit cards issued in the future include a clear photograph of the owner and holder. And, in the interim, I would urge all banks and other agencies issuing credit cards to call for present holders to turn in their old cards and receive new ones with their photos on them. Since we have become a credit-card society, so to speak, one can appreciate the importance of this issue.

Are clerks and managers in business establishments in the U.S. so eager to make a buck that they are unwilling to question a buyer who can produce only a name and a number, without showing a legitimate, properly signed credit card? Apparently that is the case across the country, including, of all places, in banks, which should be doubly careful approving card-less transactions.

Finally, I believe police departments and courts across the land, as well as lawmakers, should crack down on identity thieves and punish them so severely that the breed will soon vanish from the American horizon. Perhaps the best way to do it is to apply the “three strikes-and-you’re-out” policy to instances of identity theft. That is, if an identity thief commits a crime by using someone else’s name and credit-card number, and that crime is the third crime he or she has committed, then a judge would be authorized to “throw the book” at the thief, as the saying goes. I would wager that such legal action would soon put an end to identity thievery.

Maybe we can all agree that President Bush was pretty funny at Wednesday’s Correspondents Dinner.

Hat tip to Leaning Straight Up.

In recent weeks we have been sickened by the Democrats who stabbed our soldiers in the back and by the pictures from Portland: a young man defecating on an American flag and riff-raff burning a flag and an American soldier effigy.

King-5 recorded a home coming that serves as an anecdote to the Portland poison.  It documents the sacrafice that our military families make so that street scum can desecrate our flag:

Two of the fastest rising items in today’s economy are (1) prices at the gasoline pump at stations across America, and (2) my temperature. And I’ll bet you’re having the very same reaction. As the greedy oil companies rake in the profits from your pocket and mine, you and I are not just going for a ride. We’re being taken for one.

The oil industry and its refineries can rationalize all they want to about the reasons for the booming gasoline prices. They cannot explain away the fact that oil is actually in oversupply in the U.S. and around the world. But the law of supply and demand has been suspended by the industry because of its insatiable greed and the federal government’s failure to investigate. Gasoline prices should be falling, not rising.

One of the most ironic twists to the whole issue is this: When the Liberals, the Democrats, the Bush haters, the news media, et al, were accusing President Bush and the Republican Party of manipulating oil prices and forcing them downward for political reasons and for votes, they are all silent now that the Democrats are in control and oil prices are soaring. Hmmmmm.

There are several reasons for the out-of-control gasoline supply. One of them is that the ultraliberal environmental extremists can be blamed directly for the role they played in blocking the creation of new, sorely needed refineries in the U.S. That has had a marked effect upon the supply of gasoline and the price paid at the station.

Another reason is that we are, more than ever, at the mercy of oil-producing nations in the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere. This condition could have been eliminated if the U.S. had paid attention to a monumental energy report my old friend, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, produced with the help of scores of the nation’s best minds from private industry and its colleges.

I have detailed that report in my new book, She Should Have Been President, The Wisdom of Dixy Lee Ray, which is just off the press. When she was the chairman of the old U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, President Nixon called on her to gather the best scientific minds available and come up with a study and proposal to make the U.S. totally energy self-sufficient.

That was in 1973. The study was about six months in the making. When it was completed, Dixy took it to Nixon at the White House. However, the Watergate scandal had already broken, and so was the spirit of the President. He thanked her for the report and placed it on the shelf, where it possibly still remains. Nixon never took it to Congress.

If the nation had embarked on the remarkable program Dixy proposed, all energy sources would have been explored and all potentials acted upon, including nuclear energy, solar energy, windmill energy, and all the rest — as well as removal of the bans on new refineries and nuclear plants. If Congress had adopted the plan, the U.S. would not now be fighting a war in the Middle East, nor involved politically in other parts of the world.

Oh, yes. One more factor needs to be considered. Why isn’t competition, the element on which our free economy is based, working in this instance? If all oil suppliers, national and international, were in direct competition, prices would have had to be considerably lower. Finally, I must add this reminder: The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed by Congress 117 years ago. Obviously, the act isn’t working in the case of the gluttonous oil industry, and the American people are entitled to know why.

Chris Cillizza blogs at the Washington Post that the Dems are vulnerable to losing more seats than the R’s in the next cycle.  None of the seats of the top ten seats in play are in the Northwest.  Sorry, Darcy.

A former news colleague of mine sent me this.

