Thursday, January 31, 2008

and right on cue...

Here's the would-be White House returnee and First Man, Bill Clinton, explaining in no uncertain terms what must be done to reverse Global Warming.

SLOW DOWN OUR ECONOMY.


Good grief. Clinton is seriously proposing a deliberate foot-drag, a process that will cause much higher unemployment, reduce government revenue drastically and destroy what remains of the value of not just housing but any big ticket item at all.

Because in this scenario, nobody would be buying much of anything.

Not to mention that when the Dem majority on Capitol Hill saw a shrinking economy, they would flinch like frightened deer and wheel en masse toward the chamber to pass MASSIVELY higher taxes. Gotta get back the revenues we've lost, or else "the poor and minorities will be hardest hit".

And in a cycle of misery, higher taxes will result in even less business activity, even more unemployment, and plenty more misery to go around for everyone.

Oh, and have you seen what world markets did when our 'housing crisis' began?

They fell off a cliff. The entire world owns a share of the loans, you see. They buy derivative investments, bundled loans that are based on American homeowners paying their mortgage loans on time. So when 4% of American loans went a bit in arrears this last fall, even though 96% were ON TIME and doing fine, the entire world dropped about ten to fifteen percent in its markets. They still haven't recovered.

If Bill Clinton says it, Hillary believes it. We must slow down our economy, 'for the grandchildren'.

And McCain is totally sold on the whole global warming thing, taxes on carbon, etc. He sounds like the New York Times when he talks about it.

Big tax increases are coming. Business is flinching, well in advance. Saving Romney in the primaries is our only option, and if we can't pull it off, we're in for some real economic pain.

And as the libs in the press always rush to point out, "Poor, Minorities Hardest Hit".

All for the purpose of sacrificing at the altar of Gaia. Global Warming is truly a religion now, with its convinced minions who shout down and try to destroy skeptics and voices of caution.

We must act NOW, or the planet will be DESTROYED! The time for debate is OVER! The science is SETTLED! Taxes on business are the only way to reduce carbon emissions!

For the good of the planet, man, we must slow this economy down! It's the economy, stupid! IT'S TOO GOOD! Something must be done NOW!

More McCain 'straight talk'

Powerline is linking to a column in the WaPo by Robert Novak, in which two different sources (neither one the source for the original article) are independently confirming the events in which McCain complained that Samuel Alito was too conservative.

McCain has quickly claimed not to remember saying that, and pointed out that he 'supported' Alito.

The worry is, of course, the the things he says in private and in small groups are far more likely to be the truth about him than the things he says into microphones and cameras. And even with the lights on him, he still finds time to make leftist-sounding insults about Romney's wealth....

In the debate last night, McCain was pointing out that he too has leadership experience (military), and that it was 'for patriotism, not profit'.

Only leftists hold a grudge against those who produce and drive our economy. Only leftist elitists sneer and snort at productive and capable men of business who have provided jobs, increased the nation's wealth and set examples for generations to follow.

McCain seems to take every opportunity given him to let us know that he holds those grubby greedy little businessmen in contempt.

No wonder the market is having such trouble recovering. It is a futures market, a bet on the near and intermediate future, and at this point our near future is that we will have a big-government, tax-increasing, environmentalist leftist president who thinks businessmen need to be punished for their success--

And that's whether Hillary, Obama or McCain win! They are almost identical in their world views. McCain is somewhat stronger on military issues, but Hillary is no senseless kneejerk leftist on that front either. She did vote to authorize the war, and she has resisted promising the far left that she'd yank our troops immediately.

So what is the difference between McCain and Clinton?

McCain's first lady would wear a dress. Hillary's first man will continue trying to remove them as often as possible.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

McCain in lead, media decides its not too early to slam him

We haven't even got to Super Tuesday yet, and already members of the media are letting the world in on reasons McCain shouldn't be elected president.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

McCain and conservatism

John McCain has on many occasions let the public know of his disdain for conservatism.

On immigration, it was the McCain Kennedy fiasco. He was the driving force in last summer's attempt to subvert the will of the people by the backroom hustle of a bill, no debate, no time, just print it out and pass it out and have a vote, probably at midnight. It took weeks of screaming by the 70% of this nation who were opposed to it, left and right, for McCain to grudgingly admit he was 'wro-- wro-- wwrroggnn', and it was harder for him to say it than for Fonsie.

He claims to have learned his lesson and to be ready to fix the border first. But he admits just this week, very quickly and in passing, that if this old bill were to come across President McCain's desk, he would sign it.

Remember, he 'parachuted in off the campaign trail' (as Senator Cornyn put it) to put his impression on that bill at the last minute, and when Cornyn tried to complain, McCain said (as I suspect he says to all of us, in his mind, daily), "Fuck you, I know more about this than anyone in this room!"

Attitude. He's right, we're wrong, especially if we're working from conservative principles; enforce the law as it stands, we asked, rather than simply pretending for years that the law does not exist in order to satisfy an oddball mix of southern agriculture moguls, Tyson Chicken human resources managers, hotel and restaurant owners, construction kingpins and Hispanic political agitators. Simply enforce the current law. Control the borders, repatriate the violators, make an effort. We cannot overthrow the present law and system until we at least find out if it works when tried. But it's never BEEN tried; McCain types have been at it from the beginning, trying to force the system to look the other way and accept what's necessary 'for the good of the state'. It isn't immigrants we oppose, we said, it's ILLEGAL immigrants. If the system needs streamlining, then let's do it; but control the border FIRST, for the sake of ordinary citizens who are at risk and for the sake of immigrants who wait years and spend thousands to do it right.

McCain's response: they're chumps. They should have just swum across. Don't waste my time.

McCain was the only Republican senator (well, Lincoln Chafee too, but he's gone and forgotten) who voted AGAINST the Bush tax cuts which have taken this nation to such heights of tax revenue and booming business and low unemployment. He now explains his opposition with the notion that there weren't enough spending cuts to justify the cutting of taxes.

Back then, of course, it was 'tax cuts for the rich', just like the libs always say.

But McCain isn't a real conservative; if he was, he'd know that tax cuts always pay for themselves, and that spending cuts are not only not necessary but that spending INCREASES can be tolerated as long as the tax cuts are significant enough (as with Bush) to increase government revenue.

Each of the past five years, government revenue has hit a new all time high. These are the years AFTER the tax cuts. Clearly, cutting taxes does NOT cut revenue, it EXPANDS revenue, by encouraging the kind of activity that results in taxable transactions-- salaries, purchases, increases in business income, etc.

This has proven true in the 1960's, when JFK advocated tax cuts to increase government revenue. Again in the 1980's the Reagan tax cuts increased revenue, and now Bush has proven it a THIRD time in just forty years. Tax cuts CAUSE increases in revenue, and do not require concurrent spending cuts to remain fiscally prudent. They ARE fiscal prudence.

But if, like Democrats, taxing is the kind of 'iron fist in an iron glove' power that McCain loves to wield, well then tax cuts are almost a voluntary giving up of power.

Can't have that. McCain is no conservative on taxation, not even close.

On free speech, he was the impetus for McCain Feingold, the bill which made the 'public square' of this century, radio and tv, off limits for citizen groups within 60 days of an election. It is sardonically known as the Incumbent Protection Act, and it is utterly unconstitutional. McCain was opposed by almost everyone in his own party, but as always, that didn't trouble him.

Freedom of speech was protected in an amendment 240 years ago, a special set-aside to make absolutely sure that government would never impinge on the right of citizens to gather together and discuss things like upcoming elections and candidates. The founding fathers, had they known about television, would never have agreed to limit advertising; it would seem to them like limiting the size of political gatherings to a dozen people.

McCain Feingold makes a mockery of the idea that we are free to advocate and participate in the electoral process.

McCain, in fact, seems almost to enjoy mockery of conservatives. But he also has a temper and a long memory.

If he is elected, the Fairness Doctrine will be wheeled out in short order.

McCain will not sit idly by, not with the power of the Presidency in his hands and the ability to 'get even' with Limbaugh and the rest of them for perceived slights.

And remember the Gang of 14, how McCain went against the vast majority of Republican senators to preserve the right of the Left's minority to throw tradition in the dumpster and cheat with parliamentary law to prevent Bush's nominees to circuit courts from getting up or down votes?

McCain claimed it was in the best interest of Republicans-- because if THEY were in the minority at some point in the future, they wouldn't want the majority to have this steamroller law on THEIR side.

Thanks to McCain and people like him, we very quickly found ourselves in the minority.

If he had stood up for principle, he would have agreed that it was WRONG of the Dems to use trickery to prevent votes, that these fine candidates DESERVED votes, and that the Dems needed to be overcome in their skullduggery by whatever means was available to preserve the PRINCIPLE that the Senate was to 'advise and consent', not to reject out of hand every candidate put forward by the president solely on the basis of ideology. ESPECIALLY not when the rejection was arrived at by parliamentary trickery which was not appropriate for this use; they were using the filibuster not for a piece of legislation but for JUDICIAL NOMINEES, and until Bush's presidency this had been done only once, and NOT for ideological reasons but because the candidate was a known criminal.

