Labels: democrats, un

"It bothers Americans when we're told how unpopular we are with the rest of the world. For some of us, at least, it gets our back up -- and our natural tendency is to tell the French, for example, that we'd rather not hear from them until the day when they need us to bail them out again.

In the meantime, let's be realistic about the world we live in. Mexican leaders apparently have an economic policy based on exporting their own citizens, while complaining about US immigration policies that are far less exclusionary than their own. The French jail perfectly nice people for politically incorrect comments, but scold us for holding terrorists at Guantanamo."

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"The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm."

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A Nigerian lesbian who "married" four women last weekend in Kano State has gone into hiding from the Islamic police, with her partners.

Under Sharia law, adopted in the state seven years ago, homosexuality and same-sex marriages are outlawed and considered very serious offences.

Lesbianism is also illegal under Nigeria's national penal code.

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Labels: democrats, islamofascism

"We were happy then. And we didn't even know it."

Forty years ago Friday, the Montreal Universal and International Exposition of 1967 opened, a seminal event that still casts a spell on generations of Canadians....It was a time of optimism. a time when everything seemed possible for the city, for the country...The world was no more peaceful then. There was the Cold War and the Vietnam War and the Six Day War in the Middle East.

The site's ideals of modernity were seen in its monorail and its utopian architecture. A sleek subway had opened the previous fall. "Everything was novel. To take the Métro in 1967 was a happening. You felt you were boarding a futuristic craft," Mr. Laurendeau said.

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Munich was very popular for a short time -from the signing of the agreement on September 29, 1938 until the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, or until Hitler's nature become unmistakable even to the most appeasement-oriented Chamberlain supporter.

Ideas do have consequences and we all need to understand that the war on terror is taking place as much in the realm of ideas as it is on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This would be a good place to quote an important British writer, George Orwell, who wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Even in America, our children are often taught a watered down, inoffensive, and culturally sensitive version of events ranging from the Crusades to the battle at the Alamo.

It’s time for people who believe that they have a stake in Western civilization and its traditions to get a little backbone — even if it offends somebody.

Read more from Fred Thompson

Labels: the good guys

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Yesterday, Senator Reid said the troop surge was against the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. That is plainly false. The Iraq Study Group report was explicitly favorable toward a troop surge to secure Baghdad. Senator Reid said there should be a regional conference on Iraq. Apparently, he doesn't know that there is going to be one next week. Senator Reid said he doesn't have real substantive meetings with the President. Yet immediately following last week's meeting at the White House, he said, "It was a good exchange; everyone voiced their considered opinion about the war in Iraq."

What's most troubling about Senator Reid's comments yesterday is his defeatism. Indeed, last week, he said the war is already lost. And the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat.

Maybe it's a political calculation. Some Democratic leaders seem to believe that blind opposition to the new strategy in Iraq is good politics. Senator Reid himself has said that the war in Iraq will bring his party more seats in the next election. It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security interests of our country, not on the interests of their political party.

Source

Yesterday on CNN's "The Situation Room," a segment was aired on Reid's Lost War. CNN correspondent Dana Bash asked the Senator Reid whether he would believe General Petraeus when the General comes to Capitol Hill to explain that there is progress being made in Iraq. Refusing to risk being confronted by facts that might not agree with Reid's Lost War comment, the Democrat's Senate Majority Leader said he wouldn't believe General Petraeus.

Source & Video

Labels: democrats

“If men were angels,” wrote James Madison in “Federalist” 51, “no government would be necessary.” Because men are not angels, he argued, government is an inescapable necessity — not to perfect us, but to restrain our worst proclivities as well as to cultivate the better.

Recognizing the reality of human sinfulness and our proneness to partiality and unreason, we come to recognize government neither as the means nor the obstacle to our individual and social perfection, but as a necessary set of institutions that restrain and chasten as much as they enable and liberate.

To Read and those who hewed to his libertarian line, the warmaking powers of the state were one of the most horrible things about it, and they did not believe it was a proper duty of the American government to go abroad to destroy international communism, or to legally crush domestic communism.

