Friday, July 15, 2005

More Proof that the MSM is the Enemy

Just click it and listen. It will only take a minute. Not only is it proof that the mainstream media is dishonest and actively burying information that is of vital importance, but it also proves that the democrats in Washington have been lying to us for years, sacrificing national security for political gain. (Via Roger L. Simon.)

UPDATE: Here's the original ABC News video of interest.

Was Valerie Plame a covert agent?

Power Line concludes: ixnay. Gotta give props to the Left for their consistency in choosing loser issues.

Funny too, I was thinking today, how we used to get monthly tallies on the "witch hunt" Ken Starr conducted against President Clinton and Company.

Anyone heard how much PlameGate has cost the taxpayers yet?



Someone get Perky Katie a calculator!

UPDATE: Power Line

Thursday, July 14, 2005

"boy, it's friggin' bright out here."

Truly laughing my ass off.

Follow the links!

"America is not the America it once was"

So sayeth Andrew Sullivan, after reading that Americans really aren't all that upset about "torture" at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The Volokh Conspiracy comments. The Comments are worth a read, but I dare say that the best rebuttal of Sullivan's assertion that Americans 50 years ago would not have stood for forcing POWs to wear bras comes from one of his readers:

At the beginning of WWII, Roosevelt and Churchill were outraged and disgusted at the way the Nazis bombed civilian populations. Bomber Command made a few attempts at low-level daytime raids but the cost in men and planes was horrific, and so they too soon switched to "area bombing," at night and from high altitude. By 1943 we were launching "Operation Gomorrah" which killed perhaps 50,000 in Hamburg, almost entirely civilians. Nearly 100,000 would die similarly in Tokyo, and then of course there were Fat Man and Little Boy, which were in a practical sense "terror" weapons designed to frighten the Japanese out of fighting to the bitter end.

The use of these weapons did not turn us into the Soviet Union which would in coming years use tanks to crush democratic revolutions, or for that matter the Russia which in the last decade used a WWI-style artillery barrage to suppress the Chechens in Grozny. Indeed, our bombs are now the most discriminating in the world. There is no morality or ethics within the casing of an artillery shell, but only within the hand that directs its course.
Well, yeah.

Maybe it's because it's not my ox being gored or maybe decades of video games and cable TV have hardened me to violence, or maybe I'm just one black-hearted sonufagun, but I must say: I haven't heard a single story or seen a single picture out of Gitmo or Abu Ghraib that has horrified me, or caused me to even stop for a minute and think about what my country has become, how low we've sunk, how when we do this stuff, "the terrorists have won".

Color me unmoved.

The Phillipines, Bali, Indonesia, Chechnya, Russia, Morocco, Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Spain, The United States, Kenya, Tanzania, and now England: battlegrounds all in what cannot possibly at this point be termed anything other than a "World War".

Ugly stuff has, is, and will continue to happen.

Call me whatever disparaging name you please, I can only respond to the "news" than men are doing nasty things to each other with an underwhelmed: "Duh".

How do I differ today from what I would have been, say, sixty years ago? Unknown, but my guess is that I, having not been immersed in Late Twentieth Century New Age Political Correctness, would have been cheering this stuff.

PlameGate

Been keeping up on TV? Try some facts on for size.

Do you suppose it's contagious?

An interesting phenomenon:
"The Imam of al-Jabiriyah preached against the Americans and the Worshippers shouted 'O' Allah, make America stronger!"
I hope it catches on.

The BBC...

...is taking one shit heap of guff for its coverage of the London Bombings.

ALSO: Faces of the dead and missing.

Children in the War Against Radical Islam

Child bombers

Bombing children

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

WorldCom's Ebbers Gets 25 Years in Prison

Back to your regularly-scheduled programming...

Bernard Ebbers, who as CEO of WorldCom oversaw the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history, was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison


The fraud for which Ebbers was charged began in mid-2000. Sadly, WorldCom's behaviour was not uncommon during the Eight Great Clinton Years of Peace and Prosperity, when crooked execs and stockbrokers bilked investors and employees out of billions in their rush toward affluence.

Janet Reno was busy with Big Tobacco.

WorldCom's Ebbers Gets 25 Years in Prison - Yahoo! News

Waiting Completed

My Grandmom has passed on, as they say.

Rest in Peace, Louise Josephine
31 Jan 1915 - 13 July 2005

Your Attention Please!

Analog Kid at Random Nuclear Strikes, in cooperation with Mr. Completely, is running a Postal Match. For those unfamiliar with the term, a Postal Match is where you compete in a shooting competition, and mail your targets to an agreed upon person to be judged and scored.