Shame on the Democratic Party! With its vote to defy the President’s authority as commander in chief and to withdraw its support for American troops and their mission in Iraq, the Democrats have also tried to destroy our role as the world’s peacemaker and our mission to bring freedom and democratic government to oppressed people.

The howling Democrats, led by their new standard bearer, Big Momma Nancy Pelosi, have also delivered a loud slap to the memories of their own Democratic Presidents of the past — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy — all of whom pursued Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy to “speak softly but carry a big stick.”

If the present congressional members of the Democratic Party had been in charge in the early and middle years of the 20^th Century, the United States might have succumbed to Germany in both the First and Second World Wars and the old Soviet Union might have been in a position to fire nuclear missiles at the U.S. from Cuba.

President Bush has promised to veto the Democrats’ ill-advised bill to set an early deadline for American troops to pull out of Iraq — an action that would signal to the Muslim extremists and even to the moderates in Islamic nations that the U.S. is ripe for the taking by the Neo-Nazi Muslim fanatics.

It is believed that the Democratic Congress does not have enough votes to override a presidential veto. But, even so, the damage is already great. The Demos’ signal to retreat from Iraq — and eventually from Afghanistan, as well — has indicated to our enemies in the terrorist camp that the U,S. is vulnerable from within.

Thus, veto or no veto, the ground has been laid for a repeat of the Democrats’ fiasco in withdrawing financial and moral support from our military forces in Vietnam and forcing an eventual withdrawal and retreat from a war we should have won. As a result, all of Vietnam was lost and that entire nation rendered totally Communist. Could the same thing happen in Iraq, with Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and the international terrorists in command?

The present growing calamity can be blamed in large measure to two factors: The first was the Democrats’ refusal to support a sitting President in time of war, and the second was the news media’s brainwashing of the American public with their vicious hate-Bush campaign — a campaign that led to Democratic victories at the polls last November.

One must hope that, for America’s sake, its future, and its security, someone like a Senator Joe Lieberman, will rise out of the political morass and revolutionize the Socialist-Liberal Democratic Party so that it will once more support the nation’s historic role as a defender of freedom and liberty around the world.

The fumbling indecision of our “friendly” European allies over supplying enough troops to the United Nations’ peacekeeping forces in several regions, including Lebanon, brings me to repeat an idea I have been trying to popularize for some time — the organization of an international voluntary military force to police trouble spots wherever they occur in the world.   

The need for such a force actually stems from the U.N.’s failure to control those trouble spots, something it was designed to do when it was created in San Francisco in the 1940s, after the Second World War.  That failure was demonstrated once more as still another U.N. peacekeeping force was being formed to manage the cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. 

Although France joined with the United States in writing the U.N. resolution calling for the interim force in Lebanon, the French offered to send only 200 troops to Lebanon, despite the fact that it accepted the role of serving as the mission commander in the cease-fire zone.   

Later on, as a result of international criticism of the French reluctance, Jacques Chirac, French President, reversed course and decided that France’s contingent would be increased to 2,000.  Jealousy must have played a part, because the French turnaround came almost immediately after Italy pledged to send 3,000 peacekeeping troops and take the lead role in the process.   

However, other nations were reluctant to send troops and finally did so only after criticisms within the U.N.  As reported by the Associated Press, the original plan called for increasing the peacekeeping force from 2,000 troops to 15,000, with the Lebanese supplying 15,000 of its own forces to help keep the peace. 

These shaky and unpredictable maneuvers by the U.N. lead me to repeat once more my suggestion that a much better arrangement and a permanent one is needed to police the world’s civil conflicts and regional wars.  That suggestion is for the world’s major powers — not the small problem nations within the U.N. — to create a voluntary military force made up of men and women from all the free nations. 

The volunteers should be already trained soldiers, sailors, and airmen from all nations, who would receive a good annual salary from funds provided by all the member nations.  Command of the volunteer forces would be shared and rotated by military leaders of the major powers.  

If the proposed military sounds like an international copy of the Foreign Legion, so be it.  And if all this sounds like a repeat of my belief that we should withdraw from the “Useless” Nations and rely on a new organization formed by the world’s major world powers, so be it, as well. 

It’s time we recognize that the U.N. has shown it is not able to keep the peace and bring nations together in that endeavor.  With the world now locked into an extremely dangerous international war on terrorism and Muslim extremism, only a volunteer military force controlled by the free nations can do what the U.N. was supposed to do. 

We should bid goodbye to the United Nations and proceed to the business of protecting America and insuring the security of our people.

According to The Olympian’s Adam Wilson.

I’m not making this stuff up.  Wake up.

