WhackyNation

No one could question the statement that a college education is certainly worth the time and the money that goes into it. No argument there. But the fact that those who graduate from college are almost guaranteed more income — about a thousand bucks more a month, according to estimates — bothers me, even though I’m a college graduate, as is everyone in my family.

This is what disturbs me most. Only one in four Americans has a college degree, and the percentage is quite a bit lower for minorities. The fact that at least three out of four young people may not be receiving advanced training in special skills or vocations probably underlies the fact that the nation has slipped badly in productivity.

We need urgently to put vocational training, for example, on a level that is at least equal to liberal-arts colleges. The same should apply to young people who don’t want to or can’t afford to go to existing colleges — but who want to pursue careers in, say, business, industry, the arts, and even the professions — as, for example, paralegals or paramedics. These young people deserve an equal chance at that extra thousand bucks a month.

One of the most important decisions I made in my early years was to attend a very special high school when I graduated from the 8^th Grade at a Cleveland junior-high school. My choice was East Technical High School, a school devoted primarily to training youngsters for Cleveland’s thriving industrial complex.

Although I majored in the college-preparatory division of the school, I was privileged to learn something about various phases of industrial skills — cabinet making, sheet-metal construction, engineering, chemistry, architecture, mechanical drawing, blueprint reading, foundry work, and many more. That training has helped me immensely throughout my career in the news media.

The program there was a five-year course for all students under a measure approved by Congress called the Smith-Hughes Act. It was designed to provide adequate training for students who sought to go directly into industrial work. In other words, it was and still is a virtual apprenticeship program I believe should be copied by every city in America.

Some of us decided to go to college after graduation, but the great majority of students were hired by industrial firms immediately after graduation — and most of them advanced to important, lucrative positions in such firms as Warner Swasey, Thompson Products, and others.

Now, those successful students and industrial workers were certainly the equal of college graduates in take-home pay and, in some cases, more successful in terms of income. But despite the success of these technical schools, as well as many commercial schools, the college graduate outranks them in public esteem.

I earnestly believe that special degrees, equivalent to those granted by colleges and universities, should be bestowed on those who enter industry and the professions directly from high school and who distinguish themselves in their jobs.

And those who don’t achieve “distinction” should have an equal chance at that extra thousand bucks a month.

Rudyard Kipling had it all wrong. In his “Ballad of the East and West,” he told us that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

On the contrary, East and West seem to get along rather well. Even West Germany and East Germany are back in each other’s arms — if not on each other’s nerves — after a Communist-induced separation of less than five decades.

No. The longitudinal differences are not the culprit that ignites civil wars and bloodshed in many parts of the world. It’s the latitude that changes the attitude. Especially among people speaking the same language in the same geographical setting.

Take Vietnam for starters. It wasn’t East Vietnam versus West Vietnam that nearly touched off World War III in mid-century. It was the North versus the South, and the stalemate that has resulted from all that bloodshed seems to be permanent. As I said, the latitude seems to dictate the attitude.

On the same continent, the Koreans staged their own version of the Cohens and the Kellys. And once again it appears the rupture is permanent. Had it been West Korea versus East Korea, the odds are they’d have copied the Germans and be making Seoul music together by this time. Pun intended.

The Asians are not alone in these latitudinal shenanigans. Even the Irish seem to be suffering from the North-South jitters. Notice, begorra, that it surely isn’t the Western Irish throwing grenades at the Eastern Irish and vice versa. You’d think they’d have taken their cue to commit mayhem along the most famous longitudinal time line of all a few miles to their East, the Greenwich time line. But no, North and South it is, and may the divil take the hindmost.

Before brash Americans shrug it all off as a silly notion without historical basis, they might jog their memories a bit. Back about 140 years ago, the War Between the States was not a bloody battle between the East and the West. Does that change your attitude, you-all?

Oh, and before I sign off on this geographical note, I must bring it all up to date with an example that has been in the headlines for some time. The north and the south in deeply troubled Iraq have been at each others’ throats for years. There the Kurds of the north have long been at odds with the Sunnis and Shiites of the south. Well, make that the central area, to be exact. But the north-south jinx remains.

As I said, it’s the latitude, not the attitude. Say, that would be a great song title. But the lyrics might leave something to desired. Sorry, Rudyard.

Didn’t Senator Barack Obama’s spin doctor check his acceptance speech for gaffes?

