Musings

Condemning the moderate Arabs for not openly criticizing the radical ones reminds me of the silence of the vast majority of whites regarding the Klan pre and during the civil rights movement. Speaking out against the Klan had serious consequences throughout the south. You could be shot. Your house could get burned down. Your family could be harassed. You could get fired because of pressures placed on your boss and on your job. Sounds familiar? It is exactly what is happening now amongst the moderate Arabs. Their silence is understandable.

The left and the right are united on their criticism of subprime mortgages. The right rails that the lenders were forced to lend to unqualified borrowers by the federal government. Nothing could be further from the truth. The left is against subprime mortgages because they are mostly credit slobs feeling that the underserved should not be allowed to borrow even if they desire it at rates the left deems as usurious. Of course these rates are risk based and if they were lower, the borrowers would be forced into the arms of less scrupulous lenders. But that is just too bad. So the fed has come out with rules that essentially end subprime lending. Under these rules the 80 percent of subprime borrowers who are current on their loans would have been denied credit. So what should be a success story of increasing home ownership and after the mortgage collapse has recovered will build wealth in our most challenged households is damned as a failure. Students making 80 percent on my exams would certainly not deem themselves failures and why we persist in saying this canard about subprime borrowers is a shame.

I just heard a commercial about a couple asking the geico lizard to marry them. I thought is the lizard bisexual? Why in the world would anyone want to marry a lizard? Then the rest of the commercial said that the couple wanted the lizard to perform their vows which makes about as much sense as marrying them in the first place.

What happened to the weekly body counts from Iraq and Afghanistan that we got on the major news networks and in the press? It seems that they were only interested in the counts when Bush was president.

Obama is still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and has now taken us bumbling and stumbling into Libya. What happened to the peace movement? Why are the usual suspects not out there sounding like the protestors in Wisconsin? Where have they gone?

And of course you have noticed that the press did not say anything bad about the boarish protestors in Wisconsin because they were on the left. Not a word was said about their wanton destruction of property or about the tea party members who volunteered to clean it up. Yet a single anti-Obama poster can appear at a tea party rally and it makes every newspaper and every broadcast. Not hard to go figure who is biased.

Where is the feminist support for George Bush and his liberation of millions of women in Iraq and Afghanistan? Again silence. It is as if the support for their sisters takes a back seat to their politics.

The left and the right are confused about the "fair tax". It is supported by members on the right who brook no disagreement even though the flat tax is far superior. Attacks against the fair tax are greeted by the right like attacks against abortion "rights" are with the left. Yet the "fair" tax is a leftist tax embraced as the value added tax in the same European countries that the left so admires and the right so abhors. Yet in this country the left does not embrace the "fair" tax and the right does. Go figure.