Vocal Minority

When Obama and Gore Got Together ...

This post from the indispensible People's Cube is already a week old, but hey, better late than never. Enjoy!

Q: How many Obama voters does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. Hoping that it would change is quite enough. Q: How many autoworkers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: 17 at GM, Ford and Chrysler; 1 at Honda, Hyundai and Toyota. Q: How many Chicago pols does it take to change a lightbulb? A: F--- you, what am I gettin' outta this? Q: How many Democrats does it take to change a lightbulb? A: It's burnt out on the Republican side, so we're not changing it. Q: How many MSM journalists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: No need, Obama is the Light.

 

Q: How many Congresspersons does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None, but they'll allocate a few billion to achieve change under the Obama Stimulus Bill. Q: How many Daily Kos bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: It was Bush's fault the bulb burned out; it'll get fixed by itself when he leaves office. Q: How many Minnesota Canvassing Board members does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Depends. They'll only change it if it looks like a vote for Coleman. Q: How many Oprah Winfrey fans does it take to change a lightbulb? A: The bulb's not so light these days. Q: How many Cubans does it take to change a lightbulb? A: There have been no lightbulbs since the USSR collapsed. Q: How many North Koreans does it take to change a lightbulb? A: What's a lightbulb? Q: How many Hollywood celebrities does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Six to make movies about evil lightbulb companies, twelve to lecture about the unequal distribution of light on late night talk shows and nine to get caught with drugs hidden in cartons of lightbulbs. Q: How many Obama appointees does it take to change a lightbulb? A: His team is currently in the process of finding someone from the Clinton Administration who knows how. Q: How many Caroline Kennedys does it take to change a lightbulb? A: She's never thought about it but now that you mention it, she'd love for someone to change it for her. Q: How many President Elect Obamas does it take to change a lightbulb? A: The bulb is a lot more burnt out than we thought. Clearly, the bulb has deteriorated. It might not be changed as quickly as we would like.

Profiles in Liberal Ignorance, Hate, and Intolerance: Adams Morgan's "Destination Change"

Michelle Malkin has this pathetic story about a “fun and off-beat” event celebrating the inauguration of the Golden Calf:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Adams Morgan Main Street (AMMG) offers “Destination Change” with fun and off-beat events. Adams Morgan Main Street, the non-profit organization that produces “Adams Morgan Day,” presents an Inaugural Promotion highlighting the unique and diverse elements of Adams Morgan from Friday, January 16 through January 20.

Adams Morgan Main Street is hosting and showcasing interesting inauguration-related events with everything from elephant pinatas to extended hours to food and drink specials, costume contests, elephant dart boards, Inaugural inspired artwork and more.

The Kick-Off is at the corner of 18th and Columbia Rd. on Friday, January 16 at 5:30 pm and 7:00pm with an Elephant Pinata Bash - Take a swing! Out with the old, in with the new! … On Saturday, January 18 the public can take another Swing at the Elephant Pinata at 11:00 am and 1:00 pm, or catch another opportunity with Grand Central’s pinata that evening at 7:00pm.

L’Enfant Cafe offers a special Inaugural Brunch every day culminating in an Elephant Pinata Bash at 11:00pm on Jan 19 …

"Inaugural Inspired Artwork" is on display at Capitol Hemp [Capitol what???] from January 16 onward. On Sunday, January 18, Tom Tom hosts the Elephant Pinata at 2:00pm, and on Monday, January 19, El Tamarindo rings in the transition to Inaugural Day with an Elephant Pinata at Midnight.

Wow, that’s not one, not two, not three, but (at least?) six opportunities to take swings at an imaginary Republican elephant with some blunt instrument or throw darts at one.

Your tolerant, compassionate, open-minded liberal in action.

I never heard of this organization before, but their web site's subheading says “Combining Diverse Pieces to Make a Beautiful Puzzle.”

They forgot to add: “Republicans Need Not Apply.”

As Malkin writes:

So much for the new spirit of bipartisanship.

Can you imagine if Republicans had kicked off either of Bush’s inauguration days with Donkey Pinata Bashes?

Climate of fear! Inciting violence! Insane rage!

Nope. Now, it’s all just good “fun and off-beat.”

Exactly. I say they get back to the reality-based community and rename this extravaganza “Hate and Hypocrisy Fest.” I wonder if Andrea Mitchell will be there belly-aching about the atmosphere of fear and rage the Obamaniacs are stoking.

Actually, it is more likely that Andrea Mitchell would be among the pinata swingers and dart throwers.

But it’s Republicans who are divisive and mean-spiritied, right? Excuse me while I go throw up.

If this is the “change” Obama is promising, I want no part of it.

Diversity Lane (1/15/09)

"... with your host, Keith Olbermann!"

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (1/15/09)

My girl Ann (Coulter)’s new book “Guilty” is amazing! Chapter 1 of said book is quite controversial, and do a quick YouTube search and you will find some uncomfortably spirited appearances on various shows, including The View. Oy, I needed some Tylenol after watching that one.

Anyway, what is Chapter 1? Coulter argues that a great deal of society’s ills can be traced back to single motherhood (by choice, my overly sensitive and easily offended liberal readers; not single motherhood resulting from divorce or death). I was eventually going to write a post on Coulter’s findings, but turns out the master herself writes about it in her current article:

Murder Spree by People Who Refuse to Ask For Directions
Ann Coulter| Wednesday, January 14, 2009

In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: "U.S. Military, Psycho Killers."

The Treason Times’ banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group. […]

But as long as the Times has such a burning interest in the root causes of murder, how about considering the one factor more likely to create a murderer than any other? That is the topic we’re not allowed to discuss: single motherhood.

As I describe in my new book, "Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America," controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. (The second strongest factor is owning a Dennis Kucinich bumper sticker.)

By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.

A 1990 study by the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute showed that, after controlling for single motherhood, the difference in black and white crime disappeared.

Various studies come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. A study cited in the far left-wing Village Voice found that children brought up in single-mother homes "are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home."

With new children being born, running away, dropping out of high school and committing murder every year, it’s not a static problem to analyze. But however the numbers are run, single motherhood is a societal nuclear bomb. […]

Think I’m being cruel? Imagine an America with 60 to 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, teenage births, teenage suicides and runaways, and you will appreciate what the sainted "single mothers" have accomplished.

Even in liberals’ fevered nightmares, predatory mortgage dealers, oil speculators and Ken Lay could never do as much harm to their fellow human beings as single mothers do to their own children, to say nothing of society at large.

But the Times won’t run that series because liberals adore single motherhood and the dissolution of traditional marriage in America. They detest the military, so they cite a few anecdotal examples of veterans who have committed murder and hope that no one asks for details.

Next, another one of my favorite conservo-gals Monica Crowly, gives legitimate criticism to the Golden Calf’s cabinet—inept, lackluster, corrupt, and the farthest thing from the “change” he kept promising.

The Worst Transition in The World
By Monica Crowley

The lamestream media has been busy tripping over itself to tout the virtual perfection of The Bama. Barack can do no wrong! He’s got mystical qualities that transcend humanity! His choices are inspired! His judgment, pure and impeccable!

Now, to the reality.

This guy has been presiding over what possibly could be the worst transition ever.

Consider his Cabinet selections:

For Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton. Girlfriend has more baggage than a transatlantic voyage, starting with her Better Half. She’s bringing all of her conflicts of interests (and Bubba’s) into a job working for a guy she thought—just 7 months ago—wasn’t ready for primetime. She’s also going along with a guy who opposed a war she supported. $60 million from the Middle East? Dubai? Saudi Arabia? Kuwait? India? The Kazakh thugs? Rose Law Firm files? Whitewater? Chinese campaign contributions? Nationalizing health care? Lewinsky? Impeachment? Pilfering White House furniture? Removing the “W’s” from the computer keyboards? Anyone? Anyone?