Here’s the biggest one:

That’s the promise of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper …

Excuse me, Barack, but you have a half-brother living in a slum in Nairobi on 3 cents a day that you have never helped.

Meanwhile, you live in a million dollar mansion that was bought simultaneously with questionable real estate transactions involving your financial campaign supporter Chicago slum lord and convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko.

The Democratic Party’s convention is over, at last, and I am weary of listening to so much political blarney, organized cheering, and the incessant waving of signs, flags, and banners. Sadly, the main impression to report is that the greatest loss of all in the week-long parade of Demo leaders was THE TRUTH!

That loss was evident in every speaker that mounted the central platform to rouse the crowds — from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to the newly anointed Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Joe Biden, and finally to the convention’s choice of a presidential nominee, Senator Barack Hussein Obama.

And what was the nature of that loss of truth from beginning to end in all the speakers? Simply this: It was the Democratically controlled Congress in the past eight years that was responsible for all the problems the nation is now facing, not President Bush and the Republican Party.

Senators Clinton, Biden, and Obama, all of them Demo leaders, should know firsthand that it has been their party that has been directly responsible for the nation’s economic crisis, soaring fuel and food prices, failure to achieve energy independence, and relief from higher taxes and inflation.

Instead of continuing their assault on President Bush and characterizing him as the villain regarding the nation’s problems, they should look in a mirror to see the real villainous creature in all the crises they are primarily responsible for creating. All of them made sure to link Senator John McCain, the G.O.P. presidential candidate, to Bush and each of the nation’s economic ailments.

I hope the voters will realize it was the Democratic Congress, not Bush, that heeded the taunts of the environmental extremists and shut down any attempt in the past 35 to 40 years of critically needed oil refineries in the U.S. It was that shutdown that virtually halted the increase in oil production that forced us into a major increase in importing oil from the Middle East and other regions.

Similarly, it was the Democratic Congress that has been responsible for the 40-year ban on new and crucially needed nuclear-energy plants, again at the behest of the deeply misguided environmental extremists.

The U.S., where the Nuclear Era was born, has watched European and other nations go on building nuclear-energy plants while we have been stymied at a total of 110.

The center piece of Obama’s shrill campaign has been the word “change.” But, in fact, his rhetoric in all his speeches seems to indicate that his programs would be a throwback to the failed socialist-inspired themes of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. If he wants real change, he should be chastising his own party in Congress for shutting down the nation’s oil-refinery industry and its much needed nuclear-power plants.

I wonder if the Republicans, who will be conducting their convention next week, will make the most of the untruths voiced at the past week’s Democratic convention. If they don’t and McCain fails to counter Obama’s phony change rhetoric, the Demos could be the big winners in November.

And if Obama and the Democrats win the White House and Congress in November, I fear we may be saying “Goodbye, America.”

The recent catastrophic wildfires that left thousands homeless and took the lives of so many in Southern California left at least two clear messages.

The first was that, despite tons of official disaster plans, we never seem to be ready to cope with natural disasters and resultant emergencies, like the massive power outages created by burning trees falling on power lines. If we undergrounded all our power lines, as I have been advocating for many years, at least that problem could have been averted.

The second message comes from a lot of reading I’ve been doing lately. It seems that particularly in the West, we have a bevy of “Back to Nature” addicts — read that “extreme environmentalists” — who have been saying and writing that we must restore the earth to its original pristine character, as if anyone knows what that original character was.

Get rid of the power dams, they say. Get rid of the farms carved out of the wilderness, regardless of the fact that they are crucial to feed the populace. Return all the roads, lands, and highways to what they were before humans were invented. A pox on modern living, they say, and they don’t hide the fact that they and their anti-population cohorts really want to get rid of people!

Why don’t we call a spade a spade and describe these Back to Nature addicts as the murderers they are? The deaths in the California blazes are only one example to prove that they are, in effect, murderers, because they stood in the way of the foresters who wanted to clear the debris that provided the kindling for the devastating fires.

Anyone asking for additional proof need only examine the horrifying story of DDT, the most effective insecticide science every developed, and what happened when the extremists forced the U.S. to abandon the insecticide. DDT had reduced the number of deaths worldwide from malaria from the 3-million mark to a few dozen — but after the ban by the U.S. and other nations, the death rate from malaria has once again climbed to the 3-million figure each year! If that doesn’t amount to murder, what can it be called? Genocide might be an even better term.