Oh, no.  A Senator.  A Democrat.  A woman.  A Californian.  As corrupt as they come.  We’re talking billons.  Okay, liberals, defend this.

As the Christian world celebrates its most solemn season — a season dedicated to the nobility of Jesus Christ — it finds little news of the kind of peace preached by the Man of God. The major powers are not at war, but man’s inhumanity to man continues — and, ironically, it often does so because of religious differences, or in many cases because anti-religious and pro-religious legions clash.

They’re not always Christian factions at each other’s throats, but in most cases, the bloodshed has religious overtones. A new, but strangely old, religious war has unfolded in the Iraq to complicate the problem even more. But Judeo-Christians still have their own internal squabbles to solve.

In North Ireland, for example, the senseless killing between Protestants and Catholics goes on, despite long, drawn out peace negotiations that still haven’t brought the two sides together in a permanent peace — and despite the presence of British troops, or perhaps because of that presence.

Equally senseless and even deadlier by far are the continuing battles in the Middle East, where the bloodshed seems endless and where American forces and their allies have intervened. The Godless and the God-fearing are killing each other in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Central America, South America, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and even China and India, where Christian minorities are not safe.

While the blame cannot be placed solely at religion’s doorstep, I think it’s time that those who keep the faith, regardless of its nature, begin questioning organized religion’s role in the world’s political struggles. Would the Irish be at each other’s throats if their religious differences were minimized? Would the Middle East, the Far East, and Central and South America finally find an unbroken peace if the various religions involved removed themselves from politics?

To that end, I am compelled to repeat a proposal I have made many times in the past. In my book, F! D! F! (Fire! Dammit! Fire!) A Feast of New Ideas, a chapter is devoted to a suggestion for the creation by all nations of a World Council of Religions, in which ALL religions would meet to neutralize and quell such warring factions as the Muslim extremists.

It would not apply to the Muslims alone. The Christian denominations would have to settle the struggle between the Protestants and Catholics in North Ireland — just as other religions in other parts of the world would settle the differences that have continued unabated for decades and even centuries.

I don’t pretend to have the perfect answer, but in this most profound of religious seasons, I wish the world and its religions would start practicing the peace they have always preached. Amen.

Speaking to the National Association of Cattlemen today, President Bush criticized the Democrats for passing an irresponsible Iraqi War funding bill:

Here’s the bottom line: The House and Senate bills have too much pork, too many conditions on our commanders, and an artificial timetable for withdrawal. (Applause.) And I have made it clear for weeks, if either version comes to my desk, I’m going to veto it. (Applause.) It is also clear from the strong opposition in both houses that my veto would be sustained. Yet Congress continues to pursue these bills, and as they do, the clock is ticking for our troops in the field. Funding for our forces in Iraq will begin to run out in mid-April. Members of Congress need to stop making political statements, and start providing vital funds for our troops. They need to get that bill to my desk so I can sign it into law.

Now, some of them believe that by delaying funding for our troops, they can force me to accept restrictions on our commanders that I believe would make withdrawal and defeat more likely. That’s not going to happen. If Congress fails to pass a bill to fund our troops on the front lines, the American people will know who to hold responsible. (Applause.) Our troops in Iraq deserve the full support of the Congress and the full support of this nation. (Applause.)

Bush is remaining strong.  Nancy Pelosi has a challenge to keep all the votes she bought with pork when those bought representatives feel the heat from an angered public.

It looks like President Bush is demonstrating he can bitch slap Iran if Tehran doesn’t release all the British sailors and marines.

As Britain is exhausting all available diplomatic means to resolve the hostage dispute Russian intelligence is seeing a buildup of U-S forces along Iran’s border.  The U-S Navy has taken strike positions in the Persian Gulf with the largest naval presence in the gulf since just before onset of the Iraqi war.

Tehran has to be noticing the buildup as it plays it game of chicken with the West. 

So far, Bush has been taking the advice of Teddy Roosevelt: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”   According to CNN’s sources, Britain has asked the U-S to keep low key publically.

“They have asked us to keep the rhetoric down and not do anything that would jeopardize their efforts to get the sailors and marines released,” one senior official said.

If Bush orders the strike, he’ll show the spine that President Reagan showed in the late 80’s when he struck Iran’s navy for laying mines in the international waters of the Persian gulf.

The strike would also show the Brits and the world that America is a true ally.  It would also show the Democrats and the liberal media that Bush is not a lame duck.

Let’s hope Tehran will blink.  But if it doesn’t, don’t be surprised if the U-S might is unleashed.

“The President s