For CIA: Leon Panetta. He’s a political hack who knows nothing about intelligence about to assume responsibility for intelligence in the middle of a war. Did he notice that Osama bin Laden issued a new challenge to The Bama today? I’ll bet bin Laden is really worried about Ace Ventura taking over the CIA.

For Attorney General: Eric Holder. This guy signed off on Clinton’s pardons of terrorists and helped to create the conditions for September 11 by maintaining the strict walls of no-communication between the FBI and the CIA. Somewhere in Waziristan, bin Laden giggles.

For Education Secretary: Arne Duncan. The former head of the Illinois Department of Education, his department spent $67,000 on cappuccino machines while failing to meet all of the federal mandates of No Child Left Behind.

For Chief of Staff: Rahm Emanuel. Up to his eyeballs in the pay-for-play scandal rocking Illinois.

For EPA: Carol Browner. Until very recently, she was a member of Socialist International. This is not a nightclub.

For Treasury Secretary: Tim Geithner. This guy hasn’t paid big chunks of his taxes since 2001 and didn’t know the immigration status of three members of his household staff.

For Commerce Secretary: Bill Richardson. He withdrew because he faces possible indictment in a New Mexico pay-for-play scandal.

Shady!

This is what happens when you can only go to the Clinton trough for “talent.”

If I were The Bama, I’d watch out for a certain frosted-blonde. Looks like she’s already running the show.

Finally, from today’s WSJ Opinion page, a no-holds-barred comparison between Bush and Clinton. Which president left office having made the world a safer place? According to author and professor Ruth Wisse, Bush by a long shot:

Bush Destroyed a Dictator. Clinton Installed One.
Which of our last two presidents made the world safer?

RUTH R. WISSE

As President George W. Bush prepares to leave office amid a media chorus of reproach and derision, there is at least one comparison with his predecessor that speaks greatly in his favor. Mr. Bush removed the most ruthless dictator of his day, Saddam Hussein, thereby offering Iraqi citizens the possibility of self-rule. Bill Clinton’s analogous achievement in the Middle East was to help install Yasser Arafat, the greatest terrorist of his day, as head of a proto-Palestinian state.

This is not how these events are generally perceived. The image that still looms in the public mind is that of President Clinton, peacemaker, standing between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in the Rose Garden on Sept. 13, 1993. With the best intentions, Mr. Clinton had worked hard for this peace agreement and would continue to strive for its success, hosting the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the White House more than any other foreign leader.

But the “peace process” almost immediately reversed its stated expectations. Emboldened by his diplomatic victory, Arafat adopted Islamist terminology and openly preached jihad. The casualties suffered by Israel in the years following the Oslo Accords exceeded those of previous decades, and dangers to Israel and the world have increased exponentially ever since. This so-called peace agreement rewarded terrorist methods as fail-safe instruments of modern warfare, and accelerated terrorist attacks on other democratic countries. Though Mr. Clinton did not foresee these consequences, his speech at the signing ceremony betrayed the self-deception on which the agreement was based.

Throughout the speech, Mr. Clinton invoked the significance of the “sliver of land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea” to “Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout the world.” He repeatedly linked the “descendants of Isaac and Ishmael,” and the “shared future shaped by the values of the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible,” as though their “memories and dreams” were all equivalent. But Judaism is quite unlike Islam. The Jews claim solely that “sliver of land” and accept their minority status among the nations. By contrast, Islam seeks religious and territorial hegemony, most especially in the Middle East.

Hence 21 countries descendant from Ishmael have denied the descendants of Isaac their ancestral home. This difference of political visions is precisely what propels the Arab war against Israel. [...]

The Oslo “peace accord” made the world more dangerous and subjected Palestinian Arabs to a rule of violence, corruption and intimidation. Arafat’s dictatorship has since been outmatched by an even more brutal Hamas regime that serves as the terrorist outpost of Iran. President Bush’s military intervention, by contrast, destroyed a terrorist state and made the world safer for its citizens.

Three brilliant articles by three brilliant women.

Liberal Media Bias: MSM Mum on Radical Islam Except When It's Palestinians vs. Israelis

This is one of the best pieces I’ve read so far. Writer Victor Sharpe calls out the international media for their silent complicity in every massacre committed by radical Muslims. Only when the Muslims in question are Palestinians, and only when those Palestinians are battling with Israelis, do the media come out to report it—and then cast blame on the Israelis.

January 14, 2009
Media and activists ignore horrors when Israel can't be blamed
By Victor Sharpe

Perhaps as many as 400,000 people have been killed and some two million driven from their homes since 2003. Are we talking about Gaza? No, it is Darfur and the victims are black Christians and animists in southern Sudan. The culprit? The Arab Islamist government in Khartoum. But where are the street protests against the Islamists? There are none, because the victims are not Palestinian Arabs.

What of the Sri Lankan War in which up to 70,000 Hindus and Buddhists have died since 1983 and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the minority Muslim population have lost their lives while 75,000 others have been driven from their homes. Most people are completely unaware of this long and harrowing war. Can you remember seeing street demonstrations or lurid pictures flashed across your TV screen? The answer is no because they are not Palestinians.

How about the war in the Republic of Congo where since 1997 almost 4,000,000 people have perished? No knowledge of it? Well that's because they weren't Palestinians. Then there's the Somali civil war, which has accounted for 400,000 dead since 1988. Oh, let's not forget, they also are not Palestinians. And before I move on, there's the Mexican drug war currently raging in which nearly 8,000 have died since it began in 2006. But we can ignore that one because they are not Palestinians.

Other wars include the Second Chechen war with up to 90,000 dead; the Islamic insurgency in the Philippines with 160,000 casualties; an ethnic conflict in Nagaland with the loss of 43,000 lives; the Turkish- Kurdish struggle with 37,000 dead and wounded and, last but not least, the Islamic insurgency in Kashmir with another 60,000 lives lost. There are too many others to name but you won't hear much about them because - well yes you guessed it - they are not Palestinians.

Did you hear, during the last eight years, about the 10,000 Palestinian missiles that Hamas and other terror organizations have fired at Israeli villagers and townsfolk from the Gaza Strip? I doubt it, because the victims were Israelis not Palestinians.

Perhaps you have heard about the 6,500 rockets and mortars deliberately aimed at Israeli civilian targets since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005? No? Well, again, that's because the suffering population is in southern Israel, not among the Palestinians. Incidentally, the Israelis left behind a thriving agricultural infrastructure for the Arabs to embrace and for them to prove that they were genuinely interested in living side by side in peace with Israel. But the mainstream media soon forgot that fact.

But consider this. As soon as Israel could no longer bear the Palestinian provocations and finally retaliated, the world strangely woke up and ended its deafening silence.

Predictably the United Nations, orchestrated by the 50 or more members of the Islamic Bloc and, as always, supported by the enfeebled and hypocritical European Union, now fast sliding down into the vile pit called Eurabia, became stridently vocal with condemnations not of Hamas, with its bloodthirsty calls for Israel's destruction, but of the long suffering Israelis for daring to defend themeselves.

How odd that there were no official condemnations of the Hamas regime in Gaza by the U.N. while thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortars were raining down on Israel for years in a gigantic act of premeditated and murderous terror. Sadly, it is symptomatic of much of the world's hypocrisy, pro-Palestinian bias, and dislike of the Jewish state. The world hated the stateless Jews and now hates the State of the Jews.

Israeli civilians can die and be maimed for as long as it takes; but not Palestinians, even if Hamas uses the hapless civilians in Gaza as human shields - an indefensible war crime.

Blatant hypocrisy? You bet.

Spot on, Mr. Sharpe. Thank you! The liberal media is so stuck in their "America and Israel are the only evil in the world" template, they completely ignore the real evil around the world. I think it's partly out of fear (look what happened to the Danish cartoon fiasco) and willful ignorance.