This became one of the clearest dividing lines between nascent conservatism and libertarianism, with the Buckley side mocking libertarians' effete and useless disengagement from the Cold War, scoffing at them for evading serious geopolitics for little intellectual seminars on demunicipalizing garbage service.

What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations? Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right.

Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment.

Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism.

If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.

Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement. A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.

"The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen."

Andrew Klavan

Labels: quotes

Last week, Connecticut Republican congressman Christopher Shays briefed his Republican colleagues on the progress he observed in Iraq earlier this month. No member of Congress has visited Iraq more often than Shays, and since he’s an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s war strategies, members of Congress were attentive as he gave his impressions from his 16th trip.

He recounts that during one of his visits, behaving more like a “blunt member of Congress” than like the culturally sensitive former Peace Corps volunteer he is, he warned Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki about the consequences of delay. “I said to him, ‘Take a good look at me. You might not see me in November. You could have a Democratic Congress and then face deadlines that could mean we leave before Iraq is ready to stand alone.’”

Shays is counseling patience and resolve. He points out that last November’s voters have gotten what they wanted with a new secretary of Defense, a new ground commander, and a new mission and strategy in Iraq.

Source

Labels: democrats, the good guys

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I think the white house should have a global warming summit. Have lots of bottled water and booze. And hand out one square of TP to the ladies as they go into the ladies room. They can get 2 or 3 if they provide proof of "pesky" issues. That liberals believe that they can make pronouncements from on high on how the little people should behave never ceases to amaze.

As I drove home, I heard a local DJ saying that no one will ever be able to listen to her music without thinking of butt-wiping, and then speculating that maybe Lance Armstrong had left her because "she wasn't diligent enough with the paperwork." That was the first of many similar jokes.

Labels: global warming

CBS executives deny it, but there's a growing feeling within the network that Katie Couric is an expensive, unfixable mistake.

"It's a disaster. Everybody knows it's not working. CBS may not cut her loose, but I guarantee you, somebody's thinking about it. We're all hunkered down, waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Couric, 50, draws fewer viewers than did avuncular "interim" anchor Bob Schieffer, 20 years her senior. Much of the feature-oriented format she debuted with is gone, as is her first executive producer, Rome Hartman.

"The broadcast is an abject failure, by any measure," says Rich Hanley, director of graduate programs at the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University.

Source

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"We've done it," said senior producer Julie Snyder, who was personally interviewed for a 2003 This American Life episode, "Going Eclectic," in which she described what it's like to be a bilingual member of the ACLU trained in kite-making by a Japanese stepfather. "There is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that we have not exhaustively documented and grouped by theme."

Labels: clintons, democrats

The latest polls are revealing some trends that have the Hillary Camp wondering what it will take to make their shrew likeable. I think it is likely an impossible task. The latest Gallup Poll has her favorable ratings collapsing from 58% to 45% and her negatives climbing to an almost insurmountable 52%. Even Dick Morris who long ago proclaimed that Hillary was only beatable by Condi Rice, notes that her popularity in every demographic of her base is falling through the floor, is backing away from his predicitions about her being the Democrat to beat as a result of her attracting new first time, women voters. All and all bad news for Hillary and good news for America.

Source

The Clinton machine is obviously stumped for the moment about how to deal with Obama. But my sense, Casselman to the contrary notwithstanding, is that the candidates other than Obama are not much more than nuisances for Clinton, who is a plausible presidential candidate, while Obama is not. And that the Clinton machine is relentless, unconstrained by conscience, and will prevail. It will then tap Obama to fill out the bottom of a formidable ticket. For the moment, I think "my sense" is worth about as much as the Gallup Poll.

WASHINGTON, April 20 Democratic campaign strategists say an increasing number of fundraisers are lending their services to presidential rivals of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

The strategists say the fundraisers are alienated by the Clinton campaign's aggressive method of dealing with prospective donors and pressure from the campaign to either raise money for Clinton or sit out the Democrats' nominating process, The Washington Times reported Friday.

