tuesday january 31, 2006
Unique rose images
Looking for rose photographs, fine art prints to decorate your home or office. Check these out.
whisky ted's race card is a joker
Anything can hapen in the bizarro world where the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy gets to lecture others on morality. But yesterday's booming performance [video here] provided an extra-rich diet of irony:
- Ted foams up over the "march of progress" that he admits was only possible by actions from the courts. That is, policies he adores could not pass democratically elected legislatures. You need liberal judges making law for that.
- He smears Samuel Alito as a closet racist/sexist/elitist eager to undo civil rights legislation and screw the "working people." What's more elitist than being a spoiled rich kid who gets a young woman killed and then uses family connections to escape punishment?
- He claims that the Senate has a "responsibility to take this [nomination] to the American people." No, actually the Senate is charged with advice and consent, not the electorate. He then goes on to insult said electorate by saying they've just now starting paying attention to the nomination.
- Ted's speech was calling for a filibuster. The filibuster was the tool Senate Democrats used to block civil rights legislation for decades, forcing liberal judges to legislate from the bench. Al Gore's daddy voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So did Bill Clinton's mentor, Sen. William Fulbright.
national guard enjoys recruiting boom
National Guard officials yesterday said recruiting has accelerated so much in recent months that they expect to expand the Guard even as the Bush administration proposes to shrink it.
For the first time since 1993, the Guard exceeded a quarterly recruiting goal, signing up 13,466 recruits in the final three months of 2005, up from 12,605 the previous fall, said the National Guard Bureau, the Pentagon office that administers the Guard.
Mark Allen, a National Guard Bureau spokesman, attributed the 7 percent improvement to a new advertising campaign, a large increase in financial incentives and a near doubling of the number of recruiters, from 2,700 to 5,100.In a statement released yesterday, the Guard said it is "aggressively working" to reach the 350,000-troop level that it is funded for by the end of the current budget year on Sept. 30, despite Mr. Bush's call to cut the force next year to its current level of 333,000 troops.
It is unusual for a military organization such as the Guard Bureau to publicly suggest that it is moving in a direction that appears to differ from the administration's. Any talk of cutting the Guard is politically sensitive because Guard units are controlled by governors, except when they are mobilized by presidential order.
fly the plane, serve the drinks: what's the diff?
Canada serves as a canary in the PC coal mine: if you want to see where the American Left wants to steer our country, just look north. To liberals, everyone should be paid the same, hence:
The Canadian Union of Public Employees began the case in 1991, arguing that the airline discriminated because it paid attendants differently "for what it argued was equally valuable work performed by mechanical personnel and pilots."
Air Canada held that the three groups should be treated separately in legal terms because they worked in different establishments. The human rights commission agreed, but two court cases followed, which delivered split decisions.
Any waitress could learn to be a flight attendant. Heck, even I could be a flight attendant. But I'd make a lousy mechanic. And flying an airliner filled with human being takes more skill and training than opening cans of Pepsi from a drink cart.
Thus Canadians expose a commonly held Liberal fallacy: equal opportunity means equal outcomes.
child-like fantasy realm
In my remarks, I mentioned that the primary reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict was that the majority of Palestinians wanted Israel destroyed.
A woman who introduced herself as "a peace activist" walked over to me afterward and said I was wrong, that, in fact, the majority of Palestinians wanted peace with Israel. I asked her to go over to the Arab students who were attending a counter protest against Israel and ask them if they accepted the right of a Jewish state of Israel to exist. I bet her $5 they would say "no." She took the bet.
Fifteen minutes later, she came back to me.
"Well, who won the bet?" I asked.
"I don't know," she responded.
"What do you mean you 'don't know'? What did they say?"
"They all asked me, 'What do you mean?'"
Though not one Arab student answered "yes," she still didn't get it.
This peace activist, like other "peace activists" and just about everyone on the Left, lives in a state of wishful thinking. As director Steven Spielberg, commenting on the Arab-Israeli dispute, recently told Time magazine, "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills."
On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm.
blogger helped paul martin out the door
On Monday, Canadian voters elected a new government, led by Stephen Harper and the Conservative party. Without the Internet, Paul Martin and the Liberals might still be ruling Canada.
Last year, Canadian Judge John Gomery was conducting an investigation of a money-laundering and kickback program in which the Liberal government had given $85 million to Montreal advertising firms. Rather than spending the money on advertising for government programs, the money was apparently distributed as payoffs to political allies. Gomery allowed the public to attend the public court hearings on the scandal, but forbade publication of events at the hearing. He hoped to be able to prevent the public from becoming prejudiced about the matter in the event that some of the alleged perpetrators were put on trial.
But a Canadian citizen who attended the hearing provided accounts to Minneapolis Web logger Ed Morrissey (who blogs at www.captainsquartersblog.com).Morrissey then published reports on his Captain's Quarters Web site. Canadian media continued to obey the publication ban, but Canada's CTV reported on the existence of Morrissey's site, which soon was attracting hundreds of thousands of readers daily.
wapo pokes paul martin
Whatever their feelings about Mr. Bush, most Canadians probably agree with that sentiment. Canada sells 85 percent of its exports to the United States and depends on it for security as well as prosperity -- a fact that Mr. Martin opportunistically overlooked when he refused to join the U.S. missile defense program. His grandstanding merely gave Mr. Bush an excuse to ignore Canada's legitimate complaints about tariffs on softwood lumber and the impact of new border controls due to take effect this year.
Mr. Harper can be expected to stop the self-defeating flow of bile, to offer more cooperation on defense, and to seek to be heard on trade and border issues. If he is wise, Mr. Bush will make an effort to listen, and find compromises, as he did this month with Ms. Merkel. Foreign political leaders who stick to a platform of friendship and cooperation with the United States in the teeth of anti-American mudslinging ought to be visibly rewarded. As for Mr. Martin, perhaps he will be tempted again by the example of Mr. Schroeder, who has taken a job as an agent for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Does Hugo Chavez need another lobbyist?
clinton's list
You might excuse Bill Clinton for failing to grasp the terrorist threat pre-9/11 (I don't) but today? John Leo writes:
Bill Clinton thinks terrorism is an overrated threat. Last fall he said terrorism is less important than global warming. That was at the Clinton Global Initiative, his personal New York version of Davos, the annual big-think fiesta in Switzerland for world leaders and Hollywood stars.
Last week at the real Davos, Clinton demoted the terrorism threat from No.2 to No.3, behind economic inequality around the world as well as global warming. Most informed people think that climate change is very ominous and that poverty is of course a serious problem. But Clinton does not seem to think the possibility of New York or Washington disappearing in a nuclear blast is a very big deal.
Michael Crowley of the New Republic, reporting on the New York talkathon last September, wrote that "Clinton cast the war on terrorism as a blip on the radar of history."
Many Democrats seem to think this way. Fretting about racial profiling at airports and the turning over of library records of suspected terrorists is a much bigger deal than doing all we can do to avoid an apocalypse on American soil. I was distressed to see Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, more or less join the pack of those taking terrorism less seriously than politically aware adults should.
the people's cube
Has a few words for Der Googlemeisters:
Dear Messrs. Brin and Page:
May we take this opportunity to applaud your decision on accepting technical guidance from the Communist Party of China in your creative Google China project, and to extend our admiration for your recognition that search technologies are best left in the hands of responsible government entities (the U.S. imperialist government doesn't fall into that category, of course).
Be sure to check out their Google logo with the tank from Tieneman Square.
end of the month pith
Some reading for those with the time and interest.
First, there is The Rise of the West, a website dedicated to J. Needham's Grand Question: Why was modern science invented in Western Europe, and not in India, or China?
Then Chicagoboyz' Lexington Green offers a reading list for those eager to know more about military history.
monday january 30, 2006
bush breaks "brokeback" silence
President Bush, from a humorous speech at the Alfalfa Club:
"Lynne Cheney and Laura were out of town recently, so I called up Dick and said, 'Why don't we go to a movie?'
"He said, 'Great idea, let's go to a cowboy movie.'
"Yep, finally we went to see Brokeback Mountain. Let me tell you, whooo-eee.
"Dick sat through the movie, didn't say a word. We came out. After a while he says: 'Nice horses.' I say 'Yep.'
"Then he becomes real quiet again and kind of serious. I knew something was on his mind. Finally he turned to me and said: 'You don't suppose the Lone Ranger and Tonto …"
On Alito, he had this:
"Martha Alito won America's heart," Mr Bush said. "What a warm and wonderful woman. I talked to her. You wanna know what really caused her to cry at those hearings? Boredom."
Hillary: americans impatient for a woman pres
Americans are growing 'impatient" as they wait for a woman to be elected president, 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Saturday night. "People are saying,' Well, at least we're ready,'" Clinton told interviewer Jane Pauley, as the two held a public chat for charity in San Francisco.
But Americans are patient enough to wait out Hillary: a Gallup poll found last week that 51 percent of Americans had already made up their minds not to vote for her.
They also don't want Geena Davis:
"Commander in Chief” started out as the season’s most talked-about new show, but the initial hype didn’t translate into solid ratings – and ABC has shelved the White House drama.
The network announced over the weekend that it is pulling the show – which stars Geena Davis as the first female president – until spring to make way for a new comedy, "Sons & Daughters.” The "Commander" show will be off the air for at least six weeks, the New York Post reports.
medicine as diplomacy
Democratic Senator Patty Murray from Washington caught hell in 2002 for telling a group of high school students terrorist leader Osama bin Laden is popular in poor countries because he helped pay for schools, roads and even day care centers.
"We haven't done that," Murray said. "How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"
Murray was just plain ignorant. As Robert Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts" makes clear, we have military groups all over the globe (Mongolia, Phillipines, Yemen, etc.) serving, as one person put it, as the "Peace Corps with guns."
Often these are tiny Special Forces teams who assist locals by digging wells and holding medical and dental clinics. By becoming close to people, they are offered intelligence on the enemy without ever asking. Lest anyone think this is new, it's a method developed the US Army 100 years ago to fight insurgencies in the Phillipines.
US Navy battle groups were also at the forefront of relief efforts after the 2004 tsunami, and US forces are still helping aid the Pakistani quake victims. But that's just the beginning:
In the confusion of this post-Cold War, terrorist-troubled world, Congress is betting more and more foreign aid dollars on fighting that one common foe everyone can agree upon: infectious disease.
"Medicine can be a currency for peace" says Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon and a force behind the change. Today that "currency" is near $4 billion -- almost triple in real dollars what the U.S. was providing per year in 2001.
That increase parallels -- and is energized by -- efforts by private philanthropists like billionaire Bill Gates, who pledged Friday to triple his contributions to fight tuberculosis. Democrats have almost uniformly backed the shift. More striking has been rising support from Republicans, drawing in both the religious right and old-line fiscal conservatives who long have opposed more traditional development programs.
Mr. Frist's personal influence is significant, on the White House and his colleagues. The past 12 months have been difficult politically for the Tennessee Republican, but the emphasis on global health care will be a highlight of his legacy when he leaves the Senate at the end of the year.
Perhaps Dennis Kucinich might be made to understand why we don't need a Department of Peace.
barking dogs on the left
...want Democrats senators to use wounded soldiers as political props. (HT Instapundit.)
be a bollywood director
Choose a clip, write your own subtitles and smell the curry. (Be patient, movies load slowly.)
bbc on bush
I was hearing the other day about a woman who went to the White House Christmas drinks party.
You are allowed to bring a friend and the two of you get to pose for a 10-second photo-op (they call it a "grip and grin") with the leader of the free world.
But this woman had no friends available that evening and queued up to see him alone. When her turn came she explained to the president, "I couldn't get a date."
With a charm and wit worthy of Ronald Reagan he pulled her close and asked - mock earnestly - "Nothing I've done I hope?"
sheehan, chavez to speak for dems
Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who parlayed the death of her soldier son into a successful public speaking and writing career, will join Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Tuesday night to deliver the Democrat response to President George Bush’s State of the Union address.
“Our choice of Cindy and Hugo demonstrates our commitment to diversity, and personifies our platform for the future,” said Howard Dean, chairman of the Democrat National Committee (DNC). “Plus, they’re among the few well-known progressives who didn’t vote to support the war in Iraq while publicly attacking the Bush administration for its policy toward Iraq.”
and beautiful atrocities on "citizen superstar"
Globetrotting citizen / superstar Cindy Sheehan says she'll run for Senate against Dianne Feinstein if the bitch doesn't toe the line & call the troops home yesterday! Apparently that Idiotarian of the Year award went straight to her head. Cindy's already got DiFi jumping around like a trained seal: when she threatened to run if Di didn't support a filibluster, Di immediately fell in line. You go, girl!
In between bullying senators & slipping the tongue to Hugo Chavez, Cindy posted her latest scribbles at Huff Post about ‘matriots’, which is not a kind of marsupial but patriots with ovaries. Cindy's screed - which includes the words sputum, nefariously, matriotic, & spit - makes a stunning point:
"There is one universal truth that no one can dispute no matter how hard they try: Everyone has a mother!"
exposing free riders
Dear President / Prime Minister / Chancellor:
You, along with the leaders of many other nations, have morally condemned the United States’ treatment of our terrorist prisoners. It’s true that we use much harsher interrogation techniques on terrorists than we do on ordinary domestic criminals. But regardless of your criticisms we will continue to use these techniques when questioning terrorists about future attacks on the U.S.
Many of the terrorists we have captured, however, are involved in planning attacks on targets outside of the U.S. Up until now we have done our best to gather information on all potential terrorist objectives. But we realize that using rough interrogation to expose possible attacks on your country might taint your moral purity. We therefore offer you the following choice:
When asking terrorists about potential future attacks on your country would you prefer that we:
A. Use the exact same harsh interrogation methods we have previously been using, or
B. Use only the softer interrogation methods that we use on ordinary domestic criminals?
If you don’t respond to this question we will assume your choice is B. Please be aware that choosing B will expose your country to significantly greater risk of attack as our rough questioning has generated information that has allowed us to thwart many international terrorist atrocities.
Sincerely,
President George W. Bush.
The overwhelming military might of the U.S. has allowed many of our allies to become free-riders. They spend relatively small sums on their own military confident that in a crisis we would protect them. If, for example, Berlin were attacked by terrorists based outside of Europe the German armed forces could not possibly retaliate. Yet terrorists are somewhat deterred from attacking Berlin by the knowledge that if they did the U.S. armed forces would hunt them down. But being mere financial free-riders is not enough for many of our allies. They are now becoming moral free-riders.
To expose their hypocrisy President Bush should send the above letter to the leader of every nation that has morally criticized our war on terror. These leaders want the U.S. to protect them from terrorism but they also want to wallow in their supposed moral superiority because we but not they use unpleasant methods to combat terrorism. They are like meat eaters who condemn their own butcher for murdering animals.
words and music
by Burt Prelutsky
I have spent my entire adult life as a professional writer. Along the way, I have been a humor columnist; a book, TV and movie critic; an advertising copywriter; a celebrity profiler; a TV writer; and, of late, an essayist. It’s sort of like being the literary equivalent of a one-man band. The variety has certainly helped prevent burn-out, but it has also made me feel at times as if I were juggling dishes while tightrope walking.
Frankly, I would never encourage anyone to pursue a writing career. Pursue is the operative word. As a matter of fact, when addressing groups of aspiring writers, I do everything in my power to discourage them. I consider it a good deed on my part. However, I’m all too aware that those afflicted with the writing virus are immune to my sage counsel. People who feel the need to get their thoughts down on paper are as driven as any other group of addicts. Why else would they continue writing when every sane person in their lives is warning them to stop before they hurt themselves?
It’s true that a few writers -- people like Rawlings, King and Grisham -- become wealthy. A somewhat larger number earn decent livings. But for all the others, writing only provides a miserable hand-to-mouth existence, filled with frustration and, occasionally, humiliation.
When one considers the odds against succeeding as a writer, it probably makes more sense to invest heavily in lottery tickets or betting on the ponies.
In my case, if I had it to do all over again, I probably would have become a lyricist. Of all the writers, I believe they have the best deal. That is to say, I think they’re the only wordsmiths in the world who are actually over-paid.
It has always amazed me that a lyricist shares equally with the composer in the revenue generated by a song. I have heard that the great Jerome Kern insisted on a 60-40 division with his collaborators, but I think even he was getting short-changed.
It’s one thing when George Gershwin split 50-50 with his lyricist, for inasmuch as the guy was his brother, the money at least stayed in the family. Giants such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim, avoided settling for 50 cents on the dollar by writing the words as well as the music.
Even though I have never composed a single note, I simply can not fathom why the composer should have to fork over half the loot. The music, after all, is the thing that grabs us, the tune we whistle, the memory that lasts. In some cases, in fact, the instrumental versions, with their often banal lyrics removed, are much better than the vocal renditions.
I recall hearing an anecdote about the wife of a lyricist who, upon hearing the composer’s wife claim that her husband had written, let us say “Some Enchanted Evening,” announced, “No, your husband wrote la-la-la. My husband wrote ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’”
The lady was right, and I don’t wish to diminish the lyricist’s contribution. Without the words, singers would have to hum. But to me, the cut should be more like 80-20. The composer’s contribution is far and away the greater part of the whole. The music, after all, is always able to stand on its own, whereas without the music, most lyrics would be second-rate poetry, and the author would be lucky to get five cents-a-line from some college quarterly.
It’s true that there have been a handful of brilliant lyricists. Such people as Lorenz Hart, Johnny Mercer, Oscar Hammerstein, and Alan Jay Lerner, spring to mind. But it’s also true that, except for the Italians, nobody understands the lyrics to the arias of Puccini, Bizet and Verdi, and nobody except maybe the lyricists’ wives seems to care that it’s all la-la-la.
sunday january 29, 2006
condi's revolution
Ralph Peters:
OSAMA'S latest plea for attention suckered the media into blowing last week's real story: Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice's declaration of war on her dysfunctional department.
In a speech at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where students are deformed into diplomats, Condi cancelled the tea party. Her message was revolutionary and essential. As a result, she may go down in history as the SecState most hated by Foggy Bottom bureaucrats.
