Free Frank Warner

Preserving earmarks: Senators Bennett, Cochran, Collins, Inhofe, Lugar, Murkowski, Shelby, Voinovich vote for corruption

Earmarked appropriations, giving individual members of Congress secret control over millions of dollars of federal spending, exist only to let Congress members use that money as bribe bait.

That’s why earmarks must stop. It’s corruption through and through, and gives corrupt incumbents a hugely unfair fundraising advantage over challengers.

With that in mind, eight Republican U.S. senators joined most of the Democratic senators today in voting to preserve the system of secret earmarks. They are:

Corrupt Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah.
Corrupt Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi.
Corrupt Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
Corrupt Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.
Corrupt Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Corrupt Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Corrupt Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.
Corrupt Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio.

Destroying democracy. “Earmarked” federal contracts are paybacks for payoffs. The payoffs are a national disgrace, and anyone else who contributes to the campaigns of these senators and those Democrats (we'll get the names) is encouraging the destruction of our democracy.

Frank Warner

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Update: Here are the Democratic and Independent U.S. senators who voted to keep the corrupt earmarks:

Corrupt Sen. Akaka of Hawaii.
Corrupt Sen. Baucus of Wyoming.
Corrupt Sen. Begich of Alaska.
Corrupt Sen. Bingaman of New Mexico.
Corrupt Sen. Brown of Ohio.
Corrupt Sen. Cantwell of Washington.
Corrupt Sen. Cardin of Maryland.
Corrupt Sen. Carper of Delaware.
Corrupt Sen. Casey of Pennsylvania.
Corrupt Sen. Conrad of North Dakota.
Corrupt Sen. Coons of Delaware.
Corrupt Sen. Dodd of Connecticut.
Corrupt Sen. Dorgan of North Dakota.
Corrupt Sen. Durbin of Illinois.
Corrupt Sen. Feinstein of California.
Corrupt Sen. Franken of Minnesota.
Corrupt Sen. Gillibrand of New York.
Corrupt Sen. Hagan of North Carolina.
Corrupt Sen. Harkin of Iowa.
Corrupt Sen. Inouye of Hawaii.
Corrupt Sen. Johnson of South Dakota.
Corrupt Sen. Kerry of Massachusetts.
Corrupt Sen. Klobuchar of Minnesota.
Corrupt Sen. Kohl of Wisconsin.
Corrupt Sen. Landrieu of Louisiana.
Corrupt Sen. Lautenberg of New Jersey.
Corrupt Sen. Leahy of Vermont.
Corrupt Sen. Levin of Michigan.
Corrupt Sen. Lieberman (Geez, Ind. sell-out) of Connecticut.
Corrupt Sen. Lincoln of Arkansas.
Corrupt Sen. Manchin of West Virginia.
Corrupt Sen. Menendez of New Jersey.
Corrupt Sen. Merkley of Oregon.
Corrupt Sen. Murray of Washington.
Corrupt Sen. Nelson of Nebraska.
Corrupt Sen. Pryor of Arkansas.
Corrupt Sen. Reed of Rhode Island.
Corrupt Sen. Reid of Nevada.
Corrupt Sen. Rockefeller of West Virginia.
Corrupt Sen. Sanders (Ind.) of Vermont.
Corrupt Sen. Schumer of New York.
Corrupt Sen. Specter of Pennsylvania.
Corrupt Sen. Stabenow of Michigan.
Corrupt Sen. Tester of Montana.
Corrupt Sen. Udall of New Mexico.
Corrupt Sen. Webb of Virginia.
Corrupt Sen. Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
Corrupt Sen. Wyden of Oregon.

I feel sorry for these lost souls.

Medal of Honor, now and 100 years ago

Before the debate ends on whether the Medal of Honor has been “feminized,” let me remind readers of the medal issued 100 years ago to a soldier who fought in the first Iraq: the Philippines.

In a 1906 standoff against suicidal Muslim Moros, U.S. Army First Lt. Gordon Johnston took part in the killing of 600 to 900 men, women and children hiding in a volcanic crater.

Only 15 Americans were killed in the confrontation, and after reading the first accounts of the fighting, Mark Twain called it a massacre. Twain wrote:

“Apparently Johnson was the only wounded man on our side, whose wound was worth anything as an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any similarly colossal event since ‘Humpty Dumpty’ fell off the wall and got injured.”

