tuesday, october 31 2006
more on kerry
Senator Waffles blows smoke to convince people he didn't insult the military (scroll four posts down). He blames others:
I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have…
Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men…”
Real man? Kerry? Pfft.
Bill Frist retorts:
Senator Kerry clearly owes an apology to our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines serving in Iraq. But Mr. Kerry has refused to do so. Instead, he’s claiming that Republicans are “desperately distorting” his comments. Watch the video yourself … it is perfectly clear what Mr. Kerry said … what’s unclear is whether Mr. Kerry ever means what he says. Perhaps he was against his comments before he actually made them.
Lots of video clips at Hot Air.
the horse's mouth
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Mark Halperin, ABC's political director, and asked him if any conservatives have ever won a Pulitzer. Halperin says yes and Hugh asked him to name some.
MH: I’d rather not name them, because they’re privately conservative, and I’m trying to get away from a world in which…I’ll say it again, because I don’t want anyone who tuned in late to misunderstand. The old media is filled with liberals. There are a few conservatives, but they’re just as entitled to their privacy as I am, but there are some.
HH: And these liberals…you know, Terry Moran on this program said…Terry Moran on this program from ABC, your colleague…
MH: Right.
HH: …said that the media hates the military, has a deep suspicion of it. Do you agree with that?
MH: I totally agree. It’s one of the huge biases, along with gays, guns, abortion, and many other things.
So Halperin would not "out" any reporter as conservative because that would harm their careers. Says a lot, doesn't it?
Then there's this:
MH: I never say MSM, because I don’t believe the old media is mainstream. They’re out of the mainstream on most of the issues I’ve been referring to. So I don’t use that phrase. I believe that as I’ve said several times, happy to say again, that anyone who’s conservative in this country has every justification to be skeptical about anything, an internal memo, or product that goes on the air, from the old media, because of a forty year or more history of liberal bias on a range of issues. And after what CBS News did in 2004, regarding the President’s National Guard record, I would be…I am thankful that any conservative looks to us every for news and information, given how outrageous what they did was.
the road to condemning gitmo
black comedy
A female Musliam school teacher, at a Church of England school no less, gets fired for wearing the hijab in class. Video of her interview here.
john kerry, creep
JFK Lite was at Pasadena City College yesterday for a Democrat pep rally, where:
You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
Volunteering for military service makes you a loser, eh? And he wanted to be commander-in-chief.
For a different perspective, watch this video.
Come to think of it, I do question Kerry's patriotism.
hillary tells another lie
Dick Morris explains how Hillary, trying to get on the right left side of the gay marriage issue, is rewriting history.
Her statement dismissed her support of her husband's Defense of Marriage Act as "a strategic decision to help derail a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage."
Nonsense. I was in the room at the White House strategy meeting and was sitting next to the president when he decided to promote and sign the bill. Nobody was even talking about a constitutional amendment back then - 1995-96 - and no one in the meeting so much as mentioned the possibility.
His decision to sign the bill closely followed my announcement of polling data that suggested overwhelming support for the legislation. His announcement to his staff and advisers that he would sign the bill was, indeed, a strategic decision, but one that related to his re-election prospects rather than to any push for a constitutional amendment.
man of steele
Micheal Steele busts his opponent for using testimonials from phony "average Joes." Watch the two commercials here.
does porn reduce rape?
Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.
First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.
The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.
readers voting with feet: la times drops 8%
Among big-city newspapers, only the Miami Herald (8.8%) lost a bigger percentage of its daily readers than the Los Angeles Times (8%) in today's new numbers. The Times, of course, led in raw numbers of readers lost with a daily circulation now of 775,766.
Remember that it's only since Tribune took over that the daily count fell below a million, and the last pre-Tribune CEO, Mark Willes, even talked boldly (some might say insanely) about going for two million. Instead, daily circulation is now far below the national big boys: Wall Street Journal, USA Today and New York Times. The Sunday count at the LAT dropped 6% to 1,172,005, for the six-months ending in September.
monday, october 30 2006
it's jihad, charlie brown
A video to make some people angry.
getting served lunch
A blogger reminds us how/why the lunch counter sculpture in Wichita, Kansas came to be.
HT Instapundit
msm nancy boys
Say what you will about Pelosi, but it is a matter of record that she’s far left of the center of American politics — her rating from the liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action is routinely a 100 percent; that she enforces party loyalty — her Democrats voted along party lines 88 percent of the time last year, a record for the past 50 years; that she has primarily occupied herself with blocking legislation in the House — she has tried to kill practically every Republican initiative, no matter how small; that she uses tough rhetoric — Republicans are, according to Pelosi, “corrupt,” “incompetent” and running a “criminal enterprise.”
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Politicians should have deep convictions, and they should work to organize their party around them and to defeat the opposition. Nor is there anything wrong with sharp rhetorical elbows. But the press usually professes to like none of these qualities, and typically dubs someone exhibiting them as “radical,” “partisan,” “obstructionist,” and “mean-spirited.”
Instead, in a typical media treatment, the Washington Post finds Pelosi a “tough-minded tactician.” She has “kept the fractious House Democrats in line.” She has “thwarted many GOP initiatives” by getting the Democrats to “hang together.” Yes, Republicans accuse her of being an obstructionist, but that’s just the sort of name-calling Republicans always engage in, now isn’t it?
dead men don't wear plaid vote democrat
A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.
The Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File." That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937.
- There were dead people on the voter rolls in all of New York's 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.
- One Bronx address was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., in Riverdale, site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.
- Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where the higher population produced more matches.
the big fibber loses his touch
Bill Clinton used to lie with grace, panache and insouciance. Shoot, you'd watch him lie to your face and almost want to say, "Thank you, you bad boy."
But his fastball is missing the plate these days, and getting past the catcher. He's been shilling for California Prop 87, which claims it will reduce California's reliance on foreign oil by imposing heavy taxes on California's oil producers.
Why, of course, making X more costly to produce always results in more of X. Sure. Uh huh.
"Imagine if we stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it. They made a simple switch to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops. And it's 33% cheaper than gas."
"With Proposition 87, we can switch to cleaner fuels, wind and solar power and free ourselves from foreign oil. If Brazil can do it, so can California."
What's this "ourselves?" Clinton doesn't live here. Plus it's not true.
But as a matter of fact, that's not what Brazil did.
It launched a crash program of offshore oil drilling in the late 1990s, working with a Manhattan Project-like determination to develop its own natural resources.
In 1997, Brazil opened its oil sector to foreign competition, encouraging companies like Royal Dutch Shell to explore and drill for oil in its offshore waters for the first time. It offered incentives — like tax cuts. It also turned its inefficient state oil company, Petrobras, into a for-profit company run like a real business instead of a government cash cow, forcing it to compete on an international-standard level. In short, it got out of the way.
Net result, lots more oil for Brazil — enough to enable the once-oil-dependent country to actually export some, all from fewer energy reserves than the U.S.
Brazil's new P-50 rig has boosted output to an average 1.9 million barrels of oil a day, a bit more than the 1.85 million Brazil consumes.
By contrast, ethanol output in Brazil, the world's biggest producer, is only a small share of its energy consumption.
Last year, the country squeezed out just 282,000 barrels a day mostly using sugar, a more efficient and clean-burning energy source than the corn-based stuff produced in the U.S. But sugar-based ethanol still isn't as efficient as gasoline.
sunday, october 29 2006
more on le intifada
Muslim youths tossed a Molotov cocktail into a bus in Marseilles Saturday night. A young female passenger was seriously burned. As No Pasaran reports:
A bus torching in Marseille with intent to kill, 46 arrests nationwide along with 2 policemen hurt and 200 automobiles torched, street battles with police in Gigny, and a bus torched in Trappes. The evening's activity is being classified as "relatively calm" (which is why the Prime Minister is springing into action with a previously unscheduled Monday morning meeting).
