Texas is an Olive Growing Giant

Published October 27, 2012 | By Iowadawg

Wow…something I never knew about my home state of Texas. In that it is an olive growing giant, second only to California, and aiming to be number one grower of olives.

Jim Henry, a pioneer in the Texas olive industry, believes the midcoast area around Victoria could be the best place in Texas to grow olives and is planning a $5 million orchard there to prove it.

Henry currently produces extra virgin olive oil from the fruit of about 40,000 olive trees he’s been raising at his Texas Olive Ranch in the Carrizo Springs area for eight years.

But with a group of investors, he’s about to close on 383 acres northeast of Victoria where he plans to plant 300,000 olive trees. That will boost his company’s productive capabilities and, he says, Texas’ reputation as an olive-growing center.

“We’ve proven we can make great olive oil. The only thing we haven’t proven is that we can do it on a large-scale commercial basis,” said Henry, who has been producing Texas olives since the 1990s.

“I believe this orchard will grow Texas’ credibility in the olive industry worldwide and certainly in the U.S.”

Texas is considered the nation’s second-leading olive oil producer behind California. The Texas Olive Oil Council estimates the state has 50 “serious” olive growers – those cultivating at least 10 acres of land – and 920 acres of olives in production.

In two years, the numbers of growers is expected to double and about 2,000 acres should be under cultivation, said Karen Lee Henry, Jim Henry’s wife and the managing director of the council. The council estimated Texas produced almost 16,900 gallons of olive oil in 2010.

The new orchard, also to be called the Texas Olive Ranch, would be the state’s largest olive oil production facility, and it has generated skepticism in the small-but-growing Texas olive industry.

Jack Dougherty, who owns the Bella Vista Ranch where olive oil is produced outside of Wimberley, said he worries the quality of the olive oil will suffer at the levels Henry expects to produce. He also wonders whether the market will remain strong for Texas’ higher-priced olive oils.

Read it all HERE.

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Al Gore’s Current TV putting itself up for sale

Founded in 2005 by Al Gore, Current TV quickly made a name for itself as a go-to source for environmental incoherence, Democrat lunacy, and far-left diatribes. If providing an outlet for liberal kooks was the goal, it succeeded admirably. However, if it was trying to attract viewers, well, it’s had some difficulty. Now, it’s up for sale.

CEO Joel Hyatt recently told the New York Post that “Current has been approached many times by media companies interested in acquiring our company. This year alone, we have had three inquiries. As a consequence, we thought it might be useful to engage expertise to help us evaluate our strategic options.”

That’s big-time TV exec speak that roughly translates as “We’re getting ready to dump this turkey.”

The network began its life by focusing on young, high school and college age, liberals. Predictably, its early crusade against global warming failed to attract eyeballs, so it began to reinvent itself as a standard, left-wing, talking head channel – packed with a host of zany pundits that even MSNBC had rejected.

Chief among these was Keith Olbermann who, after being fired from MSNBC due to his horrible personality, took his show “Countdown” to Current in 2011. There, he experienced the same kind of ego-driven controversies that have plagued him at every network in his career. The acquisition of Countdown was supposed to save the struggling net but, a few months after he started, Olbermann started to implode. He began insulting his bosses, famously referring to the station as “amateur hour,” and was fired seven months ago.

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Court: Texas Has the Right to De-Fund Planned Parenthood

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to grant an additional hearing to Planned Parenthood regarding Texas’ legislation to end taxpayer funding of abortion companies, including Planned Parenthood.

The decision effectively ends the legal controversy surrounding the law and affirms Texas’ right to stop taxpayer dollars from flowing to abortion providers.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry applauded the decision, saying, “Today’s ruling affirms yet again that in Texas the Women’s Health Program has no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform or promote abortion. In Texas we choose life, and we will immediately begin defunding all abortion affiliates to honor and uphold that choice.”

This morning the Susan B. Anthony List praised the decision.

“States like Texas have the right to stop taxpayer funding of abortion providers. The Fifth Circuit court’s decision validates this and we applaud Texas for getting taxpayers out of the abortion business,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Abortion-centered organizations like Planned Parenthood neither need nor deserve taxpayer dollars.

