American Republic Online

Seriously, this is for real:

Park department staff is recommending reducing bonfires at the two beaches this summer and possibly banning them altogether next year.

The park board will hear the recommendation Thursday, and the city plans to run public-service announcements and hand out brochures later this month about the effects of bonfires on global warming.

According to a memo to the park board from the staff released Thursday, “The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon … emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.”

Under the proposal, the department in July would reduce the number of fire rings at Alki from six currently to three and at Golden Gardens from 12 to seven.

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The dream died yesterday.  On June 11, 2008, Cuban Vice Minister of Labor and Social Security Carlos Mateu announced that Cuba will be removing its egalitarian wage system.  It’s about time.  What is really interesting is how the decision was framed.  Listen to Mateu (emphasis added):

“This (new) salary system should be seen as a tool to help obtain better results in output and services,” deputy labor and social security minister Carlos Mateu told the Communist Party daily Granma, noting that employers have until August to implement the changes…

“Generally,” the paper quoted Mateu as saying, “there has been a tendency for people to earn the same, and that egalitarianism is not helpful.

“That is something that we have to fix … because if it is harmful to pay workers less than they deserve, it also is harmful to pay them what they have not earned,” he added.

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This quote was buried in the press for obvious reasons, but the ARO has ferreted it out for you. Here is a full snippet of Obama’s speech in Oregon on Saturday:

“All right. So that’s what we want to do on global warming here in the United States. We are also going to have to negotiate with other countries. China, India, in particular Brazil. They are growing so fast that they are consuming more and more energy and pretty soon, if their carbon footprint even approaches ours, we’re goners. That’s part of the reason why we’ve got to make the investment. We got to lead by example. If we lead by example, if we lead by example, then we can actually export and license technologies that have been invented here to help them deal with their growth pains. But keep in mind, you’re right, we can’t tell them don’t grow. We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in the desert or we’re living in the tundra and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.” - Sen. Obama (emphasis added)

This brief portion of his speech speaks volumes about Barack Obama’s outlook of and for the country. I must say though that this compelling messag has raised a lot of questions in me:

• What should I do with my SUV now that I can’t drive it?
• Isn’t having enough to eat a pre-req for not being among the “3rd World”?
• How many Americans are currently living in the “tundra”?
• Why is Brazil with a population of 188 Million worse than China & India that both exceed a Billion?
• How many other countries need to approve of our lifestyle to be acceptable? Just one, three, all of them?
• Since we should shrink our lifestyle to allow for China’s growth - is Obama running for President or Chairman?

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The brains behind Obama are recommending that the “Pull Out” of Iraq look a lot more like a simple force reduction. Returning us to troop levels not that far below Pre-Surge levels. While there is a significant difference in “stance” of 150k troops “on the front lines” and 80k troops in “oversight” - though the terms are as malleable as any applied to this war - it falls far short of “pulling out”. Now people with some semblance of foreign policy knowledge will find it comforting that, as many suspected, the Democrats have no intention of leaving Iraq except ceremonially for the TV cameras. On the other hand, the anti-war zealots won’t be to happy to learn that the candidate most pandering to them - isn’t quite the pacifist he claims to be .

• NY Sun: Obama Advisor: 60-80k Troops Through 2010

On March 19th at the Campaign for America’s Future Take Back America Conference in Washington, Arianna Huffington (co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, and one of Time Magazine’s “100 most influential people”) made the following statement:

“It’s time to actually have zero tolerance for certain ways of arguing.  First of all, we can not allow John McCain to ever say again that Al-Qaeda is going to increase the levels of violence because it doesn’t want John McCain to be president.  That should be outside the realm of political debate in this country.  We need to say, it is completely un-American to politicize real threats to this country for the sake of getting elected.  There is nothing we can do about Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of them.  They are toxic curiosities.  But there has to be a different standard to what happens in the United States Congress, and it is up to us to demand censure and to demand an absolute zero tolerance for statements like that starting with John McCain’s statement.” - Arianna Huffington (emphasis added)

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Our good friend Patrick Bedard of Car & Driver has a excellent piece on the governmental sneaky tax: Robo-Cop.

