CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, January 18, 2010

Have a Happy New(s) Year!

There has been so much breaking news that it is hard to keep up: Tiger still isn’t out of the woods. He’s in a sex rehab clinic in Mississippi. What they do there? If all they do is talk about sex, that seems rather counterintuitive.

Vice President Joe Biden held a conference on how to make government more transparent. It was a closed-door meeting.

One of the inherent flaws of capitalism is a natural tendency toward monopoly via sharp business practices, fair or foul. But even after engineering the demise of its former competitor, The Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Post: will seek bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. Instead of left-winging its so-called news pages, one wonders if a more “fair and balance” approach might increase readership and revenues.

Interestingly, the “fair and balanced” Fox News Channel is raking in huge advertising revenues to the point that Fox News creator, Roger Ailes, is making a higher annual salary than his media-baron boss, Rupert Murdoch.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “The inherent flaw in capitalism is the unequal distribution of benefits. The inherent flaw in socialism is the equal distribution of misery.” The Obamessiahs are determined to convert the USA from a health-care system that satisfies over 83-percent of our population into a socialized-medicine system that will make everyone equally miserable.

The U.N.’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen was hit by a blizzard that extended south to the beaches of the French Riviera. Unfortunately, the U.N. organizers messed up the registration procedure to the point that the global warmers were left standing for hours outside the conference hall in blizzard conditions.

The global warmers could have walked over to the Danish Nationmuseet (national museum) and taken shelter; however, they would have been embarrassed by exhibits extolling the exploits of the Viking explorers during the Medieval Warming Period (800 A.D. and 1300 A.D.) Back then, the planet warmed up to the point that the Vikings were able to explore Iceland, Greenland and the fringes of North America. Oops! All that global warming occurred across five centuries when fossil-fueled human activities were limited to cooking fires and forging swords.

Global warming has had its ups and downs. On the upside, food became abundant. Humankind, other animals and plant life thrived as never before. Wine-making extended northward into the British Isles and Scandinavia. On the downside, fewer farm workers were needed. That began the process of urbanization as the displaced workers sought work in town. Unfortunately, the lush times made it easier for disease-carrying rodents to multiply, setting in train the Bubonic Plague that wiped out almost half of Europe’s population.

Because its negative impacts were far worse than the Medieval Warming Period, the recent record low temperatures across Europe and North America suggest more study of the Little Ice Age (circa 1600 A.D. to 1850 A.D.) is in order. Famine and death by hypothermia were rampant. Food prices skyrocketed. In 1780, New Yorkers could ice-walk between Manhattan and Staten Island. Entire Swiss towns were crushed by advancing glaciers. Today, one-third of Florida’s citrus crop is gone. Florida has been declared a disaster area.

Quite properly, the Obamessiahs are allowing earthquake-displaced Haitians to remain in the U.S. for the next 18 month. Unfortunately, Haitians already here illegally are included in this amnesty, insuring that untold thousands of Haitians will be here for the next election cycle. In the world of ACORN, there are no illegal aliens. They are undocumented Democrats.

The Pentagon report on the Ft. Hood massacre said nothing about Islamic-jihadist terrorism. The report faulted the superiors of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan for failing to write down their negative observations of Major Hasan. No mention was made of the fact that the political-correctness police would have ended the careers of any officer who had written down anything negative about Major Hasan.

Have a Happy New(s) Year!

Syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, studied at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. Dr. Hamilton is a former assistant professor of political science and history at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

©2010 William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com