Second-term portfolio prospectus.


ush Administration starts its next term with much currency onhand after seeing profit margins increase beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Among the leading indicators to keep an eye on during the next four years, as reactionary liberals collectively gaze at their navels desperately looking for a talking point after miserably failing to notice the one lying directly beneath each of their tinfoil hats, are:

Have Zell take away Mineta's spitballs, now

For some strange reason, there's this tradition that presidents put a member of the opposition party on their cabinets. Leaving aside the wisdom of doing so when that party is clearly a national one no more, whatever possessed our president to appoint Norman Mineta and his trusty baseball bat as transportation secretary will be a topic for baffled executive-branch scholars well into the next century. It is now high time that he instead find for that job a more loyal American among the decimated disloyal opposition. Nonetheless, it's perfectly all right for our president to offer any laid-off Senate minority leaders who are victims of political downsizing an entry-level janitorial position within our nation's transportation department.

The top position, however, would be perfect for retiring senator and former governor Zell Miller.

If Senator Miller could be persuaded to continue for just two more years his distinguished career of extraordinarily capable public service, he would be best qualified, in my opinion, to turn the transportation department around from its Leave No Granny Unhassled (But Every Usama Unscreened) policies to ones that actually protect the flying public's safety. Although the department's Transportation Security Administration was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security on March 1, 2003, TSA "continue[s] to work closely with the operating administrations" of DOT. In non-bureaucratese, that means we're pretty much following their lead on security issues until the transition's 100% complete. Even now, there's much a DOT head could do to help improve TSA's operations.

For example, a Secretary Miller would be among the strongest advocates for arming more than a handful of pilots, since he was an original cosponsor of Senator Bob Smith's bill providing for the Federal Flight Deck Officer program. Unfortunately, Secretary Mineta has beaten that program over the head so much with his aforementioned bat that only pilots who are gluttons for punishment from the intentionally overly rigorous and intrusive psychological testing (affectionately called "The Rack"), the threats to career affecting anyone who fails to pass such testing, and the no-expense paid travel to a remote New Mexican desert just to reach the only training facility, are participating in the program. As a consequence, the number of terrorists who hijacked four passenger jets and used them as missiles on September 11, 2001, still exceeds the number of armed pilots who have a real chance to stop such jumbo-kamikaze attacks. Right now, all of them would need to tell the terrorist, "Excuse me why I retrieve my gun from its lockbox. It'll just take a sec."

During Secretary Miller's temporary two-year stint as our transportation secretary, he would groom the next secretary for the job, so when the latter replaces him no Middle Eastern terrorist anywhere would benefit from any secondary screening loopholes or other political correctness nonsense.

Win the war, lose the appeasement

Not having France as an ally—so the old joke goes—is about as worrisome as going hunting without an accordion. In this World War, wasting any of our time trying to successfully appease a corrupt French government just to get it onboard as an ally, would be counterproductive at best. At worst, it would divert us from actually winning that war. We should've learned that lesson in 1945, when France weaseled its way into the conference at Yalta and whined until Great Britain and the United States turned over to it significant portions of our post-war occupation zones in Germany, causing military leaders to alter their war plans.

Even after sixty years—from France's shameless mishandling of Marshall Plan aid money, to its staunch refusal to let our jets fly through its airspace on their way to attack Libya in reprisal for the latter's murderous bombing of a German discotheque frequented by American servicemen, and more recently its attempts to undermine any real enforcement of the United Nations' resolutions against its business blackmarket partner Saddam Hussein—we haven't learned our lesson. Not only that, the Left still has the gall to lecture us about the implausible virtues of mindlessly considering France our "traditional ally." Traditional backstabber is more like it. Nevertheless, it's not too late to finally learn it.

Paraphrasing the Don's immortal words, "France, you're fired." Go peddle your cheese on some other county gullible enough to buy it. When you aren't too busy unilaterally mowing down civilians in the Ivory Coast, of course. In the meantime, we'll continue to fight and win this World War for not only our own benefit but—and I'm at a complete loss as to exactly why—yours as well, without your help hindrance, merci beaucoup.

Personalized, not privatized

That's what Social Security Reform means. Current retirees won't be eating dog food or living under bridges. The promises made to them regarding their benefits will be kept, no matter what else happens.