Other events from yesterday include a bus being pelted with rocks in Seine-Saint-Denis. The City Hall in Stains was also pelted as were policemen in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil.
In Vitry-sur-Seine, 3 youths were arrested for carrying Molotov cocktails. Police were attacked in Goussainville. Other "incidents", without further precision, took place in Fleury-Mérogis and Toulouse. In Vaux-en-Velin a "runaway" car ran into 2 policemen. A Molotov cocktail was used to set alight a library next door to a police station in Vannes.
Police sources claim that the situation is "under control".
malcolm gladwell on degrees of difficulty
We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks. I know a reverse slam is harder than a simple dunk. But how much harder? And how much harder again would a slam be if you had a defender drapped all over you?
...One more example. My sister-in-law works as a chaplain in a nursing home. Every few weeks, someone who she has gotten to know dies. Can anyone who has never been in the situation of experiencing death with that regularity possible know what that feels like? My sister-in-law doesn't work long hours. She's doesn't get paid a lot of money. And she doesn't have a fancy doctorate. But I venture to say that only one in a 1000 people could do her job with any degree of diligence or sensitivity. In a way that you would have to do that job to appreciate, it's really really hard.
jolly ole england
Multiculturism runs amok. A 14-year old school girl gets arrested for racism, spends time in a cell, all for asking to be assigned to a group of students who speak her language. But there's a backlash forming.
de-fence
Demonstrators in Oaxhaca set busses afire.
Most of the discussion about the Mexican border fence has focused on illegals coming into the US to work, the impertinent expression of Reconquista, etc.
But suppose Mexico became politically unstable? Suppose our incompetent and corrupt southern neighbor suddenly fell sway to a radical change in government?
The recent election was a squeaker and the loser, like Al Gore after his manners wore off, insists he wuz robbed. Radical groups are active in Oaxaca. And they have guns. Mexico is a country where the have-nots have a righteous case.
Couple that with Hugo Chavez playing footsie with Hezbollah in the Guajira Peninsula and the notion of "south of the border" loses its benign connotation.
UPDATE: Pat Dollard emails us:
Just an interesting tidbit. Brad Will, the journalist shot in Oaxaca was a left-wing radical who had allied himself with the protesters, in this video calls for violence against the police. He tries to be surreptitious about it, but it's quite clear what he's calling for. It looks like he got what he was preaching.
saturday, october 28 2006
sheep in wolf's clothing
From Pajamas media.
CHENEY: Right, but what is CNN doing? Running terrorist tape of terrorists shooting Americans. I mean, I thought [Rep.] Duncan Hunter asked you a very good question, and you didn’t answer it. Do you want us to win?
WOLF: The answer of course is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that.
CHENEY: Then why are you running terrorist propaganda?
WOLF: With all due respect, this is not terrorist propaganda.
CHENEY: Oh, Wolf.
where's the beef?
U.S. chicken producers face a challenge: cut production or watch breast meat prices fall even further than the seven-year lows notched this week in the wholesale markets, analysts said. The problem, according to Aho and others, is that there is too much meat, be it chicken, beef or pork.
This can't be. After all, that darling of Green Scare mongers, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, predicted in 1968 in his bestseller, "The Population Bomb"
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death."
You might expect that Dr. Ehrlich would have been ridiculed into obscurity. But no, the self-described "reality-based" community still holds him in high esteem.
fun-house mirror
Some group calling itself Reporters without Borders released a report card on global press freedom, ranking the USA 53rd.
Ahead of the USA are Belgium, where blogger Paul Belien of Brussels Journal has been harassed by the police for writings critical of the government. Also ahead are Austria, which sentenced a Holocaust-denier to prison and Italy, which criminally prosecuted Orianna Fallachi for statements she made in a book.
And why the low ranking for the USA, with its First Amendment?
Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.
sixty-acre spider web
wombs will win
"One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”
So spoke Algerian President Boumedienne in 1974. Not in some secret gathering, but standing before the UN General Assembly.
french calm
Things are looking up according to French media:
The night of Friday to Saturday turned out to be an ordinary weekend, according to the police: in the entire départment of Seine-Saint-Denis, by the early hours of Saturday, one counted little more than twenty cases of arson on cars. Specific incidents however took place in spite of the 4000 police officers and gendarmes deployed to head off possible turmoil.
Wow, that's defining progress down. Put 4000 cops on the beat and only 20 cars get torched in a night.
tigerhawk on steyn
Tigerhawk reviews Mark Steyn's new book and adds his perspective.
Steyn sets forth the options at the end of the book in particularly stark terms:
There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:
1. Submit to Islam
2. Destroy Islam
3. Reform Islam
It's number three that it is possible, which leads to Tigerhawk's essay from this summer, "Wither the 'democratization strategy'? Read it.
For those who believe Bush is a blundering, foolish idealist because of his emphasis on bringing Democracy to the mideast, look at option #3. Tigerhawk quotes Cliff May:
...while freedom and democracy are not the antidote for terrorism, they are part of the long-term treatment. Right now, if you live in the Arab Middle East you have a choice only between dead-end dictatorship and Militant Islamism. There is no third option—indeed, the dead-end dictators collude with the Militant Islamists against any sprouting of liberal democracy.
It's been a mere five months since the elected Iraqi government took over, and the so-called smart people in the US (mostly Democrats and media people, but not all) have declared Iraq a failure.
On what basis? Bush is maligned for his supposed lack of critical thinking. But it seems he's the one with an eye on the big picture.
the worst political websites
Compiled by C|NET. These are bad.
friday, october 27 2006
true stifling of dissent
For those two young (or dense) to remember the black days of Iron Curtain communism, which murdered millions and condemned millions more to shabby lives, John Fund remembers the Hungarian uprising.
pentagon pushes back at NY Times
Little Pinch's newspaper hears from the Department of Defense:
The New York Times has once again repeated a popular myth to mislead its readers about Secretary Rumsfeld. We ask for an immediate correction.
Today’s editorial claims: “There have never been enough troops, the result of Mr. Rumsfeld’s negligent decision to use Iraq as a proving ground for his pet military theories, rather than listen to his generals.” Whether or not the Times believes there were enough troops in Iraq, the claim that any troop level in Iraq is the result of Secretary Rumsfeld “not listening to his generals” is demonstrably untrue.
Generals involved in troop level decisions have been abundantly clear on this matter:
- General Tommy Franks, Commander, U.S. Central Command during the opening of Operation Iraqi Freedom: “Don Rumsfeld was a hard task master -- but he never tried to control the tactics of our war-fight [Franks, “American Soldier, “ pg 313]
Rather than advancing Secretary Rumsfeld’s alleged “pet theories,” General Franks wrote that he based his troop level recommendations on the following: “Building up a Desert Storm-size force in Kuwait would have taken months of effort - very visible effort - and would have sacrificed the crucial element of operational surprise we now enjoyed. . . . And if operational surprise had been sacrificed, I suspected that the Iraqis would have repositioned their Republican Guard and regular army units, making for an attrition slugfest that would cost thousands of lives.”
Read it all.