But no. John McCain is just smarter than us, and our stupid principled stance was just not worth his time.

If John McCain is the nominee of the Republican party, it matters little whether he or Hillary are elected president. Much the same sort of legislation and foreign policy will result. Much about our lives will change, and not for the better. Taxes will increase, government programs will proliferate, regulation will stifle previously thriving businesses, Democrats will throw money willy-nilly at pet causes and, more importantly, at people, millions of them, in an effort to 'lock in' their votes for future elections. Witness the rush to do so so very much for the poor oppressed illegal alien.

Illegals can't vote? Well, not NOW. But that 'drivers licenses for illegals' thing that seems to make no sense? That's what it's for. To get them some ID so they can vote. McCain will not oppose this. Likely he will champion it. He wants their votes too, which is why he was so set on getting that McCain Kennedy immigration bill passed.

John McCain is a 'man of honor', which is a wonderful quality in a military man. His courage and determination have awed the world since he returned from that Vietnamese POW camp, and he deserves the respect of all of us.

But to be a 'man of honor' is not necessarily to be a man of principle in conservative terms.

John McCain is no conservative, and when he pretends to be one, it visibly grates on him.

I had enough of being told I was stupid or wrong back when BUSH was doing it last summer; the last thing I want is a president who will look me in the eye on TV and tell me I'm wrong about EVERYTHING I believe.

If that president was a liberal, I could manage to get up and go to work every day; but if it was a Republican who called himself a conservative, I'd probably get depressed and apply for welfare.

:-)

Read this...

... if you think drug companies are profiteering on the backs of suffering Americans, charging ten times as much as is fair, forcing little old ladies to eat cat food so they can buy their life-sustaining medications, and being all around evil rich guys at our expense.

Read this.

I'm glad we have an FDA and a federal government supervising the production and sale of new medications; if there was not that level of attention paid, many ordinary people would die while hucksters engineered money-making opportunities out of fake and dangerous products.

The downside of an FDA, though, is the tremendous expense in money and time required of a manufacturer to 'clear' a new drug for sale. It is years, sometimes decades, before a drug is ready for market. It is hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars spent in research and development, and thousands of failed attempts before a new and better treatment for this or that disease is found, cleared and ready for sale.

If drug companies were prevented out of 'fairness' from making the kind of profits they make through American sales, they would at some point simply stop investing in R and D, and as McArdle says, they'd even stop manufacturing drugs entirely; without the chance at those future big profits, investment would be pointless and foolish.

They could do better with their money in some hedge funds, or finding choice commercial real estate during this downturn.

And of course, the final result of a shrunken landscape of pharmaceutical companies and a vanishing of research and development investment would be....?

You got it. Drugs would get more expensive, quality would decrease, and of course no new drugs would be invented; the risk would outweigh the reward.

Read the article, and ask yourself if you really believe that drug companies should have artificial ceilings placed on their potential profits, artificial upper limits placed on the prices they can charge for their products. Does this EVER work?

There are three sides to the economic triangle-- price, quality, supply. When price is forced down, either supply or quality (or both) will quickly manifest a similar change. If a product is not sufficiently profitable, business will not risk investing in it. And when that happens, when manufacturers go OUT of the business, supply dries up.

And when THAT happens, the price for the remaining product escalates. While it lasts. And increased price means even lower demand, which will drive even more manufacturers out of the business.

It's not out of the question for 'price controls' or 'profit controls' on American drug manufacturers to have the end result of forcing us all to buy whatever drugs are still made from MEXICAN or CHINESE manufacturers.

And that cure for cancer? Forget about it.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Money can't buy me love

Must be what Mr. Rezko is singing today from as he does the perp walk, arrested for a bond violation.

Typical Democrat moral-free dirty pool is being played here, no doubt. It cannot be coincidence that Rezko gets arrested for a mundane "bond violation" within 48 hours of Obama's route of Hillary in S. C. More headlines about Obama's close ties to a dirty campaign finance guy (in a gubernatorial Illinois contest) are popping up all over. How wonderful for Hillary.

The pic they found of Rezko smiling with the Clintons appears to have been made of teflon, sticking to nobody and being quickly forgotten. Not so Rezko's cozy neighbour status with B. O.

So now Obama is dancing around, promising return of dirty money, notably NOT promising return of all Rezko money.

As has been said, it's fun to watch the Democrats do this dirty stuff to each other instead of to our guys. Long may it continue.

It's the little things....

I had wondered, a bit, at the fuss being made over the new movie "There Will be Blood".

It stars Daniel Day Lewis, a striking actor who, like Heath Ledger, seems to be completely different in each role he takes. He won an Oscar for "My Left Foot" and has been nominated twice more.

Lewis is quoted in this interview as having dedicated his performance to Ledger in this new film.

"
That scene in the trailer at the end of the film is as moving as anything I think I've ever seen", says Lewis of the Ledger role in Brokeback Mountain.

Okay. Take that in, for a second. In a world full of real life drama and human nobility, of redemption and salvation and rescue and all the wonderful things people do for each other amidst tragedies, a scene from Brokeback Mountain-- FICTION-- is the most moving thing ever seen by Daniel Day Lewis.

Forget about the sycophantic smooching of gay rights groups in that movie-- even the smooching being given them by DDL in this 'dedication'-- and think about the blinkered and tortured view of humanity and of the world which is held by this eclectic actor, if his own statement is to be taken as true.

It's these little things that jump out at me, now that I'm attuned to them.

Things like the original reason for writing this post; that is, the plot and story of the new movie, "There Will be Blood".

It's about an evil and ruthless Texas oilman.

So the immensely talented Daniel Day Lewis goes on the list. In a world filled with evil and murderous people vying for power literally over life and death for helpless populations in a hundred nations, in a world full of dictators who've killed millions and who have billions in Swiss bank accounts, in a world where gays are tortured and executed just for being gay, the bad guy for Hollywood is-- George H. W. Bush and his evil son, by fictional proxy. Oh, and Halliburton.

Cruise, Sarandon, the entire list of the Film Actors Guild from Team America-- now add Daniel Day Lewis to the list of people whose movies I simply do not pay to see.

Bono, Springsteen, Mellencamp, all are artists whose records I will never buy. Same reason. And it's a damn shame, because I LIKED Mellencamp and Springsteen. But "Jena, Take Your Nooses Down" is an exercise in self-congratulatory moral fingerwagging over an almost entirely fictional narrative! Like Reagan said, it's not that they don't know anything, it's that they know so much that just isn't so.

They try to sell me records or concert tickets or movie tickets, and in their records and concerts and movies they tell me I'm evil, or stupid, or the cause of the worlds' problems.

Yeah, it's hard to resist, but I manage. :-)

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Double standard at work

Try to imagine what would have happened if this female ESPN sportscaster had been drunk at a comedy roast and shouted out "F*ck Mohammed! F*ck Mosques!"

She would most likely have a fatwa target on her forehead and be living under an assumed name, and her employers would have bought millions of dollars worth of ads on every network to denounce her and separate themselves from her.

As it is, "F*ck Notre Dame! F*ck Jesus!" gets her a one week suspension.

She is a typical media type, insecure and superficial, seeking approval from the people around her, trying to impress, a pretty young girl in over her head, trying to succeed in the man's world of sports.

But alcohol has a way of shifting the decision point, doesn't it?

In her written apology she claims that's not at all who she is.

In vino veritas.

When you get drunk and mouth off, chances are what comes out of you is what you conceal every day, a part of you that good judgment won't let others see.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see ESPN defending her and claiming the suspension is the right measure, and then a year later, NOT renewing her contract.

Then again, this is the same sports newsroom which gave birth to Keith Olbermann.

Maybe they'll promote her.

The worst, except for all the others...

I"m reminded of Churchill's wry endorsement of western Democratic government-- the worst system in the world, except for all the others.

Little Green Footballs linked to this story about Italy's government in particular, another European-style parliamentary coalition that has failed-- 63 years, 61 coalition governments.

American State-based federal representative republic government, for all it's circus-like stupidity and corruption, for all it's shameful mediocrity in the person of its elected representatives, is SO much better than that Euro version-- with no regularly timed elections, and with no chance of a single party majority because of too many small special interest parties.

So the small parties, often with just a few seats in the parliament, offer their support to one or another large party based on promises of pursuing the one-cause agenda of the small party.

And the bigger parties promise away all their future flexibility, bargaining for a majority, and in the process cripple whatever majority they manage to cobble together. Too many competing voices in that 'majority' proves it isn't a majority at all, but a convenience-based group of groups.

