Knight Of The Mind

Chopping At The Root

2005-04-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

The Confederate Yankee has noted an interesting and exciting development in the citizen's war against illegal aliens. The Minuteman Project is now going to California to seek out and pillory businesses that knowingly follow a policy of hiring illegal aliens to lower their labor rates. This puts The Minuteman in a whole new league.

The Minutemen are making hay while the sun shines. They are using their fifteen minutes of fame to score like a playoff NBA team. I am now even more convinced these guys are the legitimate article and are trying to make the US a better country.

Why? because they are smart about it.

How? By knowing what makes criminals commit crimes. Criminals commit crimes because it pays.

Who gets paid by illegal immigration? Organized crime lords and shady US business organizations. When MS-13 issued its fatwa aginst The Minutemen, they knew what they were talking about. The Minutemen have engaged a group of enterprising criminals and are now engaging the people who patronize their illegal business.

Larry Elder pointed out that The Minutemen had slowed the rate of illegal immigration across the Arizona border by 75%. These people get results. They get those results by being a whole lot smarter than they get credit for.

These dishonst companies that knowingly hire illegals should go ahead and underestimate The Minutemen. You'll end up the way Gray Davis did when he underestimated The California Recall Movement.

Should We Fear The Assassin's Mace?

2005-04-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

China has undoubtably upgraded their economy and their image as a world power. Has this upward trend also upgraded their ability to mount military expeditions beyond their national borders? Do the Chinese really want to fight the US?

Like many aspects of Chinese policy the answers have more than one side. Yes, the Chinese could hurt us very badly in the short term. They have 500 ballistic missiles and build 75 more each year. Also, they have the best and latest that the Russian defense industry can build. This has been advantageous to Russia because it helps them maintain these industries even when the Russian Government can't necessarily buy an economic order quantity of their wares.

The "no" side of the question relates to logisitical sustainability. The Chinese do not produce high quality metals themselves. They cannot build the types of rolled steel alloys necessary to armor tanks against KE missiles. They also depend heavily on imports to sustain what industries they have. China would have to win a major quickly. Otherwise, the Chinese might use themselves up early, like a poorly conditioned boxer, then, as Japan did in World War II, get nailed with the haymakers towards the end.

It seems increasingly likely that the more nationalistic elements of China's government and society would like to take the US down a notch or two. Like many other countries, they see the US presence abroad as a sign of our domination and their inability to prevent that domination. They resent our support for Taiwan and would like more than anything to reclaim the island in a way that utterly humiliates the United States.

This perhaps provides the normative underpinning to their new "Assassin's Mace" weaponry program. Based on a doctrine called "The Inferior Defeats The Superior" when roughly translated from Chinese, this doctrine calls for the Chinese military to develop a series of weapon systems that enable it to nuetralize the C4I advantages of a superior, more modern, military force so that the battle can occur on a lower technology battlefield.

While the Chinese may want to take over Taiwan, there still remain obstacles to this course of action not limited to the proximity of The US Navy. The Chinese may have upwards of 111 million people who have undergone military training at some time in their lives, but that doesn't mean they have enough airlift and sealift capability to make it to Taiwan.

Also, the Taiwanese own many more modern fighter aircraft and have far more experience in training their pilots how to fly them. Thus, even if they destroy the US Navy's C4I grid over Asia and fire enough cruise missiles and SRBMs to keep our surface fleet at bay, they may be losing the third dimension of the battlefield and thus not have what every attacking force absolutely needs; freedom of manuever.

China also suffers from some societal pressures that would possibly preempt prolonged military aggression on the part of it's government. By limiting the number of children families could legally create, the Chinese have given themsleves what Thomas P. M. Barnett describes as the "1-2-4 Problem." Here one Chinese young adult supports a mom, a dad and four hungry grand parents. It's an inverted monetary pyramid that makes the US Social Security system look almost sane and logical.

If too many of the "1's" get killed in a major war, China has a social problem that their fledgling modern economy may not be able to solve. However, this rests upon the benign assumption that the Chinese leaders care more about the welfare of their own people than they do about gaining international power and influence. Sometimes that's a safe assumption....

The bottom line remians that China will always remain a dangerous potential adversary. They will always want us out of Taiwan and will always want to pay back Japan for the Rape of Nanking and other heinous attrocities committed in The Second World War. Both of these goals are thwarted on a daily basis because the US has a lot of fire power stationed where the Chinese wish we would not meddle. This puts us in an inexorable competition with The Chinese that could easily turn just as bloody as it once did on The Korean Peninsula. Thus, if we were smart, we'd remain very afraid of The Assassin's Mace.

Update I: Vodkapundit offers the possibility that China's longterm strategic goal is the conquest of Japan.

Choreographed Temper-Tantrums.

2005-04-21T03:38:00.000-07:00

In reaction to the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope, a certain segment of the blogsphere has thrown a rather predictable, choreographed temper tantrum. Here we have America Blog.

Boy, It does sound like they are going to be installing "showers" and "ovens" at the Vatican.

I see people talking about the Rat Pope's homophobia, misogyny (did his doctoral thesis on St. Augustine!), intolerance, rigid hard-line attitudes, his almost blatant electioneering from the Vatican for Bush, his condemnation of other faiths and on and on and on and on.

Well, now it is time to turn attention to the Biblical admonitions against unclean menstruating women and a return to animal sacrifice.

The saddest part is that they only took 2 days to pick this guy. That means it was pretty unanimous. I can't wait to see what dark ages this takes us to.

Hail to the new Nazi Pope! Back to the Dark Ages!

Hile Pope Ratzinger .....no wonder so many people have left the catholic church....now they can try to strenthen their flock via 3rd world countries....

Well, that explainds the red, black and white robes......what a f***** up world....a Nazi Pope...

What can one expect from a filthy Nazi?

the catholic church has always trived on violence - any belief that it is a peaceful church is delusional.

This from a Nazi bastard wearing a dress - and no doubt with a past in child-molesting. Can we say projecting our sexual guilt on others, perhaps?

WHY WHY WHY anyone would belong to this Church is beyond me. Especially if you are gay OR a woman. It's almost like the gay Log Cabin Repubs. But worse.

The only way the Catholic Church will change is for people to wake up and see they are fools for following it or continuing to call themselves Catholic. Surely of the 60 million americans who do - only a handful actually follow it all to a T anyway. WAKE up SHEEPLE!

I guess he doesn't get called Holy Father - he'd prefer Mein Fuhrer.

Now that we have Pope Adolf 1, that should be more clear to everyone.

Here's a standout, even amongst this crowd- note the KKK spelling of Catholic, and advocating "nuking" the Vatican:

Maybe they're trying to incite the Religious War that every right winger has been waiting for for so long. The arrogance and insensitivity involved with putting a freak like this in charge of the kathlick church is sure to piss off a lot of people (Jews, WWII vets of all religions and nationalities). Perhaps someone will finally nuke vatican city after this brilliant move by 115 senile, out-of-touch old men (in dresses).

So why this screed of unadulterated hate speech from the 'compassionate, caring liberals'? They didn't get to intimidate The Vatican into selecting a Pope they approved of, so now they are going to throw their temper tantrum. It would be a more impressive show if this weren't so predictable.

Another Difference Between The People And The Elite

2005-04-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

The original Latin noun Pagan, Paganis had a far different definition in the era of The Roman Republic than it does today. The term originated in the days before Constantine decreed Rome a Christian Empire. The Pagans lived far a field from Rome and grew its food supply in orchards and grain fields. They were often looked down upon as stupid and ill-informed. The noun had a negative connotation to it; like calling somebody a peckerwood today.

Fast-forwarding to modern America gives us a totally different view. The modern zeitgeist concerning religion has been informed by the writings on Engels and Marx who describe religion as "the opiate of the masses."

While most well-educated people would admit that Marxism had severe shortcomings, this view of religion has taken hold with force amongst the self-selecting intellectual elite in modern America. This view of religion held by Marx, Nietzsche and many other Post-Enlightenment philosophers has made agnosticism, if not outright Christophobia, an unstated requirement to be admitted into this circle of intellectual brilliance. In essence, these people have come to feel they prove a certain toughness and superiority by casting religion aside and proving they don't need to walk with a crutch.

This puts them outside the intellectual and social realm of the rest of America. They respond to this the same way the supercilious elite of The Roman Republic responded to being surrounded by a bunch of back-woods illiterates who worshipped the tree-spirits. Rather than stopping to question the dissonance they experience from people who don't share their views on subjects such as abortion, euthanasia, or the basic decency of Pope John Paul II, they scoff at such things the way Sulla and his good old boy network would have laughed at the practitioners of Nature Worship in Pre-Imperial Gaul.

Or, they go strongly to the ad hominum and attempt to intimidate any who oppose their views into silence. Recently, The Drudge Retort, ran a story about John Paul II receiving nutrition through a tube in his nose during the last days of his coalescence. The comments were truly illuminating. Here's a sampling of what our enlightened elite had to say about the then mortally ill pontiff.

1) Time to let the old fart go....

All he can do is barely wave. He can not even give a sermon....

PULL THE TUBE!!!

2) No. Keeping him alive cripples the power of the Catholic church. Leave it.

3) Kinda like Ah gets new-trition from the rolled up hunerd dollar bills stuck up mah nose! SSnniiiiifff!! Ahhh! (signed GWBUSH)

Now these are the very deep thoughts of a group of people who consider themselves far superior to the rest of the human race. A self-selecting elite that finds itself increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country around them. Perhaps a few of these geniuses would wake up one morning and wonder how terrifically brilliant they really were if 7 out of 10 people lived a totally different life than they did and were basically glad of it. But they don't. When they don't blame it on others, a la John Edwards' "Two Americas Speech", they consider it an affirmation of their own superiority.

While I'm not sure Jack Kelly accurately predicts a 4th Great Awakening over the Terri Schiavo incident, there is a genuine philosophical need to define what constitutes a human being, and how that life should be valued. Engaging that debate without a biased understanding of Christian Theology regarding that subject could very well be like showing up to a gun fight with only a knife. Religion will inform the politics of tomorrow no matter what the elitists believe.

This may not presage the dreaded Rovian Theocracy that many on the left currently rail against. Jimmy Carter won the presidency with the strong support of religious voters and Bill Clinton didn't give those votes away without a fight. However, this is because both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton knew that they had to at least follow the example of Henry of Navarre and accept that maybe Paris was after all worth the mass.

Update I: Of the Mind puts the spotlight on a blogger who blames Pope John Paul II for the child molestation scandal. Read the post and judge for yourself. Honest criticism or shiek, Post-Modern Christophobia?

At The Bottom Of The Pyramid

2005-04-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

For about two months after I graduated from college, I went back home to my home town while I waited for my Army OBC reporting date. This was a fairly boring and uneventful two months except for one peculiarity. These two guys I knew but wasn't really buddy-buddy with in High School, I'll call them Huey and Louie, kept trying to get me interested in this phenominal opportunity.

This phenominal opportunity was something called "interactive marketing." This was the current euphemism for AMWAY. These guys had been duped into joining a pyramid scheme and now were looking for a way off the bottom. All of a sudden they noticed "Good Old Steve" was back in town and they both hoped to latch on to the sucker who would take them off the hook.

Needless to say, I had no real desire to sell scented soaps and Fruit Of The Loom underwear to 20 of my closest friends. It took me about two weeks to get rid of Huey and Louie and as far as I know, they still have that lifetime supply of mens underwear stashed in their parents' garage somewhere. However, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of younger Americans felt the same desperation with the US Government's very own federally funded pyramid scheme. Namely, Social Security.

A recent report by the Social Security Trustees, does nothing to asuage the sense that the generation of workers now aged 25 to 35, are the newest suckers with the garages full of scented soap and unmentionables. The excellent blog Cold Hearted Truth tells us that according to the Trustees, "benefits are scheduled, not garunteed." Run that one by your attorney for a smarm check.

An FAQ at the Social Secuity website (www.ssa.gov) gives us a more comprehensive, and even less reassuring, explanation of how SS will not work. The gory details follow below.

Q. I'm 35 years old. If nothing is done to improve Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?

A. Unless changes are made, at age 73 your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter from presently scheduled levels. See the 2004 Trustees Report

Q. I'm 25 years old. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?

A. Unless changes are made, when you reach age 63 in 2042, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you lived to be 100 years old in 2079 (which will be more common by then), your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 33 percent from today's scheduled levels. See the 2004 Trustees Report

Q. Should I count on Social Security for all my retirement income?

A. No. Social Security was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement. It is often said that a comfortable retirement is based on a "three-legged stool" of Social Security, pensions and savings. American workers should be saving for their retirement on a personal basis and through employer-sponsored or other retirement plans.

Thus, we have a pension system that promised more than it can deliver and based itself on a pyramid scheme. Thus, the older people who already contributed their whole working lives want to make sure they get what they feel they were promised.

For the younger people, these benefits weren't promised, they were scheduled. Like a minor league baseball game, these benefits can seemingly get unscheduled in a hurry the next time an older member of Congress feels like raiding the Social Security Trust Fund and leaving a risible IOU in the account instead.

Therefore, the taxes we younger members of the workforce pay for Social Security go into a lock-box. The benfits we are supposed to get back out are only "scheduled." America's so-called safety net has left it's younger generation at the base of a SCAMWAY pyramid. Social Security must be reformed and the sooner the better.

Wesley Clark: The Return Of The Barracks Emperor

2005-04-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

It's Very thoughful of Barracks Emperor Wesley Clark to advise the House of Representatives when it should hold hearings, and what they should be about. It shows a level of decorum and tact that catapulted him to such hieghts in last Winter's Presidential Primaries. He may have struck his guidon and retreated last year, but he has now returned to explain to us all how to deal with Iraq and Syria.

To whit, he has strongly reccommended we reassure both Iran and Syria that our intentions in Iraq will not cause either of them any harm. Except this would not be honest. Any action we take effects these countries. They have fundamentally organized themselves around opposing us and condemning our society and way of life. So if we are in Iraq, and we organize it to resemble the United States in any way, shape or fashion, we drop the gauntlet in front of the leadership in both of these nations. They can pick it up, or they can suffer the penalties that accrue to cowards.

While niether country can put armed formations against our Iraq force openly, they are currently using Fabian tactics in hopes that our population will demand our leadership to remove our forces from Iraq. This very well may work against the US. It has in the past.

However, reassuring two countries wo are selling weapons and providing logistical support to a guerrilla force bent on our destruction will not make these countries abate. It will enhance their belief in the effort they are engaged in. The rewards of cravenness then arrive in our inbox.

Thus, when Barracks Emperor Wastely Clark demands that the House of Representatives hold hearings about what we will do if Syria collapses, we should mail The General Emeritus a bottle of champagne and a party favor. Even if that's not what Denny Hastert would do if Syria tanked, it's what millions of other people would do in Lebannon, Isreal, Turkey, Jordan and without a doubt in Iraq as well.

Reassuring Bashir Assad of anything, is like telling the school bully who steals your lunch money that it doesn't bother you at all. It's as counterproductive and ineffective as Wesley Clark's last political campaign.

Quality Vs. Sanctity - Why Should I Get To Live?

2005-03-31T12:22:00.000-08:00

It didn't used to require a PhD in Philosophy to tell whether Peter Singer was a nutcase or a genius. The Associated Press reported Singer's comments:

"I do think that it is sometimes appropriate to kill a human infant," he said, adding that he does not believe a newborn has a right to life until it reaches some minimum level of consciousness."

"For me, the relevant question is, what makes it so seriously wrong to take a life?" Singer asked."Those of you who are not vegetarians are responsible for taking a life every time you eat. Species is no more relevant than race in making these judgments."

I won't persume credentials I haven't earned, but this humble man opines that Peter Singer is niether. He is evil. As evil as evil gets and meaner than the Balrog, who nearly dispatched Gandolf, deep underground, in The Mines of Moria.

Now that wasn't a particularly nuanced statement. In fact it was downright judgemental, if you ask me. That's also OK in my book. God issued me judgement, I use it. That makes me judgemental.

Not judgemental in the sense that Judge Greer was judgemental. I didn't just yank a feeding tube out of anyone's throat and let them dry out and expire like a beached suckerfish on La Playa Del Rio. That's not only judgemental, that's flat-out cold.

It also involves making a decision based on crappy information that is itself based on a graveman that does not stand the test of truth. Judge Greer has assumed away the sanctity of life. He's based his decision on the faulty assumption that he can scientifically determine the value of a human life and thereby terminate said life if it imposes a cost to society greater than it's benefit.

I'll proceed from a more fundamentally honest premise. I'd never just chuck the sanctity of life ona lark. I like the idea of other people holding my life sacred. After being stretchered off a rugby pitch and taken in for surgery once, I'm really fond of my life having sanctity and having doctors treat it with such. I appreciate those guys wholeheartedly.

People will say that I'm in favor of the sanctity of life because I'm in fear for my own skin. I'd answer the way Robert Dinero's character Sam did in the movie Ronin. I'd look at the guy like he was an idiot and state the obvious.

"It covers my body."

That's one objection to abolishing sanctity of life in favor of quality of life, now here's another one. Judge Greer attempts to convince us that he can measure the quality of Terri Schiavo's life. Again, I'll be more honest with you. I can't tell you the true, intrinsic value of a can of green beans.

If a were a dialectical materialist, I would add the value of the intrinsic materials to the skill of the labor endowed. If I were Milton Friedman, I'd ask what my nieghbor logically perceives this can of beans to be worth. If I were Confuscious, I'd take Beano first so that I wouldn't offend the others at the dinner table.

There you have it. Niether I, nor Hegel, nor Kierkagaard nor Judge Greer can tell you what a can of green beans should really be worth. We, as fallable human beings, are in no position whatsoever to stick a price tag on Terri Schiavo's forehead.

It really is that simple. I'm not a good enough Christian to claim God told me to protect Terri Schiavo. I'm not even close to being smart enough to tell you objectively that Terri Schiavo's life or even a can of green beans had a positive intrinsic value that does not depend a certain leap of faith.

But on this one, I'll swallow my agnosticism and the egoism that it entails. I want life to have a certain, inviolate sanctity. I want this because I want my life to be treated like it has an intrinsic value, and because, as an analyst and a person who spends his professional life calculating values, this is one analysis I'm utterly underqualified to perform and hope that I never have to pull the trigger on.

I'm not sure what scares me and p-ss-s me off more. Judge Greer deciding that Terri Schiavo should have been killed, someone deciding that Judge Greer was qualified to decide such a thing, or Judge Greer believing he had the normative prowess to make this decision.

Whether you live a life that is the perfect imitation of Christ or whether you behave like I used to on Saturday Night, monotheism is an excellent principal to leave intact. Let God evaluate the value of Terri Schiavo and hope that others will let him do the same in terms of the value of your existence as well.

Update I: Wizbang posts a picture gallery in memory of Terri Schiavo.

Update II: I don't totally buy into VodkaPundit's take on this, but I must admit, he really says it well.

Update III: Judge Birch not only represents everything I'm afraid of in a judiciary, he's also a sadistic little creep. If he didn't believe The Schiavos had a legal leg to stand on, he should have just rejected their appeal and called it a day.

Update IV: Sue Bob's Diary comments on the cruel and oppertunistic behavior of Judge Birch.

Update V: Chris "Meatwad" Matthews shows us why he's one of a kind. His brain stopped working long ago, Judge Greer, may we please stop feeding him?

LAPD Gets A Wake-Up Call (Thank MS-13)

2005-03-31T07:19:00.000-08:00

Just when I convince myself that it really is all going to heck in a handbasket. Just when it looks like no one has an ounce of sanity left in them at all. Something surprising happens that completely knocks me off kilter and forces me to reevaluate.

Today, finally, the LAPD has received a wake-up call on illegal immigration. Today, they finally realized that allowing a gang like MS-13 to operate out of the barrios of East LA could not coexist with their mission of upholding the law and protecting the peace.

Against a stark backdrop of growing violence and audacity from members of Mara Salvatruca - 13, the LAPD finally has woken up to the problem on their doorstep.

"The LAPD is working on language that would direct officers who see suspects they believe to be felons in the U.S. illegally to call their supervisors for a check with immigration officials, Assistant Police Chief George Gascon said. If a person is determined to be here illegally, federal authorities would seek an arrest warrant from a judge. At that point, LAPD officers could arrest the suspect.

The move comes several months after the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department changed its policy and began checking the immigration status of foreign-born inmates in County Jail and turning illegal immigrants over to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Additionally, the LAPD's Rampart Division has been working with immigration officials on a special task force designed to crack down on violent gangs whose members go back and forth from the U.S. to Central America." - LA Times

The spread of MS-13 to every corner of the US and throughout Central and South America particularly embarasses the LAPD. The first American outpost for these drug and weapon smugglers was 13th Street, which runs near Rampart Station. LA has become home to one of the first immigrant street gangs to legitimately become a terrorist organization since La Cosa Nostra.

While the LAPD has been under executive order not to cooperate with Federal Immigration Officials, MS-13 grew wealthy, grew strong, grew audacious and grew in stature. It even had business meetings with representatives from Al Quaida. When the local drug selling operation negotiates with Al Quaida, this problem cannot remain solely under local jurisdiction.

MS-13 elevated its profile even further in the ongoing issue over what is being done or not done to secure the US border between Mexico and Arizona. A group of US activists calling themselves "The Minuteman Project" recently announced it would assist the Border Patrol by standing watch over the border and calling in the police any time they spotted illegals.

The leadership of MS-13 resented their border being appropriated in this fashion and threatened them with violence. This led the Department of Homeland Security to send in 500 agents. MS-13's arrogance and shamelessly brazen contempt for the law have finally brought the immigration issue out of the dark.

It was a leader of MS-13 in LA who finally got the LAPD to take action.

"Senior LAPD officials have been talking about creating clearer guidelines for Special Order 40 for years. But the issue came to a head several months ago in Hollywood.A group of officers came face to face with a Mara Salvatrucha gang leader walking down the street, Capt. Mike Downing said.

The officers believed that the man had been deported after being convicted in a string of violent crimes a few years ago.There was a debate over what the officers could do. In the end, the LAPD decided to get immigration officials involved. Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the man had reentered the United States illegally and received a federal warrant for his arrest." - LA Times.

Sometimes people get drunk on power and totally overplay their hand. MS-13 had gotten away with murder and everything else for decades. They treated the US Border with open contempt and laughed at any concept of it as a deterrent to their evil. Now they've laughed too loudly, and maybe the law will finally begin to get enforced.

Whither North Korea? Nowhere good either way.

2005-03-31T05:37:00.000-08:00

Even the official name of North Korea suggests that things have gone badly off track and are mired in the ditch. On a really good day, I can spell Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Even on a great day, I'd never want to live there.

If a country's official name gets any longer or more bureaucratic than say, Los Estados Unidos de Mexico, a lot of things have probably gone terribly wrong in the State of Denmark, or anywhere else that happens to call itself a People's Republic. As if there was some other kind...

North Korea's problems begin with its climate and geography. According to the US Library of Congress,

"Topography: Approximately 80 percent of land area mountain ranges and uplands. All mountains on peninsula over 2,000 meters high are in North Korea.

Climate: Long, cold, dry winters; short, hot, humid summers. Approximately 60 percent of rainfall falls in June through September. "

To make a long analysis get to the point, the place is an agricultural failure waiting to happen. It takes good, competent managers to prevent this. Which brings us, regrettably, to the cretinous moorlocks currently in charge.

The US Library of Congress works for a bunch of congressmen. This requires them to develop the use of nuance and euphemism to the point where they can technically describe the North Korean government without resorting to profanity.

"Political System: Communist state under leadership of Kim Il Sung, general secretary of ruling Korean Workers' Party (KWP)and president of state, elected May 1990. Power centralized in hands of Kim Il Sung ("great leader"), son Kim Jong Il ("dear leader"), and select few holding positions on three-member Standing Committee of twenty-member Political Bureau (elected to five-year terms under 1992 revision of 1972 constitution; as of September 1992, thirteen full members; seven candidate members), inner council of 303-member KWP Central Committee (as of September 1992, 160 full members, 143 alternate members). Preeminence of party control (estimated 3 million members) unchallenged and as of mid-1993 no discernible signs of internal opposition to Kim Il Sung's absolute authority. Members of Supreme People's Assembly, unicameral legislature, also elected to five-year terms (as revision to 1972 constitution) in May 1990, with power to elect and recall authority of chairman, National Defense Commission, on president's recommendation; universal suffrage age seventeen. Constitution revised April 1992 at Supreme People's Assembly; text released in November 1992 by South Korean press. Nominally Marxist-Leninist in doctrine, but since mid-1970s, chuch'e, indigenous doctrine, promotes ideology of national self-reliance."

Or to put things more accurately and less euphemistically, they have a dictatorship that does not dictate well, quashes dissent after they screw up, fails to share anything with anyone in the country and then tells the nation's people to go practice an "ideology of national self-reliance." You'd think they were People's Republicans or something.

They are not. They are insane idiots. Their subjects eat less than 50% of what the World Health Organization suggests a healthy adult should. These people serve a government that hates The United States, and wishes us nothing but rampant colon cancer.

Perhaps, on a primal, carniverous level, this is a good thing. Except that it isn't, unless you're Judge Greer and find these people extraneous anyhow. North Korea's suffering will become a major problem for us.

Why? Because everyone's suffering becomes a major problem for us. We are the world, we always get stuck feeding the children. The rest of the planet despises us for that, but that will never stop them from begging.

Another reason why? 39% of the North Korean population undergoes at least semi-regular military training. Out of 22 million people, that equals lots of them. To put this less flippantly, they are a potential juggernaut, commanded by a leadership, that would expend their lives like a dot.com business enterprise would blow through its petty cash fund.

To make this situation even less pleasant, we're technically at war with this nation. It's the hairball in East Asia's digestive tract and it's stubborn and determined in a way that only the truly fanatic can be.

So how will this mess probably end? Not well. There are no winners. It's the ultimate sucker bet for anybody involved. So I rank what I perceive as probably outcomes in order of least pestilent to most tragic.

The North Korea government falls victim to it's own irrational stupidity. It fails and it's fuedalistic primates all purge one another. This is good because the hellfire never rains on Seoul and the Koreans can begin the awful rebuilding project. This is bad because China and South Korea end becoming the primary care givers for over 20 million people who haven't had a good, juicy Big Mac in over a decade. This is also bad because the US, Russia, Japan, S. Korea and China have a jump ball over who gets to play with North Korea's nukes. This, of course, assumes they find those nukes before they show up on E-Bay.
The South Koreans get tired of the US Army and kick us out with KIJ still running The Nuthouse to the North. According to a Pew Survey, 58% of South Koreans regretted the fact that the Iraquis didn't put up a better fight against the US Army. It's not like these people still consider us an ally. The immediate result would probably be massive military and diplomatic pressure from both North Korea and China on South Korea to fold its tent and join the Worker's Revolution. Pyongyang would come to rapidly rule a united Korea and the South Korean economy would work about as well as Cuba's or North Korea's. That is to say, the world would then have to feed 60 or so starving, miserable Koreans with over a 12 million man military and nuclear weapons, or else.
The North Koreans get desperate, hungry and invade S. Korea to steal what they can't grow. The carnage is awful. The entire Korean Peninsula gets returned to the 4th Century AD. China and Russia deploy millions of soldiers and tanks to seal their borders and stop refugees from crossing. The US and ROK Army probably win an exhaustive war that grinds about 3 or 4 million people into fertilizer. Maybe, a nuclear weapon gets used on Seoul or on a US base.

So the Korean Peninsula is the ultimate no win situation. Everyone plays what Coach Dean Smith termed "The Carolina Four-Corners" and hopes the other side runs out of time and fresh players off the bench. The entire fiasco perhaps lends credence to General MacArthur's poignant assertion. "There is no substitute for victory."

