This is the Texas Celtic group The Rogues playing at the 2006 Maryland Ren-fest. Joining them is the piper E.J. Jones, late of Clandestine (E.J. is now officially a member of The Rogues). Some of you may remember that I have already posted this video.
Because September is the month of my birth I am going to repost some of my favorite videos as well as throw in some of my favorite music which is completely out of the Celtic/Medieval genre that I normally post.
The Rogues are coming to Hendersonville, NC on Saturday, November 3, 2007 for the Foothill Highland Games.
I posted a little while back about how this "Christian" minister named Jim Sutter had listed Hillbilly White Trash along with a number of other first rate blogs and news sites as being banned in a whole list of wretched totalitarian countries, like North Korea and Red China.
Our new friend Lady Predator left a comment to that post with links to three sites which give some information about the good "reverend".
The sad part is Sutter has a history of making false allegations. Sutter was put on three years probation by a federal court for lying to the FBI about being harassed. Sutter was working for the Cleveland, Ohio BBB as a trade specialist and was investigating Edward Ohlson when he claimed he received a death threat. Sutter reported that he got a one-page letter that read, in part: "Sutter: Testify on [Edward LaMonte Ohlson] and die. Sutter also reported that he was followed by a car licensed to Ohlson's wife, Rose Ellen and gave the FBI the license number of a car that belonged to Rose Ellen Ohlson. There was just one problem with that. It seems that Mrs. Ohlson's car was inoperable for two years. Opps Sutter caught in another lie. Oh and that "death threat" well Sutter sent it to himself! In fact it also looks like Sutter also lied about the BBB offices being burglarized where he claimed part of Ohlson's file was stolen. Sutter was forced to resign from the BBB Aug. 13. Sutter pleaded guilty Sept. 17 before U.S. District Judge George W. White, who sentenced him to , and 60 days of house detention and three years probation. As a result of Sutter's criminal behavior Sutter and the Cleveland BBB became defendants in a $18.1 million lawsuit. Ohlson wasn't happy being arrested as a result of Sutter's false reports to the FBI.
The "Reverend" Jim Sutter would like you to believe that he is a courageous champion of tolerance, but he is actually nothing more than a megalomaniac in search of a r�sum�.
The drive for Internet fame has led this otherwise obscure Ohio man to start several blogs in which he purports to do battle with "hate mongers." In Sutter's world, this is primarily defined as anyone who is critical of Islam. His expressed goal is to censor opposing viewpoints on the "Religion of Peace" from the Internet (censorship in the name of tolerance, if that makes sense). He embellishes his appeal using the religious credentials of a "Christian minister" standing up for maligned Muslims. Sutter also finds plenty of time to talk about himself in his many postings, which is turning out to be a personal liability given his affinity for tall tales. So intent is he on making a name for himself that there is actually an independent blog dedicated to exposing the many lies that he has spun about his background and fictitious accomplishments. Exposing Sutter reveals plenty of amusing details about this sad, little man, including the fact that the religious credentials and degrees that he has honored himself with are as fraudulent as his claim to being a decorated Navy Seal. It seems that this convicted felon is having a real problem telling the truth about his criminal background as well. For about 15 years Sutter has claimed to be a man of the cloth. As to which "cloth" this is exactly, well, let's just say that the story evolves with each telling. A 2005 photograph shows him posing in priest's garb, trying to bolster his claim as a "Catholic Reverend." Unfortunately for him, the Catholic clergy has no such position (and the shirt and collar can be purchased for $29.50 on-line). Sutter has recently declared himself to be a Baptist pastor - largely it seems, on the strength of a mail order certificate. He has also claimed to have three doctorates. [mail order diploma mills will sell you any degree from an AS to a PhD for a price, just like mail order ordination mills will send you an ordination certificate making you a "reverend" - for a price - LC]
[. . .]
Given his efforts to cover his tracks, and the fact that he has an obvious motivation in fibbing to impress others, Sutter may not fit the clinical definition of a pathological liar. On the other hand, this convicted felon has no apparent convictions when it comes to integrity. If caught in a lie he will either ignore the situation or try to cover it up with another story. Sutter's blog postings are usually little more than superficial ranting spiced with damning accusations of bigotry and intolerance that are rarely supported by the rhetoric that he manages to squeeze in between liberal uses of the word "hate" and the equally ubiquitous soliloquies about himself. With reckless abandon, he seamlessly lumps critics of Islam together with racists and neo-Nazis, even while admitting to being "no expert" on the religion itself. Not surprisingly, Sutter's attempts to keep critics of Islam as silent in the West as they are under Sharia has won him an audience with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an Islamic supremacist organization with documented ties to terrorism. Like the good "Reverend," CAIR is self-serving, arrogant and rigidly unapologetic. The group is also not above reaching deep into the bottom of the barrel to smear a critic, as spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper has done several times with Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.org. In fact, it is their shared hatred of Spencer that brought CAIR and Sutter together, and a big reason why the latter is enjoying his 15-minutes of fame. On August 8th, the CAIR Website briefly featured Sutter�s purported 63-page "expose" on the JihadWatch founder called "The Spencer Spin." This was picked up by other Muslim sites, causing Mr. Sutter's main blog traffic to temporarily spike from less than a dozen hits a day to about a hundred (interestingly, he doesn't appear to have figured out that the IP tracker on his sidebar reports his true readership to be substantially less than the "thousands" that he often claims). That CAIR would take the pathetically mendacious Jim Sutter seriously speaks to their desperation. That they would quote from and post a link to his document on their website speaks to their complete lack of credibility. The document is full of lies, errors and sensational but unproven claims about Robert Spencer. It will be very interesting to see if CAIR continues to stand by Sutter's work following this analysis.
Go over and read the analysis
It was obvious looking at Sutter's blog that he was a wackjob. It's nice to see my opinion vindicated.
Once again I am proud that my li'l ole blog is feared by the tyrants of North Korea, Red China and Iran.
And don't even bother asking him about Sen. Larry Craig. "Thank you for the question," the spokesman spoke. "I've already given my answer."
"No, you didn't," pointed out April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks.
"Yes, I did," Snow retorted, then reconsidered. "Okay, I gave the answer I'm going to give."
Plante detected a bit of snippiness. "Your tolerance level seems to be slipping," the veteran newsman observed.
"Really?" Snow replied. "Am I getting cranky like you? Wow."
Snow said earlier this month that he'll be leaving his position before the president has left his. But he hasn't said when.