Which reminds me a LOT of the American Democrat party, of course. Gays, women's libbers, union types, greenies, default supporters of Islamism, Bush haters, tinfoil hatters, everybody with their own little agenda, often in conflict with one another, united only by their hatred of conservatives and Christians and Bush, and by their desire to inflict their little agendas on America.

How does a women's libber sleep at night knowing she's working hand in glove with supporters of Islamism, the most oppressive anti-woman force on earth?

Over in Italy, the story tells us a tiny party with three seats was contributing to the majority, and one of the three ministers defected, changed his vote.

One of the other two shouted "TRAITOR!" A kerfluffle ensued. The 'traitor' fainted and was carried out.

Ah, parliament. Such fun to watch, and the Brits are almost as demonstrative as the Italians.

What this means, of course, is that Romano Prodi, the PM with all the UN connections, is heading off into the sunset. And Sylvio Berlusconi, hated conservative and media titan, the Rupert Murdoch of Italy, is now the strong horse and will probably end up PM for a third time.

Hopefully he'll make it back into office in time to share a celebratory shot of Grappa with Dubya. :-)

Friday, January 25, 2008

Great Britain-- the world's cruelest Homeowners Association

Talk about deed restrictions.

All of England is one giant restriction. You have to get government's permission to nail two timbers together.

This guy, admittedly, was probably going a bit overboard in strictly 'eccentric' terms, but who knows-- we can't even see his house, built without permission, and concealed behind haystacks in an attempt to take advantage of a time limit on action against a building.

His house was hidden behind haystacks. For years. Nobody knew it was there.

The local government is not amused and will not be counting the years in which the house was concealed against the time limit. It's coming down.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Sniping from Snipes

Wesley Snipes is now on trial for evading taxes to the tune of many millions of dollars.

In correspondence with the IRS, he warned them that they were thieving frauds and conspirators, and that their continued pursuit of his money opened them up to 'significant collateral risk'.

Yes, folks, Wesley Snipes now believes his own press, thinks he's invincible, and has threatened the agents of the IRS.

Using words from a pseudo-military movie script. :-)

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a wealthy rich evil guy who thinks the world is his oyster and who won't pay his fair share. it takes a village to pull the wagon by its own bootstraps, you know.

They are reading these letters into the court record today, but as yet there's no indication the judge has asked Snipes exactly what he meant by those purposefully vague words of threat.

Cuz ya know, you can't sue the government. And Snipes knows this. So there must be something else he meant by 'collateral risk'.

What is it about Hollywood stars that makes them believe they aren't 'the evil rich'?

What is it about liberals that makes them let those people get away with being rich while NOT being evil?

I don't get it.

A great blog from Israel

Here's a blog you should read every time you hear news about Israeli/Palestinian problems.

These people are right there watching, and will tell you the truth.

Mubarak of Egypt says he gave the order to permit Palestinians into Egypt because they're starving due to Israeli occupation.

But the 350,000 who went through the wall to Egypt were carrying TV sets, MP3 players and cartons of cigarettes when they came back from the shops.

The necessities of life, I guess. Boy those Israelis are cruel. :-)

Next thing you know, the UN will be passing a resolution to force Israel to GIVE them TV sets, MP3 players and cigarettes.

At any rate, the demolition of the Gaza/Egypt wall was a months-long project and had nothing to do with anything that's happened in the past few weeks, the changes in electrical supply, the Annapolis conference, the Bush visit, all are unrelated.

Hamas has been planning this for probably more than a year. And when the Egyptian border guards were confronted with rubble where the wall was standing, they stepped back and let hundreds of thousands of Palis into Egypt without a fight.

OH, and, speaking of the WALL between Egypt and Gaza.... why hasn't the world risen up in outrage at the idea of a physical wall between countries? Don't they know these people need to move back and forth across borders, so they can work and have commerce and live normal lives? Isn't a wall a cruel intrusion and oppression of these people?

Apparently, a wall is only a problem if Israel builds it. Or if Texas or Arizona tries to get one built.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Rudderless, no course set, but FULL SPEED AHEAD

These files, just a very few from back in the early '90's, are enough to shock even those of us who were cynics and pessimists about the legendary dark shadow of Hillary Care.

The files reveal that nobody knew how to accomplish their goals, how the public would react, even how to proceed.

The media was described in memos (pp.) as 'willing and eager to be told how to present this'.

Insiders admitted that only in wartime has any nation ever subjected its citizens to this level of centralized control over this big a part of their lives, and this would be the first peacetime intrusion at this level by government anywhere in the west.

So with a resounding squeak of fear and covert excitement, the great experiment was launched with secret meetings. Those who were excluded were subject, according to the files, to having their 'lifestyles and secrets' (pp) exposed to public scrutiny in order to control their criticisms.

The politics of personal destruction, in other words.

This is unnervingly close to the classic Stalin-era Soviet mode of operation. Make your plans, and to hell with whether they'll work or not. It is "for the good of the State" and opponents must be made to pay the price of disagreeing with you. Surely you are smart enough, elite enough, special enough to come up with the right answers, which is easier when your sycophantic staff know better than to ask hard questions.

And through it all, the most important thing is not success, not improvement in function, not an increase in the number and health of patients under your care--

The most important thing is that YOU ARE THE ONE IN POWER.

Period.

Read these memos and tell me Hillary is looking after the little guy.

While riding off into the sunset...

... on the way out of Nevada, don't forget this moment.

Barack Obama was unable to win Nevada, even with the endorsement of the culinary workers' union. Apparently union workers don't HAVE to vote the way their leadership does.

But do you recall, back in an earlier debate, when CNN had 'random voters' asking questions of the candidates? It was a couple of months ago. One woman stood to ask Obama a question, and before he answered, he thanked her for her work on behalf of the culinary workers union.

She was identified to the TV audience only as a cashier in a casino.

So how did he know she was a CWU activist? She was supposedly a 'random voter' picked at random by CNN.

Obama's endorsement by the CWU comes crawling out into the light...

CNN's participation not in the democratic process but in the Democrat Party also is rather more well lit...

RIP Heath Ledger

I enjoyed his work in the movies. Thought he was a very talented and flexible actor.

But once he had money, he tried drugs. Heroin, apparently, was the big one. Couldn't stop. Didn't want help.

Had a young baby but his woman left him because he wouldn't stop using drugs. Guess she thought maybe that would make him want to stop. Tough love.

But in the end he didn't want to stop, or believed he couldn't stop. No difference, really, between the two. Both will kill you.

Putting an end to use of opiates, once one has established a physical norm of using them and going through each day, is nearly impossible. Very quickly one builds up a certainty, a psychological no-go zone, a feeling that if one tries to stop, one will simply fall apart, become worthless or insane, or just suffer so much that death will seem easier.

Withdrawal is that bad.

Opiates block pain receptors in the nervous system, and thus one feels less pain or no pain when using them. The problem is 'endorphins', the Greco-Roman medical term that means painkillers which are produced inside the body, are there to do that job on an 'as needed' basis. And they work well. Morning after morning I get up and can hardly move from arthritic pain, but after a few moments of moving around, it is reduced. Ten swings of the golf club and pain leaves me (only to return later that evening! :-)

When endorphins are not needed, when the brain receives few or no pain signals for an extended period of time, the endorphin production process slows and stops. It takes weeks or months to restart it.

So when the drug taking ceases, the body is left to feel every single bit of pain and misery that is usually masked by its natural painkillers.

It is literally torture.

Only about ten percent of the general public has the genetic makeup to become truly addicted to opiates (it is higher in orientals, but they have a lower addiction rate to alcohol; as I say, genetics). Most people become habituated and have difficulty stopping, but after the discomfort is done they're as well as they were, these fortunate 90%.

But for the addict it is a wall too high to climb. People believe the addict is selfishly in search of a 'high', but here's the reality--

The addict wants to feel normal and well; having that drug in his system is what brings that feeling. To NOT have the drugs is a sickness to which death is preferable.

HAVING the drugs merely removes the sickness, the physical barrier to normal function. If he has his opiates he can get out of bed and go out the door and be a normal person. (for every addict who isolates himself and passes out, there are dozens who get up and go to work and nobody knows about it-- at least for a time.)

Maybe the first days or weeks it's about feeling GOOD. Most of us have been in the hospital after surgery and pressed the little morphine button, and we all know the glorious burst of goodness that comes down that pipe.

But after the first days or weeks, feeling normal becomes the goal. After becoming addicted, one rapidly discovers that going without drugs for too long is equal to the onset of a terrible disease. Joint pain, sweating, nausea, cramping, misery and sleeplessness and exhaustion and psychotic visions, spiders crawling up the wall, are all part of the symptoms. Like the worst flu you ever had, times a thousand. Nobody who understands how this feels is going to risk it.

Nothing, then, is more important than taking the drug.

NOTHING.

Heath Ledger was a very very good actor. He was also one of the ten percent.

It's much like alcoholism, of course. Beginning to realize what's happening, one still believes it can be dealt with in the long term, that it's not too late; one continues gradually down the slope until it becomes a wall behind him that he cannot turn and climb again.

