A time for hope

Watchdog Hattie is in the hospital in Little Rock in serious condition and will not be posting comments for quite a while. My thoughts and prayers are there in Little Rock with my brother, hoping for a successful recovery.
BW

Join Up?

Quote of the Century

'My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of theworld. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it.'

- Barack Obama -

Squishy Part 3

This really is beginning to concern me a great deal. From Laura Ingraham:

POTENTIAL COMMANDER-"OF"-CHIEF AVOIDS MILITARY:

We'd like to know what incredibly important event Barack Obama has scheduled on August 11 that prevents him from participating in a debate at Texas' Fort Hood. The townhall event, sponsored by an array of military support groups, hopes to offer the 6,000-strong audience (predominantly veterans and military families) an opportunity to directly question their next commander-in-chief. John McCain is ready and willing, but so far the Obama just can't find an opening. We wonder what scares him most -- a face-to-face matchup with McCain, potential heckles, or simply not being in front of his customary mass gathering of zombies. Whatever the explanation, Obama looks weak in front an audience that needs to respect him as their commander. Not a good start.

Being "Squishy" Part 2

An interesting post on The Corner at NRO

Obama's Response to 9/11

Throughout history, attacks by implacable foes have prompted somewhat consistent reactions:
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Winston Churchill.

We, too, born to freedom, and believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain freedom. We, and all those who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We're going to hold them by the nose and we're going to kick them in the ass. George S. Patton.
In war, there is no substitute for victory.

Douglas MacArthur.

Then there's Barack Obama’s response to 9/11 published a week later in the Hyde Park Herald (as noted in Ryan Lizza’s piece in The New Yorker.)

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we, as a nation, draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must re-examine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks and we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction. We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity or suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, it may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle-Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

It's hard to visualize Obama on a horse at Stirling. But hey, Churchill, Patton MacArthur and Roosevelt couldn't lower the oceans or heal the planet

Being "Squishy" Part !

Byron York reports on today's NYT op-ed by Obama.

"An Unbelievable, Brazen Effort By a Politician to Rewrite History"

Sen. Lindsey Graham, speaking on a conference call a few moments ago, on Sen. Obama's New York Times op-ed today, in which Obama writes, "In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness. But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true…

"While Obama doesn't suggest that he supported surge — he says just the opposite — he skips over the fact that the successes he now recognizes are ones that he once predicted simply would not happen. From Graham: "In January 2007, Sen. Obama said, 'I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.'"

Graham again: "It is very important to understand where he has been regarding the surge. He came out with full force against the idea of sending more troops. His solution was to pull out."

Saturday Browsing

Iowahawk continues to prove that he is the best satirist on the web. How can he make such stuff up?

iowahawk: The "Q" is for "Quality"

A Timely? Report

“The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from US Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.

“Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.”

This morning's New York Times? No, the U.S. Weather Bureau, 1922.

A Message from Senator Hatch

Frightening!!!

For all of us, there comes a time when the choices are so stark, the risks so great, we have to take a stand. We can no longer assume someone else will save us. We have to step forward and be counted.

We face such a time today. If we don't take a stand against the coming Democratic tsunami, the country we know and love today will be lost.

I believe the Democrats when they say they plan to double our taxes. I believe them when they guarantee they will rewrite federal labor law so unions can reorganize the work force without a secret ballot election. I believe them when they promise the trial bar they will strip away what few rights companies still have. I believe them when they say they are going to appoint liberal judges to the Supreme Court and swamp our federal benches all over the land. I believe them and so should you!

When the next President is sworn in, 6 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices will be over 70 years old. This could mean the next President could seat a new majority to the court.

And, I believe them when they vow to spend close to $100 million dollars to elect a super majority in the Senate, a majority so big that the Senate will no longer be our nation's legislative firewall.

Just this week, the Senator in charge of raising money to get Democratic Senators elected said they are going to pickup nine seats in the US Senate. Nine seats! Do you know what that would mean! That would mean they could pass every piece of their liberal agenda through the House and the Senate untouched! There would not be a tax they could not raise or a freedom they could not abridge.

And you know, there is nothing they won't say, nothing they won't do towin. Presidential hopeful Barak Obama has already raised millions to win the Presidency and he has now decided to raise funds for Democrats in the House.

Just last week he wrote a letter to Democrats around the country asking them to pour money into the House Democrat money machine.

All we Republicans can count on is ourselves. We either stand together, we either support our Senate candidates, or we are lost.Thank you and God bless you.

Sincerely yours,Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Silly Little People

Even the Washington Post has to laugh at these clowns on occasion:

The Red, White and Eat Your Greens Party - washingtonpost.com

True Leadership

We are heading into a period of history when these people will be called upon to "solve" the nation's problems. There is a mean streak in this old dog who wants to watch the younger generations come to grips with what it means to give the Democratic Party complete control of all three branches of our government.

A report from Powerline:

Democrats Sucking Wind on Energy Policy

The Democrats had vowed to take up energy policy after the 4th of July recess, but now they have scrubbed all plans to bring energy legislation to the floor of the House. Why? In the words of The Hill, they are "in a bind" because they fear that any effort on their part to offer energy legislation would be met by Republican amendments to permit domestic drilling for oil and gas.

This would force Democratic Congressmen to take a position on whether they want to do something serious to bring down the cost of gasoline, as an overwhelming majority of Americans want. The Democrats, amazing as it may seem, are locked into a blind, ideologically-driven opposition to doing what is necessary to meet America's energy needs. The Hill quotes one Democratic aide:

“Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’"
The Democrats know that they risk the wrath of the voters if they continue to force gasoline prices higher and higher:

Further complicating matters for Democrats is the growing number of pro-drilling Democrats who are becoming increasingly worried that voters might throw them in with their anti-drilling leadership.
One pro-drilling Democrat predicted that the backlash against Congress for gas prices could rival the outrage voters felt about the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

I've got news for the Dems: the voters care about gas prices a whole lot more than they ever cared about Jack Abramoff.

Reliving the Bad Old Days

John Hinderaker at Powerline offers the following theory. This old dog concurs.

I do think there is an opening here for a charismatic leader to drive the country to the left. The jury is still out on whether Barack Obama is such a leader. Why this opening should exist now is an interesting question. I think the answer is that we now have a generation of Americans who haven't learned about liberalism the hard way.

There was never a time when Americans decided that liberalism didn't sound good. Nor was there a time when a majority of Americans read Friedman, Hayek and Buckley and became intellectual conservatives. What did happen was that Americans voted for liberal policies that sounded good, and had to live with the bitter consequences: the pathologies that were spawned by the Great Society, declining cities, spiraling crime rates, high unemployment, inflation, economic decline, confiscatory tax rates, weakness abroad, and all the rest. For around 25 years, that bitter experience inoculated most voters against a return to liberalism.

But we now have a generation of voters who didn't undergo that experience, and to whom liberalism once again sounds pretty good. There are no doubt some older voters whose memories have faded, too. So, consistent with the maxim that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it, we may have to suffer through another bout of liberalism to re-learn the lessons of the past.

Our Clueless Messiah

From Laura Ingraham:

OBAMA DAZZLES WITH FOREIGN POLICY EXPERTISE:

Uh oh. Someone let Obama out of the house without his teleprompter! The man just can't help but get frazzled if he's asked about anything weightier than his favorite pie. Appearing this morning on Good Morning America and the Today Show, inquiring minds wanted to know his thoughts about Iran test-firing its Shahab-3 missile, which is capable of hitting Israel. You won't believe his answer - that is, unless you've been following his campaign. Obama ... blamed America! He claimed the missile tests were the fault of President Bush's failure to deal diplomatically with Iran (lie #1), for not pushing tough sanctions (lie #2), and for using "overheated rhetoric" (Mahmoud "Kill the Jews!" Ahmadinejad apparently being the paragon of proper rhetoric?). If Diane Sawyer knew the difference between a Shahab-3 and Shakira, she might have actually asked a follow-up question rather than let him get away with this nonsense. Alas, no such luck.

