In a bit o’ power to the people, I wrote Cong. Ron Packard, a good GOP man who represents Riverside, when I heard that a complaint from a single, solitary slime-ball secularist had brought an end to the solemn “13-Fold Recital” flag ceremony at funerals at Riverside National Cemetery and other Veterans Administration cemeteries across the country. (Here’s my post on the matter.)

Yesterday I got a response, and I just have to say … YIPPEE!

Thank you for contacting my office regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs policy on the 13-fold recital ceremony. I appreciate the opportunity to update you on this situation: good sense and common cultural values have prevailed.

On October 25, 2007, an article in the Press Enterprise brought to my attention that a memo from the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) banned the recitation of a common flag-folding ceremony sometimes used by cemetery employees and volunteers at 125 national cemeteries. The change in policy was prompted by one complaint which originated at Riverside National Cemetery.

Freedom of speech and religion are American freedoms that I strongly support, and I believe that the rights granted to all citizens through the First Amendment are instrumental to democracy. Therefore, on October 29, 2007, I sent a letter to the Acting Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, along with 127 of my colleagues expressing our frustration with the policy of disallowing employees and volunteers from providing the 13-fold recital to families if they request the ceremony.

In addition, I introduced H.Res. 783, along with Rep. Steven LaTourette, which expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration employees, volunteers, and veterans’ service organizations that perform funeral honors and memorial honor details should be permitted to recite the 13 steps to fold an American flag (known as the “13-fold recital”) at any national cemetery if requested by the family of the deceased.

You may be happy to know that the Department of Veterans Affairs instituted a different policy on November 1, 2007, which stated that NCA employees, including VA-sponsored Volunteer Honor Guards, can read the “13-fold recital” if requested by the deceased’s survivors. In addition, they will not be selective in determining which recitations on the meaning of the thirteen folds will be read.

However, the VA will not accept for reading any texts that would have an adverse impact on the dignity and solemnity of a cemetery honoring those who served the Nation. Among the texts that would not be read would be those that are obscene, racist, are “fighting words,” or are coarse, abusive, or politically partisan.

While our system of government can sometimes be slow and unwieldy, in this case strong reaction by the people and quick action by interested Representatives yielded a speedy “about face” by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

So today, somewhere in America, volunteer vets are once again folding the flag that had draped the coffin of a vet who has passed on, reciting the pledge, honoring his service, respecting his family … and letting secularists know that we Americans will stand strong in support of our freedoms.

p.s.: Flopping Aces has the text of the 13-fold recital here.

p.p.s.: Please see the site from which the photo came; it honors a fallen hero you should remember, Johnny Michael Spann.

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Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse, who’s opinions I value, has called me a idiot. I’m not sure if I still value his opinions quite as much …

Here’s what he said, writing of the rush to score political points as the SoCal wildfires burned:

It didn’t used to be like this. No one would have dreamed of trying to politicize tragedy prior to the presidency of George Bush. But we’re in a different political ballgame now with no boundaries and few rules to live by. So we can expect this kind of idiocy from both sides from now on.

Mea culpa. I did work to score a political point or two by (very gingerly) comparing the situation faced by the Superdome evacuees to the experience of the evacuees at Qualcomm. Says Moran of that:

First of all, anyone who tries to draw parallels between a Hurricane and a fire is an idiot.

There’s that “idiot” word again. But there were differences between Qualcomm and Superdome that cannot be explained by the differences between a hurricane and a firestorm, which I admitted were profound.

And it’s not about rich or poor, or the width of streets or the availability of transportation. It’s about an effective local government in San Diego, and how sharply that contrasted with a seriously dysfunctional (and since re-elected!) local government in New Orleans. (To his credit, Moran also make this point.)

Ray Nagin’s re-election stands as the most racist political act in this country in all the years since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

Moran took a shot or two at folks who harped on the enviros during the current fire, saying it was too early to cast those stones. I haven’t thrown those stones … yet … even though you can attribute at least some of the blame for the recent ferocity of fires on them.

Now, here comes the end of “not yet;” here come the stones.

It turns out, enshrined bureaucratic environmentalism did play a role in making the fire that threatened our home harder to fight. My friend Jim eagle-eyed this, way down in an OC Register story today:

Concerns over contaminated water supplies due to runoff from an abandoned silver mine kept helicopters from dropping water on flames along the top ridge along the northeast corner of the blaze.

Regulation run amok! Bureaucrats gone wild!

