Israel also lives in the real world

From The Australian - News:

ISRAEL last night threatened to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed.

The unprecedented warning was delivered to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a letter as Israel debated a deal offered by Hamas to free Corporal Gilad Shalit.

It came as Israeli military officials readied a second invasion force for a huge offensive into Gaza. Hamas's Gaza-based political leaders, including Mr Haniyeh, had already gone into hiding.

But last night's direct threat to kill Mr Haniyeh, a democratically elected head of state, sharply raised the stakes.

If this is true then it's high damn time. The Palestinians have by their own actions forfeited their right to have their "human rights" respected in any way. They have, again by their own actions, effectively removed themselves from the human race and made themselves the moral equivalent of so many smallpox viruses or plague bacilli and it is time that Israel started dealing with them thusly.

As for the "international reaction" to such a program? Who cares. The peoples of Europe and the Left-Liberals in America hate the Jews anyway and nothing they do or fail to do will change that.

Ford lives in the real world

From The Washington Post:

Ford Motor Co. has dropped a pledge to build 250,000 gas-electric hybrid cars per year by the end of the decade, saying it will expand into other fuel-saving technologies.

Environmentalists accused the automaker of backpedaling, but industry analysts said the move underscored the difficulty the industry is having in selling the technology to mainstream car buyers.

Notice how the eco-loons don't give a fig for the fact that Ford can't sell the damn things. As far as they are concerned Ford exists for no other purpose than to satisfy their infantile demands based on their delusional fantasies of global catastrophe.

US out of UN / UN out of US

From The Washington Times:

NEW YORK -- Republicans in Congress moved yesterday to cut U.S. contributions to the United Nations budget just one day before the world body is scheduled to lift a budget cap imposed by the United States and other donors and to resume spending as usual.

At least $17 million has been sliced this week from the Bush administration's appropriations request for the U.N. regular budget, as frustration with the United Nations continues to fester among conservative lawmakers.

Rep. Scott Garrett, New Jersey Republican, yesterday won approval in a House subcommittee to cut $2 million from the U.S. contribution to the U.N. budget, saying that taxpayer money should not be used to lobby the U.S. government.

He was referring to a recent speech by Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown, who told two left-leaning think tanks, the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, that Washington should do more to defend the international organization in public.

Another $15 million was diverted from the $1.28 billion request for contributions to international organizations to fund domestic law-enforcement programs. Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, successfully demanded that the United States should not pay anything toward the new Human Rights Council as long as countries on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism such as Cuba serve on the 47-member body.

This is a good start, but as long as we are spending one penny on that worthless organization it is one penny too much.

We should withdraw and kick them offshore.

You will also notice that it is Republican legislators who are cutting our contribution to the dictator's club. This is another reason why elections matter.

Death is too good for some people

Our friends at The Brussels Journal tell this sad story. I offer it here without comment:

The front page of all Belgian newspapers today had the pictures of two little girls. “Murdered” the captions said. Nathalie Mahy (10) and Stacy Lemmens (7) disappeared on 9 June. Their bodies were discovered yesterday. Exactly ten years ago, before Stacy and Nathalie were born, the Belgian papers also brought pictures of murdered girls. Their names were Melissa Russo (8) and Julie Lejeune (8), victims of the notorious pedophile Marc Dutroux.

Stacy and Nathalie were abducted in Liège, the largest city of Wallonia, the Socialist-dominated French-speaking part of Belgium. Melissa and Julie were from the same city, often referred to as “Palermo on the Meuse.” According to Urban Audit Liège has the highest crime rate of all European cities (EU27), with 256.13 recorded crimes per 1,000 population in 2001.

Two weeks ago the police arrested 38-year old Abdallah Aït Oud, a Belgian of Moroccan origin. He was seen near the little girls prior to their disappearance. Aït Oud denies having murdered Stacy and Nathalie. Though the police has not been able to prove otherwise, he is a major suspect. He has already been arrested twice for pedophilia, once in 1994 and once in 2001, and he has no alibi for the night and the day after the disappearance of the girls, who are stepsisters.

In 1994 Abdallah Aït Oud was convicted to five years imprisonment for the rape of his 14-year old niece. He had regularly abused his sister’s daughter since she was six. Three years later, however, in 1997, when the Belgians were still recovering from Dutroux’ atrocities, the Belgian authorities, though they had promised the citizens that pedophiles would have to serve their sentences, released Aït Oud from prison prematurely. On 7 September 1997 he was arrested for theft and sent back to prison, where he remained until 2000. In March 2001, shortly after his release, he abducted and violently raped a 14-year old girl.

This time the negligent Belgian authorities decided not even to give the pedophile a prison sentence. Instead they sent him to a mental hospital. Last December Aït Oud’s doctors decided that he was cured and let him go. He went to live in Stacy’s and Nathalie’s street in Liège. The authorities did not notify the neighbours that a man with a dangerous pedophilia record had moved into their street. Disclosing such information is illegal in Belgium, where the state cares more about protecting the privacy of criminals than about protecting the innocent children of law-abiding citizens.

If Aït Oud proves to be the rapist and murderer of Stacy and Nathalie, this case eerily resembles that of Marc Dutroux. He, too, was a convicted pedophile when he abducted and murdered four children and girls in 1995. He, too, had been released prematurely from prison for good conduct. When Dutroux was arrested (by chance!) in 1996, the police found four corpses in his garden but also freed two abducted children whom he kept locked up in his cellar.

There is great indignation in Belgium. If Abdallah Aït Oud proves to be the murderer of Stacy and Nathalie there might be an explosion of popular anger. If he is not the culprit the trauma among the public may be even worse, as this would mean that another pedophile psychopath is on the loose again.

Go read the rest.

There are easier ways to commit suicide

Fits has this up on Shooting The Messenger:

Sure enough, Ibrahim Hooper of the terrorist front organization CAIR immediately decided to issue this statement:"

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which brought Belile's video to the attention of the Pentagon, cautioned against a release, spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said Wednesday.

"It's a free country, but I don't know that it's the wisest choice. I would hope he would seek the advice of levelheaded friends and family and just put this sordid episode to a rest," Hooper said.

This could very well be a veiled threat.

So let me get this straight. Some Islamofascist asswipe is warning Cpl. Belile and his band not to release their song. . . Ibrahim and his crew are planning to frak with a bunch of Marines.

Please do. Just give me a heads up so I can be there with my lawn chair and a cooler full of Newcastle and my video camera. And a rain poncho so your blood won't ruin my new shirt.

I guess that Ibrahim slept through the part of terrorism school where they explain about how the Mighty Warriors of Allah only attack the defenseless.

A blast from the past

Reader and fellow Hillbilly Ecosystem member Do-San asks if the Tongsun Park involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal is the same individual who was involved in a Carter-era financial scandal. It is the same man. It seems that some people never change.

From The Washington Post:

"An American success story" was how Tongsun Park described himself when he first came to the attention of the media and the FBI, in 1977, with gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars to prominent politicians in an influence-peddling scandal that came to be known as "Koreagate."

More than a quarter of a century later, the South Korean businessman is back in the news, the subject of a federal arrest warrant that alleges he acted as an intermediary with corrupt U.N. officials in an oil-for-food conspiracy orchestrated by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The criminal complaint charges that Park received at least $2 million from Iraq, much of it in cash delivered by diplomatic pouch from Baghdad.