At this writing, the final figures on the loss of life and homes and livable land are still not known. They may never be. How does one put a dollar figure on each death and on the personal and utilitarian elements in the thousands of homes that have burned to the ground?

In the face of the California disaster, can the Back to Nature advocates say with a straight face that they are still determined to return the earth to its pristine existence? For a moment there I was thinking, “Over my dead body,” but I’m afraid they might construe that as an “invitation.”

Random House, acknowledged to be the world’s largest book publisher, has committed what I believe is a cardinal sin for publishers by forcing the withdrawal of a book by Sherry Jones because it was deemed to be “dangerous” and certain to cause great anger and a possible uprising by the Muslim population in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Poppycock! Must we spoonfeed and continually pacify Muslims because they may be offended by a book that tells the true story of Aisha, who was the child bride of Muhammad in 7^th Century Arabia? Since when is the truth grounds for censure by a publisher like Random House — or any publisher?

It’s about time America and every other nation on earth banish their fear of offending Islam or any religion or nation. I thought we had learned that lesson some time ago when Salman Rushdie was banished from Islam and condemned to be murdered by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

We cannot go on living in constant fear because individuals or governments in Islam or anywhere else are offended because an author has dared tell the truth about an incident or character the Muslims revere. Lord knows that officials, individuals, or even authors of Islamic nations have blasphemed against Westerners — without danger of being assassinated.

Jones received quick approval and a $100,000 contract from Random House earlier this year to publish The Jewel of Medina, which was also due to be a Book of the Month choice, as well as a selection by the Quality Paperback Book Club. Foreign rights to the book were also recorded by several nations, many of them with Muslim populations.

To Random House’s discredit, it accepted the word of a professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas to cancel Jones’ book because “it was a declaration of war, a national security issue, and a very real possibility of major danger for the buildings and staff of Random House and widespread violence.”

Is America, the world’s most powerful nation, to begin living in fear because some unthinking Muslims in the U.S. or elsewhere resolve to wreak havoc on our people over a book that tells the truth about Muhammad? Should the publisher of a truthful book kill an important book because it might offend a few people?

It is important to note that Rushdie, who needed protection for several years against a possible assassination resulting from the Ayatollah’s death decree back in 1989, immediately went to Jones’ defense. In an e-mail he sent to the Associated Press, Rushdie said:

“I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have canceled another author’s novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals. This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”

Come on, Random House! Stiffen your backbone and publish Jones’ book. The entire American nation, with its long tradition of courage and freedom from censorship, will be behind you!

As we enter the last 70 day sprint to November 4th, there is a new poll out every day. Earlier this week, most of them showed Senator Obama with a slight lead over Senator McCain. After having picked his running mate and had two days of convention material, Obama’s lead has actully turned into a deficit. In all my years as a political scientist, I have never seen that happen. Regardless, it is a close race. At this point, anything can happen. And by anything, I mean anything—even a tie.

We don’t elect presidents by popular vote in the United States. We elect them with our Electoral College. In all, there are 538 “electors” that will pick our next president. [In the interests of full disclosure, yours truly is one of 22 people that may be an elector for the state of Washington.]  Because there are 538 electors, it is possible to have a 269 to 269 tie in the Electoral College. This has never happened before. It might this year.

According to the Realclearpolitics compilation of state polls, Obama clearly leads in states totaling 238 electoral votes. McCain clearly leads in states totally 163 electoral votes. But, most of the remaining “toss up states” are traditionally Republican states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Indiana, Nevada). If McCain wins his 163 votes plus the states just mentioned, he will have 245 electoral votes—a seven vote difference.

Now lets give Obama the traditionally Democratic state of Michigan (17 votes), and the two trending Democratic states of Colorado (9 votes) and New Mexico (5 votes). That gives Obama the magic 269 votes. McCain would then have to win Ohio (20 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes) to give himself 269. This is not unrealistic given that Ohio went for Bush in 2000 and 2004 and New Hampshire could easily go back to its traditional Republican column after a brief spat of insanity in 2004.

What happens then? Having given us a system that could result in a tie, our Framers also set up a tie breaking system. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives gets to pick the next president. The catch however is that each state gets one vote. The Idaho delegation gets one vote and the New York delegation gets one vote. As a past referee, I am troubled by the obvious unfairness of this system. As a past resident of Idaho, I can live with it. Of course, given there are 50 states (D.C. gets 3 electoral votes but does not get to play in the tie breaker because they are not a “state’), we could have a tie there as well. In that case, they would keep voting until a president is selected.

