Beware of 'The Wedge!'

Get ready for the great wedge. Bend over, grab your ankles, and let Karl Rove and the Republican election strategists drive it home again.

You see, while you’re grabbing your ankles, you can’t see what’s going on right in front of you.

• Illegal immigrants draining our resources
• American jobs being shipped overseas
• assets at our ports being sold to Arab sheikdoms
• healthcare costs skyrocketing out of control
• and higher fuel costs robbing you and your family of disposable income.

No. With the wedge stuck up there where the sun don’t shine, it feels good …

• To be against gay marriage
• To deny a woman’s right to abortion
• To be fearful of judicial nominations
• To be fearful of gun control
• To outlaw burning the flag by constitutional amendment

These are the issues the political consultants promote to divide us. Are any of these issues going to determine the course of our nation? Is any one of them going to secure our borders, or protect our economy, or your job, or make energy more affordable, or ensure that you and your family have affordable healthcare?

No. Each of these wedge issues is divisive. Each is meant to stir up the emotions of fear and hate. Their promotion is a tactic to divert our attention from the problems the politicians either refuse to address or are being paid not to.

If you look at the wedge issues critically, they are all about denying citizens certain freedoms, rather than granting them rights.

While individually we might have strong feelings about each or even all of these wedge issues, should elections turn on such issues?

I hope not.

None of them is helping to solve our country’s most critical problems. We need to hold our elected leaders’ feet to the fire. We must force them to deal with real problems, not those that prey on our basest emotions of hate and fear.

If you’d like to comment on any of the foregoing, you can comment on this site by becoming a ‘blogger’ or you can e-mail me at WGDavis46@aol.com.

Visit my web site: www.authorsden.com/williamgdavis

New Political Party - Is It The Answer?

You may not have heard this yet but a new political party has formed.

Called Unity08, it’s the brainchild of some savvy political operators who served in past presidential administrations, both Republican and Democrat. They are concerned about the divisive state of our national politics. They feel our existing two parties are not dealing with the problems confronting our country. Using their organizational talents, they plan to mount a serious challenge for the Presidency in 2008.

The presidential nomination process will be grassroots. In other words, you can vote for the candidates! Unity08’s nominating process will be conducted on the Internet sometime in mid-2008. They anticipate up to 20 million Americans will participate.

Although their platform is far from being set in stone (you can go to their web site and propose issues to be addressed), one thing they say is for sure; the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates must either come from different political parties. Or they will be ‘independents’ running in ‘unity’ with candidates from the other parties.

The timing could be right. Polls indicate that the fastest growing affiliation by registered voters is ‘Independent.’ That means that most of us aren’t buying the crap the Republicans and Democrats are feeding us. We want to think for ourselves. We’re disgusted with what’s going on. We feel as though no one is listening to us. Unity08 could be one way to make ourselves heard.

Some might say that third party presidential runs are never successful. It didn’t work for Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Bull Moose’ party at the turn of the last century. It didn’t work for a guy named John Anderson in the early nineteen eighties, and it didn’t work for Ross Perot in 1991. The last time it did work was when this country was facing a serious issue that divided it. That was slavery. It was instrumental in the founding of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln was elected President.

Are we facing such a serious issue now? Let’s face it. Our plight as average Americans is getting worse. We are slaves to a global energy system based on oil. Powerful interests are influencing our daily lives, flooding our country with low cost illegal immigrants, making us pay more for healthcare than any other country, and shipping many of our industries overseas.

Congress is passing legislation that encourages this. The administration is making decisions that seem to go against our best interests. (How about the Dubai ports deal?)

As this happens, more of us have become disaffected with our leadership in Congress and The White House. Decisions are being made without our consent, decisions that not only do not benefit us, but decisions that actually do us harm. More and more of us are realizing that. More and more of us want nothing to do with either major political party.

The first hurdle for Unity08 will be getting someone from a third party elected in the first place. Then the challenges become even more difficult. It will be the fight against the lobbyists and their big money interests who own Congress and The White House. They are the ones who are stealing our American heritage and selling it to a one world, so-called ‘free market’ system that is destroying the American Middle Class.

Once elected, can anyone from any political party fight the Washington system—the lobbyists,the campaign contributors, and a system that provides office holders so many benefits they will do anything to keep their jobs? That remains to be seen.