Enemy fire. Of course, it was not as simple as Twain described it. The Moros were given several chances to surrender peacefully, they did shoot back, and the wounded Moros who came out then tried to kill the American medics trying to help them.

Lt. Johnston’s experience confirms there was a day when the Medal of Honor was awarded in connection with large numbers of enemy dead.

On the other hand, it was not Johnston who killed all 600 to 900 Moros. He just happened to have put himself in a vulnerable place, where he was wounded in the right shoulder either by Moro bullets or U.S. artillery.

Saving lives. A Wall Street Journal piece and then a post on The Moral Liberal this month tried to make the case that all the recent Medals of Honor were not for inflicting casualities on the enemy, but for saving lives. This “trend” was supposed to be the “feminization” of the award.

Many took offense at the suggestion recent Medal of Honor recipients were acting feminine in any way when they risked their lives in the face of enemy fire. It also turned out that almost all these heroes, including Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, had taken enemy lives while also saving American buddies.

In Giunta’s case in Afghanistan, he killed at least one Taliban fighter, and the American whom Giunta saved died a day later in surgery.

A few men. The record is unclear on how many of the enemy, if any, Lt. Johnston killed in 1906. But we know he risked his life in the combat mission of the day. So did Sgt. Giunta in 2007. Debate all you want, but that kind of valor almost always is the work of a few special men.

Frank Warner

Of the liberty bashers: ‘They are not liberals and they are not progressives’

They are pseudo-liberals and pseudo-intellectuals. They pretend they care about freeing the oppressed and defending the defenseless, but relentlessly oppose any act of liberation or rescue. They pretend to know something, but repeatedly demonstrate an ignorance of math, history and human nature.

Brian Micklethwait writes of the fakes who have given liberalism a bad name. He calls them “statists,” blind believers in the virtue and power of the state.

Because, the word “progressive” is just as wrong as the word “liberal”. The statists who argue for the destruction of the dollar and for bank bail-outs (again) and for nationalised derangement of medical care and for green-inspired economic sabotage aren’t “liberals”. They do not believe in liberty; they believe in curtailing liberty. But neither do they believe in anything which it makes sense to anybody except them to call “progress”. Progress is the exact thing these statists are now trying and have always tried to destroy, and just lately have been doing a pretty damn good job of destroying. Progress means things getting better. These self styled “progressives” are only making things worse.

Useless pretenders. There is no liberalism without liberty, no peace without freedom. If we are to live in a fully democratic world of peace and progress, the people who dismiss individual freedom and private initiative as overrated nuisances will have to get out of the way.

If we want liberalism to stand again for the little guy, we have to start using real intelligence to shape a society that regulates sparingly and wisely while unleashing the protective, creative and healing powers of freedom.

Frank Warner

$8 billion royal wedding? What’s unfair?

I don’t know why British students are complaining that their university tuition is going up while Prince William prepares for an expensive April 29 wedding to Kate Middleton. So what if the ceremony at Westminster Abbey already is priced at $127 million and is expected to cost another $7.9 billion because of the special national holiday?

Study hard and find a queen for a mother, and anyone in Britain can have an $8 billion wedding.

Frank Warner

TSA scanners spot hypocrisy at The Nation

To be a real liberal, one must adhere to reasonably consistent principles, which is why pseudo-liberals deserve criticism when they’re caught applying one set of rules to a Republican president and another set of rules to a Democrat.

Timothy Carney writes for The Washington Examiner:

The Nation magazine, a liberal publication that typically opposed George W. Bush’s NSA snooping on our phone calls, has a new article attacking those who oppose Barack Obama’s TSA snooping around our boxer briefs.

One can make an argument that both policies -- the wiretapping for terrorist communications and the airport frisking for terrorist bombs -- are good or that both are bad. But you can be sure today’s Nation writers (hey, I wrote a few stories for The Nation a long time ago) would be pounding on the president for the body scanners and aggressive patdowns if that president were a Republican.

Frank Warner

North Korea nonsense

Is North Korea the most bizarre nation on Earth? Or are the rest of us more bizarre for accommodating its nonsense?