So, who would win if the race got tossed to the House? We can’t know for sure because the current House does not get to pick. The new House elected Nov 4th, 2008 gets to pick. However, we could follow the statistics that 99% of all House members are reelected and use the current breakdowns to guess. In that case there are currently 28 states that have a majority of Democrats holding House seats, 20 states with a majority of Republicans and two states with an even delegation. So, assuming a party line vote for president and even if McCain picks up the two tied states, Obama becomes the next president if the Electoral College ends in a tie.

If you’re McCain, that means you have to find one more state to slide into your column. The most likely candidates are New Mexico and Colorado, both of which are within the margin of error.

As a citizen, I can live without out the tie. I am still tired from watching 73 straight hours of coverage after the 2000 election night. As a political science professor, bring it on. It would be three days of easy lesson plans.

As the Democrats party and smoke dope (less than an ounce is okay) in Denver, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev said today he’s ready for a new cold war with the west.

Accoding to the London Times:

“We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” said Dimitri Medvedev, after ordering his foreign ministry to start work on establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The move brought instant condemnation from America, Britain, France, Germany and other Western countries.

President Bush appealed to the Kremlin to “reconsider this irresponsible decision.”

This is a huge development on the world scene as the conflict in Georgia is bringing the United States, NATO and Russia closer to the brink of conflict.  Russia is still occupying the key river port of Poti on the Black Sea which gives Russia access to the Mediterrean and beyond.  Georgia is a democracy and an ally to the western nations.

But bigger still is the impact of this development on the election.  As Americans become aware of this new international crisis who will they trust to be answering the 3am phone call?  McCain or Tinkerbell Obama?

I suspect McCain will see his numbers rise in the polls.  Good news for McCain and Republicans everywhere.

Soon after my most recent appeal to the American food industry to adopt irradiation in banishing microorganisms from all food supplies, the federal government finally issued an order permitting “food producers to zap fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce with enough radiation to kill microorganisms such as e-coli and salmonella that for decades have caused widespread illness among consumers.”

The New York Times reported the government’s decision, adding that “it was the first time the Food and Drug Administration has allowed produce to be irradiated at levels needed to protect against illness.” An industry official, Robert Brackett, chief scientist for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, was quoted as saying:

“This is probably one of the single most significant food-safety actions done for fresh produce in many years.” The G.M.A. was the agency that petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to allow manufacturers to irradiate a wide variety of processed meats, fruits, and vegetables and prepared foods.

The F.D.A.’s action is bound to touch off a battle between the pro-irradiation forces and the self-appointed organizations of food watchers, who have been battling the scientists for some time with warnings that don’t make much sense and simply have forestalled the scientifically valid irradiation application.

According to the Times dispatch, the federal government “has long allowed food processors to irradiate beef, eggs, poultry, oysters, and spices, but the market for irradiated foods is tiny because the government also requires that these foods be labeled as irradiated, labels that scare away most consumers.”

The F.D.A. is working on a system that will pacify those who panic at the mere mention of the word “radiation.” It will need such a system to allay attacks by those consumers who have not been persuaded to accept the new irradiation method for fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce.

It seems to me that the federal government should establish a clearly drawn program to assess the pros and cons of food irradiation on, say, a ten-year or 15-year basis, during which strict measures will prevail to test the advantages or disadvantages of a large-scale food-irradiation plan.

Only such a thorough scientifically based program will eventually resolve the battle between the pro-irradiation forces and the fearful consumers. The stakes in such a battle are extremely high. They involve the food supply of an entire nation — and decisions concerning the variety of food-borne illnesses. Can any issue be of greater significance to the nation’s future?

You can’t make this stuff up.  Apparently it’s true.  An Italian magazine broke the story that Senator Barack Obama has a half-brother living in poverty in Africa whom the millionaire half-brother has not helped.  Of course, this country’s drive-by media isn’t following up.

Andrew Breitbart writes at RealClearPolitics:

Sen. Barack Obama has a problem. And it lives in a hut.

His name is George Hussein Onyango Obama, and he is the 26-year-old half brother of Mr. Obama, the multimillionaire autobiographer who neglected to write that his paternal sibling lives on less than a dollar a month in the outer slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

Wow.  Obama has the audacity to attack Senator John McCain for the number of houses he owns.  Breitbart rightly asks should McCain attack Obama for the number of brothers he lets live in destitude?

