Disqus - Latest Comments for NWIpundit

Re: Unlawful Entry

NWIpundit — Wed, 18 May 2011 10:29:16 -0000

Points to you TMLutas for commenting.

BTW Steve: I did not see any indiacation that there were comments until I logged in to disqus. That made it look like there were none. Using Chomium browser if that helps.

Re: What is behind the Democrat's walkout? Vicious radicals perhaps?

NWIpundit — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 07:49:10 -0000

I have to agree with "Guest", both sides need to knock it off with the Nazi comparisons. It was not right when the tea party did it to Obama and it is not right when the left does it.

Re: School Funding Fairness - Ghosting Be Gone

NWIpundit — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:58:58 -0000

On vouchers:
If I ran a religiously affiliated school I would be very leery of accepting gov't vouchers. When you accept Caesar's coin you have to play by Caesar's rules. Or as one church said back during the debates in the 1990's "Do not EVER underestimate the coercive power of the government.

Nobody really wants to face what needs to be done to fix our schools:

1. Fund all public schools equally. Separate the source of funding from property taxes.

2. Break up large schools. Big box consolidated schools make it too easy for kids to slide through. Small schools are better. Yes they cost more but tough.

3. Parents need an attitude adjustment. They need to push their kids to really achieve at academic pursuits. Other countries do this, we need to relearn it.

4. Quit dumping huge sums on sports complexes. Spend it on the fundamentals.

Re: Are Opponents of Ground Zero Mosque ALL Just Bigots?

NWIpundit — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:34:58 -0000

It's all slight of hand designed to keep us from thinking about the real important issues on the table: like 2 wars, crippling dependence on foreign oil, no transportation policy, no energy policy, weak banking reform, economy in the dumps, reform of the "Patriot Act", abuses by Big Government ... the list is endless and yet we seem to have infinite time to worry about some mosque being built 2 whole blocks from "Ground Zero".

Re: Who's Who in NW Indiana Blogging

NWIpundit — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:16:52 -0000

Sorry to revive an old thread.

Steve, good list of blogs. I tend to like hearing a bloggers opinions even about other blogs. To me this gives the blog a distinct "voice" and adds value. It's up to the reader to decide if the bloggers opinions are in line with their own. I always at least pay attention to what Steve says and then form my own opinions later.

Re: Mitch Daniels - focus on economy

NWIpundit — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:42:39 -0000

Social and religious conservatives vs. small gov't conservatives is a major fracture in the conservative camp. One side wants to create laws telling people what they can do and the other side does not want to be told what to do. Clashes are inevitable.

On this one Mitch is right.

Re: The coffee creek saga

NWIpundit — Sat, 29 May 2010 09:33:53 -0000

It seems like LEL can only think in big blocks of hundreds of lots and cannot dial down their thinking enough to deal with selling just one lot to one homeowner.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:04:09 -0000

Travis, I have only had time to give this a read in the most basic way. I am not going to dismiss it out of hand.

Can I suggest you start a completely new blog post on the Fair Tax subject sometime? Income tax reform is such an important issue it seems like it deserves it's own discussion and it needs to be examined and discussed.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:45:06 -0000

Occupying Iraq for maybe decades with Western armies does not sound like a good solution. It does not sound like real democracy to me. Is this the new model foreign policy, we solve our problems by military occupation and then "nation building"? If so, we are going to need more troops - lots more.

I say, time to get out of Iraq, pronto and focus on Afghanistan and destroying the terrorists that actually attacked us on 9/11. As for Iraq, Saddam is gone, time to leave. I don't feel obliged to solve all of their problems for them.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:30:57 -0000

I don't follow Buchanan, but at least he had Bush and the Neocons pegged as a bad lot right from the start.