It involves decisions and judgment. That's true. It's about choices, in the beginning.

But most people don't truly know the power of that beast and the all but impossibility of seeing light at the end of the tunnel once you've gone in.

For ten percent of us, it's the risk we take when we ingest such substances.

Almost all of those who are hooked have no idea of the risk they are taking when they begin to play with such things.

Think about this when you formulate your views on national drug policies. Think about the personal destruction awaiting, perhaps, someone close to you.

The things you find on Google...

I was googling around the other day, looking up some people I used to know, and I came across this page from the University of North Carolina website, about foreign service careers.

The reason, of course, is that I knew some of the people who appear on this page. It's a sort of mini-bio of several State department and foreign service types, and it's interesting in its way.

But in the bio of one of the people I do not know appears this, as an explanation of how he came to serve in the Army during the Korean war. He seemed at first to have made a sensible and calculating decision to use the GI bill to pay for his remaining education after his military service was complete, but he also felt the need to include this-- and it's in parentheses, as an aside--

(Having been a teenager during WWII, I must admit that there was a lingering sense that joining was also the patriotic thing to do.)

The operative word here is "was". Clearly he no longer feels that joining the army is a patriotic thing to do. And in 1950, it was already a 'lingering sense', as in something that has outlived its time and will soon be forgotten. And doesn't "I must admit" sound like an apology for the fact that he joined the army out of patriotic feelings?

And so I offer you this accidental discovery, a self-admission in a mini-autobiography by a foreign service guy who seemed to feel the need to excuse himself to his fellow FS types for having had a military background. He makes sure to imply that nobody would expect anyone to feel that way today, let alone to act on those feelings.

Further down, in a piece by a man I do know and have played lots of golf with (and whom I personally admire), is a remembrance by him of his acceptance into foreign service-- that his class, 1964, was the first ever in which Ivy League schools did not produce a majority of the new FS staffers.

His school? UC Berkeley.

p.s. It has come to my attention that he is at present dealing with some personal medical difficulties, and if he happens to read this (unlikely), I want him to know that we old 'private sector foreign service' guys are thinking about him and sending prayers his way.

He is a hell of a golfer and a very nice and thoughtful guy. Good company in any group, an ability that is doubtless a qualification for FS but is also indicative of who he is as a person.

He's one of the good ones.


Fred says vote for-- uh, whoever you want

Good news circulating around the web today says that Fred won't be endorsing anyone.

Everyone knows he's had a close friendship with John McCain over the past several years, so this is good news for Fredheads-- who are utterly unlikely to vote for McCain anyway, even if Fred asked them to, and who didn't look forward to enduring the media McCain frenzy's predictable increase in fever temperature over such an endorsement.

Michelle Malkin has done a marvelous job of explaining why real conservatives believe McCain is such a bad idea.

McCain believes firmly in McCain. Period. He thinks he's smarter than we are, he thinks there's an answer somewhere within the details of every problem, some perfect distribution of yes and no, that makes every law worth passing.

He's essentially a pro-US liberal. He'll defend us and protect us (except at our own border crossings, for some reason), and then he'll tax us and spend our money on what he believes is best for us.

No principles at work there.

"I'll do what's right for this country". Fine.

But you won't hear, "I believe in lower taxes and smaller government-- I believe the citizen is better at deciding what to do with his money than is government".

None of that.

McCain buys into the idea that a tax cut must be "paid for" by either an increase somewhere else or by cutting spending to match the expected decrease in revenue.

Conservatives know that JFK did it in the '60's, Reagan in the '80's, and Bush in his first term did it as well-- cut taxes and watched incoming money pile up in the treasury. Every year since 2001 has seen an increase to all time highs in government revenue. Tax cuts PAY FOR THEMSELVES by increasing revenue due to increased business activity and productivity.

Anyone who suggests a tax cut is 'only for the wealthy' or 'has to be paid for' just is not telling the truth. Cut taxes to the wealthy and business activity and investment increases, which causes job creation, which benefits EVERYONE. Not 'trickle down' economics, but NIAGARA FALLS economics. It's been proven three times in the past fifty years. It works.

But McCain, like liberals, thinks that if government needs more money, the answer is to increase taxes to get it. Results? A dropoff in business activity and productivity, because the extra load puts some people OUT of business and causes others to buy less and order less and have fewer jobs. Paying those tax bills doesn't happen out of thin air; it has consequences.

And in the end government has LESS money, not more. Because less activity to BE taxed results in less taxes collected.

John McCain believes in John McCain. Great warrior, tough as nails, loves his country, gave everything BUT his life for it, and God bless and keep him for that.

But the Gang of 14, the restriction on American free speech in politics called McCain Feingold "reform", the attempt to rush the immigration 'reform' bill through without public debate and the subsequent bitter and angry responses he's made to the opposition from the huge majority of Americans left and right.... it's all highly disturbing.

He does not understand or accept conservative principles, and does not qualify therefore as a leader in the conservative movement, presently represented by the Republican party.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Thompson's out

Just heard on the radio that Fred's dropped out.

His mother is terribly ill back home in Tennessee, where he is now after having left the campaign trail days ago.

Confluence of bad events. Lower than hoped for vote results, and now a family medical crisis.

I sincerely hope that Fred does NOT endorse his longtime close friend John McCain, as doing so would reveal that Fred was just expelling warm moist CO2 when we were hearing all that stuff about conservative principles.

Besides, 75% of his supporters, reportedly, are already saying in one poll that if Thompson endorses McCain they don't care, and will vote differently.

Thompson had a nice conservative base. Not big, but influential. And most if not all of them are well aware that McCain is no conservative.

This can only be good for Mitt Romney, who is the conservative's choice now that Republicans are the only people who can cast votes in the Republican primaries remaining.

I suspect Romney will collect 3/4 of the Thompson voters, if not more.

Huckabee is a big government populist liberal evangelical Christian, and since most Christians are conservatives, he is not the one getting the most votes from evangelicals.

That honor goes to Mitt RoMORMONey.

So much for the anti-Mormon Christians.

A multifaceted story if I ever saw one...

Aside from the geopolitical interest inherent in this story about politics and power in Iran, I am once more frightened by the ominous specter of manmade catastrophic global warming here.

It's gonna kill us all, I tell you. We're all going to die.

They're having subzero temperatures in Iran, and people are dying there because of the cold. I'm surprised there's no international global warming convention being held there.

Remember, the Sundance film festival couple of years ago was a slobberfest over Gore's movie. This year, all they can talk about is how cold it is there. Coldest Sundance festival ever.

Monday, January 21, 2008

A fair portrait

Oliver Stone is back in the canvas folding chair with his name on it, producing a new movie about George W. Bush-- cleverly titled "Bush".

Stone insists he'll make a fair portrait of the man.

The actor who will play Bush?

Barbra Streisand's stepson, Josh Brolin.

Can't wait to not bother to see this one. :-)

Remember, it was Josh's dad, the airheaded but handsome James Brolin, who played Reagan in "the Reagans", a tv movie that was ultimately cancelled a couple of years back, when the entire nation protested over the superficial and insulting treatment the great man suffered at the hands of the actors and directors and writers and producers of this farce. To this day the movie has not been seen by the public, and probably never will.

James Brolin is Barbra's arm candy.

Josh Brolin may be an unknown quantity for this role, but the omens do not bode well for "Bush".

Those poor Spaniards... er, Andalusian dhimmis..

(note: the use of the word "muslim" below does not refer to all muslims, only to the ones who believe the world should be under Sharia law and Islam should conquer every infidel and apostate nation.)

They went to the trouble of booting out Aznar in Spain, electing a leftist government and bringing home the troops, and STILL the Islamic fundamentalists are plotting and planning and making bombs there.

Doubtless they ask themselves in quiet moments, "what more could we do?"

Answer--SUBMIT. YIELD TO THE SWORD OF ISLAM. Become second class citizens in a government not of your making. Change your religion, including from NO religion TO religion, namely Islam. Build mosques, pray five times a day, and do whatever your Imam says is "for the good of the State"-- sorry, I mean, "the will of Allah!"

Spain, you see, holds a special attraction for Islam. It is the only European state which the Muslims consider to be territory they had won. They called it Andalusia, and still do. And they were booted out by the Catholics and have not forgotten.

They want Spain back. NOW.

Oh Spaniard, I weep for you, and your stupid leftist conviction that all you have to do is appease and the dangerous ones will be satisfied and will depart.

Oh Spaniard, I weep for you, knowing as I do that there is no appeasement short of complete subjugation and humiliation which will truly appease the dangerous ones.

Oh Spaniard, your bullfights will-- wait a sec. I suspect the bullfights will be part of the Spanish culture which the Muslims will find appealing. They'll turn it into some religious blood thing, like Ashura or that time when they slaughter animals, but the sadistic fun of bullfights will not be lost on them. They'll like it.