Then read the DoD's point-by-point rebuttal of Newsweek's cover story about how we're losing Afghanistan
nancy pelosi's voting record
From Maggie's Farm:
NO on the Border Security Bill
NO on making the Republican tax cuts permanent
NO on eliminating the marriage penalty
NO on eliminating the death tax
NO on creating Health Savings Accounts
NO on the Defense of Marriage Act
NO on the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (and NO on its reauthorization)
NO on protecting the Pledge of Allegiance
NO on banning partial-birth abortion
NO on requiring a photo I.D. to ensure only legal voters vote
NO on the Patriot Act
NO on authorizing domestic tracking of terrorists
NO on military tribunals and new interrogation rules for terrorist detainees
i was once a tour guide
...but I never did this. Video.
a scary halloween read
At Burt's book signing Sunday, I spoke with a fellow named Michael Canzano who had just finished reading Mark Steyn's, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" and told me it scared him.
Rightly so. Steyn makes the inarguable case that Europe as we know it is disappearing. Inarguable because his case is based on demographic data.
...you have basically the entire collapse of the birth rates of most of the Western world and alongside that you have this, effectively, this successive population that’s moving into a lot of those countries. That’s a huge, unprecedented, demographic transformation that is taking place in our lifetime.
...
Basically the European nations are dying and the populations in them are turning into relatively hostile Muslim populations, not all of them terrorists, but all of them, almost all of those people not sympathetic to America and American interests.
And I feel that the great assumption that we all have, that the present tense is somehow permanent, or that it’s like technological progress. You know, it’s like, cars don’t go backwards. You don’t suddenly have a Cadillac Escalade and you go out into the yard one morning and it’s turned into a Ford Model T and it’s got a rumble seat and all kinds of other stuff in it.
You take the view that—we think that social progress is like technological progress, that it can never be reversed, but I think it can be reversed and I think a lot of the world is going to be re-primitivized in the decades ahead and America has to change.
elephant in a black hole
Something to chew on this weekend:
What happens when you throw an elephant into a black hole? It sounds like a bad joke, but it's a question that has been weighing heavily on Leonard Susskind's mind. Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University in California, has been trying to save that elephant for decades. He has finally found a way to do it, but the consequences shake the foundations of what we thought we knew about space and time. If his calculations are correct, the elephant must be in more than one place at the same time.
In everyday life, of course, locality is a given. You're over there, I'm over here; neither of us is anywhere else. Even in Einstein's theory of relativity, where distances and timescales can change depending on an observer's reference frame, an object's location in space-time is precisely defined. What Susskind is saying, however, is that locality in this classical sense is a myth. Nothing is what, or rather, where it seems.
This is more than just a mind-bending curiosity. It tells us something new about the fundamental workings of the universe. Strange as it may sound, the fate of an elephant in a black hole has deep implications for a "theory of everything" called quantum gravity, which strives to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the twin pillars of modern physics. Because of their enormous gravity and other unique properties, black holes have been fertile ground for researchers developing these ideas.
it was a quagmire before it wasn't a quagmire
On "60 Minutes" last Sunday night, aspiring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced the war in Iraq as not "part of the war on terror." The war on terror, she said "is the war in Afghanistan."
So that's it. The one part of the war on terror -- or "so-called war on terror," as New York Times so-called columnist Bob Herbert calls it -- Democrats even pretend to support is the war in Afghanistan.
...
If Bush had gone to war with Iraq immediately after 9/11 and waited to attack Afghanistan, Democrats would now be pretending to support the Iraq war while pointlessly carping about Afghanistan. Afghanistan didn't attack us on 9/11! The Taliban didn't attack us! What's our exit strategy? How do you define "victory" in Afghanistan, anyway? It's a quagmire -- aahhhhh!
The beauty of Democrats' pretending to be hawks on Afghanistan is that most people can't remember what liberals said five minutes after they said it, much less five years later.
In fact, during the brief five weeks it took American forces to take Kabul and send the Taliban scurrying, liberals were not the flag-waving patriots they would have us believe.
In October 2001, Sen. Joe Biden gave a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations saying that America's air war in Afghanistan made the United States look like "this high-tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever we want to do."
Four weeks before U.S. troops completely vanquished the Taliban, Kim Jong Il's pal, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said on CNN's "Capital Gang" that the Taliban would not soon be toppled. He cited his experience with the Taliban, saying: "I think they can hold on for a while. They were very resilient."
Howard Dean joined Michael Moore in arguing that Osama bin Laden was innocent until proved guilty.
Except for a few idiots like Biden, Richardson and Dean, most politicians -- who have to run for election -- duly voted in favor of the war in Afghanistan and let their mouthpieces in the media bash it for them. (Remember: A lot of them voted for war in Iraq, too.)
Democrats who would not have to face voters -- we call them "reporters" -- were calling Afghanistan a "quagmire" approximately six minutes after we invaded.
Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post reporter who currently has a book out saying the war in Iraq is not succeeding, also said the war in Afghanistan was not succeeding.
thursday, october 26 2006
hear bush on home turf
Michael Barone and others spent an hour with Bush in the Oval Office. You can hear the whole thing.
On the stakes:
It is conceivable that 20 or 30 years from now the world will see a Middle East in which violent forms of – extreme forms of Islam compete for power, moderate governments will be toppled, oil will be used to extract concessions, and Iran will have a nuclear weapon, and writers such as yourself would say, what happened to them? How come they couldn't see the great conflict taking place in front of their very eyes? Why did they lose their nerve? Why did they not support moderate people who yearn for something better than the vision of the extremists?
And my answer to it is, I see the threat, and will use American power to protect ourselves, and at the same time, try to create the first victory in this ideological – the first victories – in the ideological war of the 21st century.
On the upcoming election:
I understand the conventional wisdom, that it's over. You've got people who are dancing in the end zones and they're measuring their drapes in their new offices. It's not over. We've got the issues on our side.
On causes of terrorism:
...these guys want to kill. And again, my frame of mind is this: We will press and press and press to protect ourselves. And this stuff about how Iraq is causing the enemy – whatever excuse they need, they have made up their mind to attack, and they grab on to things to kind of justify. But if it's not Iraq, it's Israel. If it's not Israel, it's the Crusades. If it's not the Crusades, it is the cartoon. I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you. (Laughter from reporters.) They are cold-blooded killers.
goalie science
Scientists in Canada have discovered the exact spots hockey goalies need to watch to successfully block shots. The researchers say these findings could help goalies improve even if they are already playing at an elite level.
During a hockey game, goalies face shots that zip at up to 100 mph, faster than the eye can track [batters in baseball face the same problem]. Still, professional goaltenders can on average stop 90 percent of all shots they face. To do so, the best athletes rely on what researcher Joan Vickers at the University of Calgary dubbed "the quiet eye," the critical moment of focus prior to action.
french toast
Did you see this story in your newspaper? See no evil, etc.
Last night French Muslim youths torched four busses.
The most spectacular incident took place at 1AM between Bagnolet and Montreuil. A gang of 10 pistol wielding hooded youths boarded the bus. One of the assailants placed his gun on the side of the bus driver's head and ordered him to get out of his seat. The gang commandeered the bus, drove it a short distance and torched it in a neighboring suburb.
One passenger had to break a window to escape the burning bus. Much more from GatewayPundit.
the science of procrastination
There's a study for everything. What a country!
scratch my black, i'll scratch yours
Democrats cannot survive as a party without the vast majority of blacks voting Democrat, thus they shamelessly pick the racial scab (Katrina comes to mind) to keep blacks in a state of grievous dependency.
