News roundup -- plain English -- saying the unsayable

I thought to check Freedom's Phoenix again and immediately found myself wandering through a stand of great, frank writings and only a little Libertarianoid nonsense. Had droppped my subscription to FP because of the huge volume of stuff it sends every day, and the irony is forgetting half the time that this prime source of vital info exists

First up is a beautiful piece (like a stormy Beethoven sonata) from the liberaloid Slate online magazine:

The True Cost of 9/11
Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker America.
http://www.slate.com/id/2302949/

A more appropriate title could be The True Cost of George W. Bush's Treason, but since committing 9/11 was part of that, either rubric will do. What's news is the existence of the article -- since it takes guts for even liberals to state truth so plainly -- and the yet higher figures the article offers than similar examinations elsewhere:

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America's war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50 percent of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health care costs will total $600 billion to $900 billion. The social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

But typically for liberaloids there's no mention of Obama, who is every bit as guilty of building the domestic police state and perpetuating the fraudulent warfare that serves as an excuse for it! For that you'll have to look to the comments section below the piece. Thank God for comments sections: they're often the only truly fresh air in a news site.

Next up is a really bizarre, horrible article:

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/095792-2011-09-01-president-of-ecfa-says-that-churches-to-be-controlled-financially.htm

The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.... isn't that the group whose beneficent logo appears on the form you sign to make a donation to American Family Association, Focus on the Family or other such group via their magazines? Has this adjunct to the conservative church world, ECFA, suddenly turned into another para-governmental cancerous growth?

I ask you, which would you say is more offensive to the Constitution -- churches exhorting people to get out there and stop liberals from wrecking the world (which normally brings a call from the IRS) or government becoming the local church's brain and accountant?

Ironies piled on ironies...... have another stack:

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/095781-2011-09-01-hurricane-fannie-mae-destroyed-more-homes-than-katrina-and-irene.htm

This guy has a great nom de guerre. H.L. Mencken is remembered iconically today but forgotten more practically. He could really do us some good if people would revisit or even learn his healthy contempt for politicians and other pooh-bahs. Note that his title is to be taken literally:

...............Now for the tour.

A couple of blocks from my small townhouse is a ritzy, leafy neighborhood of one-acre lots and million-dollar-plus homes, some of which are zoned as horse properties. One of the lots is vacant and devoid of any evidence that a large, brick ranch house had once stood there.

The perfectly good house had been torn down in the middle of the housing bubble. Soon after, construction began on a replacement house, a 13,000 sq. ft. McMansion. One day during the housing bust, after framing and plywood sheeting had been completed on the house, construction abruptly stopped. Construction workers suddenly departed, taking their equipment and locking the gate behind them on the temporary cyclone fence that surrounded the property. No doubt, the builder went broke.

The half-finished house sat for two years, slowly deteriorating in the elements and becoming an eyesore in the upper-income neighborhood. A couple of months ago it was sold and razed in preparation for a smaller home to be built in its place. The lot is once again vacant and devoid of any evidence that homes had stood there.

I don’t know the exact amount of money that has evaporated on this one lot, but it has to be a staggering figure, probably in the range of what it would cost to send three kids to Ivy League universities for four years. Capital that could have gone to education or been invested in new businesses is--poof!--gone with the wind, to borrow the title of Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece. Multiply the evaporated money by a million and you’ll come close to the total cost of Hurricane Fannie Mae.

Now, the main dish...... where plain English takes a crowbar to the entire governmental bureaucracy house-of-cards!

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/095774-2011-09-01-abolish-the-presidency-its-a-useless-job.htm

What would it be like to go without a POTUS? Probably a return to normalcy. How many high offices are in fact superfluous? A well-known politico ran for Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina (or was it Secretary of State) some years ago on the promise that he'd abolish the job once he got it. Search "abolish" here

http://thesouthcarolinastatesman.com/

regarding a more recent point at which SC legislators considered a bill "that would abolish the office of the lieutenant governor altogether":

One thing's for sure -- the presidency of the USA has become a serious cancerous growth on the world, and the whole world is threatened (or already tortured) by it.

.........You probably caught this story, but it deserves enshrining here

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/095771-2011-09-01-appeals-court-rules-it-is-not-illegal-to-film-police.htm

........especially when another current headline has it that a citizen is facing a lifetime in jail for this kind of pure, textbook, definitional First-Amendment activity. Which side is ultimately winning, us or the zoo world order? Let's make sure we do -- starting yesterday.

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