From Australia

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" - and they haven't even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".

"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."

To read the whole article go here:

Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change Herald Sun

"Sieg Heil"

From Victor Davis Hanson on NRO.

Megalomania 101

At first I thought the standard Obama warnings about crowd fainting when he started speaking were just peculiar, as was the bit about oceans receding and the planet healing. Then I noticed he has plans to move his speechmaking at the convention to a large outdoor arena, to allow the 'people' the right to hear him en masse. Now he negotiates to address Berliners in Kennedy/Reagan style (but weren't they already presidents?) in front of the Brandenburg Gate? Next? No doubt the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

For My Grown Up Readers

The following is the first question and answer from an interview that has been posted at National Review:

‘Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth’s promise. No more,” Diana West writes in her book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization. West is worried that “eternal youth” is “fatal” and recently took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: You note that more adults watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. Surely, you’ve seen Jack Cafferty. Is this really a problem?

Diana West: Not if that were the only statistic out there indicating a seismic cultural shift in sensibility has taken place that has made us more adolescent and less adult. Other such factoids include: the average video gamester was 18 in 1990; now he’s 33; the National Academy of Sciences has redefined adolescence as the period extending from the onset of puberty, around twelve, to age 30. And, leaving CNN aside, here’s another cartoon statistic: One third of the 56 million Americans who sat down in 2002 to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month were between 18 and 49 years old. (Nickelodeon, incidentally, thought its core demographic group was the six- to eleven-year old set.)

These older fans may be chronological grown-ups, but their taste reveals an affinity for kidstuff their forebears didn’t share and almost certainly wouldn’t understand. The point is, aspects of the maturation cycle have stalled, leading to significant changes not only in pop culture, but in ourselves as a people.

“There isn’t any clear demarcation of what’s for parents and what’s for kids,” a former Hollywood studio executive told the Wall Street Journal. “We like the same music, we dress similarly.” The Death of the Grown-Up explores how, when and why this phenomenon came about, and, on a deeper level, what it is doing to us as a society and nation.

To read the entire interview, ( it's good stuff) please go here:

Interview on The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is

This is Pretty Icky

Now, after all of these years, I find out the truth!!!

This just in from another British newspaper:

Toddlers who dislike spicy food 'racist'

The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

This kind of crap just keeps coming and coming.

News We are Not Allowed to Know

Decided to post this only because we Americans are unlikely to read or hear anything like this from our own media. This comes from that stately old British newspaper, The Times of London.

Al Qaeda's crushing defeat in Iraq appears to be virtually complete, now that it has been routed in its last remaining urban outpost -- Mosul.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul. A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10. Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects. . . .Major-General Mark Hertling, American commander in the north, said: “I think we’re at the irreversible point.”

Communism Defeated by Jokes?

A man goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years' time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: 'Morning or afternoon?' The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: 'What difference does it make?' And the buyer answers: 'Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.'

Had to laugh at this excerpt from a book reviewed by a British newspaper. To read the whole article, click below:

Was it jokes that defeated Communism? - Telegraph Was it jokes that defeated C

Something to Think About

Here is a quote from Mark Twain that I had never had the pleasure of reading before. Written over 100 years ago, it appears to be a thought that we never get a chance to think about while confronted with the every day censorship of political correctness:

"All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth--including America, of course--consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, however insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and restolen 500 times."

Our Children are Next

From Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit!

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, we'd see schoolboys punished for refusing to kneel and pray in class. And they were right!!!

Schoolboys punished with detention for refusing to kneel down and pray to Alla

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during a religious education lesson.

Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights.

You can't make this stuff up. And, sadly, you don't have to.

Independence Day

The following is an excerpt from a speech given by President Calvin Coolidge on July 4, 1926. Even back 82 years ago, many Americans saw the vicious "progressive" ideology of socialism and collectivist government. This is, of course, what Coolidge is commenting on:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter.

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Bite Sized Morsels

Notes from Laura Ingraham:

VOTE POODLE! Finnicky, elitist, entitled...a poodle would be the perfect addition to the Obama family. Put the veep vetting on the back burner for a few weeks, because Barack Obama is in search of a new pooch--and he's taking recommendations. The American Kennel Club is conducting a highly scientific poll on its website where you can weigh in on the best choice for the Obama family pet. Next up: choosing a name. Jeremiah, anyone?

THURSDAY WITH BYRON: In a bid to corroborate, further understand, and clarify Barack Obama's incessant references to his youthful days as a Chicago "community organizer," Byron York traveled to the South Side to speak with former colleagues and witness firsthand the fruits of Obama's labor. Except...there wasn't much fruit to see. In great contrast to Obama's proud reflections, Byron instead heard tales about a youthful political opportunist...and a little less asbestos on the South Side of Chicago

On the Make

Change, my ass! From a Powerline post:

This morning the Washington Post broke the news that Barack Obama got a sub-market interest rate when he took out a mortgage to buy his Chicago mansion in 2005:

The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a "super super jumbo." Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.
Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama's rate could have saved him more than $300 per month.

Obama's loan came from Northern Trust, whose employees have also donated $71,000 to Obama's campaign. This is, of course, the same home purchase in which Obama was assisted by his fundraiser, convicted felon Tony Rezko, who bought the adjacent lot for the seller's full asking price, while Obama paid $300,000 less than the asking price to the same seller for the house.
It has come to light that several Democratic Senators availed themselves of sub-market mortgages under circumstances that are more or less suspicious. Obama is in that rather tawdry category.

What is most striking to me, though, is not that Obama shaved a fraction of a point off his mortgage by being a politically powerful customer. It is, rather, the rapidity with which Obama was able to turn his ascension to the Senate into material wealth. The Post describes the Obamas' mansion, purchased just a few months after Obama became a Senator:
The couple wanted to step up from their $415,000 condo. They chose a house with six bedrooms, four fireplaces, a four-car garage and 5 1/2 baths, including a double steam shower and a marble powder room. It had a wine cellar, a music room, a library, a solarium, beveled glass doors and a granite-floored kitchen.

How were the Obamas able to afford this on a Senator's $162,000 salary? They weren't, of course. But in January 2005, the same month in which Obama assumed his Senate seat, Random House "agreed to reissue an Obama memoir, for which it originally paid $40,000, as part of a $2.27 million deal that included two future nonfiction books and a children's book." How does an author who has never sold many books get a multi-million dollar book deal? By being an up-and-coming Democratic Senator.

Then there is Michelle Obama, whose salary doubled to over $300,000 when her husband was elected to the Senate. It was the Random House book deal, together with Michelle's newly-discovered value to her employer, that paid for the Obamas' Chicago mansion.
You can draw your own conclusions from all of this. It strikes me that Barack Obama is a very old-fashioned politician. He is a powerful man, and he expects the world to kiss his ring and shower him with money and other good things. This is a Chicago tradition, I guess, and it's not hard to understand.

What's a bit harder to make sense of is Michelle Obama's attitude. She says that America is a "downright mean country." Is this an insight that she had while sitting in her double steam shower? Or perhaps while fetching a prime vintage from her wine cellar, or musing in her solarium, or applying makeup in her marble powder room, or treading the granite floor in her kitchen? It's hard to say. Maybe it's just another instance of liberal guilt.

But since Barack is as nakedly on the make as any politician in modern American history, the Obamas should perhaps drop the pose

Dissed !

A story out Denver:

9NEWS.com Colorado's Online News Leader 'Black national anthem' stirs cont

A Tale of Corruption

Chicago is the home of a dying breed of huge political machines. The Daley machine still operates. The following article comes from the Boston Globe ( hardly a conservative newspaper.)