Mythology And Health Care Costs. Prices Don't Just Go Up.

2005-03-30T10:56:00.000-08:00

No one really likes it when a product increases at a price that's twice the rate of inflation. This quickly puts that product out of the reach of the average consumer. Predictably, the mourners will sing about how it is all unfair. This has been especially true in the case of health care costs.

Health care costs in this nation are going up at double the rate of inflation and now cost $600 billion a year or a debilitating 11.5% of our gross national product. By comparison, Canada spends 8.5% of its gross national product on health care; Japan 6.7% and Britain 6.2%.

By the year 2,000 it is estimated that if health care costs continue to rise at today's rates that we will be spend-ing 15% of our gross national product on health care and at that point even our big auto companies will break under the cost burden. If America's premier manufacturing companies will not be able to afford employee health care - who will? - Mike Westfall (1990)

Who can afford employee health care? The government. And that, Ladies and Germs, is the graveman of the problem. Health care is no longer retailed in this country, it's auctioned. Even worse than that, it's not just auctioned, it's auctioned via a rigged scheme. As long as that remains the case, you'd better look twice before crossing the busy thoroughfare.

Here's how health care came to be auctioned, rather than retailed. The people who paid for health care started out being, by and large, individual consumers. This put a ceiling on how much the drug companies, hospitals and physicians could bill. My vastly empty wallet was a sure fire cost control mechanism.

People then began to recognize that they could manage risk and pool funds. Several people with a small likelihood of requiring a procedure could gang up and easily pay for the cost of the one poor unlucky soul who needed it. The insurance policy and health plan were born.

Doctors and drug inventors, by their professional nature, are not stupid people. They quickly realized that if people had more money to buy a product, they could afford it even if it cost a whole bunch more. This happened in short order, and people once more became highly concerned that they could not afford the services of medical professionals, even with a health plan.

This situation became exacerbated further, because insurers and health plan coordinators could also manage risk by controlling who was allowed to kick into the pool. People who exhibited health characteristics that led to frequent or expensive demands on the money pool had to pay in more to join or were banned outright. They were still charged for health care as if they were part of a unified money pool. At this point, the health care market was now an auction market.

When a consumer could no longer afford to bid high enough for a scarce MRI or HIV drug, they lost. This is how auction markets work at Southerby's or anywhere else in the world in which they occur. This is not a problem at Southerby's, because no one is going to die if they don't have an original Renoir to hang in the drawing room. They may very well die soon if they don't have a check for colon cancer. Hence, a lot of people felt intense pain at having to participate in an auction to get health care.

Members of the government looked at this situation and saw that the people who would need certain health care services the most would not have them made available unless they were wealthy dillitantes. They then proceeded to pave the road to Stygian health care costs with the finest and most noble of intentions.

When the government entered the health care market, they became a unique consumer for two important reasons.

They could outbid anyone who moved. Their pot of money was The Federal Budget. The Federal Budget is profoundly resourced and has a level of credit that far outstrips the actual cash account that the IRS brings in each year. No matter how badly we bloat our deficit, it's still going to be a long, long time before The Federal Reserve actually issues a junk Treasury Bond.
The people setting the prices had the ability to collude via there lobbyists and convince this bidder to actually inflate it's bid. The AMA lobbied assiduously for the US Government to spend more on health care because of the high costs. The government bid higher, the medical professionals then jacked up the prices.
The recursion here doesn't take Einstein to figure out. You can see a very similar regression line with college tuitions and Pell Grants. What's the only humane solution? More Pell Grants. What happens when the government pumps in more liquidity? Higher tuition.

So what do many advocates of fixing this problem reccommend? National Health Care plans. Letting the government be the only payer for health care. This would constitute an unmitigated disaster on several levels.

The government would price health care where ever a lobbyist told them to. This would bear no legitimate relation to what the services cost. If they made health care too cheap, everyone would demand it at a larger level than necessary. This would flood hospitals with claims that at least quasi-hypochondriatic. Drugs, vaccinations and the time of highly skilled doctors would become too scarce.

The average patient would son have little or no chance of getting these services. This is why Canadian patients wait for months to get an MRI. Sure, it's a cheap MRI compared to the US, but that's why a few million other people are in line and that MRI scanner won't be available for another year or two.

If they price the health care too expensively, you'd have The Prescription Drug Panderation Act. It would wreck our budget and drive our Medicare Program several years closer to bankruptcy. It would hyper-inflate the cost of every prescription drug on the market even more than the current regime. It would sure suck out loud if The President and Congress wanted to saddle us with a really stupid bill like that one.

So that's how we get a leviathan-like government and no health care. We keep recruiting a richer designated payer for health care costs and then wonder why the product costs go up far faster than the level of value provided via the services. It's a prima-face example of how you wind up with something for nothing when greed and fear replace intellectual thought in the market place.

Doctors and drug makers will provide a certain level of value, no matter who pays for the service. The more cash gets pumped into that particular market, the more these people will vaccuum it off the table without increasing the value they provide.

Giving the whole thing over to the government or a big HMO won't fix it either. That will cause your prostate surgery to be priced by a cost accountant or a GS-13 Operations Research Analyst. I'd rather have my medical bill tallied up by someone who's done an operation or two.

The key to killing off greedy insurers, unethical Doctors and power-lusting government bureaucrats before they become parasites who live off our medical field is to end the hyperinflation. Cut off the money and you cut off the bad guys from their oxygen. When the average American goes to the pharmacist, there should be a single payer. The patient.

MS - 13 and The Permiable US Border

2005-03-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

It's not a banner day for any government when a group of its own citizens form a posse to guard it's national border and are publically threatened one of the world's largest drug smuggling operations. This has recently happened at a section of the US border near Tucson, Ariz.

The citizens preparing to set up a vigil on the border dub themselves "The Minuteman Project." In their manifesto, they state the following.

"This project is the result of our government failing to do its most basic duty: protecting each State in the Union against invasion (Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution). ..."

and furthermore,

"At the current rate of invasion the United States will be completely over run with ILLEGAL aliens by the year 2025...only 21 years away. ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the U.S. and will have made such inroads into the political and social systems that "they" will have more influence than our Constitution over how the U.S. is governed. The ugly consequence of an ignored U.S. Constitution is already taking place.

Future generations will inherit this mutated form of the United States of America, consisting of 100 different sub-nations, speaking 100 different languages, and promoting 100 different cultural agendas. That will certainly guarantee the death of this nation as a "melting pot". Instead, it will be tantamount to a sack of marbles...with each marble colliding with the other marbles, as each culture scrambles for dominance of its culture over all others.

The final result: political and social mayhem. "

To make things even more chaotic, a renowned Salvadoran drug smuggling cartel, Mara Salvatruca, or MS-13, as it is known on the streets, has threatened to inflict violence on these 'Minutemen'. Perhaps this is an effort to demonstrate to people exactly who really owns the Southern US Border.

Mara Salvatruca has deadly intent. They have spent years smuggling drugs and weapons over the Mexican Border and are in no mood to stop doing so. This is their lifeblood. The Minuteman Project threatens to hit them where they live.

According to World Net Daily,

"A leader of the violent, terror-connected Latin American gang Mara Salvatruchas, Ebner Anivel Rivera-Paz, has reportedly issued orders from federal prison to members of his international criminal organization to teach a lesson to a group of Americans taking border control into their own hands.
...
Lately, the gang has joined forces with former members of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, a radical terrorist group, and some U.S. intelligence sources say they may also be cooperating with Islamic terrorist groups – including al-Qaida. " - Hat-Tip Digger's Realm.

The US Border Patrol has announced a significant increase in resources to protect the Arizona section of the US Mexican border. What that means in real terms remains to be seen. What we know right now is the following.

The US Government has not put the necessary effort into controlling the border.
The citizens, particularly in Arizona, have become so sick of this that they are willing to toe the line of outright vigilantiism in order to restore basic civil order.
Gangs like MS-13 have so little respect for the US Government in general that they see no problem publically threatening The Minuteman Project with violence that will take place on US soil.

I can only hope that recent overtures towards putting more Border Patrol agents in Arizona are genuine. This is not a situation that the US government has adequately under control. It will get worse and perhaps quite violent if immediate action isn't taken. Perhaps Bill O' Rielly call for National Guard deployments to the border are not as outlandish as they may seem at first blush.

System Identification And The Future Of Humanity

2005-03-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

US Air Force Mathematician David Lee descibes the system identification problem below in The Cost Analyst's Companion.

"You're given an input F(t), and output g(t), predict the output h(t) of the system if given a new input."

This seemingly innoccous engineering problem metaphorically describes a lot of what has recently happened to the human condition. We have confused ourselves of what constitutes the creation of a human being , and therefore are no longer particularly certain if all of the outputs we could possibly classify as human beings are of equal value.

When we were still certain that we all became human beings the same way and that we all had certain rights and responsibilities that flowed from that state of being. As long as we kept that basic code straight, we were fine and could all just get along. Or as Thomas Jefferson put it -

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,..." - Declaration of Independence.

This statement inhered a large number of assumptions that not everyone in the country, or in the rest of the world, willing swalloed whole. Every time we deviated from it, we wound up with nothing but trouble. The 3/5ths Compromise, the Pro-Choice Movement, even The NAZI's in Germany all found ways to skirt this basic premise. However, prior to the Euthanasia Movement, all of these deviations from the principle laid out by Mr. Jefferson, had one common denominator.

Each of the the three situations where innocent human beings were either enslaved or killed involved a philosophical subterfuge. This involved taking groups of people, namely Africans, Jews and unborn infants, and classifying them as something other than human.

Prior to the Euthanasia Movement, an individual, defined specifically as a human being, had engage in totally despicable bahavior , e.g. to murder others, before anyone in society sanctioned their killing as a just process. What is happening in the case of Terry Schiavo, and what happened in the cases of everyone Jack Kervorkian "helped", is a new level of moral depravity.

Now we no longer have the same respect for humanity. It's as if the process by which humans are created can produce a different output than the one identified by Thomas Jefferson. When it comes to basic humanity, we no longer feel confident that we have the system identification of what being human is and what being human entails completely figured out. This could kill every one of us one day, really!

Update I - The Jawa Report suggests that another Founding Father has been totally left out of the equation during the ongoing 'Euthanasia' of Teri Schiavo.

Update II - Michelle Malkin reports that Terri Schiavo's Brother-In-Law has been quoted as saying that Terri's dehydration is just a "natural part of the dying process."

Oh, The Humanity!

2005-03-22T06:25:00.000-08:00

A woman named Terri Schiavo lies dehydrating in Florida. She is incapable of receiving nutrition through her mouth, and thus must be fed by a tube. Her husband claims that she wishes to die and be free, her parents say otherwise and both the husband and the immediate family are lawyered to the hilt. This has become yet another battleground in the war between so-called Pro Life and so-called Pro-Choice political advocacy groups.

In a recent poll on whether Terri should live or dehydrate, ABC News offered the following preamble to the main question.

" Schiavo suffered brain damage and has been on life support for 15 years. Doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. Her husband and her parents disagree about whether she would have wanted to be kept alive. Florida courts have sided with the husband and her feeding tube was removed on Friday."

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters posts that ABC News made her seem less well off to push an agenda. Namely,

"... she has never been on life support, she is simply getting food and water thru a tube. That is not "on life support." Further, while some doctors have said she had "no consciousness " others in the medical community disagree. "

Wizbang demands to know "If they are doing the right thing, why do they have to stretch the truth to defend their actions?" - H/T to Wizbang.

I demand to know how in the heck anyone would know whether Mr. Schiavo or the parents has this issue right at all? Also, for the unfortunate judges who have had this one dropped in their laps, how do they adjudicate this?

There are two possible ways to approach that conundrum. The first is to make a decision based on Utilitarian grounds, under the particular instances of this case. The judge could apply the decision and then walk away, announcing that a decision of this magnitude could only be correctly made on a case-by-case basis.

The other method would be an attempt on the part of the judge to write overarching legal guidance that would settle future controversies based on clear, legal interpretation. Given that this decision would potentially be used as a precedent anyhow, there is an argument over who wins the high ground of precedent.

Having a hard and fast rule to adjudicate these cases in the future would save a lot of grief and grievance later. What would be even better, would be an overarching legal standard of what constitutes a human being. This is ultimately what this fight is being waged over. We can't just cavalierly yank the plug out of a human being.

Nobody really wants an overarching standard of what constitutes a human being. That would cut too close to the quick. It would reveal way too much when unborn infants, and the chronically ill had to be retaxonimized for the next edition of the Biology Textbooks. That's ultimately what it has come to.

There are elements of modern society who want to be able to eschew their responsibilities to the living and not pay the penalty for it. These reponsibilities can be crushing, but they are towards a human being. At least they are, until we change the definition of what human is.

This is why we need to force the issue on the courts to decide whether there is such a thing as someone who is conceived of two human parents, but is not human. Making this battle take place in front of the cameras disallow this continued defining down of all of humanities.

If Scott Peterson Were A Smarter Criminal, Who Would He Be?

2005-03-21T09:08:00.000-08:00

According to BlueStateBase, Michael Schiavo didn't have the agonizing choice to make that he's currently getting salubrious credit for. In fact, his only problem with the situation is that Terri continues to breathe.

...first Michael Schiavo beats and strangles his wife Terri, leaves her lying unconscious on the floor until her family arrives to get her to the hospital.
Then Michael Schiavo sues the hospital for $20 million because he needs the money to get his poor wife therapy.
Then Michael Schiavo pockets the money, denies his wife the care he said she needed and finally, claims she really wants to die.
Michael Schiavo killed his wife Terri's cat, melted down her wedding ring and then took up with his girlfriend and lives with her today with their children.
Just take a gander at the sworn testimony of an attending nurse: Carla Sauer Iyer (affidavit* below) but let me save you some time and report a quote of Michael Schiavo's after visiting his still living wife: "When is that bitch gonna die?"

When is this poor woman going to die? Not yet! Thank you US Congress.

Why is Michael Schiavo so concerned? It's not over the pain. It's over what's left of the $20 million. The day after he won that judgement, he probably started wanting Terri taken off the machinery and planted somewhere six feet under.

Now, she just won't die. Michael Schiavo is watching his lawsuit swag melt away like the sands in an hourglass. He thought he'd won it all and hit the jackpot. He must have figured he could plant poor Terri, pocket the green and take up permanently with his newest rent-a-skank.

If I were truely a sadist, and was the judge in this case, I'd do the following.

Euthanize Terri Schiavo.
Charge Michjael Schiavo with murder.
Charge Michael Schiavo and all of his heirs for every legal hour billed, by every attorney involved, since this became an issue.

If Terri Schiavo were to pass peacefully in her sleep the day after Michael's booty ran out, justice would be served in a way that the euthanasianists will never understand. The woman is a human being, not a slogan generator, not a talking point, not a meal ticket for her dishonest, dirtbag of a husband.

Others Blogging this slow-motion homocide by a greedy husband follow below:

Ace of Spades , Boi From Troy , Of The Mind , Sue Bob's Diary , The American Mind, and Wizbang.

Oh, and just so you can hear what people say on behalf of a slow, agonizing execution by dehydration, here's Like Kryptonite To Logic, Himself, Oliver Willis

LASER EOD WAGON

2005-03-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

The US Army may be planning on trimming about 12,000 soldiers off of it's next rotation to Iraq, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a lot of emphasis. The most recent high-tech gadget to be earmarked for deployment is the ZUES.

The ZUES is a humvee with a powerful dual laser system. Combat engineers use it to do away with unexploed ordinance via thermal combustion. According to Defense Tech,

The system uses diesel fuel to create the laser beam, which focuses energy on the outer casing of the target, which heats up until it detonates, [triggering] a less violent explosion than if the explosive was activated, causing less damage to the surrounding area...

“Its power level and utility is new and is not for aerial targets, it’s for unexploded ordnance,” Dodgen said. “It is a system that works, and we certainly would like to use it whenever possible.”

So there you have it, less collateral damage and a more rapid disposal of unexploded bombs through technology. Onwards and upwards for new military technology.

Cozying Up To Iran? I wish I were Kidding!

2005-03-17T05:51:00.000-08:00

Who could possibly forget "America Held Hostage; Day 438!" Not me, I spent over a year of my young life hearing that on the news every day. Apparently, several of our prominent experts on foreign policy can.

Bill Clinton perhaps enhaled before he offered up this incite on the current regime in Iran.

Bill Clinton also seemed fuzzy about the true nature of tyranny, and thus was clueless about murderous theocratic Iran. Recently he cooed, "Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency" — as if theocrats there allow truly popular government. -From Victor Davis Hansen. (Jewish World Review)

Thomas P.M. Barnett offers up this gem of an observation.

WORK WITH ME ON THIS ONE. Iran getting the bomb could be the best thing that's ever happened to the Middle East peace process. .....

He then maps out how satorially elegant the emporer's new appeasement outfit would look...

I would send James Baker, our last good secretary of state, to Tehran as your special envoy with the following message: "We know you're getting the bomb, and we know there isn't much we can do about it right now unless we're willing to go up-tempo right up the gut. But frankly, there's other fish we want to fry, so here's the deal: You can have the bomb, and we'll take you off the Axis of Evil list, plus we'll re-establish diplomatic ties and open up trade. But in exchange, not only will you bail us out on Iraq first and foremost by ending your support of the insurgency, you'll also cut off your sponsorship of Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli terrorist groups, help us bully Syria out of Lebanon, finally recognize Israel, and join us in guaranteeing the deal on a permanent Palestinian state. You want to be recognized as the regional player of note. We're prepared to do that. But that's the price tag. Pay it now or get ready to rumble." -Thomas P.M. Barnett (Esquire Magazine).

Iran would just love to agree to that and I'm sure Mr. Baker is packing his travel bags as we speak. Mr. Barnett would also like to unload that Florida swamp condominium he owns the expensive time share in. If this is The Pentagon's new map, please don't hand it off to an over-eager 2nd LT.

Iran runs a thug regime. It will not negotiate with the US, because it would lose any claim to its legitimacy without us as an enemy. They are also about as likely to cut loose Syria and Hamas as they are to build a Holocaust Memorial Park.

That of course assumes the Iranian government controls Hamas as well as bankrolling it. That's quite a leap of faith and not a very safe one. Iran's government probably pays Hezbollah, Hamas and all the other assorted hudlums, vipers and churls a protection fee.

Last time out it was the US Embassy, tommorrow, it could be The Iranian National Assembly. The current PM of Iran probably gets that message at least once a month. Sometime near when the rent check is due. The Iranian regime governs with the permission of their terrorist guardians. This scenario is straight out of Plato's Republic.

Change Or Die

2005-03-16T05:09:00.000-08:00

Starting as far back as the mid 1980's, Mike Westfall and other union activists have noticed a change in how business gets done. Westfall begins one of his recent sermons against corporate America witht he following paragraph.

"The working American today faces a more complex and changing employment situation than has ever existed before in history. In many segments, for a variety of reasons, available work is shrinking while the number of those seeking work is increasing. Women, out of economic necessity, have been joining the labor market in record numbers. The baby boom generation has been swelling the workforce and a yearly new crop of inexperienced and unskilled high school graduates are demanding the availability of meaningful employment opportunities where they can make a contribution to the system and their own economic well being.

Presently this country has many alienated and demoralized young people who are at the peak of their health, energy and idealism, but are being lost to society forever because they can only find unstable, low paying, part-time jobs with little opportunity for advancement.

What really is at stake today isn't economics - it is the future of large segments of an entire generation of Americans."

A fairly typical set of opinions that you'll presently hear from leaders of labor and from political leaders from "Progressive" organizations. This could easily have come from Ralph Nader, with whom Mike Westfall has collaborated in the past.

That being said, the statement has an element of truth to it. A lot of young people who believed there would be a manufacturing job waiting for them upon entry into the workforce received a very rude shock upon graduation. This is not how the US economy works anymore.

In part, Caldwell acknowledges this himself in the statement below.

"But walk into any plant and you'll consistently find that direct labor represents only about 10% of total manufacturing costs. From studies in hundreds of U.S. plants, we know on average that 35% of costs are presently due to manufacturing overhead and 55% to purchase materials. ". We're approaching the point in our work when I don't even want to hear the term, "direct labor," on a project anymore. It just doesn't count-It's 10% of manufacturing costs and that's all the attention it's worth."

This statement attempts to cast aspersion on the business practice known as outsourcing. It attempts to minimalize the potential savings enjoyed by people who move corporate operations outside the US. What that very simple breakdown misses is two items.

First, when I buy someone else's materials, I'm paying for the direct labor used in processing them as a part of the price. When GM buys ready-made parts, it's paying for the labor involved in building them. Also, if the US has more expensive regulatory compliance fees than perhaps China or Mexico, GM also pays those fees everytime it buys an American material. So to say 55% of the money spent goes to materials is an innacuracy. 55% of the money goes to the price of materials which is adjusted upwards to account for the labor costs and fees of the part producer.

"It really does pit country against- country and worker against worker in a competitive effort to reduce all workers to the lowest common denominator. Many social scientists, in fact, are now condemning some of our American based multi-nationals for their treatment of foreign workers with low wages and poor working conditions, without really contributing to the economic well-being of these workers."

So what's new? American workers used to hold a monopoly on the skill sets required for heavy industry. This used to be the only country where the skills and capitol could easily meet up and form an organization. This is no longer true, so now workers compete to offer labor at the most affordable price.

They compete the way everyone who drives wishes oil producers had to compete. Corporations are now able to pay someone what the labor involved in heavy production is actually worth. The union premium and the scarcity premium are both eliminated.

So all of this puts an American Corporations in a bind. They can change or they can die. They can change in three ways.

They can ditch overpriced American labor and overly constrictive laws. This would make them pariahs and somewhat deservedly so. Being a pariah is not something Bernie Ebbers worries a whole lot about, so the outsourcing practice will continue until American and foreign labor rates are close enough to justify saving the transactions costs and risk premiums involved in outsourcing by relocating these factories back in the US.
They can stop wasting piles of money on perks and benefits. Ken Lay loses the jet, and all the programming nerds can forget their stock options, which are good things. You and I get screwed out of our pensions, which is not. If a corporation can hire enough competant workers to do the job without offering the benefits package, guess what action they will take?
They can apply for political relief in the forms of bans, tariffs and import quotas. If I don't have to use what happens to be banned, tariffed or limited by quota, this is pretty cool. If I don't sell any of the above, this is even more cool, because I don't lose my job. The second I do need anything on the banned, or tariffed list, I'm screwed. The second Bernie Ebbers or someone of his moral character wants something off this list, we'll have the same problems with our tariff laws that we now have with our War On Drugs. It will be totally unenforceable, and the rest of the world will hate us and laugh at us for trying.

In conclusion, we are all somewhat screwed and will all have to get by on less for the following reasons.

The rest of the world is now a heck of a lot more productive than it used to be, so we have lost our monopoly on productive industrial assets. The US will only remain the center of industrial production when it pays economically to leave it there.
The rest of the world sees our lifestyle and pretty much hates us for it. Don't expect a whole lot of sympathy from a bunch of Koreans earning $2.50 an hour when we gripe about losing factory jobs that pay $25.00 an hour.
The ability of corporations to offer generous benefits and meet prior obligations on workers' benefits is directly tied to the ability of these same corporations to continue their economic dominance in their field of endeavor. Strip away the dominance and the benefits go bye-bye. That pension you were promised back in the 1970's when most Koreans, Thais and Chinese were too illiterate to work in a factory is now financially unsupportable for the corporation or government entity that promised it to you. You will not receive most of it. Plan accordingly.

So there you have it. The new reality is not a particularly good one for the US economy. We will suck it up and deal with it, or we will die. It's not rocket science and its not anyone's fault any more than the law of gravity is someone's fault. We cannot expect the rest of the world to politely roll over and let us dominate industrial production so that we can continue to get paid upper middle class wages for what has traditionally always been working class work. As I said before, we have to change both our expectations and our ways of doing business or we will go the way of Bethlehem Steel. It's very simple, change or die.

Rule Sets - How We Civilize Ourselves

2005-03-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

I've recently slammed Thomas PM Barnett over his over his glib obsession with "locking in an alliance with China at today's rates." When he thinks, he sometimes only thinks in an act utilitarian fashion. However, he does think about interesting topics and often brings them to life in both his weblog and his journal; Rule Set Reset.

In one article in February's Edition, "Rules, Rule Sets and Social Systems," author Mark Safranski posits a theory of how civilizations stipulate rules and maintain order. He described four classes of rule sets that can be charted on two sets of axis to form a Cartesian Plain.

One a first axis, he describes rules as explicit or implicit. Explicit rules are written down and technical in nature. They are the stuff of law books and are enforced by referees, police officers or regulators of some sort. They give rise to The Guardians that Plato was afraid needed guarding themselves.

Implicit rules are less tangible and require a certain savvy and soul to intuit. They are traditions, customs and "the vibe" you sense around you. They get enforced by everyone, to a certain degree. You won't get ticketed for breaking one of these, but if no one wants to be around you, even your friends, then you've probably jumped outside these sometimes subtle social norms.

On another axis he lays out rules as either strong or weak. Strong rule sets hammer violators with a bad consequence that occurs with high probability. The expected value of any transgression small or large is substantially reduced. Weak rule sets either issue a slap on the wrist or punish in an unpredictable fashion.

This analysis allows Safranski to classify societal rules as being Totalitarian (Strong, Explicit), Individualistic (Weak, Explicit), Communal (Strong, Implicit) or Anarchic (Weak, Implicit). This makes for a convenient shorthand for dividing up the world's societies. You have the Core (Explicit, well-defined rule systems) and the Gap (Implicit, unclear rule systems). Or, if an analyst prefers, there are the Repressed (Strong, harsh rule systems) or the Free (Weak, laid back rule systems).

In my opinion, niether split really gives you an accurate taxonomy of what is really out there today. A third axis, possibly hinted at by Safranski when he described "buy -in", could and should be Compliance. This would vary between voluntary (most people generally accept these rules, punitive enforcement is not frequently needed to keep the populace in line), and Coerced (most people disobey, the second the authorities take a walk and only frequent, brutal punishments keep it going).

This would further subdivide Safransky's categories into a more accurate picture of what types of rule sets exist.

Totalitarian Rule Sets would become

a) Authoritarian (Strong, Explicit, Voluntary; e.g. Canon Law of The Roman Catholic Church) - a large number of people except being told exactly how things will work.

b) Tyrannical (Strong Explicit, Coerced; e.g. Modern China, Saudi Arabia) - a large number of people are held against their will.

Individualistic rule sets would become either

a) Libertarian (Weak, Explicit, Voluntary; e.g. The Modern US in many respects) - People are willing to accept a limited amount of authority and a larger amount of personnal responsibility.

b) Powerless (Weak, Explicit, Coerced; e.g. Fuedalism in 14th Century France) - This is the best of several poor choices. It doesn't work, no one likes it, other alternatives just don't exist accept for anarchy.

Communal Rule Sets would bifurcate into

a) Mutual (Strong, Implicit, Voluntary; e.g. Social norms and cultural traditions) - People are generally in agreement over "how things work".

b) Unavoidable (Strong, Implicit, Coerced; e.g. the caste structure in most societies, taboos) - Something that no one really likes, but that has to be worked out. People accept these unwritten rules, often against their wills, in service of a higher good.)

Anarchy would not bifurcate accept that possibly, if a Voluntary anarchy existed, it would last until people grew tired of it's deleterious effects.

By ignoring the will of the people to comply with a rule set, the author ignores a vital component in judging the vitality of a given rule set. If we ignore the coersive element rampant in many modern dictatorships, then Neville Chamberlain definitely should have "locked in Hitler at 1936 rates."

