Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Busy Busy!

Posted

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much. I know, I know. I’m totally missing my ‘five posts per week’ goal.

I have no good excuse; I’ve just been busy. It’s been busy at work and I’ve been putting in some extra hours, and I have a million-item-long to-do list at home. Hopefully I’ll be able to clear things up over the next week and get back into the regular cycle of posting.

In the mean time, I’m posting occasional status updates on Facebook and you can always peruse my links section to find other stuff to read ;-). Take care!

Share to:

Send to:

Posted in: Life

More N. Korean Brinkmanship

Posted

I remarked to Melissa earlier this evening that, of all the ‘hot spots’ in the world, I am most concerned about North Korea. The conflict between democratic South Korea and reclusive, totalitarian North Korea has festered for more than half a century now, and while the Korean War effectively ground to a halt with the 1953 armistice, a state of war still technically exists between the two states. North Korea has since become a nuclear power and last year declared unilaterally that it will no longer abide by the armistice. Then the country rattled sabers with missile tests and weapons shipments.

If all that wasn’t enough, South Korean and international investigators have now determined that the mysterious sinking of a South Korean navy ship in March was due to a North Korean torpedo attack.

This really isn’t that out-of-the-ordinary . . . North Korea has been antagonizing South Korea with periodic violence on-and-off since the ’50s. But the stakes didn’t used to be this high; North Korea didn’t used to be a nuclear power with missiles capable of reaching many U.S. allies in the region. South Korea—and our own government, which maintains a significant military presence on the Korean peninsula—cannot allow the North’s aggression to go on un-checked, but at the same time we can’t risk provoking a nuclear war with a maddeningly belligerent country like North Korea.

Mark my words: North Korea is very, very likely to be the spark that sets off the next major world conflict.

Look Behind GM’s Curtain!

Posted

There’s been a lot of good news coming out of federally-owned General Motors (GM) lately, which you should pay attention to since you, the American taxpayer, are the majority shareholder in this company whether you wanted to be or not. I’m still searching for the clause in the Constitution that authorized this, by the way . . . I’ll let you know as soon as I find it.

So, the good news from Detroit: First, GM announced last month that it was going to pay off its entire $5.8 billion in government loans. Then, this month, the company announced its first quarterly profit since 2007. Awesome!

The problem is that it’s all a lie. That’s not a word I use lightly, but it’s the only one that really describes what’s happening here. It’s like a home listing in a newspaper showing a picture of the front porch of a lovely house, without revealing that—just out of frame—the vast majority of the house is a burned-out shell. What do you find when you look behind the curtain?

Read more . . .

Who Knew? TARP Angered Fiscal Conservatives

Posted

The Republican Party is supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government. The old political dichotomy in this country was between the Democrats—who wanted to increase the size, breadth, authorities, and cost of the federal government—and the Republicans who wanted to do the opposite. If you wanted a small, limited federal government, you voted Republican.

That was a nice theory, but the Republicans didn’t always practice what they preached. The Reagan revolution in the 1980’s and Contract With America in the 1990’s all promised reduced federal spending, and both delivered on those promises . . . at least to a point, and at least for a while. Things quickly went back to ‘business as usual’ in Washington, though. President George W. Bush (R) and the Republican Congress he enjoyed for much of his presidency expanded the federal government and increased our deficits, contrary to the wishes of the fiscal conservatives (like myself) that voted them into office.

The death-knell for Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign in 2008 was his idiotic move to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to help pass the bipartisan 700 billion dollar TARP bailout plan that virtually no Americans outside of the Wall Street intelligentsia supported. Then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) also voted for TARP, but he at least had the good sense not to say so very loudly. The TARP bailout was the first 700 billion dollars of many trillions of dollars since wasted for ill-advised socialist bailouts under both Bush and President Barack Obama (D). Anybody with sense opposed them; they passed in Congress with wide Republican support.

Now, many of those Republicans (including McCain) who supported TARP are finding themselves on the receiving end of a vicious (and well-deserved) populist backlash. The Republican Party has already found several of its ‘establishment’ politicos being supplanted by people with actual records of fiscal conservatism . . . you know, people who don’t think that sending trillions of your tax dollars to bankrupt banks and car companies made any sense.

People like me who have generally voted Republican for many years are rejecting those ‘Republicans in Name Only’ who supported TARP and these other monstrosities of anti-American legislation. Politico.com says that votes for TARP ‘trap’ GOP incumbents and, indeed, they do—they ‘trap’ them in their own hypocrisy, and they deserve it.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.