The rest of your culture, though, Spaniard, is done for. You've already proven to the Muslims that you won't fight for it.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Senior Editor for Golfweek Magazine thinks he works at New York Times, Doesn't Know When to Shut Up.

This jerk takes it on himself to continue a non-story that is already over, thanks to the adult and mature responses by the principals involved.

Kelly Tilghman picked the wrong expression, entirely innocently, while joking about Tiger Woods on the Golf Channel.

Tiger says no big deal, I like Kelly, it was a non-story. Kelly says I apologized to Tiger and to anyone who was offended by what I said, you gotta know I didn't mean anything by it.

Everyone agreed.

Golf had to endure a brief moment of Al Shrimpton's nose under the tent, but it appears the whole thing has ended.

Until this jerk put this picture of a NOOSE on the cover of Golfweek, a magazine that sells almost no copies on the newstands-- it's 99% subscription-based (or was, before everyone started cancelling their subscriptions). He considers it his personal duty to cause a public dialog about race in golf, which nobody in golf wants to talk about or even cares about.

He notes that almost no black people came to a golf trade show, and this anecdotal observation is supposed to support his case for putting a NOOSE on the cover of a GOLF magazine, to talk about race, based on an entirely innocent turn of phrase which is forgiven and forgotten.

He's been fired, and is annoyed about that. He seems to even now believe he's in the right, and golf has a race problem.

But as a golfer, I can categorically say that I've never heard any of my golfing companions indicate anything about race in golf, including the black guys I run into repeatedly on the courses I play. Nobody cares. Nobody's interested. Tiger Woods has done a million times more to bring young black people into the sport than this jerk of a liberal journalist ever will. And nobody ever mentions Tiger is black, not ESPN or anyone else. Because it doesn't matter to anyone, it's a non-issue. He's the greatest golfer ever, period. He's refused every effort to co-opt him into race politics; he points out that he's half Thai anyway, that racial stuff is not his concern, that he just wants to play golf. And help children. God bless his sensible and compassionate and mature soul, and thank you Earl and Kutida for bringing him up right.

And a generation from now, who knows what the numbers will be? Things are changing for the better. Can't we all just play golf?

If we golfers wanted to read about race and politics, we'd pick Newsweek. For golf, it was Golfweek, until now.

On the surface, it looks like he's shattered his career; I'm not so sure. I think he might actually get HIRED by the New York Times.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Darn Global Warming...

I tell ya, it's gonna kill us all.

Here are the latest victims of runaway soaring planetary temperatures.

One can only laugh....

Here's a story rocketing around the world on the Associated Press wire, from one Shannon McCaffrey, which explores the new reality of the generation gap in terms of a black vote.

Older black people, Shannon says, are lined up behind the traditional leadership of the post-MLK movement and planning on voting for Clinton.

Younger black people, most meaning no disrespect by it, are not following that lead and are instead investing their hopes in Obama.

I'm already bored with politics and have stopped paying much attention this year, at least until the actual election, but I had to laugh when I read Shannon's conclusion.

She believes that this age-based split in black voting plans is proof that "the black vote today is anything but monolithic."

Heh. Will it be this liberal Democrat, or the other liberal Democrat? Gosh, I just can't decide.

As always in AP news stories, it is written as fact, not comment.

I suggest, Shannon, the you check back with us around the second week of November, and bring the black vote breakout from that presidential election with you.

We'll see how non-monolithic it turns out to be.

THis is just sad...

Here's an LGF post including a BBC news story on the British National Party.

I put this up to illustrate a sad tendency of today's uneducated disinterested superficial pleasure-seeking Western people; because they consider themselves 'moderate' in their politics, they don't really stand for ANYTHING. And so, in order that everyone might feel that they are in fact heard and represented, there arises a party like the BNP, or the Vlaams Belang in Holland and Belgium.

A party that is unabashedly whites-first, and against immigration and foreigners.

Because MOST western people suffer from classic 'white leftist guilt' over the acts of previous generations (never mind that all nations have squalid histories, and white people aren't any different from the rest of the world), we are unwilling as a group to speak FOR ourselves and take on the visible threats of the worst of our immigrants, legal or illegal-- the threat to destroy our culture, to supplant it with theirs, to in fact enslave us in an ideology and religion we do not want but don't have the courage to reject.

It is therefore the Nazi types, the White Power types, who alone will stand up and be counted on this. We already know where their ideology leads and we reject it. We don't want a repeat of the 19th or 20th century; that's part of why our left feels so guilty in the first place.

But why is it that White Power types are the only people who will defend Western culture? (columnists and bloggers aside :-)

Why is it that normal, mainstream Westerners in Europe and America flinch from defending their culture, and further, reach out so ridiculously far toward the East or Africa or Mexico that they just fall face down in their silly desire to appease and please everyone?

As Shelby Steele so profoundly said, it's white guilt. They look at their own pleasant lives, consider the past, and feel guilty that they're doing so well and that it might have been 'at the expense' of someone with darker skin at some historical point.

So they overdo the make-good, to make THEMSELVES feel better about THEMSELVES.

Silly, really, because no man is guilty of what his great great grandfather did. But they FEEL guilty.

It's all about them, on the left. They aren't really trying to make life better for the easterners, the foreigners; they're just trying to make THEMSELVES feel better. They want to look out on a population of all colors and cultures living happily together, then pat themselves on the back for their grandness and charitability. It's just feel-good bilge that doesn't take human nature or history's lessons into account.

The motivation is all wrong, it's selfish, and that's why leftism doesn't WORK and will destroy the culture we love.

It is unacceptable that we leave the defense of our culture to Neo Nazis. They, after all, don't really get our culture. They're exclusive, not inclusive. They think that those 'others' are by their nature inferior, that race is the difference maker. It just isn't true.

We normal sensible westerners differentiate between culture and race; all human beings are equal, but all cultures are not. Western style democracy, for all its faults, has enabled the most people to live the best lives ever. Advances abound, education is widespread, suffering is minimized. Western culture is a strong net plus for humanity, and it takes a peculiar self-inflicted blindness to miss that.

Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except for all the others. :-)

And yet the normal moderate or liberal westerner, the inclusive non-racist in the West, is going too too far, trying to do the work of radical Islam FOR them by making us into a Muslim culture without a struggle, feeling guilty over past injustice and present imbalance and thinking-- no, FEELING-- that they need to hand it all over so they can feel less guilty.

The word "jihad" means struggle, specifically for Islam in all the forms that such a struggle can take, including work and talk and war.

It seems that if we permit our left to continue to lead, they'll take the jihad right out of the jihadis, and instead of the battlefield they envision, it will be more like a red carpet rolled out for them.

I will never be a white-power guy; the concept is as phony and self-refuting as any race-based concept can be. ALL races share their humanity, and humanity itself is the source of all the problems as well as all the greatness and nobility and achievement.

It's a human problem; but it's in the soul, not the DNA. White power isn't the answer; thoughtful assessment of cultures, and the courage to call good cultures good and bad ones bad for the right reasons, is what this world needs.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

More good news in a bad news world

It seems that, in spite of the best efforts of the Hillary crowd, our younger generations are actually becoming more responsible and old-fashioned.

Here's another example.

Of course, it's sad that I consider 1.2 MILLION dead children as evidence of a GOOD trend, but it is. American women have been told for thirty five years or more that killing their own children is no different from getting botox or having a mole removed. Tissue mass. Medical procedure.

And I still don't understand how an entire country can be so easily convinced that the heart of the discussion lies with the MOTHER's rights, while never addressing the pertinent and critical issue-- when does a human being become a human being?

If you were hunting in the woods, and weren't sure whether you were looking at a deer or a man, would you just shoot anyway?

If you were driving your car and couldn't tell if the thing lying in the road ahead was a trash bag or a human being, would you just step on the gas and drive on through?

If you really weren't sure whether it was a person or not, would you just blithely kill it and worry about the humanity thing later?

Hopefully not. But that's exactly what we do with the abortion thing. We kill now and ask questions later, but mostly never.

Easy for me to say, I'm a man, yada yada, I get that. But I am also a RATIONAL man, and rationality demands me to settle the question of whether it's a person or not before I settle the question of whether I have the RIGHT to kill it; after all, the right to kill it is PREDICATED on whether it is a person.

Because nobody has the RIGHT to murder someone.

Good to see that the younger generation of American women is availing itself less and less of these slaughterhouses, even though part of that is due to newer drugs that do the same thing.

I hope and believe in our youth, and I do believe abortion is not as acceptable to this generation as it was to those past.

I've known more than one woman who's had at least one, and in every case I'm personally aware of, there is much anguish and self doubt, many tears, even decades later.

It may seem convenient at the time, but it is a brutal wound to choose to inflict upon yourself.

Ten years on...

Without an occasional effort to remember history, it is too easily forgotten.

And those who forget it tend to discover toothmarks on their derrieres from time to time.

