The Party of KNOW

Gary Graham is my new hero:

Are we the party of ‘NO’?

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, et al, have gone on record to call the Republican Party ‘The Party of No’.

Why? Because we say NO to socialism? NO to racism? NO to weak foreign policy footing, kowtowing to despotic world leaders? Because we say NO to socialized medicine? NO to fomenting class-warfare, NO to raising taxes on the affluent? NO to killing babies in the womb, NO to redefining traditional marriage? NO to calling returning veterans extremist nut-jobs to be placed on a watch-list? NO to thinking we can spend and tax our way back to prosperity by saddling our grandkids with a Mt. Everest sized debt?

Okay…maybe they’re right; maybe we are the party of NO. But I’d like to offer a slight amendment to that moniker (thanks, Dr. Kloor):

We are the Party of ‘Know‘.

We know the principles upon which this country was founded. The principles you Lefties are always dragging through the mud. Little things like individual liberty. And respecting the flag. And love of God and country. And respect for our fighting troops. And smaller, limited government. And a dedication to our international autonomy. And the belief in peace through strength. Trust, but verify. Rugged individualism and personal responsibility.

You see…I look upon these values in a very positive light. It’s only when I see them attacked on a daily basis from the likes of the New York Times, the ACLU, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, The Huffington Post, the Daily KOS, the Daily Show, David Letterman, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Congress and RINO Republicans and every other arrogant, leftist collectivist punk who wants to completely redesign our Constitution and fashion instead a Eurotrash version of a socialist utopia….well…yeah, when I see these sacred principles attacked, I stand up and yell, NO!

NO, YOU CAN’T!!!

Ya see, Lefty… We know all about you. We know the truth. And we know you’re full of crap.

We are the party of KNOW.

Hollywood is so packed with abject fools that it's nice to see an actor who has an IQ in the triple digits.

Note that Mr. Graham's best known roles are as Det. Sykes from Alien Nation and Ambassador Soval from Star Trek: Enterprise. I think there's a trend here. Charlton Heston (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man), Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Serenity, Chuck), Ron Silver (Timecop), Gary Sinise (Mission To Mars, Apollo 13), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy The Vampire Slayer), Dean Cain (Superman), Tracy Scoggins, Bruce Boxleitner, Melissa Gilbert and Jerry Doyle (Babylon 5), Shannen Doherty (Charmed).

It seems that a lot of Hollywood's conservatives have worked in sci-fi/fantasy. It shouldn't come as any great surprise that people involved in the most intelligent entertainment genre would also have the most intelligent politics.

Angels and Demons

From The Telegraph:

The storyline for Angels & Demons, which stars Tom Hanks and Ewan McGregor, centers on a plot by the Illuminati, a secret society of intellectuals, who are intent on gaining revenge for a brutal massacre of their predecessors by the Church centuries ago. Although the society once existed, there is no historical evidence that its members were butchered by Catholics.

The Rt Rev Malcolm McMahon, the Bishop of Nottingham, warned that the film could stir up anti-Catholic sentiment."This is so outlandish, it's total rubbish," said Bishop McMahon, who is one of the Church's most senior bishops. "It's mischievous to stir up this kind of anti-Catholic sentiment. It's a gratuitous knocking of the Church and I can't see any reason for it."

Ron Howard, the director of Angels & Demons - expected to become the first blockbuster film of the summer when it is released this month - has fired back that Catholics will enjoy the movie, which is based on a previous novel by The Da Vinci Code's author, Dan Brown.

His comments will intensify a feud between some prominent Catholic leaders and the Da Vinci Code team over claims that the film smears the Church.

The bishop, who chairs the Church's Department of Evangelisation and Catechesis, said that Catholics were "getting tired" of the sensational stories and plotlines contained in Brown's novels and subsequent film adaptations. "I don't think that Catholics will be interested in seeing this as it's so far removed from the truth," he added.

Brown's book includes a number of other episodes guaranteed to upset the faithful - including a Pope conceiving a child via artificial insemination, thereby circumventing celibacy rules. Sony Pictures has declined to say whether those incidents make it to the movie.