This just in: A red-light camera on Broadway Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, has suffered fatal gunshot wounds. Three bullets struck the device, destroying the lens and rendering it inop. Clifford E. Clark III, 47, holed up in a nearby minivan, was arrested and charged with felony vandalism.

Not to put words in Clark’s mouth, but what I think he was trying to say with his .30-06 Ruger was that he had withdrawn his consent to be governed by robots. You may remember that our founding fathers had a very clear idea of the source of government legitimacy. The Declaration of Independence says that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The political theory here is that there is no moral authority to use state power unless the people say there is.

One guy expressing disapproval of a red-light camera won’t curb government zeal for robot surveillance, but it’s a start…

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We all can agree that the TSA agents tend to be operating at just above your average McDonald’s employee. (Perhaps this is part of why the Jihadists hate us - their inability to get past such simpletons) If not here’s some more proof: TSA didn’t believe the MacBook Air was a laptop (and therefore must be a bomb). Really though, if you’re going to make a laptop bomb wouldn’t you go for the 12lb gaming rig instead of the super thin 3lb MBA? Perhaps this terrorist was saving the rest of the C4 for later?

I am equally amused at the whole “turn on your laptop to prove its not a bomb” theory. As the MacBook Air proves, you can fit a fully functional lappy into a small space. Put the MBA innards into a Dell 17 inch “desktop replacement” and you have room for a 10+ lb of plastique! Hello TSA! Am I the only one that sees this stuff?

I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.

A younger agent, joins the crew. I must now be occupying ten, perhaps twenty, percent of the security force. At this checkpoint anyway. There are three score more at the other five checkpoints. The new arrival looks at the printouts from x-ray, looks at my laptop sitting small and alone. He tells the others that it is a real laptop, not a “device”. That it has a solid-state drive instead of a hard disc. They don’t know what he means. He tries again, “Instead of a spinning disc, it keeps everything in flash memory.” Still no good. “Like the memory card in a digital camera.” He points to the x-ray, “Here. That’s what it uses instead of a hard drive.”

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Well Super Tuesday II has come and gone with not quite the fan fare of the first. Most predictions held with Hillary pulling out two vital wins in Texas and Ohio, but the real story is slightly below the surface of the the win column.

#1 McCain is still struggling to convince Republican voters that he’s their man. Take a look at how Huckabee faired in the big states: 30% in Ohio and almost 40% in Texas. That does bode well for the candidate that “locked up” the nomination weeks ago. While McCain may be gaining the independents he seems to be losing the at least a third of his base. And without his base its unlikely that he will have enough votes to unseat either Dem. Think it’s just Huckabee’s charm? Look closer. Romni, Thompson and Giuliani all pulled statistically significant numbers (>1%), some as high as 4%. These candidates are not only out of the race but all have endorsed McCain. Which would mean that McCain’s negatives are high enough to only pale in comparison to Hillary’s.

#2 The Primary structure is messed up. The Dem side is worse but both sides are bad. Can someone explain to me the significance of Ohio? Don’t get me wrong it’s a great normal state, but WHY does everyone care about it? Or more accurately, why does it get a disproportional number of delegates? Let’s look at the numbers: Texas population: 22.8M delegates: 39 dems, 69 repubs. Ohio population: 11.4M delegates: 128 dems, 79 repubs. (Tennessee population: 6M delegates: 66 dems, 46 repubs.) Didn’t we outlaw the concept that some people’s votes only count 2/3 or 3/4 of others? -shrug-

In case you haven’t figured it out from the utter lack of coverage, the US Military has been kicking butt in Iraq. The surge helped our forces reach that critical mass of manpower. Coupled with the additional time, defections, and other gains - the point spread on this game has shifted considerably in the last 6 months. The underdog Al-Qaeda now just looks like a dog and a rather small one at that.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

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