Jeez

Dear Europe,



Awake yet?

Regards,

Me

Michelle Malkin: IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Unemployment Rate Declines in January

Good news on the Macro front.

Employers stepped up hiring in January, boosting payrolls by 193,000 and lowering the nation's unemployment rate to 4.7 percent, the lowest since July 2001.

BREITBART.COM

Tribes gave to Reid after hiring Abramoff

D'oh!

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada began receiving campaign contributions from at least four American Indian tribes only after they hired Jack Abramoff, Republicans charged this week in an effort to tie the Senate Democratic leader to the disgraced lobbyist.

On Thursday, Reid shrugged off questions about money he received from tribal clients of Abramoff, who pleaded guilty last month to three felonies after being accused of exchanging meals, travel and gifts for political favors.

"I've said that I received money from Indians in the past and will continue to do so," Reid said.

"Indians," he says.

Someone get that man a PC Dictionary.

reviewjournal.com

Good entry

Props: Kingdom Bound Books Online!

Subject: El Shukrijumah

Got this in an email today from an Internet acquaintance.

I didn't want to bump the thread again with this, but I wanted to expand on my reasons for believing an attack was imminent, and the target is Detroit:

Washington Times

Incidentally, Hamilton, Ontario is approximately 150 miles from Detroit.

Also, along the lines of bin Laden's truce offer, Al Jazeera reported yesterday that al Zawahiri made a truce offer of his own, inviting President Bush to convert to Islam. (Hindustan Times). This is relevant, because after the 9/11 attacks, many otherwise radical clerics and Imams were able to condemn OBL on the grounds that he didn't offer the kaffir an opportunity to submit to Islam before he slaughtered them, in accordance with Sharia law. Now, AQ's top two have both made the offer in a span of three weeks (OBL also offered a truce to the UK just prior to the London subway bombings). And the offers were made prior to the SOTU address, where Bush would certainly reject the offers in no uncertain terms.

Also, Zawahiri's white turban, white robe and the absence of his AK-47 were symbolic of this gesture of "peace". I don't have any read on the black background, except that it hasn't been done before. I don't buy the puffed-up presumptions that he's petrfied and taking extra steps to hide by concealing his background (we spend too much time congratulating ourselves on kicking ass, not enough time resigning ourselves to the long, titanic struggle this war is going to be). I believe the background is a trigger of some sort.

Also, multiple al Zawahiri tapes have consistently triggered attacks (outside of Iraq and Afghanistan) within 30 days of the last tape release. That pattern is based on two tapes released within a three month period. Never before have there been three AZ tapes and one OBL tape in a thirty day period.

And finally, I think they have to hit a hard target and they have to do it on Bush's watch to inflict maximum damage on the President and support for the overall war. A radiological attack on the Super Bowl would accomplish that in spades, and unlike the 9/11 attack, it would divide this country in a way we've never been divided before. They're not going to have an opportunity like this, in a place like this (a heavily Muslim, border city) again during the Bush presidency.

I hope I'm wrong. Or, at the very least, if I'm right, I hope they fail. But I'll be stunned if they don't try something huge on Sunday.

That is all.

Contest Entry

What if it were the media whose ox was gored?

Instapun***K.com Archives

Here's our entry:



Pretty unkind, eh? I agree.

Nothing funny about this kind of "humor" at all.

Three Cheers for the President of Latvia

At the "Sound of Europe" summit, German newspaper editor, Roger de Weck, chose the wrong target to bully as he invited the president of Latvia, Vaika Vike-Freiberga, to agree that new EU members from east and central Europe posed a danger because they are too pro-American. Her from-the-hip response can be found here. An excerpt:

"Throughout the years, in parts of Europe, intellectuals and even politicians were enamoured with the idea of Marxism and even some thought the Soviet Union was an embodiment of what Socialism and the protection of the worker was all about. America was more realistic. America looked on us as captive nations. We were captive nations, and we are now free."