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the US, accused Howard and Brown of "smearing the Catholic church with fabulously bogus tales".

The frenetically outlandish plot of Angels & Demons centers on a race against time by Harvard professor Robert Langdon (Hanks) to thwart a plot by the Illuminati to blow up the cradle of Catholicism with an anti-matter bomb during the conclave to elect a new pope.

But Mr Donahue is exasperated by the way that he says Brown and Howard blend fact, fiction and conspiracy theory.

"I have never dealt with two more disengenous people," he told The Daily Telegraph. "They wouldn't dare treat any other religion like this."

Howard responded in forthright fashion, "Let me be clear: neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is - an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome."

. . . Sony Pictures is not backing away from the controversy and will stage the film's world premier on the Vatican's doorstep in Rome on May 4, 10 days before it opens in British cinemas.

"We do not believe the film is anti-Catholic, and we don't believe the nearly 40 million people worldwide who purchased the novel were confused by the fact that this is a fictional mystery thriller," said Steve Elzer, the studio's senior vice-president.

OK, let's take Ron Howard, Sony Pictures and Dan Brown at their word. They are not anti-Catholic and sincerely believe that the world's Catholics will enjoy their new movie - which, like the Da Vinci Code, is not meant to be critical of the Roman Catholic Church in even the slightest way. Then let us issue them a challenge.

Let Mr. Brown write and Mr. Howard and Sony Pictures film and distribute a movie, which would not be intended to be anti-Islam in even the slightest way, in which Mohammad is shown to be a shiftless failure and pedophile who concocts his stories about angelic visitations as a desperate attempt to gain the attention, respect and power he has always craved.

I'm sure that Muslims the world over would enjoy that picture just as much as faithful Catholics will enjoy Angels and Demons.

Of course we know that the idea of poltroons like Ron Howard and Dan Brown attacking Muslims the way they attack Catholics is laughable. To be a coward is to only pick on safe targets. The Catholic Church is a civilized institution. The corporate headquarters of Sony Pictures will not be targeted by a truck bomb. The last view of Dan Brown or Ron Howard the world will see will not be of them being beheaded by masked Jesuits shouting "God is Great" in Latin on a video tape sent to EWTN (the Catholic cable channel). The Vatican will not even attempt to use its status as a sovereign nation to go before the UN and attempt to have Sony Pictures condemned as hate criminals.

No all Brown, Howard or Sony need to fear is words. Words which will only feed the publicity machine of their movie and thus put more money in their pockets.

And that is fine. Better to be able to mock religion with impunity than to have to fear being burned at the stake, but we should also keep in mind that any religion that you can attack without needing to hire a team of ex-Green Berets to keep your head attached to your shoulders probably doesn't deserve your attack.

Tonight's Music

Drumshamboo Jig - Banshee Celtic Band at the concert in Krakow, march 2008.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

Without any pretense of an argument, which liberals are neurologically incapable of, the mainstream media are now asserting that our wussy interrogation techniques at Guantanamo constituted "torture" and have irreparably harmed America's image abroad.

Only the second of those alleged facts is true: The president's release of the Department of Justice interrogation memos undoubtedly hurt America's image abroad, as we are snickered at in capitals around the world, where they know what real torture is. The Arabs surely view these memos as a pack of lies. What about the pills Americans have to turn us gay?

The techniques used against the most stalwart al-Qaida members, such as Abu Zubaydah, included one terrifying procedure referred to as "the attention grasp." As described in horrifying detail in the Justice Department memo, the "attention grasp" consisted of:

"(G)rasping the individual with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the individual is drawn toward the interrogator."

The end.

There are rumors that Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney wanted to take away the interrogators' Altoids before they administered "the grasp," but Department of Justice lawyers deemed this too cruel.

And that's not all! As the torments were gradually increased, next up the interrogation ladder came "walling." This involves pushing the terrorist against a flexible wall, during which his "head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a C-collar effect to prevent whiplash."

People pay to have a lot rougher stuff done to them at Six Flags Great Adventure. Indeed, with plastic walls and soft neck collars, "walling" may be the world's first method of "torture" in which all the implements were made by Fisher-Price.