The Pot Calls The Kettle Genocidal

2005-03-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

A man who once served as a domestic terrorist for The Klu Klux Klan is not the sort of person who should go around comparing anyone's tactics to Adolf Hitler. Unless, perhaps he's drawing off of knowledge gleaned from personnal experience.

Senator Robert Byrd, who honed his leadership techniques in the KKK, seems to think hubris is a hip new martial arts craze, because this is exactly what he recently did on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

"Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side," the Democrat from West Virginia said. "Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

The Republicans and The Anti-Defamation League wasted no time in calling Senator Byrd on his hateful rhetoric.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership, said in a statement, "Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable."

ADL Director Abraham Foxman said: "It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party."

CNN reports that Senator Byrd trotted out a spokesman/lackey to clean up his rhetorical dogpile.

"Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority."

Republicans poured on harder at that juncture.

"With his knowledge of history and his own personal background as a KKK member, he should be ashamed for implying that his political opponents are using Nazi tactics," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Yes, Mr. Brooks indeed had a point there. The pot did indeed have the audacity to call the kennel genocidal.

Moving The Ball

2005-03-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

The word from President Bush's oponents on Social Security Reform is that he is running out of time to convince the public that Social Security needs fixing. They say this as President Bush prepares a sixty stop tour to tout his new initiative for improving the American pension system. This is not only spin on their part, but it is a sign of growing concern.

The New York Times took a poll on Social Security and misreported it's results in the following manner.

Reporting the poll's results, the Times said the survey showed that Americans "are increasingly resistant to [the president's] proposal to revamp Social Security and say they are uneasy with Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the retirement program." The paper also reported that, "The poll underscores just how little headway Mr. Bush has made in his effort to build popular support as his proposal for overhauling Social Security struggles to gain footing in Congress."

The poll ignored the fact that 68% of repondents felt the current system had troubles. It also ignored the result that 55% of these people felt that these problems justified immediate action.

This could be why even DNC Chairman Howard Dean admits that something needs to be done about Social Security. That something may or may not be the specific proposal outlined by President Bush. However, the so-called third rail is now an open point of political debate and discussion.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan added even greater impetous by stating that Social Security Reform was a key to avoiding longterm economic stagnation. This never would have happened in years past and is a sign that George W. Bush knows exactly how to move the ball towards his chosen goal post.

Update I: Boi From Troy has more detail on Alan Greenspan's Social Security remarks.

Update II: Cold Hearted Truth analyzes the New York TImes poll from a different perspective.

Update III: Right Voices chronicles one of Harry Reid's less congenial moments.

Is This Why They Call Him "Firebrand"?

2005-02-25T11:55:00.000-08:00

"Ward Churchill is a viciously anti-American demagogue. He has every right to free speech, and I support his free speech… We should give him free speech by not paying him.

You don’t need tenure in this country anyway. The idea that he would be oppressed without tenure is nonsense. There are 75 whacked-out foundations that would hire him for life. Dozens of Hollywood stars would hold fundraisers for him. His life will become a film by Michael Moore.

The question here, is ‘What obligation does society have to fund its own sickness?’

We ought to say to campuses, it’s over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you’re anti-American is grounds for dismissal."

Newt Gingrich unloads on Ward Churchill. Next time he should tell us how he really feels.

Jim Gereghty at NRO.Com thinks Ward Churchill could abolish tenure. I doubt it. Academia takes care of itself in a vicious manner. He will be drummed out of the fraternity and left to swing in the wind.

Meanwhile: Michelle Malkin details that Churchill takes his plagarism so seriously that he does it in more than just his writing.

And Furthermore: We get a dissenting view from a different academic who dislikes both Ward Churchill and Gingrich's idea.

There already exists a great deal of resentment towards universities in the public, and Churchill has become the poster child for that resentment. Still, I find it ulikely that there will actually be a major movement to utterly do away with tenure. Although I will note that there has been a diminution in the number of tenure-track jobs in recent years, and that fact has nothing to do with public pressure.

Setting aside the issue, for a moment of whether tenure is a good thing or not, I find Gingrich’s stance to be stunning. Yes, Ward Churchill has said, and will continue to say, hateful thing about the United States, yet how in the world does Mr. Gingrich propose operationalizing the concept of “anti-America” and thereby codifying it into law? And do we really even want to do such a thing? Do we want to unleash a witch hunt in our universities to weed out those who don’t think and speak “the right way"? To what end? What will we, as society, gain from such a process? - Steve Taylor.

- Once more TKS on NRO.

This Land Was Your Land, But Now It's My Land...

2005-02-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

Eminent Domain has become way too eminent. It's also now exercising way too much domain. The various layers of government in The United States are taking possession of entirely too much land that should be in the hands of private individuals. It has to be stopped somewhere.

Unrestrained eminent domain harms both citizens and the government in two vital ways. It obviously harms citizens whose land is taken. That's immediate and in the victim's face. The person once had land and now to paraphrase an old Jethro Tull Song "Farm On The Freeway," they just have a check and broken down pickup truck.

They say they gave me compensation...
That's not what I'm chasing. I was a rich man before yesterday.
And what do I want with a million dollars and a pickup truck? - Off of Crest Of A Knave.

The problem here also runs far deeper, for the individual in question. A number of our rights as citizens have far less power when we do not own the land we sleep on. Try aguing the 5th Amendment over a search of your property, if the government owns the land you live on. It's not a daunting task for a government agency to ask an allied government agency for a search warrant. A ban on religion in the public square is far worse when the public square is almost every parcel of land within the dominion. (Nevada, for example.)

Another problem occurs when the state owns all of this land, has to service it, and discovers there isn't any revenue coming in off their land taxes because they already own just about everything in site. Or, the people that own private property, within the domain of a government entity, are not wealthy enough to support that government in the style which it has become accustomed to.

This touched off a Supreme Court case over land siezures in New London, CT. Here, the municipal government of New London tried to buy up low income housing for the purpose of moving in rich corporation that would pay more taxes. It was throwing it's citizens out into the street to improve the municipal tax rate. Let's hope they can fight City Hall. Here's a discussion of the legal technicalities involved.

It was against this backdrop that Ohio Libertarian Chairman, Robert Butler, took to a lectern to decry the avaricious leviathon our rulership had become. He first described the justifications used by municipal governments in eminent domain land grabs.

"Butler said that the government's first step in exercising eminent domain is having property condemned or declared "blighted." Property that does not meet certain criteria laid down by local government can receive this designation.

He said homes in Lakewood were declared blighted for having only one bathroom or having an unpaved driveway. "Its scary to think about," Butler said. "

He also described how these governments were defrauding the Public Good clause of these eminent domain laws.

"The way the government improves the neighborhood is by taking your house away and giving it to someone else," Butler said.

The Chairman of The Ohio University Libertarians decried this as problematic for two reasons.

Corbett argued that there are "no incentives for (private corporations) to use the land responsibly" once they have been given a "free tab by the government."

In other words, eminent domain is an ever-flowing font of contractor waste, fraud, and abuse on the taxpayer bar tab. Mr. Corbett further elaborated.

The fight against eminent-domain abuses, Corbett continued, has elements of class struggle. "It's poor people that are going to lose their homes," he said. "There's definitely class components in the argument."

So not only does The People's money get wasted, but it gets wasted in a process that empowers the government to totally screw the most destitute and defenseless people in society. Does it really surprise anyone that The Sheriff of Nottingham was a public official and that Robin of Loxley gave to the poor as a member of the private sector until he could marry and claim his inheritance?

This Libertarian Party leader is out in the sticks speaking to college students and is the only person fighting the good fight on this. Where are GOP Congressmen and Senators who came to power as signators to The Contract With America.

He's trying to accomplish what the party now in power promised us in order to get elected. It's time for the GOP to return to its base on this issue and fight for the individual rights of our people. The Rockefeller Republican model of a more efficient welfare state is not a free America. It's time for Tom DeLay, Lindsay Graham and several other powerful and more economically Libertarian members of the GOP caucus to start pounding this issue.

Update I: Boi From Troy Demonstrates that West Hollywood is not immune from municipal interdiction of property rights.

Update II: C-Pol covers the New London, CT land grab.

Update III: The Blog Of The Mind, enjoyable, but not related to my blog in any way, has also taken up this issue on behalf of the oppressed in New London, CT.

More Of A Quisling Than A Churchill

2005-02-24T06:21:00.000-08:00

How does one truly become a media darling in the Postmodern Academic World?

For Richard Feynman, this involved genuine brilliance and a knack for self-promotion. He redefined quantumelectrodynamics, helped build the atomic bomb and then still had the energy to hit the lecture circuit and sell his discipline.

For others, less talented, they have to do something really loud and stupid. That will carry someone pretty far before the world gets told the emporer really has no clothes. The developers of "Cold Fusion" at the University of Utah had us all admiring their sartorial elegance for about 15 minutes.

For those with no ability whatsoever, academia proves a barren ground, unless, of course, you really hate the United States and actively root for a lot of its citizens to die a horrible death. Then George Soros, or one of his puppet organizations, opens the funding floodgates for you.

Ward Churchill became a loud and strident activist for terrorism against The United States. Not just an apologist, not just a milquetoast, whitebread, wet-pantied, liberal sympathizer. An outright advocate, rooting for the Hamas Team the way a Good Catholic Roots for Notre Dame. He's on tape firing up the troops in seattle.

(Here, Here, Here, and Here) - Michelle Malkin reader Anthony J.

This gibberish, this hatred of his own land, this unrepentant desire to see all of us "Little Eichmans" burn in the fires of Gahenna, doesn't come on the cheap. It takes a certain level of funding and support to really stab your country in the back. A whole network of committed "Little Zunigas," ready to stand up and say "screw them!" anytime an American dies by the hands of a terrorist.

Like the end of a program on PBS, this delightful entertainment is brought to you by the following sponsors:

Gustavus Myers Center, which is in turn funded by....

NAACP
The Urban League
The Ford Foundation
The Public Welfare Foundation

and amazingly enough, B'Nai Brith International.

Please keep this in mind if you are ever handed a CFC form or are solicited for a tax-deductible contribution.

The Bizarre World Of The Neosinophile

2005-02-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

Thomas P. M. Barnett sat on a panel I attended during a business conference last week in Williamsburg, Va. The man served our country well for years at The Pentagon and has an active mind, a glib turn of phrase and the ability to make an entire room of bored convention attendees laugh at some of his remarks and gasp at others. He was enpaneled with two stodgy DC careerists and stole the entire 90 minutes with off-the-cuff blandishments such as:

-- "The bigger a mess Iraq becomes, the more it unsettles the Middle East. This is turning out better than George W. Bush could have hoped for."

--"The modern DOD analyst has a chance to really screw up the world for the next 50 years."

--"The Department of Homeland Security will end up being the Department of Agriculture of the 21st Century. I guess the current administration looked at what happened in the former USSR and decided centralization was a good model."

These are all paraphrases, but they sum up the bomb-throwing tone of his thought-provoking, amusing and interesting remarks. It also made me read his blog and try to figure out roughly what made Barnett tick. This was where I came away disappointed.

Barnett seems enamoured with an old economic chestnut known as Growth Pole Theory. This theory posits that urban areas reduce the transactions costs on economic activity and therefore encourage more of it. This, in turn, sucks more people into the city, and therefore brings them into contact with the world and makes them more civilized and urbane. This theory works in some cases, and fails in others.

Barnett, no doubt, rode The Metro to Pentagon Station at taxpayer expense rather than sitting in his car during an August rush hour on 495. He also never set foot in East Hollywood any further downhill from Griffith Park than Santa Monica Boulevard. Cities have the potential of providing convenience and socialization, and they have the reality of economic dislocation, sky-high costs of living, crack houses and homeless people.

Barnett then takes the partially errant Growth Pole Theory and attempts to apply it to the current geopolitical situation. He does this through the popular framework of a model that divides the world into a Gap and a Core. The Core lives in cities, chats on the internet and has interconnected with the rest of the world via globalization. These Core nations have enjoyed all the benefits of modern travel, information technology and commerce because of their proximity to these urban growth poles that made it affordable for them to taste this luxury.

The Gap, on the other hand, lives out there in the sticks. They are the people on the other side of the modern Hadrian's Wall of geopolitical alliances. They cannot address modernization and refuse to acknowledge its risks. Thus they are forced somehow to behave like The Unabomber or Osauma Bin Ladin.

Where this leads Barnett off the tracks of reasoned thought is on the subject of China. He sees China emerging from the Gap and entering the Core. He sees strong economic growth and reads where things are manufactured when he shops at Target or Wal Mart. This leads Barnett to uncritically label China as the success story of the 21st Century.

Barnett accurately captures the fact that China has made itself a lot better off and more civilized than it was during Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward. What he missed was the context in which the governing class of The Chinese Military was allowing this to happen.

Growth and modernization in a moral vaccuum do not lead to decency or make a nation someone the US should make a trusted ally. This is where I part company from Barnett and his Core epistomology of geopolitical thought. If there is such a thing as a Core group of modern nations, it should require some core standards of decency and decorum before they roll out the welcome mat to anyone who can jump start a national economy. Hitler and Pinochet both accomplished that to a certain degree. Niether could claim rightfully enroll their governments as decent global citizens.

China reached a critical juncture in the late 20th Century. They could not remain a backwards nation and expect to survive or even mange to feed their population. Their efforts at economic modernization via central planning had failed and they needed to import at least some of the powerful trademarks of liberal democracies such as the US, Japan and the nations of Modern Europe. The Chinese Military Oligrchy wanted the cash, the gadgets and the culture. They did not want the free thinking and dissent that came coupled with Western Style Democracy.

This lead to a crisis when a group of students demonstrated for a more open society in Tienamin Square. The Chinese could have listened to these people, and at least tried to negotiate a few of their demands and throw them a bone or two. Except that they couldn't afford to. The entire system in China smacks of Fuedal privaledge; like any failed marxist state, it was an aristocracy of pull.

Who got what and who knew what could not be decided domestically by market systems. Beijing and Shanghai may meet every definition Barnett and other Growth Pole Theorists offer for an urban core. However, the society in which they exist still rigorously enfrces a gap and refuses to let the vast majority of it's population leave that gap. No matter whether the economy is agricultural, industrial or information-based, no Fuedal manor operates for long sans its surfs.

China will have to internally collapse and combust before it is ready to join the modern world as anything other than a predator state. They claim to fear US intentions in Asia, but their government desperately needs that fear. Nearly as much as Kim Il Jung in North Korea.

Hitler would never have made it longer than two years as Chancellor of Germany without the Anchluss and The Juden. The Chinese oligarchy would gone down in widespread anarchy and bloodshed without the same nationalistic fight against an enemy. They are not ready to join us in any sort of alliance, we are entirely too useful and vital an enemy to them. This is where the Neosinofiles such as Barnett egregiously miss the point of modern Facist China.

Swallower Arguments: The Ideological Closed Loop

2005-02-23T05:41:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has ever sat through a time share sales pitch, in order to get the two free tickets at the other end of the rainbow, almost understands the exquisite pain experienced by John Derbyshire, at a recent leftist teach-in about diversity. Why an individual intelligent enough to author Prime Obsession would sit through that twaddle is a topic for another day. Today, I'll focus on why these "teaching sessions" are such a hands-on history lesson in 14th Century Dentistry.

Peter Wood wrote on diversity fetishism. He opined that "(diversity studies) is a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it." I feel this is true and can also be assumed over a much larger domain of liberal thought and belief without any significant loss of generality. In other words, you have to buy into liberalism on an emotional level or not at all.

Now that works for a lot of otherwise intelligent people, but not enough to muster the popular groundswell required to ascend to power in a representative democracy that offers anything close to universal suffrage. To make the illogical seem orderly, you have to warp the reality the reveals its flaws. To convince people that purple is really yellow or blue instead, for example, you have to do something to screw up their vision. Maybe give them glasses with funky, shaded lenses.

The logical equivalent of glasses with the weird colored lenses is an argument waged on preempted categories. That is, you make a participant in the argument agree to certain ground rules and suppositions that make the outcome of the discussion a foregone conclusion. This constitutes what's called a swallower argument. It's an argument that can't be debunked because the participants have to accept a set of unproven, a priori condiditons to entry that make disagreeing illegal to the rules of the game.

For example, no one in his right mind would buy into the environmental movement and it's ideology without first proceeding from the premise that modern industry did more harm through it's pollution than it did good through its production, philanthropy or job creation. Reject that initial ground rule, and there is no logical justification to reject the premise that environmental regulation should only occur after a cost benefit analysis establishes that the regulations do more good than harm.

Another famous chestnut is the argument that the rich are unduly compensated and should therefore be taxed more in order to share the wealth. This could make some sense on its own merits, but does not become an emotional teeth-clincher that turns out the populist with pitch forks until the apriori assumption is made that every dollar that rich person makes means less welfare for those who aren't just as rich as him. Class warfare does not work if we step back and examine whether or not this wealth was stolen or earned and whether or not people entered into a bargain with this person to enrich him.

P. J. O'Rourke skillfully eviscerated this argument by describing it has "The Dominoes Pizza" view of political economy. Where if one guy gets too many slices, everyone else has to feed their family on a bunch of old, stale crusts. Logical examination renders this conceit ludicrous. Rail Baron Cornelious Vanderbilt may have been an utter Type A, Yuppie Scum, Tyrannosaurus Rex from Hell, but every time a grain wholesaler was able to ship the contents of a silo to market before it spoiled so that every farmer in town got a better price on their grain, the entire community served by that railroad was better off precisely because Vanderbilt was an egomaniacal, driven, uber-jerk would refused to take "no" for an answer.

Thus it is with much of what the cult-like hard left believes. There is no logical discussion allowed of whether standards are fair, fetuses are alive, wealth is good, or society just. Believe any of these things and you're disqualified from the discussion. The swallower argument doesn't work and the hard core of the left doesn't want you around. There are some forms of diversity that just weird these people out.

Gonzo Journalism - Blogging Before The Internet?

2005-02-22T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head. He won a cult-like following of fans for inventing what he termed "Gonzo Journalism." The most famous example being his book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

Although he certainly coined the term, "Gonzo Journalism" wasn't entrely Hunter S. Thompson's invention. Cohorts such as P. J. O'Rourke coalesced around the tutalege of Jann Werner of Rolling Stone Magazine. Other publications that catered to this sort of blatantly and unapologeticaly opinionated reporterage included Mother Jones, Ramparts and The Village Voice.

The "Gonzo" genre relied on humor, ludeness and an open defiance of the standards of the day to attract it's following and push the debased tenets of later 20th Century Post Modern Hedonism. The entire schtick worked in aposition to the very formal and professional atmosphere in which TV News Anchors droned. It targeted a yound audience that found the MSM of Hunter S. Thompson's day to be a disaffecting, crashing bore.

Thompson's willingness to attack the self-selecting canons of journalism with the reverence of Attila The Hun broke new ground. While Thompson lived and died a committed man of the left, his example inspired many people of every ideology.

Even though I would probably fear and loathe anyone Hunter S. Thompson thought should have held higher office, I admit the man blazed a trail of defiance against the restrictive, propagandic voice of the MSM. Perhaps "Gonzo Journalism" occurred because Hunter S. Thompson started blogging decades before Berners-Lee invented the internet.

Update I: Tow wolfe niether fears nor loathes the writing of Hunter S. Thompson. According to Sean at TAM, he has branded Thompson "The last century's greatest comic writer in the english language."

Or Else What?

2005-02-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

The Syrians have denied any involvement in the brutal slaying of Rafiq Hariri. It must have been a rogue group of terrorists that the Syrians have no connection to. Bashir Assad is way too nice a guy to do a mean thing like kill someone. After all, Mullah Omar initially said the same thing about 9-11.

Well, contrary to optimistic opinion, the Syrians have owned Beirut for three decades. They've done for it what Washington, DC has done for Prince Georges County, Maryland. They've turned it into a refuse dump and it won't be improving any time soon.

So did the Ba'athists wax Hariri? Absa-Frikkin-Lutely! Of course they waxed him and they wanted President George W. Bush to see and hear it live and in stereo. Now, like the Chinese after The Tienamin Square Massacre, they are posing us an implied question. Or else what?

The what with Tienamin Square was most-favored nation status and the entire retail floor at the local Walmart. Followed then by the hand-over of Hong Kong by the British. Then to really fix the Chinese but good, we built North Korea a nuclear reactor so they wouldn't have to. We showed them what would happen if they didn't play nicely.

Bashir Assad may not have the greatest reputation for being a visionary leader of his people. However, he's not blind and deaf. He knows that the way to get over on the West is to Mau-mau them; hard. Make them have to do something and push the crisis to the sticking point.

No one had the guts to stop Hitler from rearming Germany. No one saw fit to deny China anything after Tienamin Square. No one has the nerve to call out Kim Il Jung after his announcement of a nuclear arsenal. Why would anyone have the guts to stand up to Syria. There will be no peace in Lebanon or in a new Palestinian state if Damascus has a say.

President Bush and Jacques Chiraq can denounce the Syrians all day long. It makes for good television, but the enemy always gets a vote. We're getting back to cozy with the sophisticates over on the continent. We can say anything we want, but Bashir Assad knows well that the proof is in the pudding. The question he still poses is "Or Else What?"

A Sad Song Ends - Arthur Miller, RIP

2005-02-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

The Sping Semester of 10th Grade English brought The Death Of A Salesman, by Arthur Miller, into my life. Miller saw the world in a different way than I had been raised to. I remember reading this play and thinking Willy Loman should have changed the beneficiary line of his policy and not reading too much into the ending other than that.

It took a few of the profound disappointments of adulthood to really understand why Death Of A Salesman was a masterpiece. Until someone has lost a job or two, lost a woman or two and had a member of their family completely let them down, they just don't really get Willy Loman.

When Arthur Miller sought to personify mediocrity, pessimism and mid-life despair, he developed the character Willy Loman. Loman became a symbol of the failed man. The person who reaches a level of incompetence and then loses his aim and sense of morality. Loman's failure reached his core and although Willy Loman worked for years,he had nothing left to give his family better than his life insurance.

It was this profound symbolism that expressed so many people's disenchantment with the burdgeoning wealth and decaying spirit of post World War II America. Arthur Miller was the voice of the counterculture before it became unwashed, undignified and aliterate. He leveled vituperation upon the society he saw around him, but always managed to wear a velvet glove while he back-handed the morals of his age.

As a rank amatuer at writing myself, I am at awe of how Miller viewed his protagonist as a character. Miller was obviously disgusted by Willy Loman as a human being, but at the same time, I got the sense he would have bought Loman a drink and done everything in his power to cheer this beaten man up and send him home with at least something to live for tommorrow. Arthur Miller could tell a story about a failure, because he felt honest compassion for the man.

When I think about Miller's masterpiece now, I'm reminded of EdwinArlington Robinson,aturn of the century American poet who had the same awesome capacity to loathe the failures that plague the hman race, but to still love the people who suffer from them. For Robinson to compose "Richard Cory" or "Miniver Cheevy" took a certain genius. For Miller to write the entire five acts of Death of A Salesman required a super-human stamina.

When Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter and Salmon Rushdie mourn Arthur Miller's passing, they should also stop to ponder on his decency and compassion. A lot public figures will glibly drop the biblical passage "Love the sinner, hate the sin."
Arthur Miller very nearly obtained this lofty moral goal via his character Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman.

Final Thoughts On Ward Churchill

2005-02-11T18:43:00.000-08:00

Early in his 15 minutes of infamy, I couldn't even get Ward Churchill's name right. I was sputtering mad that this jerk named Matt, Bob or Dave or maybe it was Mark Churchill had spewed a bunch of sick-up juice about the victims of Al Quaida being Little Eichmans. I should have stopped and reflected.

A little more thought on the subject of this Lilleputian Axis Sal would have caused me to at least get his name right when I reccommended that his infamous essay On The Justice of Roosting Chickens: Some People Push Back be read aloud to the drunk and happy CU alumni next Homecoming. I still like the idea, but would prefer to engage in a scholarly activity foreign to Ward Churchill. Namely, the proper citation of one's references.

Perhaps it's a little much to expect a man as thoroughly deracinated as Mark, I mean Ward, Churchill to keep his footnotes straight. He's bad enough with his own geneology. Perhaps he smoked too much dope while listening to Niel Young and Crazy Horse and woke up believing he was a Lakota Sioux. No, actually he showed up at a pow wow and got a card that named him an honorary Cherokee.

Ward Churchill then took his Cherokee membership card and concocted a dog and pony show about how The White Man was keeping him down. He wrote papers accusing the US Army of conducting medical experiments on Indians back in 1837. This led to numerous speaking engagements and teaching gigs and eventually, the Chairmanship of The Colorado University Ethnics Studies Department.

It was when Chief Fecing Bull booked an engagement to speak in New York that the facade came tumbling down. Someone actually remembered reading one of his delusional, barm-headed Jeremiads of racial victimization and wasn't too embarassed to admit to it. It turned out that Ward Churchill had all but said the 9-11 terrorism victims had it coming in spades. He's tried to backtrack since, but then Napoleon tried that too after leaving a big mess outside the mercilous, iron gates of Moscow.

Now people are blogging and researching Ward Churchill's innumerable deceits, prevarications and acts of outrageous barbarism that border on treason. The whole Potempkin Village of a CV he erected just got hit with a nuetron bomb. This is a perfect place to insert some snarky comment about justice and chickens coming home to roost.

But no, I'm done with Ward Churchill. I've found Andy, Trey or Bob Churchill to be a very useful symbol to express my unending reservior of contempt for the blood sucking, tenured lampreys that feed off university endowments to spew vile and untrue garbage. Luke Churchill's name can now be forgotten. The egg timer rang and his fifteen minutes are up.

Update I: According to Ace Of Spades, Ward's up and joined The Raelian Tribe as well.

Update II: Thanks to The Leather Penguin, we've got just what you need to go from lilly white to Custer's Blight!

Update III: Whoever is cloning the moorlocks needs to stop! According to Michelle Malkin, there's a nut-hatch on the Pittsburgh University faculty who's just as dyspeptic as Ward Churchill.

Update IV: The American Mind asks if blogging Ward Churchill helps the little creep by giving him more publicity. I would respectfully suggest that an IRS audit would give him similar publicity and be about as helpful to his career as we've been.

Correction: The little creep Michelle Malkin posted about actually teaches at Penn U. Thanks, Snake. Good Catch!

Entitlements, Budgets and Cost Estimation

2005-02-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

President Bush can generally count on the unquestioning support of the very conservative Heritage Foundation. This, however, excludes the debacle surrounding health care policy in general and more specifically, The recently passed Prescription Drug Panderation Act. This ominous money vacuum has even President Bush's strongest ideological supporters scratching their heads and asking a few very pointed questions.

Robert E. Moffet, The Heritage Foundation's ranking expert on health care policy, kicked off proceedings with the following cheerful tidbit.

"Recently, David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States, noted that the official debt of the United States is more than $7 trillion, which is about $24,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Mr. Walker told the National Press Club, however, that if you count the unfunded liabilities--in other words, the promised benefits of entitlement programs, including the new $8 trillion unfunded liability on the prescription drug benefit alone--you are talking about $42 trillion, equal to about $140,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.

Medicare is the toughest problem substantively. It is also the most difficult problem politically. The question is: Can Congress contain those costs? Will Congress contain those costs? How can Congress contain these costs?..."

Joseph R. Antos, a former Congressional Budget Office, added the following good news.

"....My former colleague at AEI, Jagdeesh Gohkale, estimates that the Medicare drug benefit will have an unfunded liability that is more like $13 trillion. That assumes that things proceed along in a normal fashion without Congress expanding the Medicare benefit.

Can Congress contain Medicare's explosive growth? There is a 39-year track record on this question and it does not look too good...."