Note how all of this comes down and how public money is squandered and stolen by "inside" players and politicians. Practices such as these have been going on in America for at least 150 years! And, yes, occasionally people like Rezko have to go to jail.

Change, my ass!

Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy - The Boston Globe

Listen Up! I don't like Obama!

This old dog wonders what he has to do to be shut down by Google as an anti-Obama web site. Since, at this point in my life, I can't really be intimidated by anything or anybody, I think I should give it a try!!

The following is a kind of scary:

Bloggasm » Who’s responsible for shutting down a number of anti-Obama Blogspot

Spreading Lies

From Laura Ingraham:

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL:

Feeling happy? Satisfied? Sounds like a job for Amnesty International! In an attempt to convince Americans of their own depravity, Amnesty is bringing a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay cell on a national tour.

One problem. As reported by Cybercast News Service, the cell has far more in common with the paranoid delusions of the blame-America-first crowd than anything you'll find at Gitmo. The replica measures 7 by 10 feet, while actual cells are 10 by 20.

The cell on the Mall is also missing the sink Gitmo cells include. Amenities like bedding, toiletries, copies of the Koran and three-square meals a day also go unmentioned. As do prayer rugs, "culturally appropriate meals," and a recorded call to prayer broadcast five times daily. AIUSA aims for Americans to know the feeling of being "almost totally isolated, where you're put in stress positions that are extremely painful."

In truth, prisoners with good behavior at Gitmo are also allowed to socially interact and even play a little soccer.

Amnesty even screwed up the colors; detainees wear tan, not orange. But other than that, this "replica" is dead on.

It's no surprise that to paint America in a bad light, Amnesty's resorting to spreading lies and enemy propaganda.

Not that I can really blame them. It's hard to imagine too many Americans getting worked up over terrorists being denied turndown service.

Tired of Being Compared to Hitler?

The following is a cute article from the satirical blog, " Stuff White People Like."

Comparing People to Hitler
By: Isaac “Absent” Amirian

Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation- especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.

Comparing people to Hitler is an easy way for white people to get a strong point across to the less enlightened, or the insufficiently white. Everyone knows who Adolf Hitler was. And everyone knows that Hitler was very, very bad. Therefore, if a white person really, REALLY, doesn’t like something or someone, he or she may angrily say something to the effect of, “This is exactly the same kind of thing that Hitler used to do!” accompanied by varying levels of profanity based on blood-alcohol content. No matter what your gut reaction may be at that point, do not disagree with that white person. Otherwise, well, you love Hitler.

This time-tested white-person maneuver may seem so awesomely useful to you that you are tempted to go out and try it right now. Not so fast. White people have spent the last 30 years perfecting this technique. There are cultural guidelines.

It’s also critical that you avoid the fatal mistake of getting creative and comparing people you don’t like to other evil dictators, such as Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro. With few exceptions, white people are actually fond of almost any dictator not named Hitler, and your remark that “this is just like something Mao Zedong would do” will be met with blank stares and possible social alienation. This is because, with the exception of Hitler,oppressive dictators share a passion for many of the things white people love- such as universal health care, conspiracy theories, caring about poor people while being filthy rich, and cool hats. Stick to the script and
compare things you don’t like to Hitler, and Hitler alone.

Now, like most reasonable people, you might find this strategy distasteful, and even a bit disrespectful, since after all, Hitler was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, and probably doesn’t have that much in common with Pat Robertson, in perspective. If you prefer to avoid hearing or using the Hitler technique, we recommend you speak in soothing, affirming tones around angry white people to prevent the phenomenon from manifesting, and change the subject tactfully. To something that doesn’t involve GeorgeW. Bush.

Crazy People Are Out There

Unbelievable stuff.

And to think these people's votes count just as much as ours! I will never understand the mindset of humans who can think this way! Please click on the link:

lgf: Obama Blog Troofer Roundup

Uh-Oh. No News Conference After All

Dems In Disarray

Yesterday, the Democrats' House leadership announced with considerable fanfare that Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, James Clyburn, Rahm Emanuel and John Larson would hold a news conference at 11:30 this morning "to discuss the New Direction Congress' efforts to lower gas prices."

Here is the press release; click to enlarge:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/PressConference61.php

This morning, the news conference was canceled. The Democrats don't have an energy policy, and they can't think of one. The truth is that the "New Direction Congress" has done nothing whatsoever to lower gas prices, and, on the contrary, the Democrats have blocked all efforts by Republican members to enact policies that would have that result. At the moment, the Dems aren't even able to come up with a plausible cover story, let alone a constructive energy policy

Palin Doing the Responsible Thing

From a statement issued by the State of Alaska

Governor Palin Urges Congress to Open ANWR

June 23, 2008, Anchorage, Alaska – Governor Sarah Palin today urged members of Congress to enact legislation that would allow oil and gas development in a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and key members of Congress, Governor Palin stressed the need to enact an energy policy that includes oil and gas production from domestic sources, since failure to enact a sound energy policy is having real-life consequences.

The Governor reminded members of Congress that the footprint of development would be less than 2,000 acres. She also assured members that any development would be conducted in a responsible and environmentally safe manner

This Dog is Happy for Ole Will

A comment from the ever wonderful Laura Ingraham:

'THE PURSUIT OF DAFFYNESS': Will Smith appeared on the Today show this morning and after some prodding by co-host Matt Lauer, went all Michelle Obama on us: "You know I just, I just came back from Moscow, Berlin, London and Paris and it's the first, I've been there quite a few times in the past five to 10 years. And it just hasn't been a good thing to be American. And this is the first time, since Barack has gotten the nomination, that it, it was a good thing."

Ah yes, the trials of visiting Moscow, Berlin, London and Paris in the Bush era. The things celebrities are forced to do.

No Wonder Newspapers are Dying

Media to America: Disaster Seen as Catastrophe Looms

June 23, 2008 10:52 AM ET James Pethokoukis

"I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?" is a quote from the film Deep Impact and immediately came to mind after I read this article from the Associated Press. (It actually took two people to write it.) The "article" made me weep for my chosen profession. The absolutely disgraceful lead:

Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in your grave. The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

I dunno, maybe contributing to our low national morale are media that 1) compare a weak economy—although one that has yet to suffer even a single negative quarter—to the disastrous economies of the 1930s and 1970s; 2) forget to mention that the average person buying a home in, say, January 2000, is still sitting on a 66 percent gain; 3) ignore the economy's sky-high productivity, which helps make it the most competitive in the world; 4) ignore a global economic boom that is pushing up gas prices but also raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; and 5) for the heck of it, perpetuate the myth that college is unaffordable.

(Oh, and since the authors of the article brought it up, it sure looks to this Soviet politics major that Iraq is turning into a situation for al Qaeda that is exactly the reverse of Afghanistan in the 1980s: Militants take on superpower. Get annihilated along with their global brand.)

America's "can-do" attitude? We are coming off a record year for initial public offerings. I mean, I could go on and on here. I don't know anyone who is giving up, other than the AP.

Time to be a Man

In response to Obama's claim that Republicans will use race to stoke fear, Lt. Col Allen West, candidate for Congress in Florida's 22 District issued this release:

My advice to Senator Obama is to run as a Man and Leader, and the American people will evaluate you as such, not as a victim. This is a Presidential race, based solely on a capacity to lead the United States of America.

It is not about skin tone...however, perhaps we should come to expect these immature statements. It also seems rather humorous that the Presidential candidate who was supposed to be such a "uniter" and transcend race is the one talking about it the most.

If Senator Obama was confident in his abilities and character, he would not need to create a crutch for failure. Senator Obama has just tipped his hand, any criticism of him and his policies will be directly attributed to racism. I congratulate Senator Obama for taking race relations in America back some 30 years

Crocodile Tears

Laura Ingraham reports on this LA Times story:

POOR LITTLE GANG BANGER!