As the memo darkly notes, walling doesn't cause any pain, but is supposed to induce terror by making a "loud noise": "(T)he false wall is in part constructed to create a loud sound when the individual hits it, which will further shock and surprise." (!!!)

If you need a few minutes to compose yourself after being subjected to that horror, feel free to take a break from reading now. Sometimes a cold compress on the forehead is helpful, but don't let it drip or you might end up waterboarding yourself.

The CIA's interrogation techniques couldn't be more ridiculous if they were out of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch:

Cardinal! Poke her with the soft cushions! ...
Hmm! She is made of harder stuff! Cardinal Fang! Fetch ... THE COMFY CHAIR!

So you think you are strong because you can survive the soft cushions. Well, we shall see. Biggles! Put her in the Comfy Chair! ...

Now -- you will stay in the Comfy Chair until lunchtime, with only a cup of coffee at 11.

Further up the torture ladder -- from Guantanamo, not Monty Python -- comes the "insult slap," which is designed to be virtually painless, but involves the interrogator invading "the individual's personal space."

If that doesn't work, the interrogator shows up the next day wearing the same outfit as the terrorist. (Awkward.)

I will spare you the gruesome details of the CIA's other comical interrogation techniques and leap directly to the penultimate "torture" in their arsenal: the caterpillar.

In this unspeakable brutality, a harmless caterpillar is placed in the terrorist's cell. Justice Department lawyers expressly denied the interrogators' request to trick the terrorist into believing the caterpillar was a "stinging insect."

Human rights groups have variously described being trapped in a cell with a live caterpillar as "brutal," "soul-wrenching" and, of course, "adorable."

If the terrorist manages to survive the non-stinging caterpillar maneuver -- the most fiendish method of torture ever devised by the human mind that didn't involve being forced to watch "The View" -- CIA interrogators had another sadistic trick up their sleeves.

I am not at liberty to divulge the details, except to mention the procedure's terror-inducing name: "the ladybug."

Finally, the most savage interrogation technique at Guantanamo was "waterboarding," which is only slightly rougher than the Comfy Chair.

Thousands of our troops are waterboarded every year as part of their training, but not until it was done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- mastermind of the 9/11 attack on America -- were liberal consciences shocked.

I think they were mostly shocked because they couldn't figure out how Joey Buttafuoco ended up in Guantanamo.

As non-uniformed combatants, all of the detainees at Guantanamo could have been summarily shot on the battlefield under the Laws of War.

Instead, we gave them comfy chairs, free lawyers, better food than is served in Afghani caves, prayer rugs, recreational activities and top-flight medical care -- including one terrorist who was released, whereupon he rejoined the jihad against America, after being fitted for an expensive artificial leg at Guantanamo, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Only three terrorists -- who could have been shot -- were waterboarded. This is not nearly as bad as "snowboarding," which is known to cause massive buttocks pain and results in approximately 10 deaths per year.

Normal human beings -- especially those who grew up with my older brother, Jimmy -- can't read the interrogation memos without laughing.

At Al-Jazeera, they don't believe these interrogation memos are for real. Muslims look at them and say: THIS IS ALL THEY'RE DOING? We do that for practice. We do that to our friends.

But The New York Times is populated with people who can't believe they live in a country where people would put a caterpillar in a terrorist's cell.

Once again Miss Ann hits the nail on the head.

Al Qaeda must be pissing themselves from laughing so hard at what the American left considers "torture". Of course Americans are going to die because of this. Our enemies are subhuman savages who will attack when they sense weakness and Obama has made us appear contemptibly weak.

The bad guys now know that no matter what they do to us the worst we'll do to them is menace them with a larva.

Since the West has no will to survive

From American Thinker:

The Obama administration looks like it's going to acquiesce in the face of a nuclear-armed radicalized Pakistan, just as Jimmy Carter bowed down low in the face of Ayatollah Khomeini. Soon we will have two radicalized Muslim states with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles: A Shiite Iran, and a Sunni Pakistan.