When The Post's Michael Fletcher asked him about the truth of reports that Snow would be departing before the end of the year, Snow advised Fletcher to "stand down" and added a hoary cliche: "When I have something to announce, I'll let everyone know."
Speculation around the briefing room is that Snow is nearing that point.
And who could blame him? The former Fox News host suffered a cancer recurrence earlier this year, and he has the admirable desire to earn more money for his family than a government salary provides.
Snow left his job as a talk radio host in order to become the White House Press Secretary because he believed he could make a positive contribution to the Bush administration and to the nation. I believe he has done so. The pay cut was not an issue because he would exit the White House into book deals, the lecture circuit and just about any radio or TV deal he could wish for.
However when Tony left his high paying radio job to go to relatively low paying White House job he believed himself to be cancer free and healthy. Now the cancer has returned and spread and the sad fact is that he is dying.
What time he has left, and it may be a year or two or even longer, he needs to use to earn as much money as possible in order to leave his family as well off as possible.
Another factor is the disappointment he must feel in the job itself. Tony Snow is a reporter and he feels, or felt, an affinity for other reporters. These are people whom he regarded as colleges and friends even when he didn't agree with them. To find that they now regard him as an enemy and treat him with hatred must be saddening.
George H.W. Bush made the same mistake with congress. He assumed that because he had been a congressmen that they were his colleges and friends. He knew that things could get rough and tumble during business hours, but at the end of the day they could all go out to an upscale Georgetown bar and have a few drinks and play golf together on the weekends and have a nice dinner at the country club. He was unprepared for the fact that the Democrat majority hated him and wanted to destroy him.
During the cold war the United States and the Soviet Union fought a vicious war against each other without ever directly meeting on the battlefield. Instead they used surrogates like North Korea and South Korea, divided Vietnam, The Sandinistas verses the Contras and so on. The same thing is going on in America today.
There is a Civil Cold War being fought between the Left and Right in America today. It is no less a civil war than the affair in the early 1860's but instead of taking up rifles and meeting on battlefields like Gettysburg or Shiloh the two sides are using surrogates.
Today, just as in the Cold War between US and USSR, the Left can be expected to back the side which is the most nakedly evil. Think about it, where would you have rather lived East Berlin or West Berlin? Where would you rather live now, North Korea or South Korea?
In the Civil Cold War the primary surrogate of the Right is the free government of Iraq and the primary surrogate of the Left is al Qaeda (even while Democrats squeak that we are not doing enough to "get" bin Laden they are doing everything in their power to hand him victory in what he considers to be the most important battlefield in the war of Islam against everything else - Iraq).
Tony Snow was unprepared for the fact that he was enlisting in a war and that the people he would be facing in his press briefings were the enemy no less than if President Reagan's Press Secretary had addressed a room full of KGB agents or President Roosevelt's Press Secretary had spoken to a room full of SS officers.
I think he knows that now and it has to wear a man down especially when he is sick.
I wish Tony all the luck in the world and I hope he makes enough that his kids can go to Ivy League schools and his wife can live extremely well and never have to work another day in her life.
I also hope than in his final book that he unloads on the left-wing propagandists that he has been having to endure since coming to work in the White House.
The People's Cube has a great video up on YouTube but it is only a matter of time till the Left gets it banned. So watch while you can. I especially like the "this is your brain on jihad" part.
Actor Michael Douglas, in the spotlight at the American filmfest here, said on Thursday he would be "very happy" if Hillary Clinton became the next US president.
"I would like my president to have pillow talks with (her husband and ex-president) Bill Clinton," he told AFP in an interview. "I would be very happy with that."
Uh, Mike. For that to happen they would have to sleep together. Unless Hillary is willing to be one of the pieces of bread in a "Bill sandwich" that isn't likely to happen.
Sharon Shannon, Mike McGoldrick, Dezi Donnelly and Jim Murray at the Cambridge Folk Festival along with friends such as James Delaney Richie Buckley and Neil Yates. The tune is Cavan Potholes, written for Sharon by Donal Lunny.
In reading Claire Berlinski's excellent book Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too. I came across this passage that I thought you all might find interesting. It concerns the resurgent antisemitism and anti-American attitudes in Germany. Ms. Berlinski is having a conversation with Jeffrey Gedmin, an American scholar of European Studies who directs the Aspen Institutes Berlin campus.
Here is Mr. Gedmin's take on the situation:
"'Look, the Germans have a chip on their shoulder. They have a chip on their shoulder because, as this journalist friend of mine said, Americans did them the ultimate injustice. We liberated them. We protected them for forty years. When unification came, and Europe was against them, we stood up and supported them, and . . . they've had enough of that! And with Israel, one could say, they just will not forgive the Jews for putting them in the black box of history. Now, you might argue that they were guilty of the Holocaust, but somehow, weirdly enough, it gets contorted to, If Germans have a bad reputation, it's because of those friggin' . . .' He didn't need to finish his sentence." The German feelings about the United States are summed up in the song Amerika by Rammstein, the most popular group in Europe.
In listening to the song and watching the video you may not get just how anti-American the song really is. To understand that you must understand that to the European mind images of people in Asia or Africa or Europe doing things like eating hamburgers and drinking Coke or enjoying pizza while watching television and admiring an American achievement like the moon landing evokes sheer horror. Just remember the massive protests which greeted the opening of Euro Disney or consider the fact that in Europe McDonald's restaurants are routinely vandalized and in one case even bombed.
Also I may owe Rammstein an apology. When I posted their video for the song Links, 2,3,4 I called it neo-Nazi hate rock.
According to Rammstein they are actually communists. They are from East Berlin and formed the band before the wall came down. In an interview with Ms. Berlinski they informed her that far from being fascist the song was intended to project the opposite image:
In fact, they said, the suggestion that these lyrics - Left, two, three, four! - might evoke a darker moment in German history was frankly defamatory. You see, they explained to me, the song had precisely the opposite meaning. It was all about being on the Left. The Left? Yes, agreed Lorenz firmly, the Left. He held that life was better under communism. In what way? "In all ways. I could live without worries about life. No one wanted to do evil to anyone. There was nothing to win or gain". What about the Stasi, I asked? "The secret police? Every country has that." "Links," said Lorenz, was written to clear up all this misunderstanding about Rammstein. "We intentionally show that one can be evil and be on the Left. People say that right-wing music is hard, and we're saying, 'We too can be hard'."