Cue the world's smallest violin, 'cause we've got ourselves a sob story of epic proportions. In saner eras, yesterday's front-page L.A. Times story about a 23-year-old Anaheim gang member would be confused for parody. Sadly, today it's just another example of the length many will go to excuse criminal behavior.

Jose Luis Muñoz, we are told, was raised by a single mother. And as if that weren't heartbreaking enough, we're also told Muñoz's childhood was not one of affluence. In 2005, Muñoz found himself running from cops for reasons the Times opts not to report. The pursuit ended with Muñoz being hit by a police cruiser. Naturally, he sued and won $2.5 million. After serving a jail sentence, the idealistic minds behind the settlement were excited, certain the cash would help Muñoz turn his life around. Not so much. Instead, he was arrested only months later for violating his parole for associating with other gang members. But don't blame Muñoz! As The Times reports:

Richard Ramos, a gang expert and author who grew up in Highland Park, agreed that identity and fitting in have a lot to do with Muñoz's recidivism.

"People who don't have money transform their lives all the time," Ramos said. "In this case, $2.5 million wasn't enough. To kids like him, identity and belonging are powerful forces that keep them in gangs. There has to be an inside-out transformation or a life-changing event to bring change. Gangs compete with your family for loyalty

.And rough upbringings are hardly a new excuse. Recall that in 2006, Zacarias Moussaoui -- aka the "20th hijacker" -- pleaded guilty to charges ranging from conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism to conspiracy to destroy aircraft and use WMDs. Before his sentencing, his attorneys offered a real tearjerker: his father was abusive, his girlfriend's parents never approved of him, his native France was intolerant of his Muslim beliefs ... of course he turned out to be a terrorist.

The only thing such excuse making serves to accomplish is to re-enforce in defendants' minds that whatever he's done -- it's not his fault. That's bad for society, and the convicted.

I Can Only Shake My Head

YouTube - IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT ENERGY SAVER LIGHT BULBS!

From Laura Ingraham

PRESIDENT POOH?

Sen. Barack Obama's top foreign-policy adviser, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, says the U.S. should follow Winnie the Pooh's lead when it comes to fighting al Qaeda. No joke. Here's what he said: "Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."

The possible National Security Adviser to President Obama added that Pooh's war philosophy can be summed up thusly: if something is causing you too much pain, give it up and try something else.Tell that to the veterans of Belleau Wood, Sicily, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Mr. Danzig. Tell it to the Special Forces troops who may be tracking al Qaeda terrorists in Somalia, the Philippines, Afghanistan or Iraq right now.

Things worth doing, things that are vital to keeping this country safe, are often difficult and, yes, even painful. Danzig's hedonistic approach to foreign affairs is a signal that America is a paper tiger (Tigger?) because the leaders we elect are weak (Eeyores, all). And if America elects Barack Obama, our enemies just may prove that theory right.

Education Matters

If you don't think that what a child learns in school can be manipulated by the teachers and the society, this should give you pause.

Elian Gonzalez Joins Cuba's Communist Youth Union

Gonzalez Says He Would Never Let Down Fidel CastroHAVANA (CBS4)

― Eight years after a headline making international custody fight which ended with his return to his father in Cuba, Elian Gonzalez has joined Cuba's Young Communist Union.

In an article in Cuba's communist youth newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, the 14-year old Gonzalez said he would never let ex-President Fidel Castro and his brother Raul Castro down. He joined more than 18-thousand others who joined the group on Saturday.

In 2000, Gonzalez' mother was killed when a boat carrying them to the U.S. capsized in the Florida Straits. Elian, who was 6 years old at the time, and two other refugees were found clinging to an inner tube for survival. After his rescue the boy stayed with relatives in South Florida until a long tug of war over custody ended with armed federal agents seizing him from his great uncle's Miami home. Elian then returned to Cuba to be with his father.

Weekend Reading

Two very interesting columns in the Wall Street Journal were published in the past few days. If you wish to, please check out these columns from Peggy Noonan and Thomas Sowell, two of the best conservative thinkers in America today:

The Tragedy of America's Disappearing Fathers - WSJ.com

Declarations - WSJ.com

Senator Mc Cain, Wake Up!

Excerpt of an editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

Anyone wondering why U.S. energy policy is so dysfunctional need only review Congress's recent antics. Members have debated ideas ranging from suing OPEC to the Senate's carbon tax-and-regulation monstrosity, to a windfall profits tax on oil companies, to new punishments for "price gouging" – everything except expanding domestic energy supplies.

Amid $135 oil, it ought to be an easy, bipartisan victory to lift the political restrictions on energy exploration and production. Record-high fuel costs are hitting consumers and business like a huge tax increase. Yet the U.S. remains one of the only countries in the world that chooses as a matter of policy to lock up its natural resources. The Chinese think we're insane and self-destructive, while the Saudis laugh all the way to the bank.

At present, it is charitable to call Mr. McCain's energy ideas incoherent, and it may cost him the election.

Gas Prices

The Republican Whip, Roy Blunt, introduced this chart yesterday to the House of Representatives. Let us remember that he is the MINORITY WHIP and likely to remain so.

So, forget about it!!!
http://www.powerlineblog.com/GasChart51.php

The Pelosi Premium

William Katz at Urgent Agenda reports on this:

Investor's Business Daily gets to the heart of the gasoline-price issue in exposing the "Pelosi premium." We can solve this problem, but we're being stopped by environmentalism's fundamentalist fanatics:
The price of gasoline when the Democrats took control of Congress was around $2.25 per gallon.

The average price of regular gas crept over the $4-per-gallon barrier over the weekend, as measured by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

That represents a more than 75% increase in the retail price of a gallon of gasoline on Pelosi's watch. Call it the "Pelosi premium" we're all now paying.

It's a problem driven by domestic supply restrictions imposed by the Democratic Congress in the face of growing worldwide demand. The Democrats preach energy independence while they do everything in their power to prevent it. If the American people truly want change, this would be it.

And...

The U.S. Congress has voted consistently to keep 85% of America's offshore oil and gas off-limits, while China and Cuba drill 60 miles from Key West, Fla. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that the restricted areas contain 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

There are 3,200 oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. During Katrina, not a single drop was spilled. More than 7 billion barrels have been pumped from these wells over the past quarter-century, yet only one thousandth of one percent has been spilled.


Katz: What is sickening here is that the very people who scream of their love for the poor are themselves gouging the poor, making them pay absurd prices for fuel in order to live their pure, aren't-I-wonderful, environmentally pure lives. Ask the independent cabbie in Harlem what he thinks of five-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. But, of course, these superior creatures in the environmental movement would never talk to a cabbie in Harlem unless he was hauling them to a fundraiser at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Fascinating Woman

The governor of Alaska had been mentioned on this site much earlier. I wonder if we could be looking at a possible Vice-President here.

What are your thoughts? Am I goofy?

BeldarBlog: Would Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin be a grand slam as McCain's Veep?

Iowahawk for President

Funny, funny stuff. This guy is absolutely the best satirist on the web!! Take some time to read through three of his recent posts and add him to your "favorites" list.
iowahawk: And Then There Were Three
iowahawk: Canadian Radio Classics: Warman of the Mounted
iowahawk: Dear Barry

We Hope

The following is a sliver of an op-ed that former UN Ambassador, John Bolton, penned in the Los Angeles Times. However, I'm cautious. Much has changed since 1984.

It is an article of faith for Obama, and many others on the left in the U.S. and abroad, that it is the United States that is mostly responsible for the world’s ills. In 1984, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick labeled people with these views the “San Francisco Democrats,” after the city where Walter Mondale was nominated for president.

Most famously, Kirkpatrick forever seared the San Francisco Democrats by saying that “they always blame America first” for the world’s problems. In so doing, she turned the name of the pre-World War II isolationist America First movement into a stigma the Democratic Party has never shaken.

