Divemedic

So the US Military is trying to railroad some soldiers because they posed for pictures with a few dead Afgans. From the article:

Troops allegedly shared the photos by e-mail and thumb drive like electronic trading cards. Now 60 to 70 of them are being kept tightly shielded from the public and even defense attorneys because of fears they could wind up in the news media and provoke anti-American violence.
“We’re in a powder-keg situation here,” said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a military law professor at Yale University.

 There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, they are denying defense attorneys access to the evidence, because of “National Security.” I thought Obama said we wouldn’t do that anymore. These guys have a right to a fair trial. Period. If National Security issues are so important that you cannot release the evidence to afford the accused a fair trial, then you let them go. I agree that sometimes National Security concerns require that we not release certain facts. However, I also feel that when such secrets cannot be released, then that means that you cannot throw people in jail by saying, “National Security, we can’t let you see it, but trust us, this evidence proves his guilt.”

Next, they are worried about anti-American violence? Have we really turned into a nation of pussies? We are constantly deluged with pictures and films of Jihadis killing and torturing our soldiers, but “OMG!!! Someone just found out that we killed a few people! I hope we didn’t make anyone angry.”

Look, I think that we have no business over there, but if we are going to be there, then you fight to win. This is exactly how Vietnam turned into the mess that it did, because we weren’t serious about winning. You win a war, any war, by destroying the enemy’s ability to fight back. How do you do that? Well, you destroy their ability to support the war effort when you blow up power plants, factories and bridges. You bomb railways, dams, and anything else that can be used to build war materiel. That also includes blowing up the people who will work in , and rebuild, the factories, bridges, and power plants.

There is also the psychological effect: The people are so afraid of what you will do to them, that they lose the will to fight. We need to stop pussyfooting around, and get this over with. The United States won a World War by bombing the crap out of the enemy. We leveled entire cities.

This is the reason why I did everything in my power to keep my kids out of the military. I have been watching as we prosecute and micromanage our military forces, placing them at a disadvantage. Somehow the American public has gotten the idea that you can fight a war without anyone getting hurt, and I believe that this is the reason why we are so quick to go to war and use our military.

Guess what? War is a dirty, nasty business, where you win by attrition. It is not to be entered into on a whim, and once you enter into war, you need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to win. Destroy the enemy. If you aren’t ready and willing to do that, then war is not the answer.

I think that the silliness and futility of the ‘war on drugs’ is perfectly illustrated with this article here. Trying to eradicate a plant that grows wild. What would be especially funny is if there were some snail or bird that was endangered and required this plant to survive. What would the Feds do then?

You hear so much lately about how the recession is over, but one only has to look at the number of bankruptcies being filed to see that this is far from over. Looking at the statistics for the Bankruptcy court for the Middle District of Florida, we can see a trend. In August of each year since 2006, the bankruptcy filings for the year were:
2006 August filings to date: 9,547
2007 August filings to date: 16,263
2008 August filings to date: 26,723
2009 August filings to date: 40,536
2010 August filings to date: 45,600

As long as people are still going bankrupt and are still out of work, they will not have any money to spend. As long as they have no money to spend, there can be no recovery. Bankruptcy filings are still increasing, and even though 2009 was a record year for bankruptcy filings, 2010 is 10 percent higher than that.

The only year that came close to last year’s record pace was 2005, when many people rushed to file bankruptcy in order to beat the effective date of the bankruptcy reform laws that the Republicans made law that year.

Rigging elections. The Census is now complete, which means that the gerrymandering drawing of districts can now commence. The Democrats are angry because they don’t rule Florida’s electoral process. The areas of Florida that have historically voted Democrat are the southeast coast near Miami, and the area around Jacksonville. (The 2008 election saw other areas in blue, but in my opinion that was more a result of the Democrats all running against former President Bush than a true shift in political power.)

To counter this, the Democrats want to redraw districts to create an advantage for themselves. It won’t work. You cannot thwart corruption in politics.

From a recent Email:

Tax rate cuts don’t give anything to the so-called rich. They don’t “get” someone else’s money. Tax cuts allow people to keep more of their own money to spend and invest as they see fit.