When this story breaks in the mainstream media, which it must certainly do now, how do you think America is going to respond?

What am I missing here?  USA TODAY publishes the USA Today/Gallup Poll this morning with startling insights on Senator Barack Obama’s huge electibility issues and the rest of the media is ignoring it.

Fewer than half of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s supporters in the presidential primaries say they definitely will vote for Barack Obama in November, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, evidence of a formidable challenge facing Democrats as their national convention opens here today.

In the survey, taken Thursday through Saturday, 47% of Clinton supporters say they are solidly behind Obama, and 23% say they support him but may change their minds before the election.

Thirty percent say they will vote for Republican John McCain, someone else or no one at all.

Hello?  Few in the media are reporting just how disunified the Democrats really are.  Locally, David Postman hinted at it yesterday, but most media outlets are playing the Obama Spin Machine theme the Democrats are healed and unified.

Postman quoted former State Democrat Party Chairman Paul Berendt as saying his Clinton contingent isn’t feeling “very warm” about Obama and, in fact “neutral.”

“We lose track of these conventions being important,” Berendt said. “If the Democratic Party isn’t tight and unified — and not just in a sterile, produced sense, but in an individually committed sense — we’re going to have some rough sailing in the fall.

“I just hope we don’t have another 1980,” he said. “It would be a disaster for our country. That’s what I’ve been thinking about all through this.”

I’ve said many times this past year that 2008 could be a Republican year.  Now even Berendt is starting to think that scenario could be right. 

Today’s published poll also stated that McCain held a four percent lead over Obama nationally.

The next two months could end up being such a fiasco for the Dem’s who don’t dare to nominate another candidate for fear of being considered racist that we could start seeing coat tails even in such liberal states such as our own Soviet of Washington.  That could be good news to Dino Rossi, Doug Sutherland and Allan Martin who are in tight races here; and it could be good news in several tight legislative races as well.

The story now isn’t really the Dem Convention which is heavily scripted for television but McCain’s V-P pick and the Republican Convention next week.  It could be McCain’s opportunity to win the election.  It’s up to McCain now.

A Mexican immigration official has just announced that 11.8 million of its citizens now live in the United States. The official, Ana Teresa Aranda, also said 580,000 Mexicans migrate to other countries each year and that 98 percent of them find their way into the U.S. However, she did not say what percentage of them do so illegally.

She did acknowledge that 21.5 percent of the migrating Mexicans have U.S. citizenship, which is proof that the Mexican government is aware of how many of its citizens enter the U.S. illegally. Using simple arithmetic, even her figures are proof that almost 80 percent of the Mexicans coming to the U.S. do so illegally.

I think the Mexican government’s statistics are all wet. Just a few years ago, it was estimated that at least 20 million Mexicans had entered the U.S. illegally and scattered to many states, most of them in the Southwest. Even that figure — 20 million — is open to grave doubt. I think the real figure is closer to twice that amount.

The stark realization is that Mexico is emptying itself of its citizenry as they find their way into the U.S. It was a mass migration that started with farmers in the Northwest and the Western states bringing Mexicans north to work on American farms. The result was that a great many of them decided to stay because of the good wages.

Unfortunately, the large majority of the Mexican workers didn’t bother to consider becoming American citizens and to make themselves legal entrants. And we, on the other hand, did not persevere and insist that those who stayed on go to school to learn the English language and to become citizens.

Little wonder that population experts are now forecasting that by the year 2050, minorities — and principally those of Hispanic origin — will comprise more than 50 percent of the American public! Should that forecast scare the rest of us into taking some sort of action to save the traditional American values and history — as well as guaranteeing that we will still be speaking English in the 2050s?

If it would get off its duff and take appropriate action, Congress could supply a beginning action in passing a new immigration measure that would give authorities the authority they must have to start weeding out the gigantic illegal population and sending most of them back to Mexico and other nations of origin.

We cannot — no, we MUST NOT — go on pretending that we can absorb all the illegal immigrants without seriously changing the face of America for the worse. And after sending most of them home, we must close up our borders for a time till our immigration statistics simmer down.

Is that a harsh proposal? Hardly. Illegal immigrants have been a prime factor in the worsening American economic situation. They are milking the trough, so to speak, with their demands for all kinds of freebies they don’t deserve, and we, like idiots, have obliged them by draining our resources without complaint. Well, here’s one very loud complaint to get the ball rolling toward sending the illegal horde back from whence they came!