Remember all this. Remember who Bill Clinton really is, and what is important to him.

Remember how little we must really know about him, even though we know all this about all these people. If a guy sitting in his own powerful political office is able to receive a visitor, the distressed wife of a friend, who cries in his presence and pleads for help with personal and financial problems, and he responds by grabbing her breasts and putting her hand on his crotch, I mean REALLY, what sort of fellow is this?

And who can forget "You'd better put some ice on that".

He is vile, contemptible. He will die happily, grinning at the thought of the (probably hundreds if not thousands of) women he's 'had'. He will sit in the sun, blanket over his legs, attendant at his side meeting his every need, smiling and remembering what was most important to him; his conquests.

And of course, if that was how it was then, ten years ago, twenty years ago, who wants to bet against things being exactly the same now? Especially when he's been so encouraged by his apparent success in overcoming this 'obstacle' in public life, this sleazy reputation that seems to have hurt him with some but helped with others?

And now to the point-- what kind of woman remains married to a piece of flotsam like this for purely political advantage? What sort of woman counts it as advantageous that her 'husband', the father of her child, is 'reaching out and touching someone' doubtless almost daily?

While speaking publicly for her. While representing her, while encouraging people to choose her. She is now past 60 years of age. How icy cold is her heart, really? Is there any humanity there at all? Or is her desire for absolute power so Caesar-like, so overwhelming, that she will endure any humiliation, promising herself vengeance later upon those who ask questions like this? (having second thoughts about posting what I am writing :-)

Remember, dear reader, these days there is Viagra, Levitra (funny name), Cialis. These days no man need bring an end to sexual activity; it is about choice.

And where a famous person under loads of stress might have a couple of bottles of Xanax or even Vicodin close by, Mr. Clinton doubtless has the handy blue triangles in his own pocket.

I like sex as much as the next guy. I look at women walking by. I'm normal. But this guy is abnormal. He has made a busy business out of viewing, choosing, and having brought to him whatever women he likes, using whatever power is available to him. It would not surprise me to learn that he selected politics for this reason, because it made maximum use of his charisma and charm to bring him women.

Some people make themselves wealthy with political power, and I do not doubt Mr. Clinton has done and is doing this; his driving force, though, seems to be sex. Money is required, power is required, for an old man to continue having sex. So he has accumulated these things.

Cialis is expensive. :-)

And the saddest commentary of all is that so many women want to be chosen by him, to be in close proximity to that power and money and charisma. It has been easy for him. The Kathleen Willeys and the other resistors are doubtless a minority.

A female reporter once professed that she would gladly give Bill Clinton oral sex just to reward him for having preserved her right to abortion.

The longer I live, the more I understand about the fall of Rome.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Old media still doesn't get it

Looks like the verdict is in, and the public trusts the mainstream media 1/3 less than it did last year at this time.

It's worse than that, though; last year only 27% said they trusted the media.

Now it's below 20% and dropping like a rock.

How do you suppose these huge multibillion dollar companies are going to remain huge multibillion dollar companies when the public has nothing but contempt for the product they tout?

In spite of this clear trend, few if any major media people are figuring it out; The NYT is the exception that proves the rule, having recently hired Bill Kristol as a columnist.

The staff is practically jumping out the windows in despair, needless to say. Which would probably ALSO help the New York Times.

unbelievable...

So Dennis Kucinich sued in Nevada to be put back on the Democrat debate guest list, in which of course he was originally invited to participate but from which his name was struck after NBC concluded he had become irrelevant.

And a smaller state court found NBC guilty of violating some right of DK's to be part of the process and ordered them to put him back on the guest list.

NBC apparently pulled some strings fast, because the Nevada state supreme court heard this appeal BEFORE the Dem debate last night, and concluded that it would be a violation of NBC's first amendment rights to give them court orders about who should and should not participate in their broadcast.

That's right, the Nevada Supremes decided that NBC has a right to control what it says on TV.

Of course, the public does not have this right, not anymore.

McCain Feingold (Thompson) assuredly removed this right by restricting political ads by groups of private citizens within 60 days of elections.

Yes, we the people can no longer go to the 'public square', for that is what television is in this country today, and advocate for or against our candidates of choice. Our right of free speech has been removed in this instance, arguably THE most important instance of free speech and certainly the one which the Founders had in mind when they WROTE that amendment.

It surely was not Larry Flynt's right to publish porn that concerned those men in the 18th century. It was the right of the public to be a part of the public discussion about government; the advance restriction of government suppression of public speech about itself, about the future of the nation.

In Nevada, NBC has the right to talk politics within 60 days of an election, but you do not.

BTW, it's McCain Feingold (Thompson) because Fred has joked with McCain about naming it this way, due to Fred's enthusiastic support of and vote for this bill.

The conservative in the race? Still unidentified.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Global Warming will kill us all...

Those in Baghdad who are inclined to believe in omens or portents or messages from Allah are almost universally pleased with the first snow in that city for more than 50 years.

The snow so far has failed to fall in much of the Middle East, but now record low temperatures are being set all over Israel, from the plains of the Negev to the heights of the Golan.

Manmade Catastrophic Global Warming is, um, a bit of a dud.

Monday, January 14, 2008

The worst that could happen.....

It's the title of a song from the 60's.

It's also President Hillary Clinton.

If you're in the finance business, that is. Or just about any other business, since business in general is how finance makes money. No business, no borrowing. No borrowing, no finance business. No jobs, no credit card accounts. No business, no jobs.

No mortgages, to say the least. Talk about a housing crisis.

No spending. No growth. No courage. No confidence. No anything, including tax revenues for the government to use to make welfare and social security payments which in this election season are being used as vote bait.

I've always said the people who really understand business are the people who know best which policies work and which do NOT.

When I'm right, I'm right

I speculated a few posts ago that, in spite of the obvious status of Barack Hussein Obama as an apostate Muslim who should be beheaded (he is, after all, born to a Muslim father, raised Muslim, and currently a longtime member of a Christian church), the Islamofascists will see him as a beacon of hope for THEM and will not act against him.

Here's a poll that shows Arab Americans overwhelmingly in support of Obama.

Why do you suppose that is?

I reckon they all know what our media has refused to discuss; that Obama is not a real Christian, is not converted, still has 'feelings' for his Muslim roots, and in the end will help them accomplish their goals.

Obama, after all, has a good working relationship with Raila Odinga, the 'opposition' in Kenya who lost an election and has decided to keep killing people until they overturn the results.

At which point he will institute Sharia law in all of Kenya, not just the Muslim parts. (Google "Obama Odinga" without the quotation marks and read the stories; they're everywhere except in the mainstream media.)

Watch and listen to Muslims here and all over the world concerning Obama, and ask yourself if he is really the faithful follower of Christ implied by his membership in that church.

IF I was just a bit more into football...

... I would have made predictions on the Cowboys' loss, and made them more than a month ago.

I did, in fact, in a few casual conversations.

Even a month ago I saw a team of disparate monstrous egos, a haunted fearful look on too many faces when they're behind in games, and a tendency to over-demonstrate whenever good plays happened, as if they were trying to convince themselves they were better than they knew.

Then, last week after the Giants' win, I noted that the Giants' front four was absolutely fearsome in their pass rush, and that was why they beat the Redskins. The Giants had worked for several years to assemble their pass rushing group, and it was unstoppable even against a very good Redskins team.

Dallas, I knew, was no better than the Redskins, and couldn't handle this rush.

The game was lost for three reasons; dominant Giants pass rush, dropped passes by Cowboys receivers (almost a half dozen, including TO's first chance at the ball), and general disorganization and lack of crispness on the part of the entire offense. Too many penalties, with a center who snapped the ball late repeatedly and made the entire offensive line guilty of false starts, too many half-run routes and loafing receivers, the usual overhyped and underperforming egomaniacs at work.

Romo really really wanted to win; he just couldn't get the rest of them to perk up and feel like they could do it.

Because the Giants pass defense really was awesome.

Now, the Giants take to the frozen tundra of Lambeau field (do you still hear Cosell? I do) to take on a considerably more confident and better executing team than this pack of blue starred losers; the Green Bay Packers.

I don't see New York going to the Super Bowl.

Brett Favre is the man of destiny. :-)

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Remember when....?

Remember when Democrats were all shouting that the American people want the troops home, this nation is overwhelmingly against the Iraq war, and the public wants it ended immediately?

Remember how important it was to give the public what it wanted?

Apparently that's a selective instinct among the left.

As you note Rasmussen's survey showing 80% agree with the idea of voter ID, remember that it is perenially true that 70%, plus or minus a couple, are against abortion.

Epic story

Here's yet another of the many stories that had no problem making it into the newspapers sixty years ago but today don't have a chance.