Dubbed the "Oriental Gatsby" by the media because of his lavish Georgetown parties, Park put together an impressive list of friends and clients over the years, including former Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega, U.S. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. His charm was legendary, as was his habit of disbursing white envelopes stuffed with as much as $20,000 in cash to congressmen as part of a lobbying campaign financed by South Korean intelligence.

"Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me," he told the House ethics committee in April 1978. "Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do?"

Although the payments to congressmen caused a scandal, Park was never convicted of wrongdoing in a U.S. court. He fled to South Korea when news of the scandal broke, and charges of bribery and conspiracy were dropped after he agreed to return to the United States and testify before Congress. His biggest problems came with the Internal Revenue Service, which said he owed millions of dollars in back taxes for not reporting his commissions.

Stop The ACLU Blogburst

ACLU Against Brain Scans on Suspected Terrorists

by Jay on 06-28-06 @ 10:29 pm Filed under ACLU, War On Terror, News

If it is a tool we use in the fight against terror one can bet that the ACLU will be against it. When the NY Times revealed classified information that we are trying to track international phone calls of suspected terrorists, the ACLU took that ball and are still running with it. When the NY Times leaked classified information that we are trying to track international bank transactions in order to catch terrorists the ACLU jumped on board with that too. If the NY Times doesn’t leak it to everyone, the ACLU will do its best by filing freedom of Information Act requests.
In the face of suspicions that the government is using cutting-edge brain-scanning technologies on suspected terrorists being held overseas or at home, the American Civil Liberties Union today announced that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with all the primary American security agencies.

“There are certain things that have such powerful implications for our society — and for humanity at large — that we have a right to know how they are being used so that we can grapple with them as a democratic society,” said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. “These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood.”

I know that the ACLU claim to be the experts on rights, but I’m not sure where they found this “right to know” every secret government program used in a time of war. This must be one of those rights the ACLU made up out of thin air. Furthermore the ACLU’s leap that it would be inevitable that the program would be misused and misunderstood is pure biased opinion on their part.

Here is a brief description of the program.

FMRI is a technique for determining which parts of the brain are activated by different types of physical sensation or activity, such as sight, sound or the movement of a subject’s fingers. This “brain mapping” is achieved by setting up an advanced MRI scanner in a special way so that the increased blood flow to the activated areas of the brain shows up on Functional MRI scans. (See here for a description of the physiology of the BOLD esponse.) The whole FMRI process will now be briefly described.

The subject in a typical experiment will lie in the magnet and a particular form of stimulation will be set up. For example, the subject may wear special glasses so that pictures can be shown during the experiment. Then, MRI images of the subject’s brain are taken. Firstly, a high resolution single scan is taken. This is used later as a background for highlighting the brain areas which were activated by the stimulus. Next, a series of low resolution scans are taken over time, for example, 150 scans, one every 5 seconds. For some of these scans, the stimulus (in this case the moving picture) will be presented, and for some of the scans, the stimulus will be absent. The low resolution brain images in the two cases can be compared, to see which parts of the brain were activated by the stimulus.

After the experiment has finished, the set of images is analyzed. Firstly, the raw input images from the MRI scanner require mathematical transformation (Fourier transformation, a kind of spatial “inversion”) to reconstruct the images into “real space”, so that the images look like brains. The rest of the analysis is done using a series of tools which correct for distortions in the images, remove the effect of the subject moving their head during the experiment, and compare the low resolution images taken when the stimulus was off with those taken when it was on. The final statistical image shows up bright in those parts of the brain which were activated by this experiment. These activated areas are then shown as coloured blobs on top of the original high resolution scan, for interpretation of the experiment. This combined activation image can be rendered in 3D, and the rendering can be calculated from any angle. (See here for a brief overview of GLM analysis.)

Now why would the public need to know about this and debate it? This kind of information is for our elected officials to decide, and our enemies don’t need to know about it.

Back to the ACLU…

The most likely technology to be used for anti-terrorism purposes is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which can produce live, real-time images of people’s brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli. Two private companies have announced that they will begin to offer “lie detection” services using fMRI as early as this summer. These companies are marketing their services to federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and to state and local police departments.

“This technology must not be deployed until it is proven effective — and we are a long way away from that point, according to scientists in the field,” said Steinhardt. “What we don’t want is to open our newspapers and find that another innocent person has been thrown into Guantánamo because interrogators have jumped to conclusions based on a technology no one understands very well.”

Who does the effectiveness of the program have to be proven to? If it has to be proven to the ACLU it would never happen. If the companies that have developed the technology are providing this service to the government as a useful means they are staking their reputation on its effectiveness. The ACLU admit that they don’t understand it well. Who would better understand it than those that developed it?

The ACLU’s FOIA requests were filed yesterday with the Pentagon, NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

“These brain-scanning technologies have potentially far-reaching implications, yet uncertain results and effectiveness,” said Steinhardt. “And we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding the underlying processes of the brain that the scanners have begun to reveal. We do not want to see our government yet again deploying a potentially momentous technology unilaterally and in secret, before Americans have had a chance to figure out how it fits in with our values as a nation.”

The Uncooperative Blogger says:

I say let’s experiment on terrorist, what better testing ground can you ask for? The ACLU has become just plain ridiculous, and they are not working in the best interest of our country. The New York Times, the leakers and the ACLU, who I refer to as the American Communist Liberation Union, are killing us in the war on terror!

So, what are we going to learn from an FOIA request? That they are using what I just told you about? Gee, that will be very helpful to the American people won’t it?

I’d just like to know how the ACLU would have us handle the war on terror. It seems they want us to fight the killers with kid gloves. If someone can name me one anti-terrorist program our government has implemented that the ACLU has approved of we might have a debate. I can’t think of one. If we are to fight the war on terror the way the ACLU wants we might as well just go ahead and surrender.

Bill O’Reilly is right on target.

The anti-Bush crew, led by The New York Times and the ACLU want civilian trials for terrorists, no coerced interrogation, no rendition for terrorists to other countries, no war in Iraq, and on and on. As I opine, The Times and other committed left media believe the Bush administration — and not the terrorists —
is the primary danger to this country.

Thats ironic, because every once in a while I think it is the ACLU and far left that pose more of a danger to America.

This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay or Gribbit. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 200 blogs already on-board.

You are being listened to

Like grandma Calhoon always used to say, "spank them hard enough and they will feel the pain". From The Washington Times:

Key backers of the Senate immigration bill said yesterday they are willing to consider a compromise that would delay the guest-worker program and "amnesty" portions until the borders have been secured.

The proposal was floated by Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter in an interview Monday with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

"I think it's worth discussing," said Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican. "Many of us have said we could work on border enforcement and, at the same time, work on other aspects that would take more time."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, said a delay will occur anyway because it will take a few years to set up the guest-worker program and
the structure to process millions of illegal aliens onto a pathway to citizenship.

"We've always understood that," he said, adding that the final bill must be "comprehensive" and include all provisions.

"That's the key," he said, after he, Mr. McCain and others hosted a broad coalition of outside groups demanding a comprehensive bill.

First of all don't get too excited about this. The Senate crowd that we're hearing from here are the biggest bunch of liars and backstabbers in American politics. Notice how Kennedy is still calling for a "comprehensive" bill.

