Arnold Ahlert

I Stand With the ‘One Percenters’

According to the mobs occupying Wall Street and other financial centers around the nation, they represent 99% of the country. That's means out of a nationwide population of roughly 300 million people, they speak for 297 million of us. Well not us. I'll take my chances with the other 3 million, or the One Percenters if you will. And I have a solution for dealing with people like me: quarantine us.

Tim, Liz and Bev Equals Moe Larry and Curly

Remember the Three Stooges? Moe, Larry and Curly entertained a generation of kids with antics that were a combination slapstick comedy mixed with unrelenting stupidity. Most comedy today is much more "sophisticated." So where do we find today's Three Stooges? Inhabiting the government, or trying to. I present to you Exhibits A,B, and C--or if you prefer, Treasury Secretary Timothy "Moe" Geithner, Massachusetts Democrat Senate candidate Elizabeth "Larry" Warren, and North Carolina Democrat Gov. Bev "Curly" Perdue.

No Acknowledgment of Israel? No More Money

Shortly before taking the podium to address the United Nations' General Assembly last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said everything the world needs to know about where the so-called peace process is headed. Speaking to an assembly of 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the United States, Abbas laid his cards on the table. "They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state," he proclaimed.

‘Jobbing’ America

Below is one section — out of 451 Sections — of the president's American Jobs Act. The internet-accessible pdf. file for this particular piece of proposed legislation totals 155 pages. Read as much as you can stand. My comments below.

Carville knows a few things about ‘crazy’

Yesterday Democrat political operative James Carville wrote a piece for CNN offering the president advice on how to get his administration back on track. That part of Carville's column is between him and the president. It was the penultimate paragraph of Carville's post I found fascinating:

Contemptible Krugman

New York times columnist Paul Krugman has always been a small man. But it took the 10th commemoration of 9/11 to reveal exactly how small. In a column entitled "Years of Shame," under the general headline "The Conscience of a Liberal," Mr. Krugman revealed exactly how compromised his leftist-addled conscience truly is.

9/11: A Hard Day for Progressives

Every year, for one day, progressives maintain a lower profile than usual. It is a day when all the multi-culti mumbo-jumbo and morally relative rot gut sound completely out of place. It is a day when America confronts two realities utterly anathema to progressives everywhere: one, genuine evil exists; and two, in the war against Islamic terrorism, one must choose sides.

The Real American Fanatics

"If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand ... But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Do they have an economic plan? Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively... I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ." — Outgoing NY Times editor Bill Keller

The Billionaire Blowhard From Nebraska

One of the things I've learned in life is that talk is cheap. If you want to know what a person's all about, watch what they do, not what they say. The latest cheap talk artist is the so-called Oracle of Omaha, aka Mr. Warren Buffett. He's the guy who, in a recent New York Times editorial, talked the talk about the super-rich not paying their fair share of taxes. Walking the walk? The Buff-meister's most recent move was one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with his mouth.

The Five Stages of (Progressive) Grief

There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. When one superimposes this psychological structure on the progressive movement in general, and the black American progressive community in particular, it becomes far easier to understand the tremendous amount of animus directed at their favorite trash-ees, the Tea Party movement. That animus was highlighted by the latest Democrat to embrace the "politics of civility" demanded by progressives in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy. Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) is another Democrat who apparently didn't get the memo. "Let us all remember who the real enemy is," Wilson huffed at a Miami town hall meeting. "The real enemy is the Tea Party--the Tea Party holds the Congress hostage. They have one goal in mind, and that's to make President Obama a one-term president."

Facts? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Facts

Comedians Penn and Teller have a show call "Bulls**t!" which runs every so often on the Showtime cable network. The purpose of the show is to expose fraudulent ideas or thinking in an amusing way. The one I watched was about organic vegetables and whether or not they were any better than non-organic ones. The show, using both anecdotes and scientific evidence demonstrated pretty convincingly that they're not. But the anecdotes revealed something profound about the way people think -- or more accurately how some people allow feelings to completely over-ride reason.