Dannenfelser told LifeNews: “Governor Perry, the pro-life Texas state legislature, as well as our friends at Texas Right to Life deserve much praise. Even after the Obama Administration carried out its threat and cut funding for Texas’ Women’s Health Program because the state defunded abortion providers, Texas refused to yield. Governor Perry vowed to keep the Women’s Health Program, which serves vulnerable women, fully funded using state dollars. Texas has shown the rest of America what it means to be both pro-woman and pro-life.

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BIG. DAMN. REASON. NOT. TO. VOTE. FOR. OBAMA!

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OHIO VOTER FRAUD? Democrats busing in Somali Muslims who can’t speak English, likely aren’t citizens

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Two volunteer poll workers at an Ohio voting station observed van loads of Ohio residents born in Somalia — the state is home to the second-largest Somali population in the United States — being driven to the voting station and guided by Democratic interpreters on the voting process. No Republican interpreters were there.

Read it all HERE.

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Backward on Women’s Dignity

“We have made woman a sex creature,” complained a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger clinic, according to Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminist Mystique. A half-century later, a new Obama ad proudly likens voting for the first time to a young woman losing her virginity.

You’ve come a long way, baby. But not necessarily forward.

Women’s liberation is parodying itself in “The First Time” spot featuring Lena Dunham, 26-year-old creator of the shockingly sexualized HBO series Girls.

“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody,” Dunham provocatively begins the ad. “You want to do it with a great guy.”

“My first time voting was amazing,” says Dunham. She salaciously describes her vote for Barack Obama as a rite of passage to womanhood, dangling a policy teaser about free birth control along the way.

It is an astonishingly base, sex-centric monologue that degrades public discourse and demeans young women in particular. Seeing sexual double entendre everywhere is typically the sport of sophomoric boys. Now adults are using it to stoop for the youth vote—and expecting women to fall for it.

“The First Time” is the lowest yet in a year of new political lows when it comes to infantilizing women.

First, liberals fabricated the “War on Women” to shroud a bumbling Obamacare mandate that trampled on religious liberty. The coercive policy requires, with few exceptions, coverage of abortion drugs and contraception despite conscience objections. When religious charities sought relief, liberals accused them and their defenders of assaulting women’s freedom—as if the First Amendment’s religious freedom protections don’t apply to women, too.

Then they brought us the government-driven Life of Julia. The faceless female seemed hardly capable of taking a step in life without government intervention from the “hubby state,” as one observer dubbed it.

Now, “The First Time” combines sexual and political debut—and vulgarizes both. In a day when more than 40 percent of children are born outside of marriage (and therefore six times more likely to experience poverty) and one out of four teen girls has a sexually transmitted disease, it is brazenly irresponsible of any leader to play on premarital sex in this way.

But it is particularly sad that the purported champions of women’s interests would objectify female sexuality for political ends. It’s hard to imagine any woman not being revolted, anyone with a daughter not being scandalized.

The ad actually flaunts its own short-sightedness: “Think about how you want to spend those four years. In college-age time, that’s 150 years.” It’s true that with our current policy trajectory, America’s horizon seems limited.

But to attribute centennial significance to an undergrad’s matriculation—or a presidential term—is to lose all sense of history. To sexually pander toward the youth vote is to degrade the sober calling of citizenship. And to so trivialize female sexuality is to deal a setback to the dignity of women.

More Foundry here.

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Another story of a democrat gone wrong. As usual.

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4) – The woman named “Democrat of The Year” this year by the Jefferson County Democratic Party has been convicted of felony theft by a Jefferson County jury for stealing from a developmentally disabled 71-year-old woman.

“The jury did right,” said Cindy Maxwell, an advocate for the victim.

On Thursday, a jury convicted 66-year-old Estelle Carson of felony identify theft and felony theft from an at risk adult for stealing checks from the woman and using them to pay her own cable, cell phone and internet bills.

The victim is partially blind, developmentally disabled, has cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair. She is on a fixed income of $596 per month according to the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office.

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Take this out and see how many chess partners you can get….LOL. Serioiusly, I could not find anywhere where this is for real and for sale.

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Was General Ham ordered to Stand Down and relieved of his command when he tried to deploy forces to Benghazi?

Rumor? could be but it sounds plausible enough …

I heard a story today from someone inside the military that I trust entirely. The story was in reference to General Ham that Panetta referenced in the quote below.

“(The) basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” Panetta told Pentagon reporters. “And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”

The information I heard today was that General Ham as head of Africom received the same e-mails the White House received requesting help/support as the attack was taking place. General Ham immediately had a rapid response unit ready and communicated to the Pentagon that he had a unit ready.