Afghanistan is slipping out of control. But worse, Afghanistan is no longer the main battleground: a Taliban-controlled Pakistan is.

And in case you've forgotten, in the decade before 9/11 Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaida suiciders found safe haven with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Talibs are Islamist fanatics just like Ahmadinejad. They will die for Allah. That means they may not be rational actors in the Western sense. They certainly will stir up terror attacks in India and maybe Sri Lanka and the Philippines, just as the Iranians are sponsoring terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt.

Once they have nuclear weapons, they will have safe havens for further terrorist attacks. Expect nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to start spreading even faster.

Weakness? Our enemies have taken the measure of Obama and Hillary Clinton. They are not bothering to wait. They know this is Jimmy Carter II in the White House, and they are acting accordingly. Expect push, push, push on all the fronts: South America with Chavez, Ortega and the Castro brothers, now trying to control Brazil; Africa with Zuma, another mad radical now in control of the modern state of South Africa; the Sudan under its genocidal regime, backed by the Arab League and tolerated by the UN; Iran and Syria now within reach of their own nukes and missiles; and Russia, which will play big power games in the Middle East as long as it hurts the West.

The Taliban just accepted Pakistan's surrender in six provinces. They promptly moved on the seventh province, and are now within a day's drive of the capital of Pakistan. And the West? The West can't even hold down medieval terrorist pirates in little speed boats, who are making a good living off kidnapping Westerners and terrorizing Western shipping companies. The pirates are making the West pay for the Shabab Islamist rebellion in Somalia.

Remember Osama Bin Laden's strong horse and weak horse? Barack Obama is the weak horse. The Muslim world may have hated Bush, but they despise weakness.

Go read the rest.

It is just possible that a radical Islamist takeover in Pakistan could be the best possible thing to happen.

Of course the United States under the "leadership" of on B. Hussein Obama will do nothing in the face of such a catastrophe (other than seek to appease) however India might very well invade and crush the new Islamofascist state, destroying or capturing its nuclear weapons.

I have long said on this blog that India would be a far better ally for the US than most of Old Europe. The Indians have the kind of hatred of Islam that only people forced to share a border with an Islamic state or forced to endure the presence of a large Muslim minority living among them can feel. That is the Indians have the natural reaction to Islam of any sane people forced to see it up close - revulsion.

India has already indicated that it if pushed it would consider the limited nuclear strike that Pakistan could launch against it an acceptable price to pay for the eradication of Muslim Pakistan.

An out and out Islamist takeover of Pakistan is likely one of the contingencies which would trigger an all out invasion of Pakistan by India and since the United States and Western Europe will not do what must be done to preserve their own culture from the barbarians seeking to destroy it all the civilized and sane people of the West (there are still some) can do is hope that some third party will step up and defeat our enemies for us.

Now if we can just get Israel to take out Iran. . .

Taking out the trash

WASHINGTON (AP) - Veteran Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania abruptly switched parties Tuesday, a move intended to boost his re-election chances that also pushed Democrats within one seat of a 60-vote filibuster-resistant majority.

"I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," Specter said in a statement posted on a Web site devoted to Pennsylvania politics and confirmed by his office. Several Senate officials said a formal announcement was expected at mid-afternoon.

So the wretched old left-wing scumbag finally made official what has been obvious for decades. He is a Democrat.

Good fraking riddance. The GOP does not - and never has - needed trash like this.

Now if we could only get John "Judas" McCain and his detestable little butt-boy Lindsay Graham to follow Specter.

And another positive development:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said, "Let's be honest: Senator Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record. Republicans look forward to beating Senator Specter in 2010, assuming the Democrats don't do it first."

The Republican party finally has a national chairman who will stand up and tell the truth.

Good for you Mr. Steele. Keep telling it like it is and in 2010 we'll have the House and Senate back and in 2010 we'll be saying "President Palin".

Tonight's Music

The Mike Church Show Band performs Manuel Went Down To Georgia. Sirius radio will only let him air a heavily edited version.

Tonight's Music

This is Wang Chung, one of my favorite bands from the 80's.

