I found this bit of news in the Local section of the OCR yesterday.  On Saturday, Nov. 7th, at 10:00 a.m., Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (retired) will be speaking at the Student Union building at CSUF.  He will make the keynote speech at the event to honor veterans that have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Following the speeches, the General will be available to sign his book starting at noon.  The book is entitled, "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story."  Sanchez was the first coalition forces commander in Iraq following the invasion and liberation of Iraq.  He was succeeded by Gen. Casey, then Gen. Petraeus, and now Gen. Odierno is the current commander.

Latino Advocates for Education and CSUF are jointly sponsoring this event.  For more info, call 714-225-2499, or you can research the event at latinoadvocates.org.  The Student Union is located at 800 N. State College Blvd., in Fullerton.  God bless our military veterans. 

Yes, THAT Jeff Flint! The founder of Red County Placer... you see, Jeff is a partner in the leading political consulting firm in America defending family values.

The MSM gives Schubert-Flint PA (the 2009 Winner of some consultant award - the equivalent of the MVP in Baseball, though) some grudging praise.

Their article points out repeatedly that people really believe in Gay marriage until Frank Schubert figured out in some right-wing focus group that running ads depicting the homosexual children's books was the ticket.

You can read the article here

Far be it from me to say - but the people that wrote/edited this article seemed irritated. I wish I could have been there when they finally decided to include the sentence about how Gay Marriage has lost all 31 times it has gone to the ballot. Of course, they leave out that the Courts (again, like with abortion, rights that nenver existed before for criminals/terrorists/illegal aliens) were and are the only way to force Gay Marriage on society.

But, I digress - oh and notice that this article gets buried in the late friday wire.

Thank you Schubert-Flint for defending the fabric of society.

It's a long-time member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it has been pushing hard to join the European Union, it has been viewed as a model for secularism in the Muslim world, and it's .... planning to host an indicted war criminal next week.  It's Turkey.  This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes over the genocide in Darfur, will visit Turkey ("Turkey Set to Host President of Sudan").  I can assure you Turkey won't be pressuring Bashir to stop the killing in Darfur.   

Turkey and Sudan say their relationship is all about their economies.  And trade has quadrupled over the past three years.  But deeper currents are connecting.  Next week's visit is the latest sign of Turkey's shift away from the West and towards political Islam.  Radical Islam is integral to the ruling party in Khartoum, Sudan.  Last month, Turkey pulled the plug on a routine military exercise with NATO and Israel's air force.  Exercises with Syria are planned though.  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist AKP party came to power in 2003, recently called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "our friend."  Ahmadinejad will be in Istanbul too, by the way, as part of the one day Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting.  As Darfur will be ignored, so too will Iran's nuclear drive.    

This isn't just my hunch.  One Middle East analyst recently noted, "the AKP's foreign policy has not promoted sympathy toward all Muslim states.  Rather, the party has promoted solidarity with Islamist, anti-Western regimes (Qatar and Sudan, for example) while dismissing secular, pro-Western Muslim governments (Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia)." (WSJ editorial: "The Turkish Temptation").  Present-day Turkey's embrace of rogues abroad shouldn't surprise, given that Ankara has moved to "tax" domestic independent media and jail political opponents.  Readers of this space know that aggressive attitudes abroad and bad behavior at home closely track (see North Korea, Iran).

This isn't some two-bit country with a growing radical population.  This is Turkey: a country of 77 million strategically sitting between east and west.  This is a NATO ally, with the accompanying security commitments and access to military technology.  We don't need any more foreign policy headaches, but Turkey's political and social trends are quite troubling indeed.  

In recent days the news has been filled with tales of carnage inflicted upon innocent victims. From the serial murderer registered sex offender in Cleveland to the 13 killed and 31 injured at Fort Hood by a deranged gunman to the 1 killed and 5 injured in Orlando by a disgruntled former employee.

This morning, after hearing the news of the Fort Hood massacre, I went down to my local blood donation center and donated blood. The brave men and women who protect us with their lives ask nothing from us. The least I could do was to give some of my blood to those who offer up theirs on a daily basis.

Red Cross of Orange County is the place to start. They take blood donations, cash donations, offer first aid and CPR classes and are always looking for volunteers.

With Veterans Day upon us next week, lets all take a minute this weekend to honor those brave souls who serve us by thanking a veteran, attending an event to honor veterans or maybe even hiring a veteran.