After this statement, the old-European newspaper editor cut-off the President of Latvia - something we have become accustomed to here in the States. When did journalists' interrupting presidents become acceptable? I wonder if President Ahmageddondinnerjakkket of Iran ever gets interrupted and/or bullied by a newspaper man.

You'd best git back to the Plantation before I cut yer Foot off!

Got a better caption?
No wonder Bubba's such a slut.

It's the economy, stupid

Another flavor of BDS?

Brilliant!

From BOTW reader John Hockert:

In all the discussion about journalist casualties in Iraq, I have heard no one comment on the fact that the media's behavior increases the risk to its reporters. The goal of the terrorists in Iraq, like that of terrorists everywhere, is not to inflict casualties, but rather to frighten people by creating the impression of lawlessness and illustrate the inability of legally constituted authorities to maintain order and provide protection. The media are a vital tool in achieving this goal. If the terrorists can get more media coverage by killing or seriously injuring one reporter than by killing a division of Iraqi soldiers, guess whom they are going to target.

If the networks really wanted to protect their reporters, they would do the following: First, issue large press decals to put on helmets, vehicles, etc. so that reporters were readily identifiable. Second, establish a well-publicized policy that any terrorist injury or killing of a reporter would cause a one-week blackout of any coverage of terrorist acts in Iraq. All coverage from Iraq for that week would focus on progress in rebuilding the nation and "good" news. Such a policy would reduce the deaths of, and injuries to, reporters in Iraq by at least a factor of 10. After all, how many al-Jeezera reporters have been killed by the Iraqi terrorists? The Iraqi terrorists are bloodthirsty and evil, but within their warped view of the world, they are not stupid.

Sadly, the media seem willing to risk the lives of their reporters in order to focus on the bad news in Iraq.

I think Hockert may be on to something;)
And it's not just terrorists that are smarter than the media, the MSM's intended audience has largely outgrown them as well.

Another 16-year-old gets a GTO

The school board is scheduled to vote Wednesday on settling the part of the lawsuit Frazier filed against board members, his teacher and assistant principal for $32,500. But Frazier, a Boynton Beach High junior who said he was berated in class when he refused to stand during the pledge [i.e., pledge of allegiance], wants more than that.

Well of course he does. I expect every kid in Florida will be pulling the same stunt now. (Via Stop the ACLU.)

Tee Shirt Mania

Who was Dave Delp?

State of the Union Stuff

Hillary grinning

Classic stuff from BDS get together in Chicago. I especially like the self-labeled "revolutionary" at about 4:00 and the lone Bush supporter at 5:00:

"Well there were supposed to be more of us and I come from the farthest away of any of them. Since we haven't renounced violence I'm gonna use it on a few of them if they don't show up."

BIG protest in St. Louis.

CCN was all over...

...the Mother Sheehan Arrest Story this morning. The schmecklehead anchor was "reporting" what had happened (he was looking down and reading) and Soledad O'Brien, from the other side of the split screen, interrupted him to note that Sheehan was asked to cover up her shirt and refused prior to her removal. The anchor said: "That differs from this account here. This is from her blog on michaelmoore.com..." and then he read Sheehan's "letter" verbatim with the text on screen.

Amazing.

CNN "reporting" Cindy Sheehan according to Cindy Sheehan from Michael Moore's web site.

Booyaka!

Excerpting now:

I was never told that I couldn't wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things...I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately, and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2,245, huh? I just got back from there."

I told him that my son died there. That's when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.
.
.
.
I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight. I will file it. It is time to take our freedoms and our country back.

I don't want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government. That's why I am going to take my freedoms and liberties back. That's why I am not going to let Bushco take anything else away from me...or you.

Comforting.

Don't be scared to read it all. It's a mind scramble.

And yet they never learn

You want to know why conservatives rule talk radio?

Because of crap like this:

Remember all those news stories in 1993 about how the nomination of former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to replace conservative Justice Byron White on the United States Supreme Court would “tilt the balance of the court to the left?”