How bad is 'not too good'? Antos offers us a 'ferinstance'.

What is the real number? It might be $400 billion; it might be $500 billion; it might be $800 billion; and it might be $13 trillion in promised, but unfunded, benefits over the long term. Whatever the total might be, it is an unlimited amount because this is an entitlement.

Not surprisingly, spending an unlimited amount does wonderful things to The Federal Budget. Another Ex-CBO staffer, Jeff Lemeuix, lays it out in somewhat plain English.

The latest projections are that the federal deficit is going to be about $440 billion this year. That is almost 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). It will probably range somewhere between 3 percent and 3.5 percent of GDP for the next several years as the economy recovers. After that, things just go downhill.

How far downhill? None of the wise men at Heritage seem to care to speculate. One thing David Crippin, the final panel member, gives us even more cheerful news.

Therefore, if we continue to tax an average 18 percent or 19 percent of GDP--as we have since World War II--almost all of that federal revenue would have to go to funding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Put another way, we would have to eliminate the rest of the federal government as we know it, including the Defense Department.

I'm not quite that libertarian, and I'm certain Donald Rumsfeld and the board members at ADM and Con Agra would all have to be put to the sword in order to make this happen. The propensity for Congress to spend has got to be changed. If it is not, there will be a day when all the benfit recipients line up for their Hershey Bar and there is no candy to hand out.

It won't feel like Christmas, when millions of government benefits recipients wake up one morning and discover that there ain't no such thing as Santa Claus. The entitlement programs like Medipander and Social Security have to either be reformed to where we can support them or flat-out ended cold turkey.

People can whine all they want about the fairness of all this, but at the end of the day, the numbers on a spreadsheet just don't give a $hit. Right now, those numbers only add up to trouble in America's future. The time to cut the budget is now. The time to kill The Prescription Drug Panderation Act is now.

Update I: Patrick Presscott gives us an excellent idea of what we're up against in reforming entitlements...AAARGGHHH!!

Update II:Sean Hackbarth hates Medipander as much as I do. He wants them to pass a new drug to the left (just kidding, Sean). Excellent post!

Update III: Martin O'Malley calls GWB the equivalent of a 9-11 Terrorist for daring to spend less the day after he annouced a $440Bil deficit. Mayor O'Malley is the Michael Moore of fiscal commentary. So There!!

FarmAid or Farmacide?

2005-02-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

Imagine government activism during the 11th Century in Europe. This would involve the Sheriff of Nottingham riding out with his men and trying to hang Robin Hood so that he could steal from the poor and give to his drinking buddies, the rich. The truly conservative believe that the essential nature of government activism hasn't changed a whole lot since back when things were rotten and Mel Brooks would have been pincushioned with arrows for having any part of Robin Hood: Men In Tights.

No segment of America's overbloated and sometimes highly uncivil government service gives the conservative view of government activism more credence than the fiasco-laden list of agriculture welfare programs. These programs operate on a premise of human nature that you would have to leaf through Das Kapital to properly appreciate and understand. They stem from the belief that a government agency can intervene in a market and fix a price without obscuring essential information that consumers require to know how much of that product they want to purchase, or how much they should be paying.

There are three predictable results of this sort of Old Deal stupidity and each is nearly as depressing as the economic conditions that spawned these government waste and fraud engines.

1) The levels of production get distorted away from what people really want. People produce to suck at the teat of taxpayer funded largesse, not to actually feed the hungry. The top recipients of this welfare program all probably dress in Brooks Brothers and could afford to have their hair cuiffed by Christophe rather than cut by Bubba. Sixty percent of the swag goes to the richest ten percent of American farmers.

"The subsidies reward the guy who gets higher yields with higher subsidies, and he's able to buy out his neighbor and get even bigger," says Dennis Avery, an agriculture expert at the Hudson Institute.

2) Renumeration for the effected activity in no way relates to how honest or effective the person engaged in that activity becomes. Rich Lowry of National Review cites some agricultural subsidy recipients as no better than Enron with a tractor.

But that restriction is evaded, sometimes by people occasionally participating in farm-related telephone conference calls. Dubious partnerships are a way to get around restrictions on how much any one operation is supposed to get in federal payments. As a result, some agriculture businesses are little better than Enrons with tractors.

3) The prices charged for the product in no way reflect what the product costs to produce or what, if given the choice in the matter, a rational consumer would pay for any of it. The US tax code contains tarrifs on a large number of agricultural products to prevent foreign competition from underselling the producers, at the same time agricultural price controls keep the price from dropping below a certain point.

This makes the cost that working class American families pay for their basic staples like milk and bread several times what it needs to be. State governments don't tax staples of sustinence like food or medicines, but the Federal Government taxes them in a major way every time they enforce a law like Senator Jeffords' Northeast Dairy Price Compact.

So by attempting to eliminate the level of current federal involvement in agriculture, President Bush is making America a better place to farm. By capping the amount that one farm can receive at $250,000, he will make it a fairer place to farm. Senators and Congressmen will hear it loudly from the so-called farm lobby about how terrible this whole idea is, but then again, the only thing these agri-business types harvest well is federal welfare money. It's time to put these fat-cats off the dole.

Ruck'd - Fear The Dragon

2005-02-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

As they say across the Atlantic about NFL games, no matter what the odds, there's a reason they play the game. Wales proved this truism in week 1 of The Six-Nations Rugby Cup, when they took England's scalp in a hard-hitting 11-9 upset. For England, it's been a long downward spiral since they defeated Australia for The Rugby World Cup in 2003.

The match stats suggest a nasty affair in which the ball was kept in maul and towards the center of the field. The sort of boring game I'd expect England to own. Except they didn't.

Wales kept the game in England's half and made just a smidgen fewer mistakes. Wales had Errors Made: 19, Turn Overs Won: 6, Free Kicks Conceded: 0 and most importantly spent 54:11 of the match in England's end of the pitch. England could only muster Errors Made: 22, Turn Overs Won: 3, Free Kicks Conceded: 1 and spent a mere 34:00 in the Welsh end.

This reduced England to only scoring on penalty kicks, as they spent most of the afternoon on the back foot and in their own end. Wales got breathing room early with an unconverted try. England grimly bore down and had managed to kick themselves to a 9-8 advantage with less than 10 minutes to play.

They weren't able to defend their zone at the end and Wales marched down for the clincher. Three minutes from time, Gavin Henson drilled a penalty kick and put England away. The Welsh had come to play, and England had once more faltered. France can only hope England plays as predictably uninspired ball when they travel to Fortress Twickenham for Le Crunch next round.

Update I: Wizbang's bawdy tale of post-match drunkenness only demonstrates that sometimes these Welsh Dragons are even a danger to themselves...

Why Denounce Mark Churchill

2005-02-03T05:58:00.000-08:00

The Colorado State Legislature registered it's mortification with CU Ethnic Studies Professor Mark Churchill. It seems the illustrious Dr. Churchill called the victims of 9-11 killed in the bombing of The World Trade Center 3,000 Little Eichmans for their role in US economic imperialism. The Colorado Legislature found this, and other passages from his magnum opis "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality."

People have called for Dr. Churchill to be fired. I think that's totally out of line. I think he should be invited to speak at CU's Commencement. His essay should be read aloud to The University of Colorado Board of Regents with television cameras focused upon their reaction to it's lyrical beauty.

It would be like the Ice-T recital Charleton Heston conducted a few years back. The one where the fat, rich whities at the record company were exposed to the musical brilliance of "Cop Killer".

Rather than just throwing Churchill out and sweeping his infamy under the rug, let's make him a public figure. Let's put him in front of the nation and let him share his wonderful thoughts with a wounded nation. Let the people judge this man by his beliefs and let them judge the values of our higher education community by the strength of its good works.

Dementiacratic Party Follows Dr. Dean

2005-02-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

The Democrats are infested by a man who is truly a charismatic Nut-Job. So steeped in unreality, that his opponents within his own party have accused him of "hiding in a spider-hole of denial." His opponents on the other side of the partisan divide violate Godwin's Law with regularity, whenever he opens his mouth in public.

He's out there so far that comparisons to Alan Keyes wouldn't be totally untoward to Alan Keyes. Heck, he's way worse than Alan Keyes. He's not only crazy, but unlike Alan Keyes, he could actually win, if you ran him for anything important.

So the Democrats found a way to put him in what the Japanese refer to as an "office by the river." One with a pretty view and an attractive secretary, but no legitimate professional responsibility. Howard Brush Dean now heads up the DNC.

His RNC counterpart was quick to congratulate him on his new promotion.

Richard Bond, the former head of the Republican National Committee, said: "He's a very capable guy, he's got high energy, but he will reinforce all of their worst instincts. His style and message is one that will narrow his party's options rather than expand them."

"I think it's a scream," Mr. Bond said.

The Post-Puberty Wing of The Democratic Party wasted no time in reminding the exhuberant Dr. Dean who he had to go see about the keys to the family car. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid offered Dr. Dean the following "reminder."

Mr. Reid said: "The Democratic chairman has a constituency of 447 people. Our constituency is much larger than that."

For those not fluent in Doublespeak, he meant "Who's your Daddy now?"

The few remaining opponents to Dean's coronation seemed to be waking up and smelling the asphalt. One candidates paid mouthpiece offered the following assessment.

"We are assessing the situation, with a dose of realism," he said.

Which implies that the other candidates are vastly more qualified than Dr. Dean to lead a major political organization. No one has come forward lately and accused Dr. Dean of prescribing anything relatively close to a dose of realism to his fellow mental patients on the far left wing of The So-Called Democratic Party.

Update I: ColdHeartedTruth gets some excellent feedback on how Dean will do as DNC chair. (I reccommend the user comments to this post.)

Update II: Sean Hackbarth can resurrect The Duck Hunt. He's keeping close tabs on Howard The Duck as always.

Frank Talk From Congressman Barney

2005-02-02T04:41:00.001-08:00

I have a confession to make. Congressman Barney Frank is not my favorite person in The House of Representatives. I wouldn't like the guy even if the prostitute who ran the escort service, catering to young males, out of his swank, Georgetown townhouse had been named Stephanie, rather than Steve Gobie.

However, he did do the US a favor yesterday as a member of our delegation to the international leftist wonkfest at Davos, Switzerland. He pimp-slapped CNN Nut-Job Jordan Eason in a manner that would have made the aforementioned Gobie fetch him a cold Coors Light.

It seems Eason Jordan has a pet theory that US soldiers are intentionally dropping the hammer on journalists. Luckily, Congressman Frank, while not a rabid fan of the US presence in Iraq, was a smart enough Congressman not to allow any personal prejudice lead him into defending the indefensible.

He told Eason Jordan to put up or shut. In Gobiespeak, that would be "Show me the money, b___h!" Jordan tried to slither back to his hole, but the Hateraid drinkers denied him the cover. So in the end, Jordan looked like a nut, the Davos Divas looked like the Anti-American bigots they all truly are and Congressman Barney Frank, yes Congressman Barney Frank, walked out of that wonk session looking like the voice of reason and Democracy. The 21st Century is truly off to a bizarre start.

Medipander - It's The Dicker-Picker-Upper

2005-02-01T04:47:00.000-08:00

The Prescription Drug Panderation Act has gone past rediculous now and verges into the territory of federally financed brigandage. It started as a plan to supplement the affordability of emergency medicines for the elderly and then like the man-eating vine in Little Shop of Horrors, it grew.

Soon obesity, pain-killer and other non-lifesaving medications were cozened onto the list of covered drugs. As one doctor put it, they were nice things to have.

"These are drugs that treat a condition that compromises the quality of life but doesn't threaten life," said Dr. Ira Sharlip, a professor of urology at UC San Francisco. "But there are many drugs that are approved for quality-of-life indications. It wouldn't be right to single out [impotence drugs] as frivolous when there are so many others in the same category" — such as prescription drugs for indigestion or mild pain, he said.

This is precisely what happens with these feel-good, oh-so-sensitive, giveaway boondoggle programs. There is never a justifiable place to say "Hell, No! GO buy your own."

So now we make taxpayers fit the bill for horny old men to buy their boner pills. This is robbery. This is an outrage. This is not why I vote for conservative candidates. This must be stopped. Next month, when the RNC asks for a donation, tell them you'd be glad to, except that the money you would have contributed is funding some old, lecherous prick's purchase of Cialis or Viagra.

Update I: Sue Bob's Diary describes the tyranny by taxation that these federal largesse programs bring into being.

Iraq Votes - An Enjoyable Look In The Mirror

2005-01-31T06:30:00.000-08:00

Anytime someone tells you not to take something they didn't want to happen too seriously, it's big. When Senator John Kerry told us all "not to overhype" the Iraqi Elections, you know they were a major success. They were a major success for reasons the Washington Post describes surprisingly well in this editorial.

Yesterday, however, Americans finally got a good look at who they are fighting for: millions of average people who have suffered for years under dictatorship and who now desperately want to live in a free and peaceful country. Their votes were an act of courage and faith -- and an answer to the question of whether the mission in Iraq remains a just cause. -Wahington Post Editorial Board.

It's a shame Americans also didn't get a better look at who amongst them didn't support the Iraqi Elections. That self-annointed Democratic Wing of The Democratic Party that hates everything about America and wanted nothing positive to arise from Sunday's Election. This blurb here pretty much sums up about 400 or so of their online posts complaining about the Iraqi Election.

I can't believe the Iraqis are buying into this "democracy" bullshit. They have to know that the Americans don't want them to have power, because they know that Bush is in this for the oil, and now that he finally has it he's not going to let it go. This election is a charade. The fact is that the Iraqis have suffered during the past two years more than any people on earth at the hands of the American gestapo. - Democratic Underground.

The Iraqis weren't trying to, but they held up a big mirror for us to look into and see ourselves. Or at least see what we really and truely think about Democracy coupled with Universal Sufferage. For most of us, both Democrat and Republican, the view was not perfect, but pretty much rico and suave. We have our faults and mistakes, but enjoy our right to vote, participate and debate and wish the Iraqis well.

But for the HaterAid Drinkers, it couldn't be pretty. It was an episode of "The Biggest Loser", where no one gets a smaller waistline or a healthier lifestyle. It was, for them, seeing their two century old lie dying in the desert streets of Ancient Mosul and Venerable Baghdad. That lie that Democracy couldn't be imposed on different cultures until they developed it themselves.

A lie disproven in Japan, Korea, The Phillipines, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and about seventy or so other countries after Great Britain, where representative Democracy really got it's start. And it was an irrational lie, given that no one had ever told Assurbanipol, Attilla, or for that matter Hugo Chavez that their might didn't make right anytime they chose to flex a tyrannical bicep.

Or more importantly, because you don't have to impose Democracy on civilized people, because Democracy is the pinnacle of human civilization. It's the essence of cooperation and teamwork. The acceptance, toleration and peaceful resolution of our differences. Which basically is what our race has been striving for since our ancestors climbed down out of the trees, built their first cities and attempted to live in early city states located not too far from The Fertile Cresecent. Which not coincidentally, intersects modern Baghdad along the Euphrates River.

Perhaps, all along, we've owed a certain debt to this region for starting the very concept of civilization. Maybe, by giving them the opportunity to build a Mesopatamiam Democracy, we've repaid some of it. Tell Senator Kerry not to overhype that.

Update I: Wizbang agrees with Kofi? Yep, it's time to sheath the swords and help Iraq rebuild.

Update II: Sometimes I read Frank Martin over at Varifrank and can only comment "Yeah, what he said."

Update III: Yes, the Iraqi people have spoken. The Virginian agrees they have spoken powerfully.

Update IV: Sean Hackbarth reminds us that a lot of the details of a free Iraq still need to be worked out. Democracy is a means to that end.

Update V: Even hardened realists at Cold Hearted Truth take a step back and congratulate the Iraqi people on their courage.

So Just What Have Religous People Done For Science Anyway?

2005-01-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

When people discuss religion and science, they refer to the two has opposites that do not attract. More like oil and water than Yin and Yang. The opinion seems to prevail that the two should never mix. Since it often comes down to a big argument about where the universe came from, I thought it was only fair to provide a religious perspective. That of Belgian Priest Georges Lemaitre.

Lemaitre, like many religious figures, went against the prevailing science of his day. He argued, in accordance with the Book of Genesis, that the Universe was created from "a primeival atom" at a discreet moment and then rapidly expanded outwars.

Most scientists of the 1920's, including the eminent Albert Einstien, argued in favor of what would later be codified as the Steady State Theory, by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle, rather ironically, also gets credited with the term Big Bang Theory. It was his attempt to subject the work of Lemaitre to professional mockery.

Edwin Hubble formulated Hubbel's Law, in 1929, which provided backers of Lemaitre with mathematical, as well theological, ammunition to support Lemaitre's hypothesis. Hubble compared the distances to nearby galaxies to their redshift, found a linear relationship. (wikipedia) This allowed people to start making determinations of the age of heavanly bodies.

This lead to the inevitable efforts to start pinpointing the age of the universe as a whole. Once that became the categorical argument Lemaitre's theory held intellectual predominance.

In fairness to Lemaitre's detractors, other possible explanations are still given scientific credence as competing theories. One of the more talented protegies of Dr. Stephen Hawking proposed a theory that the universe expanded and contracted in a manner roughly analogous to a Simple Harmonic Oscillator. This would allow for a universal expansion in accordance with Hubbel's Law and would periodically bring all the matter in the universe to a gravitational singularity, just like the Big Bang.

This gravitational singularity would have no spatial dimensions. This prohibits examination of what happened while the matter was compacted into this single, geometric point. So we're left to do what is anathematic to the scientific community. We choose our theory on a faith-based criterion. We pays our nickle and we makes our choice.

In the meantime, we can categorically prove that a religious thinker can more than hold his own amongst the giants of theoretical science. During his lifetime, Lemaitre won numerous accolades from the scientific community. He believed what he believed and could still think critically. At least according to the following institutions who lauded his name.

In 1936, he was elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He took an active role there, became the president in March 1960 and remaining so until his death. He was also named prelate in 1960.
In 1941, he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.
In 1946, he published his book on L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif (The Primeval Atom Hypothesis), a book which would be translated into Spanish in the same year and into English in 1950.
In 1953 he was given the very first Eddington Medal award of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Perhaps that challenges our modern philosophical disciples of David Hume. These people should continue to think in a critical manner, but in the end find something they can actually believe in.

The New "Show Me State", Arizona

2005-01-27T05:05:00.000-08:00

If Congressman Tom Tancredo wants to jump start his border security coalition and succeed in his aim to make the US Government take patrolling our borders seriously, the State of Arizona has given him the marquee idea with which he should proceed. They have passed a law that requires potential voters to demonstrate their US citizenship before they cast their vote.

Of course this has singed the overly sensitive, who have reflexively described this law as a violation of The Civil Rights Act. In a way, this response just back-handed well over 1 million tax-paying, flag-waving, voting Arizona citizens who, by virtue of their parental ancestory, just happen to not be of caucasian ancestory.

Here goes the So-Called Democratic Party's whine on this issue. You can decide if their all as bigoted as Senator Klansman of West Virginia.

A civil-rights group and Democratic legislators recently had urged the Department of Justice (news - web sites) to reject the law. They argued the changes will erect barriers that will hinder minorities' participation in elections and hamper grassroots voter registration drives.

I'd bet a solid chunk of pocket change that well over 90% of the minorities I've known throughout my life were US citizens. That's after I've lived in Central Texas for three and a half years of my life and in Los Angeles for a couple of more. I think that this slur against Hispanics by The So-Called Democratic Party is just as obnoxious as accusing all Mexicans of being lazy or just here for the welfare.

There really needs to be an end to the double standard of what public statements and policy actions get ascribed to racist beliefs. The So-Called Democratic Party should be called on the carpet for their incessant bigotry the same way Trent Lott got deservedly dogged out for his.

Update I: The bloggers at Right Voices also wonder why minorities are specifically effected by this law.

Update II: Michelle Malkin praises a protest at The University of North Texas over America's lax borders.

Update III: Sean Hackbarth introduces a rather painfully obtuse liberal response to Prop 200.

Saddam Insane's Tyrannical Understudy; Hugo Chavez

2005-01-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

President Hugo Chavez, like the Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran, came to hold dictatorial power as a result of Former US President Jimmy Carter. However, his behavior since ascending has been more comparable to the Iranian Theocrat's mortal enemy, Former Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein. Like Hussein, Chavez's tyranny has been ideological and secular, rather than religious. Also like Hussein, Chavez has used an abundant supply of crude oil as a fulcrum to leverage his power and influence.

Chavez has busied himself using his petrochemical empire to engage in revolutionary destabilization throughout central and South America. He, like Saddam Hussein, has gained in stature amongst the leadership of the world's non-democratic nations by combining strong anti-American rhetoric with financial and military support for leftist revolutionaries. He, like Hussein, hopes that selling oil to Russia and supporting the efforts of Ghadaffi and Fidel Castro will grant him an increased level of power and influence.

Update I: Sue Bob thinks Chavez came up two Budweisers short of a case and also wonders what this idiot will do with his new power and influence.

Also like Hussein, he has left a trail of dead and tortured bodies in the wake of his acension to governance. Aleksander Boyd, of Cubanet, has comprised a list of missing or imprisoned political opponents since Chavez took office. Many were freed, once Carter had blessed off on Chavez's electoral 'landslide'. The following individuals were not as fortunate.

Assassinated or missing
Carlos Augusto Aumatrie (assassinated)
Juan Carlos Urbano Lugo (assassinated)
Jose Manuel Vilas Liñera (assassinated)
Omar Arturo Morales
Juan Jose Perez
Juan Ernesto Sanchez
Andres Bastidas Guedes
Jose Luis Rodriguez
Eduardo Jose Miranda
Julio Cesar Gomez
Rafael Tomas Pulido Marcano (APPEARED BADLY TORTURED)
Pedro Jose Sanchez Robles (assassinated)
William Alvarez Morales (assassinated)
Yormy Rafael Suarez Riveros (assassinated)
Evangelina Carrizo (assassinated)
Dictor Damas (assassinated)
Bruno Biella (assassinated)
Marvin Carrasco
Nelly Rodriguez Martinez (assassinated)
Jose Guevara Reyes (assassinated)
Juan Carlos Zambrano (assassinated)
Argenis Dugarte (assassinated)
Jose Guevara Reyes (assassinated)
Jose Sanchez Robles (assassinated)
Jose Luis Ricaurte (assassinated)
José Antonio Quero
Carlos Armando López Martínez
Nelson Alexander Batista
Orlando Antonio Bustamante (soldier: severely burnt whilst under arrest)
Ángel Ciro Pedreáñez (soldier: severely burnt whilst under arrest)
Maritza Ron, assassinated in Altamira Square on August 16th 2004
Silvino Bustillos. Gone missing on October 31 2004. Has not been seen since. Allegedly tortured and assassinated by a Military Intelligence squad commanded by National Guard Lieutenant Danny Alfredo Daniels Perez.
Antonio Lopez Castillo, assassinated by the State police
Juan Carlos Sanchez, assassinated by the State police

The obvious domestic repression, combined with the support for radical leftist guerrila outfits such as FARC and The Shining Path, and his manipulation of the global oil prices for political ends paint the picture of a dangerous man who means his neighbors and our nation nothing but ill. We've had to use force to deal with a very similar individual and are still dealing with the fallout of letting him sink his corrupt tenticles into an entire nation.

Hugo Chavez's obvious emulation of Saddam Hussein's behavior and ideology add one more piece of evidence to the argument that perhaps the wrong President Bush removed Saddam Hussein and that this dismissal occurred about 12 years too late. Another way to look at it is that anyone doubting the malignant threat posed by Venezualian Dictator Hugo Chavez is to quote Senator Lieberman. "Hiding in a spider-hole of denial."

The Unannounced Candidate

2005-01-25T06:52:00.000-08:00

Few people doubted that Hillary Clinton harbored ambitions far beyond the Junior Senatorship of New York State. Her husband served as her co-President for two terms back in the 90's and she developed a taste for the power and the lifestyle the way bruised and muddy rugby players take to The Golden Beverage. Her activities yeaterday did nothing to change that assesment and in fact, reinforced it for several reasons.

She rose her national profile on The 25th Anniversary on The Roe v. Wade decision that had the practical effect of legalizing abortion throughout the United States. She acted officially on behalf of her party, but primarily, she acted on behalf of her ambitions.

Proposing new political language about abortion rights for an increasingly skittish Democratic Party, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that friends and foes on the issue should come together on "common ground" to reduce the number of "unwanted pregnancies" and ultimately abortions, which she called a "sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." Clinton, in a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters at the state Capitol, firmly restated her support for Roe v. Wade. But then she offered warm words to opponents of abortion and said that faith and organized religion were the "primary" reasons teenagers abstained from sexual relations. -Drudgereport

Her words suggest that she seeks accomodation with, or at least some of the votes of, people who favor restrictions on abortion. Her record provides a different take on the events of her term as Senator. She bats 1.000 according to Planned Parenthood and uses disengenuous rhetoric to obscure that issue.

The New York Times described the speech as an effort to modify the current postion of the Democratic Party. This probably lacks accuracy. She spoke in hopes of changing the perceived position of The Democratic Party on abortion.

Even her primary concessions on the issue, while true, ultimately sidestep the issue of whether abortion should remain a legal practice.

"The fact is, the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place," Mrs. Clinton said.

At one point, for instance, she drew gasps from some in the audience by mentioning that 7 percent of American women who do not use contraception account for 53 percent of all unintended pregnancies.

Hillary Clinton will say what she needs to say in order to mollify political activists that oppose abortion as a widespread, publically funded practice. She will then continue to legislate in a way that keeps abortion the number one profit center for Planned Parenthood. It's a classic example of Doublespeak and no one with intelligence or discernment should be buying.

Update I: Does Hillary's campaign have opposition already? Sue Bob's Diary suggests maybe yes, and from a source quite close to her.

Update II: This all reminds Vodkapundit of another Clinton's Sistah Soljah moment.

Update III: Rielly at RightVoices reminds Hillary that abortion is an issue where you can't have it both ways.

Publish The Tract And Let The Audience Decide

2005-01-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

I'm all in favor of Doubleday Publishing publishing, selling and profiting off of The Al Queda Reader. I also don't think this will help Osauma's cause. However, there are some who fear that the publication of this book will humanize the enemy. Sort of a written verion of Tokyo Rose, if you will.

I have the opposite opinion. I believe anyone that sits down and reads Osauma's deepest thoughts will close the book convinced that this man is an utter whack-job. I may be wrong. He may have something special and profound to say that Marx, Hitler and Ted Krycinski did not. I think that historical evidence bears my point of view out and that based on past philosophical treatises from ideological mass murderers, people who have a strong enough stomach to care what Osauma believes will find him utterly repulsive.

Das Kapital stayed in print for over a century. In fact, it has outlived most of the Marxist governments that claimed it as an unofficial, secular tome of holiness. It made whatever points that could be made on behalf of Marxian governance with far greater elquence than Nikita Krushev's shoe-banging.

When I studied Marxian Economics in college, Kapital was the text. After suffering through all three volumes, I have yet to vote for anyone to the left of George W. Bush. Presenting and publishing Marx's ideals and even teaching them to young adults in a college classroom did not lead to Soviet victory in The Cold War.

Adolf Hitler wrote Mien Kampf to glorify his rise to power and convince people he was right. People read this book now and wonder how anyone in Wiemar Republic Germany could have voted for the monster. The book convinced no one that Hitler was a philosophical genius, but rather of the opposite.

The Unabomber created quite the stir when he refused to surrender to authorities until his manifesto was printed. What a stem-winder of a screed it was! It took a Harvard education to have written the thing. It doesn't take a room full of PhD pyschologists to figure out the man was in the woods too long. Evil Industrial Society found The Unabomber a comfortable padded cell. He's still waiting on the revolution.