Something similar is happening with Nancy Pelosi, who fancies herself the next Speaker of the House. She can't get the speaker's job without support of the Congressional Black Caucus.
But they're ticked off about how Nancy dumped black Congressman William Jefferson, the accused bribe taking Democrat from New Orleans, from a key committee position. If Jefferson's name doesn't ring a bell, he was the one caught with $90,000 in cash in his freezer.
So here's where it gets really ugly. Pelosi plans to boot Democrat Jane Harman from the House Intelligence and replace her (a moderate Democrat) with one Alcee Hastings.
Hastings is black. He's also a convicted crook, having been impeached by a Democrat-controlled Senate for taking bribes and was removed as a federal judge in Florida in 1989. The man was dirty. I lived in Miami at the time and remember Hastings playing the race card.
It worked. Like crackhead Mayor Marion Berry in Washington DC who was reelected, being a crook was no problem for the voters in Hastings's Florida district. He's been in Congress ever since.
Hastings's constituents get what they deserve. But what about the United States?
Do we deserve a crook overseeing national security in the House just so Nancy can wield the speaker's gavel?
JB
paris? oh, it was a riot.
As America prepares for Halloween, France is girding for a wave of attacks from Muslim youths—a reprise of the deadly French riots of last year.
As America prepares for Halloween, France is girding for a wave of attacks from Muslim youths—a reprise of the deadly French riots of last year. A leaked French intelligence report warns that during the first week of November, a school holiday (Nov. 1 or All Saint’s Day), Muslim riots could convulse the country.
On Monday, Le Figaro, the leading center-right newspaper in the country, quoted a confidential report written by the Renseignements Généraux (RG), the French equivalent of the FBI. The 17-page RG report, dated 11 October, states that the root causes of last year’s riots are still in place.
The authorities are especially concerned All Saints Day when “many urban youths are left to their own and have more time to cause unrest.” Not that France has been a peace since last year’s riots. In the past few weeks alone, several policemen were ambushed by youths who seemed intent on killing them. In response, the French Interior Ministry asked the police to keep a low profile and not to show themselves in the Muslim suburbs in order to avoid tension. Since appeasement alone is not a strategy. French authorities are keeping a force of some 50,000 riot police in permanent stand-by.
Now we know why the French wussed out on Iraq: they needed the troops at home. Relative to population, this is equivalent to 250,000 American troops, or approximately 100,000 more than we have deployed in Iraq.
Too bad the "Muslim youths" won't be mollified by Halloween candy. Trick!
wednesday, october 25 2006
hate missing calls when swimming?
Another solution in search of a problem? The G'zOne is the first phone that you can dunk without fear.
HT: Tom Bunzel
eight reasons to vote republican
#2 The only way to win wars is to convince your adversaries that further resistance is useless. Democratic victories in the House and/or Senate would help persuade Islamo-Nazi terrorists that they are, in fact, winning the war for US public opinion. No one questions that the jihadists closely monitor our domestic politics. Why else would they so conspicuously intensify their violent attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan just weeks before a crucial election?
Read all 8 reasons.
the secret language of men
An Aussie writer meets an American classical violinist backstage and things get familiar.
Now here's a guy who doesn't know me from Jack and inhabits a world I've always perceived as cultured and dignified, yet within five minutes of meeting me, he's dropping sexist one-liners.
For the record, I'm not criticising the guy because I know exactly what he was doing – establishing his blokey credentials using the social shorthand of hangin' crap on women.
I also know when most guys tell jokes like this, they're doing just that: joking. So I don't think for a second the violinist thought domestic abuse was truly funny.
sound familiar?
Lincoln [had] political problem with antiwar opponents, whose objections to the war included, among other things: opposition to the changing reasons for its prosecution, doubt that it could be won, negative reaction to the cost of the war in both blood and treasure, their belief in the zealotry or 'fanatisism' of the war's proponents, and their willingness to use hyperbole about the 'despotism' of the president, and so on.
Vallandingham professed himself a better unionist than the Republicans whose fanatisism had provoked this ruinous war. These same Republicans, he continued, were now fighting not for Union but for abolition. And what had they accomplished? "Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer." The South could never be conquered; the only trophies of this war were "defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers ... and the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation ... of freedom of the press and of speech ... which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth for the past twenty months." What was the solution? "Stop fighting. Make an armistace ... Withdraw your army from the seceeded States." Start negotiations for reunion.
why john mccain is a fool
Look at the cover of Newsweek. There, looking dashing, is Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat running in a very tight race for the Senate in Tennessee.
Three weeks before the election, Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post, gives one candidate millions of dollars of free exposure. John McCain wanted to get the money out of politics and pushed his campaign finance crusade. It's a law that never should have written and Bush never sould have signed.
Did McCain ever consider the millions it takes for Republican candidates to break through the smoke screen put up by the mainstream media? Just to get even? I hope not, because then he's not just a fool but a traitor to his party.
Meanwhile, because of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act, American citizens cannot pool their money and advertise to counter Newsweek, cannot exercise their First Amendment rights.
John McCain has ceded power to the mainstream media.
oh oh Obama
Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post about Barak Obama as president:
I cheer also because Obama is an African American -- an African father, an American mother. For someone like him to be a presidential candidate -- maybe even president -- says oodles about this country.
That blacks serve as CEOs of the USA's largest media company (TimeWarner) and the USA's largest financial services company (American Express), or that Oprah can rise from nothing to become a billionaire and would-be king maker apparently says nothing.
After eight years of George W. Bush and his narcissistic foreign policy -- me, me, us, us -- it would be great to have a president who presents a different message just by his complexion and who compensates, if anything can, for how Iraq has tarnished America's reputation, particularly in the Third World.
"Me, me?" Sorry, that's not Bush, that's former narcissist-in-chief, Bill Clinton.
As for "us, us" is Cohen suggesting we elect presidents who do not put America first? Does he believe that any leader does not put his country's interests first? (Oh yeah, Jimmy Carter.)
But mostly I want Obama to run because he would come into the race with no baggage on Iraq. Not from him would we hear excuses about how he was misled by the Bush administration into thinking there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Obama not only was against the war when he ran for the Senate but he can claim -- as could the 21 Democratic senators who voted against the war resolution -- that it was possible to accept the "facts" at the time and still see that the war was unnecessary, if not downright stupid. It just makes me wince every time I hear John Kerry or John Edwards or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd or Hillary Clinton say they were misled, fooled, lied to or some other version of seduced and abandoned -- otherwise they would have voted the right way. This is disingenuous.
Not "disingenuous," it is lying. Honest politicans would admit everyone was fooled by Saddam regarding WMD (including his own generals) and go from there. But no, they backpedaled and concocted "Bush lied."
So just how was Obama, a state legislator at the time, able to know so much about Iraq? Turns out even after two years in the Senate, he still doesn't know much about Iraq. As we noted Monday, Obama said this:
And, I think we also have to start sending a message to the region and some of the powers there, including Iran and Syria that it makes sense for us at this point to pull back, to make sure that they are engaged and have a stake in creating some semblance of order there because right now they’re just sitting back I think and watching us flounder but they’re not investing in any kind of way to make sure that Iraq has a decent outcome.
What's next? Insist that Khartoum become engaged in restoring order in Darfur? Or that Robert Mugabe bring order to Zimbabwe? Or how about having the KKK bring order to the south after Reconstruction?
Obama's statement is so egregiously idiotic he should be laughed off the national stage.
During a presidential debate, Gerald Ford made a slip of the tongue that suggested he didn't know that Poland was in Europe. Everyone knew better, but the media ran the gaffe as if it were big news.
