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Dave Mundy - Dances with ChihuahuasTRANSCRIPT
Kim Jong Un has done the near-impos-sible. The newly minted supreme leader of North Korea has forced the Obama adminis-tration to admit that the United States needs more missile defense.
Since it was introduced by Ronald Rea-gan in the 1980s, Democrats have reflexively denounced the idea of a defense against in-coming ballistic missiles as wholly unwork-able, impossibly expensive and dangerously destabilizing. Much better to leave ourselves exposed and work to sweet-talk our enemies out of their hostility and their weapons.
In keeping with this approach, upon taking office the Obama administration promptly nixed additional interceptors planned for de-ployment on the West Coast against the bud-ding North Korean missile threat. George W. Bush had already put 30 interceptors at two sites on the West Coast, a symptom of his “Cold War mindset” that the supple and sophisticated Obama administration had no use for.
As it turns out, it is North Korea that truly has the Cold War -- or perhaps worse -- mindset. In the words of new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Pyongyang has “made advances in its capabilities and has engaged in a series of irresponsible and reckless prov-ocations.” It conducted a third nuclear test, apparently a successful one. It put a satellite in orbit with a Taepodong-2 missile. It dis-played what appeared to be a road-mobile ICBM.
While threatening to “miserably destroy” U.S. units in South Korea and turn that coun-try’s capital into a “nuclear sea of fire,” Pyong-yang has vowed that North Koreans “will be exercising our right to pre-emptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggres-sor,” which is, of course, none other than the United States.
Rather than simply trust that a lunatic re-gime running its country like a vast prison camp will rationally calculate its self-interest as we would hope, the Obama administra-tion says it is going to add back the 14 can-celed interceptors. This will take the number of West Coast interceptors from 30 to 44, but with unnecessary expense and delay. The new interceptors should be online in 2017, or by the end of the president’s second term.
While the restoration is heartening, the Obama administration has pulled the plug on the development of more technologically ad-vanced defense systems and can’t overcome
its compulsion to make unilateral conces-sions to the Russians. Hagel said the admin-istration won’t complete the final phase of a defense system in Europe to guard against an Iranian launch targeting the United States.
Why seek protection from Kim Jong Un, but not Ayatollah Khamenei?
Liberals once insisted that a missile couldn’t possibly be made to hit another missile. Now, the technology has been dem-onstrated to work again and again. It is one of the reasons that the Israelis didn’t invade Gaza in response to the rocket barrage ema-nating from there a few months ago. It pro-tected itself with the Iron Dome defense sys-tem that intercepted about 85 percent of the rockets.
The Israelis don’t have the luxury of abid-ing by stale arms-control orthodoxies. Nei-ther do we. Evidently, though, only Kim Jong Un and his ilk have the power to convince the Obama administration of it.
Ask any economic adviser, whether you’re an individual or a country, and early in the con-versation you’ll hear an idiom: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
Don’t invest all your money in one company. Don’t put all your assets behind one industry. Don’t depend too much on one source.
Texas, and especially Houston, found out the hard way in 1986. After the state became the home of the oil industry and the center for refining of petrochemicals in the U.S., high oil prices, the Arab Oil Embargo and the loss of Iranian oil production created a boom. By 1986, almost 20 per-cent of the Texas economy was based on oil.
Then the bottom fell out on oil prices and the “boom” turned to a “bust.” Wells around the state were capped. Oilfields went to rust.
Texas learned the lesson well: it wooed the infant high-tech industry, began chasing after manufacturers fleeing the Rust Belt for right-to-work states, and bolstered its agricultural indus-try. Even before the advent of the
Eagle Ford Shale oil boom, the Texas economy was healthy and growing in several directions.
For many of the communities in the Eagle Ford, however, di-versifying the local economy in the midst of the boom has been problematic simply because the rapid expansion of oil and gas exploration and production has made them hard-pressed to ex-pand their infrastructure.
Then there is Gonzales.Seated at the northeastern cor-
ner of the Eagle Ford play, Gon-zales serves as the gateway for those entering the region. And while the oil fields have brought about significant economic im-pact, the city has not ignored the lessons of 1986.
Long an agricultural and his-
torical center, the city began working to diversify its economy even before the Eagle Ford began impacting the local economy.
Back in 2010, for example, the city became the first in Texas to establish its own Texas History Museum District. Home to the Gonzales Memorial Museum, the Old Jail Museum and Pioneer Vil-lage Living History Center, with a double handful of historic homes and with other historic sites near-by, the city began working to cap-italize on the tourist trade. The Texas Pioneer Museum recently relocated a number of its artifacts to the city’s old Riverside Center as well as historic Pioneer Village.
