I love reporters.
I hear it takes a few tries.
(If you’re worried, get one of these or one of these. They are both virtually unpickable. A good, monitored alarm is even harder to beat.)
30 April, 2008
Pass the Popcorn
The next installment in the Barry and Jerry story may be about to unfold.
29 April, 2008
I’ll bet Ben Stein didn’t expect
that he’d get the ADL mad at him.
Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
But he should have known.
Gotta Love VDH
He’s my favorite egghead. Who else can turn a phrase like this and spank Obama with Greek classicism?
Note that when any candidate makes a Faustian bargain with extremists, nemesis eventually catches up with them.
Read the whole (short) thing.
Last Man Standing?
Sitting high atop my Buttle’s World perch, bemusedly surveying the political landscape, I can’t help but wonder if John McCain will win the presidency by default. He may greet November as the only candidate from either party whose campaign didn’t fade, fumble or implode.
Strange days. I’m glad I don’t live anywhere near Denver.
Come November I’ll look either prescient or foolish. Won’t be the first time.
Update:
This is what prescient looks like. Even if it was only a month ago.
DNC Hits Bottom, Digs
We already knew Howard Dean was nuts. Now we know he has no shame.
Apparently Mr. YEEEEAAAAARGH has not learned Obama’s lesson. Let’s review, shall we?
Update:
JD Johannes gets to the bottom line.
Al Qaida is in Iraq. Al Qaida wants the U.S. military out of Iraq.
The Democrats want the U.S. military out of Iraq.
Draw your own conclusions, but I think it is pretty obvious which side Al Qaida is on.
28 April, 2008
Wright’s Christianity
Jeremiah Wright dropped a lot of bombshells at the National Press Club breakfast. Mark Hemmingway caught this one.
MODERATOR: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but through me.” Do you believe this? And do you think Islam is a way to salvation?
WRIGHT: Jesus also said, “Other sheep have I who are not of this fold.”
Is this just PC dhimmitude from a particularly useful idiot, the kind of spineless Christianity we’ve seen before? Very possible. And yet, I wonder again.
In either case, Peter Wehner has coined a lovely turn of phrase.
Reverend Wright is a torpedo aimed straight at the Obama campaign.
Global Warm-Mongering
Mark Steyn scolds the scolds.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”
You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you.
Read the whole thing. Pass it along.
And here I thought I had a low opinion of the ID crowd
John Derbyshire, in high dudgeon, makes a very strong case that Ben Stein and the dishonest creationists who foisted Expelled on the world have committed a blood libel on our civilization. He includes this reminder:
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.
And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.
UN Troops Armed DR Congo Rebels
Yet another tale of corruption and un-peace-keeping on the part of UN “peacekeepers” would seem like a dog bites man story. But notice this nugget:
UN insiders close to the investigation told the BBC they had been prevented from pursuing their inquiries for political reasons.
Our correspondent says that in short, the Pakistanis, who are the largest troop contributors to the UN in the world, were too valuable to alienate.
The largest contributor of troops to the blue helmet brigade is Pakistan. Pakistan?
File under “Uncategorizable”
27 April, 2008
Islam’s Useful Idiots
You must read this article by Bruce Bawer. But take your blood pressure medication first. And keep breakable objects out of arm’s reach.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission.
If you thought that Socialism benefited from useful idiots, you ought to contemplate how idiotic Islam’s useful are.
Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
Mark Steyn, who knows something about Jihad’s efforts to silence critics, summed it up nicely in a different context:
In a scrupulously politically correct age, it’s not offensive to organize a “Kill the police!” demo or to preach that the government invented Aids in order to perpetrate an African-American genocide. You can pull that stuff and still be part of respectable society, hanging out with presidential candidates and whatnot. What’s grotesquely offensive is the chap who’s insensitive enough to point out such statements and associations.
(Steyn further notes that the Muslim Brotherhood may have its filthy fingerprints on his case.)
So allow me to be grotesquely offensive and point out that Islam’s useful idiots and Socialism’s useful idiots appear to be the same idiots.
I’ll go further: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a heroine. And every Muslim man who beats his wife or forces his daughter into marriage is a pig and a coward. And every idiot, Muslim or not, who wants to impose Sharia law on the world can, to borrow a phrase from a favorite TV show, go frak themselves.
Multiculturalism is death. Or, more precisely, suicide.
26 April, 2008
Someone at the CIA is on the ball
A nice betrayal of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan, and all for a pittance.
I suspect that the competence of CIA people is proportional to their distance from Washington.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
The State Department (when was the last time it took our side in a war?) is funding jihad.
What is State buying with your money? Well, Islamic da’wa, you may be interested to know, is the “call to Allah” — the summons to Islam. ISNA, as Rabinowitz and Mayer elaborate, is “an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ongoing Holy Land Foundation terror funding prosecution,” principally involving the Hamas jihadist terror organization. (Link to NYSun article added.) The Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological engine of modern jihadism, and though it purports to have abandoned violence in favor of other means of persuasion that we should all be governed by Sharia, its mission statement remains: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
25 April, 2008
Voluntary Taxes?
Next time some government hack tries to feed you that BS about our income tax system being “voluntary” just remind them of what happened to Wesley Snipes.
“There is no secret formula that eliminates a person’s tax obligations, nor are there any special exceptions,” he said.