Here we have presidential hopeful Barak Obama confusing the cause of disorder in Iraq (Syria and Iran) with the solution. This is more than a gaffe, it's a chance to see a pretty face, with a complexion that pleases Richard Cohen, masking a shallow mind.
tuesday, october 24 2006
message to the n.y. times' ombudsman
...Byron, you may consider launching a soul-searching campaign at the New York Times.I’d encourage a look at the decision to report on the National Security Agency’s warrantless electronic monitoring of emails and phone calls between the United States and suspect individual overseas.The outrage your paper and others stirred up over a program that falls well within the law and harms no law-abiding American citizen, and the notice you served to terrorists and their supporters of its existence, constitute aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.
But don’t stop there.You have been greatly privileged -- beyond your merit -- to hold a lofty and influential position overseeing the morality and ethics of our newsgathering profession.
The American media is morally and ethically adrift, and in need of guidance.You could be the one, based on this revelation, to provide some. Faced with a spreading threat to our fundamental values and freedoms by Islamic fascists, the media in the United States is predominantly of the view, and encourages the belief, that the United States government in its execution of conventional and unconventional war against clearly demonstrated threats poses the greater threat to our way of life.
Our media has repeatedly propagated falsehoods about what the administration and the president have said, about what was known and about what in some cases has been borne out about the threats we have faced from al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and others. This has been done to such an extent that reasonable people cannot be blamed for believing their president lied to them before committing troops to battle. To the extent that some seemingly responsible people now question whether we face any threat at all. The history leading up to the conflicts and crises we face has been repeatedly misrepresented, in a manner that undercuts the authority of a wartime president and threatens the credibility of our nation in the world -- the single most important nation in maintaining stability in the world.
Read it all.
another funny political ad
This one in the Tennessee senate race.
no first amendment in france
Lurçat, 39, a Jerusalem resident and president of an association called Liberty, Democracy and Judaism, was sued because he is the leader of an organization listed as the legal operator of a Web site, www.liguededefensejuive.com, that urged readers to attend a planned demonstration against France2 in 2002: "Come demonstrate against the lies of France2," it said, "and the gross manipulation with an award for disinformation to France2 and Charles Enderlin."
Those of you who are used to the free-for-all that is the internet are probably more than a bit perplexed as to what the big deal is here. That this sort of statement could be a cause of action in any court in a country that considers itself to be a modern, developed, progressive nation--not to mention a bastion of liberty--is ludicrous.
Let's put aside for the moment the question of whether the accusations this defendant made against France2 and Enderlin are true, as blogger and historian Richard Landes (and, in the interests of full disclosure, acquaintance and friend of mine) has suggested at his website Second Draft and his blog Augean Stables.
grow your own home
From Popular Science.
iran threatens europe
From Kobayashi Maru:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at a rally last Friday in Iran said:
"You imposed a group of terrorists [Israel]... on the region. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow... We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbours of the nations in this region... We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt... Nations will take revenge."
peanuts' schroeder was smarter
To push the sales of his new book, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder - now with Gazprom Inc. - made a number of interviews with German media outlets.
He calls Putin "a flawless democrat", draws a link between the policies of President Bush and the faith based political system of Islamic states and describes as "pre-democratic" criticism of his decision to start working for a foreign company immediately after his departure from German politics.
His chancellorship resulted in a deeply disturbed relationship between the U.S. and Germany, left the German state finances in shambles, and made Germany dependent on Russian energy. For this, he definitely deserved praise from Putin and a contract from Russia.
car insurance must cost a fortune in france
...as the one year anniversary of three weeks of rioting across France in which more than 10,000 cars were set alight and 300 buildings attacked in the worst civil unrest for 40 years.
Two teenagers were being questioned last night after cars and a bus were torched and police attacked in a rundown Paris suburb amid fears of growing tension in the run-up to the anniversary of last autumn's riots.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right interior minister who hopes his tough stance on law and order will win him the presidency next year, was accused by opposition politicians of stoking further violence to boost his election campaign.
Of course: the violence is a campaign tactic and has nothing to do with Muslim immigrants who are marginalized by French society and unemployed because of French socialist economic policies.
Manuel Valls, the socialist mayor of Evry, told Le Parisien nothing had changed on the estates. Tower blocks were decayed, unemployment in some areas stood at 40% and people on the estate where the bus was attacked on Sunday lived in "frightening misery", stigmatised for their postcode. "Let's be realistic, we are still sitting on a powderkeg," he said.
Samir Mihi, a youth worker in Clichy sous Bois, said: "We feel let down. Nothing has changed here since last year."
No kidding.
monday, october 23 2006
french drive some japanese nuts
PARIS (Reuters) - Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
bbc: we are biased
It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.
It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.
stem cell update
The progress of science is paved with stories of high hopes and heartbreaks. But in a busy lab at the University of Rochester the two extremes have met in one dazzling yet devastating experiment.
Researchers there have for the first time essentially cured rats of a Parkinson's-like disease using human embryonic stem cells. But 10 weeks into the trial, they discovered brain tumours had begun to grow in every animal treated.
"Here we have this method that works so well to reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's," said lead investigator Steven Goldman, "But no matter how you look at it, it's an expanding mass and that's bad news."
None of the cells growing out of control were cancerous tumours. But as Dr. Goldman pointed out, "In the brain, nothing's benign."
The work, published today in the journal of Nature Medicine, is a sobering setback for plans to use stem cells from human embryos to grow tissues for human transplant.
"My hopes are still high, but I think this injects real caution," said Dr. Goldman, who spent four years on the experiment and a 23-year career building up to it. "Some folks are portraying this as imminently useful and it's not. There's still a lot that has to be sorted out."
europe's immigration quagmire
The overrepresentation of migrants in all the wrong statistics — such as unemployment, unfinished education and crime — is to the ostrich merely a temporary affair. It's a phase that all groups from underprivileged backgrounds go through, and it will be short, as long as there is economic growth.
According to the ostrich, the wealthy natives should stop whining about the backwardness of immigrants and concentrate on the benefits. The ostrich points to the nurses, nannies, construction workers, grocers, bag carriers, cleaners, factory workers and a host of other jobs natives won't do but are necessary to keep the economy going.
The ostrich is not worried about the flow of migrants transforming the culture and society of Europe in any negative way. He sees only one thing as a setback: the xenophobia of native Europeans. If only the inherently racist white society could overcome its fear of what is alien, it would notice how migrants have improved the cuisine, the music, the arts and the economy of Europe.
Then there's the owl, which is a night bird and gets, more often, a glimpse of the dark side of things. Europe is healthy and wealthy, but the owl worries that it may not be so wise.
The shadow side of the free movement of people, for instance, is the trade in women and children for the ruthless sex industry. Also, weapons go unnoticed from hand to hand, from country to country. Some of these weapons could be biological, chemical or worse.
obaminable thinking, or the fool on the hill
Barak Obama said yesterday he might run for president in 2008. He also said this to Larry King:
And, I think we also have to start sending a message to the region and some of the powers there, including Iran and Syria that it makes sense for us at this point to pull back, to make sure that they are engaged and have a stake in creating some semblance of order there because right now they’re just sitting back I think and watching us flounder but they’re not investing in any kind of way to make sure that Iraq has a decent outcome.
Send a message to Syria and Iran that we can't take it anymore, and we want them to engage to create order?
Democracy in Iraq -- order -- scares these tyrants shitless. Which is why Iran is behind much of the disorder in Iraq.