The city’s Tourism Advisory Board has taken the bull by the horns on using technology, devel-oping a smart-phone application to make it even easier for tourists to locate what they’re looking for.
But diversification hasn’t been limited to tourism.
When Jim H. Wilson LLC be-gan looking for a spot to relocate its rail-car scrapping operations, Gonzales was more than happy to accomodate. Although it’s certainly benefited from the ex-
panded use of rail transport (such as gravel cars) as a result of the oil boom, the Wilson company doesn’t handle the specialized chemical transports involved in many oil/petrochemical op-erations; even if the oilfield goes bust, it will still have plenty of business.
Another company, Wise Prod-ucts, found Gonzales to be an in-viting site for a warehouse in the industrial park. The coffin manu-facturer is part of another indus-try not dependent on oil.
Now another industry which is being threatened and forced out of other states is starting to look at Gonzales as the perfect poten-tial relocation spot.
In California, Colorado, Con-necticut and Maryland, wild-eyed liberal state legislators are stumbling over their own feet in their haste to shred the U.S. Con-stitution and the Second Amend-ment. The sponsor of Colorado legislation to limit the size of rifle magazines which can be sold in the state recently humiliated her-self on camera by demonstrating her ignorance of the fact that gun magazines can be re-loaded.
Gun and accessories manu-facturers are announcing they’re leaving those states: MagPul and HiViz in Colorado, Beretta Fire-arms in Maryland, Colt Firearms in Connecticut are just a few. One California retailer, Shield Tacti-cal, has already begun re-locating to nearby Shiner, where the own-er has family connections.
Carolyn Gibson Baros, the ex-ecutive director of the Gonzales Economic Development Corp., has said she’s been in contact with several of those companies and other city officials and busi-ness leaders have enthusiastically joined the effort. What better location for firearms and acces-sories companies than a town which first made “Come and Take It!” the slogan of defiance of tyranny?
While the current oil boom has breathed a lot of wealth into the region, Gonzales isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket.
Which is probably a smart idea, even though Gonzales has plenty of eggs to work with: Gon-zales County is also a center for the state’s poultry and egg indus-try, too.
Missile defense gets a shot in arm— from N. Korea
The Cannon Thursday, April 11, 2013Page A4
In Our ViewGonzales’ economic basket contains a lot more than oil
Liberals never let truthstop emotional howling
El Conservador
George Rodriguez is a San Antonio resident. He is the former President of the San Antonio Tea Party, and is now Executive Director of the South Texas Politi-cal Alliance.
GeorgeRodriguez
RichLowry
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review and a syndicated columnist for King Fea-tures Syndicate.
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Dances withChihuahuas
Dave Mundy
General Manager
THE GONZALES CANNON (USPS 001-390) is published weekly each Thursday by Gonzales Cannon Inc., 618 St. Paul Street, Gonzales, TX 78629. Periodicals Postage Paid at Gonzales, TX 78629. A one year subscrip-tion costs $22 in Gonzales County, $24 for out-of-county, and $30 for out-of-state.
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The Gonzales CannonBOARD OF DIRECTORSBilly Bob Low • Chairman
Dave Mundy - Editor & General Manager
Cedric Iglehart - News [email protected]
Debbie Toliver - Advertising Director [email protected]
Dorothy Gast - Business [email protected]
Mark Lube - Sports Editor [email protected]
Sanya Harkey - Circulation/Classifieds [email protected]
Letters to the [email protected]
Randy Robinson, Vice ChairmanMary Lou Philippus, Secretary
Myrna McLeroyAlice Hermann
2013
In typical leftist, politically immature be-havior, liberals in Texas are screaming and claiming that Texas Governor Rick Perry and other Republican state legislative lead-ers “want people to die” because they op-pose expanding Medicaid under President Obama’s health care law. Never mind the facts…it’s the emotion that counts for liber-als.
Liberals ignore that the Supreme Court has determined that because of our fed-eralist system of government, states can choose whether or not to allow the federal expansion of Medicaid. Under the Supreme Court’s decision last year, Texas has the right to determine whether they want to accept Obamacare.
Furthermore, liberals ignore the fact that we have a broken health care system that should be fixed, not expanded. Just like the liberal approach to the broken public edu-cation system, their idea is to spend more money on the broken health care system. Governor Perry joined the state’s GOP Sen-ators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn and other lawmakers in Austin to reiterate their oppo-sition to “Obamacare” and call for flexibility in how they implement Medicaid, a health entitlement program for the poor that they view as broken.