Here's what "Killjoy Condi" had to say:
- Diplomats can no longer build careers by hiding behind desks in comfy capitals. They'll have to accept dangerous assignments and serve in hardship posts; develop regional expertise in at least two areas; and speak at least two relevant foreign languages (French waiters need not apply). That ain't going to make Rice popular with diplos accustomed to rotating between Rome and Northwest D.C. on their way to ambassadorships. Yet, it's vital if we're going to convert our failed, 19th-century- model State Department into a useful tool for the 21st century.
- Ouch! Condi really put Paris and Berlin in their places — pointedly noting that "we have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people, that we have in India, a country of 1 billion people." Cancel that order for the big schnitzel, Mr. Ambassador. You're going to be eating some development vindaloo. (Delicious, too, that la Rice smacked down Old Europe just as Jacques Chirac threatened to hurl nukes at terrorists to prove that France remains relevant.)
- Crucially, Condi named China, India, South Africa and Brazil as countries of the future while declaring that an initial 100 diplomatic slots would migrate from Europe immediately to countries that actually matter. More reassignments will follow, with even Moscow demoted to the international enlisted ranks — while Indonesia gets promoted (Double ouch!).
al-qaida is losing
...says Christopher Hitchens.
more bad news for detroit
China is getting into the auto business big time.
101 dumbest moments in business
...for 2005, a catty list from Business 2.0.
threat tracker
Here's an interesting Java applet that visualizes connections between people in terror networks. Take a moment to read the instructions because it's not a gimme. And once you get elements in the graph, click "expand" to see the connections grow.
an act of hygiene
QUEBEC--Remember the conventional wisdom of 2004? Back then, you'll recall, it was the many members of George Bush's "unilateral" coalition who were supposed to be in trouble, not least the three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere--the president, Tony Blair and John Howard--who would all be paying a terrible electoral price for lying their way into war in Iraq.
The Democrats' position was that Mr. Bush's rinky-dink nickel-and-dime allies didn't count: The president has "alienated almost everyone," said Jimmy Carter, "and now we have just a handful of little tiny countries supposedly helping us in Iraq." (That would be Britain, Australia, Poland, Japan . . .) Instead of those nobodies, John Kerry pledged that, under his leadership, "America will rejoin the community of nations"--by which he meant Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, the Belgian guy ...
Two years on, Messrs. Bush, Blair, Howard and Koizumi are all re-elected, while Mr. Chirac is the lamest of lame ducks, and his ingrate citizenry has tossed out his big legacy, the European Constitution; Mr. Schroeder's government was defeated and he's now shilling for Russia's state-owned Gazprom ("It's all about Gaz!"); and the latest member of the coalition of the unwilling to hit the skids is Canada's Liberal Party, which fell from office on Monday. John Kerry may have wanted to "rejoin the community of nations." Instead, "the community of nations" has joined John Kerry, windsurfing off Nantucket in electric-yellow buttock-hugging Lycra, or whatever he's doing these days.
saturday january 28, 2006
real world vs. government world
Los Angeles has a homeless problem. New York made theirs better. So 30 (yes 30) LA politicians flew to the Big Apple to learn NY's big secret. Could they not use a phone? Or send one person to file a report? Can you picture a corporation sending 30 employees off to do basic research?
how to make a fool of yourself on the 'net
James Lileks has tips.
iraqi army getting stronger
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - With American help, the Iraqi army is emerging as a lightly armed counterinsurgency force that may control more of the country than the U.S.-led coalition by this spring, U.S. military officials say.
But in coming years, the Iraqi army will remain too weak to defend the country and will be reliant far into the future on America to guarantee Iraq's sovereignty, experts say.
''They're not going to be the 101st Airborne anytime soon,'' said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, spokesman for the military transition command in Baghdad. ``But in 2006, this is the year that the majority of Iraq will be secured by Iraqis.''
But the Pentagon is also grappling with designing a force that assuages the worries of countries victimized by Saddam Hussein's military.
''There is a concern in the region about giving them an offensive military capability,'' said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of planning for the U.S. Central Command.
The dilemma for Washington, which wants to hand off its counterinsurgency duties and depart as soon as possible, is that a weak Iraqi army could leave U.S. forces providing security for Iraq for many years, said Mustafa Alani, a military analyst with the Gulf Research Center in Dubai.
Besides Jordan, who else should we worry about? Syria? Iran suffered the most from Saddam, but who cares what they think about Iraq?
what if wiretaps work?
From the New Republic:
Lawyers who are busily debating legality without first trying to assess the consequences of the program have put the cart before the horse. Law in the United States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy. In analyzing all but the simplest legal questions, one is well advised to begin by asking what social policies are at stake. Suppose the NSA program is vital to the nation's defense, and its impingements on civil liberties are slight. That would not prove the program's legality, because not every good thing is legal; law and policy are not perfectly aligned.
But a conviction that the program had great merit would shape and hone the legal inquiry. We would search harder for grounds to affirm its legality, and, if our search were to fail, at least we would know how to change the law--or how to change the program to make it comply with the law--without destroying its effectiveness. Similarly, if the program's contribution to national security were negligible--as we learn, also from the Times, that some FBI personnel are indiscreetly whispering--and it is undermining our civil liberties, this would push the legal analysis in the opposite direction.
Ronald Dworkin, the distinguished legal philosopher and constitutional theorist, wrote in The New York Review of Books in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that "we cannot allow our Constitution and our shared sense of decency to become a suicide pact." He would doubtless have said the same thing about fisa. If you approach legal issues in that spirit rather than in the spirit of ruat caelum fiat iusticia (let the heavens fall so long as justice is done), you will want to know how close to suicide a particular legal interpretation will bring you before you decide whether to embrace it. The legal critics of the surveillance program have not done this, and the defenders have for the most part been content to play on the critics' turf.
friday january 27, 2006
a short history of pork
Daniel Henninger explains how "reform" got us the pork barrel spending everyone decries and the lobbyists with too much influence:
...Congress planted the seeds back in the '70s for what is revolting you now with two enactments--the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Both were marketed as reforms.
The first law turned political Washington into a trillion-dollar industry camouflaged as the federal budget. The second ensured that sitting members of Congress and K Street lobbyists would become the entrenched management of that industry. Compared to this, Enron is a kindergarten game.
This is a history worth knowing and retelling. It all came to life amid another famous scandal, Watergate, and the most famous such name of all, Richard Nixon.
Nixon's impeachment is wholly linked in history to the Watergate scandal. But in fact, his battles with the Democratically controlled Congress over spending authority also greased his fall. As had Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon tried to control Congress's spending by "impounding"--refusing to spend--specific appropriations.
Congress itself had tried various gimmicks to stanch the Great Society's costs, such as "spending ceilings." None worked, as indeed no gaggle of legislators will discipline themselves. Nixon resorted to the blunt club of impoundments. Congress went bananas. This battle, fought inside the partisan cauldron of the Vietnam War, led to the oddly named 1974 Budget Control Act, which purposely eviscerated presidential control over individual spending items, such as an earmark. To kill a "bridge to nowhere," a president has to veto the entire highway bill. Ditto defense pork and so on.
The 1974 act did give the president "rescission" authority--a request not to spend money on a project. But the law also said that if Congress never took a vote to affirm the rescission, the money went out the door. Absurd, but that's current law. Congressional Quarterly, in a 1982 study of the struggle over spending control, quoted a budget official then predicting the future: "What we're talking about here is congressional government--and chaos."
But they weren't done. In 1974--the start the Long Era of Chaos in our politics--Congress claimed it was curing the abuses of Watergate by mandating that no individual could contribute more than $1,000 to a candidate per election. So of course candidates were going to need a lot of "individual" contributions to finance a modern campaign. Thus was born the current co-dependency between members of Congress who hold the power to confer federal spending and Washington lobbyists who have the power to bundle campaign contributions in PACs and such for incumbent earmarkers.
silver lining
Contrary to initial responses, Hamas’s projected victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections is a positive development. Not, as its apologists claim, because the proximity of power will favor a process of cooptation into parliamentary politics, and therefore strengthen the pragmatic wing of Hamas. There is no pragmatic wing in Hamas, and all differences within the movement — the armed wing and the political wing, Palestine Hamas and Hamas in Syria — are arguably tactical differences. No, the reason is, as Vladimir Ilich Lenin would put it, "worse is better."
Hamas’s favored outcome was not victory, but a strong showing that would leave Hamas with the best of both worlds: It would remain in opposition (or would be invited to join a coalition as a junior partner) but would impose severe limitations on the Fatah-led government on how to manage its relations with Israel. Hamas could thus claim to reject Oslo, decline to recognize the Palestinian Authority and its commitments under the Oslo accords and the roadmap, and continue to use its rising political clout and its military strength to sabotage any effort to revive the moribund peace process.
What victory does to Hamas is to put the movement into an impossible position. As preliminary reports emerge, Hamas has already asked Fatah to form a coalition and got a negative response. Prime Minister Abu Ala has resigned with his cabinet, and president Abu Mazen will now appoint Hamas to form the next government. From the shadows of ambiguity, where Hamas could afford — thanks to the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of those in the Western world who dismissed its incendiary rhetoric as tactics — to have the cake and eat it too. Now, no more. Had they won 30-35 percent of the seats, they could have stayed out of power but put enormous limits on the Palestinian Authority’s room to maneuver. By winning, they have to govern, which means they have to tell the world, very soon, a number of things.
quote of the day
White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, on John Kerry’s pathetic call for a filibuster of Judge Alito’s nomination:
I think it was a historic day yesterday. It was the first ever call for a filibuster from the slopes of Davos, Switzerland.
charles krauthammer's eulogy to his brother
Wonderfully touching.
big gains
In job growth, but it never makes headlines. Betsy Newmark weighs in.
not such a small world
Astronomers say that by virtue of the ceaseless shifting of the billions of stars in the Milky Way and a trick of Einsteinian physics, they have briefly glimpsed the most Earth-like planet yet to be discovered outside the solar system.
It is a ball of rock and ice only about 5.5 times as massive as Earth, smaller than any of the 160 previously discovered exoplanets, and is orbiting a dim reddish star 21,000 light-years from here.
saddam general says wmd flown to syria
Let's see how MSM ignores this story.
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
unhinged (again)
It must be tough being a war critic and a liberal like Al Gore. Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair -- all supporters of liberating Iraq get reelected. Germany's Schroeder? Gone. Now Canada's Paul Martin has been voted out. So what's a lib to conclude? Conspiracy, natch.
Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore has accused the oil industry of financially backing the Tories and their "ultra-conservative leader" to protect its stake in Alberta's lucrative oilsands.
Canadians, Gore said, should vigilantly keep watch over prime minister-designate Stephen Harper because he has a pro-oil agenda and wants to pull out of the Kyoto accord -- an international agreement to combat climate change.
"The election in Canada was partly about the tar sands projects in Alberta," Gore said Wednesday while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
And the financial interests behind the tar sands project poured a lot of money and support behind an ultra-conservative leader in order to win the election . . . and to protect their interests."
Darcie Park, spokeswoman for oilsands giant Suncor Energy, said she's taken aback by Gore's remarks and hopes they don't resonate with Canadians.
"Our company just doesn't do business that way. We're really puzzled about where these comments came from," she said.
"Canadians understand how elections work in Canada and understand there are these very tight restrictions around what individuals and companies can contribute to individual parties or campaigns."
thursday january 26, 2006
Under the Radar
From Polipundit:
Sometimes it’s the small stories which say the most about our nation’s politics:
President Bush on Wednesday nominated Superior Court Judge Vanessa L. Bryant to the [Connecticut] federal bench, where she would be the first black woman to serve in New England.
Wait a minute. Hold the phone.
You’re telling me that over the course of eight years Saint Bill Clinton – the nation’s “first black president” – never seated a female black district or circuit court judge anywhere in New England?
Yet Chimpy McBushitler is poised to do so before the end of year six???
Man, next thing you’ll tell me is the Prez also nominated: (1) the first black female on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, (2) the first black Secretary of State, and (3) the first female black Secretary of State.
Oh, right.
Continuing:
A Republican from Avon, Bryant is Bush’s second nominee to Connecticut’s federal bench.
Hang on a second. There are female black {gulp} Republicans???
Do the Katie/Oprah blocs know about that? Does Kayne West? Do the young librulz in the media and on campus know that?
What do you think, Ted Rall?
-- Jayson
jacques chirac finally wakes up
...to the reality of Islamic terrorism:
"All of our nuclear forces have been configured in this spirit." Although Mr. Chirac did not name any specific countries, which might be targets of a French nuclear attack, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the likely targets. These include Iran, as well as Arab countries in the Middle East.
What is so surprising is that Mr. Chirac's government has in the past favored an approach of conciliation or even appeasement toward Iran and the Arab nations. He was, after all, the vociferous foe of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and a hard line against Iran. That approach benefited French companies that were able to obtain lucrative contracts in competition with corporations based in the land of the great Satan. So, what happened?
There are two contributing factors. The first is the civil unrest in France several months ago, which involved nightly riots and a myriad of car burnings in many areas of the country. This violence had the same kind of impact upon Mr. Chirac and the French government that September 11 had upon the United States.
In his speech, Mr. Chirac bluntly declared, "In numerous countries, radical ideas are spreading, advocating a confrontation of civilizations." Mr. Chirac now understands the problem. The jihadists are attempting to capture town by town, areas within Western Europe. As one French government official put it, "This is more than a clash of civilizations. It is a cancer within our country that if unchecked will destroy all of France."
Imagine that.
dr. coburn goes to washington
Republican Senator Tom Coburn is a doctor and a trouble maker of the best kind. In November 2005, National Review wrote:
The self-described citizen-legislator kept his promise to serve only three terms, and went back to practicing medicine for four years before running for the Senate in 2004. In that race, he promised to serve only two terms, and to keep in touch with the people of his state by continuing his medical practice.
Before he was sworn in, however, the Senate Ethics Committee informed him that this would not be allowed. Under chairman George Voinovich, the Ethics Committee has decided that Senator Coburn’s request to treat patients runs afoul of a Senate rule holding that members shall not “receive compensation for practicing a profession which involves a fiduciary relationship.”
So Senate ethics rules would keep him from keeping his medical practice. Meanwhile, other senators earned outside income in less noble pursuits. For example Barbara Boxer published a novel she didn't write.
(George Voinovich, you might recall, is the Republican who wept after speaking out against the confirmation hearings of John Bolton as UN Ambassador.)
But Coburn has bigger fish to fry. Tim Chapman writes:
When Oklahomans elected Dr. Tom Coburn to the United States Senate they knew that they were sending a man to Washington who would not dance the D.C. two-step. But Beltway types have underestimated the determination of this man not to go along to get along.
Very soon, that will change.
According to Senate aides, Dr. Coburn has notified his colleagues that he intends to challenge every earmark—or pork project—on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Coburn, who has been a champion in the fight against wasteful federal spending, believes that the congressional earmarking process is the genesis of the current Abramoff-related lobbying scandals.
Coburn’s threat will dramatically slow the appropriations process because he will demand many more votes and more debate than normal on all spending bills. The added debate will allow senators to learn the merits (or lack thereof) of each earmark and affirm or reject.
According to one GOP Senate aide, many of the old-bull appropriators are not taking the threat seriously and are confident in their ability to apply pressure tactics and parliamentary maneuvers in order to ensure business as usual on spending bills. But that aide points out Coburn’s commitment, “It will take a lot of votes on one or two appropriations bills before the appropriators figure out that [Coburn] means business.”
Once they do figure out that Dr. Coburn isn’t bluffing, they will understand why some outside observers have affectionately dubbed the Oklahoman “Senator Train Wreck.”
John McCain has railed against pork barrel spending for years. Why didn't he do what Tom Coburn is planning to do?
"i wish bush spied on me"
A hilarious call for help.
hardwired
Talk about hot-button issues. Political opinions are forged in the brain by heated emotions rather than reason, according to a study released yesterday by Emory University.
Magnetic resonance imaging revealed that emotional centers in the brains of a group of staunch Republicans and Democrats "lit up" when confronted with ideological messages, prompting these partisans to hear the same information but reach opposite conclusions.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory, who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up."
wednesday january 25, 2006
only in san francisco
If you saw The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, you'll know one of the players in this story. Whose tree is it anyway? It's a good movie, by the way.
bush's focus
From his speech at Kansas State:
...I understand my most important priority, my most important job, is to protect the security of the American people.
I knew right after September the 11th, though, that the attack would begin to fade in people's memories. I mean, who wants to constantly go through life thinking that you're going to get hit again? Who wants to kind of relive those days in your memory?
As a matter of fact, I asked the American people to go on about your life.
But given the fact that it's human nature to kind of forget or try to put in the past, put the pain in the past, I want to assure you and our fellow Americans, I'm not going to put it in the past. The threat to the United States is forefront my mind. I'm knew that at time people would say: You know, it may be an isolated incident; let's just don't worry about it.
Well, for me, it's not an isolated incident. I understand there's still an enemy which lurks out there.
And so part of my decision-making process, part of these -- as you see, when I begin to make decisions to protect you, to do my number one priority, rests upon this fact: that there is an enemy which is relentless and desirous to bring harm to the American people because of what we believe in.
ucla studies media bias
...and finds 18 of the top 20 media outlets are left-of-center politically.
hugh hewitt vs. joel stein
Hewitt has a keen mind and an prosecutor's skill at asking questions. Joel Stein is unmasked as -- to use John Goodman's phrase from Barton Fink -- "a tourist with a typewriter."
reid between the lines
Yesterday, after a party-line vote (the first since 1916) sent Samuel Alito's nomination to the full Senate, minority leader Harry Reid said his party was planning to muster as many "no" votes as possible as a protest.
"I think it sends a message to the American people that this guy is not King George, he's President George," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said.
Was President Clinton king? Republicans voted overwhelmingly to confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg despite her hard left leanings. They did so because Clinton was duly elected and had the constitutional authority to choose justices, just as Bush does. Just who is being divisive in Washington, anyway? And petty?
Far from demonstrating independence, the Democrats' behavior underscores their lock-step allegiance to interest groups such as People for the American Way and NARAL. Knowing they've lost the Alito battle, they plan to assuage their radical masters with words:
...Democrats plan to stage a talk-a-thon on the nomination. It appears that each of the Senate's 45 Democrats will use the Senate's tradition of unlimited debate to talk for quite a while on Alito — a kind of non-filibuster filibuster that could make for several days of talking. At some point, Frist will have to file for cloture, that is, to begin the process of cutting off debate so that an up-or-down confirmation vote can be held.