Of course that doesn't explain why they use imagery which suggests the swastika and why they set up their video to look like an ant version of a Nuremberg rally, but I'll take their word for it.
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.
Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations. By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself.
By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.
BEIJING (Reuters)- Mattel has only itself to blame for a huge toy recall that has stoked global alarm about Chinese-made goods, state media said on Thursday, charging that a slew of foreign safety scares had exposed a protectionist agenda.
Mattel Inc, the world's largest toymaker, recalled over 18 million Chinese-made toys this month because of risks from small magnets that can injure children if swallowed, just two weeks after it recalled 1.5 million toys due to fears over lead paint.
Coming in the wake of warnings over Chinese-made toothpaste, pet food, tires, eels and seafood, and lethal chemicals that had found their way into medicine, the toy recall has magnified calls in Washington for much tougher scrutiny of such imports.
I expect more information this afternoon when a spokesman for China's Ministry of Unconvincing Denials holds a press conference in Beijing at the Pavillion of Eternal Mendacity. Cartoon from Cox & Forkum
Fred Thompson's campaign-in-waiting will hold a 4 p.m. conference call today with supporters to brief them on plans for the former Tennessee senator's presidential announcement next week, according to an e-mail obtained by Politico.com.
Randy Enwright, Thompson's political director, said in the message that they will "discuss the next steps as we move forward as an organization." A Thompson aide confirms that they'll share the news about the long-awaited formal launch. "By the end of the day, we'll have more clarity," the aide said, declining to reveal which day the announcement would take place.
UPDATE: Still no official confirmation from the campaign, but Thompson sources now confirm that he will announce his candidacy next Thursday, Sept. 6. The launch will include a tour of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. As expected, Thompson will not appear at the GOP debate in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Sept. 5.
A Thompson campaign official says that they'll hold a 4:30 p.m. conference call with the media after briefing supporters about their plans.
If the 4:30 call to the media goes through it will be all over the 'net and cable news within minutes. Look of this (if true) to dominate the Sunday shows.
Much of the jihadist picture of the West is distorted, a caricature based on superficial observation and selective evidence. Yet there remain troubling aspects of American culture that give traction to the Islamic critique. In her book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times, pulls together the various dysfunctions and discontents of American civilization by seeing them as the expression of a unique historical development, the “death of the grown-up.” The demise of the adult has led to the abandonment of adult virtues and mentalities, and their replacement by the instant gratification, impatience with the limits of reality, and the obsession with the self typical of the teen-ager. [. . .] One of West’s shrewdest ideas is to link multiculturalism’s self-loathing idealization of the “other” to the adolescent “identity crisis.” Our ignorance of the West’s unique goods enshrined in its history and traditions has led to a loss of cultural identity, which “would seem to be linked to the loss of maturity. At the very least, the easy retreat from history and tradition reveals the kind of callow inconstancy and lack of confidence that smacks of immaturity as much as anything else. It seems that just as we have stopped ‘growing up,’ we have forgotten ‘who’ it was we were supposed to grow up into.” At the same time, we give to non-Western cultures a groveling respect and timidly acquiesce in their dysfunctions. This bad habit, as West shows with numerous examples, is particularly dangerous for the struggle against Islamic jihad. That battle isn’t going to be won by calling Islamic terrorists “gunmen” or “activists,” or by ignoring the West’s long, unique tradition of tolerance for the “other” at the same time we indulge the myth of Islamic tolerance.
One of the reasons I got fed up with the Libertarian Party and left was the fact that any time someone would point out that the "all or nothing" attitude was counterproductive. There are grown-up libertarians who understand that the best way to bring about change is to align themselves with the Republican Party, which is the closest to the small government individualist philosophy of the libertarians, and work within it to advance attainable goals.
Suggestions like this are always shouted down by people who insist that they want what they want and they want it NOW and won't accept anything less. Even though that attitude guarantees that they will NEVER get it.
The Left is even worse. What libertarians want would be, for the most part, good for the country. What the Left wants would be the death of the country, culture and a great many of the people.
About 20 percent of students enrolled in D.C. public schools were absent on the second day of class this week, according to attendance records provided by school system officials.
Many students who had enrolled were not present because they had not registered for classes, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said last night. It was not clear yesterday how much of the attendance problem was due to students who had not registered on time and how much was due to students who didn't show up for other reasons.
"I think we can improve attendance overall," Mrs. Rhee said. "Attendance is something we can definitely work on."
Ya think?
Seriously who wouldn't want to go to a:
Government run institution where you are required to go whether you want to or not.
A place which you are being sent to for your own good and the good of society.
A place which you are told has the potential to make you a better person.
Where you arrive on a bus with a bunch of others who also don't want to be there.
Where the food is bad.
Where your time is scheduled for you by people who don't care what you would rather be doing.
Where your behavior is is watched by government functionaries who can punish you if you break rules that you had no part in drafting and did not consent to.
Where you are required to labor at tasks which are assigned to you and whose relevance you may or may not understand and respect.
A place with a rigid social pecking order where the strong dominate the weak, often making their lives a living hell.
I thought that perhaps someone was going to mention the fact that if Va. Tech had not turned their campus into a large unarmed victim zone, a ready-made killing field for anyone crazy or evil enough to want to pile up as many bodies as possible with as little risk to himself as possible, that many lives could have been saved. I was, of course, disappointed.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Virginia Tech officials might have saved lives if they had notified faculty and students sooner about the first two shootings on campus, a panel investigating the April shootings that left 33 dead concluded. "Warning the students, faculty and staff might have made a difference. ... So the earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving," said the report, which was released late Wednesday night.
However, the report concluded that while alerts might have helped students and faculty to protect themselves or alert authorities of suspicious activity, a lockdown on April 16 of the 131 buildings on campus was not feasible.
It may not have prevented the determined gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, from carrying out the shootings. As a student, he had access to campus buildings and the ability to get the same messages as everyone else. He could have gained access to a dormitory or begun shooting people in the open.
"From what we know of his mental state and commitment to action that day, it was likely that he would have acted out his fantasy somewhere on campus or outside it that same day," the report said.
I guess it will always fall to the blogs and talk radio to point out the stupidity of expecting criminal murderers and psychopaths to obey laws and regulations forbidding the carrying of weapons.
0-9WASHINGTON (AP) - Two Senate Republican colleagues, including John McCain, called Wednesday for Sen. Larry Craig to resign. The White House, too, expressed disappointment in the case of the Idaho Republican caught in a men's room undercover police operation. Arizona Sen. McCain and Norm Coleman of Minnesota, the state where Craig was arrested, became the first senators to join Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., urging Craig's resignation.