Tonight's Music

More limbic brained rednecks

What a bunch of losers

An entire room full of limbic brained rednecks.

Us or them

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In case you haven't seen this video clip, this is celebrity moron Janeane Garofalo on the Keith Olbermann show commenting on the Tea Parties.

Now even when I was blogging daily I doubt that I would have made much of this for two reasons. One is that Garofalo and Olbermann are a pair of class-A idiots. Nothing they have to say about anything can be of the slightest interest to anyone who isn't also an idiot.

However I have recently reassessed that opinion. You see Olbermann's show isn't on Air America or some big left-wing city's public access cable channel. It is on MSNBC, which is a subsidiary of NBC's news department.

Think about that for a minute. What transpires on Olbermann's show is a product of NBC news.

That should frighten you.

Nearly every outlet of the mainstream media has become the moral equivalent of Der Strummer, the ,Völkischer Beobachter, Pravda or The Daily Worker. In other words propaganda sheets spewing the party line. But with this critical difference. In Nazi Germany, the USSR, Castro's Cuba or any other totalitarian nation the press is owned by and utterly controlled by the government. A reporter who tells the truth about something like the murder of the Jews or the famine in Ukraine can expect a bullet through the back of the head or at the very least a long stay in a concentration camp.

"Journalists" in America have voluntarily done this to themselves.

The fact that our "free" press has willingly given themselves over to be the tools of a Castro-in-waiting underscores what I have reluctantly come to believe is a fact; that the internal differences dividing the "right" from the "left" in America cannot be settled short of bloodshed.

The fact is that after contemplating things like Al Franken's theft of a Senate race in Minnesota, Dan Rather's attempt to sabotage George W Bush's presidential campaign using forged documents, Al Gore and the Democrat party's unforgivable conduct in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, Miss California's incredibly shabby and vile treatment at the hands of an almost unbelievably moronic celebrity gossip blogger, the Obama regime's apparent intent to prosecute former Bush administration officials and ten thousand other insults and offenses both large and small I no longer even want to seek a peaceful solution to the nation's internal divisions.

I would accept a partition of the nation into "Real America" on one side and the "People's Democratic Republic of Euromerica" or some such on the other - but I don't think that will happen. In the first place the progressives (or socialists or Democrats or what ever you want to call them) would never willingly let the red states go. What they are about is power and they will never release subjects without a fight.

The other reason why the nation will not be peacefully partitioned is that the two sides simply hate each other too much to be satisfied with anything less than the spilling of the other side's blood.

So what happens now? Must the fighting break out today or tomorrow? No, but it will break out. Unless the part of the public which still upholds the values and ideals of the Founders has lost the will to survive (a real possibility) there WILL be civil war.

Tonight's Music

To all the people who are wondering where I've gone off to I promise I'll post something about that tomorrow. Until then here is a nice music video to entertain you.



This is the Rogues with the United States Air Force Band in Washington DC.

Mr. Jefferson

Here is a great video produced by Mike Church and performed by the Mike Church Show Band.

Why the left won't tell the truth about communism

I found this essay by Dennis Prager on Front Page Magazine and wanted to share it:

Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms "Nazi" or "Fascist" but almost never "Communist?"

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused - 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more -- why is "Communist" so much less a term of revulsion than "Nazi?"

There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.

This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today.

Here, then, are seven reasons.

1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao about 70 million people died - nearly all in peacetime! - virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Stalin had killed were nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example, were members of other Soviet nationalities. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs, and members of other "non-Aryan" and "inferior" groups. "World opinion" - that vapid amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from "world opinion." But if an Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it makes the front page of world newspapers.

I have to quibble over this one. The Jews, at least those who were from Germany were Germans. They were German citizens and many of them had fought for Germany in the First World War. Then there's the issue of Arab violence against Jews in Israel. Hamas can fire all the rockets into Jewish neighborhoods, using schools and hospitals and residential neighborhoods as launching pads, as it wants but let the IDF respond and the left howls in outrage. Fact is that the right hates Hitler because he was a genocidal antisemitic tyrant who tried to conquer the world. The left hates Hitler not because he murdered Jews, but because he attacked the Soviet Union.