Does Obama not know that Syria and Iran are fighting us by proxy? This he calls "sitting back and watching us flounder."
Does he not remember that Syrian "order" meant the assassination of Lebanese leaders and journalists and occupying Lebanon for 22 years?
This man is the best hope for the Democrat party?
"I think he's a very interesting and very powerful communicator with a great deal of skill," said Sen. Kerry. "I wouldn't have picked him if he didn't. And I'm really pleased to see the way in which the country is ratifying my judgment on that."
sunday, october 22 2006
burt's book signing today
A beautiful day in Brentwood. Great turnout, great fun, great chance to get Burt's book. You can get your here: Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco: 101 Reasons I'm Happy I Left the Left.
Some pals who came include actors Dick Van Patten and Jamie Farr.
don't repeat mistake of 1974
In early 1973, the Dow approached new highs in a booming economy. In the 1972 election, the new left was rejected in almost every state. The Paris Peace Treaty was concluded with North Vietnam memorializing its pledge not to interfere militarily in the affairs of South Vietnam. The nation was prosperous and at peace.
Within a short time, the mainstream media were able to dismember and destroy the Nixon Administration, using as their sword the Watergate affair. In the congressional elections of 1974, Republican candidates were pounded, losing 48 House seats and five Senate seats.
Until the 1990s, the so-called “Watergate Babies” (i.e. left-wing Democrats) ruled Congress. As its first act after the 1974 election, the new Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Within a short period of time, this led to Communist conquest of all of Indochina, the massacre of at least 4 million of our friends in the killing fields of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, and the displacement of millions of “boat people.”
In 1976, the left wing captured the White House with the worst President of modern times—Jimmy Carter. By 1979, the U.S. economy was in shambles with 12% inflation, 11% unemployment, and vast deficits. Our military was reduced to a shadow. With even our embassy officials held hostage in Tehran, the United States became a powerless joke to the world. It may be fairly said that but for Ronald Reagan the days of our democracy might well have been numbered by the consequences of the 1974 election.
america's 300 millionth bundle of joy
Across the country, the grim milestone prompted this reaction from a somber Dowell Myers. "At 300 million," noted the professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, "we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."
I, on the other hand, was feeling pretty chipper about the birth of the cute l'il quality-of-life degrader. The previous day, my new book was published. You'll find it in all good bookstores -- it's propping up the slightly wonky rear left leg of the front table groaning under the weight of unsold copies of Peace Mom by Cindy Sheehan. Anyway, the book -- mine, not Cindy's -- deals in part with the geopolitical implications of demography -- i.e., birth rates. That's an easy subject to get all dry and statistical about, so I gotta hand it to my publicist: arranging for the birth of the 300 millionth American is about as good a promotional tie-in as you could get and well worth the 75 bucks he bribed the guy at the Census Bureau. But, even if you haven't got a book to plug, the arrival of Junior 300 Mil is something everyone should celebrate.
So why don't we? The answer is that too many people who should know better are still peddling the same old 40-year-old guff about "overpopulation." What does Professor Myers mean by "quality-of-life degradation"? America is the 172nd least densely populated country on Earth.
If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 1,015 and 883 inhabitants per square mile compared with 80 folks per square mile in the United States. To be sure, somewhere such as, say, Newark, N.J., is a lot less bucolic than it was in 1798. But why is that? No doubt Myers would say it's urban sprawl. But that's the point: you can only sprawl if you've got plenty of space. As the British writer Adam Nicholson once wrote of America, "There is too much room in the vast continental spaces of the country for a great deal of care to be taken with the immediate details."
...
Everywhere else, for the most part, they've taken the advice of Myers and that think tank in Vermont. In America, there are 2.1 live births per woman. In 17 European countries, it's 1.3 or below -- that's what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, a rate from which no society has ever recovered. Spain's population is halving with every generation. These nations are doing what Myers and the Vermont "sustainability" junkies would regard as the socially responsible thing, and having fewer babies. And as a result their countries are dying demographically and (more immediately) economically: They don't have enough young people to pay for the generous social programs the ever more geriatric Europeans have come to expect.
stifling of dissent
In Seattle, two teachers are suing the affluent Lakeside prep school for illegal racial discrimination and the creation of a hostile work environment. ``Among the plaintiffs' complaints," reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ``was Lakeside's invitation to conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza to speak as part of a distinguished lecture series." But D'Souza, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a veteran of the Reagan White House, never gave the lecture: Faculty members opposed to his views howled when he was invited, and the school's headmaster, bowing to the censors, rescinded the invitation.
Asked about the campaign against him, D'Souza had said: ``I am coming to speak on one day. If they think what I am saying is so awful, they have the rest of the year to refute it." But that isn't enough for the enemies of free speech. They insist not only that speakers with politically incorrect opinions be shunned, but that anyone offering them a platform be punished as well.
saddam's plans for attacking american assets
For those who still care, Saddam had evil designs on us.
bulldozed by naivete
Politics makes artists stupid. Take "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip.
Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, "Rachel Corrie" just opened off-Broadway after a successful London run. It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better.
So why don't they? Because Palestine is the new Cuba, a political cause whose invocation has the effect of instantaneously anesthetizing the upper brain functions of those who believe in it. Take Mr. Rickman, who evidently intended "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" to be a pro-Palestinian equivalent of "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Or perhaps politics just reveals how stupid artists already are.
saturday, october 21 2006
french intifada
..discovered by the New York Times. It's brutal.
smart crows
Video clip from David Attenborough shows crows using tools (us).
dust art
Mona Lisa sketched on a dusty car window, and more.
harry reid can't bleed
In January on PBS, Jim Lehrer asked Sen. Reid why lobbying reform was moving so slowly. Reid replied, "Jim, it's taken a while for this culture of corruption the Republicans have developed to come into the fore." Aspiring "Speaker Pelosi" just gave a speech at Georgetown University pledging to "drain the swamp" of GOP corruption on Capitol Hill. The Democratic National Committee even had a page on their Website devoted to the "Republican Culture of Corruption."
But that "Culture of Corruption" page on the DNC home page has disappeared. Something funny happened on the way to the polls this year. The Democrats have shown they have their own contemporary ethical problems. Luckily for them, it probably won't matter much on Nov. 7. The national news media have decided to ignore them.
Look no further than Reid himself. Associated Press reporters John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessy reported that Reid scored a windfall of $700,000, turning a $400,000 real-estate investment in Las Vegas in 1998 to a $1.1 million land deal in 2004 -- even though he apparently had sold the property to a casino lobbyist buddy in 2001. He did not report the facts on his Senate financial disclosure forms -- while he served on the Senate Ethics Committee.
When the AP called Reid for comment, he hung up on them. You would think that an aggressive, fair and balanced media would have been incensed and activated. But we don't have a fair and balanced national media.
No, they're too busy fixating on Mark Foley.
friday, october 20 2006
internal rot
Students and their parents go into deep debt to attend college led by liberal group thinkers who teach their students how to hate America:
- Almost one-third of professors cite the United States as among the top two greatest threats to international stability -- more than cited Iran, China, or Iraq.
- Fifty-four percent of professors say U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is partially responsible for the growth of Islamic militancy.
- Sixty-four percent say the government's powers under the USA Patriot Act should be weakened.
- Professors are three times as likely to call themselves "liberal" as "conservative." In the 2004 presidential election, 72 percent of those surveyed voted for John Kerry.