But according to Senate rules, once Frist files for cloture, he has to wait three days before holding a vote. And if he wants the Senate to confirm Alito before the president's State of the Union address next Tuesday, he will have to file for cloture soon — before Democrats have actually had a chance to talk for very long. On the other hand, if he waits to file for cloture until it is clear that Democrats are just talking for the sake of talking, then there can't be a vote until after the State of the Union address.
tuesday january 24, 2006
protein wisdom 1, joel stein 0
Stein tries to kick up some controversy, gets kicked by Jeff Goldstein.
open letter to glenn whipp
(Glenn Whipp is a film reviewer for the Los Angeles Daily News.)
Dear Glenn,
Today your paper published an interview with the maker of "Why We Fight" a documentary film that argues that America's military interventions of the past 50 or so years were motivated, not by the cause of freedom, but rather to satisfy its merchants of war.
By devoting space to this interview, you tacitly take his position. If that rankles, consider your description of the film as a "sobering look at the unimpeded growth of the American war machine in the past half-century."
Josef Stalin killed 22 million people. Mao killed more than 70 million. Pol Pot killed 1.8 million North Korea more than 3 million. Fidel Castro has killed in the hundreds of thousands. So, was there not a moral principle behind the long sustained military effort we call the Cold War?
Who else but the US was in a position to stop Stalin and international communism from enslaving the world? No one. We did the hard work and the world is a better place for it. Just ask the Poles, the Czechs, the Baltic peoples, the Hungarians, the Romanians etc. who suffered under the communist dictatorships. (Why do you think Vaclev Havel was so vocal in support of liberating Iraq?)
Look at the poverty of today's Cuba, then look at the prosperity of the exile Cubans in South Florida -- the architects, bankers, professors, musicians and politicians. Black and white. Look at the condition of East Germany compared to West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. Black and white.
Without our "war machine" our world would be a lot blacker today. So please, spare us the Marxist-lite tropes about capitalism and war.
In your interview you ask:
Why Eisenhower would be alarmed if he were alive today.
"He would say that at a time when you see America printing textbooks and building viaducts in Iraq, even our own children are undereducated and drowning in the streets of New Orleans, that you have a problem here with our priorities. The balance of how money is spent in this society is broken and out of line with our democratic ideals."
Liberals once stood for human rights and idealism. Liberals right after 9/11 demanded we send foreign aid to lift the mideast out of poverty so Muslims would no longer hate us (this was defined as treating the root causes).
So what's wrong with helping Iraq onto its feet? Did we not fund the Marshall Plan to do the same for Europe, and did that not make a better world for millions? And is not liberating 56 million people from tyranny something we should be proud of? (scroll down two items to see what Iraqis and Afghanis think.)
Or do you think America should shrink from the world? If 9/11 proved nothing else, it proved that isolationism is a form of suicide.
You enjoy a pretty cushy life, watching movies and writing up your opinions. Before you get glib about our military you might consider this quote from George Orwell:
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Your cushy life exists only because rough men are protecting you. I recommend you read "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" by Robert Kaplan, a writer for Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps it will open your eyes to the dangerous world we live in. You might even find it humbling.
Yours truly,
Jim Bass
hugh hewitt on columbia school of journalism
Hugh profiles CSJ, regarded as the finest journalism school in the country. Excerpt:
The 16 students are not evenly split--there are 14 women and just two men. Two-thirds of the M.S. class this year are women, a reflection of what Lemann calls the "feminization" of journalism programs across the country. Robert Mac Donald, the assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, ran down the demographics for me: The average age of an M.S. student is just shy of 28, the mean is 26, the youngest is 20, and the oldest is 63. Whites make up 69 percent of the new class; 11 percent are African American, 7 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, 3 percent Middle Eastern, and 4 percent South Asian.
The school doesn't yet keep stats on religious background, though Mac Donald believes there has been a significant increase in Muslim students post 9/11. A fifth of the students are from the New York area, and between 37 to 40 percent are from "the corridor"--from Boston to Washington. Another fifth are from the west coast, and 10 percent are foreign. It is a pretty "blue" student body, and willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of their credentials. A year at CSJ--tuition, living expenses, incidentals--comes to $59,404 according to Mac Donald, though 85 percent of the students receive some financial aid, with packages ranging from $1,000 to $50,000. The average scholarship is $5,200, which means that these students are putting a lot of money into the program.
The "blue" nature of the student body is further confirmed by my polling of the class I attended, done with the permission of Shapiro. Six of the 16 were English majors, two studied history, and the balance spread across the humanities. No one had a background in the physical sciences. No one owned a gun. All supported same-sex marriage. Three had been in a house of worship the previous week. Six read blogs. None of them recognized the phrase "Christmas Eve in Cambodia"--though Shapiro not only got the allusion but knew the date of the John Kerry Senate speech in which he made the false claim about his Vietnam war experience.
Three quarters of them hope to make more than $100,000 as a journalist, 11 had voted for John Kerry, and one for George Bush (three are from abroad and not eligible, and one didn't vote for either candidate). I concluded by asking them if they "think George Bush is something of a dolt." There was unanimous agreement with this proposition, one of the widely shared views within elite media and elsewhere on the left. The president's Harvard MBA and four consecutive victories over Democrats judged "smarter" than him haven't made even a dent in that prejudice.
evil bush spreads optimism
Iraqis and Afghans are the among most optimistic people in the world when it comes to their economic future, a new survey for the BBC suggests.
Italians join people in Zimbabwe and DR Congo as the most downcast about their future, according to the poll of 37,500 people in 32 nations.
...
In Afghanistan, 70% say their own circumstances are improving, and 57% believe that the country overall is on the way up.
In Iraq, 65% believe their personal life is getting better, and 56% are upbeat about the country's economy.
conservatives take canada
A SAD day for Michael Moore. In the event of a terrible tragedy, the corpulent anti-corporate crusader is wont, like the Queen and Kofi Annan, to issue a formal statement to the world. And his "Michael Moore Statement On Canadian Election" made distressing reading: "Oh, Canada - you're not really going to elect a Conservative majority on Monday, are you? That's a joke, right?"
Well, no. In a very Canadian kind of revolution, we rose up yesterday and threw the bums out but gave them a soft, fluffy landing, nevertheless installing in office a minority government that somehow managed to get itself elected despite having the word "Conservative" in its name.
For Tories, it was a good night, if not a great night. But, given that the party was reduced to two seats in the 1993 debacle, after 12 years in the wilderness most Canadian conservatives will take a strong minority government as a spectacular landslide. We'd be dipping our voting fingers in maple syrup and triumphantly waving them at the UN observers if they hadn't all fallen asleep 20 minutes into the thrilling election-night coverage.
For the past century, Canada's ruling Liberals have been the democratic world's most consistently successful political party. This time round, mired in a series of scandals that were turning Canada into the G7's first Third World kleptocracy, the flailing Trudeaupians adopted an even more ferocious version of their usual strategy: scare the voters back to Nanny. As the Liberals warned Canadians - or, rather, shrieked at them - Stephen Harper will take away "a woman's right to choose"! The unwanted boys you'll be forced to have will grow up to be Bush cannon fodder in Iraq, and the unwanted girls will be sold as white slaves for Halliburton corporate cocktail parties round the pool at Dick Cheney's ranch.
culture girl
"Democrats have a better idea that will not force hard-working students to pay the price for the Republican culture of corruption that favors special interest over the needs of America's children."
And hardworking students love the rich, chocolatey taste of Ovaltine. One non-sequitur deserves another.
one last dig
...at Hillary. This from Kathleen Parker:
Unlike her husband, who was tagged "America's first black president," Hillary Clinton ain't got "all that" -- that soul thang that her husband has in, um, diamonds.
When Clinton said, "and you know what I'm talking about," what she was thinking, of course, was, "and you know wuddumsayin?" She wisely censored herself, but her slightly stuttered body English suggested juuuuuust a hint of ebonics. A little roll here, a little hand there. Oy vey, I've still got muscle cramps from cringing.
Watching Clinton's soul-sister moment was like watching a whiffed high-five, embarrassing as watching middle-aged white guys playing air guitar. Stop it.
monday january 23, 2006
oh, it's crying time again...
The LA Times Calendar section leads today with a story about Munich, the movie. It begins:
Can a movie be Swift-boated?
Swift-boated means smeared by right-wingers. In fact, despite contrary belief among liberals, most Swift Boat charges about John F. Kerry were true. But never mind that, just appreciate the whining tone.
Unfortunately, the political pundits who took swipes at the movie very early on set the course for the movie that's been difficult to overcome," says producer Kathleen Kennedy. "That was set by people who hadn't seen the movie, speculating what the movie was. That's been frustrating. We always knew, given this subject matter, there were going to be people who were not going to be open to a discussion. Unfortunately, they've found a louder voice than the people who've supported the movie.
Yeah, this weekend Timmy and Susie chose Underworld II over Munich after reading Charles Krauthammer. Sure. And they snacked on carrot sticks instead of popcorn because they read carrots are good for you.
"We live in a time where there is a very loud and strong right-wing constituency that is hellbent on suppressing any of this kind of dialogue. I've just been surprised at Hollywood and our own industry. It reveals more conservatism than I thought was there."
Making a counter-argument is suppression? Only in Hollywood.
"Munich" certainly wouldn't be the first movie subject to a takedown by the nation's political press. Indeed, movies as diverse as Oliver Stone's "JFK," Michael Mann's "The Insider" and Oscar winner "A Beautiful Mind" have generated blitzkriegs by the truth police, critics enraged by what they see as Hollywood filmmakers taking liberties with the facts.
Oliver Stone's JFK was fact-free, except that there was once, in fact, a President named JFK. By the way, End of the Spear grossed more per screen than Munich, despite going unreviewed in LA newspapers. And all the awards and news stories aren't going to turn Brokeback Mountain into a date movie, either.
apple's worm
It never hurts to flatter your customers when hawking product.
No one need explain that to Steve Jobs, who's convinced a small contingent of loyalists that Macs are not just computing machines, but proof of their non-conforming hipness. With a Mac, you almost don't need to get pierced.
Thus we have Apple's latest TV commercial, announcing that Macs now have the same powerful Intel chips that Windows computers have had for ages. In this Apple is crying uncle. But using Orwellian double-speak (ironic given Apple's notorious Big Brother commercial), Apple is pitching its capitulation as liberating the Intel chip from those boring gray boxes (PCs), freeing them to do exciting cool things. Oh, please.
An honest campaign would be:
"Macs: Not the slugs they used to be."
-- or --
"Macs: Same chips as PCs for twice the price."
Apple makes nice looking stuff. Sometimes gorgeous stuff. Sometimes it's awful technology, such as the original iMac, with it hockey puck mouse and 15-inch monitor (at a time when vanilla PCs shipped with 17-inch monitors and cost much less.)
I have one of those, which I call the iSquint. To make it usable I shelled out $35 for a Microsoft Mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel and threw away the hockey puck. Sheesh. I use ole Squinty for making cross platform CD-ROMs in my business, and not much else.
Apple's OSX is a modern operating system with much to admire. Their machines exude style. Yet choosing a Mac in a world where 96% view the Internet via Windows can leave you left out. I can't count the number of times I've sent a video link to a Mac user and heard back, "Couldn't get it to play." And despite the often superior Mac monitors, web images optimized for Windows look washed out on Macs.
With Apple's move to Intel chips, we're probably looking at a future where your computer can swing both ways (Mac or PC) depending how you boot it. Sort of a transgender 'puter.
Jim Bass
squirm hillary, squirm
Saturday Night Live mocks Hillary for her plantation gambit. Follow the link for video.
Shelby Steele on Hillary
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary's remark as follows: "I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes--the wretched of the earth, a slave people--who will surely know all about plantations." Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? Does she really see us as she projects us--as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
...
And she knew the drill--white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton's real insult to blacks--one far uglier than her plantation metaphor--is to value them only for their sense of grievance.
Read the whole thing.
the damage done
Byron York writes in the Jan 30. National Review (print only) about the consequences of the New York Times blabbing about NSA intercepts and the Washington Post revealing the existence of secret prisons for terror suspects.
While both papers made a big deal about the threat to national security vis-a-vis Valerie Plame, both gladly violated state secrets with real consequences to national security. York notes:
- Although terrorists knew that their phone conversations might be tapped, they often got sloppy. One NSA source told him, "It's amazing in intercepts how often people will say, 'We really shouldn't be talking on this line.'" Now, thanks to the NYT, they are not.
- The WaPo story about secret prisons probably did the most harm. One, our allies in Poland now feel a bullseye has been painted on them, making them a likely target for a Madrid-type attack.
- Worse, the Polish government, and other governments who might want to help us in the future, now fear that the United States cannot keep a secret. And that's a hurt with long-term consequences.
no sunburn with these spf 50 bathing suits
Made in Australia, but not what you'd expect to see an Aussie babe wearing. The ultimate anti-thong. Via Tim Blair.
band on the run
The location of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda in Iraq’s commander, and the state of the Islamist insurgency have been recent topics of conversation. Late last year, ThreatsWatch stated the focal point of the insurgency has shifted from Anbar province to the regions north of Baghdad. Today, Coalition forces believe Zarqawi is currently operating “in Diyala province near Baghdad…If his presence in Diyala is confirmed, it will reinforce the belief that violence follows him around Iraq.”
The Sunday Times: reports that, according to “a leading insurgent who met [Zarqawi] two weeks ago”, Zarqawi “goes to sleep every night wearing a suicide belt packed with explosives,” and provides clues as to Zarqawi’s questionable status in relation to other insurgency groups. During a meeting designed to forge alliances with other Islamist insurgency groups, Zarqawi is reported to have “put on a show of humility at a two-day meeting to secure the co-operation of the Army of the Victorious Sect and other groups with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
sunday january 22, 2006
how saddam came to trial
The LA Times has the story of how a New York National Guardsman, an attorney, helped bring the first case against Saddam.
...Heintz described how he and his colleagues, many of them New York police officers and firefighters sent to help stabilize and secure the area around Dujayl, wound up helping unearth the crime.
"I went there as an infantry officer," said the stocky father of two, dressed in full military uniform for a police officer's funeral. "We went there to do raids and ambushes and train the Iraqi National Guard…. I did not go there to do [legal] work."
Before he arrived in Iraq, Heintz had little idea of what awaited him in Dujayl. As soon as the troops got their marching orders, his political advisor, Sgt. John Byrnes, did a Google search on the small town. He came up with an article that referred to the 1982 assassination attempt against Hussein and the retribution that followed. Heintz and his guys stored the information away.
dim bulb
Star Jones (a hopeful name, that) opens her mouth to reveal a shallow mind.
glory road
Betsy Newmark has a comprehensive look at the new film, supposedly about breaking racial barriers.
deconstructing jacques
Professor teaches his college a thing or two. HT Instapundit.
Jacques Pluss has accomplished the impossible. He has managed to get himself hated by everyone.
Nazis, socialists, lefties, righties, academics, nonacademics -- if they have any feeling about Pluss, those feelings are negative.
I may be the only person in America who appreciates what he has done. And what he has done is to single-handedly expose the myth of academic freedom in America.
saturday january 21, 2006
democrat dirty tricksters cop a plea
In an unexpected twist in the Election Day tire slashing trial, four former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, have agreed to plead no contest to misdemeanors.
The plea agreements came in the middle of jury deliberations after an eight-day trial on felony property damage charges that carried potential 3 1/2 year prison terms upon conviction.
oprah osama book pick
Radical America-hating author (an American, natch) gets a boost from Osama bin Laden.
perfect for sierra club steering committee meetings
The seven seat bike.
giant grasshoppers!
I prefer Jack-a-lopes, but these are pretty compelling, too.
HT Museum of Hoaxes.
turning urban legend into corporate cash
Remember the story about millions of people flushing their toilets at the same time during Superbowl halftime? Scott toilet paper company cashes in with halftimeflush.com. They have games and a video from Mike Ditka.
method to iranian madness?
The question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They
do not yet have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have
now hinted that (a) they plan to build nuclear weapons and have
implied, as clearly as possible without saying it, that (b) they plan
to use them against Israel. On the surface, these statements appear to
be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are many things
one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force is
not usually one of them. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the
Iranians seem to be doing, so we need to sort this out.There are four possibilities:
1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is insane and wants to
be attacked because of a bad childhood.
2. The Iranians are engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver, and this
is part of it.
3. The Iranians think they can get nuclear weapons -- and a deterrent
to Israel -- before the Israelis attack.
4. The Iranians, actually and rationally, would welcome an Israeli --
or for that matter, American -- air strike.
Read it all.
friday january 20, 2006
osama: bush's tool?
CNN's Jack Cafferty, echoing Walter Cronkite last year, thinks Osama is helping Bush. Bush Derangement Syndrome knows no bounds.
Meanwhile, Helen Thomas (a one woman argument for forced retirement) questions whether there are terrorists in Iraq.
sister, you been pink'd
Publius Pundit caught Code Pink lying with Photoshop (LWP).
The top image comes from Code Pink's web banner. As you can see, they lifted an image of an Iranian anti-mullah protestor, squeezed up her chin, painted her lips pink and changed her message.
Unbelievable. Code Pink, an anti-American, anti-Iraqi-freedom, anti-Iranian-democracy full-Sandalista nuisance group, has taken to photoshopping photographs of Iranian freedom babes brave enough to protest against the monstrous mullahs of Iran, and used their beautiful images as recruiting tools for their own odious, anaphrodisiac cause. This cause just happens to be cut-and-run from Iraq, so that mullahs will be free to oppress women in ‘peace.’ That’s Code Pink’s cause! It is so disgusting!
Read the rest, including the original post, to see how much these shrill pinkos betrayed the Iranians.
reading between bin laden's lines
American Digest figures Bin Laden wants to run for office.
AFTER A RECENT SERIES OF HIGH LEVEL MEETINGS with ranking Democrats at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, ranking honorary Democrat Osama Bin Laden of Rat Hole, Pakistan, emerged from seclusion with some of the International Democratic Party talking points for the 2006 US election.