Because there is an old silver mine up on Saddleback Mountain, one can assume, can’t we, that silver is a naturally occurring element in our local environment?

And if the water were to be dropped, it would land on ground that was parched bone-dry — because that’s why we’re having a fire, right?

And if the soil is bone dry, what water that isn’t evaporated by the flames and happens to pick up a silver atom or two will be sucked up by the now-bare soil, right?

So if the ridiculously tiny counts of silver are back in the soil, aren’t they right back where they came from?

And if it rains like cats and dogs (Puhleeze God!) soon, and all that soil washes down the mountain, won’t it be diluted by cat-and-dog volumes of water, until it’s so diluted you could barely measure it?

In case you’re confused, the answer to all those questions is “YES!” In the face of towering flames, bureaucratic idiots (to borrow a term from Moran) are enforcing regulations about parts per trillion instead of facing realities about burning homes in the hundreds (well, not here at least, thank God, but it’s a nice turn of phrase).

So, dear bureaucrat, how many more tons of greenhouse gases were belched into the atmosphere because you denied the helicopters their water? And, in case you forgot that there are real human beings involved here, how many more hours will firefighters be placed at risk — all because you’re worried about concentrations of silver that are surely smaller than what Incredible Wife picks up through her skin when she slips on a silver bracelet?

So, Rick, all apologies, but I’m not waiting another moment. All barrels blazing here!

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Vets like these two gentlemen, Bobby Castillo and Rees Lloyd, have conducted a flag-folding ceremony for the funerals of vets at the Riverside National Cemetery, as have others throughout the country.

And they’re spittin’ mad:

Through thousands of military burials, Memorial Honor Detail volunteers at Riverside National Cemetery have folded the American flag 13 times and recited the significance of every fold to survivors of those being laid to rest.

The first fold, a narrator tells relatives, represents life, the second a belief in eternal life.

The 11th fold celebrates Jewish war veterans and “glorifies the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”

A single complaint lodged against the words for the 11th fold recently prompted the National Cemetery Administration to ban the entire recital at all 125 national cemeteries.

It turns out that complaint came from just one person, a selfish, bitter, vicious subhuman who heard the dreadful word “God” at that very cemetery. Rees Lloyd actually spun together some better adjectives than I did:

“That the actions of one disgruntled, whining, narcissistic and intolerant individual is preventing veterans from getting the honors they deserve is truly an outrage. This is another attempt by secularist fanatics to cleanse any reference to God.”

The bureaucrats at that most august and valiant agency, the National Cemetery Administration, followed standard bureaucratic protocol and simply folded in the face of one sludge-synapsed, self-aggrandizing sorry soul — the bizarre flipside of their characteristic bureaucratic inability to list a finger to simplify their byzantine processes for good people in need.

Mike Nacincik, paper clip chain maker for the Cemeterians, thinks we’re a stupid bunch that aren’t much worth his taxpayer-funded time:

“We are looking at consistency. We think that’s important.”

Yeah, but are we? Do we think it’s important to have a consistently soulless ceremony or a memorable and appropriately solemn one? Whatever — just don’t read anything into their action to imply that these secularist wimps public servants showed any bias against religion by their action.

“People are going to have their own views on that.”

You mean, Nacinicik, that there’s no Federal Manual for Raging Impotently at the Bureaucracy we can pull out, flip to subsection 7(A) 4.7c and read the proper procedures for flippin’ our stacks over the power placed in the hands of little people looking for ways to impose their twisted, minority will on everyone?

The bureaucrats are by far the worse secular intolerants in this story, not the unnamed — Oh, how I wish they had named the faceless coward! — whiner who initiated the action.

Ken Calvert is a fine conservative Republican Congressman who represents Riverside. I’m going to drop him an email to ask for an investigation and regulatory fix to this situation. Won’t you, too?

Hat-tip: Jim

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Calling all leaders! … Calling any leader at all!

Hello?

Is anyone out there?

No, Emilo Gonzales, head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, you don’t qualify. Go back behind your podium, because there’s zero leadership at your agency if you’re letting traitors work at your agency while w’ere engaged in Islamofascism’s war against us.

A criminal investigations report says several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees are accused of aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain.

The confidential 2006 USCIS report said that despite the severity of the potential security breaches, most are not investigated “due to lack of resources” in the agency’s internal affairs department. (Wash Times)

What is USCIS spending money on that’s more important that rooting out treason within its ranks? Could there possibly be a boondoggle or diversity sensitivity training program that could be cut in order to give the internal affairs department the money it needs to track down and prosecute these, I say it again, traitors?