"Comprehensive" in this context means the hard reality of an amnesty along with the false promise of border security. Do not fall for it.

What today's announcement represents is a feeler to see if the public is still paying attention. Prove that you are. Land on your congressmen with both feet. Tell them that a final bill that has border security and a promise to study a guest worker program in the future, with no commitments beyond that, would be acceptable. Nothing less.

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let me know at what level you would like to participate.

Our friends on Turtle Bay

Claudia Rosett has a good piece in NRO about the trial of Tongsun Park, the South Korean businessman implicated in the Oil-for-Food scandal:

While United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already dismissed the Oil-for-Food scandal as over and done, within the wood-paneled walls of a Manhattan courtroom it has just come to life. The opening this week of the first
federal trial linked to the U.N.’s former relief program for Iraq has transformed the distant saga of sanctions busting and stolen billions into an up-close drama, with prosecutors alleging that Saddam Hussein, in his efforts to shake off U.N. sanctions, reached via a secret “back channel” all the way from Baghdad right into Washington, New York, and the U.N. executive suite.

The defendant, South Korean businessman Tongsun Park, is charged in the Southern District of New York with acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam’s Iraq — which tried through various means, especially the manipulation of the 1996-2003 Oil-for-Food program, to end the U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Park’s lawyer, Michael Kim, says the 71-year-old Park is “absolutely not guilty.”

Whatever the outcome for Park, his trial — expected to last about three weeks — looks likely to provide an unprecedented view into the workings of U.N. backroom politics. Not least, this comes as a timely warning to beware whatever might be going on today in any back channels the U.N. might have opened with nuclear-happy, sanctions-threatened, oil-rich Iran.

[Snip]

But at the U.N. itself, which actually ran Oil-for-Food, not a single official involved in the administration of the program, from Kofi Annan on down, has been required to come forth and tell, in public, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Top U.N. officials have declined invitations to testify at congressional
hearings and stonewalled questions from the press. They have tucked under the rug of diplomatic immunity and silence a great many loose ends left by Paul Volcker’s U.N.-authorized probe, which covered some of the material now spilling into the New York courtroom, but did all its questioning in secret and is now hiding from the public its entire archive of underlying documents. No one at Turtle Bay seems even interested that the former director of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, alleged by Volcker to have taken $147,000 in payoffs on Iraqi oil deals, is protesting innocence, uncontested, receiving full U.N. pension and living on Cyprus. Watching Tongsun Park's trial begin on Tuesday, and listening to testimony that is opening one can of worms after another, I had to wonder, were the U.N. subject to a similar standard of law, what might we learn?

What might we learn? Damn good question.

It amazes me that there are people in this country that still trust the United Nations. It amazes me that there are still people who think that there is any point whatsoever in the US remaining in that rotten to the core organization.

On second thought it doesn’t amaze me. It is just part and parcel of the suicidal impulse which has infected some in the West.

New Hillbilly on board!

We have a new member of the Hillbilly Ecosystem.

Everybody extend a friendly howdie to our new neighbor Ozark Rambler.

We now have a Libertarian to balance out the Green that just joined.

Glass Houses

I'm sure that everyone has heard of this by now, from the Washington Post:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Rush Limbaugh could see a deal with prosecutors in a long-running prescription fraud case collapse after authorities found a bottle of Viagra in his bag at Palm Beach International Airport. The prescription was not in his name.

Limbaugh was detained for more than three hours Monday at the airport after returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Customs officials found the Viagra in his luggage but his name was not on the prescription, said Paul Miller, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

[Snip]

Limbaugh's doctor had prescribed the Viagra, but it was "labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes," Roy Black, Limbaugh's attorney, said in a statement.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection examined the 55-year-old radio commentator's luggage after his private plane landed at the airport, Miller said.

Investigators confiscated the drugs, which treat erectile dysfunction. Limbaugh was released without being charged.

Now this is no big deal. It is not rare for a doctor who has a famous patient to prescribe a drug like Viagra in his own name to protect that famous patient's privacy and this is not illegal under Florida law. It is unfortunate for Mr. Limbaugh that the fact that he suffers from erectile dysfunction has now been splashed all over the world's media, but the fame which makes this story newsworthy has brought him a personal fortune which must be getting close to a billion dollars now so I wont cry too many tears for him.

What makes this story stand out to me, a loyal Rush listener for years, is the fact that for years now whenever a story about Viagra or any of the other drugs which treat ED would be in the news Rush would latch onto it like a dog with a particularly tasty bone. And he would not be praising modern medical science for developing a treatment for a condition which robs a substantial number of men of an important part of their quality of life. No he would be raving about how this indicated that America had become obsessed with sex, implying that a man who might wish to continue enjoying sexual relations after prostate surgery was playing an important part in the decline of Western Civilization.

I guess we know why he found the topic of Viagra so fascinating now.

Why the parties ARE different and elections DO matter

Cam Edwards writes this on Townhall.com:

A remarkable thing happened at the United Nations yesterday. We, the United States, told the world "no". The messenger was Robert Joseph, the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Speaking before the dozens of nations that have gathered for the review conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons, Joseph told the world in no uncertain terms where the United States stood.

"The U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of our citizens to keep and bear arms, and there will be no infringement of those rights," he proclaimed to the dignitaries and functionaries. "The United States will not agree to any provisions restricting civilian possession, use or legal trade of firearms inconsistent with our laws and practices."

Now, if this sounds familiar, it should be. It was five years ago that UN Ambassador John Bolton said something similar during the first conference on small arms. Then, as now, many countries wanted the conference to discuss and implement controls on the civilian possession of firearms. . .

Is there anyone out there who believes the UN representatives appointed by President Hillary Clinton or President Al Gore or President John Kerry would have delivered those remarks to a conference whose true purpose was to get the UN behind global civilian disarmament?

Most UN member states are unfree nations ruled by dictators of one stripe or another. They under no circumstances want their subjects to be armed because armed subjects tend to make themselves citizens by standing dictators up against walls and filling them full of holes.

That the Left in America is willing to move heaven and earth to disarm the American citizen makes me deeply suspicious of their true motives.

It also makes me realise once again how vitally important it is that we keep the Jackass Party as far away from the levers of power as humanly possible.

The left shoots itself in the foot, again

John McIntyre posts this on the RCP Blog:

This story is a further example of how the political environment can change very quickly. President Bush was already looking better after two weeks of positive news (holding CA-50, killing Zarqawi, Rove cleared, a new government in Iraq) before the New York Times irresponsibly disclosed details of a top secret program aimed at protecting the nation from future terrorist attacks. The program was legal, effective, and had strong bi-partisan support: both 9/11 Commission Vice Chair Lee Hamilton and Rep. John Murtha (Pa.) strongly urged the Times not to disclose the program.

Politically, this is a clear winner for Bush and the GOP. The issue plays to Bush's strengths and continues to paint the picture of the President as a stalwart fighter, protecting America's safety while the left-wing press does their best to undermine as many successful anti-terror programs as possible.

The Times and the far left are so completely out of touch with where the country is on national security and terrorism issues they probably thought this disclosure would hurt Bush politically. They are clueless.