Although the Aljazeera ("Bin Laden offers Americans truce") translation was spotty at best, our analysts here at American Digest have prepared an annotated version to help our readers discern where Bin Laden's positions and those of his new cohorts in the Democratic party overlap.
OBL: "The new operations of al-Qaida has not happened not because we could not penetrate the security measures. It is being prepared and you'll see it in your homeland very soon."
[TRANS: Indeed, we have almost penetrated your security measures, and are only waiting for our friend Teddy Kennedy to remove the last barrier, the Patriot Act. He has promised us that only a few weeks remain. We await this with keen anticipation.]
OBL: "We do not mind establishing a long-term truce between us and you."
[TRANS: Us -- lonely and a bit cold here in the Afghan/Pakistan mountains with only a replica-kit dialysis machine to keep us warm.
You -- a shapely US senator from San Francisco with a yen for masculine Arab men with skeevy beards and a large endowment. Let there be peace between you and us that our planned cruise to Cancun can unfold, and that I may pluck your fragrant desert flower.]
OBL: "This message is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end those wars.
[TRANS: You bugger off. We stay. By the way, thanks for the ammo, the airbases, the improved roads, the armor, and the freshly trained and equipped armies. They will make my old friends in Saudi Arabia sit up and take notice, I tell you. The resulting tumult will, as I have agreed with MoveOn and George Soros, cause my Saudi Arabian oil to rise to $150 a barrel and bring on the alternative fuel boomlet the Democratic environmentalists have been yearning for. After all, as they told me just last week, "When oil is outlawed, only environmentalists will have recumbent bicycles."]
indian country
From Der Spiegel:
In the United States a growing number of white people are discovering their Native American roots. Some are doing so for financial gain, but most are just looking for the meaning of life.
A few weeks, Betty Baker was still just a white housewife. But now the woman, with her piercing blue eyes, goes by the name "Little Dove" --and has jettisoned her apron for an elaborate deerskin dress.
"I am an Indian and I've sensed this my whole life," says the 48-year-old Baker, who lives in a wooden house on the edge of the small town of Pinson, Alabama.
hidden in plain sight
Current economy vs. Clinton economy, from Polipundit:
New claims for jobless benefits last week were 271,000, with the four-week moving average falling under 300,000. (See here.)
What were those numbers back in mid-January 1998, you ask?
341,000 and 322,000. (See here.)
Yeah, that’s right, more people were getting laid off from their jobs back in Jan. 1998 when compared to the present day.
Go figure.
What do you think about that, Krugman-Dobbs?
good night irene, good night
Peggy Noonan on the demise of the media monopoly:
I don't think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, "He's like me," and the charges they made--You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy--went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It's over.
Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry. The other day, Dana Milbank, an important reporter for the Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the capital, wrote a piece deriding Judge Alito. Once such a piece would have been important. Men in the White House would have fretted over its implications. But within hours of filing, Mr. Milbank found his thinking analyzed and dismissed on the Internet; National Review Online called him a "policy bimbo."
hot black air
...Citing Katrina as a case-in-point, some environmentalists say global warming impacts minorities and the disadvantaged harder than other groups. If global warming gets worse, many African-American communities will be more vulnerable to breathing ailments, insect-carried diseases and heat-related illness and death. But asking Black folks to give up gas-guzzling SUV’s and other bling is a tough sell.
"Black folks" drive SUVs and drench themselves in bling? What a stereotype.
“It has been ingrained in our heads that to be anything, you must have everything,” says EJCC steering committee member Nia Robinson. “Because some of us have a big car and a nice house, people aren’t seeing that racism still exists. But Katrina showed that racism is alive and well in America. Now that people have that idea, I think we’re in a really critical stage to organize, educate and mobilize people.”
All Katrina showed is that racism remains a potent political weapon, regardless of the facts. And that there are plenty of scoundrels in the media and the Democrat party willing to wield it.
THURsday january 19, 2006
you go, girl!
Condoleeza Rice begins reforming Foggy Bottom:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that she will shift hundreds of Foreign Service positions from Europe and Washington to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere as part of a broad restructuring of the diplomatic corps that she has dubbed "transformational diplomacy."
The State Department's culture of deployment and ideas about career advancement must alter now that the Cold War is over and the United States is battling transnational threats of terrorism, drug smuggling and disease, Rice said in a speech at Georgetown University. "The greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them," she said. "The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power."
As part of the change in priorities, Rice announced that diplomats will not be promoted into the senior ranks unless they accept assignments in dangerous posts, gain expertise in at least two regions and are fluent in two foreign languages, citing Chinese, Urdu and Arabic as a few preferred examples.
Rice noted that the United States has nearly as many State Department personnel in Germany -- which has 82 million people -- as in India, with 1 billion people. As a first step, 100 jobs in Europe and Washington will be immediately shifted to expanded embassies in countries such as India, China and Lebanon. Many of these diplomats had been scheduled to rotate into coveted posts in European capitals this summer, and the sudden change in assignment has caused some distress, State Department officials said.
Three days after Martin Luther King Day, with all its attendant race-baiting speeches (Hillary's "plantation" and Ray Nagin's "chocolate city"), a black woman begins reforming one of the clubbiest bureaucracies in the nation.
Actions trump words every time.
one taco over the line
Mexico's fattest man (1204 pounds).
canadian media playing down polls
...favoring the surging Tory party. What else is new?
bin laden extends olive branch
Osama bin Laden warned that al Qaeda was preparing new attacks inside the United States, but said the group was open to a conditional truce with Americans, according to an audio tape attributed to him on Thursday.
Here are the conditions:
- all homosexuals must be sent to Camp for Joy Boys
- women must remain barefoot and pregnant. All driver's licenses to females must be immediately revoked.
- convert the National Cathedral into the National Mosque
- Sharia is the new super-duper precedent/litmus test for Supreme Court nominees
- any ideas not mentioned in Koran are henceforth banished from the public square
- etc.
ISRAEL VERSUS THE MEDIA
VDH Private Papers reviews The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, by Stephanie Gutmann:
Gutmann believes that Israel has been steadily defeated on the media front, and with deadly consequences. In March 2002, for instance, Israeli army planners were preparing a full-scale assault against West Bank terrorist networks. But they recalled the public-relations pummeling the country had endured during the previous two years, in which the United Nations, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, and others routinely condemned Israel for “excessive force.” And so, instead of lightning air strikes, Operation Defensive Shield relied on door-to-door raids, resulting in the deaths of 23 Israeli soldiers. Military superiority over its enemies is no advantage if Israel is continually dissuaded from using it.
In the media war, Israel has three disadvantages. The first is an open society, which allows reporters (and filmmakers and activists and human-rights observers) the freedom to roam, record, and interview in first-world comfort. This has saddled Israel with what may be the world’s highest per capita concentration of reporters. Jerusalem is host to 350 permanent foreign news bureaus, as many as New York, London, or Moscow; the volume of reportage on Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is 75 times greater than on any other area of comparable population. This obsessive attention necessarily distorts, by casting the Israel-Palestinian war in a theatric, world-historical light.
In the last decade, around 4,500 Israeli and Palestinian lives have been lost to the fighting. The Russo-Chechen war has killed 50,000 (11 times as many), the Darfur crisis has killed 180,000 (40 times as many), and the Congolese civil war has killed 3.5 million (778 times as many). But very few Americans can call to mind images of the ghastly violence in Chechnya, Sudan, or Congo—or even identify the warring parties—because these are places so dangerous that the New York Times simply cannot responsibly send a reporter there, much less a bureau.
If freedom is disadvantageous, this goes double when you happen to abut a shameless, propagandizing Arab dictatorship. According to Gutmann, the Palestinian Authority under Arafat used “the combat theatre (the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel) as a kind of soundstage.” Those famous scenes of Palestinian boys with rocks confronting soldiers, for example, are usually choreographed. Palestinian youths, exhorted by parents, teachers, and their televisions to pelt Israeli soldiers, are so conscious of the media presence themselves that they often don’t start in with the stones until photographers arrive. Israeli soldiers are actually forewarned of clashes when film crews suddenly materialize. (Coalition forces have experienced the same phenomenon in Iraq.)
wednesday january 18, 2006
gullible is as gullible does
Kevin Cooper is an inmate on California's death row who escaped execution on Feb. 9, 2004, when the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a last-minute stay to retest evidence. This evidence withstood that retesting, and other defense arguments have been since shot down in federal district court. The appeals process on those findings is now working its way through the courts, and the earliest he may face execution again--if appeals go in favor of the state--may be late this year.
His case has slipped into the background lately as death-penalty foes stole the airways in hopes of clemency for Stanley "Tookie" Williams. Yet the two murderers share many of the same supporters. As the "Save Tookie" campaign gathered thousands of signatures petitioning for the quadruple killer's clemency, the "Save Kevin Cooper" Web site has been championing his cause and featuring his writings.
Cooper's case is one in which it's hard to imagine anyone jumping on his bandwagon. He was an inmate at the California Institution for Men in Chino, serving time for burglary, when he escaped on June 2, 1983. Two days later he broke into the Chino Hills home of the Ryen family as they were sleeping and killed the parents, Douglas and Peggy, along with 10-year-old Jessica Ryen and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, a friend of Joshua Ryen, who was the only family member to survive. "The first time I met Kevin Cooper I was 8 years old and he slit my throat," Joshua Ryen testified at an April 22 hearing in U.S. District Court in San Diego. "He hit me with a hatchet and put a hole in my skull. . . . I laid there 11 hours looking at my mother who was right beside me."
But Cooper does not lack supporters: the likes of Jesse Jackson, Mike Farrell, Richard Dreyfuss, Sean Penn and Denzel Washington have come to his defense. One would think that appropriate monikers for Cooper would have career-sensitive celebrities running for the hills: Ax murderer. Child killer. Mass murderer.
al gore's creative history
Al Gore has always been an artless fibber, unlike his hero Bill Clinton. But does he think we don't know basic American history? An excerpt from his speech on Monday:
The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.
Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the full Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights was created ten years after the Revolutionary War ended.
no need to duck
The best news from Iraq this year would certainly be the long New York Times report of Jan. 12 on the murderous strife between local "insurgents" and al-Qaida infiltrators. This was also among the best news from last year.
For months, coalition soldiers in Iraq had been telling anyone who would care to listen that they had noticed a new phenomenon: heavy fire that they didn't have to duck. On analysis, this turned out to be shooting or shelling apparently "incoming" from one "insurgent position" but actually directed at another one.
old scum is still scum
California executed its oldest condemned inmate early yesterday for arranging a triple murder 25 years ago. Clarence Allen was pronounced dead by lethal injection at San Quentin prison, less than an hour after his 76th birthday ended at midnight. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, had rejected pleas for clemency. Allen, who was mostly blind and deaf, could not walk, had a near-fatal heart attack in September, only to be revived and returned to death row.
Naturally, this upset Europe's "top human rights watchdog" who found executing an old man "grotesque." Remember that Allen was executed for arranging the contract murders of three people while he was already in prison.
The damage Allen did extends beyond the tragedy of those victims and their families. A civil society relies on witnesses coming forward to testify in open court. If potential witnesses know that a man locked up in prison could still reach out and have them murdered, the whole system is weakened.
The tragedy is that Clarence Allen was able to enjoy 25 years of whatever pleasures available to him inside San Quentin. Whether it was the pleasure of his first sip of coffee in the morning or looking at clouds from the exercise yard, it was too good for him.
omigod!
Teen girls are a big influence on language.
THERE she is, flashing whale tail and lighting up another square. She’s with her so exogal friends and they’re just all trying to catch the eye of the lollipops who probably regard her as a chickenhead but will, like, all stare and point at her muffin top anyway ...
None of which will make sense to anyone other than the average 16-year-old girl from southern California, armed with a cellphone, a wide circle of friends and a keen fashion sense. But the rest of us should pay attention to her inane babbling for, according to an academic study, this US teen is the most powerful influence on the evolution of the English language around the world.
She has, according to Sali Tagliamonte, associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, ensured the success of new phrases including, among others, “muffin top” (a bulge of flesh over low-cut jeans), “exogal” (an extremely thin contemporary) and “whale tail” (the appearance of thong underwear above the waistband of a pair of low-slung jeans or a skirt).
like a stud finder
...but in a different vein.
red states could get redder
...assisted suicide gets the nod.
bush bashing as a campaign tactic
...in Canada. As the Liberals look at defeat, they're getting nasty.
Amid growing signals of panic in the Liberal ranks, the party has launched a series of crudely anti-American commercials. One stated that victory for the 47-year-old Tory leader, Stephen Harper, would "bring a smile to George W Bush's face".
Another described Mr Harper as "pro-Iraqi war, anti-Kyoto, socially conservative... Bush's new best friend".
What slurs, eh?
kill me or pay up
A woman who hired a hitman to kill her has been awarded £2,000 because she is still alive
IT SOUNDS like the law of 1920s East Side Chicago, but it is also the law of England.A contract is a contract, even if it is a contract to kill.
Break it, and if the mob don’t get you, Maidstone Crown Court will.
Kevin Reeves, 40, was jailed for 15 months and ordered to pay £2,000 compensation after accepting £20,000 from a friend so depressed that she asked him to find a hitman to murder her. He even offered to do it himself, but got no further than pocketing the money.
tuesday january 17, 2006
a bad welcome-home gift
...for Nick Harper's wife. Click image for details on the All Men Are Bastards knife block.
powerlessness corrupts, too
From Best of the Web.
We've heard a lot about the problems of congressional Republicans, in terms of both corruption and ideological drift away from the small-government philosophy that brought the party to power in 1994. There is much validity to these criticisms. Power corrupts.
Gore, however, exemplifies how powerlessness also corrupts: by producing paranoia, persecution fantasies and a generally irresponsible politics. Republicans ought to pay a price for their shortcomings, but given the choice between Democratic paranoia and Republican profligacy, voters very well may decide that the latter is the lesser evil.
wal-mart for liberals
Straight talk from an economist.
hillary looks in mirror, sees ugliness
“We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence,” Sen. Hillary Clinton said. “I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country.”
Let's see:
- Travelgate scandal.
- Novice investor Hillary turns $10k into $100k in the commodities market in one year.
- Clinton administration accidently bombs Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia.
- Clinton White House found to have 900 confidential FBI files on key Republicans.
- Clinton rents out Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign cash. Invents new ways to bend every campaign law on the books.
- Al Gore lies about money laundering fundraiser at Buddhist temple.
- Chinese Army donates $300,000 to Democrat party.
- Clinton sells advanced missile technology to China
- Clinton ignores growing terror threat, gets punked by Saddam.
- Nora and Gene Kung Ho Lum, Mac McLarty Oklahoma natural gas scandal.
- Clinton pardons drug kingpins and fugitive Marc Rich
- Nora and Gene Kung Ho Lum, Mac McLarty Oklahoma natural gas scandal.
- Clinton's Riady family/Lippo Group scandals.
- Bill and Hillary swiping items from White House on the way out the door
Ah yes, her co-presidency was indeed corrupt and incompetent. We feel her pain.
What? Huh? Y'say she meant Bush? She is a pain.
the swarm
Mohammed at Iraq the Model:
I think that now it seems that the greatest danger facing Iraq is not al-Qaeda because rejecting this organization by the Iraqi people was just a matter of time; the greatest danger right now is the possible interference of the neighbors in Iraq’s internal affairs to destabilize the country and impede the political process in the effort to escape the pressure applied by the international community on those neighbors and I think the interference this time will focus more on recruiting certain political powers in Iraq to implement the plans of those countries rather than using old allies like al-Qaeda or other terror groups.
The reason why I’m expecting this to happen is because lately we’ve been hearing Syrian and Iranian officials repeatedly saying that America wouldn’t dare escalate the situation with them as long as America is stuck in the Iraqi swarm.
It looks like the regimes in Syria and Iran have their eyes focused on the “Iraqi swarm” and forgetting the swarms forming beneath their feet…
monday january 16, 2006
foghorn leghorn
Al Gore vented again today to an audience of the faithful, accusing President Bush of breaking the law by tapping incoming phone calls from international terrorists.
A humble man might be embarassed for his role in an administration that waged wars on Big Tobacco, while letting Big Terror metastasize. Not Al, though.
His outrage is phony. Again, we draw you to this excerpt from Richard Clark's book. Al is gung-ho about practicing rendition., courtesy of Tigerhawk:
Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, "That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass." (pp. 143-144)
Gateway Pundit has a full roundup of Gore hypocrisy.
the ipod flea
You'll be itching to use it. Video.
attorneys general
Lyndon Johnson supposedly said appointing Ramsey Clark as Attorney General was the biggest mistake of his presidency. Given the lunatic fringe Clark inhabits helps define (pro-Saddam, pro-Mumia, anti-America etc.), that makes sense. Clark's successor, Nicholas Katzenbach, wrote an op-ed today that Powerline skewers.
consumer news
Get free 411 calls from your cell phone. Put your cell number on the Do Not Call list. Details here.
troubling
I find it, as grave somber Senate Democrats like to say, "troubling." Indeed, I find it not just "troubling" but sad that a party once so good at "the politics of personal destruction" has got so bad at it. The last time they had a Supreme Court nominee to hang upside down in the Democrat bondage dungeon was the John Roberts hearings. And at least, when hatchet man Chuck Schumer professed himself "troubled" by the "fullness" of John Roberts' "heart," the crack oppo-research guys had uncovered an "inappropriate" use of the word "amigo" by Roberts back in the early '80s.
But, with Sam Alito the worst they come could up with was that he might have been around some other guy who might have used the word "amigo." Not back in the early '80s, but in the early '70s.
That's it? It's a tragedy to watch once-fearsome attack dogs spend a week chasing their tails because they're "concerned" about the "Concerned Alumni of Princeton" -- though, of course, these days one's heartened to find Sen. Kennedy still capable of chasing tail. Still, would it be too much to ask these guys to put in a little rehearsal time and practice grilling themselves in front of the bedroom mirror...
It seems unfair that only Sam Alito should get to play this game. Couldn't somebody develop some software you could stick in your DVD and play "Senate Confirmation" at home? You'd sit on the sofa and a hologram of Joe Biden with eerily lifelike adjustable hair would hector you for hours on end for being uncooperative -- ''C'mon, old buddy, throw me a bone here, willya?" -- while your spouse bursts into tears and flees in terror.