Long term Iraq only makes sense if it were to be broken up into 3 - 4 states that represent either ethnic or religious lines. And even then I'm not sure we should be doing the breaking up or holding together. Let them settle their own disputes.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:07:06 -0000

Travis, what consequences? If we pull out of Iraq, Iran will get sucked into the sectarian civil war. Which means bin Laden and the Sunnis will be blowing up Iranians not us. It will mean that Iran will be spending it's treasury on troops in Iraq and not so much on Nukes. I'm not seeing a downside. Oil? I thought we were not in Iraq for oil? We still are not getting much in the way of oil out of there anyway, not close to equal to the money we are pouring in.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:59:18 -0000

Actually the "imperialist" line came from conservative Pat Buchanan.

I don't believe that democracy can be imposed, especially by a foreign power, on a country by force of arms and that it will stick. Moreover, Iraq is not a nation-state, the Arabs and the Kurds and Turks don't get along. The various Islamic factions don't get along. nothing about Iraq speaks to stability other than by continuous occupation for a generation or two. What good is an Iraqi army if the government disintegrates into civil war? In the mean time Iraq remains a huge drain on our coffers with very real American casualties daily. Next time you get worried about deficit spending remember ALL the places we are spending it.

As for Afghanistan, it might still be winnable, it would be more winnable if we were not also bogged down in Iraq. I suspect Bush and Rumsfeld lost us the opportunity when they got distracted by Iraq.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:37:15 -0000

Travis, I have never heard of the Fair Tax, please tell me about it.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Tue, 11 May 2010 09:02:06 -0000

Travis, if you rely on others for essential raw materials, and the supply of those essential raw materials gets endangered you get tempted to intervene. If you become reliant on other countries for all your other goods, both durables and the rest, then you also get tempted to intervene - if nothing else to protect you capital investment.

I'm not going to pretend to know the solution, but a nation that cannot make it's own steel, cars, railroad passenger cars, electronics, even socks is a second rate Power. We are losing all those capacities very rapidly. Right now we just design the goods and rely on the China to manufacture them. Increasingly we are even off-shoring our design houses.

All this helps big corporations, but at the expense of the Nation. One of the big reasons we have a Tea Party movement happening is that those people are terrified that there won't be any good industrial jobs left in the US in 20 years. They are right to be scared. I'm scared, because if we want internal political stability we better come up with some decent prospect of well paying, stable jobs for the masses of we are in for big trouble.

Easy to blame unions alone, but the record of industry and their treatment of workers in the past explains why workers almost have to have unions. You need a balance between the two.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:38:50 -0000

I want to be clear: We needed to go into Afghanistan after the terrorists. We needed to also commit enough troops to finish the job and get bin Laden and the Taliban. We let that opportunity slip through our hands and the current insurgency inside of BOTH Afghanistan and Pakistan is the result. (Instead of cutting the infection out we let it spread, indeed we drove it deeper into the body.)

Bush got distracted by invading Iraq. When we invaded Iraq, we fumbled the job in both Afghanistan and Iraq because Bush forgot or never learned - that taking ground can require very few troops, holding ground, indeed occupying a country, requires many more troops. You don't need to be a general to know this - ask the Germans about World War II, France fell to relatively few German troops, but it took many many more troops to hold France and occupy it. Back to Iraq, you can see what happens when you don't do it right. Colin Powell understood this in the first Gulf War, and tried to warn the Bushies but nobody was listening.

If you are not prepared to do it right, don't do it.

We are still there.

Because of this we truly control neither Iraq or Afghanistan. I doubt we have a "victory" in Iraq. My prediction is that within 5 years after we leave Iraq will be in a civil war.

And we are still in Afghanistan too and we barely control Kabul, our allies are getting weary, we are getting weary, and there is no end in sight. Why? Because Bush and his cronies dropped the ball and had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision whenever there was a decision to be made - it has to be some sort of a record for the history books.

At least we agree more on about Bush and the neo-con expansion of Federal (mainly Presidential) power.