2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories. Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history, are seduced by words -- so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less significant. Communism's words are far more intellectually and morally appealing than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis. The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine (though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine), whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology. This seduction by words while ignoring deeds has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals. How else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about vile deeds?

Christians don't get "beautiful words" credit because they believe in God.

3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia, Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, "people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin's holocaust." Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China. Until Russia and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism, communism's evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of the German state under Hitler.

No arguement here. I once told Vladimer Posner that the Russian people needed a "decommunisation" process like the denazification that the victorious allies imposed on Germany.

4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.

Communism lost the Cold War. Where are the Capitalist histories? Oh, Miss Ann is writing them.

5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.

What about the way that Che rounded up and executed homosexuals?

6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe communism. As the French put it, "pas d'enemis a la gauche," which in English means "no enemies on the left." This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university's courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism's immoral record.

True. As long as the enemies of Western civilization rule the academy don't expect any improvement.

7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last "good war" America fought was World War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard America's wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) communism is simply ignored.

WWII was America's "good war" because it was waged - in the leftist's mind - to rescue Stalin from Hitler. Don't misunderstand me. Hitler was pure evil and he needed to be stopped, but the more I study the war and the events leading up to it the more convinced I become that FDR's primary motivation for wanting the US in the war was saving Stalin.

Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.

Good luck getting the left to make that admission. The fact is that they deeply admire Stalin and Mao, Castro and Pol Pot. They envy the raw power these dictators wielded and the fact that they cloaked their tyranny in pretty words. That is the secret dream of the American and European left. To hold the kind of power that a communist tyrant like Stalin held but to cover the iron fist in the velvet glove of "serving the people" and similar talk.

Mountain legend dead

These tragic deaths tend to come in threes:

PARROTTSVILLE, Tenn. — The wife of famed Appalachian moonshiner Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton says he took his own life at his Tennessee home because he couldn't stand the thought of going to prison.

Pam Sutton told The Asheville Citizen Times in North Carolina that her husband was depressed about an 18-month federal sentence he was due to start serving Friday. A telephone listing for Sutton could not immediately be found by The Associated Press.

Tennessee authorities have said they suspected suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning after Marvin Sutton was found Monday dead in his car in Parrottsville. An autopsy has been ordered.

The author of the book "Me and My Likker" pleaded guilty in April to illegally producing distilled spirits and being a felon in possession of a handgun.

Popcorn Sutton was the last of the great Hillbilly moonshiners. Here he is in action:



Popcorn knew that given his age and poor health he would not survive a prison sentence and so chose to die on his own terms as a free man.

It is to be hoped that someone will bring out a new edition of his book.

To honor Mr. Sutton on his passing I hereby declare him the Dean of the Hillbilly Ecosystem.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

I wish I could ask Ron Silver what he thinks of the AIG bonuses. He'd have some original take -- maybe propose re-opening the bonuses paid to Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick for their yeoman's work running Fannie Mae into the ground and then collecting bonuses of $90 million and $24.7 million, respectively. Or maybe he'd just make a joke.

But I can't ask him anymore because Ron died of a rare esophageal cancer last Sunday.

So now there is one less person in the world who never chooses his positions to feed a pompous ego or to stroke his self-image as a thinking person. There was no point to posturing for Ron: His social standing in Hollywood was revoked the moment he supported Bush and the Iraq War.

Perhaps Ron always spoke his mind, but I didn't know him when he was "brave"; I only knew Ron when he was actually brave.

I've noticed that words like "brave" and "courageous" are mostly used nowadays to mean "left-wing.." We're constantly asked to admire the monumental courage of Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo and the Dixie Chicks -- sometimes even by other people.

But for my younger readers, what courage traditionally meant was risking the disapprobation of people you know. It was about losing friends, losing work and losing status where you live -- not alienating people you will never meet. Insulting people in Kansas when you live in Los Angeles is not speaking truth to power; it's speaking anything to serve power.