Even smear tactics require a certain plausibility. When you damn someone as a big scary mega-troubling racist misogynist homophobe and he seems to any rational observer perfectly non-scary and non-troubling, eventually you make yourself ridiculous. The boy who cried "Wolf!" at least took the precaution of doing so when there was no alleged predator in view. If he'd stood there crying "Wolf!" while pointing at a hamster, he'd have been led away for counseling. That's the stage the Senate Democrats are at.
More "troubling" for the party, the whole scarified routine is over something of ever more doubtful political value. Throughout last week's hearings, the Democrats had five key concerns: abortion, warrantless wiretaps, abortion, abortion and abortion. Neither abortion absolutism nor constitutional protection for terrorists resonates with the broader public -- and, indeed, going on cable TV round the clock for a week to flaunt such peculiar fixations only makes them look ever more disconnected from reality. When Ted Kennedy & Co. were demanding that the ancient records of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton be subpoenaed, I received a fluttering of e-mails comparing the Dems to Sen. McCarthy. But Red-baiting, unlike partial-birth abortion, had the advantage of public support.
how andy kwok got his monicker
What's in a friggin' name?
sunday january 15, 2006
tigerhawk right on "gang of 14"
one more reason not to aarp
As if AARP's dishonest shilling against Social Security Reform were not enough, they've given Harry Belafonte their 2006 Humanitarian Award:
...these days he's busier than ever, speaking out against civil injustice and traveling as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. "There's no question that of all the agencies within the UN, UNICEF is the most compelling, the most successful, and the most dynamic," he says. Belafonte speaks with some authority, having been associated with the organization since 1987, not long after he spearheaded the classic concert and recording of "We Are the World," which raised more than $100 million for famine relief worldwide.
And busy kissing Hugo Chavez's ass and calling George Bush "the world's biggest terrorist." Chavez is a tyrant to watch, one who is busy cozying up to Iran and Fidel Castro and supporting narco-terrorists in neighboring Colombia.
With Iranian nuclear aspirations gaining notice this week, it's worth directing attention to the growing relationship between Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez. The Reagan administration repulsed Soviet efforts to set up camp in Central America. Iranian designs on Venezuela perhaps deserve similar U.S. attention.
The warmth and moral support between Ahmadinejad and Chávez is very public. The two tyrants are a lot more than just pen pals. Venezuela has made it clear that it backs Iran's nuclear ambitions and embraces the mullahs' hateful anti-Semitism. What remains more speculative is just how far along Iran is in putting down roots in Venezuela...
Chavez is also an anti-Semite. On a Christmas Eve TV broadcast, Chávez declared that "minorities, the descendants of those who crucified Christ, have taken over the riches of the world." I wonder how Belafonte explains that to his friends in Hollywood.
"We Are the World" raised lots of money intended to end famine. But much of the food aid went into the hands of the tyrants causing the famine (using starvation as a weapon), thus prolonging the misery.
By contrast, George W. Bush's administration negotiated an end to the 40-year civil war in Sudan between the north and south that killed 2.3 million people.
moments of truth
THE fall of [Sen. Joe] McCarthy forced conservatives to change their political style. Smearing opponents as "commies" or "pinkos" only backfired. Appealing to racial or anti-Semitic stereotypes told the public more about the accuser than the accused.
The right began policing its own. Conservatives who didn't or couldn't make the adjustment were relegated to the swamps of the John Birch Society — or later, like white supremacist David Duke or evangelist Pat Robertson, instantly denounced. The new attitude was embodied in a new magazine that appeared soon after McCarthy's fall, William F. Buckley's National Review, which taught conservatives that they could gain more through reasoned debate than through conspiracy theories, name-calling, and sleazy innuendo.
Conservatives learned their lesson: The Reagan Revolution would be the result.
BUT liberals have not learned this lesson. McCarthy's defeat seemed to vindicate their own excesses. Liberals began to label conservatives as closet fascists, embodiments of a primitive and pathological "paranoid style" of politics, while the media applauded.
Over the next decades, while conservatives were reining in the rhetoric, liberals were settling into the habit of attacking every Republican as a crypto-Nazi, a racist, a sexist and a religious bigot — and those who supported them as an ignorant redneck lynch mob.
So instead of a Red Scare, America endured 30 years of a Conservative Scare. The volume and fury of denunciation reached new heights with each battle over GOP Supreme Court nominees, from Clement Haynesworth through Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas — to Sam Alito.
Democrats came to see themselves as entitled to smear every conservative as a racist and every conservative organization as a looming threat to civil liberties, while the media accepted that rhetorical excess as standard operating procedure.
And — like McCarthy — as the Democrats' political fortunes began to slip, they assumed that the way to reverse course was to ramp up the rhetoric, "to get their message out," instead of turning it down.
Then came Wednesday.
THIS time, the TV camera, trained by chance on Mrs. Alito's face, revealed the human cost of their recklessness — just as it did that June afternoon in 1954.
The media filter's control of the direction of our public perceptions and sympathies has been suddenly reversed. Americans can see which is the party of reason and compassion, and which the party of demagogues.
Of course, regardless of what a jerk McCarthy was, there were communists in the American government and they did real damage to us and the free world.
Does anyone seriously believe that Sam Alito is a closet racist?
hitchcock would've loved this item
A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.
off the hook
There's no physical evidence that the family who gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism the ill-fated pioneers have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said Thursday.
why elections matter
Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.
In interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.
Republicans say that Mr. Bush, in making conservative judicial choices, has been doing precisely what he said he would do in both of his presidential campaigns. Indeed, they say, his re-election, and the election of a Republican Congress, meant that the choices reflected the views of much of the American public.
dems dance alone
Let me be clear: attacks on Murtha's Vietnam record are pointless. Murtha's latest statements against the success of US troops in Iraq speak for themselves; his current behavior renders his past insignificant. Democrats, grown tired of waiting for an attack on Murtha's war record from the Right, have created their own. He's painted as a victim now - of "right wing chickenhawk" contempt for real war heroes. But those serious about standing up to the current John Murtha would be well advised to let his fellow Democrats and the mainstream media keep this war "unilateral".
Green Eggs and Ham
What do you get when you cross your average pig with a jellyfish? Well, a glow-in-the-dark porker, of course. Scientists from National Taiwan University have announced that they've made fully fluorescent green animals by injecting genetic material from jellyfish into pig embryos.
Apparently, there have been partially green pigs before, but the creators proudly claim these are the only ones green inside and out. "Even their hearts and internal organs are green," Professor Wu Shinn-Chih told the Reuters news agency. That will certainly please fans of the Dr. Seuss classic "Green Eggs and Ham" but they're not the only fluorescent animals out there. Does anyone remember the glowing fish or glowing bunny?
reasons for optimism in iraq
As the Haj holidays end Iraqi politics is expected to shift into high gear with the formation of a new government top of the agenda.
Although all the parties intend to play hardball there are at least three reasons for optimism.
The first is that the numerous parties and groups that contested last month’s general election are coalescing into four big blocs, reversing a tendency towards fragmentation caused by personal and sectarian agendas.
As usual in post-liberation Iraq the Kurds have taken the lead in that direction by announcing an “irrevocable merger” of the two rival administrations they had set up in Suleymaniah and Erbil since 1991. Those familiar with Kurdish politics would know how important that development is for Iraq as a whole. The two rival administrations represented two political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (KDPI) that had a history of four decades of mutual suspicion and enmity before the 2003 liberation. The PUK and the KDPI had fought at least three civil wars, the last in 1995, and, in the process, had made alliance with almost anybody including Saddam Hussein and the mullahs in Tehran.
This Kurdish unity creates a major force against the threat of sectarian politics.
saturday january 14, 2006
absolut russia
At this point you're almost numb: You've been celebrating holidays for something like a month and a half and you're asking yourself (or your liver is asking you) Haven't we had enough fun yet?
No, you haven't. Obviously. The table was barely cleared after Saturday's Russian Christmas feast when your friends announced that yet another holiday, this one bafflingly called Old New Year, was looming nigh, Jan. 14. Now you're wondering aloud to anyone within earshot: Is there no end to this revelry? Am I stuck in college forever?
russian gas
Gazprom has overtaken Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble to join the world's 10 largest companies by market value after its shares surged in London and Moscow.
The state-controlled company's London-traded American Depositary Receipts had advanced 8.7 percent to $91.60 by mid-afternoon Thursday in Britain, valuing the company at $217 billion.
That makes the Moscow-based company the seventh-biggest in the world, just behind Royal Dutch Shell, Europe's No. 2 oil company.
President Vladimir Putin is trying to build Gazprom into an international energy provider big enough to compete with Texas-based ExxonMobil, whose $379 billion market value makes it the world's biggest publicly traded company. Gazprom, which supplies one-quarter of Europe's gas, rattled the continent on New Year's Day by cutting supplies to Ukraine, the main gateway for its exports to countries including Germany and Italy.
"The publicity surrounding the Ukrainian crisis probably contributed about $20 billion to Gazprom's market value," said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at brokerage Alfa Bank. "The crisis raised Gazprom's profile around the world and a lot of investors are buying shares as a result."
george galloway reality tv
You remember Galloway, right? Looney left member of British Parliament? Defender of Saddam? Oil scammer? Cast member of Big Brother along with Dennis Rodman? The last one is new.
Read the London Telegraph story. Then watch the parody video of George pretending to be a cat. I guess the stunt was part of the show. Weird.
uh, because he's a criminal?
Modern DNA tests have confirmed the guilt of a Virginia man who had proclaimed he was innocent of murder and rape even as he was strapped into the electric chair and executed more than a decade ago, the governor announced yesterday.
The results stunned and disappointed those who have fought a 25-year crusade to prove that Roger K. Coleman was innocent. They also dashed hopes among death penalty foes that the case would catalyze opposition to capital punishment across the country.
Coleman's assertions of innocence and questions over the strength of the evidence prompted Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey charity that investigates wrongful convictions, to investigate the case. Media organizations, including The Washington Post, joined Centurion in an unsuccessful court fight to have the DNA tests conducted years ago.
Yesterday, James C. McCloskey, Centurion's executive director, said he felt betrayed by the man whose last words included the statement, "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight."
"How can somebody, with such equanimity, such dignity, such quiet confidence, make those his final words even though he is guilty?" McCloskey said.
teaching irony
ABC's John Stossel made a good case for school choice last night on his "Stupid in America" special. A better title would have been "Ignorant in America" because the students are not stupid, the system is. He covered a lot of ground, but here's one fact that jumped out: in Belgium, which spends far less per student than American schools, the funding is attached to the student, not the school.
So Belgian parents have the power to choose which school their children will attend, forcing schools to be competitive. Bad schools go out of business. "School choice" in America is considered a radical idea. The Florida Supreme Court just invalidated its state's voucher program.
Universal public education was an idea pioneered in the United States. The legacy of that radical idea is a government monopoly on teaching our kids (one which only rich people can escape). Europe started from a system of private schools.
Now we find Belgium, a socialistic country, with an entrepreneurial and vital education system. The free enterprise United States has a sclerotic, bureaucratic system.
By the way, Stossel gave an identical test to a class of Belgian and American students. The Belgians whipped us.
Jim Bass
UPDATE: ABC now has a link to the show.
friday january 13, 2006
new york times: all the news al-qaeda needs
Sales of throw away cell phones have boomed in the middle east since the NYT broke the NSA story.
Of course, the New York Times defended the Echelon surveillance program under Clinton, although Clinton's spying predated the chilling reality of 9/11.
just like christmas in cambodia
U.S. Senator and former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said on Thursday that Iran was making a dangerous choice in pushing ahead with its nuclear ambitions.
"Iran has made a dangerous and silly decision of confronting not just the U.S. government but the entire international community," Kerry told reporters in the southern Indian technology hub of Hyderabad during a visit to India.
Kids believe in Santa Claus. Liberals believe in an "international community."
important health alert
Millions of women may be jogging their way to sagging breasts as they set off on New Year fitness regimes without suitable bras, research suggests.
Some 9.5 million British women could be irreversibly damaging their busts by exercising without a proper sports bra, the Portsmouth University team said.
They found breasts moved in a 3D figure of eight and that uncontrolled movement strained fragile tissues and ligaments.
For god's sake ladies, take care of yourselves. The world is watching.
senatorial humor
Sen. Joe Biden is a satirist's dream. Here's a taste from Protein Wisdom:
Biden: “Now, my question, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, is this: If you could—that is to say, were the medical technology available, and were you to find that Constitution silent on the matter under its enumerated powers —would you be averse to ruling in favor of a state statute—say, from Mississippi or some other redneck backwater—that allows for an interested local government, by legislative fiat, to take control of a woman’s uterus?”
Alito: “—I’m not sure I understand the question, Senator --”
Biden: “Take control of it. Take ownership. Have it physically removed from her body so that they can monitor it for appropriate, Godly, reproductive use.”
Alito: “You mean...like what, exactly? Put it in a jar or some such?”
Biden: “Consitutionally speaking, yes. Certainly. Or perhaps carry it around with them, like tiny little uterus purses, ones that are roughly equivalent in size and function to the pouches of marsupials. Only, you know, appropriately decorative—with sequins and buckles and piping and the like.”
Alito: “Why on earth would I want to do that --?”
Biden: “With all due respect, Judge, don’t dodge the question. Will you or will you not allow hillbillies to take control of a woman’s uterus by removing it from her body and using it as a kind of mini-accesorized rucksack? A simple yes or no will do, sir!”
And from Scrappleface:
During an emotional barrage of questions about 20-year-old written statements by Judge Samuel Alito, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-MA, today inadvertently asked the Supreme Court nominee if he “believes in the principle of one fetus, one vote.”
Aides immediately alerted Sen. Kennedy that he had co-mingled two major Supreme Court decisions in his question, but Judge Alito chose to answer it anyway.
"Sen. Kennedy, I appreciate that question,” said the federal appeals court judge. “At no time have I ever opposed the right of a fetus — without regard to political affiliation, race, or sex — to cast a ballot once he or she has reached legal voting age. You raise issues of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, freedom of choice and civil liberties. Far be it from a judge, or anyone else, to ever interfere with those unalienable rights.”
And then there's the joke that Kennedy ("the dumb brother") just didn't get:
Probing the debate over Alito's having said he was a member of the conservative Concerned Alumni of Princeton on a 1985 job application with the Reagan Justice Department, I spoke to conservative intellectual Dinesh D'Souza of the Hoover Institution yesterday.
D'Souza worked for CAP from 1983 to 1985, editing CAP's controversial Prospect magazine. He said a number of the Democratic attacks on Samuel Alito were based on falsehoods.
First off, D'Souza says, one of the two stories from Prospect that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, read this week at the confirmation hearings was intended as a satire.
The 1983 essay "In Defense of Elitism" by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic..."
The essay may not have been funny, D'Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor.
"I think left-wing groups have been feeding Senator Kennedy snippets and he has been mindlessly reciting them," D'Souza said. "It was a satire."
Debra Saunders has a very funny idea:
IF BY SOME bizarre twist of fate, the Senate fails to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, I have a suggestion for President Bush's next pick: Ted Kennedy. After all, if some Democrats can make a federal case out of Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton -- targeting his inclusion of that membership in a resume he submitted 20 years ago and his failure to remember being in the group -- then I'd like to see how they tackle Chappaquiddick.
(For you kids, the Massachusetts senator drove a car into the drink in Chappaquiddick in 1969. Kennedy swam away, passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, drowned. The accident was tragic. Kennedy's behavior afterward, however, was criminal.
Rather than rushing to police after the 11:15 p.m. accident so that they could try to rescue Kopechne, Kennedy went back to his hotel. He did not call police until the next morning. Kennedy said he delayed because he panicked and was in shock. Many suspect that he spent those hours trying to construct an alibi. After an investigation probably less intense than the Democrats' vetting of Alito's resumes, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. A judge sentenced Kennedy to two months, suspended.)
I've never understood what senators were thinking in allowing Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee in the first place. While Kennedy seems to consider himself a champion for the little guy, he is a walking tribute to a system that, in its low moments, allows the rich and powerful to get away with crimes that would put others behind bars. He is a discredit to the system.
thursday january 12, 2006
sicko
That's the working title of Michael Moore's next diatribe, which is about health care. You can expect he'll have nice things to say about Canadian health care. Inoculate yourself by reading this:
How would you like to buy a family doctor for $3,500?
More than 20,000 Londoners and 1.4 million Ontarians who lack that key first link into the health-care system might contemplate that as they head to walk-in clinics or linger in emergency departments.
By this summer, that thought could become a reality for residents of London, Toronto and Ottawa.
But there's a catch -- it won't come cheap.
Clients willing to shell out a $1,200 enrolment fee and yearly dues of $2,300 can become members of three for-profit medical clinics to open in those three cities this summer by Vancouver-based Copeman Healthcare Inc.
And founder Don Copeman said yesterday he'd like to open similar clinics across Canada in the next few years. But what some view as a bold challenge to Canada's coveted public health-care system is already sounding alarm bells.
Health Minister George Smitherman said yesterday the Ontario government is reviewing the legality of such private health-care clinics.
It's probably easier to sell sexual favors legally (and with less stigma) in Canada than medical care. It took a lawsuit last year to allow Canadians the right to obtain medical care outside the Canadian system.
And London and area health-care workers are split on the issue.
"My grave concern is that this will deny equal access to health-care services, depending on what you can afford," said Dawn Blenkhorn-Bax, local co-ordinator of Ontario Nurses Association Local 100, representing about 1,600 London nurses, allied health care, blood services and nursing home employees.
Yes, everyone must be equally inconvenienced. That's liberal enlightenment.
Blenkhorn-Bax said such clinics also run the risk of drawing health-care professionals away from desperately short-staffed hospitals and nursing homes.
"I can guarantee you very few family physicians would receive $1,200 a year from a single patient through OHIP," she said.
But outspoken Huron County emergency doctor Ken Milne said he welcomes the clinics.
Unlike some critics such as Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton, who yesterday dismissed the clinics as an "elitist club," Milne said anything that might draw physicians back into family medicine and reduce the number of "orphan patients" -- the 1.4 million Ontarians who lack a family doctor -- is a good thing.
canadian smear
The liberal party in Canada appears to be headed for defeat in the elections. You can tell by how desperate they've become.
moolah spread
Where Jack Abramoff's money went.
china curing poverty
"China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty."