Shocking! Released G'tmo Terrorists Return to ... Commit More Terrorism!

Well, here’s a shocker for all you “Close G’tmo!” liberals (And I know you’re out there). A Reuters article reports that the Pentagon has identified 61 former detainees at Guantánamo who have resumed committing acts of terrorism after being released.

Pentagon says 61 former Gitmo detainees went back to terrorism

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed as “returning to the fight” and 43 are suspected of having done in a report issued late in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency. [...]

“This is acts of terrorism. It could be Iraq, Afghanistan, it could be acts of terrorism around the world,” he told reporters.

Morrell said the latest figures, current through December 24, showed an 11 percent recidivism rate, up from 7 percent in a March 2008 report that counted 37 former detainees as suspected or confirmed active militants.

Rights advocates said the lack of details should call the Pentagon's assertions into question.

All right, what up with that term “rights advocate”? You're not rights advocates, OK. You're aiders and abettors of terrorists. Of murderers. Of thugs. What about the rights of the innocents these animals have slaughtered all over the world? When have you advocated for their rights, huh?

You're on the wrong side of morality and history, a'ight? And you're an enemy of this country.

“Until enough information is provided to allow the press and the public to verify these claims, they need to be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism,” said Jennifer Daskal, a Washington-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch. […]

Verify these claims? Easy! Just read the paper! Gateway Pundit has done the courtesy of compiling a list of reports for you:

Gitmo Detainees Re-Arrested in Russia

Former Gitmo Prisoner Arrested for Terrorism in Moscow

Three Former Gitmo Detainees Held in Morocco

Former Gitmo Inmate Involved in Russian Terror Attack on Nalchik

Camel-Riding Former Gitmo Detainee Blows Himself Up

Former Gitmo Detainee Re-Arrested in Pakistan

Seven Percent of Gitmo Detainees Return to Battlefield.

Former Club Gitmo Detainee Carries Out Suicide Mission in Iraq

Are you getting the picture?

Rights advocates contend that many Guantanamo detainees have never taken up arms against the United States and say the Defense Department in the past has described former detainees as rejoining "the fight" because they spoke out against the U.S. government.

Yeah, right. Whatever. These liars for hire expect us to believe that folks like Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi and Monhammed Nayim Farouq were just a couple of innocent foot scrub vendors in a kiosk at the local marketplace just minding their own business, until those evil Americans came along for no reason with their guns and so they were just "speaking out against the U.S. government." Because, you know, everyone knows how dangerous it is to speak out against the U.S. government. Not like in any of the countries they guys come from. 

What a joke.

Jennifer Daskal (if that is your real name), you are a disgrace to the United States, and to the human race. The blood of every victim killed by a released G’tmo detainee is on your hands. Your parents must be proud that you work to threaten the lives innocent human beings, including Americans, by protecting the supposed rights of these subcreatures.

And that goes for all of you who think, like the president-elect you voted for, that we should close G’tmo.

I’ve got an idea. Let’s drop the innocent little angels off at your house, OK? And when they rape your wife, dismember your children, and slice your throat, don’t come bitching to me ‘cause I’ll be telling your severed head, “I told you so, schmuck!”

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (1/14/09): Israel-Hamas Conflict, 3rd Installment

Three extremely brilliant and morally grounded pundits on the continuing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza:

Guess Who Cares about Dead Palestinians? Jews!
Dennis Prager Tuesday, January 13, 2009

… [I]t would be difficult nearly to the point of impossibility, to find Israeli or other Jews who celebrate the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Jews both within and outside of Israel cringe when they see pictures of dead Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. For thousands of years at their Passover seders, Jews have removed wine from their cups to ceremonially weep for the Egyptians—their erstwhile slave owners for 400 years—who died during the Jews’ exodus. Jews have never stopped weeping for enemies.

The opposite is the case with the large majority of Palestinians. It would be quite difficult to find many Palestinians who do not celebrate the deaths of Israeli Jews or non-Israeli Jews. This is not only reflected in Palestinian polls that show majority support for terrorism—and terrorism means killing innocent Jews—it is also reflected in Palestinian media, Palestinian schools, and Palestinian mosques that routinely glorify murderers of Jews, and refer to all Jews as “monkeys” and the like.

Take for example, Palestinian reaction to the 2001 Palestinian terror bombing of a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in which 15 Jews, five of whom were two sets of parents and their children, were murdered and an additional 130 people were injured, some permanently maimed.

As reported by the Associated Press, a month later, “Palestinian university students opened an exhibition that included a grisly re-enactment” of that mass murder. The students built a replica of the Sbarro pizzeria, with fake blood, splattered pizza, a plastic hand dangling from the ceiling, and a fake severed leg wearing jeans and a bloody black sneaker.

“The exhibit also includes a large rock in front of a mannequin wearing the black hat, black jacket and black trousers typically worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews. A recording from inside the rock calls out: ‘O believer, there is a Jewish man behind me. Come and kill him,’” paraphrasing a verse in the Koran. It became a popular tourist attraction for Palestinians, to which Palestinian parents took their little children. […]

Israel’s Fight For Survival
By Bruce Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/14/2009

… Just as with the Lebanon offensive of 2006, the Western media report events in terms of a prefabricated narrative shorn of historical fact and context. In this mythic paradigm, Israel is the neo-colonial, neo-imperialist minion of late capitalism, an outpost of Western aggression and exploitation of the dark-skinned Third-World “other” whose land has been stolen and whose people have been displaced. All the dysfunctions of the West, so this tale goes, such as racism and xenophobia, are expressed in Israel’s treatment of her victims. Hence the mechanisms of Zionist “apartheid” such as checkpoints, walls, restrictions on movement, “refugee” camps, “displaced” persons, and the brutal indifference and “disproportionate” response of Israel’s U.S.-financed military machine. Muslim “terrorism” is explained away as the understandable response on the part of those subjected to this oppression and lacking the resources to fight back. Thus they can be forgiven for being caught up in the “cycle of violence” whose prime mover is Israel. […]

“Occupation” of a “homeland” is another of Israel’s crimes, yet no one talks about the Arab occupation of Spain for seven centuries, the occupation of Greece and the Balkans for five centuries, and the continuing Muslim occupation of Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean littoral, regions that were Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian for centuries before they were conquered and occupied by Muslims. And of course, no mention will be made of the historical fact that what today is called the West Bank, the presumed Palestinian “homeland,” is ancient Judea and Samaria, the heart of the Jewish homeland for a 1000 years. Likewise, “occupation” of the holy Muslim city of Jerusalem is another outrage, even though Jerusalem is extensively documented as a Jewish city and holy site dating back to 1300 B.C., and only became Muslim in the 7th Century by violent conquest. And while Israel, after retaking Jerusalem in a defensive war, has allowed Muslims to occupy the Temple Mount and keep the mosque there, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, once the second-most important church in Christendom, is in the hands of Muslim Turks whose ancestors defaced its once-glorious mosaics after the brutal sack of Constantinople.

In other words, historically Muslims have violated, and continue to violate, every principle by which Israel is deemed an international pariah, yet rarely do we hear anything other than perfunctory denunciation of Islamic bigotry and violence. This double standard, whereby the West and Israel are held accountable to principles that are not applied to Muslims, partly accounts for the moral incoherence of Israel’s Western critics. Hence to Israel’s critics, the inadvertent deaths of non-combatants resulting from Israel’s attempts to defend its citizens are condemned more vehemently and obsessively than the deliberate murder of women and children by the Arab jihadists. These terrorists, moreover, use their own people as expendable propaganda assets precisely because they have taken the measure of the Western media, which can be depended upon to provide inflammatory coverage of Palestinian suffering without providing the moral context that identifies who is responsible for that suffering.