In this day and age, the ability to handle firearms proficiently is more important than ever, for a multitude of reasons. Although the Gun-Free Paradise of Puerto Rico will not currently allow me to own a firearm, I am strongly urging each and every one of you who owns firearms to participate in this Match. All it takes is a little extra time to scan your target and email it to AK. Because you should already be going to the range once a month, correct? So download the target he provides and use that.

The introduction to this postal match is here, and once you're finished reading the intro, you can get the rules, instructions, and download the target here.

Once I fill out the bajillion forms for a rifle permit in PR, I'm going to be joining up on each and every postal match that comes out. If participation is large enough, there will be prizes for the winner of each match, but for now let's jump on this and give it our best.

I'm serious about this folks.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

"Get it on the table, Mabel."

That's what my Grandfather ("Pop-pop", pronounced, by my sister at least, "PAHpup") used to say to my Grandmother ("Grandmom"). We'd go over to their house, my Mom and Dad and my sister, for whatever occasion, and we'd sit and watch football or boxing (this was when good boxing was on network TV) or baseball and my Poppop would sit in his chair and we'd all sit around in front of the TV. Me and my sister would drink the 7-Up my grandparents always had in the fridge, drink it like the proverbial fish, since we never had soda at home. My sister and I would monitor my grandfather's highball, hoping to mix the next one, so we could slip a measure of Rock 'n Rye into our sodas if the opportunity presented itself.

Grandmom would be in the kitchen, cooking. Her maiden name was Mignona (MIN-yo-nah), and it showed.

Halftime of the game would come around and my grandpop would rise from his chair and call out: "Get it on the table, Mabel."

Can you imagine? They were from a different era, my grandparents -- he worked for thirty years machining power train parts for Westinghouse, and she did the wash and cleaned the house and cooked the meals. He took care of the money, she took care of him. That was the deal they struck up.

I think she has never driven a car.

Anyway, on those occasions when we'd be at their house for dinner, when it was time to eat, my grandpop would take his seat at the head of the table in the dining room, and my grandmom would adjust a closet door at the other end of the room so he could watch the game (on the TV in the living room) in the mirror on the door. He'd crack open a cold can of beer -- Schmidts, if memory serves -- we'd all sit down, too, excepting grandmom, and she'd start bringing the food.

Spaghetti (my grandmom never made pasta), meatballs, bread, salad, applesauce, and the specialty: sausage in tomato sauce. And we'd dig in.

The food never ran out -- it was as if my grandmom had one of those devices like on Star Trek, like she could just press a button and out would pop more spaghetti and more meatballs. Sweet Holy Moses - a feast, every time, head-shakingly unforgettable meals.

Memories.

---

My Grandmom had a brain hemorrhage two weeks ago. She was in Intensive Care for ten days, then tonight was moved to a private room. At her written request and with the consent of her two daughters (one of whom is my Mom) and her only son, the ventilator and feeding tubes that have been keeping her alive since her surgery have been removed.

Grandmom is going to die, at age 90, in that private room, and probably soon now.

---

It's amazing, the memories that come flooding back. I visited her in her ICU room on Saturday and remembered. My sister was there when I arrived, then left soon after, and it was just me and Grandmom for an hour and fifteen minutes.

I cried the whole time.

People grieve mortal illness in loved ones in different ways, and for different reasons. I find myself crying because I am helpless to turn back time so I can tell her "I love you, Grandmom" all of the times that I should have, powerless to rewind and spend more time with her at recent family gatherings when she couldn't get around so well, lamentably unable to go back and visit her all of the times I should have stopped by, just because, just to talk. I think it unlikely that a day will come when I will remember her and not regret not having done those things.

We all live with those kind of regrets though, don't we?

---

They say that smell is the sense most tied to memory. I can confirm the notion. As I sat at her bedside, the smells came back more than anything else. The smell of her basement (she called it a "cellar"), a smell I know well despite not having been in her cellar in decades, a dark and damp smell, the smell of wet eighty year old concrete.

The smell of her rug, an old rug (they were, as most people who lived through the Great Depression were, very thrifty - my Grandmom and Grandpop). Not dirty, not soiled by pets, not unpleasant, but not a fresh clean odor either. I can't explain it. But I can smell it.

The smell of the powder she used -- they had no air conditioning -- and she was from the time when women used powder to keep cool.

And, of course, the food.

I remember how I'd go over there for dinner, and she'd be cooking, always cooking. My Uncle Tommy and my Grandpop and I would sit at the kitchen table, and she'd deliver the goods. We'd watch TV and mange. We'd watch Hee Haw and professional wrestling, which my uncle and grandpop called "wrassling". This was good professional wrestling -- Chief Jay Strongbow and Billy Whitewolf, George the Animal Steele, Gorilla Monsoon, Bruno Sammartino, Andre the Giant -- the Golden Era. We'd watch Hee Haw and wrassling and howl with laughter, the three of us.