McCain told CNN the decision was Craig's to make, "but my opinion is that when you plead guilty to a crime, you shouldn't serve. That's not a moral stand. That's not a holier-than-thou. It's just a factual situation."
"I think he should resign," McCain said.
Coleman said in a statement, "Senator Craig pled guilty to a crime involving conduct unbecoming a senator."
Hoekstra said Craig "represents the Republican party" and that "his conduct throughout this matter has been inappropriate for a U.S. senator."
Craig pleaded guilty in August to a charge of disorderly conduct following his arrest in a men's room at the Minneapolis airport. He said Tuesday he had done nothing wrong and was sorry he pleaded guilty.
Senate Republican leaders have called on the ethics committee to review Craig's case, and White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said he hoped the panel could do its work quickly.
Stanzel made no expression of support for Craig. "We are disappointed in the matter. It has been referred to the Senate Ethics Committee, so they will have to deal with it," he said.
There were other signs of difficulty for Craig.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, issued a statement calling on the senator to consider stepping down. The organization is a self- described conservative government watchdog group.
"Senator Craig admittedly engaged in illegal activity that brings serious disrepute to the public office he holds," Fitton said.
Fitton's suggestion that the senator leave office suggested tenuous support among conservatives who make up his core political supporters.
You see it is like this. Republicans are in the main decent people who uphold decent standards and we police our own. This isn't a matter of "shooting our wounded" or some such. It is simply upholding a minimum level of acceptable conduct and requiring consequences for those who violate that standard.
Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, have no such standards. They are, in the main, little more than animals and have the behavioral ethics of the beasts of the barnyard, forest and field.
If only the Department of Fish and Wildlife would institute a hunting season for them so that their numbers could be controlled. . . but that's a topic for another day.
Craig will resign. Unlike Bill Clinton who was having an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter in the Oval Office (leftists will be completely at a loss to understand why the location of the trysts was important - if you explain it to them they'll think you are joking) and he was credibly accused of rape by another woman.
Craig will resign. Unlike Ted Kennedy who, along with another Democrat Senator, tried to forcibly rape a waitress in a Washington restaurant's private dining room. What is it, BTY, with Democrats and rape? Maybe the feminists need to rethink their knee-jerk support for the Democrat Party?
Craig will resign. Unlike Rep. Barney Frank who was caught running a prostitution business out of his apartment. He claims that he didn't know what was going on but his lover (a homosexual prostitute that Frank knew was a prostitute because Frank admitted to paying him for sex) who was managing the operation tells us that Frank knew all about it and enjoyed hearing all about his encounters with customers. Another prostitute claims that Frank would call the apartment to make sure that he didn't walk in on a customer who was being "entertained".
Craig will resign. Unlike Rep William Jefferson who the FBI caught with $90,000.00 of bribe money in his freezer.
Craig will resign. Unlike Hillary Clinton whose campaign, it turns out, is being financed by the Red Chinese.
Craig will resign. Unlike Diane Feinstein who as chairman of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee got caught funneling billions (that is BILLIONS) of dollars into her husband's company.
I could go on but you get the point. By refusing the circle the wagons and defend other Republicans who are caught behaving in a deplorable or illegal manner the GOP demonstrates that it is the party with the higher standards. Standards which are honored in deed and not just in word.
Today the Belgian Council of State (CoS) ruled to maintain the prohibition of an anti-Islamization demonstration on 11 September. Three weeks ago the demo was banned by Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels. Thielemans’s party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), caters for the many Muslim inhabitants of Brussels, the “capital of Europe.” Udo Ulfkotte, a German citizen and one of the organizers of the demo, who intended to bring 20,000 demonstrators to Brussels, decided to appeal against the mayor’s verdict before the Council of State, the highest administrative court in Belgium.
Yesterday, the Council of State postponed its ruling because it said it had to decide first whether the appeal could be made in Dutch or should be presented in French. Today, however, the CoS cut the case short and ruled outright to maintain the ban. According to the CoS Udo Ulfkotte cannot prove that his interests have been harmed by the mayor’s ban.
This verdict may sound nonsensical to non-Belgians, but in Belgium it is not considered harmful to have one’s political freedoms restricted. In Belgium it is also considered quite normal that the lawyer representing Mayor Thielemans before the CoS is Marc Uyttendaele. The latter is one of the most expensive lawyers in the country. He is also the husband of Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian minister of Justice, who is responsible for appointing, promoting and suspending judges.
The forbidden demonstration was an initiative of Danish, British and German organizations that wanted to protest in front of the European Parliament in Brussels against the introduction of Sharia laws in Europe. They chose to do so on the symbolic date of 11 September, which would allow them to end their demonstration with one minute of silence for the victims of the 9/11/2001 terror attacks in America.
Mayor Thielemans banned the demo precisely because the organizers picked 11 September as the date for their protest. The mayor wrote: “The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.” He told The Wall Street Journal: “I won't have Brussels regarded as the capital of racism.” Obviously, Brussels as the ‘capital of socialism’ or ‘capital of Islamization’ will do.
This is from Irish group Altan's CD Blackwater. The song is called A Stor, A Stor, A Ghra which means "A Star, A Star, My Love".
Here are the lyrics in Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) and the English translation:
One fine summer's day I mo sheasamh ar an mhargadh As I stood there in the marketplace 'S is iomaà fear a dúirt liom Many a young man remarked "Monuar, gan tú sa bhaile agam" "I'm sad you're not at home with me"
Chorus (after each verse): A stór, a stór, a ghrá A star, a star, my love A stór, a stór, an dtiocfaidh tú? A star, a star, will you come with me? A stór, a stór, a ghrá A star, a star, my love An dtiocfaidh tú nó an bhfanfaidh tú? Will you come with me or settled be?
Bhà mise lán den tsaol At one time in my life Is bhà cion amuigh is istigh orm I was dearly loved by everyone Nach mór a d'athraigh an saol Haven't times changed a lot Nuair nach bhfuil cion ag duine ar bith orm? When no one cares a whit for me?
Mexico's President Calderon has delivered a slap in the face to the United States, and provided what amounts to an endorsement for his citizens violating the laws of the United States. Steve Gilbert of Sweetness & Light caught the significance of an official photo appearing on Mexico's Presidencia website, showing El Presidente meeting with Elvira Arellano, who illegally entered our country and who illegally used a fake social security number. There can be no denying that this is a high honor for the citizen of any country. To confer such a distinction on someone who very publicly flouted the laws of a neighbor implies official endorsement of lawlessness.