Among the known crimes are these:

• Two District Adjudications Officers allegedly worked with known members of Islamic terror groups to query the DHS database and check on the terrorists’ status. The group “was responsible for numerous robberies and used the heist money to fund terrorist activities.”

• Employees, I’ll say it again, treasonously shared detailed information on internal security measures with people (terrorists?) outside the agency.
• A Lebanese citizen (terrorist?) bribed an immigration officer with airline tickets for visa benefits.
• A USCIS officer in Harlington, Texas, sold immigration documents for $10,000 to as many as 20 people.

Bill Wright, a USCIS spokesman, would not comment to Wash Times about the investigations other than to say the agency “takes all internal allegations seriously.”

Right. That’s very reassuring, especially since he admitted that some of these investigations have been going on for three years — and none of the 65 new authorized investigative positions at the agency have been filled.

Is it really impossible for government to act like the people it represents? If there’s a terrorist milling about in my kitchen or garage, you’d better believe I’d take care of it — in considerably less than three years!

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Richard Carlson looks out his Tahoe cabin window at the beautiful view knowing that if he sees forest fire smoke below him, he has 10 minutes to clear out before the fire will block his only exit route. Carlson therefore knows a thing or two about managing forests for optimum fire safety. Why?

Behind my home, it’s nearly impossible to hike off trail because you have to wade through knee-deep piles of dead branches.

The forest is ready to explode. We have too many trees, but no one dares do anything about it.

It’s not a pretty thing, this forest management debate. Lumber company and radical environmentalists have staked out the extreme positions, with the Forest Services, forest residents and mainstream conservationists in between.

Reasonable people know the forest has to be thinned. People educated on the matter know that when the first photographers lugged cameras up the Sierras, the photos they took showed forests remarkably thinner than those today. And environmentalists know they’ll always be able to make a buck by railing against loggers.

Against that backdrop, an agreement was struck to allow the sort of environmentally balanced thinning that might have prevented the Tahoe fire. It didn’t pan out, says Carlson in an SF Chronicle opinion piece today:

Effective but environmentally safe forest thinning requires compromise between environmentalists and commercial loggers. Unfortunately, the new, more ideological environmental movement refuses such compromise. This refusal is exemplified by the Quincy Library Group.

The group drafted an agreement among Sierra conservationists, industry and political leaders that would have allowed enough controlled commercial thinning of Sierra forests to actually make a dent in the deadly growing forest fuel loads. The agreement was killed by lawsuits from the new, more radical urban environmentalists who value money and ideology above science, homes and human life.

The leaders of such groups as California’s chapters of the Sierra Club knew that their urban constituencies could be depended on to contribute to any anti-logging campaign.

Compromise would lose money and support to more-radical groups. Having spent decades creating the image of the evil logger as their favorite fundraiser, the urban environmentalists didn’t dare be caught talking to one. Allied as the Sierra Forest Legacy, these organizations have largely stopped effective efforts to deal with the fast-growing fire danger in Sierra forests.

It’s not like there hasn’t been sufficient time to implement the recommendations of the Quincy Library Group’s agreement; it was inked in 1993, and DiFi submitted legislation in 1998. But nothing has happened except more of the insane status quo:

While the lawyers argue, and the environmental fundraisers happily collect their tribute, the forest fuel loads keep growing.

In Tahoe, the situation is exacerbated by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (known locally as the Tree Nazis). The agency’s rules override fire marshal guidelines and generally make desperately needed tree thinning impossible. Unless you go through an insanely complex, expensive and lengthy permit process, you can’t touch a tree that’s larger than 6 inches in diameter, even if it’s next to your house. And 6- to 12-inch firs are exactly the type of tree that is the greatest fire danger.

It’s the same all over, and not just with the fires that preceded in Arizona and elsewhere. The California Coastal Commission forbids the repair or building of sea walls. A farmer in San Bernardino County was arrested for plowing a fire-break around his home because Stevens kangaroo rats might have been disturbed.

One of my clients recently spent $3 million fighting off (successfully) a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit over air quality. Ironically, the project was able to fully mitigate its air quality impacts for one-sixth that amount, just $500,000, with which they bought new, clean diesel generators to replace dirty generators used by farmers in the area.

The Center didn’t care. This client is a major fundraising source for them and like radical green groups everywhere, solutions aren’t their goal; power and money is.