Stay Healthy, America—- or else!

In 2008 Democrats got complete control of the federal government. At one point they had a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate. Rhis led directly to the passage of ObamaCare without a single Republican vote. A majority of Americans was so repulsed they handed the House back to Republicans in 2010. Republicans want to rid the country of this albatross, even as Democrats aim to use it as the vehicle to get health care under complete federal control. So who's got the better argument? Here's the latest from England, where they've had government-run healthcare for decades.

Three-Out-of-Four Americans Are Radicals

There are a lot of absurdities surrounding the debt ceiling talks. But two of the biggest have to be the idea that Republicans are the "radicals" in this particular dance and, unbelievably as it may seem, all of our current fiscal problems are George W. Bush's fault — therefore we must maintain our spending binge with no end in sight, other than some opaque promise to address the issue somewhere down the road.

Completely Expectable ‘Unexpectedness’

Last Friday, Americans revisited two of the most depressingly recurring themes they have been forced to endure for almost three years. First, $3 trillion of debt-bloating, economy-killing, spread-the-poverty around Keynesian economics once again proved itself to be a colossal failure. Second, economists who use the word "unexpected" to describe that which is painfully obvious to everyone else have once again proven they are unrelentingly clueless. The unemployment rate? "Unexpectedly" up to 9.2 percent. Job creation? 18,000, "uber-unexpectedly" below the prediction of 90,000.

Organized Cheating

The ongoing bankruptcy known as unionized public school education has reached a new milestone. In Atlanta, 178 teachers and principals spread throughout 56 schools were investigated, and cheating on tests — by the educators themselves — was confirmed in 44 of them. So far, 82 of the people entrusted with the education of children have confessed to erasing wrong answers on standardized test and inserting right ones. Are these reprobates the focus of corruption? Don't be silly. "We have a terrible federal law called No Child Left Behind that says that all schools have to have 100 percent of their students proficient in reading in math by the year 2014 or their schools will be shut down," said Educator Diane Ravitch.

Progressivism Masquerading as Education

A couple of weeks ago the results of a nationwide history test given at various grade levels were released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). To virtually no one's surprise, only 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrated "proficiency" on the exam. Most Americans, if we're being honest, are equally incompetent, if not more so, regarding basic economics. Throw in a lack of proficiency regarding the Constitution, and you get a trifecta of ignorance that ought to embarrass any First World nation. Yet if the Maryland public school system is any indication, we're beyond embarrassment: "environmental literacy" will now be required in order to graduate high school.

NBC-ya Later

It has now been revealed that NBC's decision to leave out the words "under God" and "indivisible" from the Pledge of Allegiance in Sunday's U.S. Open golf broadcast was no accident. On Tuesday, the network released this statement: "We are aware of the distress this has caused many of our viewers and are taking the issue very seriously.

Nothing Is Anyone’s Fault Anymore

In a number of columns over the last few years, I've made the point that the heart of virtually all of America's problems stem from widespread immorality. The seeds of this social downslope were planted in the 1960s, when America's so-called "social revolution" took place, and two groups of people, lawyers and therapists, supplanted religious figures. As a result, the long-traditional understanding of good and evil has been transformed into debates about legal and illegal, and/or well and unwell. In short, nothing is anyone's fault anymore. No one exemplifies this transformation better than Anthony Weiner.

If I Were President

There's an episode of the old cartoon Popeye where girlfriend Olive Oyl sings a song entitled, "If I Were President." In keeping with that spirit, a very short list, in no particular order, of what I would attempt to achieve with four years in the Oval Office:

California Dreamin’

Sometimes one has to laugh to keep from going nuts. So here's the laugher: on Monday the Supreme Court of the United States voted 5-4 to release upwards of 46,000 inmates from California's prison system, due primarily to "overcrowding." The joke? Alcatraz, one of nation's most famous prisons, which also happens to be located in California, has become a tourist attraction since it was closed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963.