Most of the talking heads spent all Sunday morning yapping about what did or didn’t happen with the two Boston Bombers, who knew what and who didn’t, what the FBI had done with the info they were supposed to have gotten from the Russians and what the cops had or hadn’t done at the death scene of the older brother.
Of course no one came up with any palatable solutions because as usual with these discussions, no one knew what he or she was talking about. The biggest things missing from these discussions are facts but that never seems to bother any of the combatants because their job isn’t to illuminate anything, it’s just to fill their hour, as amusingly a possible
Strangely enough, the one thing that came out of most of the discussions was the lack of facts about what each of the American agencies, FBI, CIA and Homeland Security knew and what they did with what they knew. There was also a lot of discussion about how little they seemed to share with each other about what went on before the bombings and how that may have led to the bombing’s success.
On the plus side, was how mainly through interagency cooperation they brought the perpetrators to justice so quickly. So I started thinking about all the government agencies and what each of them does to keep us safe. There’s as already stated, the FBI and the CIA and there is also the DEA, the NSA, the Secret Service and ATF which is part of the Secret Service, and there’s the US Marshal’s Service, and state and local; sheriff’s and police departments. That, my friends, is a hell of a lot of law enforcement and most of us have a pretty god idea of what each of these agencies do.
But then there is Homeland Security. This is a gigantic organization founded after 911tasked with keeping us safe from terrorists and made up of over a quarter of a million people. They have extraordinary powers and they are able to completely screw up a person’s life, seemingly on the whim of one of their lower echelon functionary, but what do they actually do? How are they different than the FBI, which seemed to be doing an okay job before Homeland Security came along, and still seems to be the main homeland protectors in any given situation.
I’m not knocking Homeland Security, I’m just wondering why we are spending so much money on them, why are they necessary with all the other agencies? Is it just to give a name to a popular TV show? I would love it if one of the people who like to comment on this blog wrote me with an answer to this. I am truly confused.
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This past weekend we were privy to the height of hypocrisy when the George W. Bush presidential library was unveiled. We have now and will continue to spend millions supporting a library from which you can’t borrow books and which has been erected in honor of a man who gloried in the fact that he didn’t read. What the hell is the matter with this country?
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Everyone is talking about the immigration bill and this weekend the big question was, did the Boston bombing set back its timetable? On one show I watched there was a great deal of discussion about whether it should be one huge bill or several smaller bills each dealing with a single aspect of the problem. Many thought that if it were broken up, the road to citizenship would be the victim.
It seems that the road to citizenship is already the victim, the victim of its own timetable. As now discussed, the road to citizenship would take twelve or thirteen years. That’s ridiculous. Under that time frame a large percentage of the people taking the trip will be dead before they achieve their goal. It’s also counterproductive. I know a lot of right wingers and even some left wing unionists hate the idea of adding these people to the citizen roles because they think it will cost jobs but contrary to what they claim, we need these people to become legal and in fact full fledged citizens and we need that to happen as fast as possible.
Why do I say that, because it will help, not hurt, the economy. The only people who don’t want to have our current illegal work force become legal are the ones who are paying them sub par wages and thereby dragging down the wage scale of the entire work force, legal and illegal.
What happens when people become legal? They are eligible to join unions, which they cannot join now. What happens when they do that? They get better wages and when that happens they no longer have to work for less and it helps all workers get higher wages. Bad management contends that this will drive some companies either out of business of to other shores. This is mostly bullshit. Any company that has had the option to move overseas to take advantage of cheap labor has already done so. A small number of companies might fail but most will continue to move on, paying higher wages and just charging higher prices to make up for it. The result will be more money floating through the entire economy and that’s the best thing that can happen.
We should actually make it mandatory for illegal aliens living here to move through the citizenship process in no more than five years or be forced to leave the country. We would have to do a little arm twisting to expedite the process but anyone who doesn’t get through it in five years, we don’t want here anyway.
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I was listening to Clarissa Ward, an intelligent young woman speak of her time in the middle east and especially in Syria before the conflagration. She was speaking about how many of the people blame us for not stepping in and helping them. The big question from the other side of the discussion was why do they expect us to solve all their problems. Why have we become the policemen of the world?
I thought the answer was pretty evident. It’s because we are always sticking our noses into other countries business. Over the past hundred years we have been in more wars than any other country in earth. Since WWII it’s not even close. And how do we justify all these wars? We claim we are helping people get out from under bad rulers. Sometimes it’s even true, even if it also helps us get oil or gold, or iron ore or copper or trade routes or even if the rebel who’s fighting the bad ruler can convince our government that he is fighting communism or some other evil that we can use a an excuse when we ask our parents to send their kids to their death for the benefit of the good old US of A.
Right now the only plausible reason for us to get even minimally involved in Syria is to convince Iran that we will do the same with them if they continue to play atomic roulette.
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Since 911 there have been 12 foreign inspired killings in the US. In that period there have been 100,000 gun killings and 400,000 auto related deaths. Do you begin to get the picture? Does the sign spell insignificant? Even Michael Hayden former head of both the CIA and NSA admits that we can reduce that total of twelve slightly but at what cost? Both Hayden and logic tell us that even though we can reduce the number from 12 it can only be done slightly, that a few of these incidents will always be successful. So is it worth it to give up a significant bulk of our freedoms and our privacy to achieve this, especially given our reluctance to slow down when driving or to not be able to blast rabbits on the back forty with a machine gun.
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Kelly Ayotte thinks that background checks on potential gun buyers would impose a burden on gun shop owners. Poor babies. Is that like the burdens imposed on the families of men shot with those guns? Is that burden equal to the grief suffered by a mother who has lost a child or a daughter who has lost a father? Is Kelly Ayotte really a moron or just pretending to be one so the Tea Party will like her?
All businesses except maybe being a politician have a certain amount of work that has to be done to maintain them; so too with the gun trade. What a burden these poor bastards have. They actually have to work for their living. Having been an FFL for over twenty years I can tell you that it is no great burden and for those who think it is, maybe they should go into something easier, like dealing drugs.
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Kimberly Rivera is going to jail this weekend for 10 months. Kimberly is pregnant with her third child. She is also a private in the Army. Why is Kimberly going to jail? The army has decided she is a deserter. How did that happen?
Back in 2005 Kimberly and her husband were working for Walmart and not making enough to support themselves and their two kids. This is par for the course for Walmart salaries but that’s another story. They decided that one of them would go into the army but were both overweight so they also decided that whoever lost enough weight to qualify for the service would go in. Kimberly lost weight faster and she went in and served one tour in Iraq as a gate guard. She saw enough death and destruction that she realized she didn’t believe in the war or want to support it any longer so she went to her chaplain and told him about her problem. The chaplain reacted in a very Christ-like way by telling her to suck it up and go back on duty. I say it was Christ-like but only if Christ is your master sergeant. What this pathetic excuse for a clergyman should have told her was that there were organizations all over the place that would help her with her resistor status.
So when Kimberly came back from her tour and was told that she would be going back to Iraq, she and her family went to Canada. She stayed there with her family until Canada extradited her back here to go on trial for desertion. She was convicted and sentenced to 10 months. That’s right, folks, Kimberly is a deserter, much like George Bush was a deserter when he abandoned his squadron during the Vietnam war and fled to North Carolina… or was it South Carolina.
It’s funny how the decisions we make in life affect us for years and years. George Bush became president, lied to the American people, and got us into the phony war that Kimberly served in. Kimberly got to be a convict.