It is just one statement in an interesting new book titled "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. But it has huge implications.
I haven't checked out the statistics but they sound reasonable. If so, this is something worth everyone's attention.
People on the political left make a lot of noise about poverty and advocate all sorts of programs and policies to reduce it but they show incredibly little interest in how poverty has actually been reduced, whether in China or anywhere else.
You can bet the rent money that the left will show little or no interest in how Chinese by the millions are rising out of poverty every year. The left showed far more interest in China back when it was run by Mao in far left fashion -- and when millions of Chinese were starving.
Those of us who are not on the left ought to take a closer look at today's Chinese rising out of poverty.
First of all, what does it even mean to say that "China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty"? Where would the Chinese government get the money to do that?
The only people the Chinese government can tax are mainly the people in China. A country can't lift itself up by its own bootstraps that way. Nor has there ever been enough foreign aid to lift a million people a month out of poverty.
If the Chinese government hasn't done it, then who has? The Chinese people. They did not rise out of poverty by receiving largess from anybody.
The only thing that can cure poverty is wealth. The Chinese acquired wealth the old-fashioned way: They created it.
wednesday january 11, 2006
loathsome ted: no sense of decency
Liberlas love to toss around "McCarthy" as an epithet. But the closest we've come to it is from Sen. Ted Kennedy and his foul attempt today at guilt-by-association. Samuel Alito, as a judge, held his temper. Too bad. Wouldn't it have been great if Alito had responded with questions of his own, such as:
- Senator Kennedy, is it not true that you spend holidays in close quarters with an accused rapist?*
- Senator Kennedy, since you are asking about my college days, why you cheated at Harvard and were expelled?
- And a followup question: how did you manage to get re-admitted to Harvard? Was it your family's money and clout that greased the wheels?
- Senator Kennedy, after you saved your skin and left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown, you did not report the accident for ten hours. Do you consider yourself a feminist?
- Senator Kennedy, is it not true that you caucus in the senate with a man who once held a high rank in the Ku Klux Klan?**
* Michael Kennedy Smith, who was found not guilty.
** Sen. Robert Byrd
We have become so accustomed to distortions and outright lies, you'd think it's patriotic to insinuate decent nominees are racists, sexists or liars. "Oh, that's just par for the course" is no longer an observation; it's a rationalization.
Here's just one of the dozens of deceitful low blows aimed at Samuel Alito. In his opening statement Monday, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said Alito "has not written one single opinion on the merits in favor of a person of color alleging race discrimination on the job" among the thousands of cases that came before him. Any reasonable person hearing that would assume Kennedy was calling Alito at minimum "insensitive" or, more likely, a racist. But Kennedy was lying — albeit in a very lawyerly way.
Alito has ruled for the plaintiff in many racial discrimination cases, but he wasn't always the guy on the multi-judge appellate panels who wrote the opinions. In fact, Alito has written many opinions siding with plaintiffs "of color." Even so — as appeals court judges are wont to do — he didn't always write to the "merits" of the plaintiff's claim so much as to the relevant legal issues. So by peeling off selective opinions, Kennedy is left with the slimy insinuation that Alito is biased against minorities. But instead of, "Have you no shame, senator?" we get, "It's par for the course."
us information tech. employment at 2001 levels
Says Jayson at Polipundit:
Wow, despite the dot.com bust, 9/11, the corporate recession, {gulp} ‘outsourcing,’ and everything else too???
I’ll blame the economy for that.
I’ll also blame freer trade and the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans who actually work for their livings.
What say you, Krugman-Dobbs-Chomsky?
senator(s) blowhard
From Ankle-biting Pundits: during the John Roberts confirmation hearing it became clear that the Senators from both parties were not interested in the nominees views on matters as much as they were in love with the sound of their own voice.
So we did something that was highly popular. We did a statistical analysis of the percentage of words spoken by each Senator compared with the number of words spoken by the nominee. We found that in nearly every case the Senators spoke far more than the nominees.
Democrats
"Rosary Joe" Biden 78-22% (DE) (3,673 - 1,013) (an 1,879 word, and 13 minute opening "question")
Chuck Schumer (NY) 75-25% (3,555-1,165)
Ted Kennedy (MA) 69-31% (3,439-1,539)
Pat Leahy (VT) 60-40% (2,714-1,874)
Russ Feingold (WI) 56-44% (2,976-2,364)
Diane Feinstein (CA) 42-58% (1,912-2,593)
Herb Kohl (WI) 37-63% (1,835-3,094)
Republicans
Mike DeWine (OH) 72-28% (3,398-1,323)
Lindsey Graham (SC) 65-35% (3,032-1,643)
Jeff Sessions (AL) 61-39% (2,827-1,773)
John Cornyn (TX) 56-44% (3,407-1,900)
Jon Kyl (AZ) 53-47% (2,594-2,255)
Orrin Hatch (UT) 54-46% (2,686-2,242)
Chuck Grassley (IA) 51-49% (2,305-2,183)
Arlen Specter (PA) 50-50% (2,232-2,194)
These folks make Oscar acceptance speeches seem humble and succinct.
1862 compared to 2006
Nothing we’ve seen in this war comes close to the vicious criticism leveled at Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the war. Nor was his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, immune from the same sort of impatient nitpicking of every difficult decision. The management of the war, just as today, was constantly second-guessed and criticized, and failure hysterically parsed for causes no matter how fantastical.
One of the most frequent charges made after a lost battle was “betrayal,” hollered not just by politicians but also by many a soldier both Union and Confederate while skedaddling from the battlefield. George McClellan, a Democrat opposed to emancipation and a notoriously timid general, was constantly accused of outright treachery by the fire-eating Republican abolitionists.
And this complaining was attended by cruel personal attacks that make the puerile Bush-bashing by Howard Dean and moveon.org seem complimentary in contrast. One of the favorite insults for Lincoln was “the original gorilla,” an allusion to speculations at the time about the Darwinian missing link. Lincoln’s striking ugliness was a constant source of amusement for his political enemies and even his political kin.
The New York Times’ Paris correspondent suggested an embargo on portraits of the president in order to preserve European support for the Union: Lincoln looked like “a man condemned to the gallows,” and some French shopkeepers were selling his portrait as that of a notorious guillotined serial killer. Keep such pictures at home, the reporter advised, for “such a face is enough to ruin the best of causes.”
Read it all.
everything must be political
...including mining accidents.
A Jan. 5 the New York Times editorial echoed this sentiment, complaining that “the Bush administration’s cramming of important posts in the Department of Interior with biased operatives from the coal, oil and gas industry is not reassuring about general safety in the mines.”
And USA Today’s Jan. 9 editorial (“Latest coal tragedy reveals lax safety enforcement”) complained that “federal regulators and judges have failed to use the tools they have to rein in those who don’t comply with the law and force needed change.” High dollar fines, it said, have dropped 12% under Bush as compared with Clinton.
In fact, mining accidents have dropped every year since Bush has been in office.
tv is better than movies
David Kronke, writing in the Los Angeles Daily News:
This is Hollywood's favorite time of the year, film's awards season, perpetuating the long-standing notion that the most significant, rewarding and exhilarating work coming out of the entertainment industry can only be seen at your local movie theater.
Bunk.
While this was once true, it is no longer. The best American television is better today than the best American movies, say a number of industry professionals who have worked in both mediums.
Indeed. Last night The Shield returned in fine form. It's on FX and repeats a few times during the week, so you can catch it if you missed it. It is not for kids.
Leary's FX series, "Rescue Me," follows Tommy Gavin, a New York firefighter scarred by the twin memories of those he lost in routine rescues and the colleagues lost on 9/11. When Tommy's not managing hair- raising rescues or cracking sharply bitter jokes, he variously drinks too much, pops too many pills, gets into downright twisted sexual relationships and ignores sundry firefighters' codes of ethics. And he's the show's hero.
Tommy is a blistering, compelling character, made all the more memorable by his contradictions - he's a miserable human being, yet a decent man. Yet he's just one of TV's current pantheon of great characters - think of Tony Soprano, the mobster whacking a guy one minute, in therapy the next. Or "Deadwood's" Al Swearengen (Ian McShane ), the brutal brothel owner with the soul of a corrosive poet. Or Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the acidic, pill-popping doctor who will save anyone but himself. Or Alda's Arnold Vinick on "The West Wing," the brilliant, iconoclastic politician who can barely censor himself.
HBO offers Deadwood and The Wire, two unsung (or undersung) masterpieces. I understand Rome was quite good, too. The first season of The Sopranos was brilliant, as was Six Feet Under. Showtime had Dead Like Me, a series I missed completely until getting it on DVD from Netflix.
Great stuff. Compare that with the flaccid Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator or the atrocious Sideways, which were considered the cream of 2004 feature films.
Kronke, a liberal, writes about willingness of TV to tackle prickly subject matter:
"Good Night, and Good Luck" articulately tackles, through the prism of history, today's tremulous media; "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" speaks truth to power, reaming the mainstream news media for failing to do so - and with sharp, literate humor - 40 weeks a year.
What tremulous media? The New York Times that waited until the morning after the Iraqi elections and the day the Senate was voting to renew the Patriot Act to splash a story they'd been holding for a year (based on leaks) about the NSA wiretaps? Or the Washington Post leaking news about a secret program of "black prisons"? Or the Cindy Sheehan carnival coverage? Or the histrionic Katrina television coverage that got most of the facts wrong, yet managed to poke President Bush with a partisan stick?
Tremulous? If only.
there's a dim bulb a risen
Michael Barone reams New York Times James Risen, the main mover in blowing the cover off the NSA anti-terror eavesdropping program:
Risen: Well, I–I think that during a period from about 2000–from 9/11 through the beginning of the gulf–the war in Iraq, I think what happened was you–we–the checks and balances that normally keep American foreign policy and national security policy towards the center kind of broke down. And you had more of a radicalization of American foreign policy in which the–the–the career professionals were not really given a chance to kind of forge a consensus within the administration. And so you had the–the–the principles–Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tenet and Rice and many others–who were meeting constantly, setting policy and really never allowed the people who understand–the experts who understand the region to have much of a say.
Couric: You suggest there was a lot of power grabbing going on.
So, "the career professionals were not really given a chance to kind of forge a consensus within the administration." Evidently, such consensus-building is how government is supposed to operate. Instead, you had folks like "the principles [sic, presumably transcriber's mistake]—Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tenet and Rice and many others—who were meeting constantly, settling policy, and really never allowed the people who understand—the experts who understand the region to have much of a say."
What a scandal! Presidential appointees like Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice and an elected official like Dick Cheney were meeting together! How dare they? And they were settling policy! Astonishing! What will such people dare to do next?
Risen makes it quite clear how he thinks the government should be run. Elected officials like the president and vice president and top presidential appointees should sit quietly in their chairs. They should not meet, at least not very often. They should wait for career government employees—"the experts who understand the region"—to "forge a consensus." Policy should always be kept "toward the center," regardless of what the American people or their elected president think.
So that is the New York Times's idea, or at least this New York Times reporter's idea, of how democratic representative government should work. Unelected bureaucrats should rule. If the policies produced by their understanding of the region should produce September 11, they should still rule. Elected officials' jobs are to sit in their chairs, to meet infrequently if at all, and to accept the decisions of the unelected and for the most part unremovable bureaucrats.
tuesday january 10, 2006
"the shield" is back!
Tonight on FX, the best cop show on TV, returns for its new season.
florida can vouch: schools uniformly bad
Get this: There's a new principle in American education -- namely, that public schools are to be "uniformly" bad. Such is the rock-bottom meaning of that 5-2 Florida Supreme Court decision last week scuttling a public school voucher program.
You needn't sift for long the legal gobbledygook to figure out that the Florida decision cuts aspiring students off at the knees and rewards substandard performance by their teachers and administrators.
Florida's constitution requires that "free public schools" be, among other things, "uniform." Which, by public consensus, many surely are -- uniformly bad. Which is why the state created a voucher program in the first place -- so that victims of such oppressive uniformity could opt either for public schools or private ones, with the state paying the bill.
Under the program, 730 such students are being educated in private schools. The idea is that we'll drag 'em back to the dungeons next fall. Why (according to the court's reasoning) should these brats, trying to claw their way out of ignorance, be allowed to undermine the Florida public school system's proud reputation for, ah, insufficiency? A vast, thundering irony here is that the constitution, besides requiring uniformity in education, mandates schools of "high quality"!
This is what happens when the government gets a monopoly on education. Just imagine if the government were given a monopoly on health care.
the latest from iraq
...the latest audio tape of Zaqrqawi urged the Iraqi Sunni parties especially the Islamic Party to abandon the political process and go back to the “right path”.
The Islamic Party didn’t need much time to voice their rejection for Zarqawi’s message and his ideology that recognizes only violence as a way to reach goals.
The 2nd man in the Islamic Party Ayad al-Samarra’i stressed that the Party has no intention to abandon the political process.
Salih al-Mutlaq is another Sunni politician who apparently feels that Zarqawi was addressing him as well. Al-Mutlaq has also condemned violence again today and stressed that “ending violence is the key to stability in Iraq”.What matters most about such immediate firm reactions to Zarqawi’s call is that they show that the gap between foreign terrorists like Zarqawi and Sunni Arabs in Iraq is growing wider by the day and perhaps the Sunni politicians’ decision to join Allawi and let him lead their alliance will contribute to pushing them to a more reasonable, moderate attitude rather than the relatively extreme attitude they adopted for a long time.
monday january 9, 2006
yes, there is a bob loblaw
Bob Loblaw is the name of the TV-advertising attorney played by "Happy Days'" Scott Baio on the great, soon-to-be-late Fox sitcom "Arrested Development," about the dysfunctional Bluth family.
At his first appearance, the has-to-be-repeated joke was his name: Say it fast, and you get the idea. It's exactly the combination of sounds my 4 year old makes when he loses interest in finishing a sentence.
It's funnier affixed to a TV-character TV lawyer. (The other great Loblaw joke, which I also can't help continuing to repeat was this, from Bob Loblaw's TV ad: "Why should YOU go to jail for a crime someone else noticed?")
Read on. There really is a lawyer with that name.
bug me, please
It's very hard to fight a terrorist war without intelligence. By definition, you can only win battles against terrorists pre-emptively -- that's to say, you find out what they're planning to do next Thursday and you stop it cold on Wednesday. Capturing them on Friday while you're still pulling your dead from the rubble is poor consolation...
It shouldn't be necessary to point out the obvious. But, unmoored from reality, wafting happily into fantasy land safe in the hermetically sealed Democrat-media bubble, Sen. Barbara Boxer and her colleagues are apparently considering impeaching the president for eavesdropping on al Qaida calls made to U.S. phone numbers. Surely, even Karl Rove can't get that lucky.
two cents: why postage went up
I have no beef with the postal service: they cover a lot of ground and do it pretty well. But with email and online bill paying, postal volume is dropping. You could assume that's why rates rose today. But you'd be wrong. The increase will fund postal workers' retirement.
Rewind to 2002, and listen to the cheering from magazine publishers who greatly rely on the postal service:
Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) commended the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s approval of the Senate postal reform bill (S.662) on June 22. The bill was passed by a vote of 15 to 1.
“The magazine industry applauds the leadership of Susan Collins (R-ME), Ted Stevens (R-AK), Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Tom Carper (D-DE) in this major positive development to move the bill forward,” said Nina Link, President and CEO, MPA. “This is important news for the magazine industry, which reaches 85% of its readers through the postal service.”
The bill allowed the postal service to increase rates to fund a $3.1 billion escrow account. Now you know.
letter to europeans
Even in this debased era of multiculturalism that misleads our youth into thinking no culture can be worse than the West, we all know in our hearts the truth that we live by and the lie that we profess — that the critic of the West would rather have his heart repaired in Berlin than in Guatemala or be a Muslim in Paris rather than a Christian in Riyadh, or a woman or homosexual in Amsterdam than in Iran, or run a newspaper in Stockholm rather than in Havana, or drink the water in Luxembourg rather than in Uganda, or object to his government in Italy rather than in China or North Korea. Radical Muslims damn Europe and praise Allah — but whenever possible from Europe rather than inside Libya, Syria, or Iran.
dirty dollars
Another financial scandal in DC.
Influence peddling, gaming the system, spreading cash around town. What a shock, eh? Democrats are singing "culture of corruption" as if they're pure. But not so fast.
Of 45 senate Democrats, 40 took moolah from Jack Abramoff. See who took how much here. Our very own Barbara Boxer grabbed more than $20,000.
Then Harry Reid has his own connections.
ugly american
Harry Belafonte goes to Caracas, kisses Hugo Chavez and calls President Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" and said:
...millions of Americans support the socialist revolution of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez's television and radio broadcast Sunday.
"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution," Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.
Well, what did you expect? After 45 years, Belafonte and his fellow showbiz idiots still haven't figured out that Fidel Castro is a psychotic monster and mass murderer. Chavez is still a wannabe.
chomsky youth?
While Germany has so much to thank the USA for - how is it then that so many Germans can't stand the leader of the United States? The answer is simple: It has to do with George W. Bush's politics, that many people see as very inconsiderate. Because he allowed the entire world feel that the USA is the only remaining superpower on earth after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The previous President of the USA, Bill Clinton, also had a lot of power. But, unlike his successor, he did not show it so openly. Clinton wanted to solve the problems of the world together with as many nations as possible.
George W. Bush, by contrast, really didn't care whether other nations agreed with his policies or not. He simply did what he wanted. In any case, he is the most powerful man in the world, and no one can do anything against his decisions. And he knows that too. That showed itself with great clarity during the Iraq War.
Did you think that came from Germany's Stern? Der Spiegel? Nope, it's from a German website for kids. David Kaspar notes:
It is a long and unfortunate practice in Germany: The political indoctrination of those who have yet to form a mature picture of the world. We at Medienkritik have already reported on a few particularly shameful instances of indoctrination from state-sponsored children's programs like "Lilipuz." But sadly, there are other groups, including a website named "Helles Koepfchen" or "bright little head", that push their political views on Germany's kids in the conveniently prepackaged form of "child-friendly" news.
