Michelle Malkin’s book, “Culture of Corruption” is truly depressing. I could take only so much at a time. I always read Malkin’s essays, because she states facts for her opinions and gives the sources of those facts. She does the same thing in her book. I believed that the Obamas obtained power through the corrupt Chicago politics, but I hadn’t realized the extent of it – she quotes sources, dates and money. Then she continues to do the same thing with the crowd with whom Obama has surrounded himself in DC including Joe Biden. It is discouraging that these people are running our nation. 

Charles Forelle has an article worth reading in the Wall Street Journal (3 Nov 09). He reports on a survey of 5, 694 citizens of nine former members of the Soviet bloc. The people surveyed reported that they were much happier than they had been under Communism but were not especially happy with democracy and capitalism. Reading it reminded me of an article I read on the slave who accompanied the Rogers/Clark expedition exploring the northwest. On his return, as a reward for his efforts, he was given his freedom and the ownership of a stagecoach line. Some months after assuming his position as owner, he abandoned his ownership and left. He was reported to have said that it was easier to be a slave than a free man. It is the same with the peoples of Eastern Europe. Under Communism, they had the security of a minimum existence. They had minimum food and medical treatment and guaranteed jobs where little was expected of them. Now life is riskier, they must depend on themselves.  Democracy and freedom require effort and thought - as the Eastern Europeans have discovered. 

Recently, Harvard honored the 10 graduates who had received Medals of Honor for their military service in our recent wars. This was an empty gesture. Harvard professors continue to refuse permission for ROTC to operate on campus. Despite this, they receive hundreds of millions of tax dollars from our government. I have difficulty understanding why we should give millions of dollars to any institution that refuses to permit a recognized government agency on campus. I recommend that Congress bar the granting of any federal money to Harvard or any other educational institution which refuses to permit government agencies on campus. I know this will not affect the instruction and research at Harvard. Their professors have complete integrity and will not object to their salaries and benefits being slashed as a result of their following their convictions and barring the ROTC from campus.

The extent to which the media has ignored the Muslim beliefs and terrorist connections of Nidal Malik Hasan while seeking and creating other reasons for his behavior is astounding and displays great creative imagination.  

The articles by persons astounded by the lying and cheating by university faculty in the area of “global warming” amuse me. Are people, theoretically educated people, really so naïve as to think that people are honest just because they are employed by universities? There was a time when university professors were very poorly paid, but they only “worked” twelve or fifteen hours a week as teachers. The rest of the time they led a pleasant life. They could study and conduct research in anything that interested them. Campus swimming pools and tennis courts were free to them. They could attend plays, concerts, football or basketball games or all of them, according to their interests, for free. It was a pleasant life, but not a highly paid one. Then President Johnson was elected. In addition to paying out huge sums of money for people not to work, called welfare reform, he also poured money into colleges and universities. Millions of dollars were poured into universities to conduct “research” provided it was research that the government wanted. Salaries skyrocketed and teaching loads of professors dropped. With almost thirty years experience in universities, in both administration and teaching, and as a producer and reader of research, I can guarantee that I knew professors who cheated like mad in their reports in order to keep the funds coming.  I am certain that if prominent politicians, such as Vice President Gore, wanted global warming, global warming there would be, regardless of factual evidence. Too much money was at stake.

Governor Huckabee had best forget running for President. The man who walked into a restaurant and shot to death four police officers he didn’t know who were sitting at a table, drinking coffee and preparing for their days’ work, had been serving a life sentence for murder and assorted other violent crimes in Arkansas. His sentence was commuted and he was released from prison by Governor Huckabee against the advice and wishes of all. The deaths of those four police officers are a direct result of Huckabee’s decision, one which would appear in ads across the country if he received the Republican nomination. I, for one, would give up and stay home if my choice were between Obama and Huckabee in 2012.

Actually, we had an incident at a festival in Cumberland Furnace a few years ago in which a musician was showing too much interest in a young girl. Two or three of the men went over and told him they knew how to calm a man who was interested in young girls and that if he kept it up, they would take him up in the nearest cornfield and show him.  After they walked away, he packed up and left.

The most fun news article I have heard in weeks was reported on either CBS or NBC. It seems a group of elderly ladies, probably at a cocktail party, were sorrowing over the recent death by cancer of one of the husbands, a Mr. Baker. Wondering how they could raise money for cancer research, one said that people liked nude calendars, so these ladies, aged fifty to seventy, decided to produce one. They were the models. To date, they have raised more than a million dollars, had and provided a lot of amusement. It is true they were all nude, but the photographs were shot in such a way that the television station was able to show many of them. Laughing about it to Andrew, he wasn’t surprised. He said people were tired of pornography and would like something that satirized it.

Not at all humorous has been President Obama’s vacillation on troops to Afghanistan. Six months ago he said he had clear goals and a clear strategy to achieve them. Now he says he doesn’t know what to do. Granted, it is a difficult choice. He must send in another fifty or hundred thousand troops to – maybe – win or withdraw acknowledging that he was wasted the time and lives of the those additional twenty thousand he has already sent.  

Currently the Senate is considering a health bill that has the blessing of President Obama. What I found interesting was that a Democratic Senator on the committee writing the bill said he hadn’t read it, it was too confusing, that no one could read it. And the Senate will pass this with the President’s support?  I didn’t want McCain for president because I was afraid he would “shoot from the hip” without thought. Considering the trillions of dollars in “stimulus” passed at his demand over night and the above, maybe the nation elected an immature McCain, one with a lot of corrupt friends.

I tuned in to the Rush Limbaugh program during lunch and heard him say that the Sixty Minutes show of 27 September had reported that President Obama had not spoken to the top commanding general, who has been asking for help, in the past 70 days. To me, this is incredible, if true. He had time to praise himself at the UN, visit Chicago about the Olympics and fly to Denmark to campaign for Chicago, but did not have time to speak to the Commanding General in Afghanistan where we have between forty and sixty thousand young men and women fighting and dying – twenty thousand of whom he sent. I hope someone can tell me this is false.

On the other hand, I must respect Michelle Obama. After flying to Denmark with her friend Oprah Winfrey in the presidential private four engine jet, she said she made this “sacrifice” willingly for the children of Chicago. We should have a national “Michelle Obama Day” for this sacrifice. It was really tough on her: that taxpayer paid luxury flight, the dinner with the nobility of Denmark, the wine and cheese tasting party. Her life is hell.