When Doubleday introdues The World According To Wahabbi Whack-Jobs, it won't be pretty. It also won't win over any converts or make Osauma a host of new friends. I seriously doubt the youth of modern America will run out and emulate the youth of the 1960's over Osauma's Little Red Book.

If anything, after the disinformation campaign by Michael Moore, Goerge Soros and a legion of others, this book will be a refreshing reminder. A refreshing reminder of how creepy these people really are and why we fight The Global War On Terror.

Update I: The Libertarians at Brainwash want Osauma's ideas out there as well. Perhaps for a different motive, but still....

UNICEF Finds It Irrelevant

2005-01-24T06:59:00.000-08:00

President Bush has done his part to combat world-wide racism. How? He's chosen a secretary for UNICEF that will shift the organization out of the business of mass produced third world abortion. Bush's appointee, Former Secretary of Agriculture, Ann Veneman has the unenviable task of changing a culture of death and racial condescention as she steps in as the new UNICEF Director.

For years, pro-life groups have fought a losing battle explaining the contradictory nature of a child welfare agency performing abortions to the intellectual elite at UNHQ. It's hard to convince these people that the world doesn't need a few million fewer babies that look like "them"; meaning anyone of a different race, culture or religion than the highly educated, European elites that handle most of the money and power in the current UN.

It's tough arguing logic with people who feel more abortions and sterilizations would serve as a form of humanity. Particularly in poorer parts of the world where people look considerably different than their adorable children. It's this fundamentally racist condescension that makes me really want to unload on the UN advocates of abortion that specialize in mass marketing the procedure to poor, underdeveloped nations.

Veneman steps in, with Kofi Annan's tacit acquiesence, to do the best she can to stop a moral tragedy. In this case, it's to quietly stop the practice and euphemistically call it "irrelevant". Accepting 1/2 a loaf and calling it gradual progress.

The logical part of my mind tells me to take it and be happy. The stratergery's working and the ball is incrementally moving towards the right set of goal posts here. Namely, as revolting as it sounds to call abortion "irrelevant" to a child's welfare, this will end up reducing the number of abortions being performed.

There's another part of me that really wishes someone would actually pay. Other than US taxpayers, that's never been the case with the UN. It's probably part of waging a peaceful struggle to forego vengeance in return for the cessation of a hostile wrong. However, "irrelevant" is just not the way that this should be described somehow.

Maureen Dowd - All Smarm, No Point.

2005-01-24T05:01:00.000-08:00

Maureen Dowd, as many of you have probably surmised, is no real fan of President Bush or anyone in his administration. She really isn't a fan of very much, except for perhaps, Sam Cooke and surprisingly Lawrence Summers. At least she found Summers a convenient jumping off point into her attack on Condelizza Rice.

Maureen, while taking a sabatical from The Sandia Laboratory to pen a few columns for The New York Times, suggests that Condi brush up on her math skills. An amusing anecdote from a woman who thinks 32 years after the Roe v. Wade decision minus the 50 million abortions since is a positive contribution to society. If you took the square root of that figure, and that's ok, Maureen's a wiz at those imaginary numbers, it would still kind of suck.

According to the mighty Doctor Dowd,

She can't do simple equations. She doesn't even know that X times zero equals zero. If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero achievement for Rice, who helped the president and vice president bamboozle America into war.

Ad then there's this piece of snarkdom...

Her geometry is skewed if she thinks she'll now be more powerful than Rummy and Dick Cheney. Doesn't she know that the Pentagon has more sides than her Texas triangle with George and Laura?

I can't help but wonder if there's anything at all about triangles that Maureen didn't learn from Catherine Zeta Jones. What an under-handed cheap shot. She not only questions Rice's qualifications (not at all untoward if Maureen had an intellectual graveman from whence to do so), but she also accuses Condi of sleeping her way to the top. Something Maureen would have done herself, but when it came down to it, a younger leading lady stole her part.

What I Saw At The Reformation; Blogging Against The Machine

2005-01-23T17:16:00.000-08:00

Hugh Hewitt offers an interesting theory of what happened to the MSM. He has theorized that an information monopoly has just fallen apart. He writes it in his new book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World, which I highly reccommend you buy and read if it didn't magically appear beneath your Christmas Tree this year.

Hewitt plants the axiom that the MSM had ingrown to the point where it no longer understood the regular world. They had no prolonged contact with anyone significantly different than themselves in philosophical orientation. It reminds me of a job I worked one summer where I met someone that lived in such a strongly liberal background that he was still surprised when I met him in 1991 that Ronald Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter in 1980. This the sort of ideological and philosophical echo chamber that Hugh Hewitt describes the modern newsroom as.

Secondly, the MSM had no ethical compunction except to perpetuate their belief system. They had drifted out of the business of news reporting and now had taken to the evangelization of secular humanism and modern neoliberalism. Thus, belief and faith had become more important to them than legitimate evidence.

Like that forged National Guard Memorandum that felt just right to Dan Rather. It was in this environment where Jayson Blair was free to fabricate newsroom fiction, as long as Howell Raines could morally approve of the protagonist.

Finally, the MSM had grown used to demoninance and perogative. They didn't know competition when it took their audience. They had been raised to believe that the ideals of their opposition were ignorant and that they were enlightened.
The MSM did not respect the threat blogs posed to their information monopoly just by reinterpreting the news of the day without the spin or with a different flavor of sauce.

The LA Times called the blogsphere "the sizzle, but not the steak". Perhaps the LA Times could be described as the marble, but not the protien. Audience and market share were taken for granted, and the potential of the internet was never taken seriously by the print and TV media.

So was this event comparable to the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation? I doubt it, but the rise of the blogs did matter. It mattered in the sense that traditional media firms now had external sources doing due diligence on their articles.

It mattered because a truth filter had been added to the mass information pipeline. It mattered because people of all backgrounds and walks of life were now transmitting information. This gave everyone greater courage to speak up and a better understanding of the strengths, weaknesses and agendas of our traditional media sources.

So yes, the monopoly has been broken. What happens now, remains up to the humble reader. If not of my blog, at least hopefully of Mr. Hewitt's timely and informative treatise on blogging against the machine.

SpongeBob = GayBob!?!? (I see stupid people!!)

2005-01-22T18:15:00.000-08:00

I'm forlorn and heartbroken. I haven't felt this used since Charlie Hustle gambled on baseball and cheated on his wife. In a cruel and heartless world, we should be allowed to keep our heroes. But no, another paragon of truth and justice has swam off into the polluted waters of debauchery. At least according to the highly attuned rocket scientists over at American Family Association.

The American Family Association claims Spongebob Squarepants undermines our morals. And here I thought he was fighting the good fight. I couldn't imagine anyone more square than SpongeBob Squarepants. But alas, he's been swimming with the suckerfish over at the pink end of the reef.

The Central Scrutinizers over at AFA have claimed the latest SpongeBob video glamorizes homosexuality. At this point, I was overwhelmed with curiosity at how a guy who was so deformed he wore square pants could pitch or catch much of anything. The sordid details follow below.... (If you really worry about masculinity issues, use the back button on your browser now!)

The video is a remake of the 1979 hit song "We Are Family" using the voices and images of SpongeBob, Barney, Winnie the Pooh, Bob the Builder, the Rugrats and other TV cartoon characters. It was made by a foundation set up by songwriter Nile Rodgers after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in an effort to promote healing.

Having read this about thrice now, I'm still ok. I think my fiance' is beautiful and won't be trading her in for a male hairdresser named Chauncey. As for James Dobson, he has issues and badly needs to lighten up. Here's what actually put the hairballs in his colon.

Christian groups however have taken exception to the tolerance pledge on the foundation's Web site, which asks people to respect the sexual identity of others along with their abilities, beliefs, culture and race.

"Their inclusion of the reference to 'sexual identity" within their 'tolerance pledge' is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line," James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, said in a statement released Thursday.

So it's their website, not their SpongeBob video that crosses a line. Phew! That was a close one. Sponge's agent really needs to do more research next time before he signs on the bottom line. I'd hate to see the modern day Savanrolas burn all the SpongeBob videos. They are the Berninis of our junk food culture.

Update I: I finally found the person to the far right of Michelle Malkin. Oh Barnicles!!

Update II: Ricky at The New Democrat has a laugh at The Christian Right's expense. Congratulations Mr. Dobson.

Barbara Boxer - She Has To Be A GOP Plant

2005-01-19T07:38:00.000-08:00

I've run out of rational explanations for Barbara Boxer. She defies the term rationality. Her deracination eclipses the usual pompous, out of touch lunacy resplendant inside the Capital Beltway. She is unique and I personally hope Quality Control required the mold broken from which she was originally cast.

Somewhere in a confirmation hearing that occurred on Planet Barbara, Condelizza Rice described the Southeast Asian Tsunami as an opportunity while responding to questions posed by Senator Voinavich. A mere Earthling combs the transcript of Voinovich's questions for Dr. Rice and cannot find any refernece to the tsunami. The Senator never asked her about it in the first place.

A few days earlier, Condelizza Rice had said the following:

"I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us," she said. - Agency France Presse.

This brings up two points. One, Condelizza Rice simply points out that the tsunami relief effort gives us an opportunity to do good and secondly, this was days before Senator Voinovich ever questioned her in a Senate confirmation hearing. And then there is the manner in which Senator Boxer interprets Dr. Rice's statement....

"And if you're going to become the voice of diplomacy, this is just a helpful point. When Senator Voinovich mentioned the issue of tsunami relief, you said -- your first words were The tsunami was a wonderful opportunity for us. Now, the tsunami was one of the worst tragedies of our lifetime, one of the worst, and it's going to have a 10-year impact on rebuilding that area. I was very disappointed in your statement. I think you blew the opportunity. You mentioned it as part of one sentence. And I would hope to work with you on this, because children are suffering; we're worried they're going to get in the sex trade. This thing is a disaster -- a true natural disaster and a human disaster of great proportions. And I hope that the State Department will take a huge lead under your leadership in helping those folks in the long range." -Barbara Boxer

My only theory of how Senator Boxer came to be prominent is the following. Years ago, Goerge Bush's father, Carl Rove, George Soros and several high ranking corporate officials met in secret at a Masonic Lodge in some undisclosed location. The corporate officials were all bankers and lawyers with coincidental ties to Bildenburg, Germany. They had to come up with a way to so thoroughly discredit The Democratic Party that these people could in no way threaten The New World Order.

Not even Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter had been disasterous enough to really stifle the opposition. They had to infiltrate the organization and place a mole so disasterous to The Democrats so that they would never be viewed in a favorable light again. So there you have it folks, Barbara Boxer is trained to be that stupid.

Carl Rove, the Energy traders at Enron and The Illuminati all got together and planned the ascendance of Barbara Boxer as a way to undermine any prestige and respect The Democratic Party may have still maintained. It's stratergery, and it's the only explanation I can come up with to logically justify Barbara Boxer's job performance. Unless, of course, she really is, to quote Ayn Clouter, an individual "for whom The Bell Curve tolls."

Update I: Boi From Troy admires both of Barbara Boxer's IQ points.

Update II: According to The New York Times, the rest of the Senate should be.... more like Barbara Boxer?!?!?!

Update III: LaShawn Barber knows a LOSER when she sees one.

Update IV: QandO stand bemused as Barbara Boxer explains to Condelizza Rice why George W. Bush went to war in Iraq.

Update V: If anyone really cares, Wizbang points out that Barbara Boxer's phone number is busy. That would seem contradictory, given that in her case, the lights are on, but nobody is usually home.

How Not To Reform The Tort System

2005-01-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

Tort reform became an issue that the Maryland State Legislature could no longer duck. In a beautiful gesture of irony, a lobby of medical doctors served the legislature with an ultimatum. The language was no doubt the flowery pufffspeak of academia, but the message rang loud and clear: "Fix this broken system, or we walk off the job and you can take a break from your law offices and treat the sick, the halt and the lame yourselves."

The legal community didn't enjoy being served this notice anymore than the typical deadbeat father would enjoy being served with a summons for an alimony hearing. They even got their briefs in order and mounted a blistering counterattack. One talented personal injury attorney pointed out the fact that 3% of Maryland's Doctors were targeted with 50% of the litigation.

This clever argument tells a pointed partial truth that obscures vital information, relevant to the matter at hand. Attorney Irvin Kramer fails to point the specialization of the target doctors. This ignores the fact that practices such as OB/GYN are targeted far more often than others. This selective targeting denudes the health care system of certain vital specialties which some people quite literally could die without. Athwart Kramer's clever rebuttal, the fact that 3% of the doctors eat 50% of the pounding is the obvious truth that which 3% get annihilated matters greatly.

Another point that goes under the bridge and down the river involves how insurance companies operate. The insurance companies have two competing imperatives. They have to earn a reasonable profit and they have to set premiums that doctors can actually afford to pay. This means that if the cost of insuring the local Optimologist goes up by 300% because of repeated, beligerent litigation, the insurer would logically jack the premiums up 300% to keep his bottom line from drooping below cost level.

This is where logical runs into a cold brick wall. The one or two targeted specialties soon find themselves incapable of buying malpractice insurance and comtemplate taking up golfing as more than just a hobby. This kills the goose that lays the insurance company's golden egg, so Gieco et al. now face a dilemna. In order to solve this dilemna, they spread costs. All the dentists, podiatrists and neurologists in Maryland get an extra Christmas present in the mail, the next time a set of insurance bills arrive in the mail.

The attorney's, if they were nicer than most other human beings, would stop right here and say "Wow, this won't work. We'd better make sure our plaintiffs are bringing legitimate acts of malpractice to the table, before we represent them and negotiate renumeration." Of course, lawyers are normal human beings, like the rest of us. They see money on the table, they have what it takes to get that money; lot's of it. Hence they react like a pool of sharks aswim in a current of chummed-up water.

So that brings the situation to a tenuous head and throws the pass to the Maryland Legislature. The situation is exacerbated for the litigators and law makers by a governor who jumps in on the side of the medical doctors, both fists swinging. The populists with pitchforks, (Ok, so maybe these populists all drive Lexi) converge upon the statehouse and demand a solution.

The legislature consists of law makers. Talk to a typical law school candidate and he'll tell you that lawyers should make the laws because only they truly understand them. Of course, these lawyers than further convolute these laws so that even lawyers themselves no longer read them all 5 X 5, but that's a subject for another rant on another day.

The upshot of this is that a legislature full of attorneys becomes a fully owned subsidiary of the ATLA. When lawyers say "Boo!", legislatures get worried. Rather than brandishing up their resumes on USAJobs or Monster.com, they pretty much do what they are told. The ATLA plays pimp, which fully overdetermines which part the law makers play.

This brings us to the medical malpractice reform legislation in The Great State of Maryland.

Maryland doctors are claiming loudly that they demand relief from malpractice costs or Judge Dreadwort had better have a good folk remedy for those troublesome kidney stones.
The ATLA and it's constituent lawyers have told the legislature in no uncertain terms that tort damages will not be capped under any circumstances.
The public does what the public always does according to the laws of economics. They demand total access to both legal and medical services and refuse to pay enough money to make both options possible.

The legislature does what Jimmy Carter did in the 1970's. They magically create more money so that the citizens get their Plantar's Warts healed and can dial 1-800-Bad-Back and sue if their foot itches afterward. The doctors get part of their insurance costs renumerated and the lawyers have enough money rolling in in damages to live like, well, rich legal attorneys. Everyone should go home and live happily eaver after.

Regretably, Santa Clause doesn't really exist and Governor Ehrlick is a mean old Republican who has no intention whatsoever of indulging such fantasies and seeing the world as the world is not. For starters, legislatures can't waive a magic wand and create more money. They have to tax somebody in order to expropriate those funds.

Even Robin Hood had to aim his trusty longbow at The Sheriff of Nottingham's head before he could go off and fund the widows and orphans. The legislatures used the dreaded HMOs as their archery target and imposed an insurance tax to rob Peter The Health Care Exec and pay Paul The Insurance Boss. This is where Governor Ehrlich had to become an inconvenience. He saw the bill as the buncomb scheme that it was and slapped his veto upon the bill with a flurish of press conferences filled with fulsome condemnation.

At this point the legislature had three options.

They could stiff the doctors an risk having them go elsewhere or try out new professions in large numbers. In essence, deny the public the maximum possible availability of private health care.
They could put a cap on liability damages. In essence not let the public and the attorneys ride the lawsuit lottery.
They could override the veto and stay out in never-never land where the votes are.

An elected legislature will tend to choose door number three, and this is what happened in Maryland. Governor Ehrlick has his veto overridden and the taxes went into effect. So what happens now that the money spiggots got opened?

Doctor's bills will go up. In all fairness, lawyers are not the only piglets oinking in Maryland. The doctors will hike their fees to get their share of the newly confiscated swag.
The lawyers will sue more often and go to great pains to remind jurors that the HMOs, not the physicians are the people paying.
The insurers will raise their rates whether the lawyers and doctors raise their rates or not. They see money on the table, just like everybody else.
The costs associated with health care in Maryland should skyrocket and three or so years from now, another intrest group will hit up the legislature for comprehensive tort reform.

The buck has successfully been passed.

Bluff Prince Hal Dresses For A Party

2005-01-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

Prince Hal felt like playing the Young Bloke at his friend's dress up party. They all dolled up to the nines and he went in casual summer dress. A casual summer weight Nazi Desert Uniform. Prince Hal made sure to accessorize with a big swastika on the sleeve, in case someone didn't get the joke.

Mums was naturally mortified, but tried to play it down as best as possible. Being rather British about the whole affair, The Royals offered forth the following public understatement.

It read: "Prince Harry has apologised for any offence or embarrassment he has caused. He realises it was a poor choice of costume."

A really poor choice of costume indeed. Particularly since a fairly large elderly population in London still remembers what a lovely diversion The London Blitz provided. It was good of him to apologize. That takes care of everything.

Well, not everything. It seems The Royals are now under accusation of not caring enough that there was a holocaust. An outraged Dean of The Simon Weisenthal Center suggested a day trip for the amusement of Prince Hal.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles expressed outrage and urged Prince Harry to travel to Poland later this month to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. -ABC News.

Diverting, but it would require Winter Wehrmacht attire.

Meanwhile, the stupid stunt may have a personal cost to the prince as well. He's long attempted to get into Great Britain's military academy at Sandhurst. At least one MP has already sited the incident as evidence Prince Henry has no business serving under arms. Quite possibly accurate. I'd have no desire whatsoever to see one of the abnoxious twerps donning a Che Guevara shirt get commissioned into the US Army either.

The bigger issue stems from the appaling lack of concern on the part of Prince Henry, for what had happened before. Prince Hal may not try to be obnoxious, he just doesn't seem like the sharpest knife in the block. P. J. O'Rourke once remarked something to the effect that those who fail the lessons of history probably aren't racking it up in Algebra 2 Trigonometry either. However, he needs some training in empathy and decorum.

It's seems a shame, but even with proper eugenics, royal families all seem to go the route of The Spanish Hapsburgs. Perhaps this is because they are at least as insulated from consequence as the Kennedys are in the US. Whatever the reason, it's a sad thing to watch and a sign that nothing is permanent all will one day decay and fall into decadence. A decadence that won't play well on the brutal training grounds of Sandhurst.

Rattling Cages

2005-01-12T05:42:00.000-08:00

The President has done it again. He's publically articulated exactly what he believes in and it will drive the people who intensely dislike him to public hyperbole and many expressions of modish angst. Nothing morally offends like an honest man who insists on seeing the world 180 degrees in aposition to a deeply held point of view. It removes all room for compromise and blurring.

President Bush recently interviewed with The Washington Times and according to Matt Drudge wielded Occam's Razor with his usual blunt tone-deafness to the sensitivities of the perpetually offended. He made two statements that drew pings from the sensationalization radar tower at Drudge Report Central Command.

'I don't see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord'
'No women in combat'

Certainly, President Bush knows this will drive certain, highly vocal elements of the left to screaming fits. After a news spin cycle that was asi-asi at best, George W. Bush seems to be bating the ACLU to make stupid, ill-advised public statements for the rest of the week. Almost mocking them to say something stupid that can serve as a milestone demarking the extent to which the money and power of The Democratic Party have drifted into leftward deracination.

The first statement challenges the very premise of the secular state. Planting the axiom that no man can lead without practicing followership of the devine rebuts the central premise of the loudest cheerleaders for the secular state. A statement like the one made by George W. Bush undercuts the logic behind enforced secularism. It takes the moral bite out of our modern tolerance with teeth.

Like John Adams' statement that the US Constitution is only fit for a society governed by Christian morality, it takes away from the ability of those who think they are too 'modern' to believe in religion to stay on the fence. The President knows good and well that he just challenged Michael Newdow and his extremist followers to pick up the gauntlet.

The President's second statement wrong-foots a certain segment of the anti-war movement that uses legislative manuevers, as well as protest, to attempt to end the current war in Iraq. No one other than Patricia Schroeder actually wants to see women lock, load and don combat armor. The movement seeks to up the moral cost of a combat operation.

Artificially burdening the executive decision of whether or not the nation should go to war is not a new or original tactic. The Charles Rangel bill to reintroduce the draft had a list of cosponsors who wanted a real return of the draft like most people want three days of influenza symptoms. The entire purpose the bill served was to question the necessity of the Iraqi conflict.

The implicit accusation of measures like the draft bill and the women in combat movement states that if President Bush isn't willing to take the necessary steps to demonstrate that he is really serious. Almost as if he expends soldiers lives on a neoconservative lark. This can only serve the mischief makers to a point.

When run in to the bloody hilt, this win at all costs doctrine demands a certain level of thermonuclear annihilation. I mean if President Bush were really serious, what other choice would he have. Say that, and Congressman Rangel, Congressman Moran and the rest of the Greek Choir accussing George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld of being "chicken hawks" would recoil in horror the second they believed the suggestion was seriously tendered and based upon their suggested graveman.

The President has sat down with The Washington Times and with his characteristic, disarming simplicity, baited a duplicious trap for the ideologues of the left. Metering the extent to which The Democrats have learned from their discomfiture last November will be possible by what degree their leadership gets impelled to go forth and flail in response to two seemingly offhand comments from George W. Bush that wound up "flashed" atop the masthead over at The Drudge Report. The election may be over outside of Washington State, but in Washington DC, the stratergery never ends.

Pornucopia: Columbia House Cheeses Out Completely

2005-01-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

It used to be impossible to get any cheesier than the old 12 CDs for 1 penny deal that Columbia House used to hook new members. The CDs tended to be turkeys bound for the discount rack and the artists one mediocre release away from being a Vegas lounge act that no one was quite willing book on a weekend night. The Columbia House program conveniently emptied the corporate warehouses of unwanted plasticware and wasted rolls of film and basically suckered chumps and losers into buying a bunch of stuff no one really considered entertaining.

Well now they've gone one step lower on the food chain. They've reached the level of coprophages. They mass-distribute has-been porno tapes. The ones the audiences just couldn't get up for. It must have been the shallow plot line or the really weak performance from the leading man. The genre somehow lacks room for character growth and human empathy.

This foray into the merchandise that teenage boys hide in between the mattress and the box springs would be laughable if the only likely consumers were puberty-stricken teens in search of relief. The laughter stops when any serious thought is given to what goes into one of these actions features and who some of the non-teenagers who use this service may be.

Pornography addiction can ruin the career and family of a man who lacks the moral certitude to shut the VCR or the computer off once the filth starts streaming. One of the first questions a potential sex addict gets asked by a therapist is probably the following.

Do you spend long hours on the computer downloading pornographic images or interacting in chat rooms while neglecting your job and family? -This Is War (an addiction treatment website)

The answer to that question is probably 'no' for the vast majority of people who have watched one or two stupid porno films. I'm sure most viewers find themselves getting naked, only if they found the movie's contents so disgusting they feel like taking a shower. However, if shown to the wrong person, these videos can be visual cues that lead to truly parasitic behavior.

Does anyone really like the idea of a convicted child molester getting his or her hands on 12 blue movies for just 1 penny? There's something about the 90% or higher recidivism rate that makes me think stimulating these people with a visual cattle prod isn't a very smart or decent thing to do.

Columbia House had its spinners out in force when asked about their new list of film offerings. The smarm was thick enough to stir with a stick and burn with mogas and diesel. I read the following and unfortunately didn't have the hip-waders on.

"This will be a separate subsidiary," said Jim Litwak, senior vice president of marketing at Columbia House. "It will be completely separate from Columbia House, and will not be marketed to current members. We are not using Columbia House at all, and are not talking to existing members; this is a separate business and deal." -A Columbia House Executive in The NY Post.

The real question here is not how and where the movies are sold and distributed. If Columbia House rakes in money off this and provides the motive power to make it happen, they are morally responsible. Some slickmiester press secretary can't deny the obvious truth. Columbia House cannot stoop any lower and remain in the same species as the rest of us. Do the children of America a favor and throw this company's cheesy add circular in the trash.

UNron - Auditing Not A Priority In Oil For Food Program

2005-01-10T05:21:00.000-08:00

Paul Volcker has made common knowledge officially official. The UN did a really poor job of auditing it's accounts involved in the Oil For Food Program. This led to widespread abuse and allowed Saddam Hussein to pocket millions of Euros, Pounds and Dollars worth of kickbacks and bribes.

When describing the financial brigandage, Volcker's panel left us this chestnut of a summation.

"More comprehensive monitoring" of the contracts could have prevented the massive rip-off, the U.N.-appointed panel said.

That and one or two honest employees. It gets better. Volcker also found the following fraudulent payments in connection with the activities of UNron in Iraq.

A Dutch company managed to get away with several years of charging the United Nations for 31 days of work each June — a month that every schoolkid knows has 30 days.
The United Nations may have overpaid up to $5 billion in compensation to individuals, companies and Gulf states that suffered losses in Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
A housing program in northern Iraq paid $625,000 in salaries to people who were not employed by the United Nations. -NY POST

Someone put those crazy guys at Halliburton on a leash. We can't have corporations rebuild Iraq, they might embezzle money or something. The type of thing UNron would never dream of.

This, of course, brings us to ponder another question. Do the victims of the recent tsunami in SE Asia really deserve this type of help? The way in which UNron helped out in Rawanda and Iraq would make the censors who condemn George W. Bush cry racism if Kofi Annan were not dark of hue.

This, in turn, brings us to the final question atop the $64,000 Pyramid. The US Congress gives the UN money and lets them infest New York City in order to make the world a better place. The member states of UNron then do the following things,

Embezzle this funding right and left.
Use it to give a megaphone to people who would like nothing better than to wipe their rears with Old Glory after amorning bowel movement.
Stand there like ineffectual potted plants in the face of tragedies like ethnic cleansing in the flotsam and jetsom of what was once Yugoslavia or the open tribal butchery in Rawanda.

Why again do we continue to fund this sickening, disingenuous charade of a world organization?

Update I: The forgiving folks at ColdHeartedTruth chalked it all up to Kofi needing some new shoes...

Update II: Michelle Malkin describes UNron's travesty of a relief effort in The Congo. Another reason India was smart enough to tell UNron to stuff their aid package.

Update III: Mypetjawa chronicles Kofi Annan's mastery of the art of the illicit deal.

Opportunity Knocks At The Boxer Rebellion

2005-01-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

Barbara Boxer should know better. Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid all three had better political instincts. The latter three have stayed out of the blast radius during the So-Called Democratic Party's latest self-immolation fest. It's not that Senator Boxer will face a difficult election challange in the forseeable future, but she should have the desire and acumen to inspire respect once she gets into office.