That's not all. Kaspar dug deeper into the children's site and found it linked to a site that makes 9/11 sound like a Bush administration consspiracy. Sample:s
We learned that Bush & Co. were allegedly totally surprised by the attacks, but were already able to name the 19 hijackers and their mastermind Bin Laden a day later. To this day no evidence admissable in a courtroom has been found to back this claim and the true identity of those behind the attacks remains in the dark now as then.
germany's best and brightest leaving
...for the United States. And not just for a quickie visit. Why? Atlantic Review notes:
Two of the reasons he mentions are the continuingly unpromising outlook for the German job market and "absurd practices within the German academia," which will soon drive so many experts abroad that we can expect a distinct shortage of trained professionals in certain sectors. Among the highly and very highly qualified experts Germany is loosing are IT-professionals, many of whom migrating to the United States.
Canada is among other favored countries of immigration. Predominant among the emigrants are young, educated people "in their best years of earning," Bade laments. "Germany is on her way to find herself on the loser's side of the competition over the brightest minds." An additional problem he contends: While many second- or third generation immigrants to Germany are now leaving the country for better opportunities abroad, their parents and grandparents tend to stay in order to enjoy their retirement benefits in Germany."
sunday january 8, 2006
pelosi: it's all fruit to me
Time's Joe Klein:
...In the days after 9/11, [the Bush administration] asked Hayden to push the edge of existing technology and come up with the best possible program to track the terrorists. The result was the now infamous NSA data-mining operation, which began months later, in early 2002. Vast amounts of phone and computer communications by al-Qaeda suspects overseas, including some messages to people in the U.S., could now be scooped up and quickly analyzed.
The release of Pelosi's letter last week and the subsequent Times story ("Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show") left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn't exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."
Boxer and Pelosi, both from the Bay Area, both idiots. Is it something in the water? More importantly:
...It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.
There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.
morons in every camp
First goofball Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson (a media darling for his many nitwiticisms) says God punished Ariel Sharon with a stroke for...ah, who cares, it was blather. But some Israelis agree:
"The jarring fact is that he was hit from above," said Avraham Hertzlick, a Brooklyn-born shepherd who has lived in Tapuah, a remote settlement about 20 miles north of Jerusalem, for seven years. "He caused such tremendous pain to thousands of Jews, pain beyond measure…. Without a doubt, this was God's punishment."
auf wiedersehen
From David Kaspar:
Results are now in from an analysis of statistical data from 2004 regarding the situation of families in Germany, conducted by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation. As one could expect, the favorable consequences of the German Social Model clearly show up in the data.
Here is a short summary of the family situation in Germany:
- There are more couples without children than with children.
- Within Europe Germany is among the countries with the smallest share of households with children.
- One third of each age group will not have children. This is a worldwide uniquely low share.
- People's desire to have children is ever shrinking.
- Marriage is at a historical low in Germany. Those who are married will have an 38 % chance of separation.
- 12 percent of newborn's parents don't have the German citizenship. In some larger cities, more than 40 percent of children and youths have a migration background. In 2010 migrants will present a 50 percent share of the under 40 age group in many cities.
- Germany's population size shrinks and the average age rises. In 2050 every third German will be older than 65, and the share of young people (up to 20 years of age) will decline to 16 percent (now at 21 percent).
For the implications of this, read Mark Steyn's piece.
please, no more body armor
U.S. soldiers in the field were not all supportive of a Pentagon study that found improved body armor saves lives, with some troops arguing Saturday that more armor would hinder combat effectiveness.
The unreleased study examined 93 fatal wounds to Marines from the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 through June 2005. It concluded 74 of them were bullet or shrapnel wounds to shoulders or torso areas unprotected by traditional ceramic armor plating.
Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade ''Rakkasans'' are required to wear an array of protective clothing they refer to as their ''happy gear,'' ranging from Kevlar drapes over their shoulders and sides, to knee pads and fire-resistant uniforms.
But many soldiers say they feel encumbered by the weight and restricted by fabric that does not move as they do. They frequently joke as they strap on their equipment before a patrol, and express relief when they return and peel it off.
Second Lt. Josh Suthoff, 23, of Jefferson City, Miss., said he sacrifices enough movement when he wears the equipment. More armor would only increase his chances of getting killed, he said.
Meanwhile, mediacrats try to score political points by making it seem the military does not care for its soldiers:
When other mothers were starting their Christmas shopping, Elaine Brower was online buying $3,000 worth of body armor for the son who will be heading for Iraq with the Marines next month.
"I said to him, 'I don't understand why they don't give you this stuff,'" Elaine Brower recalled yesterday.
James Brower had been among the first Marines into Afghanistan after 9/11. His mother thought her nightmare was over when he returned home intact and left the Corps for the NYPD.
taxing cigarettes to benefit illegals
Normally, I would wait until later in the year to protest a proposed $2.60 per-pack tax on cigarettes being pushed for next fall by the American Cancer Society and other powerful health associations. But it's such a rotten idea, I can't wait.
Huge new taxes on specific groups of people create weird backlashes - in this case probably skyrocketing sales of black-market cigarettes as smokers find creative ways to avoid this massive grab at their wallets.
But far worse, the proposed $2.1 billion tax, which will hit a shrinking population of smokers, is horribly backward. It uses scandalously little of the windfall to pay for research into lung cancer or other smokers' diseases - 2 percent. Instead, in one of the great stealth political moves I've seen in a while, this measure would transfer money from smokers' wallets into the wallets of illegal aliens.
In our hopelessly PC world, we aren't supposed to talk about illegal immigrants anymore. But let's be bad and do it anyway.
This proposal diverts most of the $2.1 billion tax to emergency-room care and to health coverage for children - two services that, in California, provide out-sized assistance to illegal immigrants. It's a political ploy backed by the American Cancer Society, California Hospital Association, American Heart Association, American Lung Association and Children's Partnership.
She goes on to point out that children are already well covered in California.
California already pours vast sums into free health insurance for children. We are probably the most generous state, offering Healthy Families and other programs to families who need not even be poor. You can make around $50,000 and get Healthy Families coverage as good as a private plan, and you don't need to be legal.
John Graham, director of health-care studies for the fiscally conservative Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, tells me: "If your child hasn't got health care in California, you are a negligent parent. There are 900,000 children who qualify for Healthy Families and other programs. ... They are eligible but still not enrolled due to parents' inattentiveness, laziness or the feeling that the kids are healthy so they don't give a hoot."
racism in news media
Still pimping the race angle about Katrina:
In the chaos of Katrina, the press was hardly in a position to know that whites were dying as fast as blacks. But it was responsible for strumming the racial theme so relentlessly in the absence of actual information. A mix of factors was operating: Faces shown on TV were mostly black, quotable black spokesmen kept insisting that racism was at work, and national reporters on the scene may have thought that since this was the South, blacks were probably being victimized in some way. This hardened into a narrative line for New Orleans that stressed race, and to lesser extent, class.
Jack Shafer of Slate.com said, "(We) in the media are ignoring that fact that almost all the victims in New Orleans are black and poor." Wolf Blitzer said the victims were "so poor, so black." The Washington Post, reflecting the resentment of its majority-black city, pumped up the racial theme. A questionable Page One story headlined "To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked."
Racial agitators and entertainers played a big role. Randall Robinson, the former head of TransAfrica, said: "This is what we have come to. This defining watershed moment in America's racial history." Jesse Jackson said, "Today I saw 5,000 African-Americans desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying." (That would be 5,000 blacks dying out of a total of 1,349 known dead of all races in all Gulf States combined.)
saturday january 7, 2006
soldier tells off murtha and moran
...at a Town Hall meeting (Washington Post) or fuller context here Mudville Gazette:
"Yes sir my name is Mark Seavey and I just want to thank you for coming up here. Until about a month ago I was Sgt Mark Seavey infantry squad leader, I returned from Afghanistan. My question to you, (applause)
"Like yourself I dropped out of college two years ago to volunteer to go to Afghanistan, and I went and I came back. If I didn't have a herniated disk now I would volunteer to go to Iraq in a second with my troops, three of which have already volunteered to go to Iraq. I keep hearing you say how you talk to the troops and the troops are demoralized, and I really resent that characterization. (applause) The morale of the troops that I talk to is phenomenal, which is why my troops are volunteering to go back, despite the hardships they had to endure in Afghanistan.
"And Congressman Moran, 200 of your constituents just returned from Afghanistan. We never got a letter from you; we never got a visit from you. You didn't come to our homecoming. The only thing we got from any of our elected officials was one letter from the governor of this state thanking us for our service in Iraq, when we were in Afghanistan. That's reprehensible. I don't know who you two are talking to but the morale of the troops is very high."
Moran - who is one of the few congressmen supporting Charlie Rangel's call to restore the draft - responded quickly: "That wasn't in the form of a question, it was in the form of a statement. But, uhh... let's go over here." And he took the next question.
best blonde joke ever
who said poverty causes terrorism?
London bomber had $212,000 in the bank.
word of the year
The American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on the Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel, truthiness refers to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.”
You can download their whole list here as a PDF.
None of them beats a word my cable repairman coined. Explaining how much better the lower channels would be after they were digitized, he said the difference would be "dramastic."
Dramastic: Attack Machine's word of the year winner.
game theory and politics
It used to be that the press would report the happenings of politics. Somewhere along the line, the process became perverted, and politicians began playing to the press and engaging in behavior that was motivated solely because of the prospect of media coverage. The tail wagged the dog, and politicians learned they could manipulate the press. Today, the message of politics is delivered through a liberally biased prism. Not only do Reid and the Democrats make moves designed to get media coverage, they take full advantage of the premise that the people reporting the news are predisposed to liberal ideology.
Reid knows that President Bush did not mislead the public, lie or “cherry pick” intelligence as he made his case to go to war in Iraq. Reid remembers the first debate in 2002 was about whether the president had the authority to go to war. He must appreciate the solid political move President Bush made as he slapped the issue back to the Democrats and forced Congress to authorize the war. It was an uncomfortable vote for Democrats in an election year. Reid is aware that he and the rest of his party included many reasons in the 2002 resolution authorizing the war that had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. They included these reasons to provide themselves political cover with their base, but now say they were tricked into voting for the war, because President Bush gave them faulty intelligence about nuclear weapons.
With his understanding of game theory, Senator Reid is confident the mainstream media is not inclined to report the facts objectively. There is no doubt in his mind that liberal reporters and editors will give him cover as he lies and rewrites history. He won’t be exposed for telling his big lie that President Bush lied.
friday january 6, 2006
saddam hosted terror training camps
No connection between Saddam and terror? Read on:
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army.
Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
This destroys the argument that Iraq had no place in a war on terror. It also raises serious concerns about the competence of US intelligence agencies charged with sifting through the mountain of documents (two million of them) discovered after Saddam's fall.
We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"
How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people--Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq--that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don't know literally killing us?
why ted was called "the dumb brother"
Senator Ted Kennedy, infamous for leaving a paramour to drown and for getting kicked out of Harvard for cheating, demonstrated he's still a spoiled rich kid, but old.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), hosting a morning roundtable with reporters, had nothing nice to say about Alito. "We here in the United States are not going to stand for monarchial tyranny," he said, protesting Alito's support for "unfettered, unlimited power of the executive." He faulted Alito for belonging to a group that was "anti-black and also anti-women." Kennedy wondered if "the average person is going to be able to get a fair shake" under Alito.
Briefly, Kennedy rewrote the outcome of the 1964 election. "This nominee was influenced by the Goldwater presidency," he said. "The Goldwater battles of those times were the battles against the civil rights laws." Only then did Kennedy acknowledge that "Judge Alito at that time was 14 years old."
A questioner pointed out that Kennedy sounded like a sure bet against Alito. "I haven't reached a final conclusion," the senator demurred.
murtha's mouth
A Democratic congressman's remarks about the military are damaging to troop morale and to the Army's efforts to rebound from a recruiting slump, the nation's top general said Thursday.
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked at a Pentagon news conference to comment on remarks by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a Marine Corps veteran who has become a leading voice in Congress advocating an early withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Pace was asked specifically about an ABC News interview this week in which Murtha, 73, said if he were eligible to join the military today he would not, nor would he expect others to join.
"That's damaging to recruiting," Pace said. "It's damaging to morale of the troops who are deployed, and it's damaging to the morale of their families who believe in what they are doing to serve this country."
parenting hall of shame
Bad celebrity parents.
it's the demography, stupid
We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
As usual, his column is brilliant. Read it all. Then send a copy to your friends.
thursday january 5, 2006
teachers' pets
From Wall Street Journal:
If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson''s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you'd probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.
Under new federal rules pushed through by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, large unions must now disclose in much more detail how they spend members' dues money. Big Labor fought hard (if unsuccessfully) against the new accountability standards, and even a cursory glance at the NEA''s recent filings -- the first under the new rules -- helps explain why. They expose the union as a honey pot for left-wing political causes that have nothing to do with teachers, much less students.
debt be not proud
From National Review:
Would you judge the status of someone’s personal finances without even looking at his assets? Probably not. But that hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from obsessing over the level of debt of the average American family, which they only look at in a vacuum, completely ignoring the growth of family net worth.
According to the Federal Reserve’s “Flow of Funds” report, released last month, the net worth of the American household (measured as assets minus liabilities) stands at a robust $51 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a “T.”
This isn’t just higher than last year (or the year before that; or the year before that). It’s almost twice what it was in 1995 and over 27 percent higher than it was in 1998 — right in the middle of Clinton’s “economic miracle.”
jaws of defeat
There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party now underway, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008.
At the center of this has been party Chairman Howard Dean, now increasingly joined by the two other party spokesmen -- Senate Minority leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
A string of bad news from the Middle East had emboldened this trio into calling for premature retreat from Iraq and thus defeat for the United States, hoping of course that the blame for the defeat would fall on President Bush and the Republican Party, which also controls both houses of Congress. Until recently, Mr. Bush remained silent to most of the criticism of the war and the repetitive allegations of deception that many Democrats have claimed got us into that war.
This combination, coupled with sudden rising gasoline prices, provoked a precipitous fall in the president's support in the opinion polls, and only further induced the three horsemen of the Middle East apocalypse -- Mr. Dean, Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi -- to expound their denunciation and defeatism only louder.
We already knew that Mr. Dean was a screamer, and I warned on these pages less than a year ago that naming him chairman of the party was institutionalizing a political disaster to come. I do not doubt that Mr. Dean is sincere. This only makes his presence as the Democratic spokesman more perilous for the party's prospects. Party liberals and moderates said he would mind his fundraising and not get into trouble. Now they may have to fire him or face losing excellent electoral opportunities this year and in 2008.
the human bite
Did you know that you are ten times more likely to be bitten by a human than a rat? So says item #52 on the BBC's 100 things we didn't know this time last year. Also:
#14: It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked from his ears, and he can now inflate balloons and blow out candles.
But be wary, some items don't pass the smell test:
#54. Deep Throat is reportedly the most profitable film ever. It was made for $25,000 (£13,700) and has grossed more than $600m.
As Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times observed, that film came out in the mid-'70s, when admission prices were about three bucks. So that would translate into $1.8 billion gross in today's box office. Not likely.
Here's another good one:
# 74. It takes a gallon of oil to make three fake fur coats.
wednesday january 4, 2006
healthy debate
Blogger Stuart Browning takes on Paul Krugman:
Instead of basing broad conclusions about the quality of the U.S. health care system on unreliable indicators - as Krugman does - why not judge our system by how well it prevents deaths from cancer, heart disease and other conditions that modern medicine can actually treat? Well, because the U.S. is better at these things than other nations - and that's not part of Krugman's message.
Consider breast cancer. In the U.S., the mortality ratio - the percentage of people with the disease who die from it - is 25%. The breast cancer mortality ratios for Canada, the U.K. and New Zealand are 28%, 46% and 46%, respectively[4]. The U.S. prostate cancer mortality ratio is only 19%. In Canada, its 25%, in France, its 49% - and in the U.K., over half - 57% - of men diagnosed with prostate cancer die from it[5]!
stupid host tricks
More vapor from shallow minds:
David Letterman (interrogating Bill O'Reilly) demanded: "How can you possibly take exception with the motivation and the position of someone like Cindy Sheehan?"
Easy.
- Cindy Sheehan dishonored the sacrifice of her son, who not only enlisted in the service of his own volition, but re-enlisted and volunteered for the very mission that got him killed.
- Sheehan is an unhinged kook who demanded that national guard troops be withdrawn from "occupied New Orleans" during Katrina.
- Sheehan lied about her meeting with President Bush.
- Sheehan is a pawn of leftwing groups and media enemies of Bush. She has made anti-Semitic statements and glorified the terrorists who killed her son.
- Sheehan's own family has denounced her, thus "taking exception."
Letterman should keep his politics better hidden because he's embarassing himself. For full coverage of the Letterman-O'Reilly event, click here.
more from that "hawk" murtha
From Elephants in Academia:
Speaking of cluelessness (see previous post), Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) took it upon himself to speak up again on the state of our military over the weekend. Outrage has justly focused on his first comment regarding volunteering for the military, but his other remarks deserve attention as well.
Continuing on his "the army is broken" theme, Murtha announced that if he were a young man today, he would not enlist in the US military because the Iraq war was a "wrong" war:
"Would you join (the military) today?," he was asked in an interview taped on Friday.
"No," replied Murtha.
"And I think you're saying the average guy out there who's considering recruitment is justified in saying 'I don't want to serve'," the interviewer continued.
"Exactly right," said Murtha.
What an appalling, egregious thing for an ex-Marine to say on a major news program ("Nightline") over the holidays while our all-volunteer soldiers are in the field. Think about it--he's both denigrating the decision of those who did think it was noble to serve and volunteered, and actively discouraging new recruits.
walking on eggs
Neo-neocon writes about the delicate matter of discussing politics with her Bush-hating liberal friends. The comments to her post add a lot, too. Curious how illiberal liberals can be, and not know it.
no wonder maureen dowd is alone
If Joel Stein's account is accurate, Dowd is a thin-skinned, sulky sourpuss. Just what men are not looking for in a mate. Or women for that matter.
tuesday january 3, 2006
nyt = kgb?