God only knows what my Grandmom was thinking -- looking at three generations of men reveling in the absurdity of ludicrous Americana.

She used to make this pot roast -- oh she'd cook it early in the day and then it would just stew in its juices for hours. A finer roast has never graced this Earth, I assure you. My uncle would put ketchup on it, and offense that would have me shaking my head for days and days. I am still amazed that she never cuffed him upside the head on that account.

What a pot roast.

Dear me, the memories - the old ones, numerous but faded, the recent ones, too few, too fleeting.

---

For the past ten days my Grandmom was hooked into all manner of tubes and IVs and wires and stuff. It was atrocious, how uncomfortable she looked. I am in no hurry to see her go, but to keep her alive in that way would have been an abomination.

She's resting easy now, and soon, I suspect, will go to her Husband (departed over a decade ago) and her God -- she attended Catholic Mass every Sunday. He will welcome her, I am certain.

A finer soul He has never created, after all.

Her family will be left, after the grief passes, with the sure knowledge that we were blessed to have loved her, and blessed to be loved by her.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Live Free or Die

A commenter (Claudia) in the last post drew my attention to an interesting characteristic shared by many criminals, terrorists, and liberals. These people believe that if they do something bad, or good for that matter, it is not their fault. It is society's fault that the pedophile raped that little girl and her brother and killed her entire family. It is America's fault that islamofascist hijackers flew planes into skyscrapers and killed 3000 people. They had grievances. It wasn't their fault, it was the world they live in. To a liberal, it’s never the case that the criminal should “take responsibility” for his crime, but rather, “What made him do what he did?” I don't think that liberals believe that human beings are in control of their own lives. They must think that we are preprogrammed automatons. If you are successful, then they want to take your wealth and give it to those “less fortunate,” as if success is all about luck. This lack of belief in self-determination would also explain why liberals fight any notion of there being a moral right and wrong on any given issue. Of course, when one follows their arguments to their logical conclusions, you find a contradiction every time. For example, if you insist that having moral convictions about what is right and what is wrong is itself wrong, you are displaying a moral conviction. If you assert that people are not in control of their own lives, then what would be the point in arguing about it? For that matter, why not just slit your wrists right now? Without self-determination, what would be the point in trying to achieve a better life? You can't!

About those grievances...

...I think Lileks (i think it was Lileks) stated it best: "The West [at war] kills people as a means to an end. For terrorists, killing people is the end."

As for being afraid, check it out: We're not Afraid!

Fury

"How in the world can the dangerous turns of a convicted child molester cross your desk—high risk mind you—and yet you find more benevolence toward the violator than you do towards the violated? He's now killed a little boy that he molested, all in the wake of your legal blessing—in retroactive thanksgiving towards you and your judicial liberalism, Judge. And for good measure, he beat the rest of that little boy's family to death, and abused his sister just for kicks. All because you let him go—judge."
Read it all. Our "judges" must STOP putting the rights of pedophiles above those of our children.

The situation with many of our judges is bad, but not only due to their negligence in protecting our children. I can't help but notice the similarity in how the rights of terrorists are protected by judges both here and in Europe, even as the blood of their victims is splashed on the walls of London. And unless the attack is on the scale of 9-11, our governments refuse to punish those states which actively support terrorism. Now everyone has their own theory as to why people want to blow us up.
"We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.
The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism.
"
I had, in an earlier post, suggested half jokingly that the reason for Islamic terrorism has to do with impotence. I am more inclined to believe, seriously, that their religion is indeed a death cult - they worship death. (To be honest, I don't care why they want to kill us. Trying to reason with your own executioner is an act of insanity if you ask me.) Our enemies are not afraid of death. Therefore, we must determine what it is that they are afraid of and use that to our advantage. Giving captured terrorists blood transfusions of pig's blood might help... kinda twisted though.

Also, and this is essential, we must hold someone responsible for these acts of terrorism. Iran is only the most likely candidate/target. Syria is also a sponsor of terrorism. But would invading Iran or Syria actually make a difference? Could it actually make things worse? I'm just asking. Eventually, things may become more urgent. An example may need to be made. If it comes down to it, if we have to decide between freedom and survival, the enemy needs to understand that the U.S. is not Europe. "Give me liberty or give me death" are not just words to an American. I think that nuking Mecca and Medina would very much be considered a rational response in this country, and would be demanded if, say for example, the water supply near Lodi, California were poisoned causing mass death (millions).