Exactly. Look where the money goes:

The total Federal Budget is $3.7 trillion for FY’10
Income: $2.164 trillion
Outlay: $3.720 trillion
Deficit: $1.556 trillion

Here are the top 5 spending categories and the percentage of total outlays:
1 Social Security $722 billion 19.4%
2 Defense $719 Billion 19.3%
3 Welfare $557 billion 15%
4 Medicare $457 Billion 12.3%
5 Welfare, healthcare (like medicaid) $335 Billion 9%

Add together the money we give people not to work (all of the above, except Defense) and you get $2.071 trillion, or an amount equal to virtually all of the taxes collected.

For 2004 (the last year I could find data) The top 25% of wage earners in the country comprise everyone making more than $139,491 (per return, not per person). That top 25% paid 84.8% of all income taxes.

(Source: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in06tr.xls)

Yeah, the problem is the rich.

This year, I have done quite a few posts illustrating how much fraud took place on the part of mortgage lenders. There are many conservative bloggers who have spent a lot of bandwidth spreading the theory that “the homeowners owe money to someone, so they should just pay. It is the homeowners’ fault for taking out loans they couldn’t repay,” all the while denying that the banks had any responsibility in the mess we are in.

Those same people will probably not want to see this:

Some of the nation’s largest mortgage companies used a single document processor who said he signed off on foreclosures without having read the paperwork – an admission that may open the door for homeowners across the country to challenge foreclosure proceedings.

The legal predicament compelled Ally Financial, the nation’s fourth-largest home lender [ed. note: Ally used to go by the name GMAC], to halt evictions of homeowners in 23 states this week. Now Ally officials say hundreds of other companies, including mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, may also be affected because they use Ally to service their loans.

In other words, these document factories are producing paperwork on demand, as the lawyer handling the foreclosure needs it. Read on:

As head of Ally’s foreclosure document processing team, 41-year-old Jeffrey Stephan was required to review cases to make sure the proceedings were legally justified and the information was accurate. He was also required to sign the documents in the presence of a notary.
In a sworn deposition, he testified that he did neither.
The reason may be the sheer volume of the documents he had to hand-sign: 10,000 a month. Stephan had been at that job for five years.

10,000 times a month, this man testified in a sworn affidavit that he personally reviewed the records, and determined that the person whose home was being taken was rightfully losing his home. TEN THOUSAND TIMES A MONTH. That works out to over 500 people every business day who lost homes based upon FRAUD. At 8 hours per business day, this man reviewed the paperwork for each foreclosure and signed an affidavit swearing it was accurate in an average of 55 seconds per foreclosure. It is obvious that a person cannot review all of the mortgage paperwork and testify to its accuracy in only 55 seconds. For five years. This one man’s fraud and lies were used to take 600,000 homes. 

That is just from one paperwork factory. There are hundreds of these companies out there. But hey, those deadbeat homeowners should pay. The lawyers are never wrong. The courts use this paperwork, generated in less than a minute, to justify holding a hearing under “rocket docket” rules, where each homeowner is given an average of 60 seconds to argue his case, and that even assumes that the bank isn’t granted summary judgment without a hearing, based upon the forged paperwork.

The same conservatives who complain that we can’t trust the courts to safeguard our right to keep and bear arms, our freedom of religion, and our right to free speech trust the court to decide who takes a home and who doesn’t.

This illustrates why you should own a gun. Reading the story, I know it sounds like the gun caused the problem in the first place, but looking below the surface, the person on the killing spree caused the problem. The reason why owning a gun would have helped is illustrated by the fact that police did what they always do in a shooting situation: they set up a perimeter and waited.

In fact, they waited for over an hour. Shots were still being fired in the house when responders got to the scene, just after 1 o’clock. They locked down the local schools. They set up a perimeter. They set up a command post. They assembled a SWAT team. At about 2:15, a family member grew tired of waiting, broke the perimeter, and went inside himself. If he had not done that, who knows how much longer they would have waited? How many of those people in the house would have survived if the police hadn’t have waited for over an hour?

If the day should ever come that you are involved in a shooting, will you want to wait for over an hour before the police come to help you? Or are you going to wish that you could take care of it yourself? When seconds count, the police are minutes away, and then spend an hour setting up.