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The principles that rule this blog

Principles that will govern my thoughts as I express them here (from my opening statement):


  • Freedom of the individual should be as total as possible, limited only by the fact that nobody should be free to cause physical injury to another, or to deprive another person of his freedoms.
  • Government is necessary primarily to provide those services that private enterprise won't, or won't at a price that people can afford.
  • No person has a right to have his own beliefs on religious, moral, political, or other controversial issues imposed on others who do not share those beliefs.

I believe that Abraham Lincoln expressed it very well:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot
so well do, for themselves — in their separate, individual capacities.”


Comments will be invited, and I will attempt to reply to any comments that are offered in a serious and non-abusive manner. However, I will not tolerate abusive or profane language (my reasoning is that this is my blog, and so I can control it; I wouldn't interfere with your using such language on your own!)

If anyone finds an opinion that I express to be contrary to my principles, they are welcome to point this out. I hope that I can make a rational case for my comments. Because, in fact, one label I'll happily accept is rationalist.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Two more egregious lies out of Barack Obama's mouth

President Barack Obama knows he cannot make a case for re-election on his record — which marks him as the worst President, except for Jimmy Carter, since the early part of the Twentieth Century. He is forced to do two things: engage in mudslinging and lie.

In the debate Monday night, he said:

First of all, the sequester is not something that I proposed. It’s something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen. The budget that we’re talking about is not reducing our military spending. It’s maintaining it.


Well, this is directly contradicted by Bob Woodward, in his recent book “The Price of Politics,” which says:

At 2:30 p.m. [White House Office of Management Director Jack] Lew and [White House Director of legislative affairs Rob] Nabors went to the Senate to meet with [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and his chief of staff, David Krone.

“We have an idea for the trigger,” Lew said.

“What’s the idea?” Reid asked skeptically.

“Sequestration.”

Reid bent down and put his head between his knees, almost as if he were going to throw up or was having a heart attack. he sat back up and looked at the ceiling. “A couple of weeks ago,” he said, “my staff said to me that there is one more possible” enforcement mechanism: sequestration. He said he told them, “get the hell out of here. That’s insane. The White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And you come to me with sequestration?”

Well it could work, Lew and Nabors explained.

What would the impact be?

They would design it so that half the threatened cuts would be from the Defense Department.…

Lew, Nabors, [White House National Economic Council Director Gene] Sperling, and Bruce Reed, Biden’s chief of staff, had finally decided to propose using language from the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction law as the model for the trigger. It seemed tough enough to apply to the current situation. It would require a sequester with half the cuts from Defense, and the other half from domestic programs. There would be no chance the Republicans would want to pull the trigger and allow the sequester to force massive cuts to Defense.


This is clearly in contradiction to Obama's “the sequester is not something that I proposed. It’s something that Congress has proposed.” So we have him in lie #1. Another lie from the debate came in the very next paragraph, from Obama's cutesy attempt to paint Romney as ignorant about military matters, or perhaps about modern technology:

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You — you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets — (laughter) — because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.


But of course, while “horses” may be obsolete, “bayonets” are still quite useful to the modern military, so perhaps it is President Obama who “maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works.” To quote A. W. R. Hawkins on Breitbart.com:

While the Army discontinued traditional bayonet training in 2010, the USMC still trains Marines with bayonets and issues them as standard equipment. The Army has also begun training soldiers in a different style of bayonet use — not affixed to the end of a rifle but as a secondary melee weapon.

To make bayonet training relevant again, the Army got rid of the bayonet assault course, in which soldiers fixed a bayonet to the end of a rifle, ran towards a target while yelling and then rammed the bayonet into the target center. Instead, soldiers learn in combatives training how to use a knife or bayonet if someone grabs their primary weapon.


Some users on Twitter have claimed that, by virtue of the USMC still using bayonets, there actually are more bayonets in use than 1916, when the army had between 100,000 and 140,000 enlisted members. As of 2010, the Corps boasted 203,000 active duty members and 40,000 reserve marines.


That's two lies in two paragraphs — even more than Obama's usual!

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