This is yet another piece of history that Obama has ignored or never learned. There may be one more piece of history worthy of attention: In 1984, Mondale went down to one of the worst electoral defeats in American political history. We will now see whether Obama follows that path as well.

Steyn Time

Enjoy:

Mark Steyn on Barack Obama on National Review Online

An Important Distinction

Taken from an article by David Warren, a Canadian columnist:

I have myself observed this distinction between the Right and Left sides of mainstream electorates in most other Western countries: the Right tends to believe in facts, the Left to believe in “theories”; and as we advance through post-modern irrationalism, those theories become battier and battier.

The trend towards “global crazing” was not always there, however. If we go back half a century, differences between Liberals and Conservatives up here, as between Democrats and Republicans down there, did not hinge on “ability to discern reality.” On the facts of life; on moral, legal, and religious principles; on the need to keep government out of our lives and resist tyranny in any other form, there was broad agreement. A “very liberal” voter from the 1950s would pass for a “rightwing dinosaur” today.

This has become a signal threat to democracy. For where we once had broad agreement on facts, and relatively mild disagreements on what should be done about them, we now have one-half of the electorate drifting off into Cloud Cuckooland.

I have attributed this to many things, but chiefly to the effects of mass urbanization. People living in vast conurbations become disconnected from nature, and thus increasingly suggestible. The press of crowds enforces conformity, so that we get “school of fish” movements in public opinion. The individual fish believes that the direction of the school has been determined by “experts,” and anyway fears being eaten if he deviates from the consensus in any way.

Back to My Favorite Subject

How Are These Kids Going To Learn Such Things?"
By Ed Driscoll · June 05, 2008 12:24 PM · The Return of the Primitive

Andrew Klavan, the author of True Crime, adopted by Clint Eastwood for the big screen, albeit in a slightly bowdlerized form, visits an inner city fourth grade class, and comes away noting:

Beating poverty in America nowadays is largely a matter of personal behavior. Get a high school diploma, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t get married until you’re 21, and you probably won’t be poor. It also helps if you work hard, show up on time, act courteously, and avoid anything felonious.

But where are these kids going to learn such things? It’s the stuff you just sort of absorb in a healthy, traditional, two-parent home, and that’s exactly what they’re missing. If they learn what they’ve lived, they’re done for—the girls too likely to “come out pregnant” like their mothers, the boys to be underemployed and maybe even do time.

You can’t legislate responsibility, either. Personal behavior in a free society has to be a matter of choice—choice without which there is no virtue—virtue without which a society can’t be free.
It seems to me that leaves these kids only one recourse: the culture. Where the institution of family is broken, only the surrounding culture can teach people the inner structures required for a life of liberty.

Many conservatives often seem to have given up on culture or not to care. There’s a strong strain of philistinism on the right. When we talk about “culture wars,” we usually mean preventing the courts from redefining marriage or promoting abstinence instead of birth control: culture, in other words, as the behavioral branch of politics.

Culture, in the true sense, is more than that. It’s the whole engulfing narrative of our values. It’s the stories we tell. Leftists know this. These kids get an earful from the Left every day. Their schools serve up black history in a way guaranteed to alienate them from the American enterprise. Their sanctioned reading list denies boys the natural fantasies of battling villains and protecting women from harm. Any instinct the girls might have that their bodies and their self-respect are interrelated is negated by the ubiquitous parable of celebrity lives. And I hardly need mention the movies and TV shows that endlessly undermine notions of manly self-discipline, feminine modesty, patriotism, and all the rest.

Conservatives respond to this mostly with finger-wagging. But creativity has to be answered with creativity. We need stories, histories, movies of our own. That requires a structure of support—publishing houses, movie studios, review space, awards, almost all of which we’ve ceded to the Left.
There may be more profitable businesses in the short run. The long run, as always, depends on the young. If you want to win their hearts, you have to tell them stories. I have reason to believe they’ll listen.

It's all part of the Great Relearning, especially important when the rest of culture is essentially ashamed of any history that's prior to 1968

For another fabulous article, please read the following from P J O'Rourke. Both humorous and sarcastically slamming the "silly left," you will enjoy his notes from his visit to the Field Museum in Chicago as it today, and how it was when he went there with his grandmother 50 years ago:

When Worlds Collide

The Messiah Speaks

Last night Barack Obama broke all records for campaign promises, with one of the most over the top self-aggrandizing statements ever uttered by a presidential candidate.

"I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

He’s going to heal the sick and make the oceans part.

Ooohhkay.

A Good Rant

From Kathryn Lopez of NRO this morning:

We don’t need faux pioneers like Hillary Clinton. In her 2000 book, The Hillary Trap, Laura Ingraham wrote of Hillary Clinton: “If you think Hillary Clinton is a pioneer, if you think Hillary is a political genius, if you think Hillary is an innovator, you have been drawn into one big Clinton con job.” Ingraham wrote, “She wanted to be seen as the strong, assertive, mature feminist, but she advocated policies that were guaranteed to keep women as dependent on government, unions, and even the United Nations — as she was on Bill.”

We don’t need faux pioneers like Barack Obama. Tell me he’s a pioneer when he meets with Ward Connerly and embraces his Civil Rights Initiative movement, a successful effort to undo the damage big-government patronizing has done to civil rights.

Tell me he’s a pioneer when he talks about the importance of the damage the welfare state has done in urban America, to the family.

Tell me he’s a pioneer when he talks about protecting marriage.

Tell me he’s a pioneer when he talks about the effects of abortion on blacks in America. Americans need to be confident in American greatness — with its exceptional promise and opportunities.

Hope is here, it’s not contingent on an Obama win in November. We need leaders who share this confidence — leaders who don’t need Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to make them believe

Quote of the Day

" A TAXPAYER VOTING FOR A DEMOCRAT IS LIKE A CHICKEN VOTING FOR COLONEL SANDERS "

Being Old and Rich

That appears to be the only thing that will keep this woman from being thrown under the jail house floor.

Ain't no way that western civilization is going to wake up, is there?

Former screen siren Bardot convicted in race case - Yahoo! News

Let the Race Begin

My Old Party [William J. Bennett]

This is an astounding moment in American politics. You cannot credibly say the Clintons are a political dynasty the way, say, the Kennedys or Bushs are. But I think one has to say the Clinton rule of the Democratic party has been dynastic. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to have served two terms as president in two generations, the only Democrat to twice beat Republican nominees for president and his wife is a two term U.S. senator who will likely be in the Senate for years to come. Bill Clinton has been rated one of — if not THE — most popular person in the world, and yet Clinton rule in American politics ends tonight. Whatever it was the Republicans and so many independents did not like about the Clintons, we’ve learned the Democrats have had enough as well.
And thus the Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of George McGovern, albeit without McGovern’s military and political record.

The Democratic party is about to nominate a far-left candidate in the tradition of Michael Dukakis, albeit without Dukakis’s executive experience as governor.

The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of John Kerry, albeit without Kerry’s record of years of service in the Senate.

The Democratic party is about to nominate an unvetted candidate in the tradition of Jimmy Carter, albeit without Jimmy Carter’s religious integrity as he spoke about it in 1976.

Questions about all these attributes (from foreign policy expertise to executive experience to senatorial experience to judgment about foreign leaders to the instructors he has had in his cultural values) surround Barack Obama. And the Democratic party has chosen him.

A Longer Version

We have all probably seen a short clip of the new rant by the Marxist priest from Chicago's south side. Here is a longer version of his contorted views:

YouTube - Obama's Church: Hillary Cried Because White Supremacy Failed

A Peek Ahead to this Fall

Roger L. Simon points to a subject that I think will be quite an isue this fall in the general election campaign. Obama's ties to the ugly political machine in Chicago will have to be covered...even by his adoring press!