In August, I blogged here about the political dominoes that would come from Riverside County Supervisor Roy Wilson's resignation (and untimely death, shortly thereafter).  As expected, the Governor appointed Senator John J. Benoit (R-37) to the seat.  Why does this matter to Orange County?  Well, Assemblyman Jeff Miller is the front-runner to replace Benoit, thereby opening an Assembly seat that is mostly in Orange County.

Jon Fleischman had an extensive report about the prospective candidates for Benoit's seat: Miller (who represents a sizable portion of the district and has lived in the district for years), Assemblyman Bill Emmerson (who barely represents the Senate district and would have to move to run for the seat), former Assemblyman Russ Bogh (who lost to Benoit in the 2008 primary), and former Palm Springs Police Chief Gary Jeandron (who was the Republican nominee for the AD-80 seat).

With Miller possibly going to the Senate in 2010 (if Miller wins the SD-37 election, the timing is such that under California's Elections Code, there will be no AD-71 Special Election; it will stay vacant until the regular election, much like how Tom Harman was elected to SD-35 and his AD-67 seat wasn't filled by Jim Silva until the regular election), who will run for Miller's seat?

Current names being bandied about include Rancho Santa Margarita Councilman Neil Blais, who lost to Miller in the primary in 2008 by less than 4,000 votes; conservative activist and California Republican Lawyers Association Chairman Steve Baric, who is also Secretary of the California Republican Party and is a former gang prosecutor; and Mission Viejo Councilman John Paul Ledesma, who ran for the seat in the 2008 primary, but dropped out before candidate filing.  All of this is moot of course if Miller doesn't win the SD-37 special primary election, and no one will officially declare until Miller officially wins the Senate seat.

We all know the well-worn wopper that the stimlus package was going to help keep unemployment from rising above 8%. Well, that one looks sillier every time we get an employment report. Today's, in case you didn't see it, crossed the psychological 10% mark:

Unemployment rate hits 10.2% in October

Of course, government unemployment numbers are like its inflation numbers: they're, um, subject to interpretation.

I'm not suggesting some Ron Paul-goldbug-Libertarian conspiracy here, but CPI, for example, is rightly called into question because the headline, or "core," number excludes food and energy from the inflation guage, which seems odd-- unless you think most of us could go very long without eating food or using energy!

Less odd, but worth noting, is that there are multiple ways the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates unemployment.

That 10.2% headline number, for instance, excludes two types of people:

1. Those who aren't actively looking for work but have indicated they want a job and have looked for work (without success) in the past 12 months. This class includes "discouraged workers" who have completely given up on finding a job because they feel that they just won't find one. This one strikes people as very odd because if you're unemployed for a year and a day, you're still unemployed, aren't you?
   
2. Those who are looking for full-time work but have had to settle on a part-time job due to economic reasons. This one's more debatable because those folks are working, but it's certainly a worthwhile segment of the workforce to measure.

When these two groups are added back, you get what the BLS calls its U-6 unemployment rate, which today stands at 17.5%.

Ouch.

By the way: for the headline number, the peak level of unemployment during the 1981-82 recession, the worst since the Depression, was 10.8%, and that was exacerbated in the short run because we were doing then what we should be doing today: encouraging savings and strengthening the dollar through higher interest rates, and encouraging production and employment through tax cuts. It also happened to be the right long-term policy, as history has clearly shown.

Today, we have embarked on precisely the opposite course, and despite the crystal-clear evidence that the stimulus package is not working, soon the talk of a second such package will intensify-- bizzaro economics.

One last thing: don't be fooled by the stock market's rally; it isn't predicting recovery, but an inflationary surge which will lift prices of virtually all asset classes (though in real-- inflation adjusted-- terms, stocks won't be making much headway). And I say "virtually all asset classes" because the broken one from the previous bubble doesn't tend to participate in the following "recovery;" just like stimulus measures earlier this decade couldn't lift the busted technology sector, neither will today's measures lift home prices.

Today's policies are so horribly flawed that inflation and unemployment are sure to march higher. Indeed, the only question now is whether we'll top the 1982 headline unemployement rate of 10.8%, which is really no question at all (we will).

Yet despite the fact it is actually harming the patient, not helping it, expect more of the same bad economic medicine from Washington.