The Conservative Soldier

Republican political candidates and their supporters are warned repeatedly about overconfidence. On the heels of game-changing victories for the right in Massachusetts (the “Kennedy seat”), Kentucky (primary winner Rand Paul), New Jersey and Virginia (gubernatorial wins by Conservatives), to name a few, Republicans still hear a drumbeat of apprehension.

The wrist wringers insist they cannot assume anything going into November, despite numerous signs their candidates will win back majorities in the House and Senate, or both.

But it appears the wrists are about to enjoy a well-deserved rest. Barack Obama and fellow radicals are nearing panic mode. What else might explain Obama’s cross-country fly-in to pump up high rollers who back California Sen. Barbara Boxer? In the midst of domestic crisis on many fronts, Obama appeared with the San Francisco liberal Democrat who famously scolded a Brigadier General for omitting her title during a hearing.

Boxer is in trouble. Polls show likely Republican opponents trailing her by just 9-11 points, and it’s only May. This fall, the General likely will still be wearing his stars. Will Boxer still be a scolding Senator?

The Scolder in Chief, Obama, is meanwhile emerging as the inexperienced lightweight he was feared to be. Unemployment. The Gulf oil rig disaster. A weak housing market. Illegal immigration anger. Growing realization that ObamaCare is a sham. It’s actually hard to believe his approval rating is as high as it is (42%).

Yet, what might do in Obama faster than all of the above is the story of a Democrat Senate candidate from Pennsylvania who dared contest a 2010 primary against turncoat Sen. Arlen Specter. Joe Sestak says someone inside the Obama White House offered him a high profile job to drop out of that primary. (He refused, and won).

Suddenly the Obama worshipping mainstream media is starting to follow this story. If Sestak’s account turns out to be accurate, a federal crime was committed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The very existence of teachers’ unions makes my blood boil. But I approach the breaking point when a union operative calls for sweeping measures and more spending because, after all, it’s “for the children”.

Are their demands for perpetual pay raises for the children? How about the medical benefits, which are the envy of countless other professions? How about the crushing pension obligations? Are those for the kids?

The president of the American Federation of Teachers took up one third of the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion page Thursday morning pleading for a $23 billion federal bailout of the nation’s schools. Care to venture a guess as to her rationale?

When teachers begin losing jobs in cash- and revenue-strapped districts (joining some who’ve already been terminated), writes Randi Weingarten, the resulting trend “could rob an entire generation of students of the well-rounded education they need and deserve.”

And so goes the eternal argument from the entitlement addicted education community, voiced by its unions: If we fail to continue to throw money at public school systems, gushers of cash born of rising property taxes and other taxes, then we forsake our children and imperil our nation’s future.

“The federal government didn’t let Wall Street fail,” Weingarten observes. “Why would we do less for our public schools, which undeniably are too important to fail?”

She’s right about the schools, so let’s cut to the chase about who deserves what in this scenario. If there must be a bail out, the place to drill for crude is not the federal government, which is obviously tapped dry. Let the bail out be orchestrated by the caring teachers and school administrators, the ones who are deeply troubled that our kids won’t get what they deserve. Weingarten’s formula conveniently overlooks the fact that unions are sitting on mountains of pension funds and discretionary lobbying cash, accumulated across years of two-handed grabbing of taxpayer dollars.

As noted by Townhall magazine in an April piece entitled, “Everything But Education”, the National Education Association, the nation’s oldest and largest teachers’ union, “ranked as the nation’s single-biggest contributor to state-level and federal campaigns, political parties and ballot measures between 2007 and 2008, spending more than $56 million.” This is more than the combined contributions of a behemoth holy troika of labor unions — the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and SEIU (Service Employees International Union).

Considering that there are teachers’ unions in which individuals have embezzled more money than some school boards would need to return to educational solvency and save jobs, it is the height of disingenuous logic to decry the financial crisis in public education without offering to stop it with these treasure troves of union funds.