Obama the Greatest Machine Politician of Our Time?

Sounds like an exaggeration, doesn't it? But I'm not so sure. He and his cronies have already made mince-meat of the so-called Clinton machine, and we know Bill is no slouch in this regard.


No, Obama gets the nod for several reasons, not the least of which is he has been able to hide so brilliantly under the mantle of "new politics" when his style is as old as Boss Tweed and as monolithic as the Mayors Daley from his hometown of Chicago. But he's done Tweed and the Daleys one better because he's got the nitwits in the national press eating out the palm of his hand as well. Those bozos bought into the Politics of Hope crapola from the get-go.

Obama can go around accusing McCain of hobnobbing with lobbyists, being a warmonger, you name it, and they lap it up. Meanwhile they wouldn't dare print anything nasty about Barack, even when it bites them in the foot. Can you imagine what chance McCain would have if he had spent twenty years in a racist minister's church and then titled his book after a sermon from the minister? McCain would have had to retire to Fiji, but Obama is running for President, decimating his opposition.

Has there ever been a more brilliant, machine-like political move than that? And now there's the implication that Obama's campaign manager might have been...ohmygosh... a lobbyist in good old Chi-town? How much mileage is that going to get in the MSM?

Think it's going to make it to the front page of the NYT along with story about McCain's putative girl friend? I wouldn't hold my breath, but I might my nose.

An Instinctive Trust for Freedom

From Powerline comes this review of Vaclav Klaus' speech yesterday in Washington.

Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus addressed the National Press Club today, talking about his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles, which has just been translated into English. Klaus speaks from a unique perspective, as an economist who lived under Communism and who places the current wave of environmentalist extremism squarely in that tradition. Introduced as a global warming skeptic, Klaus objected:

I'm just surprised to hear that I'm skeptical vis-a-vis environmentalism. I'm not skeptical. I am totally against it. "Skeptical" is an understatement which I would never, never use.

To my knowledge, Klaus's talk is not available online; sadly, we can't post it in its entirety. But here are a few highlights:

My today's thinking is fundamentally influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under the communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom and, as I remember quite well, wanted to command not only the people, but also the nature....

I do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old- fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar. Like their predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality.

In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat; this time, in the name of the planet. Structurally, it is very similar. The current danger, as I see it, is environmentalism and especially its strongest version, climate alarmism. ***

My central concern is in a condensed form, as was mentioned by Madam President, captured in the subtitle of this book. I ask, what is endangered, climate or freedom? And my answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity.

The book was written by an economist who happens to be in a relatively high political position. I don't deny my basic paradigm, my economic way of thinking, because I consider it an advantage, not a disadvantage, by stressing that I want to say that the climate change debate, in a wider and the only relevant sense, should be neither about several tenths of a degree Fahrenheit or Celsius, about the up or down movements of sea level, about the depths of ice at north and southern poles, nor about the variations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The real debate is and should be about costs and benefits of alternative human actions, about how to rationally deal with the unknown future, about what kind and size of solidarity with much wealthier future generations is justified, about the size of externalities and their eventual appropriate internalization, about how much to trust the impersonal functioning of the markets in solving any human problem, including global warming, and how much to distrust the very visible hand of very human politicians and their bureaucrats.

Klaus defended freedom and indicted statism:

I know that you lived all your life in a world where you were used to discuss the market failure as a phenomenon. And there has been permanently attempts to correct some real or would-be market failures by government action, government intervention.

That was the spirit of the 20th century. I think that rational people and many American economists made a great contribution in this respect, started to study the opposite, started to study the government failure. And the issue is, is the market failure bigger and more dangerous than the government failure?
You may have your experience, but my experience with half-a- century in communism, I know that government failure is incomparably worse than any market failure. So, therefore, my position on any form, kind, motivation of government intervention is quite clear, to limit it as much as possible.

Ditto

The following column appears today on NRO. It is rather longish, but this is a good example of how so many of us older baby-boomers feel about our times. The counter-culture of the '60's just never got more than half of us. The problem is that the half who were part of the counter-culture became the teachers and administrators who have foisted their views on two younger generations of Americans.

When reading this, please remember that this old dog views both the past and our current events very closely to to the author's:

Kyle-Anne Shiver on Barack Obama on National Review Online

The Sun Sets

Mark Steyn Reports:

From The Church of England Newspaper:
If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore needs a share in any religious establishment to reflect this....

At all levels of national life Islam has gained state funding, protection from any criticism, and the insertion of advisors and experts in government departs national and local.

A Muslim Home Office adviser, for example, was responsible for Baroness Scotland’s aborting of the legislation against honour killings, arguing that informal methods would be better. In the police we hear of girls under police protection having the addresses of their safe houses disclosed to their parents by Muslim officers who think they are doing their religious duty.

While men-only gentlemen’s clubs are now being dubbed unlawful, we hear of municipal swimming baths encouraging ‘Muslim women only’ sessions and in Dewsbury Hospitals staff waste time by turning beds to face Mecca five times a day — a Monty Pythonesque scenario of lunacy, but astonishingly true...

The point is that Islam is being institutionalised, incarnated, into national structures amazingly fast, at the same time as demography is showing very high birthrates...

Today the Christian story is fading from public imagination, while Islam grows apace.

Strange to witness one of the oldest and most successful of nations commit suicide without even being aware of what it's doing

Oh, You Democrats

Another post from Roger Kimball:

Instapundit points to Ann Althouse who, investigating The New York Times on the West Virginia primary, comes to this melancholy conclusion.

“White. White. White. Race. Race. Race. Oh, you Democrats. You’ve really made a nice place for yourselves.”

That about sums it up.

Who was it who pointed out that in the 19th century the Democrats were the party of slavery, in the 20th century they were the party of segregation, and in the 21st century they are the party of neo-segregation (aka, racial quotas, spurious multiculturalism, and the mendacious imperatives of political correctness)?

I don’t recall, but whoever it was, he was correct. The interesting rhetorical issue is why many people (which might, now that I think of it, mean just “many democrats,” i.e., professors, media types, etc.) believe that Republicans, who champion freedom and individual responsibility, are as a party more racist than Democrats.

A question that deserves more study.

Give Me that New Age Religion

An interesting post from Roger Kimble of the New Criterion.

Poor Kermit. He lived too soon.

Had he waited a few years, he would have found it all-too-easy, indeed almost mandatory to be green. “Environmentalism,” as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed years ago, “is school prayer for liberals.” It has that Award-Winning, Never-Fail, Left-Liberal combination of 1) providing its exponents with an ever renewable (and hence environmentally sound) source of self satisfaction (”I recycle/drive a hybrid/don’t use plastic/only bathe weekly . . . Do you?”) and 2) it is infinitely elastic: you can never be green enough.

There are always new prohibitions to impose, new causes to espouse, new ways to demonstrate your moral superiority over your neighbor. What great religion! The Green shall inherit the earth . . . .

The always-sensible Thomas Sowell makes a further pertinent point about the new Kermits of the world. “At one time,” Sowell observes, “to call someone ‘green’ was to disparage them as inexperienced or immature. Today, to call someone green is to exalt them as one of the environmentalist saviors of the planet. But it is amazing how many people are green in both senses.”

Indeed.

A Pathetic Congress

Mark Steyn writes brilliantly and, as always, wittily about the horse and pony show in Congress last week.

Your weekly Steyn! Enjoy.

Mark Steyn on Government Change on National Review Online

Defining Post-Modernism

From the International Herald Tribune comes this story on the president of France. I find him to be a fabulous subject when trying to define our "post-modern age."

PARIS: Serge Hefez is a practicing psychiatrist, and he has identified a new mental illness among the French: "obsessive Sarkosis" - an unhealthy fascination with President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name," Hefez said in an interview. "He's penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man - he's like a reflection of us in the mirror."