But things have got to change. If they don’t, all our kids have to learn in school is how to say, “Do you want to super-size that?”

You can find out more about Unity08 at www.unity08.com/about .

If you’d like to comment on any of the foregoing, you can comment on this site by becoming a ‘blogger’ or you can e-mail me at WGDavis46@aol.com.

Visit my web site: www.authorsden.com/williamgdavis

War in Iraq - Dazed and Confused

On June 16 The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution “Declaring the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.”

Because it is such a divisive issue, I’ve avoided expressing my feelings about the war in Iraq. As a former Marine Corps officer, I am all for the troops. As an American citizen and the stepfather of an active duty Marine, I am troubled with the war’s conduct.

Like many, I wanted revenge for the attacks of 911. Attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan seemed logical. When we were told that Iraq posed a threat due to their possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), taking down Saddam Hussein seemed like the next logical step.

Most Americans felt the same way. Among them were tens of thousands of our sons and daughters who volunteered for the armed services. We fielded the finest fighting force in the world. In just a few weeks we had defeated Iraq’s standing army and were pulling down Sadam’s statues. “Mission Accomplished” was the word of the day.

And then things started to go wrong. No WMD were found. We disbanded the Iraqi army, disenfranchising them from their country’s future and allowing much of its leadership to regroup into an insurgency. Because many who ran the electrical grid, the water works, and other critical elements of infrastructure were part of Saddam’s political party, we fired them, disenfranchising them also. Critical services began falling apart.

We didn’t seem to understand that Iraq is a complicated and contentious society. It has two Islamic sects that hate each other. Iraq is a country of tribes whose loyalties are to their tribe first, their religion second and their country third. Whether our intelligence and diplomatic services knew all this, I don’t know. But if they did, and if they passed that information up the chain of command, our leaders weren’t listening.

And then Islamic extremists from other countries began infiltrating Iraq, bolstering an insurgency our modern armed services and intelligence agencies had difficulty combating. Most standing armies have problems defeating guerilla tactics. If the enemy stands and fights,we beat them. But they don’t fight that way. They use the psychological weapon of killing and maiming our troops with improvised explosives devices (IAD’s). I believe that IAD’s have more of a psychological effect on American public opinion than they do on the troops themselves.

Every day the media reminds by of how many of our young men and women have been killed. This week that number topped 2,500.

But we need to put that number in perspective. We are at war. The number of deaths in Iraq has accumulated over the three years we’ve been there. Soldiers, sailors, Marines and Airmen die in war. It’s the nature of the bloody business. Perhaps we forget that in one day, June 6, 1944, the American Army had 5,000 killed on Omaha Beach alone. In one month’s fighting on Iwo Jima the Marine Corps had 6,800 killed in action. During three month’s fighting on Okinawa the Army and Marines had 7,400 killed in ground combat and 5,000 died offshore in ships, many of which were attacked by kamikazes.

My feelings about the war in Iraq can be expressed in one word; confusion.

I’m confused in that now I feel that invading Iraq was a mistake. But even more confusing is my belief that now that we are committed, we must win. Radical Islam poses a danger to the entire Western world. Nuclear technology has been obtained by several Muslim nations, and possibly by at least one Islamic terrorist network. Their philosophy of jihad is as foreign to us as was Japan’s militarism and the Nazi’s ‘final solution. As in World War Two, we are fighting a dangerous and fatalistic philosophy.

Though invading Iraq was an error, and mistakes have plagued our strategy and tactics, we are at war. We must win. We must win or all the deaths and maiming injuries that have occurred in the last three years will be for nothing. If we leave Iraq without achieving our goals, others will continue to challenge us, realizing that if they make us bleed enough, we’ll throw in the towel.

Late last week American fighter-bombers dropped two 500 lb. bombs on a terrorist safe house, taking out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the major terrorist and insurgency leader in Iraq. That attack yielded invaluable intelligence. Since his death, Iraqi and American forces have conducted 452 raids and dispatched 104 insurgents to Paradise.

The Iraqi security chief has even begun talking about the possibility of a draw-down of American troops in his country by the end of this year.

Maybe we’ve turned the corner.

I hope we have.