But while this is a huge win politically for Bush, it doesn't have to be a loss for Democrats. This brewing scandal is a tailor-made opportunity for a Democrat to show his or her independence from the far-left, borderline anti-American media. Hillary Clinton would measurably improve her chances of becoming President if she walked down to the Senate floor and denounced the New York Times for harming American security.

So while the issue helps Republicans, it provides a huge opportunity for Democrats to send a message to the public on how seriously they take the War on Terror. They would be smart to take it.

He is correct. This helps the President and Republicans while killing whatever tiny, microscopic shred of credibility the New York Times might have had left.

However he is wrong that a Democrat candidate could help herself by merely denouncing the Times on the Senate floor. Democrats have so little credibility on the national security issue that a Democrat would have to demand that the Times editors be prosecuted for espionage or treason. They would have to demand congressional hearings and sponsor legislation creating special punishments for media outlets which publish leaks that damage national security.

In other words a Democrat would have to back up words with deeds and that will NEVER happen.

Well, Lieberman might, but you see how popular he is in the Jackass Party.

More Good News

Clarice Feldman brings us this in The American Thinker:

In contrast to the video Time relied on to condemn Kilo Company, a video of dubious provenance and authenticity, the military apparently has another, one taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle which recorded the entire battle and which confirms the Marine’s version of events, or so NewsMax reports:

As I said before the charges against these Marines seem to be melting like a snowball in a blast furnace.

Keep the pressure up and it is likely that the right thing will be done.

Mark up one for the good guys

Michelle Malkin has good news:

I talked last night with Marine Josh Belile, who was targeted by the Haditha exploiters at CAIR for a satirical song he sang to the troops. He has been exonerated and asked me to post his statement:

It's good to be able to breathe again. I have had a lot of support since this all began, and I want everyone to know that I've read every e-mail, and every message that came my way, and out of nearly 1300 messages, I had one single message that was negative. I can definitely say that this could have been a blessing in disguise. Before this all began, not many people knew of my band, The Sweater Kittenz... and we just played a concert at the largest venue in my local area this past Friday.

You can read the rest on her blog.

For everybody who wrote to the Marine Corps or to Josh give yourself a big pat on the back. The good guys won this one.

"Youths" will be "Youths"

Paul Belien writes this in The Brussels Journal:

The Belgian state is no longer able to guarantee the security of its citizens. On Saturday afternoon Guido Demoor, a 54-year old Flemish train conductor on his way to work, was kicked to death by six "youths" on a crowded bus near Antwerp's Central Station. The incident recalls the rush-hour murder ten weeks ago of Joe Van Holsbeeck, 17 years of age, in a crowded Brussels Central Station on 12 April.

Guido Demoor, a father of two, intervened when six "youths" got on bus 23 in Antwerp and began to intimidate passengers. There were some forty people on the bus. Demoor asked the "youths" to calm down, whereupon they turned on him, savagely beating and kicking the man. At the next stop thirty passengers fled the bus. The thugs kept beating Demoor. They then pulled the emergency brake and jumped from the bus leaving their victim to die.

I don't think I need to tell anyone who reads this blog that the "youths" were Muslim immigrants from North Africa.

Two points. One, there were at least 30 people on that bus. There is no mention of the 6 Muslim sacks of garbage having weapons. 30 against 6. These passengers had the numbers to have stomped these little buckets of sewage into six little wet spots on the pavement. In America that is exactly what would have happened. Even in a liberal Mecca like New York City.

Two, if giving its citizens an absolute guarantee that this kind of thing can never happen is the test of a nation's power to protect its citizens then no nation can pass.

About 25 years ago an acquaintance of mine was murdered in this fashion right here in North Carolina. He was making a phone call in a pay phone when he was set upon by a small group of Black teenage boys who were trying to start a street gang just like they had seen on the TV news. I guess the sight of a dwarf slightly under 3 feet in height was too much for them to pass up. Apparently they took turns standing on either side of him and kicking his head back and forth like a soccer ball.

This was before NC had "shall issue" concealed carry licenses so he had no realistic means with which to defend himself.

It is deeply immoral for a government to deny its citizens and legal residents (and tourists for that matter) the legal right to defend themselves and legal access to the tools necessary for that self defense.

There's nothing sexier

Than a fine looking woman with a gun.

Fits posted this picture of three young Israeli women who had stopped at the mall for ice cream after shooting practice.

Words like "Never Again" don't mean squat unless you are willing to DO SOMETHING to back them up. It is a good thing that the Jews in Israel understand this.

Turning our hate toward home

Roger Scruton was recently asked to address a meeting of Vlaams Belang, the Belgian political party which advocates independence for Flanders. He relates that after his upcoming appearance began to be publicized he began receiving warnings from his academic colleagues. They were urging him not to address an organization which he was assured was xenophobic and racist.

He decided to make the issue of how accusations of xenophobia and racism are used by the European elite to silence criticism one of the topics of his address. He points out that it is not enough for the Belgian political establishment and its allies to defeat Vlaams Belang at the ballot box, the party must be utterly destroyed.

His entire speech is posted on The Brussels Journal and is worth reading; however what I want to focus on here is his remarks on “oikophobia”, the name he applies to the attitude of mind which is the polar opposite – or perhaps mirror image would be more accurate – of xenophobia:

Members of our liberal élite may be immune to xenophobia, but there is an equal fault which they exhibit in abundance, which is the repudiation of, and aversion to, home. Each country exhibits this vice in its own domestic version. Nobody brought up in post-war England can fail to be aware of the educated derision that has been directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to criticize would have been extinguished years ago, had the English not been prepared to die for their country. The loyalty that people need in their daily lives, and which they affirm in their unconsidered and spontaneous social actions, is now habitually ridiculed or even demonized by the dominant media and the education system. National history is taught as a tale of shame and degradation. The art, literature and religion of our nation have been more or less excised from the curriculum, and folkways, local traditions and national ceremonies are routinely rubbished.

This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. I call the attitude oikophobia – the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers. The Cambridge spies – educated people who penetrated our foreign service during the war and betrayed our Eastern European allies to Stalin – offer a telling illustration of what oikophobia has meant for my country and for the Western alliance. And it is interesting to note that a recent BBC ‘docudrama’ constructed around the Cambridge spies neither examined the realities of their treason nor addressed the suffering of the millions of their East European victims, but merely endorsed the oikophobia that had caused them to act as they did.

This deep aversion to “home” which characterizes the elites not only of Europe, but the United States as well, explains a great deal about the state of the political debate both here and in Europe. As Mr. Scruton observes:

The domination of our national Parliaments and the EU machinery by oikophobes is partly responsible for the acceptance of subsidised immigration, and for the attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life. The oikophobe repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national overnments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed from on high by the EU or the UN, and defining his political vision in terms of cosmopolitan values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oikophobe is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of oikophobia that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France, and of course it is now being felt in Belgium too.

The issue of WHY educated and otherwise intelligent people would feel this way is a topic of endless fascination to me. At this point I have no theory of why the citizens of Western democracies would turn their backs upon the ideals which have provided so much freedom and prosperity to so many people.

What I do know is that the elites must not only be opposed but defeated. It is not just possible but likely that Europe has gone too far to be saved. I am on record as believing that we are seeing the emergence of what I have termed as a Forth Reich in Europe. The only real question that I see is what shape it will take, Soviet style communism or Islamofascist theocracy.