“The majority of Americans pay their taxes timely and accurately. Those who willfully violate the law must be held accountable.”
The jury acquitted him of the felony charges, buying the defense’s argument that he had been duped by bad tax advisors. So, for three misdemeanors he gets three years. Why?
But prosecutors, in their sentencing recommendation, said the jurors’ decision “has been portrayed in the mainstream media as a ‘victory’ for Snipes. The troubling implication of such coverage for the millions of average citizens who are aware of this case is that the rich and famous Wesley Snipes has ‘gotten away with it.’ In the end the criminal conduct of Snipes must not be seen in such a light.”
The government is worried about bad press, so they make an example of him. What is this, Russia? I’m no lawyer, but doesn’t that sound like something that could be brought up while appealing his sentence? Anybody care to bet folding money that the sentence would have been less if he had not been famous?
Voluntary. Hah.
24 April, 2008
Influence vs. Credit
Here’s an interesting take similar to Reagan’s observation, “There’s no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”
One of the most active translators, the Englishman Adelard of Bath, was a startlingly original and perceptive thinker. Rueing how difficult it was to get his ideas accepted, he wrote: “Our generation … refuses to accept anything that seems to come from the moderns. Thus when I have a new idea, if I wish to publish it I attribute it to someone else.” This is why so many of the works of natural philosophy from antiquity to the Renaissance have apocryphal attribution: a book apparently by Pliny or Aristotle was more likely to be read. The progressive thinkers of the early Middle Ages hid their new wine in old flasks, so that others would take them seriously.
The Ethanol Killers
Lefties with Bush Derangement Syndrome like to blather about how he has blood on his hands.
Well, Bush, and every politician and greenie behind this idiotic ethanol nonsense may really have some blood on their hands.
Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’s April 12 ouster. Haitians are sick and tired of food prices that are 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.
If you think that free markets are heartless and cruel, you are now seeing the opposite. It’s time to stop this brai-dead market meddling before people starve to death.
Update:
I have to agree with David Freddoso:
[W]hy has the price of food followed the price of oil, upward and rapidly so? A small portion of that is transportation and farming, but most of it is due to the the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which mandated that we use an incredible amount of the food we produce to create biofuels — for 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, gradually increasing to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. This year, it means that 28 percent of our grain crop will be used for energy and not eaten.
And that’s not all. If we simply set all that grain on fire and watched it burn, such a major decrease in supply would already cause a significant price increase. But our policy of subsidizing food-to-fuel conversion further exacerbates the problem by creating a nexus between grain and oil prices.
Obama’s Real Ayers Problem
A good question for the man who wants to be the “education president”.
I shudder when I hear the phrase “education president” (I’m looking at you, W). Besides the fact that the federal government is not authorized by the constitution to administer interfere with education, it brings back memories of the Nasty Little Man giving the most destructive union in America a cabinet seat.
Would Obama put a terrorist in charge of the department? It’s a fair question.
Update:
Andy McCarthy’s not buying Stern’s analysis.
Obama did not call Ayers an English teacher because he was confused or misinformed. He called Ayers an English teacher because he was lying. That is, he was intentionally minimizing his relationship with an anti-American revolutionary with whom Obama has been friendly, collaborative and entirely comfortable.
Point well taken. I still submit that teachers have done more damage than the Weathermen ever did.
The Real Green Agenda
Buried in this silly story about China’s plans to use carbon from a generating plant to carbonate fizzy drinks is one of my principal objections to the solutions proposed by the “Global Warming” hoaxters.
GreenGen president Su Wenbin said he has escaped the funding and planning problems that have delayed similar ventures in the US and Europe because tackling climate change is a top priority for Beijing.
“In China our system is different. When we decide to do something we can just push on with it…we know we will get government support,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Just so. No need for that pesky “freedom” or “market” to get in the way. Just decide and do it! How efficient and shining!
No report on what they think happens to the CO2 after it’s consumed in the fizzy drinks.
Nancy Pelosi, Biblical Scholar
Heh.
I’ve read the book a couple of times myself, and I sure don’t recognize that passage.
Update:
Here’s a claim that she’s in the clear. I still think she’s stretching doctrine. Those passages don’t sound much like the current “green” agenda to me.
23 April, 2008
No More Pizza Hut
I can’t honestly say no more Pizza Hut for me because I never ordered the stuff to begin with. But I’ll be sure not to in the future and, via this blog, I encourage you never to order from them again.
Disgraceful.
Pizza Hut waited for the controversy to die down then fired a pizza delivery driver, who police said defended himself by shooting a robber who attacked him.
Tick, Tock
The Iraqi government has issued an ultimatum to Mooky’s boys.
The senior-most Iraqi general in charge of the security operation in Basrah has issued an ultimatum for wanted Mahdi Army leaders and fighters to surrender in the next 24 hours as the Iraqi and US military ignore Muqtada al Sadr’s threat to conduct a third uprising. US troops killed 15 Mahdi Army fighters in Baghdad yesterday and have killed 56 fighters since Sadr issued his threat last weekend.
Fifty-six a week sends a pretty clear message.
22 April, 2008
Tax Freedom Day!
April 23rd is the day when you get to start keeping your own money. I think that’s an average, and strongly suspect I’ll be workin’ for the man until well into May.