If you’d like to comment on any of the foregoing, you can on this site by becoming a ‘blogger’ or you can e-mail me at WGDavis46@aol.com.

Visit my web site: www.authorsden.com/williamgdavis

Naming Names – The Senators Who Sold Us Out

Thanks to the Internet, a list of the Senators voting for the “immigration reform bill” (and against the majority of American citizens) is being circulated.

These are the culprits who believe that illegal aliens should be allowed to collect Social Security (even though they have been using stolen identities and Social Security numbers). Combined with that, this bill will put 8 to 10 million illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship.

If you want to wade through the entire list of 50 offenders, they are listed in the comments section of this entry.

But in studying the list, I found some interesting patterns in how they voted.

There were several states in which both Senators voted against the bill. They were the Senators from Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri,New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. For whatever reason, these Senators chose to follow the wishes of their constituents and the American people.

Hooray for them!

(For those of us who live in Florida, Senator Martinez voted for the bill, while Senator Nelson didn’t. Nelson is up for re-election this November. I guess he was reading the political tea leaves.)

In my opinion those who voted for this bill should be targeted for defeat the next time they come up for re-election. Make no mistake, there are some prestigious names in this group of offenders, names like McCain, Kennedy, Biden, and Clinton. Some want to run for President. What’s their vote on the illegal immigration issue telling us about their agenda once they achieve the White House?

The liberal Democrats like Kennedy have been compromised by a political agenda. Many others have sold themselves to lobbyists and campaign contributors whose agenda is to maintain a constant flow of cheap (meaning illegal) workers into the American labor force. As I’ve stated before in previous entries, the continued uncontrolled influx of these illegals will only create a greater burden on our social welfare system in which you and me, as a Middle Class Americans, will pay dearly.

If you are so inclined, print out the names of those who chose to sell you out. Keep them in a safe place. And when these arrogant jerks come up for re-election, remind everyone you know
what they did in 2006.

If you’d like to comment on any of the foregoing, you can comment on this site by becoming a ‘blogger’ or you can e-mail me at WGDavis46@aol.com.

Visit my web site: www.authorsden.com/williamgdavis

Sealing The Border - The Game

Texas Governor Rick Perry has a great idea. He revealed it to a group of border county sheriffs last Thursday.

He wants to place hundreds of surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande. The images would then be streamed on to the Internet so computer users could become virtual border patrollers. Upon spotting border incursions, participants could call a toll free number and report the violations to Texas authorities.

Great idea, Governor Perry!

But I’ve got some enhancements …

Let’s turn this idea into an immense nationwide video game. We’ll call it “Zap the Wetback.” Imagine hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, manning their PC’s and Mac’s to defend the Texas border. The illegal aliens wouldn’t have a chance!

To score points players would maneuver their joystick crosshairs over an invader and then “zap” a targeted offender. That would trigger a satellite image to a central monitoring station, dispatching authorities to make arrests.

The scoring system would be as follows:

Coyotes -- 2,000 points

Females of childbearing age -- 500 points

Males -- 100 points

Point system rationale;

Coyotes have the ability to bring hundreds if not thousands of illegals across the border. Eliminating a coyote has the potential of dramatically decreasing the flow.

Females of childbearing age have the potential of producing four to five new mouths to suckle from the welfare sow.

Males, well … there are just so many of them …

Special Bonus Scoring;

10,000 points -- Blasting a drug tunnel

15,000 points -- Zapping Mexican troops assisting drug cartels

Yes, I can see it now. “Zap the Wetback” will become the new nationwide phenomenon. It will replace poker and Texas Hold’em as the most preferred on-line game activity. It will spawn a new reality TV series that will rival “American Idol.”

See, all we needed to solve our border problem was Governor Perry’s great idea … and a little American ingenuity.

In other border-related News …

Border Patrol Getting Bigger than FBI

With a proposed major expansion, the Border Patrol may soon overtake the F.B.I. as the largest federal law enforcement agency. The agency has swelled to more than 11,000 agents from 4,000 15 years ago, with 6,000 more proposed by President Bush by 2008.

If you’d like to comment on any of the foregoing, you can comment on this site by becoming a ‘blogger’ or you can e-mail me at WGDavis46@aol.com.

Visit my web site: www.authorsden.com/williamgdavis