Steve asks the important question of how Mexico would regard a neighboring nation encouraging its citizens to flout Mexico's laws, such as its strict immigration laws.
This is not the behavior of an amigo.
Of course it isn't the behavior of a friend. The government and people of Mexico hold the United States and its people in contempt. To them we are nothing but a giant ATM machine.
President Bush prizes loyalty above all other things. His supposed friend President Calderon has just spit in his face. I wonder if this will wake Mr. Bush up?
ATLANTA (Aug. 29)- Former security guard Richard Jewell, who was erroneously linked to the 1996 Olympic bombing, has died, a spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday.
Richard Jewell, 44, was found dead in his west Georgia home, GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.
He died at 9 a.m. Wednesday, said Meriwether County Coroner Johnny Worley. Worley said Jewell died of natural causes.
"There's no suspicion whatsoever of any type of foul play. He had been at home sick since the end of February with kidney problems," Worley said.
Bankhead said the GBI would do an autopsy Thursday.
Lin Wood, Jewell's longtime attorney, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he was "devastated" by the news. He declined further comment, saying he was in New York trying to get back to Atlanta.
Jewell was initially hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack in a park and moving people out of harm's way just before a bomb exploded during a concert at the Atlanta Summer Olympics.
Then the media called him a suspect and he became a public spectacle.
The blast killed one and injured 111 others.
As recently as last year, Jewell was working as a sheriff's deputy in rural Meriwether County.
The frenzy that changed Jewell's life started three days after the bombing with an unattributed report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that described him as "the focus" of the investigation.
Other media, to varying degrees, also linked Jewell to the investigation.
He was never arrested or charged, although he was questioned and was a subject of search warrants.
Eighty-eight days after the initial news report, then-U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander issued a statement saying Jewell "is not a target" of the bombing investigation and that the "unusual and intense publicity" surrounding him was "neither designed nor desired by the FBI, and in fact interfered with the investigation."
Eventually, the bomber turned out to be anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, who also planted three other bombs in the Atlanta area and in Birmingham, Ala., that killed a police officer, maimed a nurse and injured several others. Rudolph was captured after spending five years hiding out in the mountains of western North Carolina, pleaded guilty to all four bombings last year and is serving life in prison.
Jewell told the AP last year that Rudolph's conviction helped, but he believed some people still remember him as a suspect rather than for the two days in which he was praised as a hero.
"For that two days, my mother had a great deal of pride in me - that I had done something good and that she was my mother, and that was taken away from her," Jewell said around the time of the 10th anniversary of the bombing. "She'll never get that back, and there's no way I can give that back to her."
As if to prove his point about being remembered for the unfounded accusations that were leveled against him the headline on this story was:
Former Olympics Bombing Suspect Dies
Not "Hero who saved dozens from Olympic bomber dies", but former suspect dies.
The Clinton era Justice Department suspected Mr. Jewell because he fit their idea of a "redneck" and a "gun nut". The leaks were targeted at Mr. Jewell to put pressure on him and make him crack. In the end he was vindicated, won a financial settlement and realized his dream of working in law enforcement. Of course a reputation once tarnished is never quite the same. Let us remember this before we are foolish to put another Clinton into a position to shape the Justice Department.
That means that you are listening! This week, congressional Democrats vowed to investigate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of himself. Gonzales has said he was not involved in the discussions about his firing and that it was "performance-based," but he couldn't recall the specifics.
Right-wingers like me never trusted Gonzales. But watching Hillary Rodham Clinton literally applaud the announcement of Gonzales' resignation on Monday was more than any human being should have to bear. Liberals' hysteria about Gonzales was surpassed only by their hysteria about his predecessor, John Ashcroft. (Also their hysteria about Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Rice, Barney and so on. They're very excitable, these Democrats.)
Liberals want to return the office to the glory years of Attorney General Janet Reno!
There is reason to believe Reno is precisely the sort of attorney general that Hillary would nominate, since Reno was widely assumed to be Hillary's pick at the time. As ABC News' Chris Bury reported the day Reno was confirmed: "The search for an attorney general exemplifies Hillary Clinton's circle of influence and its clout. ... The attorney general-designate, Janet Reno, came to the president's attention through Hillary Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham."
Let's compare attorneys general:
-- Civilians killed by Ashcroft: 0 -- Civilians killed by Gonzales: 0 -- Civilians killed by Reno: 80
Reno's military attack on a religious sect in Waco, Texas, led to the greatest number of citizens ever killed by the government in the history of the United States. More Americans were killed at Waco than were killed at any of the various markers on the left's via dolorosa -- more than Kent State (4 killed), more than the Haymarket Square rebellion (4 killed), more than Three Mile Island (0 killed).
-- Innocent people put in prison by Ashcroft: 0 -- Innocent people put in prison by Gonzales: 0 -- Innocent people put in prison by Reno: at least 1 that I know of
As Dade County (Fla.) state attorney, Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the notorious "child molestation" cases from the '80s, when convictions of innocent Americans were won on the basis of heavily coached testimony from small children.
Charged by Reno's office in 1984 with child molestation, Grant Snowden was convicted on the manufactured testimony of one such child, who was 4 years old when the abuse allegedly occurred.
Snowden, the most decorated police officer in the history of the South Miami Police Department, was sentenced to five life terms -- and was imprisoned with people he had put there. Snowden served 11 years before his conviction was finally overturned by a federal court in an opinion that ridiculed the evidence against him and called his trial "fundamentally unfair."
In a massive criminal justice system, mistakes will be made from time to time. But Janet Reno put people like Snowden in prison not only for crimes that they didn't commit -- but also for crimes that never happened. Such was the soccer-mom-induced hysteria of the '80s, when innocent people were prosecuted for fantastical crimes concocted in therapists' offices.
-- Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Ashcroft: 0 -- Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Gonzales: 0 -- Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Reno: at least 1
On Aug. 19, 1991, rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death in Crown Heights by a black racist mob shouting "Kill the Jew!" as retaliation for another Hasidic man killing a black child in a car accident hours earlier.
In a far clearer case of jury nullification than the first Rodney King verdict, a jury composed of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted Lemrick Nelson Jr. of the murder -- despite the fact that the police found the bloody murder weapon in his pocket and Rosenbaum's blood on his clothes, and that Rosenbaum, as he lay dying, had identified Nelson as his assailant.