General Ham then received the order to stand down. His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow. Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.

The story continues that now General Rodiguez would take General Ham’s place as the head of Africon.
I found this story when I got home after hearing this story.

President Barack Obama will nominate Army Gen. David Rodriguez to succeed Gen. Carter Ham as commander of U.S. Africa Command and Marine Lt. Gen. John Paxton to succeed Gen. Joseph Dunford as assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Thursday.

More here.

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Teen Dating Fads, 1957

Sword Signals

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What about the Camp Bastion attack?

Sgt. Bradley Atwell, left, and Lt. Col. Christopher Raible

Three days after the bloody 9/11 siege on our consulate in Benghazi, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The murderous jihadists released video exactly one month ago this week showing off their training exercises in preparation for the assault. Where are the questions?

Where’s the accountability? Where’s the Obama administration? Where’s the press? Where’s the outrage?

Two heroic U.S. Marines were killed in the battle. Their names — Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and Sgt. Bradley Atwell – have not been uttered publicly by the commander in chief. Their arrival back in the U.S., in flag-draped coffins, was not broadcast on network TV. But their brothers-in-arms did not and will not forget. And neither must we.

On September 20, John Gresham of the Defense Media Network wrote a scathing detailed breakdown of this little-noticed terrorist attack on our troops. He called it “arguably the worst day in USMC aviation history since the Tet Offensive of 1968.” Eight irreplaceable aircraft were destroyed or put out of action by Taliban warriors dressed in U.S. combat fatigues — amounting to “approximately 7 percent of the total flying USMC Harrier fleet,” Gresham reported.

His summary is bone chilling: “A Harrier squadron commander is dead, along with another Marine. Another nine personnel have been wounded, and the nearby Marines at Camp Freedom are now without effective fixed-wing air support. The USMC’s response to this disaster will be a telling report card on its leadership and organizational agility.”

On September 21, the left-leaning magazine The Atlantic published an article on the Camp Bastion attack titled “The U.S. Suffered Its Worst Airpower Loss Since Vietnam Last Week and No One Really Noticed.” A few right-leaning blogs raised troubling questions about preparedness and security.

“How did this band of radicals even manage to approach a highly advanced multi-national military base without being detected, much less force their way inside en masse?” asked Kim Zigfeld of the American Thinker. “How were they able to attack so quickly and efficiently that, even though nearly every one of them was killed in the effort, they were able to harm the mighty leathernecks more than they had been in half a century?”

National Review’s Jonathan Foreman wondered whether Pakistan was behind the attack. “It seems likely that the special forces of a professional army planned the raid, and trained, advised and led the raiders — that is if they did not actually take part in it. Those special forces would, of course, be those of Pakistan,” Foreman posited. “This may sound shocking, but it would hardly be the first time that Pakistani special forces have operated in Afghanistan on behalf of Islamabad’s allies and proxies.”

President Obama has referred callously to the murders of our civilian diplomatic staff in Benghazi as “bumps in the road.” Even more maddening, though, is the radio silence from the White House about what happened that day at Camp Bastion — and what, if anything, Obama’s Pentagon did between the last major attack on Bastion in March and the bloody siege in September.

Somehow, a band of 15 insurgents managed to penetrate the wire with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons on 9/14. Their destruction was of historic proportions. The attack came six months after U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was the target of a failed suicide attack attempt at Bastion. The (UK) Sun reported at the time that an Afghani was believed to have made the deliberate attempt on Panetta after “he broke through defenses and drove a vehicle towards his aircraft. He then went past the perimeter surrounded by armed security and large concrete block guards. Disaster was only averted when the truck caught fire and crashed into a ditch on the runway close to where Mr. Panetta’s jet had landed or was set to land.”

Team Obama mocks GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney with snarky lines about bayonets and binders. The thin-skinned commander in chief exploits Seal Team Six to burnish his “leadership” cred. And the president’s campaign surrogates have ceaselessly attacked their critics as “unpatriotic” for questioning this administration’s commitment to national security.

But silence is complicity. The questions must be asked: Did politically correct rules of engagement hamper our troops’ defenses? Who knew what and when? Who was behind the attackers? And what is being done to ensure our front-line defenders of freedom are able to defend themselves?

More here.

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Liberals Find out Women Aren’t Amused

Soon will come the finger-pointing.

Liberals will gnash their teeth, pull their hair and recriminate.