“Medicaid is a broken system that is fail-ing Texans and overwhelming the state bud-get,” Senator Cornyn said. “The program must be fundamentally reformed, and Texas — not the federal government — is best suited to design a health care program for its poorest and most vulnerable residents.”
Governor Perry and others have stated correctly that expanding the federal health program would make Texas “hostage” to the federal government. “It would benefit no one in our state to see their taxes skyrocket and our economy crushed as our budget crumbled under the weight of oppressive Medicaid costs,” Perry has said.
Another fact the liberals ignore is that Texas is facing a $25 billion deficit for their
next two-year budget cycle. Texas law-makers are considering reducing the defi-cit by dropping out of Medicaid because it would be such a large expensive burden. Medicaid consumes more than 20 percent of the Texas state budget, and Obamacare will force the state to massively expand our already burdensome Medicaid rolls.
Starting in 2014 all states must expand Medicaid to all non-elderly individuals with family incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Obamacare will pick up the first three years of benefit costs, but in 2017 states begin to shoulder a larg-er and larger share of these benefit costs, maxing out at 10 percent by 2020.
However, none of these facts matter to liberals. For them, emotions are everything. Their argument is that Texas is heartless for hurting the poor, and the wealth must be redistributed by the government…regard-less of whether the program actually is working.
They want to take Texas over by 2018, and their emotional arguments favoring the expansion of Medicaid will resonate along with allegations of racism, sexism, and class warfare.
But Texans must stand tough and not be frightened by liberal emotionalism. We should fix the broken public health care system rather than spend more money it and create more debt.
While conservatives are caught up in IRS scandal regarding the political intimida-tion and influence exercised by the federal government, we should not forget the local intimidation and influence liberals have in Texas.
For example, let’s consider the politiquer-as in Texas’ Hispanic communities. A poli-tiquera is a person who is paid by an elec-tion campaign to knock on doors, to issue fliers, and encourage people to get out and vote in favor of the candidate, almost always Democrats. These politiqueras are hired by candidates who lack the grass root volun-teers, and use them in that role. They are lit-erally the “ground game” for the Democrats.
Politiqueras are part of a tradition and po-litical culture of the south Texas communi-ties. While politiqueras view themselves as providing voter assistance, others see it as voter fraud, accusing them of directing vot-ers to specific candidates — for a price. They are enormously powerful, because they are able to steer the poor to the right lawyer, the right social service agency, the right office-holder to solve their problems. In return for their reach within the community, they are wined and dined, invited to high-society weddings, and given paid trips to the state party convention.
In Brownsville, CAVA or “Citizens Against Voter Abuse” has alleged and in-sisted that fair elections are not possible as long as candidates choose to cheat by using politiqueras to harvest votes.
Last month in April, the Texas House voted on HB-148 by Rep. Cindy Burkett (R-Sunnyvale) which capped the number of ballots an individual can mail in any elec-tion to 10. Republicans, citing the role of politiqueras, argued that the mail-in voting system is rampant with fraud in part be-cause of ballot harvesters.
But Texas House Democrats claimed that those generally seeking help to mail a ballot
are often the state’s neediest, such as the dis-abled or elderly who can’t make it to a mail box. They said that placing a criminal pen-alty on folks who are lending a helping hand would result in fewer votes being cast. Curi-ously, “fairness” in elections always takes a back seat to “helping” someone for liberals.
On Friday, April 26, the Texas House gave final approval to the HB-148 by 93-48 vote without any debate. The measure is now in the Texas Senate.
Whether intimidating groups of voters as the IRS attempted to, or influencing vot-ers as politiqueras try to do, the best defense against such abuses is an informed and edu-cated voter. The challenge is how to reach out low-information voters who are mostly aware of their immediate surroundings, and how to encourage them to vote for conser-vatives. The answer is simple.
While politiqueras represent an aberra-tion in the democratic process, they have been successful for Democrats in playing the role of grassroots organizer. Their suc-cess can be matched in a legal, lawful man-ner by conservatives if they establish an on-going, year round ground game to help citizens with immediate and local issues, rather than just when there is an election. Let’s remember, all politics is local and pres-ence (in communities) is power.
It sounds like the plot from a dystopian libertarian novel. The word “patriot” and the phrase “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” triggered heightened scrutiny from the most intrusive agency in the federal government.
We now know that the Internal Reve-nue Service did indeed target conservative groups, as had long been rumored and oft-denied. The news is a perverse confirmation of the groups’ worldview, and a challenge to President Barack Obama’s. He always ha-rangues us about putting more trust in gov-ernment, and then you find out that the IRS has been singling out his political enemies.