It is true, we are not afraid, but could you imagine what it would be like if we as a nation really were afraid?

Rage

For four years the MSM have done nothing but attack President Bush, and the democrats in congress have gone against him at every turn even on things like CAFTA which they know is a win-win deal. NAFTA was fine and dandy, but free-trade is too good for the poor people of Costa Rica and Honduras. Hypocrites. They, the democrats, will not allow any kind of victory for Bush no matter what. That is why they undermine the war effort and compare our military to Nazis. They have become the party of NO. Do you think for a second that the democrats would be demanding an exit strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan if AlGore or JFKerry were in office? How about an exit strategy for Kosovo already? It's a freakin' quagmire! And why did we bomb Kosovo, anyway? What did it have to do with national security? Not a thing, but so long as a democrat is president, whether it's Kosovo or Somalia or Vietnam or Hiroshima, it's all good. The second we have a Republican president, it's an unethical war and extremist judges and class warfare, elitist media squawks about "courage" and "speaking truth to power," and everybody's rights are being trampled, etc.

Well, they've thrown everything in their arsenal at this President yet the established media and the DNC, the legions of the left including ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBCNYTLATPBSBBCNPR, and let's not forget Hollywood which has produced nothing but anti-conservative propaganda (with the notable exceptions of the Passion, the Incredibles, and maybe Team America) since 9-11, have all failed. In entertainment/media circles, and academe as well, open hatred for Bush is a prerequisite for promotion and has become so transparent as to be implicit in nearly everything we see in the newspaper, on tv, and not just the news shows, on the big screen, and in the classroom. But Bush has not broken any law. Even if "there were no WMDs," saying something that isn't true but that you believe to be true is not lying, otherwise we would all be liars. Bush did not lie, and you cannot point to a case where he did lie. It's all huff and puff. Like Jayson Blair, established professionals in the media, journalists, politicians have and continue to make stuff up in the hopes that something, anything, will stick. They all have fallen for fictional reports backed by anonymous sources. They bought into lie after lie after lie after lie, willingly, eagerly, hungrily. They need to believe those lies. They need to believe that Bush is evil to support their world view, because to believe otherwise would mean that they are insane and/or stupid.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

The Left and the Damage they cause

Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the past few years, you know about the Joe "Frogmarch" Wilson/Valerie Plame case, and how the liberals were howling for Karl Rove's head. Wilson talked about how he wanted Rove frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs, and the Left what whipping itself into a masturbatory frenzy trying to get whoever "leaked" Plame's name to Robert Novak arrested and sent to court. On what charges, I'm not sure. Hell, I'm not even sure if the Left knew what charges they wanted to press, but that didn't stop them from frothing at the mouth and imitating feces-flinging monkeys in their shrieking hysterics to do something to somebody.

Well, the leaks came out, it wasn't Karl Rove, one of them is in jail, and now we're reaping the whirlwind.

"As I write this, two stories of profound importance languish in our hands," Clifton wrote. "The public would be well served to know them, but both are based on documents leaked to us by people who would face deep trouble for having leaked them. Publishing the stories would almost certainly lead to a leak investigation and the ultimate choice: talk or go to jail. Because talking isn't an option and jail is too high a price to pay, these two stories will go untold for now. How many more are out there?"


While the Right was patiently trying to explain that there wasn't a crime committed by whoever "leaked" Plame's name, the Left was doing everything and anything it could to try and pin the leak on nefarious VRWC plots. And now that the Left has gotten it's way, and people are in jail, it has effected people the country over. Congradulations, Liberals! You have officially screwed not only yourselves, but the rest of the country! I hope you're happy!

I swear, Liberalism is a mental disorder. A disease. A condition of the brain that removes all logic and reason. And as if the above didn't make you angry enough, check out part two of the linked blog post!

Talk-radio hosts regularly discuss candidates and ballot issues, often with a particular point of view in favor of one or opposed to another.

Do those comments constitute a financial contribution to a campaign?

Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham thinks they do. In a ruling issued Friday, Wickham said the comments and activities by KVI-AM (570) hosts Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson on behalf of the Initiative 912 campaign are in-kind contributions that must be reported to the Public Disclosure Commission.


That's right folks, political speech by a radio host is now considered "contributions" and is subject to campaign finance rules! Thank you McCain-Fiengold, you worthless bastards! And guess what else might fall under that logic?

Brian Maloney, a former Seattle-area talk-show host who now runs a national blog on talk-radio issues, raises this question: If talk-radio comments count as political contributions, why not newspaper editorials? Or Web sites?


NannyState is here, and it's looking for things to control. Where's the reset button?