Of course you don’t. Because there weren’t any.

Ya don't say....

Most of the people running the Has-Been Media back then are still in charge today. Or it's their like-minded successors. If you read the newspapers back in 1993 you would never have heard about "far-left nominee Ginsburg", or "left-wing judge Ginsburg", despite the fact that the woman is a card carrying member of the ACLU. The only way you could find about about how far left Ginsburg was, was by listening to conservative radio, which in 1993 meant Rush Limbaugh and various local DJs. The conservative backlash against the Has-Been media started on the radio, and we've controlled the airwaves ever since, at least in national ratings. I make no guarantees when it comes to local nutjobs. God knows Seattle had more than it's share.

I guess what really makes my mind pop is the fact that the Has-Been Media still tries to call itself "objective". They haven't been objective in fifty years, and they ain't gonna change now.

Sensitive PETA guy....

...gets totally owned on Scare Tactics.

Kennedy loses mind on National TV

Let's see here.....

Taking credit for crap you didn't do? Check.
Incoherent drunken ramblings? Check.
Baseless accusations? Check.
Pandering to extreme Leftists? Check.

It's all there.

The Klueless Kos Klan must be thrilled.

Of course, the effect that Ted hic! Kennedy wanted failed to materialize, thank god, and the Senate voted for cloture on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito.

The worthless gasbags who voted "Nay" on cloture? The DANE has the links and the info.

Cindy For Senate

Hahahahaha!

Run Cindy Run.

I have grown tired of Patty Murray being the dumbest woman in the Senate.

You knew it was going to happen....

Hey, guess who's to blame for the elections in palestine? Y'know, that whole Hamas "Let's blow up all the jews" thing?

Well, if you listen to the Saudis, we are.

A confidential Saudi report prepared just weeks before the Palestinian elections predicted a Hamas victory in Gaza and the West Bank and puts the blame on the United States: "By failing to strengthen (President Mahmoud )Abbas's position, the U.S. has paved the way for a Hamas victory," states a document prepared by the Saudi National Security Assessment Project.

Pay no mind to the fact that the House of Saud exports Wahabbism at every opportunity. Forget that if it weren't for the fact that Saudi Arabia supports splodydopes in palestine, the splodydopes would run out of money and support rather quickly. It's all the fault of the nasty USA!

"Moreover, the U.S administration's faith in the power of elections to transform people makes it oblivious to the possibility that the democratic process is often a double-edged sword which can have unintended consequences," goes on to say the policy brief delivered last Dec. 27 by the SNSAP's director, Nawaf Obaid.

Furthermore, the brief states that the U.S. failed to press "Abbas to implement his commitments to security and disarmament, and has not succeeded in convincing donor nations to fulfill their pledges for financial assistance to the Palestinians."

It's laughable. It really is. The Arab countries in the Middle East have been using and supporting the terrorist groups that make up palestine for decades, and now that those terrorist groups are in power, the goat-fucking sand fleas want to whine and blame us.

Just think - if we were pulling oil out of ANWAR, we could tell the entire region to go piss up a rope. Thanks for keeping us dependant on foreign oil, liberals!

Recent surveys conducted by the Saudi National Security Assessment Project indicate that there is deep distrust of senior officials in the Palestinian Authority, most of whom are Fatah members. "This situation has created an opportunity that Hamas has been able to exploit."

The brief cites United Nations statistics indicating that "almost 75 percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line."

Maybe that's because the United Nations as a whole were too busy giving Yasser Arafish a humjob to notice that he was a corrupt greedy crook who took the billions upon billions of dollars given to the palestinian authority and used them for his own perposes, mostly including blowing up Jewish children. The palestinians as a country and as a society produce nothing but misery and terrorists. They choose to be that way. I say to hell with them all. Maybe when they stop blowing up busses and bat mitzvahs and pizza shops I'll start caring about them again.

