Sorry, AARP! I Quit a Decade Ago.

It occurs to me that the collateral damage from the election of Scott Brown.

Add good old AARP. They gambled and lost, putting themselves solidly in the ObamaCare Camp, and lost a lot of their elderly support. Older people don’t really like the prospect of losing half a billion dollars in Medicare to help fund the expansion of healthcare to the lazy.

That is a black eye that will last. I still remember that the United Way Crusade opposed Prop. 13, and they have subsequently had zero dollars from me.

Of course I sent AARP a nasty letter more than a decade ago, because they have ALWAYS supported liberal issues to the detriment of their membership.

But I still get e-mail offers to rejoin AARP.

Nope, I burned that card many years ago. Now AARP lost both the reputation, and ObamaCare.

iPAD Has Me Interested (Somewhat)

It has been a decade since I predicted the demise of newspapers – I did it on the pages of the Rancho Bernardo Sun for whom I was a columnist before I moved to the Rancho Bernardo Journal and the Poway Chieftain. At the time it caused quite a stir among the RB Press Club, and I was invited to speak on the subject but the meeting never came about. (I don’t believe that they thought I was accurate – or they just did not want to hear about it!)

What brings this to mind is the new iPAD. Steve Jobs has positioned it to help readers, as a color Kindle or Sony Reader. And I have not tried ANY of them yet although I am an inveterate reader. (Primarily history and technology.)

I buy books from Amazon, and I download audio books from audible.com – and often have one of each in my daily “things to do”. The audio is particularly useful while I am exercising, and the books are simply relaxation devices.

I have not been drawn to the Kindle devices, yet, and it appears to me that the iPAD is a much better Kindle, and certainly better for newspapers and magazines because of the color and better for books because of the size.

I can’t see much reason for buying a more expensive iPAD than the minimum priced one, at least until they punch it up with more capability. My iPOD is sufficient for music and audio books, and much easier to carry. My netbook is better for writing and internet use because it has an actual keyboard. I am currently awaiting an iPHONE that matches the Nexus in physical capabilities, and suspect that Apple will announce one very soon. Probably this Spring. (They had better or the Nexus will eat Apple’s lunch. The current iPHONE is a little behind Nexus.)

Newspapers have a problem that iPAD can’t solve – they have been giving away content for so long they can’t find ways to charge for it. More on that in due course.

I see it as a great textbook device.

Where Is Kit Carson When We Need Him?

What we need in Afghanistan is – Kit Carson!

The Afghan War is turning into the US Army war against the Navajo, who were a nomadic, small group raiding tribe – fierce fighters.

Kit was not an “Indian Hater” – in fact he was married to one. He understood the Navajo, spoke their language and admired their fierce independence, but understood that their raids against “settlers” just could not be tolerated.

In the end, kit and the Army had to drive them to surrender by both attacking and killing and by destroying their infrastructure needed to feed themselves. He killed their livestock, burned their crops and cut their peach trees.

The Taliban in Afghanistan live among the people, and fight in small groups – not unlike both the Indians, and the American Militia in our Revolutionary Wars.

We KNOW how to do this – from both sides.

We also know that the Taliban have strongholds in areas of poppy production. Destroying the poppy fields brings more support to the Taliban as the farmers join them in a fight against those of us who destroy their crops.

Eventually, however they run out of fighters because having run out of poppy field income THEY STARVE!

That is what defeated the powerful Navajo nation. Even when defeated in numerous small-scale battles, the Navajo inflicted sufficient casualties among the Army that the Army had Pyrrhic victories and from sheer numbers the Army was eventually simply going to win, what cut the war short was starvation. You may still want to fight when you are your family are starving but you won’t fight well.

Marjah is the next Taliban stronghold in the Marines way. They should destroy all of the crops surrounding it as they move closer, and wait a year before attacking. Given a year, time will be on their side.

Seismic

The collateral damage to the Democratic Party by the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts goes far beyond the Obama Healthcare Bill.

A  lot of elected and unelected Democrats have now had their reputations severely damaged without the benefits for which they prostituted themselves – in particular Senators Landrieu and Ben Nelson, but to a lesser degree Democrats in Florida, Massachusetts and even Vermont.

The President’s offer to SEIU, to exclude them from taxation of Cadillac Plans, means that the President himself suffered a blow to his reputation on two fronts – one that he singled out a supporting union for an unearned benefit, and additionally that he did so behind closed doors in violation of his own pledge of transparency. The President probably can’t measure the impact against his continually lowering poll numbers anyway, but more-local politicians suffer more quickly and publically.

It is easy to see the visceral reaction that Senator Nelson suffered in being booed out of a restaurant in his home state of Nebraska, and even the “break in” of Senator Landrieu’s office. The “journalists” claim that they were in her office to get a video reaction of the staff to claims that the staff was so annoyed by constituents’ complaints of the Senator’s political prostitution that the staff had sent the complaining calls to dead-end phones.

Whether that staff claim was true or not, and actually whether the ‘break in” claim by the ‘journalists” is true or not, the very claim means that the cover story was believed to have sufficient legs to act as justification.

To say that the election of a single new Senator in Massachusetts was a game changer is an understatement. The ability of Speaker Pelosi to hold her votes from swing districts was simply destroyed. A Mississippi Congresswoman told the Speaker in a private Democrat meeting that after telling so many of her Katrina constituents that they had lost their house, it was now necessary to tell Madam Speaker that she had lost HER House!

After the political earthquake in Massachusetts, my wife called our ultra-liberal sister-in-law, a member of a long-time Massachusetts Democrat family – only to find that she had voted for Brown! She said that after so many decades of one-party rule in that state, the Democrats had become too corrupt even for her!

Everyone has their own spin on how, and why, Brown won – and all of those issues probably played a role. Liberals even continue to claim that Brown won because the Healthcare bill did not go sufficiently far – and I am reasonably certain they really believe it.

But whatever the reasons, the collateral damage is real.  Additionally, there is the independents flight from the Democrats radical movement to the left. General Motors is still Government Motors, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and a lot of other entities are still government owned or government controlled, but the attack has been blunted.

That is a lot of seismic activity for a single Senatorial election of an unknown in Massachusetts.