Behold the face of Europe

From Reuters:

STUTTGART (Reuters) - Riot police detained around 200 England soccer supporters on Saturday after they clashed with German fans, throwing bottles and chairs and trading punches in a square in the center of Stuttgart.

Worthless fans of a worthless sport popular on a worthless continent act like the worthless louts that they are.

More on the hatreds of the Left

From The American Thinker:

The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times today disclosed the existence of a secret, but entirely legal, program to monitor financial transactions between America and overseas nations. A priceless counter-terrorism tool may have been rendered ineffectual.

For certain kinds of funds transactions there is a nerve center, a Belgian cooperative that routes about 6 trillion dollars daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. This is where the program was focused.

The goal was to trace financial flows between people previously suspected of having Al Qaeda or other terror ties. The operation, up till now anyway, has proven a success:

[The program] has provided clues to money trails and ties between possible terrorists and groups financing them, the officials said. In some instances, they said, the program has pointed them to new suspects, while in others it has buttressed cases already under investigation.

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said.

In the United States, the program has provided financial data in investigations into possible domestic terrorist cells as well as inquiries of Islamic charities with suspected of having links to extremists, the officials said.

The data also helped identify a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges last year, the officials said. The man, Uzair Paracha, who worked at a New York import business, aided a Qaeda operative in Pakistan by agreeing to launder $200,000 through a Karachi bank, prosecutors said.

Before, civil libertarians rush to the defense of this disclosure, they should bear in mind that, as admitted by the New York Times, the program is entirely legal. The administration has briefed the members of Congress entitled to know of the program with nary a protest. (Of course, this will change if the issue becomes politically potent. Then there will be a chorus of feigned outrage that Tia Maria’s money orders are being spied upon.)

The question that I want us to think about is why these newspapers would print this information.

My guess is that it is fear which is motivating them. They are desperately, terribly afraid that American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military will put al-Qaeda out of business before the 2008 presidential election. They are also afraid that the US government under President Bush will score some major victory before the 2006 congressional election.

They can read the polls as well as anyone else can. They can also read the translations of the documents recently recovered in Iraq in which the disarray, pessimism and low morale of the al-Qaeda organization in Iraq are revealed.

The very real possibility that the Iraqi resistance might collapse before 2008 must be haunting the Left like their worst nightmare. Anything they can do to buck up the terrorists, to make it harder to shut down their networks is worth doing since it will help Democrats regain the power which they have had stolen from them. The power which they see as their birthright.

That this is treason honestly does not occur to them. Their hatred of Republicans in general and George W Bush in particular is so great that it literally blinds them to anything else. This phenomenon has been termed, only half jokingly, as Bush Derangement Syndrome. In their universe ANYTHING which damages the president and aids Democrat electoral prospects is by definition good.

The only thing that can possibly deter them from further actions like this is the realistic possibility of prosecution and harsh sentences upon conviction.

The Times does it again

Michelle Malkin has a good summary with lots of links up about the NY Times blowing the cover of yet another successful anti-terrorist tool. Here is the Times' description (I'm not going to link to it, Michelle has a link up on her blog):

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government
and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

She has addresses where you can write to the papers that ran with the story and express your displeasure. I think that the time for that is long past. If the publishers of papers like the New York Times cared about what their readers thought they would have made changes a long time ago in order to stop their disastrous decline in readership.

What we need to do is write to congress and the Justice Department. If media outlets in the US are going to break the law by revealing classified information they need to be prosecuted just like anyone else would be.

There is a very good change that innocent people will die because of what the NYT did. They should not be held blameless for it.

The hatreds of the left

I ran into this post on Blogs for Bush in which Mark Noonan quoted an article in the Telegraph about why the Left in the United Kingdom still seethes with hatred for Margaret Thatcher. Here is a sample of the Telegraph piece:

However, last week a light was shone in on my ignorance. A long-time servant of the BBC explained to me, in a moment of stunning insight, why the Leftists in that organization, and the Leftist contributors to it, are so bilious and angry even 16 years after Lady Thatcher left office: it is because they lost. They were wrong. They were humiliated. They have become bores with nothing else to say. They were not, of course, defeated just by Lady Thatcher: the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War defeated them, too.

Their defeat was then compounded by the speed with which the party of the Left - Labour - abandoned many of its historic principles and, in order to be elected, adopted what can only be described as a Thatcherite consensus. And finally, Mr Blair put the icing on the cake by (we are told) promising that, at her death, Lady Thatcher will be granted the state funeral she deserves.

Consider how angry, how seethingly, dribblingly, incontinently, steamingly angry, you would be if you were a Leftist, as you reflected on the past 25 years or so. First, Lady Thatcher had policies that, after a period of bloody but necessary economic restructuring, improved not merely the growth rate and prosperity of the private sector in general, but also helped create wealth for millions of people who had hitherto owed everything to the state. People suddenly owned their homes, owned shares, and had the freedom to spend more of their disposable income.

Second, her example flashed around a world benighted by socialism, so much so that she remains a heroine in those nations liberated from it. Freedom, choice and prosperity have replaced oppression, uniformity and poverty. Do these people ever ask Poles, or Latvians, whether they wish the clock could be turned back to the age of socialism? How do they explain that things in such lands are so much better, and people so much happier, now?

Finally, why hasn't "their" party undone all the "damage" of Thatcherism? Why do trade union laws remain unrepealed, and industries privatised? Why has there been no uprooting of the property-owning democracy? It is because she was right, and they know she was right. They cannot, however, bear to admit it. All they can do instead is tell lies, call her names and spit with rage. Don't laugh at them. Pity them.

Mr. Noonan draws a parallel between the UK’s leftist elite’s hatred of Lady Thatcher and the American Left’s hatred of Presidents Reagan and Bush:

I actually have met some Brits who, being leftists, assert boldly that Thatcher ruined Britain...what they mean, of course, is that she ruined the British welfare State which the left used to keep people under leftwing control. The left hates being beaten at election time (and thus there frequent resort to voter fraud to prevent same), but they really hate being proved wrong on policy - so, they still hate Thatcher 16 years after she left office, still hate Reagan 18 years after he left office; and they will hate President Bush for decades after he leaves office.

What President Bush has done over the past 5 and a half years is to drive the last few Reaganite nails in the leftwing coffin - by boldly changing US foreign policy in a liberation direction, by cutting taxes, by lifting burdensome regulations - by doing all this while also getting a boom economy without a market bubble or corporation corruption, President Bush has shown once and for all that leftwing policies are wrong - there's just no chance that anyone is ever going to be elected majority powe0r by advocating leftwing ideals...everyone knows they don't work, and that just ticks the left off no end. You'd think that it would make leftists change their minds - and a few do; but most are armored from ear to ear against anything contrary to leftwing ideology.

I tend to agree. The Left will never forgive Reagan for being right in his belief that the Soviet Union should be confronted rather than appeased. They will never forgive him for being right about SDI. They will never forgive him for being right about tax cuts.

In like manner the malignant left hates President Bush. After the first bombing of the World Trade Center President Clinton prattled about criminal prosecutions and asked people not to “overreact”. After 9/11 President Bush moved the battlefield from American cities to the Middle East and liberated two nations with tens of millions of people.