Gah. Read the whole article. It's one big "Let's all blame the USA and try to make the world forget that the reason the palestinians are even a problem is because we turned them into nothing more than terrorist animals" piece. As I said earlier, the palestinians just made our lives a whole lot easier, because we no longer have to pretend that they're not subhuman parasitic asscannons. I just think it's funny to have a major supporter of the palestinian's terrorism blame us for Hamas winning elections.

Found at Random Nuclear Strikes.

Iraq's Insurgency Joins Fight for Democratic Iraq - Democrats SILENT

Democrats (be they on the internet or your TV set), driven by the radical left, have made it quite clear what their assessment of our efforts in Iraq have amounted to - "QUAGMIRE", WITHDRAW THE TROOPS (Quickly! We don't want there to be the "appearance" of victory!), WE HAVEN'T AND WON'T ACOMPLISH ANYHING! They based this on the grim news coming out of Iraq as the Sunni Arabs (former Saddam loyalists) had paired with foriegn members of al Qaeda's terrorist network to thwart our attempts to build a stable democracy in Iraq. Democrats kept close count of our dead and never mentioned our successes hoping that they would succeed in doing what the insurgency and terrorists in Iraq could not - force us to abandon our efforts before we had achieved our objectives. In November 2005 Democrat John Murtha called for an immediate withdrawal and redeployment of US troops. That was right before the December 15th elections. Up until those elections our men and women in uniform had been fighting diligently to foster a secure environment while a constitutional democracy could take root and the security forces to defend it could be established. A temporary slate of representatives was elected and drafted a constitution which was ratified by the Iraqi people who's turnout (measured as a percent of the population voting) was greater than the turnout for the 2004 Presidential election in this country. This was followed by another vote which saw even greater turnout in which the Iraqis voted for their first official slate of representatives based on the ratified constition. The election of December 15th has proven a monumental turning point in our struggle to make Iraqi into a democratic ally in our war on terror. The Sunni Arab Iraqi resistance recognized the election as a crossroads. Their fellow citizens were deciding their own destiny through democratic action while they fought against the coalition forces and the growing Iraqi security forces. They could continue down this dark and bloody path, or they could participate in the process and attain equal representation for themselves in determining the future of their country. They chose wisely.

Since then the news has been exceptionally less grim, the Democrats on the internet and on tv have reacted primarily with SILENCE. Were they truely concerned about the fate of Iraq, the would join us in celebrating the amazing transformation taking place right now. But their silence is owing to their previous defeatist declarations. They predicted this was all a terrible waste and that there was no salvation save for our withdrawal. They offered no constructive critisism - nothing that would help us achieve our goals. They offered only constant complaints based upon the bad news, discounting any news that indicated progress toward the same. But progress we have made. Iraq is a constitutional democracy. It's security forces will soon be built out and by early next year their police force should also reach expected numbers. Their economy is improving along with their infrastructure. And since December 15th, the "home grown" Sunni Arab insurgency have come to realize that the foriegn terrorists don't have their best interests at heart.

The results of the December 15th elections:

An alliance of Shiite religious parties won the most seats in Iraq’s new parliament but not enough to rule without coalition partners. Sunni Arabs gained seats over previous balloting. The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance captured 128 of the 275 seats in the Dec. 15 election, down from the 146 it won in January 2005 balloting, said commission official Safwat Rasheed. It needed 138 to rule without partners.
A Sunni ticket, the Iraqi Accordance Front, won 44 seats. Another Sunni coalition headed by Saleh al-Mutlaq finished with 11 seats, Rasheed said. A few other Sunnis won seats on other tickets. That will give the Sunni Arabs a bigger voice in the legislature than they had in the outgoing assembly, which included only 17 from the community forming the backbone of the insurgency. Many Sunnis had boycotted the January vote. Women hold 59 out of 275 seats though the constitution grants them 69.