This isn’t an unaccustomed role for the IRS. It was notoriously used as a partisan bludgeon by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, an abuse that was a Water-gate impeachment count. In this case, the IRS gave special scrutiny to conservative groups filing for tax-exempt status as so-called 501(c)(4) organizations. Their ap-plications would be flagged if an offending phrase or issue popped up, say, “tea party,” or statements criticizing “how the country is being run,” or concern about the federal debt. Then, the group might be hit with massive document requests and queries about the activities of family members of board members and key officers.
No one defends the propriety of any of this. President Obama says it is “outra-geous,” and even the IRS calls it, drawing on that elastic Washington word, “inappropri-ate.” So how did it happen? The IRS expla-nation is that it was an innocent mistake by the rubes out in the Cincinnati office, who apparently lack an appreciation for objectiv-ity and the rule of law, not to mention com-mon sense.
We will learn soon enough how this holds up. But Ken Vogel, a reporter at Po-litico who has covered the IRS, says via twitter that the “Cincinnati office has little autonomy” and “mostly just follows DC’s
instructions.” Certainly, if the IRS had a rogue operation on its hands, it didn’t act like it. An agency vigilant in defense of the rights of citizens and of its own reputation would have exposed and shut down the misconduct immediately.
Reports say that the IRS targeting of conservatives began as early as 2010, and senior IRS officials learned of the practice two years ago. In March 2012 congressio-nal testimony, then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman repeatedly denied any targeting of conservatives. Evidently, no one who knew about it did his or her boss the favor of telling him he had misled Con-gress.
There are two steps toward making it right. One is a thorough congressional investigation and the firing of anyone in-volved in the harassment or in looking the other way or covering it up.
The other is, as much as possible, to re-move political regulation from agencies like the IRS that can become the tool of one party and its partisan agenda. The Federal Election Commission has its faults, but it is designed to be bipartisan and is better-suited to making politically sensitive judg-ments.
Needless to say, ours should be a country where you can start a group with the word “patriot” in the title and not incur the hos-tility of the American government.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Re-view. (c) 2013 by King Features Synd., Inc.
Conservatives in Texas are claiming a major victory with the announcement on Monday that the state’s Regional Education Service Centers were going to get out of the curriculum-writing business and remove CSCOPE from the shelves shopped by Texas school districts.
I have a warning for my fellow Texas conservatives: it’s great that you won a battle — but you’re still losing the war.
Don’t get complacent. They’ll be back.CSCOPE was nothing less than the education es-
tablishment’s attempt to by-pass the scru-tiny of parents and those elected to su-pervise what is taught in Texas schools. Recall that it took some strong-arming from Attorney General Greg Abbott for the consor-tium of government-employed officials to admit that they are, in fact, government employees and thus open to transparency law.
I recall the words of Ron Gamble, a Pennsylvania state representative, quoted in a piece in the Nov. 13, 1992 edition of the Washington Times: “Old social en-gineers never die, they just sit and wait, change a few words around, and trust that the public has a short memory.”
I predict that within months many of those regional ESC leaders will leave government service and form a relationship with some “private” organization, then set about re-packaging CSCOPE with just enough words changed to throw the hounds off the scent.
In and of itself, the concept of CSCOPE had a pro-found appeal for local school districts across Texas faced with the unenviable task of attempting to edu-cate our modern kids, many of whom flit from one school district to another on a regular basis, kids who do not rate a taxpayer-funded education to begin, with and kids whose home environment is so chaotic as to make schooling next to impossible.
For many of Texas’ school districts, CSCOPE of-fered a chance to have every kid at each grade level getting the same lesson on the same day in the same way. That way, no one gets behind anyone else, espe-cially when it comes time to take those dreaded state accountability tests.
A major problem was that one size does not fit all — which even some of CSCOPE’s developers in Texas admitted.
“We’ve learned one thing: lesson plans have a lot of subjectivity to them. We talk about how vast Texas is — one size does not fit all in this great state,” Kyle Wargo, the executive director of Regional Service Center 17 in Lubbock and a CSCOPE board member, reported in one news account. “Lessons need to be developed at a local level, by the teacher, who understands the values and needs in that community.”
The other major problem was that in developing CSCOPE, the regional ESCs relied on “education experts” who are, in fact, specialists at political brain-washing.
One of those listed as a primary inspiration for CSCOPE was Lev Vygotsky — the father of the Russian communist polytechnic education system. Another was Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the driving forces behind the federal Common Core stan-dards, which have been described as “brainwash in a bottle” for their very decidedly progressive political bias. Yet another lesson author is a very vocal atheist known for her hatred of anything Christian.