Sometimes I think that when a story like this does not make the country's major newspapers, some publishers ought to be somehow sanctioned. But I suppose the plunging stock value of the New York Times is sufficiently illustrative of the American peoples' ability and desire to punish them through market choices, and that's good enough for me. :-)

I found this through this link at Blackfive, and if you'll follow that link you'll find an extremely amusing cartoon that ties into this news story.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Lame and Predictable

Well, now that we've had a couple of years of cooling off, and crazy stuff happening like snow in Baghdad, you will be hearing from the hucksters of climate change soon and loudly.

In fact, here they are, insisting that 'it's still happening' without offering any proof, or even any explanation of why it isn't happening this year, or last year, or the year before.

This is another example of how they worm their way out of the explanation by saying 'extreme weather events of all kinds could be caused' by global warming-- er, sorry, climate change.

In other words, when it's cold, it's global warming causing it. When it rains, when it doesn't rain, when it's hot, when it's cold, when it snows, it's all caused by manmade catastrophic global warming.

Please do not miss the fact that this story is distributed worldwide by Reuters, guaranteeing it will appear in thousands of newspapers and on thousands of radio and television shows. Worldwide news agencies like AP, Reuters and Agence France Presse are the de facto writers of many of these shows and articles, because people do 'rip and read' from news wires for convenience in broadcasting and publishing. If the story is there and it's already written, and you need to fill the last minute of the three minute local news, hey, why not? So Reuters becomes the controller of what you hear and what you do NOT hear.

I was in radio for almost thirty years, people. This is what happens. AP and Reuters and the old UPI (in my day) were pretty much our only newswriters in small and medium town radio news.

Note that this spokesman says 'the decade from 1998 to 2007' is the hottest decade on record.

See if this holds true in a year, when it's 1999 through 2008. It won't. Because 1998 is the big one, and the rest are almost average, especially now, when the last two years are below average. It's convenient to them that 1998 begins a decade that just ended, so they can speak of this in current terms, but it won't hold up.

2005 was warm, and had lots of juicy hurricanes. But their threats and fear-mongering about the next two hurricane seasons fell totally flat. They're wrong, and they're getting defensive about this.

Expect more.

Mixed emotions

On the one hand, Bush continues to amaze me with his personal strength and willingness to do things he believes are right no matter what the criticism.

On the other, he continues to amaze me with unexpected abandonments of certain principles, or what I thought were his principles, in favor of concrete compromise.

I suppose I'm just too simple a man. I can't keep up with what it takes to actually change the world.

Bush is demanding concrete change with specific language, and it is impressive. It is also doomed, because too many Palestinians will either never agree and sabotage it with violence, or else they will agree and then violate the agreement violently, happily.

Because for too many Palestinians, the end of Israel is the only acceptable outcome.

Can the people of Gaza, enthused for 'a lasting peace and a nation of Palestine', overthrow Hamas, or even defeat it in elections? Can the people without guns who voted for the people with guns now vote against them? Or was this, as in Stalinist times, "one man, one vote, ONCE"?

I am sure Gazans want peace. I am also sure those Gazans are outnumbered by the ones who want bloodshed and destruction. Perhaps things are different in the West Bank, which enjoys a certain commerce with Israel and thus enjoys being in touch with the free world and free markets.

But Gaza is hell, and the decent human being is a distinct minority.

And even if the people of Gaza can see the light of peace and overthrow Hamas in grasping for it, will the Arab world or the larger Muslim world permit this without interfering?

Bush is in my view not actually pursuing peace, but trying to define more clearly than ever the intransigence of one side and the willingness of the other. He seeks to prove to the world that the Jews are not the problem.

But the world doesn't care. To them, the Jews will ALWAYS be the problem, as they always have been before. No matter what, who, or where, or even when in history, the Jews are the problem. Any simple reading of any historical review of any nation that ever had Jews in it will tell you this. See "the Dreyfus Affair". See "the Pale" of tsarist Russia, and of course all of Axis Europe shortly thereafter. And those are just in the past couple of hundred years.

Bush is a brave man, and will be remembered much the way Reagan is, as a world-changer and a difference-maker. But will a practical and political peace in the land of Israel, the Philistines, the second temple, the Dome of the Rock, the birthplace of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob and of the Messiah, be on his resume?

God knows I hope so, but it is very hard to believe in it.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

If you had told me ten years ago....

If you had told me ten years ago that tonight, January 2008, I'd be searching the cable channels for something interesting to watch and would settle upon a celebrity boxing match, with Michael Buffer as ring announcer and Boom Boom Mancini as color commentator, and with Tonya Harding and Paula Jones in the ring with the gloves on, throwing lefts and rights at each other--

Well, I'd have laughed in your face at the very least. :-)

And yet, it is at this moment that I am watching precisely that.

It is entertainment in which everyone, from the networks to the participants to the fringe participants to the ticketed audience members to those of us watching on TV, is utterly degraded.

As I write that line at the beginning of the third round, I see that Paula Jones, completely bewildered at how much it hurts to be punched, is standing in her own corner shaking her head, saying "no mas". The ref has his hands in the air, back and forth, it's all over....

...and Tonya Harding moves in while Jones is not looking, steps around the ref, and blasts Jones with another overhand right.

In the face of all these circumstances, Tonya Harding still finds a way to look classless.

Incroyable
.

Paula Jones doubtless pines for the days when she gave the blows instead of taking them.

But Tonya takes the cake for postmodern American degradation.

Or I do, for watching. Every day I live in this country, I understand a little bit more about the fall of Rome.

Death in America

The Dallas Morning News finally tells the whole story today with a big page one article-- about the two teenage girls who were shot repeatedly to death by their Egyptian cabdriver father.

The girls were found in the back of his cab, after one had called 911 and said "I'm dying" over and over again.

Notably, nobody in the area saw anyone walking away; it is believed he was picked up by someone, probably a Muslim who was helping him leave the country to escape punishment. He is likely in his native Egypt, a place he went once or twice a year.

The News actually did describe it as an honor killing, but they added "a practice which has been largely repudiated".

They did not say by who, or how many, or provide any evidence for this assertion. The problem is that this practice has NOT been repudiated, and isn't going to be anytime soon.

It would be nice if, while striving mightily to lay a smooch on le grand derriere of Islam, the DMN would source assertions like that one. I have little doubt that in this case they cannot.

EEEEeeevil Nuclear Power

The Brits have now endorsed the evil nuclear powerplant as the answer to meet increasing energy needs without environmental destruction.

This is only common sense, of course. France, despite declaring its intent only a few years ago to disassemble all its nuclear plants for environmentalism's sake, has done nothing of the kind and will not. There have been no accidents. Systems are much better than in the days of Three Mile Island, which didn't actually harm anyone, and of course Chernobyl was a product of legendary Soviet inefficiency and "centralized carelessness" that happened over 20 years ago.

Nuclear energy is sensible. Clean, endless, the way to charge batteries on all those electric cars of the future. The only thing wrong with it is... well, nothing. But that usually doesn't stop enviro protests, and it isn't stopping them there either.

Amazing what you find when just browsing...

The blog called Gates of Vienna has two contributing writers, neither of whom is personally known to me, but both are excellent. The main point of the blog is the eternal constancy of Islam's battle with the west, and a desire to educate for the sake of practical solutions; you can't succeed in a struggle when you don't understand the viewpoints and the history and the purposes of the other side.

But today I found sublimity, in this post from a couple of years back. I found a perfect expression of my own passion and sentiment on the subject of Israel, Jews, the Holocaust, and the world's present eager desire to pretend it never happened.

Dymphna is the writer, presumably female and a decade older than I am; but her discovery of and response to the evil that men do to one another is in every sense my own.

The end of innocence. The shock at the callousness of the onlooking world, the millions who yawn at evil. And the determination to be, feel, think, speak right against wrong, and to jump in and clarify when one sees the subject being changed out of boredom and disinterest.

Evil should never be boring. If it is, there is something horribly wrong with you. You are incomplete, not quite human. Evil should provoke a visceral response in every person.

Dymphna, thank you so much for finally finishing and posting this. It moved me in a way I'm finding hard to explain, and I will not forget it.

Common grounds of humanity should be so clearly touched upon more often. :-)

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Tasty irony...

Apparently there is trouble in Bradford.

Local Pakistani muslim men are angry, because immigrant Poles are taking less pay, working harder than they are and beating them out of jobs.

Yes, those darn blond blue-eyed European immigrants have arrived in the Pakistani neighbourhoods, driving down property values and wrecking things for everyone.

Interesting not just for the irony of the races involved and their positions in the argument, but also for the fact that the chief complaint seems to revolve around how much harder the Poles are willing to work.

The best yet....

If you want to really understand what is going on over there in the middle east, you must find your own news, and you find it on the web.

Turn off the TV, put down the newspaper, and go here for what is arguably the best story yet in terms of understanding Iraq through the eyes of Iraqis.

Iranian comedy....

The story of the Iranian naval provocation is serious enough... another second, they say, and those speedboats would have been toothpicks, and then of course world recriminations against our dangerous and out of control military would have ensued.