For those still working, I believe in their right to choose whether to have all their withholdings go straight into the Social Security system, or to have a portion of those withholdings go first into their own personal retirement accounts, from which it is invested in a number of federally certified bonds and stock options that they select, are secure and safe, yield a higher rate of return than the current system ever could, and, equally important, help boost our economy and create jobs.

Every penny in a workers' personal retirement account, including all accumulated interest, remains in the Social Security system. The total amount in all such accounts is used to meet the system's payout obligations to current beneficiaries. There is no bankrupting of that system or removing or diverting any funds from it.

The only way a person receives any money from his personal retirement account is if he retires or dies. If retired, he receives monthly benefits just like every other retiree as long as he's alive. When he dies, whether before or after reaching retirement age, the balance in his personal account is paid out to his estate, either in a lump sum or periodic payments, depending on which method he may have chosen. The latter is the default method.

Finally, there is a maximum limit on the percentage of withholdings that an individual can choose to have go into his personal retirement account. The rest goes straight into the Social Security system. Moreover, the account's principal and accrued interest are not taxed. Only payments from it to the beneficiary or his estate are. This means the withholding tax on a person's wages or salary is not considered part of that person's income for income tax purposes. Not only does this avoid unfair double-taxation, but it allows the government to tax a much larger amount later than a small one now. Liberals, especially, should be very happy about that part.

That's why we should establish, stand up and fight for, support, preserve, guarantee, uphold, protect, keep a vigilant guard on, save, affirm, and celebrate a worker's right to choose how she or he should plan financially for her or his own retirement. We should not take away, eliminate, ban, curtail, repeal, limit, erode, infringe on, undermine, or otherwise deny her or him that right to choose.

Here comes the judge, here comes the judge

Speaking of retirements, there's a strong likelihood that several Supreme Court justices will be entering theirs during the next four years. Also, the last election makes it more likely that many of the remaining vacancies in our federal courts of appeals will finally get filled. With the return of up-or-down voting in the Senate, we will also once again see democracy at work and no longer held hostage in that august body.

2Aers of the world, unite!

The 109th Congress has a much better chance, too, of passing a number of bills that would better protect our Second Amendment rights, given that former obstructionist-in-chief SadTom Daschle and his hoplophobic, extremist former colleagues in the Senate are now practically incapable of setting up any more undemocratic roadblocks there. These bills include the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which would prohibit predatory lawsuits whose real aim is to blame American manufacturers of non-defective firearms for any criminal misuse of their products, therefore completely eliminating that coordinated, restraint-of-trade effort to run them all out of business; and the repeal of the Firearms Control Regulations Act (D.C. Law 1-85; sec. 7-2501.01 et seq., D.C. Official Code), which effectively disarms all law-abiding citizens in our nation's capital, making every such citizen inviting prey for any criminals who—because they're criminals—don't really believe gun-ban laws apply to them.

Perhaps combine the two and name the final bill the Make Americans Happy While Making Tom Much Sadder Act of 2005.

Swiftly Reducing the Budget Deficit: A Modest Proposal

It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through the halls of Congress, or fly over flyover country, when they see the federal budget, CBO projections, the OMB accounts and U.S. Treasury crowded with IOU's, followed by three, four, or six trillion dollars' worth of debt, and importuning every liberal for an huge, offsetting tax increase.

Happily, we do have a mandate from the last election which everyone can agree on regarding this situation. Namely, that the right to choose higher taxes or not is one the government must both recognize and protect in every area of the country, according to whichever choice the citizens of that area may democratically express. Given that such expression by an entire state's citizenry is too broad, or by any one precinct's too narrow, in fairness to all citizens the choices they've expressed at the county level should be the ones specifically recognized and protected.

In endeavoring to promote this necessary work, I am offering a plan to reduce spending in every county which has requested those higher taxes, rather than one that would directly raise the amount of taxes its citizens now pay. It is a more just and fair manner of achieving the same object. They would also have the added comfort of knowing that the savings in spending on their counties is going to be applied toward the very thing they most want: reducing our federal budget deficit.

The particulars of this plan are summed up in the following formula:

W (P - 50%) / 2

Where W is a factor representing when we win World War IV—i.e., zero if it's won before 2005, 1/2 if won before 2006, 2/3 if won before 2007, 3/4 if won before 2007, etc.; and P is the percentage of a country's voters which chose to accept the tax-increase agenda (Qerry "Plan") offered in the last election.