Instead she's chosen to grandstand. She has officially challanged the electoral college votes cast from The Great State of Ohio. She and an unwashed bevy of DU spambots have declarde George W. Bush redefeated in a display of puerility that only gets matched in Washington by the Sports Page of The Washington Post after the Redskins lose another one to the hated Dallas Cowboys. It seems that folks inside The Capital Beltway don't take kindly to geting thumped by Texans.

So this display of denial and whining presents the GOP a gift-wrapped oportunity. It seems that another election race in November went far closer to the wire than the Presidential one and the voting procedures bear far greater scrutiny. This was the Governor's Race in The State of Washington and prior to the display of purblind myopia by Senator Boxer and a host of non-entities in The House of Misrepresentation, it was basically off limits to reasoned congressional debate. This was a state affair, not a national one.

Now that Ohio has been dragged unfairly into the national spotlight, the issue could be much better explored if we had a few data points to compare to it. If, for example, a major urban area ends up with more ballots cast than it has registered voters, maybe that should be a standard for whether or not vote fraud has taken place. And yet, when the GOP complains about the unfairness of it all, the Washington State Democratic Party calls it another example of the GOP attack machine.

It seems Senator Boxer wants a recount done in Ohio. Perhaps the recount done in Washington, where only certain counties were recounted, but others were not, should be held up as an example of how not to properly organize these audits of popular preference.

Also, there is the issue of exactly how many recounts should be authorized. Should the votes be recounted once, or until the party currently holding the governor's mansion gets the result it wants. These issues should all be resolved before The State of Washington inaugurates its next governor elect.

Today's exercise in Senatorial naval-circumspection gives the GOP an excellent opportunity to make these points over and over and over again. We should all thank Barbara Boxer for presenting this opportunity. Should Senator Frist use it to the hilt, I'm sure Christine Gregoire won't be penning Senator Boxer a thank you note.

Update I: Cold-Hearted Truth points out the obvious paradox between the sancrosanct 218 vote margin they enjoy in Washington State and the suspect 110,000 vote margin George W. Bush racked up in OHIO. Somewhere Niel Young must be toning up his whining vocal chords for another rendition.

Update II: Right Voices carries a list of other idiots who also have protested Ohio's vote count. Notice the conspicuous absence of John F. Kerry from that list.

Update III: Wizbang notices that not even The Daily Kos reaches the level of deracination of Barbara Boxer's latest fumble in the shadow of her own goalposts.

Two Birds With One Stone

2005-01-05T11:55:00.000-08:00

When the Senate confirmation hearing opens for Alberto Gonzalez tommorrow a lot will be taking place. A discussion of Judge Gonzalez's qualifications for the national Attorney Generalship will also take place, but only as an aside; or rather as a pretense. If the issue were competence, not ideology, Gonzalez would assume the job prior to 10 January, and the newspapers would care a lot more about the coming inaugural balls.

The issue here is not Gonzalez, it's the partisan theatre that Senate confirmation hearings have turned into. These hearings provide an ideal soapbox to a group of people that love the sonorous drone of their own vocal chords. The fact that these senators are putting the function of the federal government and the life of the appointee on hold is a nonsequitor. As William Shakespeare pointed out, "The play's the thing!"

This January's performance will be staged to accomplish three goals. It will give opponents of the US military's aggressive role in the Middle East to use the trumped up exaggerations of The Syros Declaration and other preoccupations of their star witness Douglas A. Johnson, to smear the ongoing efforts of the current administration. To many on the far left of the Democratic Party, the War on Terror has been a war on their agenda by other means.

Their accusations that Judge Gonzalez greenlighted the torture of POWs from Iraq and Afghanistan held by US forces, gives them an opportunity to hold up all their recycled Abu Gharaib photographs and get them on page one of The New York TImes again. It has everything to do with getting a megaphone to blast the current war with and nothing to do with how Gonzalez's resume happens to read.

The second goal of the Senate obstructionists is to put a lot of bad publicity about George W. Bush in the newspapers a couple of weeks before the inauguration. This gives them the chance to throw sand in his political gearbox before he even begins championing issues they don't like his positions on such as tort reform and social security privatization.

Finally, there is the ongoing committment by Senators, such as Charles Schumer, to the ideological extremes that fund his political career. He is expected to administer litmus tests to any judicial nominee on issues such as abortion and prayer in school. If they fail these litmus tests, he is payed by his contributors to vote that nominee down.

Recently, the Democrats lost an election that many owithin their own ranks feel turned heavily on such "values" issues as abortion and the role of religion in society. This puts the litmus testers in a position where they still have to kill any nominee for disagreeing with them on certain core issues. They, however need a pretense for the no vote that obscures their true motivations.

Thus, Douglas A. Johnson plays the perfect Anita Hill roll for Democrats looking to change the real subject and kill the nominee at the same time. Johnson's ludicrous charges have been summarily dismantled both here, and here. Yet it is the convenience, not the veracity of Johnson's Cynthia McKinneyesque conspiracy charges that lead some Democrats to believe that he can help them kill tow birds with one stone.

Exit Left: The 2004 Exit Poll Failure

2005-01-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus continues to cement his reputation as a Democrat with an actual brain. Today he links to an excellent takedown of Edison/Mitofsky, the firm that conducted the Exit Polls for the 2004 Presidential Elections, by the blogger Mystery Pollster. Kaus points out the following:

As late as 7:33 P.M. on Election Day, Mitofsky and Lenski were apparently telling their clients (NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, etc.) that after "weighting" Kerry was beating Bush by 9 points among women and losing by only 4 among men.

He backs his claim with this Edison/Mitofsky actual report that was forwarded to the National Pool on election Night. The real results, contained in the Edison/Mitofsky "revised report", nearly mirror the final actual election totals.

On the surface, this just appears to be another example of gullible wishful thinking by liberal members of the media. They all got "pantsed" as badly as Dan Rather got it from Bill Burkett. They bought from a snake oil merchant who sold them the lie they wished was true. Another day, another line of media Bravo Sierra, so what?

Well actually exit polls serve an important and worthwhile purpose when dome properly. They can also serve the cause of mayhem when they are conducted the way Arthur Anderson used to audit Enron. An honest broker conducting an exit poll is Democracy's best check and balance for fraud on election day. If done fairly and competantly, exit polls are the insurance policy that guarantees a fair counting of the votes.

The recent overturn of a fraudulent election in the Ukraine has been partially credit to the work of exit polsters who smelled a rat. Perhaps no one would have known the real outcome if the exit polls had not been taken. The international pressure that led to a revote would never have been applied absent solid data from the polls.

The exit polls in Venezualia showed Hugo Chavez getting metaphorically treated the same way he physically treated leaders of his country's opposition parties. It took hours of careful "inspection and certification" by Former US Preseident Jimmy Carter to turn that election into a mandate for Chavez. It's a wonder Carter hasn't called for a recount of the results from all 50 states in 1980. So a set of exit polls can't always guarantee the correct outcome, but they do make it harder to explain away a broken process.

But what happens when the exit poll process itself fails to effectively work. We saw this in 2002, when the computers crashed and the networks got no data. We saw the process break in a different way in 2004. Mystery Pollster suggests things were not done in accordance with good polling ettiquete. His description of the polling process follows below:

This year's NEP exit poll interviewers were trained via telephone and most worked for just one day without supervision.

This slipshod methodology leads to doubts concerning the ultimate validity of the 2004 election. The academic papers concerning the supposed miscounting of the votes in 2004 are already amounting to mathematical propaganda. The sentence below is undoubtably true:

To carry our analysis further, we can employ a normal distribution curve (see
Figure 1) to determine—again assuming proper poll methodology, no discriminatory voter
suppression 24, and an accurate and honest popular vote count—that the probability that
Kerry would have received his reported popular vote total of 48.1%, or less is one in959,000—a virtual statistical impossibility.

If you doubt me, run the numbers on SAS or SPSS. These guys appear to be talking the talk only after they've walked the walk. The numbers run; just like they tell you. Just looking at those numbers would make the theoretical 50/50 undecided voter mad as all get-out that Bush got all those electoral votes. This is the rather obvious intent the authors had in mind before they ever put finger to keyboard.

Here's where they perhaps accidently mislead. They assume apriori that the exit polls are gospel. They totally ignore the evidence idicting the exit polls and focus instead on the prior resumes of the lead data managers. It's only when you overwhelmingly assume proper poll methodology that the result of the current election falls into doubt.

This is why the exit polling messup is more than just a minor problem. The exit poll results become an historical document that can be innacurately or dishonestly interpreted the same way Michael Bellesiles incorrectly read historical documents to present false history when writing The Arming Of America.

Update I: Ace Of Spades discusses Kaus' post as an exoneration of bloggers who were duped by the false exit polling data.

Update II: It seems the exit polling results from the Presidential race aren't the only funny results floating around. Cold Hearted Truth claims Seattle, WA had more ballots than voters. At least the exit pollsters can quite manage to pull of that one.

Beavis and Butthead Play Laser Tag With Airplanes

2005-01-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

It’s not very hard to twist the knickers of people working for the TSA. They operate in a zero-defect environment where they can’t really look like heroes, but they sure look like idiots if they ever drop the ball. It could be said that the TSA plays a zero max game. The best anyone there can do is not miss something. Thus, it’s no surprise that when pranksters started flashing lasers onto a couple of planes, they didn’t get the joke.

The people who administer the TSA and the entire rest of the Department of Homeland Security operation have got to be careful not only of how well they patrol our domain, but how professional they look while they do it. It requires diligence and patience to catch that one individual in ten million who actually plans to strike a match to his own Reeboks and scupper a passenger jet.

It also requires a certain level of judgment not to look like a caricature to the other 9,999,999 people who just want to get on the plane and finish their trips. If the TSA, or any other uniformed authority, takes itself so seriously that people think they have a G-d complex, they lose the respect of the people they seek to protect and are rendered totally ineffective.

The more rebellious people out there start treating them the way Beavis and Butthead treated Principle Vickers. Soon their authorite’ gets about as much respect as Cartman’s does on the South Park Cartoons.

Recently, the Department of Homeland Security got a memo terrorists were trying to use lasers as a possible weapon. This is not totally without precedent. Internet conspiracy theorists still believe to this day that the Russian Navy blinded a US Navy Pilot who flew too close to a Russian Frigate by shining a laser into the cockpit of his jet. In the imaginations of fear-mongers, laser weapon systems make the black helicopters take flight.

So the DHS goes on alert for lasers. Then a guy from Parsippany, NJ gets a laser thingy and decides to play around with his daughter in the back yard of his house. He shoots a few planes with it, and his daughter probably thinks he’s a goofball. Not surprisingly, the DHS radar screen pings and the alert is sounded

Having the cops show up ten minutes later and question him doesn’t look good. It’s understandable, given the alert memo and given that a plane flying only a few miles from where The Twin Towers were struck just got lased. However, it just looks like something Mike Judge or Trey Parker would put into a cartoon short to ridicule overzealous authoritarianism.

Thankfully, the FBI and Jersey Police have given this guy his due process and hopefully an apology for the misunderstanding. The Jersey Laser Man will probably play with his daughter more carefully next time. If everyone is lucky, the incident will be a one-off and can everyone involved can forget about it.

The incident has spawned a copycat in Nashville, Tennessee. These imitators don’t do this to be malicious or even seriously insubordinate. However, they do issue the authorities a good, timely reminder. Uniformed authority is necessarily put on a short leash in America.

We respect the people who wield it, but we expect them to use judgment and intelligence. That respect can turn to resentment, anger or maybe even hatred if the majority of the people see the authority being misused. The DHS has a thankless job. They don’t need to complicate it further by eroding the confidence that is placed in them by those who they protect.

Update I: The New Jersey incident gets taken much more seriously by posters on Right Voices.

The NYT Rouses Itself

2004-12-30T06:10:00.000-08:00

A minimum of 100,000 people recently died in and around Sumatra. They got swept under a massive tidal wave and their bloated bodies are still washing ashore. The world wept and began to raise an effort to provide aid.

An idiot UN bureaucrat, Jan Egeland, who gets payed a higher annual salary than the President of The US, and pays no income tax whatsoever on that money, cavalierly announced that the wealthy nations of the world were stingy. He further opined that this was because they paid too paltry an income tax.

Perhaps his own personal rate of taxation rendered his outlook so niggardly that he really doesn't understand why people got so mad. After perusing the editorial fever swamps of The New York Times this morning, it would seem Jan Egeland has company in his collossal indifference to the plight of the average citizen. Today's unsigned masterpiece actually supports Mr. Egeland's contention, and displays a profound lack of concern for how our government actually works.

The editorial begins with the rather infamous sentence. "Mr. Bush finally roused himself..." and then continues to state that $35mil really isn't a significant contribution. It continues to to state that Colin Powell should feel embarassed at how little our government is giving in disaster relief. This is where the New York Times editorial liars need to leave the tending of their Hamptons Mansions to the illegal alien help and pick up the text book from the basic civics class that they probably slept or snorted cocaine through back in High School.

The US government never gives anything to anyone. It redistributes wealth that is created by others. It does not have a large current reserve of cash and in at least 40 out of the last 50 years, it has operated at a deficit. The US government is allowed to spend money only after legislation has been drafted to appropriate the funds and passed on by both houses of Congress. This gives pretentious blowhards ample opportunity to vote for expenditures prior to turning tergivorate and voting against them.

So the New York Times intentionally ignores or genuinely lacks an institutional understanding of how the US government overspends its dollars. Either way, all the news that's fit to print isn't making it into the copy room and is conspicuously absent from their vapid, Trotskyite editorial page. Leaving the tragedy and the pathetic cheapshot at our president aside, the editorial becomes more turgid as The Constant Reader stifles the human gag reflex and plows on.

But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

This, quite simply, should facially invalidate the entire axiom that this editorial attempts to plant. So the United States, as a solitary country, is giving between 30 to 40 percent of the total amount given by about 18 out of the next 25 wealthiest nations in the world. One year's worth of our contribution probably at least doubles what these other nations expropriate from their taxpayers.

Every country in the EU probably taxes it's own citizens at much higher marginal rate, across every level of earned income, than the United States of America. That quoted statistic completly obliterates the entire point of the NYT editorial smear job. The United States, which has almost the lowest set of marginal tax rates of any modern, industrial nation, is outgiving these other disgusting, yuppie pikers by leaps and bounds.

They threw a set of statistics into their editorial to create a misleading appearance of factual graveman that simply does not exist. As they say in online short hand, "LMAO!!"

Correction: Jan Egeland exceeds Pres. Bush's Gross after tax income, not his Gross Salary. (Credit FreeRepublic for a nice catch!)

Update I: The force is with The Jawa Report today. It also covers the nasty politics of aid donation.

Update II: An interesting and very disturbing post on an Australian blog about the inevitable efforts of charlatans to use this disaster to steal money.

Update III: If you'd like to do something the NYT is constitutionally uncapable of, and actually help, follow this link to a very non-fraudulant organization. (Over $5mil in the bank and counting...)

Update IV: Wizbang suggests that the NYT editorial board got its idea for this piece dumpster-diving comments over at The Daily Kos. Is there any source of news, gossip or inuendo that ISN'T more reliable and up-to-date than the NYT?

Susan Sontag: Priestess Of The Cult Of Anti-America

2004-12-29T04:58:00.000-08:00

Susan Sontag's death brings grief and sadness to all those who were close to her and is thus a very sad occasion. It is only fitting to begin even this anti-eulogy with a proper expression of condolences to those stricken by her passage from the terrestrial vail of tears. So for those who loved Susan Sontag, I hope they find solace in their grief.

What looms sadder and more grievous than the attenuation of her lifespan is the meaning Susan Sontag gave to her life. If John Paul Sartre speaks the truth and we really become the summation of all that we do, than what Susan Sontag did to herself as a writer and a leading intellectual figure of the latter half of the 20th Century remains impardonable, even with her final demise.

Sontag pioneered the black art of intellectual anti-Americanism. More than Gertrude Stein, Earnest Hemingway or even Alan Ginsburg or William Burroughs, Sontag directed the American counterculture beyond the mere rejection of our nation's ideas. Stein and Hemingway may have expatriated themselves and Ginsberg and Burroughs may have drugged up and hit the road, but none of these prior countercultural figures actively rooted for the demise of modern America.

The four aforementioned rebellious figures certainly disliked some aspects of the America they lived in, but none spewed the bilous and conspicuous hatred for our people that tinged the vile writing of the late Susan Sontag. Her extant works mark a point of divergence and crossover from America's previous countercultural figures. Earnest Hemingway certainly opposed and hated the entire concept of war and probably felt the US lacked any justification for engaging in high intensity combat even with Hitler, but he drew a line at denigrating the mean who actually wore our uniform.

Sontag perhaps combined a certain ideological courage with her hatred. Her essay following the attacks of 9/11 is a hate America first screed for the ages. Richard Grenier recorded her vituperations in one of his columns so that future generations could truly understand intellectual hatred and national self-loathing when they read it. Her aspersions follow below.

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.

There is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing bombing of Iraq?

And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue) whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards. -World Net Daily

Sontag's fulminations over 9/11 were not the first instance in which she rooted for America's enemies the way good Catholics from Indiana root for Notre Dame. John Miller of NRO offers us some other examples of insight from Susan Sontag.

On John McCain's torturers: "The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets."

On Castro's Cuba: "The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality, and freaking out. The increase of energy comes because they have found a new focus for it: community."

On red-state America, circa 1969: "To us, it is self-evident that the Readers Digest and Lawrence Welk and Hilton Hotels are organically connected with the Special Forces' napalming villages in Guatemala." - The Corner on NRO.

So there you have what so many intellectual Americans pay tribute to. A woman who hated her country, revered it's mortal enemies, cheered when thousands of our citizens were slaughtered and deemed the American people somewhat psuedosapient in their belief in all that she personally despised. Sontag may no longer walk the verdant fields of Earth, but the ideology she abetted continues to pollute our culture and politics.

Perhaps the next time DC101 blasts "American Idiot" by Green Day, a tip of the cap is order to Susan Sontag who articulated the philosophical premise behind the punk rock drivel. Every time I hear that song I wish the idiots in Green Day would catch the next cab to San Francisco's international airport.

There they could book transport to one of the other 161 nations of the world and decrement that country's average IQ with their presence rather than ours. At least then they would have their wish of no longer being American idiots. Susan Sontag has left us at last. It is time for Noam Chomsky, Howard Dean, MoveOn.Gore members, and the caterwauling cranks of Green Day to do likewise. The friendly skies do beckon , unless 21 more terrorists display the late Susan Sontag's version of courage, which she found until the end to be morally neutral.

Update I: Little Green Footballs also notes the passing of our intellectual enemy. They do, however, find her defense of Salmon Rushdie somewhat redeeming. Perhaps fair is fair and no person can really be completly evil.

Update II: Leather Penguin won't be sending a bouquet to her funeral.

How Dare They!?

2004-12-28T04:48:00.000-08:00

The UN has gone beyond the realm of effrontery. They've gone past being criminal, they've gone past being hypocritical, they've flown past the limits of churlish and ungrateful. There should be a picture of the UN coat-of-arms in the dictionary next to the word "nauseating."

The latest pile of vomitous to spew from the world's foremost unelected deliberative busybodies came from Jan Egeland, who may not be a leading expert on taxation policy, but must have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. He offered us the following insights regarding our tax policies and our generosity to the victims of the tsunami in Indonesia.

"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."

"There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy," he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe "believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more."

Now the Indonesians certainly deserve the sympathy of the world. Particularly, since they lack the wherewithal to dig out from under this deluge of watery death. However, some bean-counting prick from the pampered circles of European Academia has no valid graveman to criticize the generosity or the economic policies of the US government.

The last great aid effort I heard about the UN conducting was the Oil For Food program in Iraq. That one greatly augmented the Kofi Annan Wine and Cigar Fund, but did nothing for the suffering masses of Basra, Iraq. If we gave Jan Egeland and his corrupt, contemptutous, turgid, cynical, bureacratic frauds at the UN $30 million instead of a mere $15 million, he'd probably just buy himself another yacht. We'd wind up funding his "fact-finding" trip to Phucket, Thailand.

Yes Jan, the government and people of the US would love to give more. However, contemptible pricks like yourself are not trustworthy custodians of our aid money. We'll work through the faith-based charities instead. They have a rule the UN has never honored. "Thou shalt not steal."

Update I: Jan Egeland should know better than to tee this man off.

Update II: Michelle Malkin questions the value of UN "assistance". Jan shouldn't trifle with Mrs. Malkin either.

Update III: QandO reminds Jan Egghead that a lack of coerced charity in no way implies stinginess.

Update IV: Right Voices suggests that Kofi find some of the Oil For Food money under his sofa cushions if he really cares about the starving people of Indonesia.

Update V: Ace of Spades cares. He took time out from his busy day to remind the Un of something: THEY SUCK!!

Update VI: More fulmination...Rusty Shackleford shows how a stone-cold blog pimp handles Eurowanks with this suggestion: "The next time you want to weigh in on U.S. tax policy, with all due respect, put a sock in it."

So When Does A Governor's Election End

2004-12-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

The race for Governor in The State of Washington isn't over yet. The votes have all been counted at least six times now, I'm sure. The problem seems to be that some of them weren't quite being tallied enough times to put the Democratic Candidate over the top.

Thus, via the Al Gore Florida Cherry-Pick Methodology, they went to the traditionally Democratic King County and "found" 735 new votes that must of fallen in between the seat cushions of some poor poll worker's sofa. How convenient.

The next time Boris Yeltsin feels like stealing an election in a neighboring country, he needs to give soon to be selected Governor Gorgiare a call. It's a good thing we have a whole nation full of lawyers to cure the US of this nagging democracy problem.

MALDEF - Enemy Of American Democracy

2004-12-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

Homeland Security has become a touchstone and mantra of the modern American politician. We've added an entire bureaucracy to make sure it gets talked about ad infinitum. When you fly the friendly skies, make sure your feet don't stink because the shoes are probably coming off before your flight leaves.

All this serves a need that America had patendly and somewhat arrogantly ignored until 11 September 2001. Regretably, not everyone has gotten with the program and some aspects of our country remain painfully vulnerable. Secretary Thompson spoke up about our nation's food supply and how he could not believe no one had hit us there yet.

However, there is one giant hole that runs for several thousand miles and has not been discussed in the slightest. Our national borders are still a wide-open, target-rich environment for Osauma Bin Ladin and all of his fanatical ilk. We're not just asking people to smuggle a nuclear device across the borders and detonate it in one of our downtowns, we're flat-out begging.

Finally, the good citizens of Arizona had taken as much as they could stand. They put a ballot initiative through aimed at restricting illegal imigration. The Washington Times describes it as follows.

The initiative, known as Proposition 200, passed Nov. 2 with 56 percent of the vote. It requires state and local government employees to verify the immigration status of those seeking public benefits and to report to federal immigration authorities any applicant who is in violation of U.S. immigration law. It also subjects the employees to criminal charges if they fail to report illegals. - Washtimes

This is not sedition, racism, backwardness or nativism run rampant. This initiative features a 56% majority of the citizens of the State of Arizona asking their state government to enfore the (expletive-deleted) law!

Of course nothing seems to get liberal activists more exercised than a vigorous and aggressive exercise in liberal democracy. The will of MALDEF, in this case, is not the will of the people. So this particular liberal intrest group is invoking the usual liberal refuge from having to honor the will of the people. They've lawyered up and intend to sue Arizona to block the will of 56% of it's citizens, because these arrogant liberal (expletive-deleteds) think they're smarter, holier and just a shade better looking than the rest of us.

MALDEF grounds its arguments against the proposition with the same intellectual rigor and commitment to the truth we remember fondly from Soviet propaganda and Howard Dean's campaign speeches. Here are three stirling examples of how Arizona's people are tyrannizing the less fortunate.

MALDEF had argued in court papers that unless the initiative was overturned, it would "jeopardize the health and well-being of families and children who depend on public benefits for their basic necessities."
MALDEF said Proposition 200 would "cut off all state services, including education, medical care and police and fire services, to all individuals who are unable to immediately provide adequate proof of their U.S. citizenship or residence."
MALDEF President and General Counsel Ann Marie Tallman called the initiative "an illegal, impermissible, unconstitutional state attempt to regulate immigration policy, which is a fundamental function and responsibility of our federal government." She said it "denies basic services to hardworking, contributing members of our community while forcing public servants to become de facto federal immigration officers."

Dissecting this terrible logic is nearly as much fun as it is depressing. As a person who works with mathematics for a living, I would be fired tommorrow for failing so utterly to base my work on a graveman of factually supported syllogism.

As for fallacious argument number one, no one has to depend on the government for their basic necessities if they are sound of mind and able in body. If they could walk across the border, evade US employment law, and hold down a job long enough to mail lots of money back home, they are smart enough to make it off of welfare. They, like me, have earned their job. Now they, like me, can support the people they love without leaning on the government dole like a crutch.

As for argument two, a rational mind would deem this facially invalid. If I worked on a fire truck, drove up to a burning house and saw a propane tank getting ready to explode and spew burning fuel all over the nearby woods or some other houses, I think I'd have that hose out and active before I checked the homeowner's citizenship.

If I were a cop on the beat and saw a woman getting raped, I don't think I'd amble on over to the woman and say "Excuse me Ma'am. Before I pull this cretinous reprobate off your bodice, could you please provide your proof of US citizenship."

Argument number two has to be one of the stupidest written arguments ever presented in a court of law. It's a shame lawyers don't get disbarred for offensive stupidity. A legal mind of that caliber could reaffirm The Dred Scott Decision.

Argument number three reestablishes the institutional hostility of liberal Americans to the 10th Amendment of The US Bill Of Rights. Anyone doing anything without permission from a Federal Commisar is trampling on the Federal Government's role. What a wonderful view of society. Germany tried that out as a form of government a few decades back and the Jewish people didn't like it much.

The second part of that argument looks better, but only because it couldn't possibly have been as collosally bad as its predecessor. It's like comparing your local High School team to The Washington Redskins playing Dallas. Some of those kids are bound to look professional by comparison. The wannabee Louis Nizer's of MALDEF argue that anyone who reports a violation of Federal Immigration laws to the Feds is being forced to serve as a defacto federal immigation officer.

Perhaps if I do my civic duty and report a criminal activity, I should qualify for a police pension. It follows from MALDEF's logic that our civil responsibility to report wrong doing to the authorities deputizes us all.

So there you have it, America. MALDEF argues the following:

a) Expecting illegal immigrants to get a job and work like the US citizens have to deprives the poor of their only source of income. Next thing you know we'll make these people learn English or something.

b) Cutting off any state services from illegal aliens means that you'll cut them all off, no matter how rediculous the consequences of doing so would be. If an illegal alien's roof catches fire, all the neighbors better crank up their sprinkler systems and make sure the lawn is good and wet.

c) The 10th Amendment was only in a rough draft of The Bill of Rights and no state agency can operate in any way that even approximates a federal function.

d) Anyone reporting a crime serves as a de facto enforcement officer. Yes, you should report wrong doing, but first read the malefactor his rights first and then call your attorney and make sure you're covered by The Posse Comitatis Act.

It's really fortunate that this case will be heard by a judge of sound mind and stern bearing who has lived in Arizona for years and loves the state and all of its people. What? It's going to the 9th Federal Circus Court in San Francisco? They have jurisdiction over a case involving Arizona state law?

Of course, the 9th Circus has juris-my-dickshun. They get every case that a whackjob liberal intrest group wants a 2% chance of winning. If this law were passed in Maine, the federal case would be heard in San Francisco. Everyone knows the role of the Federal Judiciary is to lord it over those stupid (expletive-deleteds) that don't vote the way Dennis Kucinich wants them to.

Alan Drury wrote best-selling novels about this sort of abusive governance. They were given boring, ponderous titles like "Come Nineva, Come Tyre" and no one with a date on Friday Night ever read the stupid things. Well, it's come to pass.