Meanwhile, don’t think for a minute that school districts have truly considered “cutting into the bone”, as Weingarten contends in the Journal. A March 2010 study published by the Cato Institute found that public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school in the five largest metro areas and Washington, D.C.

Writes Cato’s Adam Schaeffer, “Since runaway education spending is a major cause of current and future budget problems, it is the best place to look in state and local budgets for serious savings.”

Teachers discover early in their careers that it’s almost always a mistake to underestimate the children, both in terms of learning potential and b.s. detection.

The time has come for teachers’ unions, administrators, educators and school boards to cease underestimating the taxpaying public and its enormous capacity to see through the myths unions attempt to perpetuate as they dig deeper for our last dollars.

Reduce public school spending and de-fang the bloated unions. Then we can have an honest discussion about who really cares about the children.

Americans have been told that we’ve abandoned the War on Terror. Thanks, Barack. Take a bow.

But the ‘War on Tax Paying Suburbanites Who Travel With Tooth Gel and Acne Meds’ is positively raging. That’ll put your mind at ease, won’t it?

Mayor Bloomberg can’t bring himself to believe that an Islamic Jihadist born of affluent parents and trained in Pakistan would try to blow up Times Square. Has to be a Tea Partier from Omaha, no?

Liberals can’t comprehend that violent drug dealers from Mexico should be cuffed and printed by no-nonsense Arizona law enforcement officials. Why, that might be “profiling”. Is that any way to treat a professional landscaper?

But, by golly, when three white people in a suffocating tax bracket from DuPage County, IL, pay roughly $700 to board a jetliner from Washington-Dulles to Chicago-O’Hare with various personal hygiene products in their carry-ons, the TSA head crackers will positively bring the world to a dead stop to interrogate my wife and daughter as to their gels and liquids.

According to the uniformed female TSA employee at Dulles Airport, our Mother’s Day bliss needed a puncture wound because my teenager has acne meds containing evil peroxide(!) and tooth gel that is dispensed using an aerosol mechanism. AquaFresh, indeed! Never mind that our SUV parked back at O’Hare is devoid of alarm clocks and fertilizer. Who cares that our underwear is not rigged with explosive crotch lotions. Or that our shoes have no hidden detonation compartments, or that we don’t even know how to pronounce, “Allahu Akbar”.

Theater security, aka, TSA reverse profiling (go after the least likely perpetrator), is rivaled for its alienation of the flying public only by flight attendant harassment of passengers, what with the new War on Carry Ons raging, as well. Our country is done a disservice when the terrorist scum are living in undisclosed locations while being tutored by government attorneys, and reading ‘Thank You’s from Michael Bloomberg. (Dear Mr. Disaffected Youth, Thank you for bungling that car bomb in Times Square. I can’t express my gratitude in words.). Meanwhile, we subject citizens to increasingly invasive screening.

You know it has gotten out of control, when I arrive at the airport and find myself suffering beard and turban envy. “Damn it, if I had one or both of those, I would have been out of this security line 15 minutes ago — with all my stuff.”

The TSA agent at Dulles was polite but unwavering. Too much peroxide in the acne meds, she said. And that toothpaste, well, it just looks borderline. Today, I visited the TSA web site, at her suggestion, and could find no specific ban on peroxide-based skin meds. I did find a rather definitive statement referring to gels and aerosols. They are “permitted through the security checkpoint in reasonable quantities.” In thimbles, actually.

Unless you are frequent fliers who voted for McCain. Then all bets are off.

So I guess we can only assume there was some kind of Trainee Sweepstakes event going on at Dulles on Sunday night. The guy monitoring the X-ray screen was beside himself with misgivings about our quart-sized bags and their contents. Who knew one could be an infidel and a suspect all in one afternoon?

The legendary columnist Mark Steyn brought this insanity into focus today in his latest column exposing the hypocrisy of the PC Age.

“America is so un-Islamophobic that at ground zero they’re building a 13-story mosque — on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning (on 09/11). So in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.”

While, nearby, the Lady in the Harbor is wanded. Repeatedly.