Professors, says the report, are at the "forefront of the political divide" over U.S. foreign policy that has developed since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Faculty members have "aligned themselves in direct opposition to the political philosophy of the conservative base voting for the prevailing political power" in America, it says. Unlike most Americans, it adds, faculty members "blame America for world problems" and regard U.S. policies as "suspect."
As Glenn Reynolds says, "sounds like a diversity problem." Indeed. And since college suckle on the federal teat, why are they allowed to get away with this? Perhaps we need a "fairness doctrine" in academia.
he was against him before he was for him
James Webb in the American Enterprise magazine in 1997: "I cannot conjure up an ounce of respect for Bill Clinton when it comes to the military. Every time I see him salute a Marine, it infuriates me. I don't think Bill Clinton cares on iota about what happens in a military unit."
James Webb on Clinton's presidency, in 2000: "the most corrupt administration in modern memory."
James Webb, yesterday: Accepting the fundraising support of a man he has considered corrupt and unworthy of his respect. He said that things had changed.
democrat leaker
WASHINGTON - House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month.
Democrats politicizing the war? No!
No wonder Bush tries to keep Congress out of the loop: he's fighting a war on terror while Democrats are waging a war against him.
clint eastwood makes history
The adage that the victors write the history no longer applies.
One, we have a cadre of Leftist academics who write American victories as defeats and American virtues as sins (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky etc.) and two, Hollywood provides its own version. Millions of people understand the JFK assassination through Oliver Stone's warped mind.
A movie about the battle for Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" premieres today. In the LA Daily News, film critic Glenn Whipp engages Clint Eastwood in a Q&A which included this:
Q. Because, obviously, the Japanese wanted to live and get back home to their families, too.
A. And there really wasn't an option for these men. There were 22,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. Nearly 21,000 were killed or killed themselves. They had the same desire not to die. Many of the men fighting each other probably could have been friends.
Amazing: men with a "desire not to die" killed themselves.
Like most liberals, Whipp projects rationality into irrational places. The casualties in the Pacific theater were so high because the Japanese forced the issue.
European armies surrendered when there was no hope of winning. The Japanese fought to the death. Those who might want to surrender were killed by their own troops.
One 15-year old boy, drafted in the Japanese army, remembered years later:
Although Okinawans could not openly say it at that time, it is a fact that they were more afraid of Japanese soldiers than American soldiers at the end of the war. After they lost in the last organized military operations at the Yaese Hill, the Japanese soldiers were desperate, and committed extreme acts of aggression.
Japan was a death cult run by the Emperor and his military. Soldiers and civilians were brainwashed into believing that dying for the Emperor gained them a seat in the afterlife. Surrender was a disgrace.
This is the song suicide bombers (Kamikaze) sang before taking off:
If I go away to sea.
I shall return a corpse awash;If duty calls me to the mountain,
A verdant sward will be my pall;Thus for the sake of the Emperor
I will not die peacefully at home.
In the American Experience documentary "Victory in the Pacific" we see footage of Japanese civilians jumping off a cliff to their deaths because their island had fallen to the Marines. It's chilling.
One five year old survived the leap because he got snagged on a branch.
My father usually tell me, you know, "American people going to kill you, someday, somehow. It's better off dying than caught by American soldier." My father told me so I just follow people, people, and lot of people jump the cliff. So everybody jumping, so I just jump myself. I find I was hanging on a tree. Branch caught me, save me.
Anyway, I can laugh now because I'm here. I was just hanging there over the cliff. Then few minutes later other people jumping. Whole families jumping. Some people say "hamnohaim banzai". "Banzai".
A Japanese woman recalls:
"We were taught that the Americans and the British were kichiku, or 'ogre-beasts.' The Americans were monsters and beasts, and not humans. So, if you were caught by them, you would have your ears and nose cut off, be blinded, and be run over by the tanks. If you were a woman, you would be raped."
So, no, Glenn and Clint, the Japanese did not have the same desire not to die. It's not a trivial matter.
Why obsess over "ancient history?"
- Today we face an insane enemy that has turned Islam into a death cult (no, not all Muslims are part of it). Engagement with insane, homicidal people does not work.
- Fighting evil is ugly and brutal and takes backbone, not whining about exit strategies.
- The US dropped two atom bombs on Japan before it surrendered. One was not enough. That should tell you something.
- The Japanese military and Emperor were planning a long, bloody defense (turning their own people into cannon fodder) of the mainland to demoralize Americans. They hoped war weary Americans would force Truman to negotiate, and end the war on terms that would leave their regime in power. Had we made that mistake, we would not have the democratic ally that Japan has become.
The past informs the future.
Glenn Whipp: Much of "Flags" focuses on the flag-raisers going on a bond-raising tour and how the U.S. government suppressed the truth about the photo in order to sell their heroism, sell bonds and sell the war. It's not a huge leap to see some current relevance, given that all wars have their public relations battles.
Clint Eastwood: All wars have to be sold. It's just easier to justify the hypocrisy sometimes. The day after 9/11, it wasn't hard to sell any idea. The day after Pearl Harbor, it wasn't hard to sell it.
The war we're in now is different. It's smaller. It's far off. There's less agreement on it. I must say, I was probably not one of those people who was excited about going into Iraq.
I love democracy. But I'm not sure that you can sell it to just anybody.
I don't believe we are trying to "sell" democracy to anyone. We are trying to enable Iraqis to have it. Remember the 11 million purple thumbs, Clint?
As for "just anybody" do you think Americans in 1944 would have believed the Japanese people to be capable of democracy?
thursday, october 19 2006
theo-panic
Rich Lowry on the fear of theocracy.
For such self-professed advocates of reasoned discourse, they show an appalling tendency to want to shut down the other side with their swear word of "theocracy." They are emotional, self-righteous and close-minded. They are, in short, everything they accuse Christian conservatives of being. When the theo-panic passes, maybe a few of them will regret their hysteria.
it's the homos, stupid!
Iowahawk channels Howard Dean:
An Open Letter to the Conservative-American Community
by Dr. Howard Dean
Chairman, Democratic National CommitteeDear Valued Potential Customer:
As the leader of one of America's premier political parties, I know firsthand the importance of building bridges to the various communities and constituencies we serve. Unfortunately, when serving as many diverse communities as we do at the DNC, sometimes an important relationship can inadvertently fall through the cracks. Frankly, I realize we have not always brought our "A Game" when it comes to the concerns of conservative-Americans. That's why we would like to take this opportunity to start a dialog with you, the conservative "values voter," by addressing an issue of vital importance to all of us -- the growing Republican homo menace.
Despite what you may have heard on Fox News, we Democrats know what issues are on the minds of heartland conservatives like you. We know that your number one concern of is the safety of your children -- whether they are plucking their banjos on the back porch, speaking tongues to snakes at Jesus Camp, or torching crosses at your local Nascar racing contest. We also know that the number one threat to your children's safety is the scourge of international homo-ism. That's why we at the DNC have created "The Contract With American Hillbillies," a new multipoint investigation program to identify and root out conservative stealth homoism before it threatens you or your precious little inbreeds.
Read every hilarious word of it.
lefty fascist teacher
Larry Elder tells the frightening story of a public school teacher in LA harassing a student for his political views. (The schools district needs to screen for Bush Derangement Syndrome.)
A new "super" liberal English teacher has been indoctrinating and not educating -- always calling President Bush names, claiming the war in Iraq was illegal and Bush should be put in jail. My son for the most part has stood up to this tyrant, as this teacher claimed he "welcomes" healthy debate.
The first sign of trouble came after my son stood up to his "liberal claims" and promptly received an "F" on a paper in which the teacher wrote in red "sloppy Republican" at the top of the paper. (I have a copy of this paper if you would like to see it.)