For example, if 62% of Smith County had chosen al-Qerry's "Plan," and our nation is still at war on January 1, 2005, then the decrease in federal assistance for Smith County in that year would be—

(1/2) (62% - 50%) / 2 = 3%,

with the savings applied toward deficit reduction.

Because there are a number of such Smith Counties bluely dotting the United States, sufficient in their levels of desire for higher taxes to make the total calculated spending decrease much larger than any anticipated budget shortfall, it behooves our nation to wholeheartedly adopt this most effective deficit-reduction plan.

Jesusland welcomes you, hallelujah!

In addition to allowing liberals the chance to have their counties contribute toward reducing this nation's budget deficits, we should also, for the good of our country, be ever willing to reach out to the less radical and extremist ones in the Congress so we may together spend all accumulated political capital on these investments. Consequently, there is no need for any of those more rational senators and representatives to become Canadians. The rest, however, always have the right to choose such an exit strategy if they so wish. Amen.

It's the tax cuts, stupid

Duh. Three words: Make! Them! Permanent!

Whadya mean she can't marry both her sisters or her cat, you fascist!

One formula that has long stood the test of time with regard to maintaining the strength and self-perpetuation of civilization as we know it as well as every human community, securing a real future for both, is:

Marriage = Man + Woman.

Where the man and woman are not closely related, and both are legally competent to give their knowledgeable consent. That formula is irreducible and not subject to any division by a society that values its own preservation and stability. It is no mere hyperbole to say this formula is only defined within an asymptotic boundary that none but the most suicidal of cultures have ever attempted to cross. All questions of discrimination or equal protection and other related issues dealing with the law's treatment of individuals, whether married or unmarried, may not be equitably addressed except from this side of that line.

Of course, selfish engagement in destructive behaviors such as trying to redefine marriage without the people's consent, has been an enduring hallmark of the Left's more narcissistic contingents. Not content with mere toleration, they would rather shop around for a panel of unelected judges eager to force on everyone through judicial edict an uncommon acceptance that no majority has ever chosen at the ballot box to give them. Others who resist the tyranny of these undemocratic impositions are branded Nazi, Hitler, Bigot, 'Phobe, and similar hearts-and-minds winning terms. They show only contempt for the views of anyone who disagrees with them. Why should they expect anything else in return?

Fortunately, in this country, unlike in many European nations, every court, agency, or office of our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. All public acts are amenable to them—a fact our nation's constitution recognizes, even if liberals don't. That's why it provides for amending anything and everything in it, short of denying any state its equal suffrage in the Senate without that state's consent. So if two-thirds of both the Senate and House and three-quarters of all the states want to constitutionally protect the current definition of marriage, the Left will totally lose access to its pet judges on this issue. The people, not their courts, will have the final say.

Here's the text of the marriage protection amendment introduced in the last Congress:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

The caribou are back—and this time it's personal

While we're on the subject of self-sustaining herds, in Alaska's North Slope in Prudhoe Bay an increasingly prodigious group of Porcupine caribou are demonstrating to the fullest extent their own sexual preferences. To say that Santa has more than enough of them now to pull an entire fleet of sleighs would be putting it mildly. Unfortunately, in a small, extremely inhospitable portion of the nearby Arctic National Wildlife Refuge the reindeer are about the only ones actually finding good jobs.

Underneath the herds' hooves is something else even more prodigious. Oil. Tens of billions of barrels of it. Including in ANWR's coastal plain area—"a flat, treeless, almost featureless plain...[where the] temperature can drop to -40 degrees Fahrenheit":

The U.S. Geological Survey and the federal government's Energy Information Administration estimate that there are possibly 16 billion barrels of oil beneath the surface in the coastal plain. Even at the low end—with about 3.2 billion barrels—the field would be the second-largest ever discovered in the United States.

The first is Prudhoe Bay, which was estimated in 1968 to hold 9 billion barrels of oil, but which has produced nearly 13 billion barrels—or 20 to 25 percent of the oil produced in this nation for the last 23 years. If there were 16 billion barrels in the coastal plain, it would substitute for what we would otherwise have to import from Saudi Arabia for the next 30 years. [emphasis added]

That's the consensus among geologists, not professional tree huggers.

Although liberals aren't the only ones saying we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, their answer is basically to have us all turn in our SUVs and buy bicycles and tennis shoes instead. Those not residing in Disneyland know we can lessen that dependence by safely drilling here at home. In time of war we should. We can still minimize in a sensible and practicable way that drilling's environmental impact.

