The Wall

Twenty years ago this week I was standing over the Model 15 Teletype printer in my Utulei office on a Pago Pago harbor beach. Crowded around were Samoans, Europeans, and Mainland Americans. It was the only AP ticker on the island, the only source of current credible information on the amazing teardown of the Berlin wall.

My buddy the middle-aged Dane started crying. He tried to control it, couldn't, and left. Later he told me one parent was German and this entire side of his family had been locked in the Communist East since August, 1961. That's time enough for one generation to be be born and grow to adulthood while another one rots away and dies in a Peoples Republic where everything was decided by government for your own good. There was universal military service, universal government health care, universal employment, universal civilian gun prohibition, universal misery.

As I remember my friend's tears, I hope everyone can find a way to help our young people absorb the notion that things like The Berlin Wall are very real with very human consequences. They are not made for teevee movies.

Abby on the Ft. Hood massacre

I find a lot to agree with here.

Messing the troops

The electric teevee showed a busy mess hall during the moment of silence. I don't know where it was, but the on-camera troops were predominently Air Force enlisted men. There wasn't enough detail to identify the actual chow as the troops stood reverently, but it had nice color and was served on plates. The drinks (coffee, Coke?) were in stemmed glassware. Table cloths. Copious condiments. Carpet on the deck.

Ladies and gentlemen, today's military establishment is different from the one I knew.

As if Obama and his Team Left cadre aren't enough to mangle what remains of our economy, the bastions of American individualism, rural conservatives, are now looking for another way into your pockets.

It's the ethanol shysters again, and their PR operation won this front-page lead in the Des Moines Register :

"Now that its losses have ended, the ethanol industry needs the federal government to increase the amount of the corn additive in gasoline, industry leaders say."

What the boys are after is a federal law requiring gasoline sellers to boost the pecentage of ethanol from ten to 15.

The ethanol backers, already firmly ensconced at the public trough, concede that drivers are not demanding more booze in their tanks and therefore the state should use its police function to make them. They find logic somewhere in that statement.

The big player here is an outfit called POET of Sioux Falls, and the company brass showed up at its big plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, yesterday with former General Wesley Clark in tow. Spurned for a high policy position by the Democrats he's been sucking up to since his retirement, the general is supplementing his pension by hawking positions and products, as in:

""We want you to stand up and tell Washington that we need E15," Clark told about 250 farmers and implement dealers gathered in a chilly tent beside Poet's plant Tuesday. "If the EPA won't make the ruling, then Congress should do the job."

Makes a fellow glad Wes is no longer commanding armed Americans.