This failure of Western moral and historical intelligence represents the greatest danger to Israel’s survival, and it exposes the fatal weakness of the West––a loss of confidence in the very values and beliefs that have created the ideals, such as freedom and human rights, without which life is intolerable.

 

Pretty Talk and Ugly Realities
Moral preening from a safe distance and at somebody else’s expense.
By Thomas Sowell

No phrase represents more of a triumph of hope over experience than the phrase “Middle East peace process.” A close second might be the once-fashionable notion that Israel should “trade land for peace.”

Since everybody seems to be criticizing Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired into their country from the Gaza strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten the peace, so they should take back the land. […]

Whatever the benefits of peace for the Palestinian population, what are the terrorists going to do in peacetime? Become librarians and furniture salesmen?

So-called “world opinion” has been a largely negative factor in this situation. Nothing is easier than for people living in peace and safety in Paris or Rome to call for a “cease fire” after the Israelis retaliate against people who are firing rockets into their country.

The time to cease fire was before the rockets were fired.

What do calls for “cease fire” and “negotiations” do? They lower the price of launching attacks. This is true not only in the Middle East but in other parts of the world as well.

During the Vietnam war, when American clergymen were crying out “Stop the bombing!” they paid little attention to the fact that bombing pauses made it easier for North Vietnam to move more ammunition into South Vietnam to kill both South Vietnamese and Americans. […]

Today, so-called “world opinion” not only limits the price to be paid for aggression or terrorism, it has even led to the self-indulgence of third parties talking pretty talk about limiting the response of those who are attacked to what is “proportionate.”

By this reasoning, we should not have declared war on Japan for bombing Pearl Harbor. We should have gone over to Japan, bombed one of their harbors — and let it go at that.

Does anyone imagine that this would have led to Japan’s becoming as peaceful today as it has become after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Or is the real agenda to engage in moral preening from a safe distance and at somebody else’s expense?

Those who think “negotiations” are a magic answer seem not to understand that when A wants to annihilate B, this is not an “issue” that can be resolved amicably around a conference table.

Well written, well thought-out, well grounded. If only our world’s leaders, including our incoming president, possessed the wisdom and moral clarity as these authors …

Some Thoughts on George W. Bush's Final Week in Office

Part I

In many ways I feel bad for George W. Bush. Certainly he has made some really stupid mistakes—and I’m talking about actual documentable ones, not the imaginary ones liberals/Democrats have concocted on a daily basis (e.g., knowing about 9/11 in advance but letting it happen for political gain; letting New Orleans drown because he hates black people.)

But despite his flaws, I believe that President Bush has a good soul. For this reason alone he is light years different from his Democrat predecessor and successor, both of whom exude the narcissism, self-righteousness, sense of entitlement, and need for instant gratification that are the cornerstones of baby-boomerism. Unlike the smug finger-wagging Bill Clinton, Bush is loyal to his loved ones and friends. Unlike Barack Obama, he has a deep respect for his country and its foundings.

Another trait I admire about George W. Bush, which is also completely wasted on liberals/Democrats, is that he is gracious. Remember the temper tantrums the Democrats threw Bush was finally deemed the winner of the 2000 election? Remember the Clintons leaving the White House with $20,000 worth of damage, including stupid childish pranks like the “W” key missing from 100 computers?

Yet, the minute Barack Obama was elected president, Bush has been nothing but helpful and welcoming. The media, who have made it quite clear can’t wait for their Messiah to replace him, couldn’t stop pressing Bush about how he’s helping with the transition. All Bush had to answer, really, was this: “Let’s put it this way, I’m treating Obama way better than Bill Clinton—and you—treated me in 2000.”

Another significant way Bush differs from Barack Obama this that while Obama only talks about making “the tough choices,” George W. Bush actually made the tough choices required of the president of the free world, even if that meant his popularity would suffer. And suffer it did.

In contrast, I’d wager that Barack Obama never made a tough choice in his entire life, or at least his political life. No one who votes “present” in the Senate as much as he did knows the first thing about making tough choices. Someone who as a candidate kept promising to “restore our moral standing in the world”—Translation: kowtow to morally bankrupt Marxist-socialist and Islamo-fascist regimes in order to win their favor—has neither the desire nor the balls to make “the tough choices.” (Maybe I’ll do a post on this at another time …)

That’s why I fear for the next four years. Bush strives to do what was right; Obama, like Clinton before him, live to do what’s popular. This is why, as many pundits claim, history will treat George W. Bush much more favorably than his contemporaries have.

Many liberals/Democrats erroneously explain President Bush’s dismal approval numbers over the past few years as an indication of the failings of conservatism and a signal of its demise. They think that even conservative voters have come to some realization that their ideology is a failure, and so they abandoned ship. (This is also why many on the left think the end of the Bush era also means the end of Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio; they couldn’t be more hopelessly wrong but that’s another story.)

Let’s face it: Because of the visceral hatred of him by the left, Bush’s starting point was regularly not much more than 50%. His popularity after 9/11 was a politically-motivated fluke. Any liberal/Democrat who supported him was doing it only as long as it was politically expedient. As soon as Bush starting making the … oh, yeah, tough choices … which damaged his popularity, that was a signal for popularity-obsessed Dems to start jumping ship.

But the reason Bush’s approval ratings hit the gutter in recent years isn’t because conservativism failed; it’s because Bush failed to be a conservative. (Some would even argue that Bush was never a true conservative; his whole concept of “compassionate conservativism” was just big government liberalism with a different name; to some degree I agree with that argument.) Aside from the War on “Terror,” Bush failed conservativism: from No Child Left Behind to the amnesty bill debacle to the recent bailouts.

With all that big government spending, Bush should have been a liberal’s dream Republican president. What ruined it for them, of course, were his deep faith in Christianity and its positions on issues such as abortion, his “disturbing” moral clarity in the War on “Terror,” his horrible oratory skills, and his Republican connections.

So, in the end, Bush’s unpopularity at the end of his presidency was because he was too conservative for liberals, and too liberal for conservatives. Kind of like another Republican who recently lost a presidential election …

Gaza Conflict Just Another Example of Radical Muslims Endangering the World, While Jews Get Blamed

For the moral equivalence crowd: A brilliant piece yesterday by blogger Doug Ross. See his original post to view accompanying pictures and to access any relevant links.

“It was the Zionists’s fault.”

Most of the United Nations—and Islamists around the world—blame Middle East unrest on “the Zionists”. This assertion is even more ludicrous than most of their other statements. Consider:

In Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities around the U.S., Muslim protesters chanted “Jews to the ovens”, “Long Live Hitler”, “Slaughter the Jews”, “We will cleanse you, Palestine” and other epithets advocating genocide. It was the Zionists’s fault.

In the Sudan, 300,000 have died as Muslims attacked Christians and Animists. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In Mumbai India, a terrorist attack by Muslim extremists killed or wounded 500 people in 2008. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In London England, Muslim extremists killed 52 and wounded 700 in a series of bombings in 2005. That was the Zionists’ fault, too.

In the Philippines, Muslim groups have killed hundreds in a succession of attacks since 2004. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In Madrid Spain, Muslims killed 191 and wounded 1,755 people in a series of bombings in 2004. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In Iraq, tens of thousands have been killed and many more wounded by Muslim extremists in suicide bombings, car bombings and other attacks since the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In Bali, a Muslim extremist group used three massive bombs to kill over 200 tourists and resort workers in 2002. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In Afghanistan, hundreds have been killed and thousands wounded by Muslim extremists in suicide bombings, car bombings and other attacks since the removal of the Taliban from power in 2001. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, Muslim extremists killed 3,000 people in 2001. It was the Zionists’ fault.

In Chechnya, Muslim separatists have battled Russians and waged a series of terrorist attacks since 1999. Between 25,000 and 50,000 have perished in the conflict. It was the Zionists’ fault.

For decades, Palestinian and Iranian children’s television shows and textbooks have taught hatred of Christians and Jews; suicide bombing; killing; and destruction. This is the Zionists’ fault.