Unbelieveable -- read it all.
economic hypochondria
Recently Bill Clinton, at the British Labour Party's annual conference, delivered what the Times of London described as a "relaxed, almost rambling" and "easy anecdotal" speech to an enthralled audience of leftists eager for evidence of American disappointments. Never a connoisseur of understatement, Clinton said America is "now outsourcing college-education jobs to India."
But Clinton-as-Cassandra should not persuade college students to abandon their quest for diplomas: The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2 percent.
Clinton is always a leading indicator of "progressive" fashions in rhetoric. And every election year -- meaning every other year -- brings an epidemic of dubious economic analysis, as members of the party out of power discern lead linings on silver clouds.
"Worst economy since Herbert Hoover," said John Kerry in 2004, while that year's growth (3.9 percent) was adding to America's GDP the equivalent of the GDP of Taiwan (the 19th-largest economy).
Nancy Pelosi vows that if Democrats capture Congress they will "jump-start our economy." A "jump-start " is administered to a stalled vehicle. But since the Bush tax cuts went into effect in 2003, the economy's growth rate (3.5 percent) has been better than the average for the 1980s (3.1) and 1990s (3.3). Today's unemployment rate (4.6 percent) is lower than the average for the 1990s (5.8) -- lower, in fact, than the average for the last 40 years (6.0). Some stall.
These very same Democrats whined in 2000 about Bush "talking down the economy" before he took office. Bush, of course, was noting the recession he was inheriting.
was izzy dirty?
The first I ever heard of I.F. Stone was at an anti-war rally at the Washington monument in 1971. It was a typical rally: good weed, good music and tiresome spreaches (no, that's not a typo) in between.
Stone, the so-called iconoclastic publisher of I.F. Stone's Weekly, made a speech. Like most of those in attendance, I heard little of it. We regarded the political talk like commercials on TV -- something you endured until the show returned.
Izzy, as he was called, came to mind while reading Tim Rutten's review of ""All Governments Lie! The Best of I.F. Stone."
AS a young editor, I had the privilege of working with three authentic heroes of American journalism: One was Phil Kerby, a champion of civil liberties who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials against government secrecy and judicial censorship; another was Carey McWilliams, the radical journalist and historian who edited the Nation for so many years; the third was I.F. Stone. Of the three, his contribution was the widest and most consequential.
So Rutten, an acolyte of the biography's subject, gets to review the book.
One of MacPherson's singular contributions in her book is to reconnect Stone to the indigenous American tradition of radical journalism that begins with muckrakers. As a boy, he distributed copies of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" to relatives, and throughout his life, Stone was amused by the fact that Sinclair's exposé of the Chicago packinghouses was supposed to ignite sympathy for oppressed workers but resulted in passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Stone liked to quote Sinclair's rueful observation that "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Stone was similarly misunderstood from time to time. His break with the Soviet Union cost the Weekly 400 paying subscribers he could ill afford to lose at that point in life.
If a loss of 400 readers meant that much his subscriber base must have been slim.
Whether the book touches on Stone's relationship with Soviet agents is unclear; Rutten never says. But to discuss Upton Sinclair and Stone without a look at their roles in Stalin's PR and spy efforts earns a big incomplete.
First, Upton Sinclair was an unwitting part of a plan by Stalin to stain the reputation of the United States by turning the Sacco and Vanzetti case into an international cause celebre, a plan that worked brilliantly. People here and abroad were convinced that the two men had been railroaded by a racist, xenophobic America.
They were guilty. And Upton Sinclair knew it and said nothing because it would tarnish his standing with fellow radicals. A letter Sinclair wrote to his attorney proves this point:
During his research for "Boston," [a novel about Sacco Vanzetti] Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
"I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point," he wrote to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."
Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.
"My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.
He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.
So big, fearless muckraking Upton Sinclair, hero to the Left, "indigenous radical" in Rutten's eyes, buried the truth out of fear and self interest.
On the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed anti-American demonstrations took place all over the world. (Yes, anti-Americanism predates George W. Bush.)
Back to Izzy Stone. At a minimum, Stone flirted with acting as a Soviet Spy. From Wikipedia:
The remarks of Oleg Kalugin, a former major general in the KGB, shortly after Stone's death set off months of speculation about Stone's alleged collaboration with that espionage agency, with one columnist going as far to call Stone "the KGB's front man in American journalism." Romerstein claimed that Kalugin, who had worked as a press officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington, had verified his accusations.[3] Kalugin later wrote in The First Directorate (1994) that KGB headquarters had cabled him to re-establish contact with Stone because "he was a man with whom we had regular contact".
He goes on to describe Stone as a "fellow traveler who made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system." Kalugin later elaborated on his relationship with Stone, explaining that Stone was not a paid agent of the KGB, only that he was a friendly contact who regularly had lunch with him.[4]
According to Kalugin, Stone sought to sever his ties with the KGB after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and hearing Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. Stone returned home and wrote "Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men." Stone's conclusion that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists" cost him over 400 subscribers to the Weekly. Kalugin stated that while Stone sought to sever ties in 1956, Kalugin eventually persuaded Stone to maintain his ties to the Soviets after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt.
Okay, you probably skimmed that. The gist is that Stone was, at the very least, enamored of the Soviet Union until 1956. If nothing else, that indicts his common sense. Stalin's mass murder was clearly known to anyone with an open mind by then.
To things round off, read Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern that tells of one Willi Munzenberg, Stalin's master of disinformation who played dozens of America's leading artists and intellectuals for saps.
Tim Rutten would never bring any of this up. To do so would let history spoil his hero worship.
wednesday, october 18 2006
crackpot or spy?
From American Spectator:
My first venture into punditry dealt with the arrest of Susan Lindauer on various charges, amounting to her acting as a paid agent for Saddam's intelligence service.
Lindauer worked for several Democratic lawmakers, including Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Peter DeFazio, and Senators Ron Wyden and Carol Moseley-Braun, and also wrote for Fortune and U.S. News & World Report.
According to her indictment, Lindauer worked with Iraqi agents based in New York starting in 1999, and even met them in Manhattan on September 19, 2001. That's right: eight days after the atrocity of September 11, Lindauer was allegedly meeting with enemy intelligence agents somewhere near the ruins of the World Trade Center. (According to the New York Times, her last job with Congress ceased in 2002, so she was allegedly working for both the Iraqi government and ours at the same time.)
Lindauer was ruled mentally incompetent and unfit for trial. Now out of the hatch, she's being used as an expert source on stories about domestic terror threats.
Read the whole thing.
pseudo histories of the iraq war
Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian of good repute, does not think much of the scholarly standards of the three latest books on Iraq, including Bob Woodward's latest:
There are a number of other things wrong with all this gossip.
First, note the disturbing pattern in this resorting to anonymity. Usually the unidentified source supports the author's critique — and thus is almost always critical of the present policy in Iraq. Rarely do these journalists quote unnamed sources who dissent from their own views, although there are surely pro-U.S. Iraq policy candid voices among the thousands of retired generals.
Second, here is the cardinal rule for anonymous sources in this new genre of pseudo-history: Talk to reporters as soon as possible "off the record" in hopes that they will be sympathetic. If you keep quiet, some of your loudmouth enemies might unload on you from the safety of anonymity, ensuring their narrative, not yours, will become authoritative.
Third, we are not reading accounts of golf or fashion but the most important event since the end of the Cold War as it unfolds. When one writes military history in the middle of