The Hasidic community immediately appealed to the attorney general for a federal civil rights prosecution of Nelson. Reno responded with utter mystification at the idea that anyone's civil rights had been violated.
Civil rights? Where do you get that?
Because they were chanting "Kill the Jew," Rosenbaum is a Jew, and they killed him.
Huh. That's a weird interpretation of "civil rights." It sounds a little harebrained to me, but I guess I could have someone look into it.
It took two years from Nelson's acquittal to get Reno to bring a civil rights case against him.
-- Number of innocent civilians accused of committing heinous crimes by Ashcroft: 0 -- Number of innocent civilians accused of committing heinous crimes by Gonzales: 0 -- Number of innocent civilians accused of committing heinous crimes by Reno: at least 1
Janet Reno presided over the leak of Richard Jewell's name to the media, implicating him in the Atlanta Olympic park bombing in 1996, for which she later apologized. I believe Reno also falsely accused the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez of violating the law, which I am not including in her record of false accusations, but reminds me of another comparison.
Number of 6-year-old boys deported to totalitarian dictatorships by Ashcroft: 0 Number of 6-year-old boys deported to totalitarian dictatorships by Gonzales: 0 Number of 6-year-old boys deported to totalitarian dictatorships by Reno: 1
Not until Bush became president was the media interested in discussing the shortcomings of the attorney general. Whatever flaws Alberto Gonzales has (John Ashcroft has none), we don't have to go back to the Harding administration to find a worse attorney general.
From the phony child abuse cases of the '80s to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious attacks on Americans' basic liberties since the Salem witch trials. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing prosecutors, but liberals like Janet Reno.
Reno is the sort of wild-eyed zealot trampling on real civil rights that Hillary views as an ideal attorney general, unlike that brute Alberto Gonzales. At least Reno didn't fire any U.S. attorneys!
Oh wait --
Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Ashcroft: 0 Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Gonzales: 8 Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Reno: 93
As usual Miss Ann jams her thumb deep and hard into the Left's eye. Long may she continue to do so and may her tribe increase.
The Los Angeles Times reports on this website tonight and in Wednesday's print editions that a major Democratic Party fundraiser named Norman Hsu is wanted by authorities for skipping out on an agreement to serve up to three years in prison after pleading no contest to grand theft swindling charges.
In a story by Chuck Neubauer and Robin Fields, The Times reports that for three years Hsu has been carving out a place of political and financial influence by funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions into Democratic Party coffers, much of the money earmarked for Sen. Hillary Clinton. He has earned the ranking of Hillraiser for pledging to raise at least $100,000 for her.
In just the last 36 months Hsu has been involved in raising more than $1 million for Clinton and other Democrats. Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, confirmed today that Hsu had been a "longtime and generous supporter" of the party including Clinton. "We have no reason to call his contributions into question or to return them," Wolfson added.
Hsu has developed a specialty of bundling hefty campaign contributions from obscure citizens who live modest lives and have never before given money to campaigns. Many are not even registered to vote.
Over the years other recipients of Hsu donations have included Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Edward Kennedy.
Clinton return the money!
[Lemuel stops and laughs out loud for 47 minutes]
Look, left-liberals aren't going to care that Hillary Clinton (like Bill before her) is the bought and paid for property of the Red Chinese military-industrial complex. Not as long as she wants to keep baby killing legal and raise taxes on the "wealthy".
But the rest of us, you know the sane ones, can and should take all this into account. But then again the sane people weren't going to vote for Mrs. Bill Clinton anyway.
As was pointed out in a comment, if Craig was a Democrat he would just say that this was his lifestyle and the entire left would be rushing to his defense.
However conservatives have actual standards and morality so when this happens to one of us we take hits, and rightly so.
To the Left all that counts is what policies one advocates. Bill Clinton was pro-choice so he could be credibly accused of rape and the feminist establishment would not turn on him. Al Gore says the politically correct things about global warming so he can have an actual "carbon footprint" the size of Alaska and no one on the Left cares.
Here is a statement by Matt Margolis on his decision to exclude ass-clown Ron Paul from this month's GOP straw poll:
UPDATE: Some of you may be wondering about the absence of Ron Paul from this months straw poll. Let me explain. After my decision to include Ron Paul in the previous poll, I monitored (to the best of my ability) the efforts by Paul's online supporters. With the help of other bloggers, we discovered a sophisticated coordinated effort to spam the poll, obfuscate their actions, and even cheat the poll.
Shortly after the launch of the previous poll, I received an email from Jesse Benton, the communications director for Ron Paul's campaign. He was interested in getting information about what safeguards are used in the straw poll in order to protect it from spammers/cheaters. I made it clear that I was not about to share the details of what protections are place. His response was a bit less than amicable.
I found it very curious that someone from Ron Paul's campaign would have such an active interest in the GOP Straw Poll and specifically request such guarded details about it. This high suspect request, combined with the efforts of Paul's online supporters to spam/cheat the poll. Ron Paul has been removed from this months poll in order to provide usable data on the acceptability/unacceptability of the candidates in the race. As you may have noticed in the previous poll, people who voted for Ron Paul as their number one choice also only put Ron Paul as the only acceptable candidate -- a voting behavior not mimicked by supporters of other candidates. This made the data severely flawed and useless as a barometer -- even for an unscientific one.
So, that's all there is to say about it now.
The fact that the Paul campaign was asking directly about the security measures indicates that the gaming of online polls is not just the work of overzealous supporters with lots of time on their hands (because the part-time jobs at McDonald's aren't very demanding). The attempt to create a distorted image of Paul's true level of support is apparently a deliberate strategy of the Paul campaign.
So much for Libertarians being "principled".
Since the average Ron Paul pod-person has an emotional age of about five this will not bother them in the least. After all they have been the ones sitting home all day with a jumbo bag of Doritos and a six pack of Mountain Dew obsessively voting over and over in online polls to make it appear that Ron Paul (ass-clown) actually has a detectable level of support. To them this is just an opportunity to get one over on the grown-ups.
What I am curious about are Paul's reasons for this. He knows, he absolutely knows, that he has zero chance of getting the Republican nomination. He knew going in that he had no chance whatsoever. Until now I've been thinking that his purpose was to gain a forum in the debates to advocate his ideas. This is, after all, the only reason the Libertarian Party even bothers to mount a presidential campaign every four years.