Thanks to President Bush democracy is taking hold in a region which was once home only to despotism and the terrorists (who’s numbers are dwindling due to attrition and demoralization) are fighting our armed and highly trained military forces on Middle Eastern ground rather than our civilians on US soil.

For this the American Left will hate him until the sun is a burned-out cold cinder.

The coming Forth Reich

Here is some more information about the deteriorating situation in Europe from The Brussels Journal. It seems that the governments are not willing to take “no” for an answer in regards to the proposed European Union Constitution.

So we’re all agreed. One year after the “no” votes, the leaders of the EU have decided to make the text binding by 2009. The new Italian government says it interprets the “no” votes as “a demand for more Europe, not less”. The Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt suggests changing the rules so that the European
Constitution may be adopted by a qualified majority vote. The Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel says that ratification should be completed in 2007. Angela Merkel says the text is “vital to German interests”. The European Commission plans to push ahead with as much of the constitution as it can, with or without formal approval.

Am I forgetting anyone? Oh yes, there is one lonely voice of dissent: that of the ordinary citizen who, when invited to express an opinion on the Constitution, usually rejects it. Opinion has swung against the constitution over the past 12 months, both in France and the Netherlands and in those countries whose governments pushed ahead with ratification.

The distinction between governments and peoples has been explicitly acknowledged by the constitution’s chief author, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. “It is not France that has said ‘no’ to the constitution,” he said last week, “it is 55 per cent of French people.” France, in other words, is represented, not by its ill-informed population, but by its former President. “L’état, c’est Giscard.”

The European Constitution transfers an enormous amount of power from the governments and people of Europe to the Union. So much power is concentrated in the Eurocrat buracracy that even the average European citizens, who have been programmed for generations to be docile sheep who trust implicitly in government, were frightened by it.

The European citizenry in many nations were so put off by the proposed constitution that they did what they almost never do. They stood up to their supposed “betters” and said no.
Of course the elites find this unacceptable and plan to go on with implementing the Constitution anyway.

Americans need to watch this closely because this kind of thing can happen here [link].

Some good news, and a lesson

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am less than thrilled with the President and the congressional Republicans over a number of issues. However I believe that however much of a disappointment they may have been in however many areas that it is vital to keep them in control of both houses of congress. Here from today’s Washington Post is a good reason why.

House leaders abruptly canceled a vote to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act yesterday after rank-and-file Republicans revolted over provisions that require bilingual ballots in many places and continued federal oversight of voting practices in Southern states.

The intensity of the complaints, raised in a closed meeting of GOP lawmakers, surprised Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his lieutenants, who thought the path was clear to renew the act's key
provisions for 25 years. The act is widely considered a civil rights landmark that helped thousands of African Americans gain access to the ballot box. Its renewal seemed assured when House and Senate Republican and Democratic leaders embraced it in a May 2 kickoff on the Capitol steps.

But many Southerners feel the law has achieved its purpose and become more nuisance than necessity in several respects. They have aired those arguments for years, but yesterday they got a boost from Republicans scattered throughout the nation who are increasingly raising a different concern: They insist that immigrants learn and use English.

[Snip]

The immigration debate, which has preoccupied Congress for much of the year, included complaints that too many immigrants fail to learn English; the Senate version of the legislation declared English the "national language." House GOP leaders said the issues are unrelated, because only those immigrants who have become U.S. citizens are allowed to vote, while the immigration debate focuses on illegal immigrants.

A very good argument can be made that the Voting Rights Act was once necessary, but that day has passed. The Ku Klux Klan is a hollow shell of what it once was and the attitudes that fed that kind of racism in the white community are dead as well.

In today’s America the Act serves only two purposes, neither legitimate, one as a stick for liberals to continue to beat the conservative South in order to delegitimize conservatism, the other as a convenient framework on which other unsavory provisions, like the bilingual ballot laws, can be hung.

It is time and passed time for the Voting Rights Act to be allowed to fade into the sunset. Not to bring back the bad old days of Jim Crow when robed Klansmen on horseback surrounded polling places to make sure that no Blacks were allowed to vote, but to acknowledge the present reality that such robed poll watchers would be as unwelcome by White Southerners as Black.

Without Republican control of the House of Representatives this would have never happened. Without Republican control of the House of Representatives the Brady gun control law would never have been allowed to sunset.

No Republican control of congress and there would have been no tax cuts and no economic recovery like we are now enjoying. Without Republican control of the House the immigration reform bill passed by Senate Democrats with the help of a handful of RINO backstabbers would today be the law of the land.

As much as the temptations of the inside-the-beltway life tend to pull elected Republicans off the reservation from time to time (immigration, Harriet Meiers, the DP World Port deal) recent history shows that concerted action by conservative grass roots activists, talk radio, and the internet can whip them back into shape.

The same can not be said of Democrats. No amount of pressure from the right-wing blogosphere or talk radio will change Ted Kennedy’s mind on anything. Let’s not throw out the people we can influence and replace them with people who will never listen to us just because “our guys” don’t always pay perfect attention.

Of course there are some “Republican” traitors who do more harm than good and should be removed, John McCain and his wretched little hand-puppet Lindsay Graham come to mind, but that is a topic for another day.

That's almost enough for a good rifle

Hat tip: White Trash Republican

Left-liberals

Patrick at Born Again Redneck has a post up about Iraq where he says this:

Several of you have said I'm nuts to think that the commies in this country are more dangerous than the Jihadists but, sorry, I won't budge from that opinion. I feel that, if we could just get rid of the commies in this country so that we could conduct this war with full force instead of pussy-footing, it would be over by now. You know the Jihadists are emboldened by the nonsense that our treacherous commies talk. If we could shut up our traitors, we could bomb the Jihadists back to the Stone Age where they want to be to be anyway.

I posted a comment in which I agreed with him. He suggested that I post that comment here. So here it is with some additions:

You are correct. The venomous left in this nation is far more of a threat than the terrorists.

Terrorists cannot appoint a Justice to the Supreme Court that will use foreign law rather than the United States constitution to decide cases.

Terrorists cannot create a political climate in the US which will lead to US servicemen being railroaded by false accusations of war crimes. Accusations which melt away like a snowball in a blast furnace when objectively examined.

Terrorists cannot enact legislation like McCain-Feingold which places unacceptable limits on free speech in order to further protect incumbent legislators.

Terrorists cannot take over the administration of our institutes of higher learning and pack their faculties with like minded leftist professors who will indoctrinate our young people with poisonous doctrines of political correctness and multiculturalism. Doctrines which, when they have spread through a society, will render that society defenseless against threats both external and internal.

Terrorists cannot gain control of our major mainstream media and use them as a Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment for the Democrat Party.

Terrorists cannot kill our prosperity by raising taxes and increasing government regulation.

Terrorists cannot pervert the establishment clause of the first amendment into an absolute ban on any mention of God in the public square.

Terrorists cannot render honest citizens defenseless against predatory criminals by enacting gun control laws.

Terrorists cannot keep us dependent on foreign oil by preventing us from developing our domestic resources.

Terrorists cannot open our southern border to an unlimited number of third world immigrants and fast track them into citizenship in order to give the Democrat Party an unbreakable electoral majority which will last for more than a century.

Left-liberals can do all of these things and worse.