One thing you cannot say about Ron's magnificent speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention is that he did it to go with the flow in Hollywood, to take the path of least resistance, to win easy applause. Ron did lose work, lose friends and lose his entire social apparatus.

Ron didn't say what he said to get any kind of reaction, but because he believed it. He was an intellectual trapped in an actor's body.

Amid the antiques at his beautifully appointed Park Avenue pre-war, there were piles and piles of magazines and newspaper articles on topics ranging from Sunni Muslims to Darwinism. Nearly every room was lined with books, most of them dog-eared.

When I needed to stay with Ron for a few weeks once, he'd get up hours before I did, read all the major newspapers and leave the interesting articles circled at the foot of my bed.

This might be the nicest thing a man could ever do for me. Hey, skip the bagel and fresh coffee -- bring me that op-ed page and a pair of scissors! It was like a fabulous Park Avenue hotel with a clipping service.

During his long-shot chemo treatments at "the spa," as he called Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Ron turned his chemo rooms into Command Central. Most people doze off during chemo; Ron would be sitting upright, watching the news, checking his laptop and making cell phone calls, seemingly oblivious to the poison being injected into his arm.

He'd often come to church with me on Sundays -- while insisting he favored the "Original Testament," as if the New Testament were an act of judicial activism. He just liked to hear an intellectual lecture on the Bible -- and always perked up when the minister began discussing the "Original Testament."

On Sundays when we had communion, Ron would pop the host in his mouth as soon as the tray passed him, approvingly observing that matzo was served at church.

No ideas frightened him, which is part of the reason why we were always laughing, even when we were arguing.

Ron sometimes told me of the cruelty directed at him by his former friends, but never with bitterness or for publication -- although I'm tempted to get it off my chest even if he didn't want to get it off his chest. You know who you are.

As with his impending death, Ron mostly joked about his banishment from the plutocracy. When I off-handedly mentioned in December 2004 that I had to get a Christmas tree, he told me he'd like to help, but having recently spoken at the Republican National Convention, the last thing he needed was to be seen walking through the streets of New York carrying a Christmas tree.

After an aborted operation on his cancer in July 2007, as soon as I saw Ron in his hospital bed, I told him I had Christians across the country praying for him. He said, "That's good, because the Jews are praying for me to die."

Here he was joking only hours after being told his cancer was inoperable and he had mere months to live. Nearly two years later, he was gone. Luckily for him, he now faces a Maker who rewards bravery, but despises "bravery."

I almost wrote something about Ron Sliver's passing but decided to wait for when I would have more time. Now I'm glad that I did wait because Miss Ann, who knew him personally, can say what needs to be said far better than I could.

Ann calls Mr. Silver brave and he certainly was but the world that always comes to mind when I think of him is "honest". Ron Silver was a man who had taken in the left-wing zeitgeist of Hollywood but when brought face to face with reality he was simply too honest to stick his fingers in his ears and hum real loud till the nasty old facts went away.

Ron Silver paid the price for his honesty in the loss of his acting career. I leave it to others to expound upon the Hollywood blacklist which ostracizes anyone who dares to be a sincere patriot. I will simply observe that we are a great deal poorer for the passing of one who counted the cost and did the right thing anyway.

May his tribe increase.

Natasha Richardson dead

NEW YORK (AP) - Tributes have begun to pour in from across the show business generations for Natasha Richardson, the Tony Award-winning actress who died after suffering a head injury on a ski slope.

"She was a wonderful woman and actress and treated me like I was her own," said Lindsay Lohan, who as a preteen starred with Richardson in a remake of "The Parent Trap" in 1998. "My heart goes out to her family. This is a tragic loss."

Richardson, who fell during a private ski lesson Monday at a ski resort in Quebec, was seemingly fine afterward. But about an hour later she complained that she didn't feel well.

The 45-year-old actress was hospitalized Tuesday in Montreal and later flown to a hospital in New York. Alan Nierob, the Los Angeles-based publicist for Richardson's husband, Liam Neeson, confirmed her death Wednesday without giving details on the cause.