Yes; true, this is normal behavior on the part of liberals. But this time the behavior will be uproarious and hilarious.

Because this time, the folks who brought us Occupy Wall Street won’t be in a drum circle, but in a circular firing squad facing their comrades, their righteous fingers loaded and looking for blame.

“Oh, Chicago!” they’ll say. “Bang, bang.”

Sure, there will be the typical liberal shots at the “racists” on the right who denied Obama a second term.

But the delicious irony lost on them will be found in their final chant of “It’s all Bush’s fault.” But that irony won’t be lost on history.

Count me amongst those laughing hardest.

Because Obama’s term can best be described as a Harold Ramis movie.

Remember when Obama had to redefine his stimulus program that was supposed to create millions of jobs, to only “saving” millions of government jobs?

“We spent a trillion dollars on what?” Ha, ha.

As Jimmy Kimmel explained at the 2012 White House Correspondents Dinner:

“Mr. President, remember when the country rallied around you in the hopes of a better tomorrow? That was hilarious. That was your best one yet.”

Well not quite.

There was that time that Obama got roughly $90 billion for green energy jobs, or green energy “investments,” as he calls them, which were touted to save us billions of dollars in imported oil and create 5 million green energy jobs.

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 set aside $90 billion in renewable energy grants and loans for a grab bag of thousands of projects—wind farms, solar installations, natural gas fueling stations, biofuel research, and a $5 billion weatherization project for low-income homes,” reports BusinessWeek.com. “Digging into the public records of the $21 billion spent so far through 19 U.S. Department of Energy programs reveals 3,960 projects that employ 28,854 people.”

Only 4,971,146 jobs left to go!

Four more years? No, at that rate it would take 693 years for Obama to create 5 million green energy jobs at the rate he created them over the first four years. And at the current cost, Obama would have to spend $3.6 trillion just to create those jobs.

That’s 25 percent of our GDP dedicated to creating about 3.5 percent of our jobs, if it ever happened.

You can not find a better punch line that knocks the water out of Obamanomics so completely. Forget about Obama’s 1 percent. At $727,000 per job, the 3.5 percent who would have green jobs would have it pretty good.

Thankfully economics, and by that I mean real-life market forces, not wishful theories by central bank and Ivy League economists, have prevented Obamanomics from working.

So as a healthy alternative to providing actual money to families during the recession, Obama created the bumper sticker war that liberals call: The Republican War on Women (R-WoW).

R-WoW’s not doing so hot though. It’s based on the faulty assumption that Republican men want to control women’s brains and their uteruses. And it’s way too transparent an attempt to distract from Obama’s record of failure.

I’ll admit that as a man I don’t always understand women. They are girly and often smell powdery. That and the insides of their purses intimidate me. But I know that they have a healthy respect for money. This I understand.

If you gave them a choice between a job that pays money and free birth control, the ones I know would pick a job. They aren’t buying into the R-WoW credo that the GOP is somehow hostile to women. And it’s not just the girls I know. According to the latest AP survey the vaunted gender gap that Obama counted on to get re-elected has disappeared.

More here.

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Media’s Racial Campaign against Romney Supporters Intensifies

With inside two weeks until the presidential election and Mitt Romney’s campaign awash in momentum, the left’s accomplices in the mainstream media and in the ivory towers of academia have ramped up their efforts to mix race into the fray, trying to guilt whites into again voting for Obama or else make them feel as though they are racists.

Take that bastion of news independence, CNN. During much of Thursday, the main story at CNN.com was titled, “Could Obama’s Struggles With White Voters Cost Him The Election?”

CNN called upon Mark Anthony Neal, a cultural and black studies professor at Duke University, to comment on the story. Neal, a staunch leftist and liberal blogger, stated, “Part of the reason we’re thinking about this is the dynamic of this being a black president.”

He went on to say, “If we were in a post-race society, the measurement is not the election of Obama but the re-election of President Obama. He still had to perform and he has been held on a short leash in that context.”

What happened to the initial election of Barack Obama as being indicative of a changed America — an America where someone of any color, race, or ethnicity could sit in the Oval Office? It was, in fact, the New York Times which heralded the election of Barack Obama in a November 5, 2008 story, using the headline, “Obama Elected President As Racial Barrier Falls.”

Evidently the benchmark of a post-racial America has suddenly moved from the election of a black president to the re-election of a black president. If Obama is re-elected, will the benchmark of proving a post-racial America move to the people insisting that the 22nd Amendment be repealed?

