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.

I did not vote for McCain, I voted against Obama. Having been brought up on the sayings, “birds of a feather flock together” and “you can tell a man by the company he keeps” I considered the anti-American, anti-democratic and corrupt politicians with whom Obama associated in Chicago and voted against him. I had no idea, however, how thoroughly corrupt the Democratic party had become until I read Michelle Malkin’s book, “Culture of Corruption” in which, as is her style, she gives names, dates, cash flow and her sources of information. It is disheartening reading. Now, I have read “Obama’s Moral Leadership Balloon Crashes” by Mona Charon (Townhall.com, Oct. 20). Ms Charon takes a different approach, but, like Michelle, names events and sources in writing about how Obama’s messages of “hope” in his campaign have translated into his support of dictatorships around the world.

Disappointed in the National Football League refusing permission for Rush Limbaugh to become a part owner in the Rams, based on false charges of racism brought by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the president of the players’ union, I decided to stop watching professional football. I quit this past Sunday and was surprised to discover that I didn’t miss it, or even notice that I was missing it.

Perhaps this belongs under “Family Affairs,” but I suspect it is more political. I had a bad night last night, the first in a long time.  Fifty-five year old memories woke me at two and kept me awake.  I know what caused it. While at the hospital yesterday I spotted my friend Jim, an unreformed Democrat, waiting in Dr. Blazer’s office so I dropped in to make certain this was simply a routine visit. Reassured, I traded fun, political, jabs with him before asking if he still liked Obama. He said he objected to Obama having a thirty thousand dollar a plate dinner with people he had just bailed out with millions of tax payer dollars. I didn’t respond to that, but what bothers me, and woke me up this morning, is something different. I don’t like what is happening in Afghanistan.

We have generals and military leaders saying we need more men and equipment, but Obama is too busy to talk with them: busy interviewing five year old children in New Orleans, busy visiting Chicago and Europe to try for the Olympics, busy giving political speeches in New Jersey and attending that expensive donor dinner. All of this while our men and women are fighting, and dying, with a lack of help and equipment in Afghanistan. 

My knowledge of this awoke me in the middle of the night: memories of night after night of explosions and men dying. I laid down to sleep in Outpost Howe on the 10^th of June, 1953, thinking that it was the first night in over a week I could sleep with my boots off. I woke up an hour later with dirt falling in my face as shells exploded on top of and around our bunker. I spent the night working in stocking feet. The Chinese had decided to take Seoul by going through us, and they allocated two divisions to do it. When morning came and life calmed down, three of us were sent to a watching post about a hundred and fifty yards in front of the front line and a hundred or so yards off of the west slope of Outpost Harry, the point of the Chinese attack. I was there for the next three nights. As a point radio scout, I received radioed requests for more men, more ammunition and more medical supplies and forwarded them to headquarters. After the third night, the fourth night of the battle, we three were pulled back and returned to Regimental headquarters for a night’s sleep. I remember being shocked by the supplies and the guns. There were hundreds of cases of grenades and bullets stacked immediately behind the line. Heavy guns had been pulled into the area to support us: forty and fifty caliber machine guns, heavy mortars, artillery of all types including rockets. This was all new. We were in a fight, but our government was supporting us. Over the eight nights of that unknown battle in that forgotten war we lost about 2300 men while killing an estimated 7000 enemy, but we held. And we held with our government’s, President Eisenhower’s, support. 

Where is that help and support for our people in Afghanistan? Obama is too busy doing other things to even talk to those trying to run this war.

I know his work isn’t easy. Any decision he makes, to fight or to run, will be criticized. It wasn’t easy for Truman or Eisenhower or Johnson or Nixon or Bush either, but they were in charge and knew their responsibility. It is time Obama learned his.