Navy Flight Team Brings Hope To Oil-fouled Beach

WKRG.com, 7/8/2010 - Pensacola Beach, Florida (AP): Six U.S. Navy Blue Angels aviators hope to cheer up Panhandle residents dealing with the massive BP oil spill. ∴ The Blue Angels annual Pensacola Beach Air Show starts Friday with formal practice. The main event is Saturday. The team held an informal practice Thursday. ∴ The men who fly he six F/A-18 Super Hornets said they understand how concerned area residents area about the oil and tar that has reached the area's once pristine white beaches because they also live in the community. ∴ The pilots said they hope he show will raise spirits and provide a much-needed boost to beach businesses.

Gotta love those Naval aviators! :-) --bc Read More......

Tocqueville on the BP Spill

LIBERTYCENTRAL.ORG, 6/18/2010 by Brian Faughnan (via The New Ledger, et. al) - ...Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the collision between big government and quick, decisive action, and wrote about it in Democracy in America. Tocqueville observed that by its very nature, big government makes responding to problems like the Gulf oil spill more difficult. As Tocqueville observed:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

There are many virtues to a limited central government. But as we see in the case of the stopped barges, one is that big government inherently hampers the creativity and ingenuity of millions of Americans. And the fact that the story of the barges is not a national headline shows that our culture has largely come to accept this as the norm. After all, if it were shocking that the Coast Guard had stopped disaster response teams over some minor rule, it would be leading the news nationwide. Instead, many Americans accept that this is normal. That’s a sign of how bad the situation is. Read More......

Sowell: Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?

INVESTORS.COM (IBD) News & Analysis, 6/21/2010 by Thomas Sowell (Hat tip: Jean Nelson) - "When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. ∴ Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions. ∴ "Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union. ∴ Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive. ∴ In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP's oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.

But our government is supposed to be "a government of laws and not of men."

If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law."

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in constitutional government." Read More......

WSJ: The 'Paralyzing' Principle

WALL STREET JOURNAL/Review & Outlook, 6/21/2010 - The Gulf disaster rehabilitates a discredited idea. The Gulf oil spill is having all sorts of nasty consequences well beyond damage to the regional environment and economy. Not least, the resulting political panic seems to be rehabilitating the thoroughly discredited theory of regulation known as the precautionary principle. ∴ This principle holds that government should attempt to prevent any risk—regardless of the costs involved, however minor the benefits and even without understanding what those risks really are. Developed in the late 1960s, this theory served as the intellectual architecture for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is still required to eliminate certain environmental risks no matter how expensive or pointless the effort is. ∴ This same mentality is now prompting not merely tighter safety standards, but President Obama's moratorium on all new deep water drilling, shutting down dozens of Gulf and Alaskan projects, maybe permanently. Last month, 26 Democrats demanded that the government fold up BP's other major Gulf operation, Atlantis, "to ensure that the explosion and mishap of the Horizon platform are not replicated." Read more at WSJ...

Jim Huffman (R), candidate for U.S. Senate, commented on this article: We need policies that weigh and balance risks... Read More......