The Hammond Report

War has become «feminized». We can no longer go into a war situation and just crush the enemy. Not since WWII have we been able to decisively win a war. Korea is still in a cease fire, we lost in Viet Nam, we didn't finish the first Gulf War, and we are playing around in Iraq right now. In every one of these cases we did not unleash the full force of our military to completely win and force the enemy to surrender. The masculine thing would have been to do just such - wipe out the enemy. The feminine thing to do is what and why we are in the current state of affairs now. The enemy and/or future enemies are not afraid of us. They know we will wimp out and capitulate in the end because our liberal polititians and media will do everything they can to sway public opinion by emphasizing the cost in lives. We need to toughen up and fight this war until we win it. Quit worrying about what the world thinks and whether we might hurt the feelings and offend the detainees and prisoners at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or listen in on a terrorist's phone call originating from the US. What a joke! Toughen up buttercup.

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A terrific column by Thomas Sowell

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I was navigating through the New West Missoula web site yesterday and ran across an article about the minimum wage vote coming up in November's election. I read with interest the debate in the comments that followed and, of course, was reminded how many uninformed and uneducated people there are out there. I was compelled to add to the comments, particularly one that attacked republicans and President Bush's tax cuts. The entire minimum wage argument is one of the Liberal's classic class warfare techniques. They attack President Bush's tax cuts for the rich while keeping the minimum wage so low without acknowledging that the top 1% of wage earners pay 34% of the taxes and the top 50% pay 94.5% of the taxes. That tax cuts fuel economic growth by putting more money into the hands of people that know how to generate more economic production. I would argue that the tax cuts help increase the wages of the bottom 50% of wage earners.

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The Missoulian ran a fantastic opinion piece yesterday entitled «Sprawl: The ultimate scapegoat» by Robert Bruegmann. The online version of the Missoulian doesn't have the piece but I have linked the same piece from the LA Times which they titled «Gridlock, schmidlock». I think the Missoulian ran it because they wanted to add different (correct) point of view to the discussion on sprawl, light rail or transit, and building/expanding roads. He focuses on Los Angeles but it can easily apply to Missoula and the Bitterroot considering the recent push for light rail, the road diet, etc.

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There was another pedestrian/vehicle accident on West Broadway in Missoula on Saturday night. Although it was not fatal, it was the kind of accident that the infamous «Road Diet» was supposed to prevent. When watching the newscast, it was clear that the real problem with safety is lighting and alcohol, not the amount of lanes. The drunk pedestrian was leaving the bar and crossing the middle of the street and the sober driver did not see him until he was on top of the hood of the car!

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