Source

Labels: clintons

He had, for example, a large capacity for facing brute contingency as part of human existence. A great deal of life is chance. (The fact that you were born, for example. Think how arbitrary that is.) And much of the rest of life consists of learning to evade that truth – walling it off, away from consciousness, because otherwise the reality of it would be too hard to fathom. Instead, we throw ourselves into fictions of power and belonging: nationalism, militarism, religion, the acquisition of cool stuff. These are ways to contain both the vulnerability before chance and the terrors of loneliness. In Vonnegut’s understanding of the world, loneliness is a fundamental part of human experience that became much, much worse in the United States, somehow, during the second half of the twentieth century – with no particular reason to think it will get better anytime soon.

Muslim militants behead seven abducted workers in Philippines

Zamboanga City, Philippines - Al-Qaeda-linked Muslim Abu Sayyaf rebels have beheaded seven workers they abducted earlier this week on a southern Philippine island, the military said Friday.

The decapitated heads of the seven workers were delivered to two military outposts in Parang town on Jolo island, 1,000 kilometres south of Manila, on Thursday.

Source

Anti-police riots in Sweden

On the 14th of April the Swedish police was subject to stonethrowing in the southern city of Malmö (third largest in Sweden). A large gang attacked the police what were filing a police report regarding a man with a sword. The gang, mostly younger people, then started the stonethrowing.

Source

Labels: islamofascism

EU agrees to penalties for racism and xenophobia

LUXEMBOURG (AFP) - The European Union on Thursday made inciting racism and xenophobia crimes throughout its 27 member states in a landmark decision tempered by caveats to appease free speech concerns.

The new deal specifies one- to three-year prison terms be available for incitement to violence or hatred "against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin".

Source

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"The novelist Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at age 84. Back in the day when I took my lessons in political thought from John Lennon, Kurt Vonnegut was one of my favorite writers.

Just before Vonnegut became a celebrity he collected his shorter fiction in Welcome to the Monkey House. Vonnegut included his early dystopian story "Harrison Bergeron" in the collection. In it he envisioned a nightmare future in which "everyone was finally equal." It's a story that runs against the grain of the kind of leftist political orthodoxy that Vonnegut came to embody."

Mr Blair expounded his "doctrine of international community" in Chicago in April 1999, during Nato's air war against Serbia. It was an emotive appeal to America to choose internationalism over isolationism and, given the horrors of ethnic cleansing, was none the worse for that. But what the Prime Minister has signally neglected in his zeal for pre-emptive action is to provide Britain with the military means to bring it to a successful conclusion. Under strength and poorly equipped, the Armed Forces have been stretched to the limit, and their prospects look no rosier under Mr Blair's successor, whoever that may be. Labour has traded on the professionalism of the men and women in uniform to grandstand on the international stage, and that cynical attitude has now caught up with it.

Labels: islamofascism

It's time for him to stop relying on the bully pulpit and the big screen, and put some skin in the game. He should buy Chrysler, which parent DaimlerChrysler put up for sale in February, and make it the greenest automaker on the planet.

Dump Chrysler's gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines altogether and replace them with fuel cells, electric motors and engines that run on biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel.

Labels: economics

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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was attending ceremonies at the Natanz enrichment plant, where the Iranian press has speculated he will announce the installation of 3,000 centrifuges, a dramatic expansion of the program. State-run TV said only that he would announce "good nuclear news" in a speech at the ceremony.

Across Iran, school bells rang to mark the "national day of nuclear energy." The government sent out SMS messages of congratulations for the occasion to millions of mobile phone users.

In Tehran, some 200 students formed a human chain at Iran's Atomic Energy Organization while chanting "death to America" and "death to Britain." The students burnt flags of the U.S. and Britain.

Source

Labels: islamofascism

At the heart of that thinking is this proposition: We’re the problem. America, or rather George W. Bush, is the problem. We’re not doing enough to get the Israelis and Syrians together; we’re not doing enough to address the grievances of the Palestinian people (than whom “nobody is suffering more,” according to Barack Obama); we’re not doing enough to mollify the dictators who are working against us.

Akin to this is the feeling shared by most Democrats and, it seems, by most American voters, that if we can just get our troops out of Iraq all will be well in the world.