When students began smuggling out lesson plans suggesting that the Boston Tea Party was an “act of terrorism,” that Christianity is a “cult” while Islam is a “great religion,” parents began asking hard questions of local school boards. Then came the lesson plans which called for girls to wear full burkas to school, or other kids to draw a flag to represent their ideal communist country.
CSCOPE was no more about public education than was any of its predecessors like Outcomes-Based Edu-cation (OBE).
“OBE is all about mind-changing and attitude changing rather than about real education,” former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett once said. “When you combine this with the ‘political cor-rectness’ and the ambitions of a lot of people in the education business, it’s meant to recruit people to a political point of view — not to educate them, but to sign them up.”
Texas conservatives need to remember that this pro-gressive bias isn’t a recent addition to the mix; they’ve been infiltrating it into educational training and man-agement since the late 1960s. They are patient.
Recall the chilling charge given to teachers by Ches-ter M. Pierce in 1973:
“Every child in America entering school at age five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a su-pernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make these sick children well — by creating the inter-national child of the future.”
Patriot games at the IRS
The Cannon Thursday, May 23, 2013Page A4
In Our View
In Our ViewCSCOPE: wewon a battle,not the war
News mediahas failed todo its duty
Conservatives need a ground gameEl Conservador
George Rodriguez is a San Antonio resident. He is the former President of the San Antonio Tea Party, and is now Executive Director of the South Texas Politi-cal Alliance.
GeorgeRodriguez
RichLowry
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review and a syndicated columnist for King Fea-tures Syndicate.
Dances withChihuahuas
Dave Mundy
General Manager
THE GONZALES CANNON (USPS 001-390) is published weekly each Thursday by Gonzales Cannon Inc., 618 St. Paul Street, Gonzales, TX 78629. Periodicals Postage Paid at Gonzales, TX 78629. A one year subscription costs $22 in Gonza-les County, $24 for out-of-county, and $30 for out-of-state.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Gonzales Cannon, PO Box E, Gonzales, TX 78629.
An erroneous reflection upon the charactor, stand-ing or reputation of any firm, person or corporation, which appears in the columns of this newspaper will be corrected upon due notice given to the publication at The Gonzales Cannon office. Office hours are 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Phone: (830) 672-7100. Fax: (830) 672-7111. Website:www.gonzalescannon.com.
The Gonzales CannonBOARD OF DIRECTORSBilly Bob Low • Chairman
Randy Robinson, Vice ChairmanMary Lou Philippus, Secretary
Myrna McLeroyAlice Hermann
Dave Mundy - Editor & General Manager
Cedric Iglehart - News [email protected]
Debbie Toliver - Advertising Director [email protected]
Dorothy Gast - Business [email protected]
Mark Lube - Sports Editor [email protected]
Sanya Harkey - Circulation/Classifieds [email protected]
Letters to the [email protected]
2013
We have to openly wonder what it is going to take to wake up the mainstream media to a simple truth: the administration of presi-dent Barack Obama is the most corrupt, vindictive, power-drunk tyranny in United States history.
In the days following revelations that the Obama Administration was using the Internal Revenue Service to punish organizations opposed to the President’s radi-cal socialist agenda, some pundits have begun comparing the lat-est Obama White House scandal to the Watergate scandal which drove Richard M. Nixon from of-fice.
That’s not fair. Nixon, at least, was a combat veteran who served the nation patriotically for years; he fought against communism, rath-er than for it.
Now we are learning the Obama White House has been using other government agencies to shred the First Amendment’s right to free-dom of the press — secretly siez-ing phone records, e-mails and other communications from re-porters and news agencies which had nothing to do with national security but were instead directed at unearthing wrongdoing by the government.
The entire Bill of Rights, in fact, has been taking a beating for the last six years, from unwarranted searches to complete disregard for the sovereignty of the states.
More importantly, no one was killed as a result of President Nix-on’s abuse of power. The grave-stones of the victims of Fast & Furious — both American and Mexican — and Benghazi stand as a testament to this administra-tion’s complete disregard for fidel-ity and integrity.
Yet in spite of the unbroken string of scandals, the mainstream news media continue to fawn over the Progressive Messiah. Even the Washington Post — whose Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein be-came the model for modern in-vestigative reporting in exposing Nixon’s misdeeds — continues to pooh-pooh every new misdeed as it is uncovered.
What happened to the days when the Fifth Estate was the pub-lic’s watchdog over government?