The French project themselves onto Sarkozy, Hefez said.

"He's the incarnation of the post-modern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic. And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme - that it's the individual who counts, not the society."

A year after taking office, Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere - at least in the world of television and print. The daily Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, his life and loves, with more than a million sold for about $25.1 million.

Television covers Sarkozy's every gesture, both in homage and mockery, itself an effort to try to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the "pipolization" of political life - the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera, which Hefez considers an example of "democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw."

A Most Important Subject

John Hinderaker on his Powerline Blog reports on what the oil companies actually said to Congress when they were called by the Democrats to testify. The Democrats were looking for a way to place the blame on the oil companies, instead of where the the major problem of high gas prices actually lies. It is the Democratic Party.

While this is quite long, it is an extremely interesting post, and something you certainly not something you will read in your newspaper, or see on TV nightly news programs.

Oil Executives Try to Educate Senate Democrats, But Democrats Appear Hopeless

Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned top executives from the petroleum industry for what Chairman Pat Leahy thought would be a politically profitable inquisition. Leahy and his comrades showed up ready to blame American oil companies for the high price of gasoline, but the event wasn't as satisfactory as the Democrats had hoped.

The industry lineup was formidable: Robert Malone, Chairman and President of BP America, Inc.; John Hofmeister, President, Shell Oil Company; Peter Robertson, Vice Chairman of the Board, Chevron Corporation; John Lowe, Executive Vice President, Conoco Philips Company; and Stephen Simon, Senior Vice President, Exxon Mobil Corporation. Not surprisingly, the petroleum executives stole the show, as they were far smarter, infinitely better informed, and much more public-spirited than the Senate Democrats.

One theme that emerged from the hearing was the surprisingly small role played by American oil companies in the global petroleum market. John Lowe pointed out:

I cannot overemphasize the access issue. Access to resources is severely restricted in the United States and abroad, and the American oil industry must compete with national oil companies who are often much larger and have the support of their governments.
We can only compete directly for 7 percent of the world's available reserves while about 75 percent is completely controlled by national oil companies and is not accessible.

Stephen Simon amplified:

Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1 percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.
To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.

Because foreign companies and governments control the overwhelming majority of the world's oil, most of the price you pay at the pump is the cost paid by the American oil company to acquire crude oil from someone else:

Last year, the average price in the United States of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was around $2.80. On average in 2007, approximately 58 percent of the price reflected the amount paid for crude oil. Consumers pay for that crude oil, and so do we.
Of the 2 million barrels per day Exxon Mobil refined in 2007 here in the United States, 90 percent were purchased from others.

Another theme of the day's testimony was that, if anyone is "gouging" consumers through the high price of gasoline, it is federal and state governments, not American oil companies. On the average, 15% percent of the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4% represents oil company profits. These figures were repeated several times, but, strangely, not a single Democratic Senator proposed relieving consumers' anxieties about gas prices by reducing taxes.
The last theme that was sounded repeatedly was Congress's responsibility for the fact that American companies have access to so little petroleum. Shell's John Hofmeister explained, eloquently:

While all oil-importing nations buy oil at global prices, some, notably India and China, subsidize the cost of oil products to their nation's consumers, feeding the demand for more oil despite record prices. They do this to speed economic growth and to ensure a competitive advantage relative to other nations.
Meanwhile, in the United States, access to our own oil and gas resources has been limited for the last 30 years, prohibiting companies such as Shell from exploring and developing resources for the benefit of the American people.
Senator Sessions, I agree, it is not a free market.
According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico.
The Argonne National Laboratory did a report in 2004 that identified 40 specific federal policy areas that halt, limit, delay or restrict natural gas projects. I urge you to review it. It is a long list. If I may, I offer it today if you would like to include it in the record.
When many of these policies were implemented, oil was selling in the single digits, not the triple digits we see now. The cumulative effect of these policies has been to discourage U.S. investment and send U.S. companies outside the United States to produce new supplies.
As a result, U.S. production has declined so much that nearly 60 percent of daily consumption comes from foreign sources.
The problem of access can be solved in this country by the same government that has prohibited it. Congress could have chosen to lift some or all of the current restrictions on exportation and production of oil and gas. Congress could provide national policy to reverse the persistent decline of domestically secure natural resource development.

Later in the hearing, Senator Orrin Hatch walked Hofmeister through the Democrats' latest efforts to block energy independence:

HATCH: I want to get into that. In other words, we're talking about Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. It's fair to say that they're not considered part of America's $22 billion of proven reserves.
HOFMEISTER: Not at all.
HATCH: No, but experts agree that there's between 800 billion to almost 2 trillion barrels of oil that could be recoverable there, and that's good oil, isn't it?
HOFMEISTER: That's correct.
HATCH: It could be recovered at somewhere between $30 and $40 a barrel?
HOFMEISTER: I think those costs are probably a bit dated now, based upon what we've seen in the inflation...
HATCH: Well, somewhere in that area.
HOFMEISTER: I don't know what the exact cost would be, but, you know, if there is more supply, I think inflation in the oil industry would be cracked. And we are facing severe inflation because of the limited amount of supply against the demand.
HATCH: I guess what I'm saying, though, is that if we started to develop the oil shale in those three states we could do it within this framework of over $100 a barrel and make a profit.
HOFMEISTER: I believe we could.
HATCH: And we could help our country alleviate its oil pressures.
HOFMEISTER: Yes.
HATCH: But they're stopping us from doing that right here, as we sit here. We just had a hearing last week where Democrats had stopped the ability to do that, in at least Colorado.
HOFMEISTER: Well, as I said in my opening statement, I think the public policy constraints on the supply side in this country are a disservice to the American consumer.

The committee's Democrats attempted no response. They know that they are largely responsible for the current high price of gasoline, and they want the price to rise even further. Consequently, they have no intention of permitting the development of domestic oil and gas reserves that would both increase this country's energy independence and give consumers a break from constantly increasing energy costs.

Every once in a while, Congressional hearings turn out to be informative

My Favorite Canadian Watchdog

COMMENTARYMay 21, 2008News from nowhere

So it will soon be legal in Britain to hybridize humans with other species, and grow humans from embryo for “scientific research” -- however medically unnecessary. Two free votes on Monday established this, in the House of Commons at Westminster. Neither was close. They defeated amendments to the Labour government’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, now certain of passage. The bill is advertised as the legal means to put Britain at the forefront of international biological research, as part of the government’s broad commitment to “make Britain a world leader in science and technology.”

Back in the 1940s, Germany and Japan were world leaders in medical research, thanks to what their doctors were allowed to do, to Jewish and Manchurian human beings, respectively. Countries with less “progressive” views on the requirements for research, risked falling behind. In putting it this way I am being what the BBC, and other liberal media, call “emotive.” And I could not reverse the charge, without arguing absurdly that “smugness” is an emotion.

In our contemporary version of Orwellian Newspeak, those who defend a position in logic and morals, that might well be unassailable, with any degree of passion, are “emotive” and deserve to be ignored. Whereas, those who advocate the most monstrous crimes in a cool and dispassionate spirit deserve, at the very least, to be spared the inconvenience of explaining their motives.

But no, I am not going far enough, in exposing this hypocrisy.The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown -- the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one -- is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

This in turn allows such as his unpleasant public health minister, Dawn Primarolo (one thinks of Miss Hardcastle at the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments , the “N.I.C.E.”, in C.S. Lewis’s novel, That Hideous Strength), to follow the argument through, and accuse those who are morally repelled by animal/human hybrids of actually willing that humans should suffer from incurable diseases. To be plain: emotional blackmail is being compounded with vile slander.

For Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures -- Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality -- has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

In every subsequent battle, in which the darker angel of our human nature has attempted to “push the envelope” forward, those who defend the sanctity of human life have fought a hopeless rearguard action. And now we have “advanced” to the cusp of the Frankenstein era, in which the wanton breeding and destruction of embryonic humans is taken for granted, along with the assembly of animal/human hybrids. My reader need not believe for a moment that it will stop there.