It's not like anyone's asking to drill every inch of the coastal plan's non-pristine, barren wasteland's 1.5 million acres. President Bush proposes limiting it to just 2,000 acres—a mere 0.1 percent of the total. To hear liberals talk you'd think we were going up there to chop down all the trees (which don't exist there) and club every baby seal in sight.

If you're an Inupiat tribal member who actually lives in the region and would like an extraordinarily well-paying job, it must be especially galling to know that radical liberals would rather hold back and discriminate against minorities in favor of such environmental wastelands, than allow them the real chance to have a good job and help the economy. The Teamsters aren't too pleased about the liberals' Jobs Prevention Policy™ either.

Moreover, it doesn't take a national-security expert to understand that our economy is a major target too in this World War; and that the more we strengthen our economy and decrease its vulnerabilities, the less inviting a target it becomes. Where it's glaringly vulnerable is our overdependence on foreign sources of the one indispensable ingredient fueling that economy. That's why islamofascists are killing petroleum workers and attacking oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Given that the democratic process is about to be restored in our Senate, the Congress has a much better chance to finally pass an energy bill that includes plans for extracting oil from those 2,000 non-pristine acres inside ANWR, using the most environmentally-safe methods possible. That will do much to increase our dependence on domestic rather than foreign oil and thus make terrorists and liberals very, very unhappy.

Micky's DVDs for Osama no moore

Nor for Hamas murderers and other FOMs (Friends of Mooron). It would be so much more helpful to our war effort, don't you think, if we didn't have to hear bin Laden quoting on Al-Jazeera TV his favorite lines from Mickey Francis Manure's latest flatulentary? Of course it would.

Speaking of enemy propaganda and efforts to demoralize us, is there a good reason we aren't jamming Al-Jazeera's signals while our servicemen and women are dying in combat? I don't see any good reason either.

Save the liberals, collect the whole set

Let's face it. President Bush and many, many, many other Republicans could not have won their elections without the hard work and dedication shown by liberals on behalf of their various and notably incoherent whacked-out moonbateous causes. For this reason we would do well to nurture and encourage them in their time of need for a microphone through which they may spew before a national audience every syllable of their fatuous utterances and shrill Deaniacal screams. Not only that, the American viewing public would stand to lose out on experiencing further the unfathomable pleasure of seeing more incomparable episodes of their enormously entertaining sideline antics as they struggle to discover why they'd been ejected off the third-string bench, much less from the actual field of play, in the event they ever learn to keep their big, stupid, treasonous mouths shut.

So when a liberal speaks, give him ground as well as a shovel, and watch the fun start when he uses them to quickly dig an extremely deep grave for himself.

Our future's in exceptionally good hands

Terrorists and tyrants are also being exposed to such graves, literally. All thanks to the Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the United States Armed Forces. They even caught a deposed tyrant crawling out of one; with the exception that his had the shape and plumbing apparatus of—appropriately enough—a septic tank.

When I see our men fighting islamofascists on the front lines of this World War it's hard to remember that they are in fact mostly very young men. That's because the bravery, heroism, discipline, and ambassadorship-by-example they brightly display for all the world to see is uncommon other than among the most revered and aged leaders of any society, present or past. Yet they do so under circumstances more adverse than many of the latter ever experienced after having lived three or four times as long. It is easy to see our troops in such an age-defying light.

Their acts of defending freedom, from the harrows of combat to the hearts of those they're liberating, are affecting the course of human events on a global scale. They are steering it against the violent resistance of Freedom's worst enemies, and towards a better future for all her friends. It is why as I witness them living most totally in the present during operations that require them to bring to bear all their resources and training on defeating these evilest of enemies, I also see most clearly what this future portends.

Those fighting and the servicemen and women training and supporting them—each faithful defender of all our freedoms—have paid the price necessary to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to millions of others around the world for generations to come. We owe them our gratitude, now and when they return home, for a job well done. Rest assured we'll be hearing from them again long afterwards as they continue to demonstrate that same courage and leadership in a society and world they helped to make a better and more peaceful one in which everyone may live.

It's the Soldier, not the reporter who has given us Freedom of the Press.

It's the Soldier, not the poet, who has given us Freedom of Speech.

It's the Soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the Freedom to Demonstrate.

It's the Soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the Right to a Fair Trial.

It's the Soldier who salutes the flag, serves under the flag and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives the protester the right to burn the flag.

—Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

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