If people die and cabins burn because of their goals, so what? The world in their view is better without people and cabins anyway.

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The cause of the devastating Lake Tahoe fire, which burned down 200 structures causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and who can measure how much heartbreak, has been found.

It is the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), a bi-state land czar bureaucracy dedicated to protecting the clarity of Lake Tahoe at all cost.

Among TRPA’s passions is imposing maniacal restrictions on cutting trees because … follow the logic … a gone tree means more exposed soil (i.e., the area where the trunk once was), which would mean more sediment would run into the lake. So cut a tree in Tahoe and look at thousands of dollars of TRPA fines, which TRPA uses to find more people to fine.

Nevermind that tree branches shade the ground, limiting ground cover and that tree trunks absorb no groundwater; that’s their position and they’ve stuck to it. Of course, there was this one minor negative side-effect: Homeowners couldn’t cut trees near their homes, those trees caught fire, and voila, no more house.

Now that so many trees and houses are gone, rain and snowmelt will have hundreds of bare, disturbed acres like those in the picture, to run off, pummeling Tahoe with silt and ash. Nicely done, TRPA; a shining example of just how stupid environmental bureaucracies can be.

TRPA’s executive director, John Singlaub, says the agency does allow trimming around homes, but the message just didn’t get out. Well, whose fault is that? The OC Reg reports people aren’t buying Singlaub’s line … or his attitude:

“I thought our message was out there better,” Singlaub said “I was not expecting this.”

Singlaub was less conciliatory during his first explosive encounter with the public at a town hall meeting Monday, when the blaze was still tearing through forests south and west of the local commercial hub of South Lake Tahoe. Many in the crowd of about 1,200 booed and shouted down a defiant Singlaub as he tried to defend the TRPA’s policies.

Two days later, when he resurfaced to tour the destruction with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, local reporters and town leaders interrupted the governor’s news conference to pepper the TRPA director with questions.

What is TRPA’s vaunted new leniency? It allows homeowners to clear pine needles all the way to five feet from their homes. Any more will mean too much erosion, they say, and big trouble. Not all homeowners went along with this rule … and they were the lucky ones:

“I went around my whole property and took out every single pine needle,” said Neil Cohn, 35, pointing to a blackened line where the advancing fire that destroyed eight of his neighbors’ homes stopped short of his own. “TRPA came up here last year and gave me a warning but I did it anyway, and I’ll keep doing it.”

After all this, Singlaub is unbending: preserving the lake’s clarity is still job number one for TRPA, he says.

That’s absolutely true. Following the fire, TRPA may be talking big about fire protection, but a review of the executive summary of the agency’s 2006 Threshold Evaluation, basically an annual report, finds lots of talk about water quality and runoff control, but a search for “fire protection” yielded no results.

My heart goes out to homeowners who lost their homes, not just for their loss, but because they have only entered the nightmare; they’re hardly over it. In the years since their homes were built, TRPA has screwed down the regulatory thumbscrews and what was permissible then will not be approved now. And pity the poor soul who attempts to add even one square foot to his home during rebuilding. They will be burned in a firestorm of regulatory paperwork — and ultimately denied, I’ll bet.

I predict something of a range war in the Tahoe area in coming years as residents who love and have protected the land there for years are told by TRPA that their plans for rebuilding just can’t be approved. TRPA caused the fire, now they’re going to cause the political fire that will follow.

But let’s not over-demonize TRPA. It is not that much worse that land czar bureaucracies from sea to shining sea. These agencies have been completely overrun with hardcore, anti-development environmentalists — Singlaub says humans degrade the environment “just by living here” — and their agenda is to push us out of the areas they regulate.

The policy train has wrecked in Tahoe. Will the land czars be able to get it back on track, or will be people demand real change? My bet, sadly, is on the land czars.

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According California DMV, some extremely stupid people are driving on our roads and highways. I have it on good authority — it’s right on the wrapper of my new license plate.

Right next to the “click it or ticket” logo is this:

A safety belt can

• Prevent painful injury
• Save your life

When you buckle up!
Protection is void if your seat belt isn’t fastenened at time of impact.

Thank you for that helpful little tip, Mr. Schwarzenegger & Co. Here we thought we could avoid the discomfort of continual seatbelt clickage by simply waiting until we have an accident, then click it shortly after impact. Things are much clearer now.

Does the government really think they serve people this stupid? Or is the government so stupid that it actually thinks warnings like this are necessary?

Methinks the latter.

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