David Warren© Ottawa Citizen

This Makes Me Sick

From Fox News:

Boston’s Children’s Hospital bills itself as the hospital for children — and now it’s also the hospital for children who want a sex change, a procedure some critics are calling “barbaric.”

Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric specialist at the hospital, has launched a clinic for transgendered kids — boys who feel like girls, girls who want to be boys — and he’s opening his doors to patients as young as 7.

Across the Pond

John Hinderaker at Powerline weighs in on what is happening in the UK:

The United Kingdom represents an interesting parallel to what is happening in our election season. In the U.K., the Labour party has been in power since 1997, when Tony Blair crushed John Major. British voters are now heartily sick of the Labourites, and recent polls show the Conservative Party leading Labour by twenty points, with the Tories at 45%, Labour at 25%, and the Liberal Democrats at 18%. Nearly all observers expect the Tories to sweep to victory when Prime Minister Gordon Brown is finally forced to call an election.

The Prime Minister's personal standing is even worse than his party's, with 17% approving his performance and 78% disapproving--a worse showing than Neville Chamberlain in 1940! The Conservative Party leader, in contrast, has a net 33% positive favorability rating.

We conservatives would like to think that this swing toward the conservative party in Great Britain is due to Englishmen reading Adam Smith, Hayek and Friedman, and seeing the light. But of course it isn't. British voters are unhappy about the same things American voters are--high energy costs, declining home prices, and so on. The difference is that the party in power in the U.K., which naturally gets blamed for these things, is the party of the Left.

It is inevitable that when a party has been in power for some years, irritations accumulate. That party will be blamed for pretty much any discontents that come along, and eventually voters become tired of the current "ins" and turn to the "outs." That's good news, for the moment, in the U.K.; bad news here, unfortunately

The Hard Left Plays Hardball

Victor Davis Hanson comments on what appears to have happened within the Democratic Party nomination this season.

Clintonian Pathos

After a lopsided victory, Hillary seems a mute bystander to the Obama / McCain exchanges.
Of course, there is irony in Bill Clinton whining about media bias against his wife's candidacy, when to suggest the reverse in the 1990s was McCarthyesque. Ironic too is to see the viciousness of the hard left—in Clinton war-room style—eviscerate Hillary. And more still to see the identity politics of race trump Hillary's 2007 gender card of our would-be first female President. And even more still to see Bill out crooned by a younger, far slicker version of himself.

But all that said, Hillary, the far more experienced and knowledgeable candidate and the better debater, does have a point—under any other rules than the byzantine system of her own party, she would be the nominee. She won all the key in-play states. And her recent margins in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, (and Kentucky to come) prove the momentum is still with her, despite a lack of cash and coverage. If she doesn't quite win the popular vote, her victories still more derive from plebiscites than Obama's caucus wins.

In the past other less successful Democratic candidates have stayed in the race far longer than she. Surely all that should equate to a tight race rather than a media stampede to have her get out in shame and defeat. Either one of two things—or both—is going on. Either the Democratic establishment and media, nursing hidden slights and pent-up grievances over nearly two-decades of Clintonian selfishness and hard-ball and now smelling blood, have finally and collectively yelled "No mas. " Or at this point, it matters not at all what Obama or his various embarrassments say any more. He is a new messianic piper, part old Adlai and JFK, and the Democrats are swarming to his tune.

It's now a question of pure emotion, not reason, and any poor soul like Hillary who stands in their way—well, suffers the fate of all disbelievers...

Steyn Weighs In

Obama's childishness was on display again this week. I have been waiting for Mark Steyn's response. Here it is. And, as usual, it is good.

Mark Steyn on Barack Obama on National Review Online

More Pessimism

This time from our columnist in Canada:

Israel at 60

Will Israel last another 60 years? Will Canada? Will the West? I believe the questions are closely related, and will begin by giving two quick answers.The first is, “I don’t know.”

Attempts to predict the future from the historical past have a track record around zero, and while it is true that history is constantly repeating itself, it is able to repeat itself in many different ways. On the present leadership performance of Israel’s complacent, incompetent, and probably corrupt prime minister -- and in view of the assembling forces dedicated to the country’s annihilation -- one might reasonably say that Israel will be lucky to reach three score and ten.

But as I’ve myself frequently argued, all trends are reversible.The second is, “It depends what you mean by survive.” If the world is still here -- and let’s not take anything for granted -- there is likely to be a little patch of land corresponding to that upon which Israel now sits. And if there are still Jews, it will still belong in their hearts, as it has done for millennia. It is not inconceivable to me that Israel might be annihilated, or nearly annihilated, and then restored. Such events are compatible with very large, planetary wars. They hardly bear thinking about.

But I insist, that Israel’s survival is tied to that of the West. She is our front line, an embodiment of unambiguously Western values. The enemies we have are common enemies -- Left-fascist ideology (formerly expressed as Communism, but now reorganizing around the “scientific materialism” of the environmentalist cause), and Islamo-fascist ideology (now called “Islamism,” to distinguish political from religious Islam, on the assumption that this can be done).

These are the two great contemporary Sirens, and each calls upon constituencies lodged deep in the West itself. The appeal of simplistic ideological movements spreads in the spiritual vacuum left by the recession of Christianity. But whatever dark forces answer to the command of these two great Sirens, there is agreement between the Left and the Islamists that Israel is the front line of the West, and that she is sufficiently isolated to be worth destroying first. There is moreover agreement between them that the ultimate target is “Amerika” and the whole “bourgeois, Judeo-Christian” order that has sustained our freedom and prosperity.

What happens if our enemies succeed? I would guess it is then Green versus Green, and the Islamist monster eats the Environmentalist monster, for the former is more wilful and ruthless.I risk being misunderstood at this point, for I am not exactly equating Osama bin Laden with Al Gore. Environmentalism, and the current “global warming” hysteria, is only a flag of convenience, just as the “class war” served the Left in a previous generation, and there are many alternative flags. Its root cause is a Gnostic, religious atheism: it forms and disperses and reforms like the mist. Whereas, Islamism is a unified and cogent force, with an instinctive recourse to violence.

To understand what I mean, the reader must consider almost any contemporary university campus, in which the radical political causes are quite various, but there is general agreement among radicals on each other’s agendas. That one must attack Zionist Israel, and conversely champion Oppressed Palestinians, is something every little half-educated campus ideologue knows he can take for granted.What has this got to do with the future of Israel? Everything.

For while Israel’s proximate enemies are Hamas and Hezbollah, and the unspeakable regimes in Iran, Syria, and elsewhere that control and supply these frontline terrorists, and are themselves pledged to Israel’s physical annihilation, and are assiduously building missile stockpiles for the task -- they have no chance of prevailing so long as the West remains united behind Israel. But for various reasons, the will to defend Israel is crumbling, and Israel’s enemies know this. She resides in a region where she is outnumbered 60-to-1 in population, and by a much greater ratio in land area or elbow room (with accompanying natural resources). Israel has no prospects on her own.

And this is where I feel least hopeful about the future. The desire to defend Israel is being sapped, across the West, by causes ranging from exhaustion with endless trouble in the Middle East, to the thirst for oil, to the rapid growth of Muslim immigration, and thus of an electoral constituency that tends to be extremely unsympathetic to Israel.But more profoundly, the Left-Islamist alliance -- forged in common opposition to everything the West stands for -- has made the abandonment of Israel a common priority across the spectrum of people who take their politics from fashion.

Alas, most of the West’s internal enemies, demanding the abandonment of Israel as first step, do not even know what they are doing. They are like parasites upon a host organism, and do not understand that when the host organism dies, they too will die.

David Warren

© Ottawa Citizen