If you live in America and can't stand the oppression of Representative Democracy, just lawyer up and tap a kidney on those stupid little people and their ballot box. If they can't vote the way we tell them to, we'll just sue them for having a contradictory opinion. Once these people learn how to think properly this whole Democracy thing could have potential. In the meanwhile, back to the lawsuits.

Update I: Michelle Malkin offers the following analysis of how this fiasco of a case ever reched the 9th Federal Circus:

It's a gratifying (if temporary) win for pro-immigration enforcement activists. Even the Democrat state attorney general, who had publicly opposed the ballot measure, agreed that it was constitutional and dismissed the open-borders lobby's argument that allowing state and local officials to help enforce our laws was "illegal." - MichelleMalkin.com

The Denazification Of The American Left

2004-12-27T04:45:00.000-08:00

The Democratic Party still has a number of intelligent people at work to advance its cause. These people woke up after Election 2004 with a case of heartburn that Maalox wouldn't put down. They realized that their party had gone too far towards the fringes to win even when they had the news of the world on their side.

The Democrats entered 2004 with a golden opportuninty. They were running against a candidate that had presided over the start of a major war, a net loss of jobs, a declining equities market and country that had been hit with a military strike more lethal than the attack on Pearl Harbor. Things looked really good for The Party of Jefferson and Jackson until the public heard who they were running for office and what their party members actually believed.

Then America got to know Dr. Dean and Demented Dennis. They saw Al Sharpton on stage being treated like a man with legitimate gravitas. They got to watch John Edwards perform his flim-flam routine time and time again.

This, in and of itself, would not have done the Democrats in. The Republicans allow nut-jobs and charletans their moment in the sun as well. Allowing Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean to speak at their convention only equals the malfeasance of the GOP handing a microphone to Patrick J. Buchanon.

What really put the Democrats in a strait-jacket was the actual people who care about their party and run its grass roots. These people actually believed Fahrenhiet 9-11 and appreciated all the hard work turned in by Michael Moore. These people actually joined MoveOn.org and like the haters of capitalist greed that they are, gave George Soros money. For their next fool's errand they drag a few bags of coal to Newcastle.

The Democrats did run a few candidates that could have beaten George W. Bush and probably by a wide margin after he kowtowed to the AARP with the infamous Prescription Drug Panderation Act and to big labor with the Steal Tariff of 2003. An incumbant that urinates on his base vote should have been fodder for Joe Lieberman, John Kerry or Richard Gephardt.

This was where the good, committed, liberal Democrats rode to the rescue of the Republican Party. When Hatred-Powered Howard Dean was unsure the capture of Saddam Hussein was a positive contribution to the world, Joe Liebermann was smart enough to tell Howard The Quack that he was "hiding in a spider-hole of denial." The rank-and-file Democratic activist wasn't quite bright enough to figure this out and rode Joe Liebermann out of the race on a rail.

After chasing Gephardt and Liebermann out of their nationwide Phish Concert acid test, the radical left then made sure the candidates still in the mosh pit were only slightly less deracinated than Dennis Kucinich was with his Grandfather Twilight endorsement. When John Kerry attempted to make somewhat aggressive noises on fighting terrorists, the activists made darn well sure he voted against the $87 Billion to fight the war.

There are people out there who care a lot about the Democrats and want them to get out of left-hand ditch and back on the road to making a positive contribution to society. However, these poor, benighted individuals have to denazify the American Left. They need to convince their activists that Grandfather Twilight will not be leading an army of Ents to the polls in 2008. Unless, of course, Pat Buchanon gets the nomination and they mistake him for Saruman, the Evil Grand Wizard.

The Peter Beinarts, Joe Liebermans and others who want the Democrats to compete well are not really bad people, but they are dangerous. I'm not sure George W. Bush would have won without MoveOn.Gore. In fact, I'm not sure W would ever have been President without Al Gore.

It is for this reason, that I very strongly hope Howard Dean gets the nod as Chairman of The Communist Party, I mean DNC. The Denazification of the American Left has got to fail. Only Hatred-Powered Howard can save the GOP from its own mediocrity and corruption and keep leftism out of power in America.
Update I: Right Voices lists New Year's Resolutions for The So-Called Democratic Party. Denazification didn't make the list. They'll still basically suck and the GOP will still feel entitled to perpetual power until the Dems or someone else get serious about providing principled opposition.

Update II: Ricky is another blogger who gets what the Dems need. He's a scary and worthy adversary.

Why Happy Holidays Just Won't Cut It.

2004-12-23T04:42:00.000-08:00

Everyone looks forward to Christmas. It's a redemptive time of year for many of us. The people we've forgotten or overlooked in the past 12 months are suddenly forefront in our minds. We all, at least I do, strive to reconnect with family and friends that I don't get to see everyday.

These traditions are part and parcel to our holiday celebrations. It's the spirit of the Christmas Season and it brings a welcome levity to the dull slog of Winter and a fitting coda to another year's striving. However, the very underpinnings that make Christmas a spiritual holiday of redemption and forgiving are under attack in our media and in our marketplace.

Christmas stands athwart what many view as a necessary and inevitable march towards secularism. Those who deride the Christmas Holiday will tell us that religion is just so much mumbo-jumbo and ritual; like the spells a wizard casts in an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. Fun, but not serious or related in any way to our everyday lives. The graveman of their objection to Christmas is a firm and long-standing mental abnegation of the existance of Christ.

What these doubters fail to grasp is that everything good associated with Christmas flows from the religious symbolism of the holiday. God sent Christ to Earth to redeem mankind. Once The Almighty has done that, the least I can do is call my mother in law and wish her Merry Christmas. The Peace of Christmas is the redemption of mankind through the life and death of Christ.

A failure to grasp the religious significance of Christmas is what Tupac Shapur would call a failure to see the whole game. It leaves a person sitting at a party, somewhat pickled on eggnog, and not quite sure why anyone would spend a bunch of time putting ornaments on a tree. Without the religious context, Christmas becomes what Lucy in The Peanuts Christmas Special called "The Gift-Getting Season."

Like all worldviews rooted in purely objective, corporeal fact, the non-religious Christmas proves a non-starter. An agnostic Christmas is a big logistical pain in the neck, not a redemptive reunion of family and friends. I don't think you can have a Merry Christmas without Christ, any more than you can effectively explain human behaivior through dialectical materialism.

Our spirituality seperates us from the salacious monkeys in the local zoo. This is why Happy Holidays just doesn't cut it. it has to be Merry Christmas. And while you're at it, have a successful New Year as well.

Update I: Paul at Wizbang gives us about as thurough an argument against my assertion as you'll find. It's a fairly well-written essay linking Christmas to pagan Solstice Festivals. Still on the skimpy side compared to the four Gospels, but at least there are a few agnostics out there that shower regularly and can write a coherent sentence without their nose rings itching. It still won't have me singing Solstice Bells by Jethro Tull this year around the Maypole Tree.

Update II: Wunderkinder links to Charles Krauthammer's dismemberment of the common agnostic case for expelling spirituality from the public square. It's both interesting and depressing that the best defense of modern Christmas celebrations I've read this year comes from a dedicated, practicing Jew.

The Smartest Man You've Never Heard Of

2004-12-08T21:22:00.000-08:00

John Cowperthwaite will never receive his just due. The man proved the power of humility, simplicity and faith in his fellow man. He reaffirmed hallowed principles set forth by Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson and brought enlightenment to millions living in misery after World War II. However, you will never hear of this heroic man unless you pick up a copy of Eat The Rich by P. J. O'Rourke.

The dying British Empire sent Cowperthwaite to oversee Hong Kong in 1945. If Cowperthwaite read Bullfinch at all, he had to feel like the Pommies had just handed him a shovel and pointed him in the direction of The Augean Stables. The war had ruined Hong Kong, and Cowperthwaite realized that he lacked the power or the ideas to bring the place back single-handedly. So Cowperthwaite did something so brilliant that I'm certain no US politician would ever be smart enough to figure it out.

Instead of taking over and installing a bunch of misguided government programs that would have mirrored the post-birth abortion the Labour Party was performing on the economy of the British Mainland, he told the people of Hong Kong to fix it themselves and then labored mightily to ensure that these entrepreneurs were left in peace to do it.

He openly admitted that he wasn't the man driving the train. He stated. "I did very little. All I did was prevent some of the things that might undo it."

In hopes of just persuading the colonial legislature to take prophylactic measures against the syphilis of socialism, he made the following declaration during a debate over the colony's budget in 1961.

"...in the long run the aggregate of decisions of individual businesses, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."

Someone please tell this to the US Congress the next time another Prescription Drug Panderation Act or another effort to weaken Welfare Reform makes it out of committee and on to the floor. We have the collective knowledge and decisiveness to solve our own problems without our government deciding for us. If we let our government decide, there is very little we can do to avoid tragedy if that decision is wrong.

We stand in awe of the politician who, like Charlemagne, gets handed the crown and the unlimited power it signifies, but who shows ultimate wisdom and puts aside personal powerlust on behalf of the common weal. George Washington did this for the US when he refused the crown after successfully freeing the thirteen colonies from British Rule. Cowperthwaite did the same when he intentionally steered a different course from then Prime Minister Clement Attlee and let Hong Kong remain freer than the mother land that held it as a colonial possession.

Pearl Harbor As DNC Agitprop

2004-12-07T18:06:00.000-08:00

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe had the following to say in memorial of Pearl Harbor.

"While we as a nation are united in this fight, there are clearly deep divisions within the Republican Party, divisions that are impeding our fight against terrorism," he said.

"Moving forward, it is my sincere hope that the Republicans running Washington will stop playing their political games and start fighting for the American people, just as our honored veterans did 63 years ago."

This revolting cheapness reveals a level of deracination and total unconcern for anything accept power and facile, temporary advantage that has left The Democrats the minority party since 2004. McAuliffe shouldn't apologize to anyone. His retraction would be no more sincere than his use of a historical tragedy to advance his partisan agenda.

Visitors to The USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii will see a sign telling them to treat the memorial with reverance for they are about to walk upon hallowed ground. Terry McAuliffe probably wouldn't even care if he was buried in hallowed ground.

Update I: For more appropriate and moving tributes to the brave sailors killed 63 years ago, see Michelle Malkin's Pearl Harbor Post.

Why We May Still Lose The War On Terror

2004-12-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

A cursory examination of hard data on the ground makes it seem ludicrous to plant the axiom that the US could eventually lose our bid to democratic Iraq, Afghanistan and other authoritarian hellholes scattered throughout the Middle East. Our Marine Corps just finished demolishing the heart of the Al-Quaida-backed elements of the Iraqi resistance. The rapid and complete purging of Fallujah sent a message to our enemies.

Unfortunately, other actions on our part send them a message as well. That message reads that our front line military troops may prove indominatable in open battle, but that in many cases, the resolve to back their efforts does not exist back home across the ocean blue.

The Department of Defense has been served with a lawsuit that alleges that its use of stop-loss regulations to extend soldier enlistments violates the Constitutional rights of soldiers who get extended. This utterly defies reality. Anyone who dons the uniform of the US Army knows that they are not immediately cut loose at the end of their term of enlistment.

If they even get a set of retirement orders cut, they are placed in the Inactive Ready Reserve. Soldiers on this list are liable up to seven years after separation for call-up in the event of national necessity. In other words, if you sign on the line and put on a set of the BDUs, Uncle Sam owns an option contract on your butt anytime he seeks to exercise it.

If the soldiers suing the DOD didn't want to actually go to Iraq, they never should have signed on the bottom line. The Army exists to win America's wars, not provide social welfare or outdoor adventure to people who are underemployed or flat-out bored.

This basic moral logic didn't dissuade the plaintiffs. One of them issued the following statement to the press.

Army Specialist E-4 David W. Qualls said Monday that he had filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of himself and seven other soldiers protesting the Department of Defense's stop-loss policy that involuntarily extends tours of duty.

"What this boils down to, is a question of fairness," Qualls said. "I've served five months past my 1-year obligation -- and I feel it's time for us to be allowed to go back to our lives."

This lawsuit received immediate backing from others who's motives are far less simple and understandable than the desire to return home from a very bad place.

"This (case) is unique because (Qualls) volunteered for a specific time, " said James Klimanski, an attorney involved in the case. "There's nothing in (the Try One) contract -- even in the fine print -- that calls for the involuntary extension under this circumstance," he added, calling stop-loss "a backdoor draft that the Bush administration is imposing on American service members."

Apparantly Mr. Klimanski hasn't quite realized the election ended last month. He's still spreading the rumors of a backdoor draft. This, of course, is contemptible stupidity. You can't stop-loss an individual who hasn't enlisted to begin with.

James Lobel, attorney and vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights agrees. "This case involves one of the fundamental values of our society -- honesty," Lobel said: "Our government has not been honest with Mr. Qualls and other plaintiffs. ... The courts should (not) tolerate such dishonesty."

Lobel attempts to mask his naked desire to undermine the war effort in higher motives. He's no more convincing to me than a horde of stoner college students demanding medicinal dime bags. The day our courts start deciding what military recruiting practices they will or will not deign to tolerate is the day the US should just take the flag down and surrender to the first bunch of suckers who would willingly take over The Land of The Free and The Home of The Litigous Ass-Hat.

What happened to SPC Qualls is very sad and was handled very poorly on the part of the Army. Should they have counseled him first that this would happen and let him at least tell his family? Absolutely. Finding out his contract had been re-upped from an LES statement was not professional, decent or even worthy.

However, SPC Qualls signed up for service and qualifies automatically for the Inactive Ready Reserve. The US Army had a viable and legal way to extend him without the chicanery. Qualls has no case except to his IG Representative. He's been treated shabbily, and maybe the Army needs to crack a few heads in someone's G-1 shop over this.

However, this should in no way proclude the military from exercising stop-loss as a way to keep qualifieds soldiers in until the war is over. Somewhere in Iraq, Iran, Syria or the wilds of Afghanistan, the leaders of the Whabbi movement read about this and gain hope. As they gain this hope, they gain recruits. SPC Qualls isn't saving any lives or ending the likelihood of further stop-loss orders. He's only making more carnage and a longer war more necessary.

The Dress Rehearsal

2004-11-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

The Ukranian election has become a crisis that could have resonance this Winter in Iraq. The contest proved close and its results dubious. This has led to a crisis in the streets of Kiev and a test case for what might happen if the election results in Iraq don't wind up being crystal clear.

Ukraine's Central Election Commission declared Viktor Yanukovych the winner by a tally of 49-46. This result suggests a tight election, but a discernable majority. However, 4 out of the 15 people in charge of certifying Ukainian elections have thrown the red challange flag and announced they believed the results illigitimate.

According to CNN, the four dissenting election commissioners were not the only people unconvinced that the election was fair and valid. According to Ted Turner's info sources,

protests from Viktor Yushchenko and his supporters -- and international election observers -- began before the final results were announced.

Ukrain's Parliament has taken an extremely courageous step. They have passed a resolution declaring the election invalid. The measure lacks legal teeth, because the Ukranian Constitution doesn't task the Ukranian Parliament with election oversight. However, again according to CNN, the parliament studies its options.

Meanwhile, the followers of Yushenko protest and shut down government buildings over what they precieve as a gross injustice. The Parliament has asked the demonstrators to stand down in return for which the legislatures would set up a new election and reform the election commission.

The crisis has received intense international attention. US Secretary of State Colin Powell totally denounced the election. President Bush was actually less hawkish than Secretary Powell. However, he reinforced the incredulity Powell initially expressed with the results in the following statement.

"There's just a lot of allegations of vote fraud that place their elections, the validity of their elections, in doubt," Bush said. "The international community is watching very carefully. People are paying very close attention to this, and hopefully it'll be resolved in a way that brings credit and confidence to the Ukrainian government." -CNN

People outside the international community and the US Government are also watching. Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi watches and wonders just what the international community will do when an election gets stolen right in front of their observers. He hopes that Ukranians behaving like Hugo Chavez won't find a patsy Jimmy Carter to bail their boats.

Another intrested party, Abu-Masab al-Zarqawi, will watch events unfold for a different reason. The Ukranian election scandal is a test for the US. The results that occur in Kiev will effect the results that occur in Baghdad.

The crisis in The Ukraine has to get resolved in a way that upholds the will of their electorate. The outcome in this election resonates throughout the world.

Update I: Wizbang wonders why the challenger in The Ukranian election has such a sudden, mysterious illness. This looks more and more scary as more information emerges.

Kenneth Knows The Frequency Now

2004-11-24T11:50:00.000-08:00

CBS Uber-Anchor Dan Rather has elected to step down. The time has come and he's recognized fate when it struck him soundly between the eyes. He also claims that the hoohah over the Bush Memo Story had nothing to do with his decision, which is totally ludicrous.

Unlike King Lear who stayed well past his prime, Dan Rather has added up the score. Rather has forced himself to admit the truth and accept that the game has passed him by. With that stunning admission, from a man who expected to dominate the media world for another ten years, an era of media dominance has ended.

The king stepped down when the world he claimed to rule changed. His efforts to pawn Bill Burkett's false National Guard memo off as legitimate were rebuffed by a hornet's nest of angry bloggers. The media world had changed.

Dan Rather had no answer for it. It was time for him to go. He did what remained his last option. He stepped down and walked away. His departure will have repurcussions. Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez gives us a surprisingly honest appraisal of those repurcussions below.

SANCHEZ: I agree with Jesse. I agree with my colleague. I believe that we made mistakes. The media certainly is not in our hands any longer, and, in particular, radio talk shows where that is completely in the opposition's hands, and they use it effectively against us.

BLITZER: But, Loretta, when you say the media -- when you say the media is not in your hands, are you saying that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN are hostile to Democrats?

SANCHEZ: No, that's not what I said. I'm saying that -- if you would let me finish -- that the majority of people are now receiving a lot of their information out of radio. And the radio isn't in the hands of the Democrats anymore.
Hat Tip - Wizbang

Update I - Varifrank channels Rudyard Kippling in his very fitting epitaph for the anchormanship of Gunga Dan.

2004-11-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Meanwhile In The Ivory Coast

2004-11-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

The video has a sort of Blair Witch Project quality to it and the audio is worse than what you'd get at a Whitesnake Concert. However, you can obviously see what goes on when The French Army makes nice and condescends to the poor Africans by keeping peace.

The Africans rallied against the French, and chanted slogans. The French responded with automatic weapon fire. They mowed them down like they were not even human. The videotape is heart-breaking. It makes anything Kevin Sites ever photographed look pathetic.

Maybe it's a good thing the French aren't helping us by "pacifying" Iraq in the same way they operate in The Ivory Coast. So many of the people the French shot were women. They have no dignity, no chivalry, no class. It's sad that barbarians such as The French are allowed to keep their armies.

Update I: Sue Bob's Diary runs a self-congratulatory self-defense from Kevin Sites. I invite Kevin to go cover The French Army in Africa. I wonder how Jacques CHirac would like inbeds.

Update II: Wizbang asks for comments on The Kevin Sites affair. I offer the Ivory COast massacre as an exercise in compare and contrast.

Update III: Rusty Shackleford doesn't ask for comments, Biotch. He tells you your opinion on Kevin Sites. He is, afterall, Blogfather of The Blog Pimp Alliance.

Update IV: Dean offers his sardonic take on the morally superior French. Mon Dieu, Monseur Chirac!

Update V: Captain's Quarters asks us to see the larger context in which the Fallujah shooting occurred. I do my best to help him by sharing the film clip. He runs an excellent blog.

Pork And Circuses

2004-11-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

According to Taxpayers For Common Sense, all 50 US states are going to be red states next year. Unfortunately for us, this has nothing to do with elections. It has more to do with the most recent spending bill passed by Congress.

The $388 billion spending bill that cleared Congress on Saturday and will head to President Bush for his signature has 11,772 earmarked special projects totaling $15.8 billion, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Among them:

$25,000 for the study of mariachi music in Nevada's Clark County School District.
$225,000 for the National Wild Turkey Federation in South Carolina.
$1 million for the Missouri Pork Producers Federation to convert animal waste into energy.
$75,000 for renovating the Merry Go Round Playhouse in Auburn, N.Y.
$100,000 for a weather museum in Punxsutawney, Pa.
$800,000 for "soybean rust research" in Ames, Iowa.
$75,000 for "hides and leather research" in Wyndmoor, Pa.
$1,593 for potato storage in Madison, Wis.
$1 million for a world birding center, Texas.
$150,000 to pay for beaver management and damage in Wisconsin.
$200,000 for the American Cotton Museum in Greenville, Texas.
$100,000 for a swimming pool in Ottawa, Kan.
$70,000 for a "Paper Industry International Hall of Fame" in Appleton, Wis.
$1.5 million for the Rep. Richard Gephardt Archive at the Missouri Historical Society.
$2 million for the government to buy back the presidential yacht USS Sequoia, sold in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter to demonstrate frugality.

-Hat Tip USA Today.

Tom Delay may try to pass this budget off as an improvement, but that doesn't even remotely pass the smell test. The Line-Item Veto needs to be rewritten to proclude lawsuits and brought back from the political abyss.

Budgets like this are an outrage. Thievery is poor government. Delay needs to stop campaigning like Robin Hood and then governing like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

The Fog Of Dishonest Scholarship

2004-11-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

Environmental Science has frequently proven itself to be oxymoronic. It's one of those phrases like Military Intelligence that requires a certain level of ridicule for its audacious dishonesty. Since the halcyon days of disco and The Club Of Rome, environmental scientists have been generating gloom and doom scenarios that have been has collossaly wrong as they've been depressing.

This continual overexaggeration on the part of these researchers is nothing accidental or innocent. It's how they pay the bills. A lot of success in science depends on the ability to attract attention and research money. No one in the field of environmental science ever got payed for predicting a nice day.

An article in the Nov. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association continues the distressing trend.

The researchers compared the non-injury-related death rates and smog measurements for 95 urban areas for the period 1987-2000. They reported a one-half percent (0.5 percent) increase in premature death (mortality) per 10-part per billion increase in ground-level ozone (smog) in the urban areas. Reducing smog levels by 35 percent, they claim, could save about 4,000 lives per year.

However, the methodology employed in the study is badly suspect.

First, if smog is deadly in New York City, then it should be deadly everywhere. But even granting the researchers every benefit of the doubt with respect to the validity of their analysis, among the 95 urban areas included in the study, the correlation between smog and mortality is only statistically meaningful in five of those 95 urban areas (New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Chicago).
That means in 95 percent of the urban areas studied, there was no meaningful correlation between smog and mortality.

The only conclusion I can come to in all of this is that the researchers believe that their goal of a clean environment justifies their means. They've decided that lying and overhyping a risk has value if it makes the public take action and assuage the potential negative cause they are hyping.

This may actually work in the short term. However, the day will come when the environmentalists will actually be right and nobody will bother listening because they lied so badly and so often. Then, where will you be the day after tommorrow?

A Good Half Of Ball At Lansdowne Road

2004-11-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

USA Eagles coach Tom Billups wants his team to match up against the best in the world. They've done so twice now, but unfortunately, in each case, Team USA has only managed this for one half. The USA vs. Ireland match Saturday, like the previous USA match against France, was truly a tale of two halfs.

In the First Half, The Eagles played a slow, scrum-oriented match and managed to grind things out enough to keep it close match. Matt Hercus matched boots against The Great David Humpries. The only margin of difference was a try for the Home Team by Tommy Bowe, who was playing his first international match. The Irish went in ahead only 13-6.

The Second Half saw the demise of Tom Billups and The USA scrum. Once Ireland got control of the scrummage, their back line became unstoppable and every mistake the Eagles made was another penalty kick for the aforementioned Humphries. He finished with 20 points in an exceptional performance for the man with a kicking foot like a sniper rifle.

The game turned into an unfortunate rout for The USA Eagles, Ireland won 55-6, as the last twenty minutes of the match became an Irish Pub Party of scoring. RugbyRubgy.com writes the autopsy.

Man of the match: Left wing Tommy Bowe for his debut try that helped to ignite the Irish Backs for a second-half assault on the Americans line.

Moment of the match: The start of the second-half when Ireland came out firing after a poor first-half that was dull and lacked imagination.

Villain of the match: US flanker Brian Surgener for his yellow card in the 27th minute for persistent off-sides that was killing the game at rucks and mauls.

The scorers:

For Ireland: Tries: Sheahan, Bowe, Miller, Murphy 2, Horan, Stringer Cons: Humphreys 7 Pens: Humphreys 2

For USA: Pens: Hercus 2

The teams:

Ireland: 15 Geordan Murphy, 14 Shane Horgan, 13 Brian O'Driscoll (captain), 12 Kevin Maggs, 11 Tommy Bowe, 10 David Humphreys, 9 Guy Easterby, 8 Eric Miller, 7 Denis Leamy, 6 Simon Easterby, 5 Paul O'Connell, 4 Donccha O'Callaghan, 3 John Hayes, 2 Frankie Sheahan, 1 Marcus Horan.

Replacements: 16 Shane Byrne, 17 Simon Best, 18 Leo Cullen, 19 Anthony Foley, 20 Peter Stringer, 21 Ronan O'Gara, 22 Girvan Dempsey.

USA: 15 Francois Viljoen, 14 Al Lakomskis, 13 Paul Emerick, 12 Salesi Sika, 11 David Fee, 10 Mike Hercus, 9 Mose Timoteo, 8 Kort Schubert (captain), 7 Tony Petruzzella, 6 Brian Surgener, 5 Gerhard Klerck, 4 Alec Parker, 3 Jacob Waasdorp, 2 Matt Wyatt, 1 Mike MacDonald.

Replacements: 16 Mike Hobson, 17 Chris Osentowski, 18 Jurie Gouws, 19 Fifita Mo'unga, 20 David Williams, 21 Matt Sherman, 22 Albert Tuipulotu.

Referee: Rob Dickson (Scotland)

Tom Billups goes back to the drawing board. His next big match is against Italy. It might be his chance to fight for his job as US Head Coach.

Ruck'd - Don't Cry For The Pumas, Argentina

2004-11-20T20:59:00.000-08:00

The International Rugby world has become a predictable place. The Big Three of The Southern Hemisphere and the original 5 Nations of Europe pretty much call all the shots. New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, England, France, Scotland, Ireland and Wales can generally walk on to a pitch against any national team not on the above list and expect an automatic win. Ok, well maybe there's an exception or two. HEHEHEHEH!

Just when France-bashing had begun to go a wee bit stale, The Argentina Pumas remind us all of why Great French Moments of Courage is a very short history book indeed. The Pumas polished the Mighty Blues of France today. The 24-14 scoreline was a result of the Pumas not putting the cane to the French as hard as they could have. Rugbyrugby.com has the vital statistics.

Man of the match: The Argentina forwards were just immense, deconstructing the same unit that bullied the Wallabies into submission last week - namely, the cultured French pack. Our award goes to that man who always managed to coerce the best out of the bid Argentines - the irrepressible Agustín Pichot, surely still one of the finest exponents of scrum-half play to have ever graced a rugby field.

Moment of the match: With France creeping back into the game, Argentina opted for two line-outs when attempts at the sticks would have been the more pragmatic approach. It's could have pure machismo, or pure masochism - but when you can out-gall the Gallic, you know the day will be yours!

Villain of the match: Despite the furious clash of forwards, it was all good, clean fun. No villains.

The scorers:

For France: Try: Marsh Pens: Elissade, Michalak 2

For Argentina: Tries: Durand, Hasan Con: Contepomi Pens: Contepomi 4

The teams:

France: 15 Nicolas Brusque, 14 Aurelien Rougerie, 13 Tony Marsh, 12 Yannick Jauzion, 11 Cedric Heymans, 10 Frederic Michalak, 9 Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, 8 Imanol Harinordoquy, 7 Olivier Magne, 6 Serge Betsen, 5 Jerome Thion, 4 Fabien Pelous (captain), 3 Sylvain Marconnet, 2 William Servat, 1 Olivier Milloud.

