Front page Archive Why Arlen? Arlen is the TV home of "King of the Hill." It's a small conservative town that is threatened with ruination on a regular basis by twig boys, enviro wackos, diversity nuts, "PC" police and other ivory tower liberals. I like to think of Arlen as a metaphor for this here great nation of ours.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 Posted 5:23 AM by Hank HURRICANE KATRINA: WHO SHOULD PAY FOR CLEAN-UP? An Economics Professor tells Fox News that federal aid for disaster ravaged areas is unconstitutional: ..if we look at Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution — and I encourage all Americans to look at that before we start opening up our tax coffers to pay for all of this — we have every obligation to provide for New Orleans in terms of charity, private charity from one person to the other. But the founding fathers never intended...to provide one dollar of taxpayer dollars to pay for any disaster or anything that we might call charity. What we now have is the law of unintended consequences taking place, where FEMA has come into New Orleans, a place where, ecologically, it makes no sense to have levees keeping the Mississippi River from flooding into New Orleans, like it naturally should. Now with FEMA bailing out Louisiana, bailing out Florida and lowering the overall cost of living in these places, we have people with no incentive to leave. And the law of unintended consequences means that more people are dying with every one of these storms. They're becoming more and more expensive, more and more property loss, just because the federal government has violated the Constitution to provide for these funds. It's an interesting viewpoint and, given that, more often than not, the free market approach tends to be proven the correct one over time, it is possible the Professor is correct that less, not more, federal aid will save lives in the long run. Saturday, August 20, 2005 Posted 10:35 AM by Hank SOMETHING DID GO WRONG An Army intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, is alleging that his unit, known as "Able Danger," had identified two of the three cells involved in the 2001 terrorist strikes more than a year before the attacks. According to the Associated Press: the unit had identified Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta along with three other hijackers as terrorist suspects However, he says, his unit was prohibited by the Clinton Administration from passing the information along to the FBI "out of concerns about the legality of gathering and sharing information on people in the U.S." "The lawyers' view was to leave them alone, they had the same basic rights as a U.S. citizen, a U.S. person and therefore the data was kind of left alone," Shaffer said. Shaffer said he and a Navy officer disagreed with that and tried to set up meetings with the FBI, but each time the idea was rejected by lawyers from the Special Operations command. "There was a feeling ... if we give this information to the FBI and something goes wrong, we're going to get blamed for whatever goes wrong," Shaffer said. Thursday, August 11, 2005 Posted 7:59 AM by Hank “FREE SPEECH”, ITHACA STYLE (August, 2005, ed.) Today’s Ithaca Journal editorial page is a good primer on what passes for “free speech” in what claims to be “the most enlightened city in America.” First, there are letters to the editor about recent liberal calls to censor both Rush Limbaugh and "the Wizard of Id" from the city’s airwaves and newspapers. Then there is the paper’s own editorial, which calls for the end to “inane, insulting and infuriating” Native American nicknames for sports teams. In support of their call for censoring these team names, the paper trotted out the usual litany of alleged sins committed by the United States against Indians. In fact, the newspaper went so far as to compare the U.S. to Nazi Germany in its choice of team names: Imagine, just for a horrifying moment, the Nazis won a partial victory in World War II….Move to the 21st century. Sitting in a giant football stadium in Berlin, you get set to watch Paris play Warsaw for the German national collegiate title. The Frogs vs. The Ghetto Fighters, complete with a tall man dressed like Joan d' Arc on a paper mache horse chasing a short Moses parody with foam rubber tablets and oversized staff. …Inane? Insulting? Infuriating? Good. Now you get it. Native Americans have been enduring this cultural insult for decades. Ironically, however, the paper, in using hypothetical “European” nicknames as “The Frogs” and “The [ Warsaw ] Ghetto Fighters” to illustrate what would be “hostile and abusive” towards those of European descent, did not bother to condemn other “ethnic” nicknames, such as the “Fighting Irish” or “Trojans.” This would seem to demonstrate that, in Ithaca, “cultural insults” are apparently fine against some ethnic groups, but not others. In fact, between the Indian nicknames, “the Wizard of Id,” and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, it would seem to demonstrate that even the local newspapers support censorship, as long as the “right” voices are censored. Home