Neal’s comment that Obama, because he’s black, “has been held on a short leash” is preposterous. Every president is held on a four-year leash, if you will. Obama has had just as much time as other presidents to make the grade and convince voters that he should be re-elected.

Professor Neal further ignited the racism cry when he exclaimed, “Many voters including black voters don’t feel Obama performed exceptionally [on the economy.] … So much of what we’ve seen in terms of Romney support is a fundamental distrust of Obama because he’s not giving the goods. That argument is easier to be made because he’s black. … It’s not so much they are voting for Romney because he’s white but the economy protects them. They don’t have to feel guilty because of the economy. The economy lets them off the hook.”

So Professor Neal is claiming that, in reality, many people who vote against Obama in 2012, especially white voters, are subconsciously voting against Obama because he’s black. However, they can feel better about themselves because they can blame the economy. If Obama loses, then, according to Neal’s spewing, it’s because we racist white folks can’t get past the color of our skin. Never mind the fact that so many of us don’t have jobs or have jobs paying less than what we have grown accustomed to; those aren’t the real reasons we’re voting for Romney this time. It’s because we are racists. Yeah, that’s it.

Those comments by Neal are bathed in the utmost of idiocy and folly. Perhaps Neal would be wise to recall the story Jesus told in His Sermon on the Mount, when he told his audience not to pick the speck out of your brother’s eye without first removing the log from your own.

How Neal has an ounce of credibility is a mystery.

But CNN continued on Thursday by providing a racial voting bloc calculator so that those on CNN.com could tinker with the voting percentages of blacks, whites, Hispanics, and others. Now, that may seem harmless, but imagine if Fox News had a similar tool on its webpage. The uproar would be immense. You see, it’s the left that so often sees the world, the issues, and elections through racial lenses.

We then have MSNBC host Chris Matthews. You remember Matthews’s claim, back in 2008, that hearing Obama speak resulted in “a thrill running up my leg.” With Obama struggling down the stretch of his re-election bid, Matthews now says that it’s “racial hatred” which is fueling Romney’s rise and Obama’s fall, associating those of the “white working class” and those from the South with that “racial hatred” remark.

Matthews went on to recently interview Clarence Page, an African-American and writer at The Chicago Tribune, regarding Sarah Palin’s recent comments that Obama was engaging in “shuck and jive” in his handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack. Matthews and Page, of course, agreed that Palin’s criticism of Obama had a racial overtone, and therein was the issue with which they were enamored — not the Benghazi mishandling, mind you. It was the supposed racial aspect.

To illustrate the lunacy in these charges, Page admitted he had to look up the term to see where it was derived. In other words, he knew it had to do with black people and that it should be offensive, but he didn’t know why he should be offended — nor, no doubt, would most African-Americans. You just cannot make up the Left’s level of hypocrisy when it comes to racism.

Matthews later went on to interview Jonathan Alters, Bloomberg View columnist and MSNBC contributor. They discussed Trump’s request to see Obama’s college transcripts. Of course, Matthews and Alters considered this racist. In fact, Alters was adamant in using the term “racist.” Matthews and Alter believed that the request was so that Trump and others could prove perhaps that Obama was a product of affirmative action more than academic merit.

Where were these two when President George W. Bush’s college transcripts were being hunted? Oh, of course — they were conspicuously absent.

‘The Policies That Caused the Mess in the First Place’

For the last four years, Democrats and their amen corner in the old media have been trying to lay all the blame for the financial crisis of 2008 on poor old George W. Bush. They want folks to believe that that since the crisis happened on “his watch,” that Bush’s policies therefore caused the crisis.

Since we’re all about thinking here at American Thinker, that seems to be an example of the error known as post hoc ergo propter hoc — “after this, therefore because of this.” However, in the “thinking” of your garden-variety progressive Democrat, the translation from the Latin is: “after Bush, therefore because of Bush.”

Back in the Olden Days, this kind of thinking was considered fallacious — a failure in logic. Even the old media understood. But here’s the deal: the crisis didn’t happen only on Bush’s watch; it also happened on the Democrats’ watch. That’s because Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the final two years of Bush’s tenure. Nevertheless, during the 2008 campaign, all Democrats talked about were the “last eight years,” as though they hadn’t also been in power. Actually, Republicans controlled both houses for only four and a half years of Bush’s time in office. If one were to adopt the post hoc thinking of Democrats, one might say that the financial system was doing just fine until Democrats took over Congress in January 2007. Indeed, the Great Recession began about a year after Democrats won the 2006 midterm elections.