Since 2001, Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 11,188 separate attacks on Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, women and others. These attacks were the Zionists’ fault.

In 2007 TROP reported that the Muslim and Jewish holy days overlapped for ten days. During this period, “Muslims racked up 397 dead bodies in 94 terror attacks across 10 countries... while Jews worked on their 159th Nobel Prize.”

It was the Zionists’ fault.

It was all the Zionists’ fault.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Because of Obama and the Left, We Will Be in Debt FOREVER

I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t read it with my own eyes. Michelle Malkin reports:

Public radio and public television — already funded with your money to the tune of some $400 million in direct federal handouts and tax deductions for contributions made by individual viewers, not to mention untold state grants and subsidies — want a big chunk of Barack Obama’s stimulus pie (a.k.a. the Generational Theft Act of 2009). And they are deadly serious.

That’s right: Government-supported NPR and PBS want even more of a bailout than they’ve lived off the last 40 years. According to Current.org, the two entities along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have petitioned Obama for $550 million in stimulus funding to help create more workers suckling on the public teat (big hat tip: Steve Bartin).

Read the rest of Malkin’s post to read the letter from the NPR/PBS/CPB letter to petition His Majesty for a juicy portion of our taxpayer dollars, which, as Malkin notes, they already get!

These leftists have balls the size of planet Jupiter. Obama the ultra-leftist is in charge and everyone has their freaking hand out like Oliver Twist, "Please sir, may I have another!" We are so screwed come January 20th. So screwed.

I have no doubt that Obama will grant them this wish. Because this is what Obama and the left have in mind for us: More taxpayer dollars shuffled to leftwing causes. And for conservative talk-radio and the like? The Censorship Doctrine. Money grab and power grab: The left’s dream come true. And our nightmare.

Welcome to Hope and Change, my friends.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: If you voted for Barack Obama, you’re a freaking idiot.

End the Occupation! Liberals Out of our Cities Now: Homicide Rates, U.S. Cities vs. Iraq & Afghanistan

The Stuck on Stupid blog has some interesting data:

Iraq & Afghanistan 2008:465 Deaths, Chicago: 509, Change We Can Believe In?

Barack Obama’s Chicagoland is a war zone. The community service model seems to have failed in Obama’s home base.

• 314 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in 2008, down from 904 in the previous year.

• Chicago finished 2008 with 509 homicides, a 15 percent increase from 2007.

• Chicago’s median number of homicides over the years average about 700 per year.

• The combined total of 465 U.S. deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan for 2008 is lower than the 509 homicides in Chicago for same period.

Chicago the murder capital of the U.S.  Where was Obama during this surge?  Campaigning for the Presidency on the merits of his community involvement in Chicago.

He was also voting "present" a lot. "Absent" is more like it.

Here are some more homicide statistics from 2008 (from USA Today, Jan. 3. '09):

    Detroit: 344, down 13% from 396 in 2007 
    Philadelphia: 332, down 15% from 392 in 2007
    Baltimore: 234, down 17% from 392 in 2007.
    New York: 522, up 5.2% from 496 in 2007.
    Los Angeles: 376, down from 400 in 2007.
    Washington, D.C.: 186, up from 181 in 2007. [So much for that gun ban]

Isn't that frightening? By per capita percentage, these U.S. city homicide rates dwarf the U.S. death rates in Iraq and Afghanistan.

End the occupation! Liberals out of our cities now!

2008: The Year Man-Made Global Warming Hysteria Was Sunk by an Iceberg

This is truly the new Dark Ages. In the year 2009 we have the most mind-blowing technologies. The activities of everyday life are made easier than in our predecessors’ day because of virtually every imaginable convenience. Yet, many on this tiny spinning ball are just as uninformed, anti-intellectual, paranoid, and blinded by false ideologies and conventional wisdom as in the days of witch burnings.

In the 21st century, we have leaders who are willfully ignorant of the inconvenient truths that face them, and who plan to uproot our daily lives and our hard-earned money in order to keep with their erroneous beliefs. I am talking about man-made global warming climate change.

Let’s face a very inconvenient truth: Virtually nothing went right for the catastropic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement in 2008. Oh sure, Al Gore got his worthless Nobel Peace Prize and Australia’s own GW hysteric Tim Flannery was crowned Man of the Year.

But remember those little things called facts, data, predictions and results (as opposed to “debate” and “consensus”)? In 2008 the glaciers of AGW hysteria came crashing down under the weight of those things real science is based on. It is the year that anyone who still believes in the Gore trifecta—(1) the earth is warming, (2) the results will be catastrophic, (3) humans are responsible for causing it and have the ability to halt it—should look really foolish.

Predictions of melting ice caps? Didn’t happen. On the contrary, by the end of 2008 ice increased at both tips of the planet.

Predictions of warmer temperatures? Didn’t happen. Cold temperatures broke records worldwide in 2008.

Predictions of more/stronger hurricanes and other catastrophic weather events? Didn’t happen. Not even close.

Remember that “consensus” Al Gore is always babbling about? He even got to joke with Katie Couric (or some other anchor babe; who the hell cares who) that Dick Cheney is the only one left on the planet who doesn’t believe in AGW. Fuggedaboutit! In May over 31,000 scientists signed their names, fields, and degrees on a petition stating in part: “There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

So much for your consensus, right, Al? Well, at least you still have got your SUV’s, private jets, and three computer screens in your office. Not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for Best (cough, cough, hack, hack) Documentary. Life sure sucks for you selfless, caring whistleblowers, doesn’t it, Al?

What about the revered computer models, like those created by Al Gore’s right-hand man James Hansen? As Andrew Bolt at the Melbourne Herald Sun reported last month:

A study this year in the Hydrological Sciences Journal checked six climate models, including one used by [Australia’s main scientific body] the CSIRO. It found they couldn’t even predict the regional climate we’d had already: “Local model projections cannot be credible ...”

It also confirmed the finding of a study last year in the International Journal of Climatology that the 22 most cited global warming models could not “accurately explain the (global) climate from the recent past”.

You have nothing to go on, people. Nothing. No facts. No data. No trends. No science. Yet, whole governments, including our own, can’t wait to take your money away and send your lifestyle back to the 1800’s because they have bought into the hoax that your car, your lightbulbs, your farts, your breathing, your very existence are killing our planet.

But it really doesn’t matter to the alarmists. There’s too much money, power, and control that go along with AGW hysteria. There’s no stopping them now. These are sick, megalomaniacal people—who, by the way, have demonstrated that they have no intention of changing their lifestyles in any inconvenient way. And if we the People follow them down this road of planetary despair, we deserve everything that happens to us and our children will never forgive us.

The following is the first of a series of posts outlining the biggest AGW busts of 2008. Much of the information is gleaned from three important pieces that came out in December:

Top 10 dud predictions, Andrew Bolt, (Melbourne, Australia) Herald Sun, 12/19/08

The Global Warming Myth – Your 2008 Year-in-Review, www.SkepticsGlobalWarming.com, 12/22/08

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved, Christopher Booker, U.K. Daily Telegraph, 12/31/08

So grab a cup of hot cocoa, wrap yourself up in a cozy blanket, and enjoy.

 

Part One: Ice, Ice Baby

Let’s start at the beginning ... of 2008, that is. On January 3, Reuters published the following article:

2008 to be in top 10 warmest years say forecasters
By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - 2008 will be slightly cooler than recent years globally but will still be among the top 10 warmest years on record since 1850 and should not be seen as a sign global warming was on the wane, British forecasters said.

OK, a quick lesson in media bias, class: The first sentence states that (1) 2008 will be cooler than recent years, but (2) it will still be among the top 10 warmest on record since 1850. However, the title only mentions the second point. This is the impression Reuters wants to leave the reader, including those who end up not reading the article itself. Plus, the title leaves out “since 1850,” which is important since “top 10 warmest” and “top 10 warmest since 1850” are two completely different statements. “It’s like saying Earth is the largest planet” versus “It’s like saying Earth is the largest planet out of the four closest to the Sun.”