Re: The “N” Word

NWIpundit — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:30:29 -0000

I don't mind people being hawks, but if you are going to lead the nation into war, then you need to have some competence in how to conduct said war. Even more importantly you need to have a Grand Strategy about how to win a better peace after the war. The Neo-Cons went right along, lockstep with Bush, getting us in the war without a clue, getting us bogged down without a clue. Hey, we're still there, longer than World War II and having spent US taxpayer money like drunken sailors, and still NOTHING to show for it.

Sorry Travis, essays by the Neo-Con elites all sound good but we gave Bush and the Neo-Cons basically 7 years and they screwed up nearly every major challenge they were tasked with. The only thing that matters is results and they failed. Thank God for term limits.

The other problem with the neo-cons is their expansion of the power of the US government. Now I always expect the Democrats to expand Federal power, but I never expected the big power grab to come from Bush and the neo-con Republicans! Once they opened the door, once they threw Federalism under the bus, they made it easier for the Democrats to do they same thing in the future. Frankly, neo-cons are just hawkish Democrat retreads.

The neo-cons tried to lead us into a new age of imperialism. I know it is tempting to try imperial expansion when we are so reliant on importing raw materials, and indeed because of the "new world order" we seem to have lost the will to even make our own manufactured goods, but it just is not going to work. Military intervention has it's uses but is not some magic solution to our global problems.

Re: I wanna be British

NWIpundit — Sat, 08 May 2010 12:38:27 -0000

>>neo-con French

K. Tracy is right, the French were engaging in very cynical - maneuvering - in the dance of the Great Powers. They were using us against Britain and we were using them.

Not sure about the French Neocons, but the 21st Century American ones are the real Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and pretty much proved their own incompetence or got shot down in a flurry of Wrong.

Re: First glance at primary stats Porter County

NWIpundit — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:02:40 -0000

Poparad vs. Biggs: Biggs gets tagged as a flip-flopper and loses credibility with both the pro and anti RDAers. I don't think either side knows where he stands. With Poparad at least you know where he stands on that issue.

Re: RDA - Round Two

NWIpundit — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:47:38 -0000

I wonder if they would appeal if the legal fees had to come out of their, personal, pockets? It's always easy to spend someone else's money. Notice they did not repeal the tax when quitting the RDA.

I do agree that there should be a 10 year review on RDA membership and suspension for non- payment. Good suggestions.

Overall, I think membership in the RDA has been positive for Porter Co. There are just some things that have to be tackled regionally. Part of the reason Northwest Indiana is so marginalized in Indianapolis is because we are so Balkanized and tribal. The RDA lets us cooperate across county boundaries without having to actually unify in a Unigov type structure.

Re: Illiana Expressway Hearing tonite

NWIpundit — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:50:07 -0000

Frankly, I don't think either the state Democrats or the Republicans are truly looking out for the best interests of the State or it's citizens anymore. They are too busy collecting each other's scalps, posturing for reelection and playing games.

Re: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : The evolution of Google?

NWIpundit — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:55:19 -0000

Google does some things well and many things only mediocre. Fortunately there are good substitutes for just about everything Google produces. You don't need Google.

Re: Today in the Region

NWIpundit — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:53:36 -0000

South Shore schedule for mobile phones:
http://www.nictd.com/mobile...

It's a bit crude but works on my iPhone.

Re: An early look at 2010 - Northwest Indiana elections

NWIpundit — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:07:33 -0000

Let me preface this remark by saying that I don't pay much attention to party affiliation on a local or county level when I vote.

With that said I hate seeing candidates run unopposed - especially incumbents. Let's hope both Dem's and the GOP field some really viable candidates *ahem* especially for county offices. Real world, hard nosed, successful business experience would be a plus.

#justsayin

Re: An early look at 2010 - Northwest Indiana elections

NWIpundit — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:32:43 -0000

I remember reading that somebody from Beverly Shores is running for some county office. Heh. Can I be any more vague? Trouble is I can't remember what paper I read it in.

Re: An early look at 2010 - Northwest Indiana elections

NWIpundit — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:00:07 -0000

Vicki Urbanik is running for Porter Co. Auditor. Source: http://chestertontribune.co...