Neeson and Richardson's sister, actress Joely Richardson, were seen leaving Lenox Hill hospital Wednesday. Actress Lauren Bacall also visited the hospital.

Richardson's career highlights included the film "Patty Hearst" and a Tony-winning performance in a stage revival of "Cabaret."

Descended from at least three generations of actors, Richardson was a proper Londoner who came to love the noise of New York, an elegant blonde with large, lively eyes, a bright smile and a hearty laugh.

Jane Fonda on Wednesday recalled meeting a young Richardson on the set of "Julia," the 1977 film Fonda starred in opposite Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave.

"She was a little girl but already beautiful and graceful. It didn't surprise me that she became such a talented actor," Fonda recalled on her blog. "It is hard to even imagine what it must be like for her family. My heart is heavy."

As an actress, Richardson was equally adept at passion and restraint, able to portray besieged women both confessional (Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois) and confined (the concubine in the futuristic horror of "The Handmaid's Tale").

Like other family members, she divided her time between stage and screen. On Broadway, she won a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in a 1998 revival of "Cabaret." She also appeared in New York in a production of Patrick Marber's "Closer" (1999) as well as 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams'"A Streetcar Named Desire," in which she played Blanche opposite John C. Reilly's Stanley Kowalski.

She met Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in "Anna Christie," Eugene O'Neill's drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.

The New York Times critic Frank Rich called her "astonishing" and said she "gives what may prove to be the performance of the season."

Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title character in Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst," a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actress became so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with her real-life counterpart.

Richardson was directed again by Schrader in a 1990 adaptation of Ian McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers" and, also in 1990, starred in the screen version of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

She later co-starred with Neeson in "Nell" and with Mia Farrow in "Widow's Peak." More recent movies, none of them widely seen, included "Wild Child,""Evening" and "Asylum."

Richardson was born in London in 1963, the performing gene inherited not just from her parents (Redgrave and director Tony Richardson), but from her maternal grandparents (Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson), an aunt (Lynn Redgrave) and an uncle (Corin Redgrave). Her younger sister, Joely Richardson, also joined the family business. She also is survived by two sons, Micheal, 13, and 12-year-old Daniel.

I was always impressed with Ms. Richardson's performances and am sorry to see her go at such a young age and in such an senselessly tragic manner.

Let us keep her family in our prayers in the coming days.

Tonight's Music

Mike Oldfield's version of Flowers of the Forest, a lament for those who have fallen in battle.

I've heard the lilting, at the yowe-milking,

Lassies a-lilting before dawn o' day;

But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning;

"The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away".

Dool and wae for the order sent oor lads tae the Border!

The English for ance, by guile wan the day,

The Flooers o' the Forest, that fought aye the foremost,

The pride o' oor land lie cauld in the clay.

I've heard the lilting, at the yowe-milking,

Lassies a-lilting before dawn o' day;

But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning;

"The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away".

The tide is turning

PRINCETON, NJ -- Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.

This is one time the US is lagging behind Europe. In the UK the majority of the public now realized that global warming is a hoax designed to remove what little wealth and freedom they still retain.

Why are Americans being slow on the uptake?

Simple, America is a richer country with a stronger economy. As long as the American people felt confident of their own economic situation they were willing to pay the dollars and cents price for the self esteem boost of "being part of the effort to save the planet from the danger of man made global warming".

However when they are frightened of things like not being able to pay the mortgage or buy groceries the thrill of being on the front lines in the battle to preserve human civilization from a non-existent threat just isn't worth the cost.

I have said all along that global warming was the best hobgoblin that the left had ever come up with to terrorize the population into surrendering their wealth and liberty. I have said that they would not abandon global warming - regardless of the evidence against it - until they found a replacement hobgoblin.

I submit to you that the global financial crisis is that very replacement hobgoblin. The government has managed to bury its tentacles more deeply into the private economy due to the economic meltdown than it ever could because of global warming. As this fact becomes ever more apparent to the left it will allow global warming to die a quiet death unmourned by any except the environmentalist lunatics who externalize their own self loathing into a belief that their entire species is a "cancer on the earth".