I hate them. I hate them with every fiber of my being. I know that on a one-to-one basis many of them can be very nice people. But I also know that if given the chance to exercise power they would ruin this nation and bring about slaughter of the type not seen since the days of Stalin.

A new Ecosystem member!

It Baffles Science has joined the Ecosystem. Here is how the blog describes itself:

The bombast of a narcissist concerning whatever strikes his fancy, including, but not limited to, things involving himself, music, guitars, politics, values, culture, junk...and....stuff. (oooh, eloquence abounds!) A wholly owned subsidiary of Richards's Ego, Inc.

How can I add anything to that?

Welcome to the family. Marry your first cousin and keep your shotgun loaded and you'll fit in right nice.

Amnesty may be dead, for now

By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 21, 2006; Page A01

In a move that could bury President Bush's high-profile effort to overhaul immigration law until after the midterm elections, House GOP leaders yesterday announced a series of field hearings during the August recess, pushing off final negotiations on a bill until fall at the earliest.

The announcement was the clearest sign yet that House Republicans have largely given up on passing a broad rewrite of the nation's immigration laws this year. They believe that their get-tough approach -- including building a wall along the border with Mexico and deporting millions of illegal immigrants -- is far more popular with voters than the approach backed by Bush and the Senate, which would create a guest-worker program and allow many illegal immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship.

From their word processor to God’s ears. Please let this abomination die the painful death that it deserves.

The House move was widely viewed as a slap at Bush, who is seeking a comprehensive immigration bill along the lines of the one approved by the Senate on May 25, which would tighten border controls, establish a guest-worker program for future immigrants and offer most of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal residents a chance to become citizens. The announcement came shortly after Bush left on a trip to Europe.

Does the president really not understand that if that 12 million (in reality it is more like 20 million) illegal aliens (the vast majority Mexican) had been citizens in either 2000 or 2004 that he would not be president today?

The United States is very evenly divided between Republican and Democrat with a small edge for the Republicans. In other words the nation is slightly right of center in a political sense. Mexicans here legally vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats. The highest percentage of Mexicans ever to vote for a Republican candidate was in Texas where 30% of them voted for George W Bush in his last statewide race for governor.

He did not get those numbers in either of his runs for the White House. Even in Texas Hispanics who had voted for him for governor voted or Gore or Kerry instead of him in his presidential races.

Why in the name of God do the Senate Republicans or President Bush think that things will be different if we allow 10 plus million more Mexicans to vote in future elections?

If you want America to become a hyper-taxed, hyper-regulated socialist state (the kind of nation that Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore would make it) then support the immigration plan passed by the Senate and supported by the White House.


**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let me know at what level you would like to participate.

That is A-Ok with me

You Are A: Bear Cub!

Bears are strong and independent creatures who roam in the forest in search of food. Bears are usually gentle, but anger one and be prepared for their full fury! You're big, you're tough, you won't back down from a fight -- classic attributes of a bear. Intelligent and resourceful, though lazy at times, you are a fascinating creature of the wild.

You were almost a: Turtle or a Duck
You are least like a: Puppy or a ChipmunkWhat Cute Animal Are You?

Hat tip: Born Again Redneck

Neighborhood terrorist

From The American Thinker:

There is a cat in Connecticut – Lewis by name – that has brought terror to its neighborhood. Using its sharp long claws and stealthy feline tactics, it has attacked at least a half-dozen unsuspecting individuals. So appalling has been its behavior that the animal is in danger of being put to sleep by the order of a superior court judge. In a desperate bid to save it, a group called Friends Animal Society, which claims to be the nation’s ‘largest no-kill animal sanctuary,’ is offering to take Lewis on for free.

Animals like this are why God gave us CB Caps.

I heard on the radio today that the cat will not be destroyed if the owner keeps him indoors. This is fine with me. Let the beast claw up the owner until the owner either gets tired of him or dies from infected wounds.

European Homeschooling Update

Alexandra Colen has posted an update on her and Paul Belien’s situation in regards to the Belgian government’s threat to prosecute them over the homeschooling of their child:

In today’s Belgian newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen Bob Van de Voorde, the spokesman of Frank Vandenbroucke, the minister of Education, says:

“One of the conditions [for homeschooling] is that the homeschoolers must sign a document in which they promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights. These parents have not done this. This is why the ministry has started an inquiry.”

The parents Mr Van de Voorde is referring to in the paper are my husband (TBJ editor Paul Belien) and myself. The “inquiry” is a threat to prosecute us.

Homeschooling is a constitutional right in Belgium. We have homeschooled four of our five children through high school. Only the youngest is still being homeschooled because the others are already at university. And yet, as if they have nothing better to do, the Belgian police and judiciary are conducting an “inquiry” into our homeschooling to see whether we “rear our children along the lines of the United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights.”

Until two years ago, we never encountered any problems with the authorities concerning our family’s home education. In fact, compared to neighbouring countries, Belgium was very tolerant of homeschoolers. In 2003, however, the Flemish regional parliament decreed that all homeschoolers are obliged to sign a document in which they promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention. The latter undermines the authority of parents and transfers it to the
state.

The document the homeschoolers are made to sign also states that government inspectors decide whether families comply with the UN’s ideology. Furthermore, it contains a clause in which the homeschooling parents agree to send their child to an official government recognized school if the inspectors report negatively about them twice.

We refused to sign this document. Not only do we object to the imposed UN ideology, but we would never put our signature under a document that forces us to send our children to government controlled schools simply because two bureaucrats decide on the basis of arbitrary criteria that we are not in compliance with the imposed philosophy. Last week my husband was questioned by the police. He was informed that, because we refuse to sign, our children are not being schooled or brought up adequately, i.e. along the lines of the UN Convention. Hence, we are committing a criminal offence. The authorities are threatening to prosecute us.

As I said in my last post on this topic this is not just a problem for citizens of Belgium. All across Europe those who dare to keep their children out of the increasingly fascistic governments’ state run indoctrination centers (sometimes called public schools) are facing similar problems:

Since Adolph Hitler prohibited homeschooling in 1938, Germany is the worst place for homeschoolers in Europe. Many parents have already been fined, and even sent to jail. Last March a court in Hamburg sentenced a German father of six to a prison sentence of one week for homeschooling his children, while the children
were forcibly sent to school by the police, who pick them up each morning. The father, a conservative Christian, had previously been sentenced to a fine of 1,500 euro, but this did not persuade him to stop homeschooling. The court did not imprison the mother, but said it would not hesitate to do so if the parents continue violating the law. The bill prohibiting homeschooling is one of the very few Nazi laws that are still on the books in Germany. Today other countries, such as Belgium, seem intent on copying Germany’s Nazi system, whilst invoking the UN Convention.

Adolph Hitler wanted the kids in the government schools because he wanted them molded into good Nazis. I’m sure that the anti-homeschooling law in Germany was allowed to stay on the books because of fears that unrepentant Nazi’s would keep their kids out of the state schools in order to bring up another generation of Hitler Youth.

Now that the Nazi influence in Germany is essentially dead (most school-age kids in Germany today do not even know who Hitler was) what is the German government’s excuse? Perhaps they want the same kind of influence that Hitler did?