Replacements: 16 Sebastien Bruno, 17 Nicolas Mas, 18 Pascal Pape, 19 Julien Bonnaire, 20 Julien Peyrelongue, 21 Clement Poitrenaud, 22 Jimmy Marlu.

Argentina: 15 Juan Martín Hernández, 14 Lucas Borges, 13 Federico Martín Aramburu, 12 Manuel Contepomi, 11 Hernán Senillosa, 10 Felipe Contepomi, 9 Agustín Pichot (captain), 8 Gonzalo Longo, 7 Lucas Ostiglia, 6 Martín Durand, 5 Rimas Álvarez, 4 Patricio Albacete, 3 Omar Hasan, 2 Mario Ledesma, 1 Rodrigo Roncero.

Replacements: 16 Federico Méndez, 17 Daniel Rodríguez, 18 Pablo Bouza, 19 Martín Schusterman, 20 Nicolás Fernández Miranda, 21 Juan de la Cruz Fernández Miranda, 22 Gonzalo Tiesi.

Referee: Jonathan Kaplan (South Africa)

So Much for the famed French Pack. So much for the superior scrum-half and fly-half. The French came out flat and took one too lightly, and The Pumas ate Les Blues for lunch.

Meatwad Needs A One-Way TIcket To Fallujah

2004-11-19T06:04:00.000-08:00

During the recent Fallujah fighting a US Marine found himself on the horns of an ethical dilemma. He and his squad came upon a group of enemy soldiers who were lying as if dead or wounded in a religious shrine that they had previously been using as a defensive fighting position.

This enemy force, consisting of ununiformed guerilla fighters who had booby-trapped the bodies of their fallen comrades, had also faked death to shoot at Marines. The soldier saw them, made a probabilistic decision that at least one of the enemy was really laying an ambush, and pumped rounds into a wounded Iraqi.

The Marine Corps is currently investigating the matter and may or may not charge the soldier as a war criminal. This has happened before. The US Military is unique among fighting forces in that it enforces the law on its own service members. This is why no Fallujian insurgents have been hung from an overpass in retaliation as of this blog entry.

Regretably, Chris "Meatwad" Matthews doesn't seem to understand this vital and important distinction. He seems intent on fondling the pain of the poor Iraqi insurgents. Matthews had this to share with his audience regarding the actions of the US Marine.

"Well, let me ask you this," Matthews says. "If this were the other side, and we were watching an enemy soldier, a rival — I mean, they're not bad guys, especially, just people who disagree with us, they are in fact insurgents, fighting in their country — if we saw them do what we saw our guy do to that guy, would we consider that worthy of a war crimes charge?" - NRO

So Meatwad doesn't think they're bad people. They just cut people's heads off over a simple disagreement. They were found with Ricin gas, bomb-making factories, torture chambers, and rooms used to stack the bodies after the torture was over. There was more going on in Fallujah than just a heated discussion or two.

Meatwad seems so intent on undermining our war efforts, he doesn't willingly admit the obvious truth about what the US Marines saw and encountered in Fallujah. Some people have to have their nose rubbed in the dog pile before they are willing to believe the manure actually stinks. Chris "Meatwad" Matthews needs a one-way ticket to Fallujah.

Cartoons By Cretins

2004-11-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

Cartoonist/Sick Boy Ted Rall has finally reaped the rewards of his own profound stupidity. It seems the Washington Polemnic has shown him the door. It wasn't for mocking the recently killed Pat Tillman. It wasn't for offering the theological insight that Ronald Reagan was in hell 24 hours after President Reagan expired.

Finally, Ted Rall had to go after the poor disabled students. He shows them taking over a classroom as a metaphor for what he believes happened in the last election. The Meatmen never really made it big with their song Crippled Children Suck from their less than talented album We're The Meatmen and You Suck. Ted Rall has descended to their level and finally generated the contempt he richly deserves.

Update I: Michelle Malkin introduces us to the work of Rall's fellow traveler in tasteless wastes, Pat Oliphant.

Update II: Captain's Quarters joins the celebration of Ted Rall's discomfiture. He also links to the revolting piece of 'art' that got Ted Rall relieved of his duties.

In The Child's Best Intrest

2004-11-18T18:21:00.000-08:00

There is obviously no requirement that a judge actually show good judgement. The recent decision made by a judge in Saint Paul, Minnesota wins him a KOTM Dumb-Ass Medal. Bravo Judge Joseph T. Carter! You've just awarded a convicted and registered sex offender custody of a ten year old girl.

The people in the judge's circuit were also less than impressed with the decision.

"It's outrageous they didn't do more in terms of investigating," said Gail Chang Bohr, executive director of the Children's Law Center of Minnesota. "It's very tragic. It's not what we should be doing for kids. The question is, did anyone try to find out from the child if she felt happy and safe?"

An elegant understatement if there ever was one. But it seemed necessary, given the mental capacity displayed by the Judge Carter.

In May, Carter awarded Farnsworth custody of his biological daughters, concluding that Farnsworth provided a "stable, satisfactory environment for the children."

This seems earily reminiscent of what Sean Penn said about Saddam Hussein. Maybe Joseph Carter could go help Dhimmi Carter certify Hugo Chavez's next reelection as fair and democratic.

Thankfully, the reprobate father is now finding out what his fellow inmates think of pedophiles. Maybe Judge Carter should make him a prison trustee. Or maybe not. Maybe Judge Carter should resign instead.

The Nuts Among Us!

2004-11-18T18:06:00.000-08:00

I taught High School Math for a while. It's hard to get the kids locked in and paying attention. A good teacher always offers a gimmick or two to spice a dull classroom session.

A teacher in Manchester, England has taken it a step too far. She predicted the emminent demise of her students. Some would call this the sort of wishful thinking a fly on the wall may overhear in the faculty lounges. Instead, it was a rather dorky profecy that the world was ending. Her rather infamous lecture went as follows:

Saying she had bad news, the teacher announced that a meteor would strike the Earth in 10 days' time, and that they should return home and say their "final farewells" to their parents.

After the crowd of 13- and 14-year-olds looked on in horror, and many burst into tears, the teacher swiftly explained that she was only trying to encourage them to "seize the day".

Perhaps the school should show a sense of humor and terminate her contract 10 days from today. After all, she sure had some of students convinced.

"Some of the children were 100 percent convinced they were going to die," the father of one child told the paper.

"God only knows what this teacher thought she was doing."

Premature Speculation - GOP Edition

2004-11-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

Election 2004 went as well as the GOP could have hoped for. GWB won reelection, the GOP gained 4 Senators and they took down a small number of newly gerrymandered Congressional Districts. Should GOP darkhorse Dino Rossi take Washington State's Governor's Race, the GOP will have even gained a governorship in a state where this was no likely probability.

Election 2006 promises to be dull, but generally pleasant for GOP party leaders. Barring a catastophic two years for President Bush, the Senate map will feature 18 Democrat incumbants to 15 Republicans. There is also no Census until 2010. Thus, the House should thus stay status quo antibellum.

This makes Election 2008 the next major battleground election. The Senate math will probably turn pro-Democrat. The House will be harder for the GOP to hang on to as a result of the Presidential Election heading both party's tickets. Thus 2008 will involve trepidation for the Post-GWB Republican Party.

This begs the question of who the GOP is likely to nominate in defence of President Bush and Newt Gingrich's gains. There are several possible choices for the GOP nomination. Here are some possibilities.

Highly Likely -

John McCain - Senator McCain rebuffed John Kerry's Veep Offer and went heavily for George Bush during Election 2004. He doesn't support all of President Bush's agenda, but he does believe in his party's aparatus. He wants that aparatus to support him in 2008 and will not go quietly if it doesn't.
Bill Frist - Senator Frist wins the mantle of most electable conservative. He will be judged by his ability to make Senator Specter and other more liberal Republicans loyally back the GOP agenda between now and 2008.

Somewhat Probable -

Rudy Guliani - The 9/11 Factor works highly in Rudy's favor. However, he's held no elected office higher than mayor. Also, a lot of conservatives thinks he's too far to the left.
Arnold Schwarzenagger - He's banned from The Presidency, for now. He's working to change it and he'll call you a gurlymon if you try and stop him. I think he's too leftward leaning not to be terminated as a ticket head, but could make a good strategic Veep choice.
Bill Owens - Some consevatives like the man. No one else has heard of him.
Colin Powell - Getting too old, but a perenial talking point.
Haley Barbour - Interesting dark horse. He beat a tough challenge from Robert Musgrave to become governor of Mississippi. He also has worked for the GOP on a national level and knows where all the bodies are hidden. Hmmm....

Longshots -

Mitt Romney - The wants the job for some strange reason. He has won statewide office in Massachussettes where the natives believe the road to perdition is MacAdamized with dead Republicans. This will either help him or make the conservative base call him a sellout.
Alan Keyes/Pat Robertson/Gary Bauer - One of these three jerks will run. If the evangelist de jour does well, he can emulate Howard Dean. If he lands squarely on his can during a pancake breakfast, he's the GOP Dennis Kucinich.

McCain would probably want Colin Powell or Rudy Gulianni with Mitt Romney having an outside shot at joining this basically Rockefeller Republican ticket. Frist would go with Powell, Rudy Haley or Ahnold.

These are my premature speculations for Election 2008.

Update I: QandO reports that Gallup already has polls out on preferences for both Democratic and GOP Presidential candidates. I guess President Bush can get an early start on feeling like a lame duck...

Should The Media Be 'Impartial'?

2004-11-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

The most recent Michael Barone column takes a few well-aimed whacks at the 'old' media for their assistance to John Kerry during the recently completed US Presidential Election. He points out their bias in no uncertain terms.

More than in any other election in the last half-century, Old Media -- The New York Times and CBS News, joined often but not always by The Washington Post, other major newspapers, ABC News and NBC News -- was an active protagonist in this election, working hard to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush and doing what it could for John Kerry.

If we assume that media outlets are suppossed to be impartial arbitrars of current events and should always strive to be fair. Barone makes an excellent point. The vast majority of the established print and television media favored the Democrats to the point that they lost any valid claim to being objective.

The fake documents caper pulled by CBS anchor Dan Rather only typified an overall anti-Bush media effort. Even events such as Abu Gahraib, where the US Government deserved a certain amount of negative media attention, were handled in a way to maximize their impact on the coming election.

Seymour Hersch had his prison abuse story for two months, but would not release it until he had the footage he wanted. The commentators covering the Abu Gahraib scandal routinely downplayed or failed to mention that the US Army had discovered the prisoner abuses during an internal investigation in response to complaints from soldiers in Iraq. The entire story was treated like a full-blown cover-up and media outlets kept wanting to know how high it went and would not accept any answer that defrayed their preconceived notions.

Another way to look at this is to ask why media sources continue to be asked to do the impossible. I think media members should publically advertise their bias. It should fly on their mastheads and lead off their news broadcasts. "We distort, you decide" or "We'd Rather Kerry won." would be perfectly acceptable themes for a news broadcast as long as they were made public from the outset.

Media consumers could quickly understand whose axes were being ground if media participants were forced to make their political and philosophical biases a
public disclosure. To me, this is how media should report events. In a scientific experiment, you report any limitations that may cause the information gleaned to be unrealistic. I think a required statement of bias would have the same salutory effect on what we read as news.

Mavaricks, Malcontents and Malicious Back-Knifers

2004-11-14T11:40:00.000-08:00

The GOP currently holds the majority in the US Senate under Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist from Tennessee. This gives Senator Frist and his compatriots the ability to set the committee chairs and push much of the Senate's agenda. This does not, however, give the GOP full control of the US Senate.

The most obvious obstacle to the senate pursuing a more conservative tack would be the ability of the 44 Democrats to filibuster any piece of legislation they do not like. As long as they can maintain 40 votes or more behind a filibuster, the Senate will not be able to vote on the nomination or piece of legislation being filibustered.

In a more contested Senate, former Senator Tom Daschele made this tactic his legacy. He lost his bid for reelction to John Thune and perhaps his many filibusters may be viewed as part and parcel to his decline and eventual dicomfiture. Thus the Democrats will have to turn to a source of power outside of their own ranks to hold parity against Senator Frist.

The vote of liberal lackey Jim Jeffords brings the party of Jackson and Jefferson within 10 votes of an even footing. This forces them to find Republican accomplices to their legislative goals. Unfortunately, this goal is not entirely a fool's errand for Democrats remaining in the ranks of the US Senate.

Several GOP Senators are ripe for inclusion in the ranks of the Democrats on certain issues. Senators Snowe, Chafee, and Hagel have been occaisional thorns in the side of George W. Bush. Lincoln Chafee made a particularly odious threat of switching parties. When The Red Sea failed to part and Senator Chafee wasn't offered any bribe by President Bush or Senator Frist, he quickly subsided.

Senator McCain has often opposed conservative aims while taking for granted the support of many loyal Republicans. His Campaign Finance Reform Act gave George Soros leverage over US elections which we may rue in future electoral contests. His coauthorship of The Climate Stewardship Act with Senator Liebermann suggests that he may be willing to give international agencies sovereignty over parts of our economy.

However, when the chips went down and the Election of 2004 was in the balance, McCain came squarely to the aid of the GOP. He roasted Michael Moore as a 'disingenuous filmmaker' at the GOP Convention and worked the stump hard for his former primary opponent George W. Bush. This suggests that he may disagree with the GOP on some issues, but remains a loyal member of the family.

The same can not necessarily be said of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. Senator Specter relied heavily on the endorsement of a sitting president to hold of Pat Toomey's primary challenge for his seat. Toomey derived an avalanche of conservative support from groups Club For Growth as a result of Senator Specter's previous record as a liberal. George W. Bush's generous support did not prevent the appearance of Kerry/Specter signs all over Philadelphia prior to the 2004 election.

Specter has clashed with Republican Presidents and party leaders throughout his tenure in the US Senate. He personally deep-sixed Robert Bork's hopes of a Supreme Court seat. He rallied briefly by defending Clarance Thomas against the scurillous charges of Anita Hill.

However, Senator Specter has long associated himself with the Pro-Choice Movement and let it be known that this would direct how he voted on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He declared Roe-v-Wade inviolate as Constitutional Law. His financial support from George Soros is conspicuous among GOP party members.

If there were one Senator that actually does more damage to the GOP as a Republican than a Democrat, Arlen Specter would be that man. I expect he will keep his chairmanship and temporarily make nice with the rest of the Republican Party. However, Arlen Specter is a snake who bears his own party niether love nor loyalty. He is a less couragious version of Aaron Burr.

McCain Vs. The CIA

2004-11-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

Senator McCain has decided to make CIA reform his visible issue in the coming year. Rather than settling for just saying he thinks the CIA needs to be fixed, he called them a rogue agency. Perhaps Valerie Plame could be described as a rouge agent moonlighting as a political smear merchant, but McCain has hyperbolized to keep his name in the headlines.

The occasion for this ruckus involved the Washington Polemic's efforts to smear Porter Goss. George W. Bush's new director of the CIA. It seems Goss intends to change how the CIA operates and the CIA doesn't feel like changing. Goss has offered eviscerating criticisms of the agency.

The CIA's loss of prestige stems from what many critics, McCain included, see as institutional failures to gather accurate information prior to the Iraq War. The games played by Joe Wilson and Agent Plame only reinforce this image of institutional chicanery. The CIA becomes a handy scapegoat for anyone who needs to explain why we haven't found Saddam's WMDs yet.

A more accurate target for national ire would be the congressional leaders who have 'reformed' the CIA into flaccid, embarassing impotence. Senator Frank Church accused them of being assassins and waghalters. He detailed what he believed to be American plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign despots. The CIA was also accused of serving as Boogeymen for the Nixonian purge of dissident groups.

Robert Toricelli also worried about the investigative practices of the CIA. As a congressman, he impressed his girlfriend Bianca Jagger by outing an alleged CIA recruiter in Guatamala. He also accused the CIA of being responsible for the deaths of two left-wing Guatamalan dissidents.

As a result of Torricelli's meddling, President Clinton issued an executive order forbidding the CIA from deling with criminal or terrorist informants. In other words, if an informant hangs around with bad guys, the CIA could not use their information. Torricelli than could not understand why the CIA didn't prevent 9/11.

Senator McCain may be voicing needed support for Porter Goss at the CIA. His motives may be good rather than jaded. However, when Senators tell the CIA how to collect intelligence, the US government seems to have a very hard time buying a clue. I can only hope John McCain will restrain himself to blasting media critics of Porter Goss and appoint himself to perform Mr. Goss' duties.

Feel The Love (Another Tolerant Liberal)

2004-11-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

Howard Dean must have hired this guy as a speechwriter. He's lost it! What a crack baby! I wouldn't follow someone like this to the water fountain, much less ask them who should be President. So much for liberal tolerance.

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep. And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really? Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence?

Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier.

Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.All those Federal taxes you love to hate?

It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money.

What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.Let’s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It’s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that’s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that’s just some aberration?

How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ruining it pretty well on your own, you little bastards. Oh, but that's ok because you go to church, right? I mean you do, right? Cause we fucking get to hear about it every goddamn year at election time. Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning and sing, and then you're fucking towers of moral superiority. Yeah, that's a workable formula.

Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? Ever think of that, you self-righteous assholes? No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite. And who has the highest murder rates in the nation? It ain't us up here in the North, assholes.Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off.

Update I - TAM gives links to the gloaters, whiners and uber-jerks of Election 2004.

Real Time With Bill Maher

2004-11-11T17:21:00.000-08:00

The Smoking Gun dishes on HBO's house lefty, Bill Maher. The former host of Politically Incorrect has gone beyond being incorrect. His former girlfriend, Coco Johnsen accuses him of being a malicious, small cad. Imagine that?

The complaint involves the following actionable torts:

Breach of Contract
Promissary Estoppel (Heaven Forbid!)
Promissary Fraud (Before or after the estoppel?)
Battery
Assault

Plus he called her racial derogatory names. perhaps he really is a lot more politically incorrect than he portrays himself while sucking up to the Hollywaste left.

Dhimmi Carter Can't Be Worthless Enough!

2004-11-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

Retirement should provide a hard-working and successful person an opportunity to rest. That individual should appreciate their leisure and realize that it's someone else's turn to carry the burdens and sweat under the limelight. Lacking anymore euphemistic ways to say this, I'll just unload. "Dhimmi Carter! shut your obnoxious pie-hole."

Today Dhimmi Carter eulogized deceased killer, thug and malefactor of the worst description Yassir Arafat as follows:

Former US President Jimmy Carter called Yasser Arafat “a powerful human symbol and forceful advocate” who united Palestinians in their pursuit of a homeland.

“Yasser Arafat’s death marks the end of an era and will no doubt be painfully felt by Palestinians throughout the Middle East and elsewhere in the world,” Carter said.

“He was the father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement. A powerful human symbol and forceful advocate, Palestinians united behind him in their pursuit of a homeland,” he said in a statement distributed by his Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center.

If Ghaddafi and Zaraquawi are fortunate, Carter will remain on the eulogy circuit when they kick the bucket as well. Maybe he can praise "The Big Z" for decorating the freeway overpasses leading into downtown Fallujah.

If Arafat were allowed to rot in peace, I would feel no reason to mention his name. His spirit will certainly inhabit the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie. No rational human being will mourn his passing. That leaves Dhimmi Carter out there talking about what a swell lad Yassir Arafat was towards everyone who knew him. He identifies Arafat's endearing qualities with the same sharp eye he used to certify Hugo Chavez's election victory in Venezuela.

As Jimmy gets on towards life's distant finish line and the sun sets at last over the final horizon of his days, he should look homeward and return to Plains, Georgia. The place has been missing it's village idiot ever since Dhimmi set sail for Annapolis, Maryland.

Update I - Captain's Quarters views a variety of speeches on Arafat's death. He sees the passing of Yassir as a Rorshach Test.

Update II - Yes, according Spoons Experience, Dhimmi really praised Yassir Arafat for 'providing indespensible leadership to a revolutionary movement.'

Premature Speculation - Dem Edition

2004-11-11T04:38:00.000-08:00

Hyperbolic exageration aside, the Dems lost this last election, but did not get wiped out. They lost most of these races in the margins, by 3 to 5 points this time. The Senatorial races were mathematically inclined against the Democratic Party and this caused the results from 2004 to sting just a little bit more.

Now we'll fast forward to 2008 and speculate on what the Dems will do to get back in the power game. It won't be easy. In 2006, the mathematics of the Senatorial races will again favor the GOP. The senate could be 56 or 57 percent Republican by 2008.

Also, there will not have been another census yet, thus the House of Representatives will remain in pro-GOP gerrymander. Therefore, the likelihood of the Dems picking up either house of congress will come close to zero unless George W. Bush has a disasterous 2nd term.

So that brings us to the presdential race, which will probably be the only opportunity the Democrats have for a good election night in 2008. Speculation now centers on who the Dems will run and where that person will take the party. Here are a few of the possibilities, and what I think would happen if they ran.

Highly likely:

Hillary Rodham Clinton - I have a personnal theory that no one in the Democratic Party really wants Hillary! to win this nomination. At least no one that wants to win the 2008 race. She would meet with condemnation from every corner of the GOP coalition.

However, Hillary would also bring out everyone who cares at all about core Democratic Party issues. It would be Armageddon. It's also a highly likely scenario. I'd have to rate Hillary as the early leader for the Dem nomination.

John F. Kerry - A lot of people are counting him out as a discarded loser. A lot of people counted him out against Howard Dean about 10 months ago. He got within 3 points of being inaugurated and had a great time winning the big debate against George W. Bush. Never count Kerry out.

Al Gore - No, he hasn't gracefully gone away. After reading some of his speeches to MoveOn.Org, he hasn't even really conceded the 2000 election. He can do nothing positive for the Democratic Party and would lose Hawaii and almost all points East in a Presidential Race. This, however, doesn't make him stop and doesn't make an Al Gore candidacy impossible.

Could Happen.

Tom Daschele - He's got connections and lots and lots of time on his hands.

John Edwards - I think he lost respect for trying to jump to the White House after only one term. Only people named Clinton can do that and be taken seriously.

Howard Dean - He really could grow up a bit in the next four years. Would his fans adore him if he acted like a rational man?

Dark Horses

Barak Obama - It would be way too early for him to run. However, he does have the star power.

Gray Davis - Seriously? Yep, he's ambitious enough to ignore the fact that people detest him.

Evan Bayh - This would be a disaster. I like Evan Bayh enough that I'd actually have to consider voting for a Democrat. The Horror! Good thing the Dems would NEVER be smart enough to nominate this guy.

My prediction for a 2008 ticket: Clinton - Daschele is my most likely. Kerry - Obama or Kerry - Davis are, in my opinion, the next most probable combinations. In the unfortunate event that he were nominated, I'm quite sure Al Gore would select Howard Dean.

Update I - Sean Hackbarth is not so sure Hillary! has the nomination in the bag just yet.

KOTM's Best and Worst of Election 2K4

2004-11-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

In honor of a close and exciting Election 2K4 I'm handing out my inaugural edition KOTM Best and Worst Awards.

Best GOP Performance: GWB! He won a tough fight and his coattails were long and abundant. He broke Ronald W. Reagan's record for highest vote total ever received by a GOP candidate. There couldn't have been a better way to memorialize Reagan's passing.

Honorable Mention: John Thune, South Dakota Senate. He took down Terrible Tom Daschele. America became a better-governed nation when Senator Daschele conceeded defeat.

Best Dem Performance: Ken Salazar, Colorado Senate. He was the second highest profile victory for the Dems, but unlike Barak Obama, he went out and won against the varsity.

Honorable Mention: Dr. Dan Mongiardo, Kentucky Senate. Senator Jim Bunning should never have compared this man to one Saddam Hussein's sons. Even if he meant to compare him to the one who was smarter and better looking. Bunning conduct was pathetic, and by making a shoe-string race go down to the wire, Mongiardo hopefully cured Jim Bunning's delusional behavior.

Worst GOP Performance: Alan Keyes, Illinois Senate. He's been Buchannanized. Unfortunately, the Libertarians are probably more competitive in Illinois now than the GOP. I'll bet you all those lesbian jokes he told about Mary Cheney are no longer funny right now.

Honorable Mention: Colorado GOP, Colorado Senate. Pete Coors did his utmost to hang on to Ben Nighthorse Campbell's old seat. The fault here lies with the state party. They (a) relied heavily on evangelical christians to turn out to the polls, and (b) hired a guy who brews beer for a living to be there candidates. Maybe Madison Avenue liberals aren't the only ones who are somewhat out of touch with Middle America.

Worst Democratic Performance: John Edwards, VEEP and Litigator. At 10am John F. Kerry sat down, sipped his coffee and looked at what had happened. He decided he had done his utmost, Bush had one, and it was time to rejoin the US Senate. John Edwards argued against this course of action until Senator kerry, the adult portion of the ticket, gave the Yup-Start from the Tarheel State a lesson in basic civics.

When John Kerry looked at the numbers and saw a 95% chance that he had lost, he felt honor bound to concede and let the country get back to business. When John Edwards saw the numbers, he saw a 5% that he could successfully litigate. That, right there, is the difference between old and new Democrats.

Honorable Mention: Lousiana Democratic Party, Louisiana Senate. Every time the Dems force a Senate race into a run-off, they win it. The last two iterations of this were big-time Democratic wins. By allowing John Vitter to escape with 51%, they sabotaged their opportunity to put Moon Landrieu's machine to work. They blew it. They can now congratulate Senator Vitter.

So there they are, my humble attempt at a best and worst of election 2K4. Enjoy.

A Divided Nation? No Way!

2004-11-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

Jen Nelson of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an exceptional article that I believe deserves further commentary (see link in post title). While the article contains a strong and compelling endorsement of George W. Bush for President, it does also make a highly valid point that everyone, regardless of political inclination, should take to heart regarding Election 2004. A bunch of us may not agree on who to vote for tommorrow, but in no way is the United States a divided nation.

I'll cite myself as an example. I long ago mailed in my absentee ballot for my list preferences in the November election. I consider this particular part of my civil duty taken care of. I'm not shy as to which candidate for president I happened to vote for. I voted for Bush.

Some of my coworkers have also taken the opportunity to exercise their rights as well. I garruntee everyone that if we passed around a sheet of paper and took a poll, our office would not be unanimous in who we preferred in The White House. However, that constitutes a difference of political opinion to me, not a division of good versus evil.

As someone who works around people who disagree with me by 180 degrees on politics, I feel very lucky to have known and worked with some of these individuals. In fact, aside from the political differences, I tend to find myself having a great deal in common with most of them. When it comes to the politics, we all just pay our nickle and make our choice as well as we possibly can.

As Jen Nelson put it,

Though it would be nice to return to a day when our political culture -- and our society in general -- was less antagonistic and more genteel, we shouldn't sugarcoat history. Voters have always felt strongly about the candidate of their choice, and this country has survived bitter divisions in the past. The question is, Are we willing to put the negativity behind us after the election is over -- no matter which candidate is the victor? - SFGATE

I would hope very much that most of us could answer yes to the question above. If most of us actually can, we are not a devided nation. We are a highly advanced and civilized nation that settles things in a decent way. We vote, we don't shoot one another. No politboro selects our next leader, we do.

Our fundamental debate that reccurs every four years is not a sign of division. Almost without exception, we settle this like mature adults. We can disagree and still walk away a unified whole.

That, my friends, is not division. That is enlightment. That is America. Go out there tommorrow and celebrate your right to vote your conscience. Regardless of who wins tommorrow we remain forever the bright and shining city on the hill.