Now I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't just some kind of money making scheme. I know that money raised in a campaign must be spent on campaign related matters, but you can use it to retire debt from previous campaigns and bank it for future campaigns as well. Paul may well be in this to retire debts from his previous runs for the House and to build a war chest for his future election expenses.
Again, so much for being "principled".
Whatever the Ass-Clown's motives for orchestrating this online hoax he has demonstrated himself to be as immature, no childish, as his pod-people followers.
PS: Notice that without the distorting effect of pod-people voting multiple times Thompson is far and away the leader.
Our friends at Power Line are covering the refusal of MSNBC and CNBC to run advertisements urging support for the war in Iraq:
We wrote here about the television commercials that Freedom's Watch has produced, featuring veterans and their families, that urge Congress and the public to continue supporting the Iraq war. The commercials are well done, and convey the simple message that the Iraq war is important and winnable, and that we should allow our troops to see the mission through. The ads are appearing in the context of a blizzard of anti-war ads by left-wing groups, intended to pressure Senators and Congressmen into pulling the plug on the Iraq effort. Freedom's Watch has placed its ads on Fox and CNN, but CNBC and MSNBC have refused to run the ads. Ari Fleischer wrote this morning on behalf of Freedom's Watch to let us know that CNBC and MSNBC have stubbornly refused to air the pro-war ads, even though they have run issue ads on other controversial topics. Freedom's Watch has written to CNBC and MSNBC to protest their decision; here is the text of that letter:
They end the post this way:
Freedom of speech: at some of our cable networks, you can't even buy it! We'll follow up with any response that may be forthcoming from NBC.
As I have said before the mainstream media is not an impartial observer and chronicler of events. They have chosen to become partisan players and the side they have taken is the side of America's enemies. Enemies both foreign and domestic.
From The Strib: U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in Minnesota this month after being arrested by a plainclothes police officer investigating complaints of lewd conduct in a men's restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Craig denied the police account of what occurred and said he erred in pleading guilty.
"At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions," he said in a statement Monday afternoon. "I was not involved in any inappropriate conduct.
"I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty. I was trying to handle this matter myself quickly and expeditiously."
Craig was arrested at the airport on June 11, according to Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper. According to police reports, Craig kept watching the undercover police officer through a crack in the bathroom stall, Roll Call reported. Craig then entered the next-door stall and placed his luggage against the opening under the stall door.
"My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall," said the officer, Sgt. Dave Karsnia.
The report continued: "At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. ... The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area."
The report said that Craig swiped his hand beneath the stall divider several times and that Karsnia showed his police identification under the stall.
Roll Call reported that Craig was detained about 45 minutes and questioned by officers at the Airport Police Operations Center. At one point, police reports said, Craig handed the arresting officer a business card that identified him as a U.S. senator and said, "What do you think about that?"
Roll Call reported that a Craig spokesman said the incident is a "he said/he said misunderstanding." Craig denied any lewd intentions and told police he has a "wide stance" in the bathroom and reached down to pick up a piece of paper from the floor.
"It should be noted that there was not a piece of paper on the bathroom floor, nor did Craig pick up a piece of paper," Karsnia wrote in the police report.
According to the report, Minneapolis airport police have made "numerous arrests regarding sexual activity in the public restroom."
Craig's arrest was confirmed by Nancy Peters, a spokeswoman for the Hennepin County courts. Peters confirmed the Roll Call report that said Craig pleaded guilty Aug. 8 to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. Craig was fined $1,000 and sentenced to 10 days in jail, Peters said. However, the 10-day sentence was stayed for a year, meaning that Craig avoids jail time unless he is rearrested on a similar charge within a year.
Peters said Craig paid $575 of the fine and won't have to pay the $425 balance as long as he meets the terms of his year-long probation, which will be unsupervised.
Craig, 62, is married and in his third term in the Senate. Craig hasn't said if he plans to run for a fourth term in 2008.
Craig has been one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's top Senate supporters, serving as a Senate liaison for the campaign since February. As word spread of Craig's guilty plea, a Romney campaign spokesman, Matt Rhoades, said in a statement: "Senator Craig has stepped down from his role with the campaign. He did not want to be a distraction and we accept his decision."
A "wide stance" in the bathroom.
I like the part where he gave the cop his "I'm a Senator so I can do whatever the frak I want" card.
This is painful to watch. The poor kid is asked why she thinks that one-fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a map. Her answer rambles on and she manages to mention that she thinks the US should help South Africa and something about "the Iraq".
GENEVA (Reuters)- The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.
U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.
About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.
"There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said.
India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.
I knew there was a reason why I liked the Indians.
Seriously now 90 guns for every 100 citizens is not acceptable. We can't stop until it is 100 (or more) guns for every 100 citizens becuase as Patrick Henry said, ""The great object is that every man be armed . . . [e]veryone who is able may have a gun."
The latest intelligence assessment of the military and political situation in Iraq offers a mixed picture, providing both critics and supporters of President Bush’s “surge” strategy with ammunition to espouse their respective positions.
On the one hand, the National Intelligence Estimate (as the intelligence assessment is officially known) concludes that the Iraqis are falling short of expectations for political reconciliation among the various sectarian groups. This is true particularly at the national level where Prime Minister Maliki has proven unable to forge political unity among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds and the Iraqi parliament left town for a month’s vacation without reaching agreement on any significant issues.
The defeatists in Washington are seizing on this finding to argue that the war effort is a failure. They will press this fall for a vote in Congress to cut our losses and force us to leave Iraq as soon as possible. But they overlook the part of the intelligence assessment that points out how security conditions have improved in Iraq and how changing the current mission would “erode security gains achieved thus far.” If we leave too soon, the country will implode into even worse sectarian violence than before.
Gen. David Petraeus will be providing his military status report to Congress in mid-September. It won’t be all rosy to be sure, but General Petraeus is expected to point out two significant measures of improvement since the surge has been underway that are also reflected in the intelligence assessment findings: (1) the number of violent extremist attacks has gone down; and (2) the number of local Sunnis who turned against al-Qaeda, which had come to dominate the Sunni insurgency, has gone up. This second measure of improvement is especially important, but is at risk of being reversed if the defeatists in Washington force a premature withdrawal of our troops from Iraq.