Iraqis Taking Over Anbar Security

Haider Ajina sends what sounds like great news from Anbar province in Iraq, a part of the Sunni triangle which has been one of the main centers of the "insurgency." This is a portion of Haider's translation of an article from the Arabic newspaper Dar Alhayat.

Dar Alhayat newspaper has learned that Iraqi Prime Minster Aljaafery has agreed to replace U.S. forces spread throughout Anbar province with locally enlisted forces. This agreement was drafted in a meeting between tribal leaders, Aljaafery, the U.S. Ambassador Khalil Zad and commander of the multi national forces General George Casey. The agreement was reached in a meeting last Sunday in the province. The local tribal leaders committed to expelling the foreign fighters and isolating the local Alqaida network lead by Zarqawi. In preparation for this local involvement local recruiting centers have been reopened and local training camps have been set up. These camps will prepare locals to take over full security responsibility in their province [as in Nejaf, Kerbala, Kut, parts of Baghdad etc…]. These newly (U.S.) trained local units' primary responsibility will be fighting, terrorists, and chasing down or chasing away-armed groups. This will be done as U.S. forces withdraw gradually. Alhilli [a high ranking member in the leadership of the Aldaawa party the head of which is PM Aljaafery] said: "This agreement resulted from requests of Anbar tribal leaders (including the Dulaimy tribe) for government, monetary, political and social aid to defy and get rid of Zarqawi’s organization. Haithem Alalusi, an official of the “Congress of the Islamic Revolution,” confirmed this request. Families and tribal leaders in the Alkhalediah, Alfelahat and Alkermeh areas (south of Felujeh) have formed local councils. Council members are Local Imams and educated individuals who will educate locals to reject violence and terror. Sources close to armed Iraqi groups said that Zarqawi’s organization is trying to gain favor with Iraqi resistance groups by shooting down three U.S. helicopters. But local fighters in Ramadi have labeled Zarqawi and his organization terrorist and have had armed clashes with them. These sources also said that the local resistance in Ramadi and the tribal leaders are trying to force Zarqawi out of Iraq and are looking for any means to get rid of Zarqawi. Some local families have asked for Zarqawi and his follower’s heads, after locals were killed in bombings while enlisting at police recruiting stations. Theses bombings have lead to armed clashes against Alzarqwi’s group, which resulted in the death a tribal leader. Samara has also formed local committees to chase and keep away foreign fighters and reestablish the local council. Albubaz family of Samara was able to kill four and chase away 11 foreign fighters in joint operation with Iraqi security and other tribes. Tribes of Samara have asked to reopen military and police recruiting centers, government offices and promised to guard the city from attacks.

Haider comments - This area is no longer a safe haven for Zarqawi and his followers nor is it an open recruiting ground any more. This is a 180-degree turn around from just 8 months to a year ago when these areas provided support for Alqaida in Iraq. Now these areas are recruiting grounds for the fight against Zarqawi and his ilk.

Six Iraqi militant groups announced that they will unite their forces and join the rest of resident of Anbar and Salahiddin in fighting al-Qeda.

And fellow blogger Scaramonga at Curiouser and Curiouser points us to this supporting information as well:

The Anbar tribes’ campaign to rid the province of Zarqawi’s terror organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq is in its 2nd day and so far, 270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested. Usama Jad’aan, the leader of Karabila tribes in Qaim told al-Hayat that “the operation will continue to eliminate terror elements according to a quality plan” and added “270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested, in addition to some Iraqis who were providing them shelter”. Sheikh Jad’aan added “the operation is conducted in coordination between the tribes and the minister of defense Sa’doun al-Dulaimi and since we arrested hundreds of terrorists, I don’t expect the operation to take a lot of time”.

Democrats will continue to remain silent during this historic turn of events. The radical left will hope that the fledgling Iraqi democracy will fail. But their inaction will not make the progress disappear and their hope will not cause Iraq's new government to fail. Leftist Democrats and Al Qaeda terrorists are holding a losing hand.