When did life become so complicated?

Just a personal note today.

So really, when did life become so complicated?  It seems the older I get the more complicated life becomes.  Perhaps I'm not relying on God enough?  In my best Mel Brooks movie line impersonation, "Why am I asking you?".  I dunno.  I guess I just need to vent a little.  If it's not office politics or national politics, it's family politics.  Ugh.  

When I was younger I thought life was hard.  Doing homework every night as a child.  Junior high with all the awkwardness of going through puberty, then senior high trying to figure out who I was.  Then adulthood arrives as well as kids of your own and then your trying to figure it all out again.  Then your children become adults and your parents start needing the same care your children once did.  At what point does life become easier?  So when does the answer finally arrive?  

So I will go on, trying to figure life out and find the answers to lifes questions.  

The real cost of the stimulus/porkulus?

From the Heritage Foundation.  $3.2 TRILLION!!!!  Woof.

Obama administration on a political land grab?

It sure looks like it.  They are taking the census out of the Commerce Department and bringing it into the White House.  Sure looks like a good way to pad their territory.  Remember, the census is used to redraw districts.

Change someone can believe in?

The folks over at Barron's make a very good argument. One I agree with. While we all played a part, the Government meddling in the free market is the biggest cause. The article can be found here.

Here are a few Key Paragraphs.

The government's meddling got us into this mess.

CONTRARY TO A VIEW POPULARIZED DURING THE 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation.

The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them.

Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.

The bipartisan Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 to prevent corporate fraud and restore investor confidence after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. It failed to prevent the accounting fraud and influence-peddling scandals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And even after those scandals were widely understood, regulators sent Fannie and Freddie back into the market to continue buying subprime loans, lending and borrowing with implied taxpayer backing.

Across the government, the Bush administration supported new regulations that added almost 1,000 pages a year to the Federal Register, nearly a record. If this is insufficient regulation, it's hard to imagine a scope that would be effective.

We are in this mess largely because critical thought and moral judgment have been subordinated to the politicization of our economy, resulting in regulatory gaps and excessive controls of the wrong kind.

Today's problems have their roots in programs and financial instruments that shifted the locus of moral responsibility away from private individuals and institutions to wider circles that were understood to end with a government guarantee. Heads of the top banks and financial institutions could approve substandard home-mortgage underwriting -- prone to increased default -- because those loans could be securitized by Wall Street and sold off to investors or to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), with no likely recourse to the financial institution of origin.

Our present crisis began in the 1970s, during the Carter administration, with passage of the Community Reinvestment Act to stem bank redlining and liberalize lending in order to extend home ownership in lower-income communities. Then in the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took a fateful step by getting the GSEs to accept subprime mortgages. With Fannie and Freddie easing credit requirements on loans they would purchase from lenders, banks could greatly increase lending to borrowers unqualified for conventional loans. In the name of extending affordable housing, this broadened the acceptability of risky loans throughout the financial system.

Hat Tip to Hotair.

Michael Moore remains classy

What a class act. In case you hadn't heard, he recently stated “I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven,” Moore said, laughing. “To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention, up in the Twin Cities – at the top of the Mississippi River.”

What is it with the left? They always accuse the right of being hate mongers, racists etc., yet they consistently spew this type of drivel.

Monthly reunions bring together 'fighting-est unit in World War II'

This story was in my local newspaper. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

By KATHERINE KERSTEN, Star Tribune
January 8, 2008 - 8:27 PM

There's an elite gathering on the first Saturday of each month at a Perkins restaurant in Bloomington. A small group of men in their mid-80s -- some joined by a son or daughter -- gather around a table to reminisce over coffee and pancakes. They are World War II Army Rangers. Every year, their number grows smaller.

The Rangers weren't numerous back in 1942, for that matter, when -- at a low point in the war -- they were formed to give the U.S. a desperately needed capability to carry out commando raids and amphibious assaults. Then at Cisterna, Italy, in 1944, they were almost wiped out. But they became the foundation of today's Rangers, who have played a vital role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 1st Ranger Battalion was "the fighting-est unit in World War II," said Don Frederick of Richfield, who organizes the breakfasts.

Frederick, who joined the National Guard at 16 and was sent to England at 18, was one of several hundred Rangers selected from a much larger group of volunteers.

Their training in Achnacarry, Scotland, included brutal daily speed marches, cliff-scaling and the "death ride": a perilous rope slide over a river while live ammunition was fired and demolition charges detonated.

Needless to say, conversation at the breakfasts never flags.

Frederick, for example, took part in the Rangers' first solo operation, a night raid to take out coastal artillery at Arzew, Algeria.

While recuperating from appendicitis, he went AWOL from a hospital in North Africa to rejoin his unit, which had spearheaded the invasion of Sicily. He and a few buddies hitched a ride on a boat to Sicily, commandeered a private car ("we borrowed it," says Frederick), and scoured the island to find their units. "The Army is still looking for me," he jokes.

Frederick was part of the 1943 invasion of Italy near Salerno, where the Germans were dug into mountainous terrain in a complex network of pillboxes and minefields. Sick with jaundice, he was instructed by his doctor to sit the next mission out. "I told him we were going to be relieved in 24 hours, and then I would go back to the hospital if necessary," he says.

Frederick -- by then a lieutenant -- was charged with preventing German infantry and armor from getting beyond a couple of hairpin turns in the highway far below. But their relief troops never showed up. "We were out there all alone. One little battalion with no air support, no artillery support, no support period. But my platoon ran the Germans off the mountain three times."

At one point, Frederick clambered down to give morphine shots to two badly wounded men. He was caught in the open by the Germans.

"They took me to a young German lieutenant about my age," he explains. "He extended his hand and said, 'Congratulations on a fine fire fight.' But then he took me down to a quonset hut. They had a Lugar pistol right at the back of my neck. There must have been 50 dead and dying Germans in there."

"'Why are so many of my men shot through the head?' he asked. I think he thought I might have captured and executed them."

The Rangers were excellent marksmen. "We didn't waste ammunition," says Frederick. "The Germans were in prepared positions, like foxholes. I told the lieutenant their heads were the only target we had. He accepted that, or I wouldn't be here today."

For a year and a half, Frederick was shuttled among German POW camps. In March 1945, he was liberated by an American force, only to be recaptured after the tank he was riding on was blown up.

He was finally liberated at Moosburg, Germany. Several tanks broke through the camp's front gate, he says, followed by Gen. George Patton. He was "standing up in his jeep, dressed as if for a ball and vowing, 'I'll have you men out of here in 48 hours.'"

Frederick ended the war puffing on Hermann Goering's personal cigars, which a buddy had procured at Hitler's Eagle's Nest.

For Rangers like Frederick, the monthly breakfasts are a chance to reconnect. For example, he can see Sophie Wojcik Komec, sister of his best friend, Walter Wojcik of Minneapolis. Wojcik was killed at age 21 on the beach in Sicily. And there's Zane Shippy of Burnsville, who lost a lung in Italy a week after Frederick was captured.

Rangers from later days -- Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan -- are welcome, too. "They are fine guys," says Frederick.

War is war, as the Rangers say.

Katherine Kersten • kkersten@startribune.com

The Contest in America

I read this today. I thought it was amazing that this was written over 100 years ago. It sounds like something that could have been written today.

In his essay “The Contest In America,” 19th-century libertarian philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill wrote, “[W]ar... is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.”

Mill added, “A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”