That its giant neighbor China tolerates the North Korean regime's deadly oppression and dangerous tantrums says something about the codependent fraternity of dictators. That we know of North Korea's horrors and yet often overlook their cause says something about the Free World's willingness to take freedom for granted.

North Koreans are dying in their chains while their dictator builds atom bombs and shoots at South Koreans. There is something madly wrong with this picture.

Frank Warner

‘It’s not him, and we gave him a lot of money’

Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, possibly the No. 2 man in the Taliban, was supposed to be negotiating in good faith with Afghan leaders over the last several months. The Afghans, with NATO’s consent, listened to the man and even thought they saw signs Mansour was willing to arrange a peace agreement.

The trouble was, the man wasn’t Mansour, U.S. officials told The New York Times yesterday.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

If the incident looks bad to you, you get it.

Frank Warner

They still debate the Kennedy assassination

As the debate earlier this month showed, the argument continues over whether Lee Oswald acted alone, or even acted at all, in the assassination 47 years ago of President Kennedy. The open-and-shut case has been made that Oswald fired all the shots that day in Dealey Plaza, but it hasn't ended the fantasies.

In preparing a sketch of the Single Bullet Theory (Proven Fact), I have found only one leg of that bullet's flight that could not complete a perfectly straight line (with slight arc) from Oswald's perch in the Texas School Book Depository: It was the movement of the bullet from Gov. Connally's right wrist to his left thigh. And even there, that can be explained by the fact the bullet, already slowing down after passing through Kennedy's neck and Connally's torso, hit the thick part of Connally's wrist bone and deflected downward and slightly to the left.

The conspiracy theories are the unproven scenarios, and none has a chance of explaining the sad chain of events Nov. 22, 1963.

Frank Warner

Obama on war and peace, not far from Bush

In early 2009, certain Democratic partisans declared that President Obama’s policies on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars already were completely different from President Bush’s. I doubted this. I figured reality would force Obama to continue Bush’s basic thrust -- on just about everything but waterboarding.

As things turn out, Obama has not been much different from Bush on national defense. He has been almost the same on Iraq and Afghanistan. He has not pulled the plug on military support for either democratically elected government. He still has nearly 50,000 troops in Iraq, and he has even abandoned his July 2011 Afghanistan exit deadline. (The "drop dead" withdrawal date now is 2014, and we're sending tanks!) Obama has not ended terrorist electronic surveillance, and in some ways he has broadened it.

He has not shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison (where no waterboarding ever happened) because he’s discovered there is no safer (or more physically comfortable) place for captured terrorists, and because his own Democratic Congress won't let him close Gitmo. And despite his administration's botched civilian trial for Ahmed Ghailani (convicted of only one of 285 charges in the 1998 Kenya embassy bombings), the president's men have claimed he can keep such prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely, even if a civilian court convicts them. (I don’t think Bush ever made that claim.)

Awakening to facts. One area of defense policy where Obama acts in a notably different manner from Bush is Obama's inexplicable emphasis on a new nuclear arms agreement with Russia, which even as a semi-democracy is a minimal threat to the United States. Then again, Obama has suddenly embraced missile defense.

So yes, hard facts have a way of demolishing partisan fantasies, at least on war and peace. On the other hand, we continue to see a wide partisan divide on matters of free markets, economical energy and soaring debt. Sooner or later, reality will draw us closer together on those items, too.

Frank Warner

Medal of Honor feminized?

Brian Fischer has an interesting thought the Medals of Honor awarded during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars:

We have feminized the Medal of Honor.

According to Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, every Medal of Honor awarded during these two conflicts has been awarded for saving life. Not one has been awarded for inflicting casualties on the enemy. Not one. ...

[W]hen are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?

I would suggest our culture has become so feminized that we have become squeamish at the thought of the valor that is expressed in killing enemy soldiers through acts of bravery.

Manly rebuttal. Tom Maguire responds:

I have a suggeston for Mr. Fischer - if he is lucky enough to meet a Medal of Honor winner, just salute and say 'thank you.'

Blackfive points out that the first Medal of Honor awarded in the Iraq war went to Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who saved 100 buddies and killed 50 enemy soldiers in the process.

Frank Warner