Now, fortunately for you, I am not only a global warming skeptic, I am also a media skeptic. And I hereby accuse Jeremy Lovell, or at least his sources, of choosing their dates with a purpose in mind. For one thing, 1850-2008 is a speck of a speck of a speck of a dot of time in the history of the planet and its climate. Even if the planet in 2008 is warmer than it was in 1850, it means less than nothing. More importantly, though, go to a point of time before 1850, say, the Little Climate Optimum (LCO) from roughly 800 to 1300, and you’ll find evidence of climate equal to or warmer than we have today.

The Met Office and experts at the University of East Anglia on Thursday said global average temperatures this year would be 0.37 of a degree Celsius above the long-term 1961-1990 average of 14 degrees and be the coolest since 2000. […]

0.37 of a degree Celsius? This is what global warming fanatics are getting hysterical about?

“The fact that 2008 is forecast to be cooler than any of the last seven years does not mean that global warming has gone away,” said Phil Jones, director of climate research at UEA.

“What matters is the underlying rate of warming – the period 2001-2007 with an average of 0.44 degree C above the 1961-90 average was 0.21 degree C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000.”

First of all, Jones is a liar. The rate of warming from 2001 to 2007 is a negative number; i.e., the earth has been cooling since 1998.

Second of all, how can these “experts” call the climate from 1961-1990 neutral or ideal? Answer: They can’t; there is no “neutral” climate to speak of. In fact, just prior to 1961, roughly from the 1920’s to the late 50’s, the climate was higher than in the 1990’s-2000’s. Of the 10 warmest years since 1850, half of them—yes, half—were in this period. That’s why Jones says 1961, and not, say, 1921. By not going backwards forty years, his global warming scaremongering would be of less value than your newspaper subscription.

Indoctrinated school-children and easily duped adults wouldn’t know this of course, and if Jeremy Lovell of Reuters knew this fact, he certainly didn’t want you to.

The World Meteorological Organisation said last month there were indications that the 10 years from 1998 to 2007 were the hottest decade on record.

The Met Office Hadley Centre said the top 11 warmest years have all occurred in the last 13.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)

This is a flat out lie, and it is criminal for the WMO and the Met to perpetuate it. As I said above, out of the top 10 warmest years since 1850, half have been before 1961. Any dimwit with an internet connection can go on-line and get this information for themselves. But it’s so much easier as a “world citizen” to just let global warming fanatics spoonfeed lies to you while you lie back in your easy chair calling for carbon taxes from your fellow citizens.

Next, consider this article from the U.K. Telegraph on May 21, 2008:

Climate change threat to alpine ski resorts
By Graham Tibbetts
21 May 2008

Again with the loaded language right in the title. Notice it’s not “less snow” or “warmer weather” that might adversely affect the late-2008 Alpine ski resorts; it’s “climate change.”

... A study of snowfall spanning 60 years has indicated that the Alps’s entire winter sports industry could grind to a halt through lack of snow.

It found a dramatic “step-like” drop in snowfall at the end of the 1980s which has never recovered, New Scientist magazine reported. The average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.

In some years the amount that fell was 60 per cent lower than was typical in the early 1980s, said Christoph Marty, from the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, who analysed the records.

“I don’t believe we will see the kind of snow conditions we have experienced in past decades,” he said.

The warning comes four years after a study for the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that more than half of resorts in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria could be forced out of business over the next five decades as the snow line rises.

It was based on temperatures increasing by between 1.4C (2.5F) and 5.8C (10.4F) during this century.

The latest research, which paints an even bleaker picture, is the first to take in 10 years of new data from 34 stations between 200 and 1800 metres above snow level.

Dr Marty, whose work will appear in Geophysical Research Letters, said it was difficult to know whether the findings indicate a tipping point in climate change had been reached. [...]

Climate change has been identified as one of the factors; warmer conditions cause snow to melt, making it more unstable and prone to sliding down the mountain.

In addition, poor snow cover leads to harder, icier conditions which is more dangerous for sports enthusiasts and can result in crevasse falls on glaciers.

The effects of global warming on the atmosphere could be far worse than scientists initially feared, it has been suggested. It been assumed that carbon locked in the Earth’s crust was completely cut off from the surface. But Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution warned that rising temperatures could destabilise underground ice structures, releasing trillions of tons of methane – a greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. “We may be on the verge of a transformational moment,” he told New Scientist magazine.

Did you catch all the “scary science fiction movie” language packed like a snowball in this article? Grind to a halt! Far worse than scientists initially feared! Paints an even bleaker picture! Verge of a transformational moment! This is not an objective news article; it’s a press release for the AGW alarmists movement. Plain and simple.

So, let’s fast forward a year later. How did these forecastors (who for all we know could just be London tarot-card readers; Lovell never gives us names) and university experts fare? The Skeptics Global Warming blog compiled this list about the weather and climate for 2008:

Australia had the coldest August in 35 years
A town in South Africa had the coldest September night – ever
Denver set two record lows
Charlotte had the coldest November in 32 years
Latest Storm Gives Kansas Foot of Snow
Big Winter Storm Pummels Northeast
2007 One of Coldest Years in Decades [and yet the alarmists call it one of the warmest]
Record Snowfall in Denver on Christmas
New Hampshire Breaks 131 Year-Old December Snow Record
Snow in Florida? Would I Kid You?
Southern Farmers Fret As Cold Sets In
Snow Flurries Reported in Daytona Beach
California Mountains Under 5 Feet of Snow
A First! Snow Falls in Baghdad
China Issues Red Alert for Snowstorms
Jerusalem blanketed with heavy snow
January Cooler than Average
Madison Wisconsin to have Snowiest Winter on Record
Winter carnival activities canceled (too much snow!!)
Cool Summer in Sydney
Record Snow Buries Columbus
Quebec children get holiday as snow piles on roofs
Technically It’s Spring, But Huge Snowstorm Coming
It’s a record year for snowfall
Cold Temperatures Freeze Gardening
Idaho Extends Ski Season into May
Anchorage digs out after record snowfall
May blizzard shuts down parts of South Dakota
April Coolest in 11 Years
Memorial Day: Time for Hot Dogs, BBQ and … Snow?
One of the Coolest U.S. Springs on Record
Charlotte Hits 123 Year Low Temperature
Iowans Won’t Have Sweet Corn for Fourth [of July] (Spring too cold and wet!)
Chicago Experiences Coolest Decade of Summers … Since 1930
Patchy Frost Forecast for Minnesota, Wisconsin This Weekend [in August]
More Frost Warnings: Oregon and California [in August]
New Zealand Temperatures 0.2 Degrees Cooler in August
Australia Coldest August in 35 Years
August Temperatures Dip Slightly
Durban, South Africa Experiences Coldest September Night … Ever
Ireland Experiences Coldest September in 14 Years
Wyoming in for Winter Storm – in Early Autumn

I guess the only question remaining is: When are writer Jeremy Lovell and editor Matthew Jones getting fired by Reuters for journalistic malpractice. When are the folks at the Met, British “forecasters” and East Anglia “experts” also going to get their pink slips for soiling their profession?

And let's not forget our friend Graham Tibbetts of the Telegraph and Dr. Christoph Marty, who warned the him in May about a dearth of Alpine snow not witnessed in over 100 years? How did Phil Jones and the illustrious United Nations Environment Programme do with their dire predictions of the end of Europe’s ski industry by mid-century due to AGW?

The very same Telegraph reported just seven months later, on December 19:

The Alps have best snow conditions ‘in a generation’
Heavy storms this week mean that skiers will enjoy records amounts of snow in Alpine resorts this Christmas.