Which, I'm sure, was the purpose of that provocation.

But after hearing the radio recordings, I couldn't help but giggle. That deep, ominous, threat-laden voice-- "you will explode in two minutes".... it was like some old radio show villain from a generic foreign country, or a "Mission Impossible" bad guy.

My fave milblog Blackfive has links to video of the Phalanx gun system in operation, and he asks the Navy respectfully to be sure it's a woman firing the weapon of choice up the butts of the Iranians when the time comes.

"you will explode in two minutes"... cue villain to twirl mustache and say moouaahahahaaa... :-)

dunno how I missed it....

... after all, the Golf Channel is on two or more TVs in my house pretty much all the time...

But apparently, Kelly Tilghman is a raging southern racist from Duke, a crazy woman who thinks Tiger Woods oughtta be lynched, because you know, he's black and all....

Reality-- Kelly Tilghman (announcer, teamed with the very funny Nick Faldo on tournament broadcasts) was clowning around with Faldo about how the younger players should deal with Woods, as they cannot defeat him individually. Faldo suggested ganging up on him, and Tilghman followed with something like (not a quote) 'they oughtta lynch him in a back alley' or some such.

Now the world is abuzz. Golf is still the refuge of country club racists, a whites only sport, Tilghman's attendance at Duke is proof that the Duke lacrosse team WAS guilty of racism after all, and Tilghman represents the worst of the whitest, yada yada.

Poor Kelly. She was making it in a man's world, practically from scratch. She played golf at Duke but never made it to the LPGA. The Golf Channel was her niche in life, and she handled it with aplomb, until this week.

But now something she obviously did not mean is going to be held against her, because there are some who will perceive that they will gain political strength from it. And she will be compelled to disappear. The Golf Channel will be blackmailed by Sharpton or Jackson into removing her for fear of losing ad revenue, as was the network that used to employ Don Imus.

But let's be clear-- Imus was and is a provocateur, a paid assassin whose job it was to flirt with those lines, to push those envelopes, to make people think about getting angry with him while they laugh.

Poor Kelly is just a nice, decent, good announcer who meant nothing by it and will be destroyed by the politics.

I hope I am wrong, and that the Golf Channel will stand by her. It depends in large part on Tiger's response, and he is not known to hold strong public positions related to race.

And I will be colossally disappointed in him if, like Tom Jackson at ESPN during the Rush Limbaugh fiasco, he gives a nod toward race hucksters and lets Kelly be the real lynching victim.

Tiger, though, has always brushed aside the race hucksters in the past. One more time, please, Tigre, for the sake of common sense.

UPDATE-- the Golf Channel has settled the matter, along with a dependable response from the sensible Tiger Woods and a dismissive statement from his agent. It's over.

Common sense wins the day. How rare, and how exquisite.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

A prediction

Barack Hussein Obama was raised a Muslim, and attended a Madrassa when he was young.

I personally do not hold this against him, nor do I believe there is a particular Islamic conspiracy to sneak a secret Muslim into the White House. It's just a fact from his youth.

It is also a fact that, in Islam, your father's religion is the one you are 'born into', and if your father was a Muslim, then that is what you are. Period.

It is also a fact that Obama rather more likes and identifies with his father, a black Muslim African, than his mother, who provides the family links that are distantly related to VP Dick Cheney. Not that Cheney has anything to do with it.. :-) It's just that Obama is his father's son, by choice.

So we have this possibility:

An American president who is currently a member of a Christian church in Illinois and speaks from its pulpit for campaign purposes, but who was raised a Muslim and born to a Muslim father he reveres.

In other words, in the view of the radicals this man is the worst kind of apostate, a Muslim who has become a Christian. Of course, it doesn't matter how serious he ever was about either religion; what matters is what radicals think, and what they DO about what they think.

If Obama were any other ordinary dusky-skinned man, a former Muslim now saying he is a Christian, he'd either already be dead or be marked for assassination.

Interestingly, it doesn't seem likely to me that even the most radical of radicals will call for his death. I believe that those men are media-savvy political players of the worst order, who alternately embrace and ignore their own self-stated principles based on their estimations of what will benefit them.

And I suspect the radical Islamists would enjoy an Obama presidency on a number of levels, and hope that he wins. And they aren't the least bit interested in beheading the apostate, as they would be if it were any other apostate.

Just my take, but I believe the apostate Obama is uniquely safe from Islamic fatwas. Because if there's one thing I take to the bank, it's the fact that radical Islamists are far more practical than principled.

Monday, January 7, 2008

simultaneously amusing and sickening

In the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, an article (in Dutch, naturellement) suggests that because American affairs have such a marked influence on world events and the world economy, non-Americans have to somehow pay costs or 'taxes' accrued by American politics.

They therefore compare themselves to early Americans at the Boston Tea Party and have begun to insist that the rest of the world have a vote in the American presidential election.

Taxation without representation, they say, is what this is. So it's unfair. To them.

I wonder if they know how much American taxpayer money flies through the UN and the IMF and various other bloodsucking agents of corruption for which the American voter has NO SAY WHATSOEVER.....?

If anything, there is a net economic gain to the world by the existence of America, not just in stolen American taxpayer funds (another tea party would be good, but I can't figure out what to throw in the harbor) but in the very fact that the world is a more economically vital place because of American leadership and productivity.

And yet some Belgian whiner thinks that he should have a vote in our election because he feels taxed, somehow.

As a longtime resident of Brussels myself, I recommend to this man and any who share his idea that if the Belgians would just ditch the economy-choking socialism and get their butts to WORK, they'd be AMAZED at the problems that would literally solve themselves.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Yet another proof that journalists aren't the smart ones

HEre's a story from ABC about the Rollins/Romney pugilistic puns....

Rollins aggressively says he'd like to punch Mitt in the mouth.

Mitt jokes that he'd ask Rollins to please leave the well coiffed hair alone.

ABC prints the quote, but they use the word 'quaff' meaning to drink, rather than 'coif', meaning to style hair. It's a bonehead mistake from a network priding itself on superior intellect and education and prose style.

This is what they learn, or don't, in Columbia School of Journalism, the school they go to in order to become smarter than you and me, so they can tell us how to live.

Journalism was so much better off fifty years ago, when its workers were ex-soldiers with sleeves rolled up and cigarettes glowing, just making the phone calls, checking the facts, and telling the public what happens. Nowadays it's a 'profession', having succeeded in conning the public about the 'qualifications' and the 'superior education' required to practice it, and of course having started the Columbia School of Journalism and such institutions.

Journalism was never meant to be on an equal footing with doctoring, lawyering and accounting. It just isn't that hard.

Even I know that I can't coif a beer or quaff someone's hair. Good grief.

For the record...

Ed Rollins is a major league A$$hole.

He is, at present, campaign manager for the 'Evangelical Christian Preacher candidate', and here's a sampler of his opinions, freely and loudly rendered to a female dining companion in Iowa recently.

Yet another example of the twofaced nature of Mike Huckabee, who pretends to be guided by Christ in his campaign venture and yet hires the same dirty trickster types that everyone else hires when the going gets serious.

Rollins, remember, has already expressed a pointless desire to knock Mitt Romney's teeth out.

Apparently Rollins was some sort of boxer when he was young, but the complete lack of public awareness of his efforts in that arena says something not unexpected about his skills.

Rollins hasn't won anything for anyone in decades, and although he's delivered Iowa for Huckabee tonight, I rather suspect that's the sum total of the winning streak. Huck will win no more states, in my view.

And if the conservatives of this nation are inobservant enough to overlook Huckabee's lack of principle and distance from conservatism, and he should happen to become the nominee, he will lose to whomever the Dems put up. Period.

The man who murdered his own daughters.....

Follow this link and look into his eyes, this Islamic man who decided his two ordinary American teenage daughters were dishonoring himself and his family name by being.... ordinary American teenagers.

So he shot them, killed them both.

Right here, where I live, in Irving, Texas, USA.

Multiculturalism is NOT a virtue. Virtue, or lack of it, lies within each culture participating in a multicultural society. The society itself depends on each participating culture to bring its own virtue with it, and some DO NOT.

Traditional, fundamentalist Islam calls for fathers and brothers to kill their own daughters and sisters in order to maintain family honor. This is vile, demonic, pure evil, the OPPOSITE of virtue. Parents are supposed to love their children. What could be less honorable than to kill your own daughter because you think she makes YOU look bad?

It is about the male ego of the Islamic father, and it is unutterably evil.

If rejecting this with every ounce of my strength and energy is intolerant of me, then so be it. Some things simply should not be tolerated.

There is no punishment fierce enough for this kind of crime. But think creatively... perhaps if he is tied naked to a post in a public square, on a cold day, and coated in Alpo so that dogs will lick him.... wait, make it pigs.

Make him long for the day when he believed the behavior of his daughters was the most embarrassing thing that could happen to his ego. That'd be a good start.

UPDATE: more on this from Phyllis Chesler.