There are evil leaders out there — the mullahs of Iran, Assad and his thugs, Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his pal Fidel Castro — who hate the United States and want to do us as much damage as they can.

They don’t hate us just because the Republican Congress didn’t raise the minimum wage or because George W. Bush has a stubborn streak and speaks with a West Texas accent. They hate us because of our freedoms and because we have worked to export those freedoms around the world.

Friendship, hope, and a determination to be on the road to peace are not enough to protect us in this world. A speedy exit from Iraq might make many Americans less unsettled while watching cable news — for a while. But it wouldn’t make us safer. It will just leave us more likely to face the kind of surprise we had on Sept. 11, 2001.

I recall reading a few weeks ago an article on Democratic fund raising that quoted a woman as saying that “we were very safe under the Clinton administration.” No, we weren’t “very safe” — we just thought we were. Bill Clinton knew we weren’t “very safe,” and he took some steps — unfortunately, not enough — to make us safer.

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I’ve become bored hearing myself recount all the usual reasons—I dislike the anti-American Michael Moore element in the Democratic base, have less faith than my friends and neighbors in the government’s ability (or obligation) to solve all social problems, and so on. All that just invites a potentially endless argument.

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Labels: the good guys

Only 6% of Korean eighth-graders expressed confidence in their math skills, compared with 39% of eighth-graders in the United States, according to the latest annual study on education by the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The problem is that the surveyed Korean students are better at math than the American students.

Their kids are unsure and good, in short, while ours are cocky and dumb--not exactly a good position for the U.S. to occupy in an increasingly competitive global economy.

Source: Forbes

Labels: economics

I caught a few minutes of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" on the way to work this morning. That was enough to remind why it's a bad idea to tune in NPR news shows even when sports talk radio breaks for commercials.

NPR's reporter described the Iranian capture of British sailors as part of a tit-for-tat involving the capture of Iranians and British personnel in and around Iran. So for NPR, the seizure of British sailors minding their own business on the open seas is not just morally indistinguishable from our capture of Iranian agents sent to Iraq to foment killing, including the killing of Americans; it's an understandable response to that action.

Labels: democrats, left-wing media

Why didn’t Iran just kidnap 15 American soldiers?

That’s the question that no one seems to ask, especially those who consider Iran’s actions some sort of response to American wrong-doing. I’ve long argued in these virtual pages that George W. Bush scares the holy shinola out of the world’s bad men. [LIMESTONE NOTE: He used an absolute! Danger!!!!] If Iran tried this stunt on American troops, it’s hard to imagine President Bush being mindful of pleas to give democracy time to work.

This is where Bush is most effective as a wartime leader. For all his faults in communicating and building consensuses and crafting a coherent post-occupation strategy in Iraq, we’re fortunate to have him on that wall when the world’s bad men come calling.

Labels: democrats, islamofascism, the good guys

Feinstein Leaves Senate Defense Panel Amid Controversy

Government watchdog groups want more answers as to why Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) stepped down from a military appropriations subcommittee at a time questions were being asked billions of dollars in federal defense contracts going to her husband's companies.

Feinstein resigned her post as chairwoman of the Senate Subcommittee on Military Construction Appropriations last week.

Source

Labels: democrats

Tariffs Imposed on Chinese Coated Paper (04/02/2007)

The U.S. imposed duties on two Chinese makers of coated paper, one at 10.9%, the other at 20.4%. The Commerce Department says the volume of coated paper imports from China increased 177% last year to $224 million.

The decision came on the grounds that China is illegally subsidizing some of its exports. Paper manufacturer NewPage Corp. filed a complaint, with the backing of leaders of several industries, to the Commerce Department regarding the Chinese government's practices.

Labels: economics

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What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the “sacred soil of the Fatherland”, etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

Labels: democrats, islamofascism

Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

Source

Dozens of Jewish tombs damaged in northern France

PARIS (Reuters) - More than 50 Jewish tombs were damaged overnight in a cemetery in the northern French city of Lille, a local government official said on Sunday.

"Fifty-one tombstones were damaged, of which two were broken. The vertical part was separated from the horizontal part or broken," a spokeswoman for the local prefecture said, adding that none of the tombs were broken into.

Source

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