Although the financial crisis didn’t happen merely because George W. Bush occupied the White House, Democrats would have you believe it. Notice that when Democrats bring up some variation of “going back to the policies that caused the mess in the first place,” it stops right there; they don’t go on to say what those policies were. The reason why Democrats don’t elaborate is because many of the factors that “caused the mess” were created by Democrats — and some of them had been in effect for decades.

Housing, especially sub-prime mortgages, was at the center of the financial crisis. The Community Reinvestment Act, which coerced commercial banks to make loans to folks who weren’t creditworthy, was a big factor. Enacted in 1977, the CRA is a Democrat policy. Fannie Mae was also a prime suspect in the crisis, and Fannie was created by Democrats in 1938, during the New Deal era. The “implicit guarantee” of certain “government-sponsored enterprises” (private companies like Fannie Mae) and the securitization of mortgages are also Democrat policies.

Another factor that may have contributed to the crisis is the repeal of Glass-Steagall (the Banking Act of 1933), which created “firewalls” between commercial and investment banks. That repeal was signed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Yet another factor implicated in the crisis is the “easy money” policy of the Federal Reserve. That misguided policy is attributable to the Fed’s “dual mandate,” which Democrats created in 1977.

So some of the causes of the financial crisis are Democrat policies that were already in place when Bush took office in 2001. In his column “Blaming the Bush Tax Cuts” on October 10, Jonah Goldberg sums up the causes for the crisis like this:

The question of what caused the crisis is obviously still controversial (though, Kessler notes, the official inquiry makes no mention of Bush’s tax cuts). But a consensus seems to be forming around the following narrative: The federal government, out of an abundance of concern for the plight of the poor and middle class, made it too easy to buy a home. Congress, on a bipartisan basis, set unrealistic affordable-housing goals for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. President Clinton used those goals to expand access to mortgages to low-income borrowers. Then President George W. Bush, with the approval of Congress, expanded the practice, until way too many low-income or otherwise underqualified Americans owned mortgages they couldn’t afford.

A mixture of greed, idealism, cynicism, and stupidity led to the practice of bundling those iffy mortgages into financial instruments that Wall Street didn’t know how to handle and regulators didn’t know how to regulate. As Representative Barney Frank (D., Mass.) put it in 2003, he wanted to “to roll the dice a bit” on regulating subprime mortgages.

In another recent column, “The Fed’s Mission Creep,” concerning the aforementioned “dual mandate” of the Federal Reserve, George Will on October 17 wrote:

Before the Fed was created 99 years ago, the U.S. economy was in recession 48 percent of the time; since 1913, it has been in recession only about 20 percent of the time. The Fed has done much good. It cannot, however, do every good thing, although Congress now seems to think it should.

In July, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testified to the Senate, where one of Fisher’s Harvard classmates, the ineffable Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), clearly hoping the Fed would give the economy a pre-election boost, exhorted Bernanke: “The Fed is the only game in town.” Good grief.

Is Congress a spectator at the game of governance? Does it have anything to do with tax rates, spending levels and health care and other policies that have U.S. businesses, in Fisher’s words, “inundated with regulatory overload”? Expecting — no, mandating — the Fed to perform the irreducibly political task of managing economic policy means off-loading legislative responsibilities.

To repeat: Congress is “off-loading legislative responsibilities” for “economic policy” onto the Federal Reserve. The offloading of its responsibilities onto other bodies, like the Fed, is one of the reasons Congress is the branch of the federal government held in the most contempt. What are we paying these people for? Why not just dissolve Congress and let the Fed do everything?

Democrats, whether it’s President Obama or members of Congress, find it difficult to accept responsibility. Maybe that explains why Democrats have a hard time demanding responsibility from the citizenry. Given this unfortunate tendency, conservatives need to erect a “firewall” against the possible re-election of Pres. Obama by returning complete control of Congress back to Republicans. Winning back the majority is paramount.

Democrats fail to mention that during the halcyon days of Bill Clinton, when the budget was balanced and the economy was humming, America had an all-Republican Congress. We need to return to those prosperous days of yesteryear when America had an adult Congress, one that accepted responsibility. The Pelosi-Reid Congress was the worst in generations.