Ask him to tell you about his struggle

Hat tip: White Trash Republican

Oh to be in Europe

I realize that most of you are not worked up over the internal politics of Slovakia; however the story of how the conservative Mikulas Dzurinda was unseated by socialist Robert Fico is interesting. As The Brussels Journal tells it:

The left-wing Slovakian Social-Democrat Smer (Direction) party of Robert Fico won last Saturday’s general election in Slovakia. Voters rejected the government of Mikulas Dzurinda, the longest serving Prime Minister in the region, who has turned the Slovakian economy into one of the most successful in Central Europe

[Snip]

During the election campaign Smer promised to scrap the 19% flat tax that is one of the central pillars of the Slovakian economic recovery. The flat tax is credited with generating strong economic growth – at 6.1% the highest in central Europe. However, Slovakia also faces high unemployment at 15.5%. Political analists say that Dzurinda lost because voters are dissatisfied with the widening gap between rich and poor. “We need a Slovakia with more solidarity and justice,” Fico said. “It means that, if we form the government, benefits from our country’s development will not be restricted to a small group of people.”

Scrapping the flat tax will be welcomed by the welfare state politicians in Western Europe, who are opposed to the system and aim for tax harmonization across the European Union.

Notice how the socialist came out and promised to kill the goose that is laying the economic “golden egg” for Slovakia, the flat tax. Notice how so many of the Slovakian people were willing to go along with this because of class envy. Notice how the European Union’s elites are happy with this turn of events.

After all European economies are highly taxed and have the double digit unemployment and microscopic growth rates to show for it. We can’t be having those upstart Eastern Europeans showing them up with prosperity gained in some other way than socialist redistribution, can we?

Oh, and what caused Mikulas Dzurinda’s governing coalition to collapse? That dear reader is the icing on the leftist cake:

Ironically this collapse was the direct result of EU interference. The Slovak government fell after an EU committee criticized the draft of a proposed treaty between Slovakia and the Vatican. The treaty included a guarantee that Catholic doctors and hospitals in Slovakia would not be legally obliged to perform abortions, and other acts violating their conscience. According to the EU “Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights” doctors should sometimes be forced to perform abortions, even if they have conscientious objections, because the right to abort a child is an “international human right.”

The criticism of the EU experts killed off the draft treaty with the Vatican and led to a conflict between Dzurinda’s party and its coalition partner, the Christian-Democrat KDH. While Dzurinda, under pressure of the EU’s criticism, agreed to abandon the proposed treaty with the Vatican, the KDH defended it and left the government.

Isn’t that special? The EU objected to a treaty which would have allowed doctors who believe that abortion is murder to refrain from performing abortions (how tacky). The Eurocrat elites can’t understand why anyone would not want to force a doctor who is some kind of religious believer (are there even any of those left in Europe?) to terminate the life of an unborn child.

After all the Eurocrats have already skidded far past abortion on their slide down that slippery slope. They are currently into performing involuntary euthanasia on non-terminal patients.

Forcing someone to provide a service to someone against their will. . . there used to be a name for that. What was it? . . . Started with an “S”, I think. . . Oh well, it will come to me.

By now I’m sure that you can see why this story interested me. We have a socialist political party stirring up class envy in order to win an election on the platform of killing a flat tax which is the engine of a magnificent economic boom. All of this made possible by Eurotrash elites meddling into Slovakia’s internal affairs by objecting to a treaty which does nothing more than allow that nation’s physicians to NOT commit an act which their consciences tell them is murder.

It is a “perfect storm” of post-modern leftist evil breaking on a small Eastern European nation which had been doing a terrific job of digging itself out from under decades of Soviet Communist oppression.

There must be popping champagne corks in Brussels tonight.

A must read

Bill Whittle writes this on Eject! Eject! Eject!:

There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.

How many students today believe what they believe because they met someone who knew a guy whose girlfriend turned him on to an article by Noam Chomsky? Noam Chomsky predicted, in his even, intellectual, authoritative, tenured manner, that if the US went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11, the result would be 3 million Afghan casualties. How many of these students who worship St. Noam independently ask themselves why he had come up 2,999,500 bodies short? Noam is not wrong by a factor of one or two; Noam is not wrong by an order of magnitude. Noam is not wrong by a factor of a hundred to one. Noam is wrong by more than three orders of magnitude. Noam is wrong by a factor of 6,000 to one. Noam says the reef is three miles off the port bow, when in fact it is barely ten feet away. That’s six thousand to one. Noam says the ocean is a thousand feet deep when in fact the keel has been ripped out and is sitting on the sandbar back yonder: that’s a 6,000-to-one error. Extrapolating this accuracy rate, if Noam writes 6,000 pages on the evil of the United States, how many pages of truth might there by in such a twenty-volume set?

Does this mean that everything Noam Chomsky writes is nonsense? Not at all. He is a professor of Linguistics. I am not qualified to say how accurate the work in his field of expertise is. I can however make a stab at how accurate he is in the field of US foreign policy, and if you have a handheld calculator at home, you can make the same comparison and achieve the same results.

Listen, I’m all in favor of reading and studying all manner of philosophy and literature. And while social studies evidence cards cut both ways, there are not too many expert physicists out there claiming objects regularly fall up off the table and into the air. People are not pool balls. Their behavior is not as predictable. Both intellectual studies, and expert opinion, have their place. It is only when they are used beyond their limits that problems come thick and heavy.

Don’t take my word for this. Let’s not sit down in the bilge arguing about whether Karl Marx or Adam Smith had the best course to freedom and happiness. Let’s just go up the stairs, open a hatch, go out on deck, get out the telescope and have a look at what actually happened to the lives of the people impacted by one map, and what happened to those subjected to the other.

We are not blind, and we are not crippled, and the world is not a novel or a treatise or a theory or a manifesto. It exists. We can go look for ourselves. And on the way up, when those desperate elitist bastards start clutching at your ankles and implore you to stay below where it’s safe and argue some more…be sure to kick those sons of bitches right in the teeth. Their blind obedience to their Big Ideas have killed more people in history than anything except disease. Boot to the teeth, I say.

But that’s just me. You’ve been around. You’re no sap. What do you think?

Hat Tip: Sondrak

PA. city poised for immigration crackdown

From Morning Coffee:

With tensions rising and the police department and municipal budget stretched thin, Hazleton is about to embark on one of the toughest crackdowns on illegal immigrants anywhere in the United States.

Last week the mayor of this former coal town introduced, and the City Council tentatively approved, a measure that would revoke the business licenses of companies that employ illegal immigrants; impose $1,000 fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants; and make English the official language of the city.

It is good to see local leaders taking action to enforce the laws. The Senate and House should be taking lessons from this guy.

Mayor Barletta said he had no choice but to act after two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged last month with shooting and killing a 29-year-old man. Other recent incidents involving illegal immigrants have rattled this city 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia, including the arrest of a 14-year-old boy for firing a gun at a playground.

"This is crazy," the mayor said. "People are afraid to walk the streets. There's going to be law and order back in Hazleton, and I'm going to use every tool I possibly can."

The City Council, which approved the measure in a 4-1 vote, must vote on it twice more before it can become law. The next vote is scheduled for mid-July.

Full Story here

Uncooperative Blogger posted a couple weeks ago on San Bernardino Ca. proposing similar local laws.

California Conservative has more here.

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let me know at what level you would like to participate.