The Soviets Had the KGB -- Al Qaeda Has the NYT
America spends $40 billion per year on intelligence operations aimed at discovering our enemies’ secret activities. All our enemies have to do is subscribe to the New York Times and, for as little as $4.65 per week, they can discover most of our secret operations -- at least as long as a Republican is President.
Granted, reading the Times won’t give them an accurate picture of the growth of the U.S. economy, the progress in the Iraq War, or the average American’s political opinions. But it will provide them a detailed description of almost any classified military, CIA, or NSA operation designed to catch or kill them.
people must bow to courts
I'm agnostic on the gay marriage controversy. But this gets me going:
BOSTON (Reuters) - Gay rights lawyers filed on Tuesday a lawsuit to stop a proposed ballot measure aimed at overturning a court decision that made Massachusetts the first and only U.S. state to legalize gay marriage.
The lawsuit by the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) said the state's attorney general erred when he ruled in September that Massachusetts voters could decide in a 2008 poll to redefine marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
They said the decision by Thomas Reilly, a Democrat who is likely to run for governor this year, was unconstitutional because ballot initiatives cannot reverse judicial decisions under the state's Constitution.
If true, Massachusetts citizens derive their authority from courts, not the other way around. Now there's a case of civil liberties being infringed.
crime in canada 50% higher than us
Shocking, eh?
at least bill o'reilly doesn't laugh at his guests
This host has a lot to learn (link is to video).
dick morris on isolationist americans
Here's something to chew on.
Why do majorities support the Patriot Act and NSA wiretapping but oppose the war in Iraq? Because the true swing voters in politics today are isolationists, who vote with the left on Iraq and with the right on homeland security.
It is impossible to understand politics today without grasping the essential power of isolationism in our political community. The voters who rate Bush's performance in Iraq negatively or who call for a pullout are not, in the main, dedicated liberals or even Democrats. Rather, they're marching to the beat of a drummer never stilled in our political music — the desire for the rest of the world to go away.
...
In 1996, I did a series of polls for President Bill Clinton to quantify the isolationist element in the American electorate. The surveys indicated that 15 percent of the voters were global in outlook while 35 percent were isolationist. (The balance — 50 percent — was either open to internationalism or closed to it based on the particulars of each situation.)
And the isolationist 35 percent divided evenly among the political parties, constituting a third of each party's base voters.
On the left, they tended to say that we needed to pay attention to America's poor and our own problems rather than squander our resources abroad. On the right, they complained that the rest of the world was at least ungrateful and perhaps unworthy of our attention and money. But left or right, it was an undiluted block of opposition to any foreign involvement.
...
Isolationism lost its power in the '50s and '60s as the white Catholic voters who were prominent in its ranks defected, rallying behind the Vatican in opposing atheistic communism. In the Vietnam era, it resurfaced and linked with the left in undoing three decades of interventionist consensus in our foreign policy.
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and Bill Clinton avoided offending the isolationists by adopting foreign policies that limited overseas military intervention — and limited casualties even more. But President George W. Bush has aroused the isolationist left and right by his determination in Iraq.
Yet the irony is that the very same voters the Democrats attract by attacking the war they lose by condemning domestic wiretaps and the Patriot Act — policies that isolationism argues for.
By figuring that all antiwar sentiment is liberal, Democrats misread the public — about the isolationists, whom the Democrats will keep in their corner when the argument is 4,000 miles away but will lose when it is right at home.
german priest: saudia arabia morally ahead of usa
From David's Medienkritik:
There is almost unanimous consent among German media that the death penalty for Tookie Williams reflects badly on the U.S., on California and on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Occasionally things get a little out of hand...
On Saturday, Dec. 17, I watched in disgust the commentary of a Catholic priest on German public TV who favorably compared Saudi Arabia's (!) practice of the death penalty with that of the United States.
Clemency, so his conclusion, is a typical aspect of the Saudi's - and Islam's - handling of the death penalty, while the U.S. follows a merciless "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" approach.
And then, of course, our moral apostle made a reference to the country of absolute ethical superiority:
"We don't have to worry here (in Germany) about the death penalty, thank heavens."
The good priest should be reminded why "we" don't have to worry about the death penalty in Germany:
Contrasting their nation's policy with that of the Americans, Germans point proudly to Article 102 of their Basic Law, adopted in 1949. It reads, simply: "The death penalty is abolished." They often say that this 56-year-old provision shows how thoroughly the postwar Federal Republic has learned -- and applied -- the lessons of Nazi state-sponsored killing. (Communist East Germany kept the death penalty until 1987.)
But the actual history of the German death penalty ban casts this claim in a different light. Article 102 was in fact the brainchild of a right-wing politician who sympathized with convicted Nazi war criminals -- and sought to prevent their execution by British and American occupation authorities. Far from intending to repudiate the barbarism of Hitler, the author of Article 102 wanted to make a statement about the supposed excesses of Allied victors' justice.
The International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced 11 top Nazis to death, all of whom were hanged in November 1946 except for Hermann Goering, who committed suicide. The Western Allies hanged or shot dozens of lesser-known war criminals -- including 284 at a U.S. Army prison in Landsberg between November 1945 and June 1951. Though SS men who had supervised death camps and massacred Jews were among the condemned, many Germans bristled at victors' justice. "The longer the executions went on," reports a town history on the Landsberg Civic Association's Web site, "the louder became the voices demanding an end to them. There was a broad political alliance in favor of clemency efforts." (Source / via Kosmoblog) (emphasis added)
Thank heavens?
I would like to add, as a personal opinion, that the German state was responsible - among other evils - for the gassing and slaughtering of millions of Jews, and it is therefore unconceivable in all eternity to again grant this state a right to put humans - even convicted killers - to death.
In terms of being in a moral position to judge other countries' practice of the death penalty, Germany ranks even below Saudi Arabia.
And that is quite an accomplishment...
russian gas
Oil rich Russia has been flexing its mineral muscles of late. First, it hires former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to an executive position at Gazprom, the state-owned oil company. This is just shortly after Schroeder finished off an Russo-German pipeline deal in his last week in office. (Just imagine if he worked for Halliburton.)
Then Gazprom offered a job to Don Evans, former US Commerce Secretary. Evans said thanks, but no thanks. As Moscow Times wrote, A Strange Year Ends in Utter Phantasmagoria. But then Putin pushed it further:
Russian President Vladimir Putin was irresponsible and spiteful to cut gas supplies to Ukraine and has resurrected Cold War-style fear and mistrust of Moscow abroad, European newspapers said on Tuesday.
Many said the row over how much Kiev pays for gas from its eastern neighbour could only be solved by a step-by-step price rise, not the fourfold hike Russia's Gazprom monopoly demands.
And this from VodkaPundit on Russia:
PJ O'Rourke once described Russia as "the ugly stepsister of Western Civilization." Thanks to high energy prices, today the ugly stepsister has step-daddy's Platinum Amex card to go along with that great big chip on her shoulder. Russia has a line of credit big enough to put all the pretty people in their place - and she's determined to make them suffer without worrying about the bill.
Is this how a grown-up nation behaves?
...
Putin is causing trouble for the world because he can. Unable to do anything productive – not even anything as fundamental as create children – Russia seeks to destroy. Sell nuclear materials to Iran? Da. Bully Ukraine around? Da. Occupy bits of Georgia? Da. Foment trouble in Central Asia? Da. Cozy up to Beijing's butchers? Da. And the list goes on.
Russia's destructive impulses don't end there, however. Rather than lay the foundations for a high-trust society, Putin has brought back the kangaroo court. Instead of nurturing free markets, Putin has renationalized everything he can get his hands on. Free press? No way. Free trade? Rule of law? Not on Putin's watch.
hasta la vista siesta
The Spanish government condemns the siesta to the Big Sleep.
monday january 2, 2006
democrats vs. blacks
Homeless activist Ted Hayes:
American blacks who are affiliated with the Republican Party are vigorously vilified by Democrats, especially black Democrats. Uncle Tom, sell-out, Oreo--the list of slurs is long.
But it is not only insults. I am the founder and director of a unique, progressive homeless facility in downtown Los Angeles, known as the Dome Village. Yet the 35 men, women and children and their pets who call the Dome Village home are being "evicted" from privately owned property after 12 1/2 years--apparently on account of my political beliefs and activities. You see, though I am a leading homeless activist, I am also a conservative Republican and a strong supporter of President Bush.
Here's how the situation played out. Recently, I was invited to address a local Republican Women's Club; my landlord read an article in the local paper reporting on the event. Soon after, I received a notice raising the Dome Village rent from $2,500 a month to $18,330. Shocked, I inquired as to the seriousness of the change, and the property owner blurted out that the cause of our "eviction" was "because you are Republican." He said that as a Democrat, he was tired of helping me and the Dome Village. In other words, let the homeless be damned.
And people think the Democrats are the party of compassion and tolerance.
farrakhan vs. honoroe
Wanna bet on who BET.com chose to honor?
look out, they're gonna git ya
rose parade dodges a bullet
Nature rained on the Rose Parade today, but it could have been worse.
I live in Ventura County, north and west of Pasadena. At 8 o'clock, the wind and rain we were getting would have ripped the floats apart. Given that storms typically come from the north, we were an hour or so ahead of Pasadena.
Nothing compares to the floats built for this event. To see them up close is to appreciate the imagination, aesthetics, engineering and labor (of love) that goes into their creation. It's a shame they didn't get their moment in the sun, but, had the parade started an hour later, it would have been a disaster.
top ten overreported and underreported stories of 2005
Good reading, great perspective.
clinton in china
"60 Minutes" brought us a report by Dan Rather on President Clinton's recent trip to China. No, Clinton wasn't there to check up on how the Chinese are using the advanced missile technology he sold them. And he wasn't there to thank the Chinese Army for the $350,000 campaign donation.
The mission was AIDS relief, and for that Clinton is to be congratulated. However, when Rather noted that in fighting AIDS as president, Bill talked the talk while Dubya has walked the walk, Clinton excused himself by blaming the Republican Congress. Rather could have pointed out that Clinton had a Democrat controlled Congress for his first two years in office, but did not.
As for Rather, his weirdness continues. Some of his facial expressions during his reaction shots were outright strange. Once his eyeballs widened as if he'd been goosed or been struck by a gastric spasm and was surpressing flatulence.
In covering the AIDS problem in China, the report never mentioned that Chinese and Russian AIDS epidemics are self-imposed wounds. Unlike the free world that was sucker punched by the virus, China and Russia were closed societies during the initial outbreak. They had a good ten years advance notice about the menace and could have prevented infection with a public health program. Alas, these "peoples republics" were incompetent and once again, their peoples suffer.
Jim Bass
funniest news stories of 2005
new york times won't leak to itself
The NYT's own public editor gets stonewalled by Pinch and Bill.
dog trainer of the year in review
Patterico does his annual review of the Los Angeles Times. It's never pretty.
french auto insurance must be pricey
PARIS: Fears that French New Year's celebrations could turn into a repeat of the urban violence that swept through the country in November proved unfounded as youths set "only" 425 cars on fire overnight, National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said on Sunday.
The figure is only slightly above the average for the last night of the year in France, where the sight of minority youths from disadvantaged suburban ghettoes torching cars has become a unique New Year's tradition.
Last New Year's Eve, for example, 333 cars went up in flames. In 2003, 324 vehicles were burned and in 2002 the number was 379.
FYI, on a per capita basis, this would equal 2,072 cars torched in the USA in one night. Aside from random Earth Liberation Front knuckleheads destroying SUVs and drunken rioters celebrating Superbowl victories, you don't hear much about car burnings here.
All those Citroens going up in smoke can't be good for global warming.
new year's day 2006
the plague of success
Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.
Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.
notable quotables of 2005
Awards for the year's worst reporting. They are all gems, but here's a couple:
Co-host Matt Lauer: "Pain at the pump. Gas prices are going sky high. I paid $2.94 a gallon over the weekend to fill up the car."
Co-host Katie Couric: "It’s ridiculous. I had to take out a loan to fill up my minivan. It’s crazy."
— Exchange at the top of NBC’s Today, August 15.
Couric makes about $15,000,000 a year.
"What do you hope your legacy will be?...You literally have the weight of the world on your shoulders." — Katie Couric’s questions to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in an interview shown June 7 on NBC’s Today.
Gosh, I never knew that Kofi "Atlas" Annan was capable of literally bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas: "Is this attack [on public broadcasting’s budget] going to make NPR a little less liberal?"
NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg: "I don’t think we’re liberal to begin with, and I think if you would listen, Evan, you would know that."
Thomas: "I do listen to you and you’re not that liberal, but you’re a little bit liberal."
Totenberg: "No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, I really don’t — any more than, any more than you would say that Newsweek is liberal."
Thomas: "I think Newsweek is a little liberal."
— Exchange on Inside Washington, June 26
Read them all.
15 great years
On this date in 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist. As detailed by University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel on his website "Powerkills", the 20th century was humanity's worst century of genocide and democide (the latter including mass killings not based on religion, race, or ethnicity). By far the greatest perpetrators of genocide were Communist regimes. Although a few of the Communist genocide perpetrators eventually developed hostile relations with the U.S.S.R., none of the Communist regimes would ever have come to power without the support of the Evil Empire that arose in October 1917, and which began styling itself as the "U.S.S.R." in 1922.
old news
The CIA's controversial "rendition" program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper. Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.
"President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda," Scheuer said, in comments published in German.
"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."
Then there's this from Tigerhawk:
While we're on the subject of the loyal opposition's wholesale memory failure, perhaps it is worth reviewing Al Gore's support for the practice of "extraordinary rendition" (aggressively anti-rendition Wikipedia entry here). I stumbled across this passage in Richard Clarke's Against all Enemies, published last year in a fairly blatant attempt to compare the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts unfavorably with those of Bill Clinton:
Snatches, or more properly "extraordinary renditions," were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government.... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law.
Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, "That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass." (pp. 143-144)
saturday december 31, 2005
remember the hippo and the tortoise?
Snopes updates the story of the duo brought together by the tsunami.
live local, see global
Earthcams around the world.
top five ignored stories of 2005
American Thinker has its list.
bengali buddha and the rickshaw
Hand-pulled rickshaws will soon be disappearing from Calcutta's streets because they're getting in the way of progress.
friday december 30, 2005
gateway pundit
...shows how Iraqi deaths have tapered off dramatically.
dana priest: why won't bush heed me?
MSM arrogance on parade:
The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.
To which clear headed Americans say: Right on!
The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.
GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.
Good, good...
Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by members of Congress.
Burst? Y'mean they showed up on the front page of your newspaper, written by you?
Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush's personal commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been key to resisting any pressure to change course.
And despite all your best efforts, Bush is still determined to protect the nation? Oh, the horror!
open letter to "euroeunuchs"
From Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities.
bold predictions for 2006
Some things we all know about the coming year: a poor soul in Nigeria will require our help, our PayPal accounts will be on the verge of being shut down and the New York Times will further degrade.
Here are our bold predictions:
1. GRATE AMERICAN
A caller to Sean Hannity's radio program will call him a "great American" and Hannity will reply "you're a great American." Millions of Americans will suffer a wave of nausea. A minor scandal will erupt after an Al Franken-Air America investigation determines that the caller was in fact, merely a good American.
2. EYE BALLS GO AIRBORN
During a news conference, Nancy Pelosi's eyeballs will completely leave their sockets, much like Jim Carrey's in The Mask. It will also be revealed that the author of recent Democrat slogans such as "arrogant abuse of power" and "culture of corruption" moonlights from his full-time job writing fortune cookies.
3. "MENOPLAY" DEBUTS
After years in the laboratory, the long awaited female Viagra (developed under the code name "Hot Pants") will become available. A splashy Superbowl commercial will feature before and after moments: an annoyed wife with a "get lost" grimace that morphs into a randy come-hither. The tagline: "Turn MenoPause into MenoPlay." Sales of Viagra and Cialis go through the roof.
4. BRAT TAX GOES INTO EFFECT
Everyone knows brats are painful to be around. But new studies showing that brats, when grown, generate massive social costs (increased criminality, incessant whining and demands for public services) lead to a nation-wide movement for a brat tax. With "Make Perp Parents Pay" as their campaign slogan, advocates of the new tax garner bipartisan support. Millions of supermarket checkers and waiters are deputized as enforcers.
5. SPORTS FANS CELEBRATE THE "DE-BLABBERIZER"
A device that hooks up to equipped TiVo units and cable boxes uses waveform recognition technology to filter out annoying sportscasters from broadcasts. Sports fans jump at the chance to download filters for such notorious blabbers as Bill Walton, Dan Dierdorf and Brent Musberger. The nuclear option eliminates "color commentators" completely.
6. MALLS GET FAST LANES
In a desperate attempt to draw male shoppers back to shopping malls, owners will institute striped pedestrian lanes, like on highways. Dawdling, gawking shoppers will be segregated from brisk walking, point-to-point shoppers. "Men are used to point and click Internet shopping," said Mike Glick of RDL Properties. "They become frustrated by pokey women walking four abreast, especially when they're a wide load." For further appeal, users of the fast lane will be allowed to "hockey check" dawdlers who drift into the fast lane.
7. THIN THE HERD HIT LIST
The paranoid left will circulate rumors that President Bush plans to solve the impending Social Security disaster by selectively eliminating vast numbers of Baby Boomers. Bush's secret hit list will be leaked to the Daily Kos and will echo within the fringe for several months before Howard Dean lends the conspiracy theory credence with a slip of his tongue. Millions of suggested names for the list will be emailed anonymously to the White House.
8. EVERYTHING BAD BECOMES GOOD
Every food or chemical that was bad for you in 2005 will be found beneficial in 2006. Once again, the diet industry will suppress the secret to weight loss (eat less, more around more) in order to sell hope to hopeful suckers.
9. FOX LAUNCHES MISSING WHITE GIRL CHANNEL
After determining there was insufficent air time to adequately cover the disappearance of Nattalee Holloway in Aruba on Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch will launch a 24/7 "Missing (White) Girl Channel." Ratings among Alzheimers patients will soar.
10. MEL BROOKS DEBUTS "THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS"
Not content to repurpose the same concept three times, Brooks brings a gloomy, serious drama to Broadway. The story hinges on a Willie Loman-like writer (with nothing more than a "high concept and a smile") who turns a cult movie into a blockbuster Broadway musical and back into a lame movie.
Jim Bass