Some 400,000 British skiers heading for the Alps over the coming fortnight will find the best Christmas and New Year snow conditions in a generation. [...]

Val and neighbouring Tignes have already enjoyed more snow in December than in any year since 1981 and seem set to beat all records by New Year’s Day. [...]

Italy is currently offering some of the best skiing in the whole of Europe. Courmayeur and Champoluc in the Aosta valley benefited particularly well from falls earlier this week and Cervinia has a mighty 300cm of cover up on the border with Switzerland. [...]

In the United States conditions in the Rockies continue to improve with Colorado now in good shape for this time of year – and more snow on the way. Some of the best skiing is to be found in California where Mammoth saw 88cm fall in the last storm.

These AGW hysterics should be in mental institutions, not on the boards of international environment panels! They should be in prison for fraud, not awarded prizes!

Why does anyone with one fraction of a functioning brain listen to any of these quacks???

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (1/8/09): More Israel-Hamas Stuff

More wise words to a very morally confused world re: the Israel-Hamas conflict:

First, Larry Elder, the Sage from South Central, weighs in:

Israelis and Palestinians: Who’s David, Who’s Goliath?
January 08, 2009

Much of the world buys the line—peddled by the Palestinians and the Arab Muslim world and, indeed, many Western countries—that paints Israel as the bad “Goliath” that “stole” the land from the “Palestinians.”

Israel gave Gaza self-rule in 1994, unilaterally withdrawing the last of its citizens and soldiers from Gaza in 2005. Hamas, voted into power via free elections in 2006, fought and defeated their political and military rival, Fatah, to seize de facto control of Gaza in 2007. In the past eight years, Hamas has fired more than 10,000 rockets and mortars into Israel—7,000 of them after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. With improved technology—reportedly assisted by Iran—Hamas’ rockets can now fly 24 miles before impact and explosion, thereby threatening, injuring and killing more and more Israelis living in southern Israel. […]

We turn our attention to the “stolen” allegation.

Israel lies in the ancient Fertile Crescent’s southwest corner, with some of the oldest archeological evidence of primitive towns and agriculture. Historians and archeologists believe the Hebrews probably arrived in the area in the second millennium Before the Common Era. The nation itself was formed as the Israelites left Egypt during the Exodus, believed to be in the late 13th century Before the Common Era

The 12 tribes of Israel united in about 1050 Before the Common Era, forming the Kingdom of Israel. David, the second king of Israel, established Jerusalem as Israel’s national capital 3,000 years ago. Jewish kingdoms and states existed intermittently in the region for a millennium.

After conquests by Babylonians, Persians and Greeks, an independent Jewish kingdom was briefly revived but Rome took control in the next century, renaming the land of Judea “Palestine” after the Philistines, historical enemies of the Israelites’.

Invading Arabs conquered the land from the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantines) and attracted Arab settlers. Within a few centuries, the Arab language and Islam prevailed, but a Jewish minority remained. After a brief period of prosperity, waves of invasions and changes of control followed, including rule by the non-Arab empires of the Seljuks, Mamelukes and European crusaders, before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire from 1517 until 1918. […]

After four centuries of Ottoman rule, Britain took the land in 1917 and pledged in the Balfour Declaration to support a Jewish national homeland there. In 1920, the British Palestine Mandate was recognized. A declaration passed by the League of Nations in 1922 effectively divided the mandated territory into two parts. The eastern portion, called Transjordan, would later become the Arab Kingdom of Jordan in 1946. The other portion, comprising the territory west of the Jordan River, was administered as Palestine under provisions that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

The United Nations, in 1947, partitioned the area into separate Jewish and Arab states along meandering and indefensible boundaries. The Arab world, insisting that any Jewish claim to Palestine was invalid, staunchly refused to compromise or even discuss the subject.

When Israel’s independence was declared in 1948, Arab forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq combined to crush the 1-day-old country. They lost. Still, Egypt occupied most of the Gaza Strip, and Transjordan (calling itself “Jordan”) held most of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem. Neither Arab country gave the “Palestinians” a state.

The word “Palestinian,” as employed today, is a relatively recent term. Until the end of the British mandate over Palestine, in 1948, all inhabitants of the area west of the Jordan River were known as “Palestinians.” A Jewish person living in what is now Israel was a “Palestinian Jew.” An Arab living in the area was a “Palestinian Arab.” Likewise, a Christian was known as a “Palestinian Christian.”

Israel won more land after a series of wars, land since returned or offered for return in exchange for peace. The Jews “stole” nothing.

Thank you, Larry, for that well-written concise history of the land of Israel.

Next, “Rite Jew” Richard Baehr at today’s American Thinker writes:

Let Them Eat Rockets
January 08, 2009

The international community is expressing outrage over the relatively small number of civilian casualties reported in the first 11 days of Israel’s operation in Gaza. War, apparently, must now mean zero civilian casualties. If anyone is killed, they seem to be saying, war crimes are committed.

Of course, anyone has the right to object to Israel’s invasion. But these critics are conveniently silent about Hamas’ deadly objective when it fired 7,000 rockets and mortars into Israel over the past few years, and the recent torrent of projectiles it launched to end the six-month ceasefire, precipitating the current conflict.

The goal of the Hamas rocket fire was not only to terrorize a significant percentage of Israel’s population, but also to kill or maim Israeli civilians. But because most of these rockets did not cause casualties, Israel’s critics do not consider them a serious threat.

The fact that more than 15 percent of Israel’s population is now within Hamas’ rocket range, or that the rockets are more precise with a more lethal payload (thanks to Iran), also seems to be of little concern.

That Israel has taken great pains to minimize civilian casualties in the current fighting, going so far as to contact Gaza residents by phone and warn them to evacuate from targeted areas, also does not matter. Critics vilify Israel for being less than 100 percent effective in its attempts to only hit armed Hamas men. […]

Israel’s care for the sanctity of human life, even in war, is something completely absent among Israel’s foes. Hamas educates and trains their children to kill themselves to achieve the greater good of killing the “Zionist enemy.”

In fact, contrary to what we see on television, Hamas does not grieve for children accidentally killed by Israel in the heat of battle. Rather, this is part of the Hamas war strategy. The Palestinian children who die in conflict with Israel are fodder for Hamas’ propaganda machine. This is why Hamas uses civilians as shields—both to protect their fighters and weapons caches, and to play the resulting civilian casualties for all they are worth. […]

When Israel ceded control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians as a measure of goodwill in 2005, the Palestinians had an opportunity to demonstrate what they could do with political sovereignty. Instead, in 2006 both Gazans and West Bank Palestinians cast their lot with Hamas, an organization known primarily for suicide bombings against Israel, voting to give them 60 percent of the seats in the Palestinian legislature.

Less than two years later, Hamas engineered a bloody coup in Gaza in the summer of 2007, slaughtering more than 200 Fatah men in the process. Hamas then began making intense preparation for its next war with Israel. Indeed, this conflict was planned. Hamas smuggled deadly rockets and other weaponry into Gaza via tunnels between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Hamas is now firing rockets at the Israeli cities of Beersheba, Ashdod, and Ashkelon.

Hamas unquestionably knew that Israel would respond with force to the renewed rocket fire. Hamas also knew what this war would mean for the Palestinians living in Gaza. But Palestinian misery has never been a concern for Hamas. By continuing to provoke Israel, their message to the Palestinians is simple: Let them eat rockets.

Finally, at Human Events, Rachel Marsden addresses …

The Biggest Lies About The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
01/08/2009 ET

1) Israel launched a preemptive war.

Congressman and former GOP Presidential candidate, Ron Paul, suggested to Press TV—the official propaganda arm of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—that Israel’s actions were “preemptive”. His logic: Israel has nukes and Hamas doesn’t, so it’s unfair. … In early 2007, on Fox News, Rep. Paul told me that he didn’t have a problem with Iran possessing nukes. The whole idea of Israel’s nuclear advantage is moot, until Israel nukes Gaza—and they haven’t. If you ask me, the “Zionists” are showing unbelievable restraint.