Al-Qaeda has clearly failed to win the hearts and minds of the local populace whom the terrorists have been killing in the name of Allah. Indeed, al-Qaeda’s brand of Islamic fanaticism did not sell to their fellow Muslims who should have been an easy source of recruits for the Islamic terrorists’ cause since many local residents had started out hating the American ‘occupiers.’ The intelligence assessment points out that the Coalition forces – working with Iraqi forces, tribal elements and Sunni insurgents – have succeeded in reducing al-Qaeda’s capabilities, removing its freedom of movement, and denying it grassroots support. The Iraqi citizens turned on al-Qaeda when they experienced first-hand their evil acts – the beheadings, the murder and rape of women and children, the conscripting of forced labor and the destruction of the Iraqis’ own livelihoods.
In short, al-Qaeda managed to alienate the local Sunni Muslim population all on its own. We turned out to be the more attractive alternative. This in itself represents a major victory over al-Qaeda’s claim to represent pure Islam against the infidel Western invaders. Now the cut-and-run crowd in Congress wants to throw all this progress away and create a vacuum that al-Qaeda will quickly fill again and exploit for propaganda purposes.
[. . .]
Back in December 2004, Osama bin Laden called Baghdad “the capital of the caliphate” and said of the war in Iraq, “[T]he whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic nation, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation.”
The Iraqi people are rising up against the terrorists. With the benefit of the security we have been providing, they are courageously delivering a humiliating blow to al-Qaeda’s standing in the Muslim world. However, if the defeatists in Washington prevail and cause us to surrender our troops’ hard-earned gains, the terrorists will prevail by forfeit.
If the United States continues its present course al Qaeda is finished. Their only hope of victory now is the American Left. If Mr. Bush can keep America engaged in the war after Gen. Petraeus' presents his report the political situation in Iraq will fall into line relatively quickly. Iraqi politicians, tribal leaders and common citizens have been waiting to see who is going to win before deciding definitively which side to support.
Right now it looks like the United States is the side to bet on - if the Democrat Party can be held at bay.
That doesn't mean that the final agreements arrived at by the various factions in the Iraqi government will be all that the US is hoping they will be, it is a different nation and culture after all, but they will work for the Iraqi people.
DALY CITY, Calif. -- One of the biggest sources of political donations to Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tiny, lime-green bungalow that lies under the flight path from San Francisco International Airport.
Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.
That total ranks the house with residences in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan's Upper East Side among the top addresses to donate to the Democratic presidential front-runner over the past two years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of donations listed with the Federal Election Commission.
It isn't obvious how the Paw family is able to afford such political largess. Records show they own a gift shop and live in a 1,280-square-foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. William Paw, the 64-year-old head of the household, is a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service who earns about $49,000 a year, according to a union representative. Alice Paw, also 64, is a homemaker. The couple's grown children have jobs ranging from account manager at a software company to "attendance liaison" at a local public high school. One is listed on campaign records as an executive at a mutual fund.
The Paws' political donations closely track donations made by Norman Hsu, a wealthy New York businessman in the apparel industry who once listed the Paw home as his address, according to public records. Mr. Hsu is one of the top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign. He has hosted or co-hosted some of her most prominent money-raising events.
Mr. Bill Clinton's presidency was a wholly owned subsidiary of the government of communist China. Why does anyone think that Mrs. Bill Clinton's presidency (if God is angry enough with the US to permit that) will be any different?
Thanks to Bill Clinton the Red Chinese were able to steal our most secret nuclear weapons technology and able to buy the knowledge of how to make a functional ICBM from a corrupt American company. In return for this treason the Chinese generously financed Clinton's campaigns using a series of Asian front men in the United States. Anyone who thought things would be different with Hillary Clinton was a fool.
The really sad thing is that Democrats will not care. They will loose no more sleep over this than they lost over the fact that Bill was a paid agent of influence for a foreign government which is aiming thermonuclear weapons at the United States. If anything proves the absolute moral bankruptcy of the Left this is it.
A slide show of Scotland accompanied by Capercaillie'sThe Sound of Sleat.
Sleat (pronounced Slate rather than Sleet) is "the soft, green and wooded southern peninsula of the Isle of Skye" It is also sometimes called "The Garden of Skye".
It seems that a website run by a certain Christian minister has compiled a list of Internet sites which spread various types of "hate speech". These sites have been banned by various nations such as (but not limited to) Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Red China, Iran, North Korea, Palestinian Territories, Sudan, Vietnam, Yemen.
Of course there are also nations on the list which are not evil but have simply signed the cultural suicide pact of political correctness, however the fact that the good reverend proudly lists North Korea (which seeks to keep its people from learning the truth about life outside North Korea) alongside Israel (which bans neo-Nazi and antisemitic websites) and apparently sees no difference between them informs us that the gentleman suffers from what has to be the worst case of malfunctioning spiritual discernment since some members of the German Protestant clergy endorsed Hitler.
Let me go on record as being proud as peaches to be included alongside websites like:
Regnery Publishing, publishers of Laura Ingrham, Jed Babbin, Robert Spencer, Rowan Scarborough, G. Gordon Liddy, John R. Lott, Jr., Russell Kirk, Mark R. Levin, David Limbaugh, Mark Steyn, Haley Barbour, Michael Barone, Bill Gertz, Bernard Goldberg, David Horowitz, Oliver L. North, Dinesh D’Souza, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Steve Forbes and many others.
As you can see someone thinks damned highly of me.
The good reverend warns me and the others listed that:
Hate mongers are going to have to accept, sooner or later, that the world is tired of them, the world has realized how such hatred leads to violence, extremism and terrorism, the world has seen through the motivation of the more prolific haters, and the world is changing to deal with this - previously ignored or seldom-enforced laws and regulations are now being aggressively enforced, new laws are going into effect, and international pressure is being brought to bear on various entities that offer forms of Internet access.
Dude, my advice to you is to go back to telling your congregation how Jesus being THE way, THE truth and THE light is just a load of dogmatic crap. If I changed this blog to make it acceptable to the Stalinists of North Korea or the Whabbi friutcakes of Saudi Arabia or the Shiite nutjobs of Iran I would certainly burn in hell. But I doubt that you believe in hell as anything but the final destination of Republicans so I don't think you'll get my meaning.
. I came across this passage that I thought you all might find interesting. It concerns the resurgent antisemitism and anti-American attitudes in Germany. Ms. Berlinski is having a conversation with Jeffrey Gedmin, an American scholar of European Studies who directs the Aspen Institutes Berlin campus.
ATLANTA (Aug. 29)
Explore Christian Blogosphere