2) Israel is killing Palestinian civilians.

Press TV says that 25% of deaths in Gaza have been civilian. These terrorists could severely curtail the civilian killing at any time by getting out there and taking their jihad like real men, rather than hiding around women and children like cowards. Hamas’ lack of warfare decorum, and insistence on guerilla tactics when push comes to shove, really isn’t Israel’s problem. Israel is so caring and humane that even in the midst of war, they paused their military efforts to provide civilians with aid. […]

4) Iran has nothing to do with this.

While on vacation in Vancouver, BC, I actually heard a local talk-radio host say, “The next thing you know, the USA will link Hamas with Iran!” Actually, Hamas has saved these Leftists the trouble of blowing out a few more brain cells coming up with conspiracy theories, and has already publicly linked itself with Iran. A Sunday Times of London article from last March quotes a senior Hamas commander: “Iran is our mother. She gives us information, military supplies and financial support.” […]

6) Obama is waiting in the wings, and will save the world shortly.

About the only thing on which Al-Qaeda and the GOP have ever agreed is how useless Obama is, and how pathetically he has been propped up by the American media. Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a recent audio message: “This is Obama whom the American machine of lies tried to portray as the rescuer who will change the policy of America. He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection.” Not only has Obama failed miserably in appealing to psychotic terrorists’ gentler and more reasonable instincts, but he’s also apparently “killing” people before even having taken the oath of office.

7) George Bush has “studiously ignored the whole problem” of Israel vs. Palestine.

Or so says new agey expert turned political analyst, Deepak Chopra, in this week’s San Francisco Chronicle. No mention of the Annapolis Conference that Bush held in November 2007 with representatives of 49 countries to develop a new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. No mention of Condoleezza Rice’s eight trips to the area that year. But none of this matters, because Chopra—a recognized expert in such things as “self-awareness”—concluded by humbly declaring his own analysis “irrefutable”. […]

Some people get it, thank God. But bear in mind: They are primarily on the Right.

Orwell Is Alive and Well at Pro-Hamas Rally in Atlanta

It’s no less than Orwellian the pro-Hamas rallies in the streets throughout the world. What David Horowitz calls an “Unholy Alliance”— Radical Muslims and Radical Leftists— have been marching in solidarity to denounce the supposed hateful, terroristic, and genocidal practices of the Little Satan, Israel and, naturally, the Great Satan, the U.S. It’s Orwellian because, contrary to the findings of the corrupt and morally backward human rights commission at the corrupt and morally backward U.N., it is those very Muslims and Leftists filling the streets who are the outward, skilled practitioners of hate, terrorism, and genocide.

For your consideration, two pictures from a recent “peace” rally in Atlanta. Look a little strange to you?

   

Alice didn’t have to bear such backwardness in Wonderland. Hamas supporters and Marxist-socialists worshiping A’jad and calling for Israel to be pushed into the Sea while simultaneously hoping for “Peace in 2009.”

These pictures were taken by Orit Sklar, who gives her description of this rally at Front Page Magazine:

Hate on the Home Front
By Orit T. Sklar
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/8/2009

No one shouted “Go Back to the Oven” at the pro-Hamas rallies held in Atlanta in the last few days, but the sentiment was echoed in the messages their organizers promoted. Islamic fundamentalists spouted their hatred at the gatherings far-Left activists called to protest Israel’s self-defense. The unholy alliance met at the CNN Center January 3rd and at the Israeli consulate the previous Tuesday, where CAIR members and Communists blocked traffic, endorsed the annihilation of Israel, dressed in terrorist garb, extolled those plotting a new Holocaust, and equated Jewish self-defense with Nazi genocide.

The tone should be no surprise considering who organized these events. The organizational force behind both was the Atlanta chapter of the International Action Center (IAC). An e-mail from the IAC indicated that Emory Advocates for Justice in Palestine, Athens for Justice in Palestine, and other “peace and justice organizations” would be involved. On site, I discovered these “peace and justice organizations” included the once-laudable Amnesty International – alongside, the International Socialist Organization and the Revolutionary Communist Party. (The RCP publication Revolution were also represented.)

• The International Action Center, the main organizer behind the massive “antiwar” demonstrations before the war with Iraq, was founded by Ramsey Clark as a front for the Marxist Workers World Party. IAC is a beehive of radical causes including prosecuting American soldiers for “war crimes” during the Korean War, spreading “the truth” about North Korea, freeing cop-killers Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier, and insisting “no one in the world…has a worse human rights record than the United States.”

Revolution is the publication of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist sect founded by Bob Avakian. The RCP maintains an office in Atlanta, and this is hardly the its first collaboration with Muslim extremists; “In the summer of 1983, the organization set up terrorist training camps in Colorado, drawing people from the Iranian Student Association.” The RCP remains dedicated to “the seizure of power right within the U.S. itself…as part of the world proletarian revolution.” The current issue of Revolution features a front page headline screaming, “Stop the Israeli Massacre in Gaza!” (Emphasis in original.) Author Larry Everest accuses Israel of committing a “war crime” and condemns its “despicable display of Nazi-like threat” by dropping pamphlets asking Gaza civilians to evacuate the bombing area.

• Emory Advocates for Justice in Palestine (EAJP) maintains a website that describes all of Israel, from 1948, as “colonization.” In November, EAJP hosted a lecture by Hassan El-Najjar. In an op-ed for Al Jazeera entitled “Towards a Clear Definition of Terrorism,” the professor cited a number of “terrorist” acts, including “attacks on Muslim mosques after September 11, 2001” – but not 9/11 itself. He added, “It is inaccurate to use the term [terrorism] in describing resistance to foreign invaders and foreign occupation forces, such as the case of Palestinians fighting Israeli occupation forces to liberate themselves from foreign military rule.” In another, he shed more light on his view: “[The] September 11 attacks happened as a reaction to the American foreign policy in the Middle East.” By the first anniversary of 9/11, he brought himself to write that killing civilians during “air attacks” – he still could not call it terrorism – was not justified, “no matter how much the perpetrator was victimized.” Not alone, EAJP brought in a representative of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement two months earlier. Its “Resources” page further radicalizes its members, directing eager readers to the publications Electronic Intifada and Al Jazeera.

• Athens for Justice in Palestine (AJP) has co-sponsored many of EAJP’s outings, as well as a 2005 speech by Jeff Halper, an American anthropology professor who heads the “Free Gaza Movement,” which attempted to deliver 3.5 tons of “medical supplies” to Hamas-controlled Gaza on December 30. The AJP website features YouTube footage of its members gathered outside the CNN center chanting, “U.S./Israel, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide!” AJP, too, links to Electronic Intifada, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, and the radical Indymedia.org.

• The International Socialist Organization, a Trotskyite organization, calls for “militant workers” to wage a perpetual revolution against the bourgeoisie. It justifies Islamic violence, whether 9/11 hijackers against the United States or Palestinian suicide bombers, writing these innocents were “not born wanting to become suicide bombers. But their lifetimes of humiliation…made them open to terrorism as a means to avenge their oppression.”

The rhetoric of these protesters was predictably egregious. The most clearly genocidal message at Saturday’s soiree extolled Hitler’s nearest successor: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One Muslim man displayed a poster with a picture of Iranian President Ahmadinejad below the message, “I heart A-JAD.” Ahmadinejad, who denies the first Holocaust occurred, has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and his drive for nuclear weapons is the most dangerous existential threat Israel faces – a threat these supporters of Hamas would love to hasten. The protester would not allow me to photograph him or the sign. However, when a man who identified himself as Iranian gave him a high-five and said he thought the sign was awesome asked to take a picture, I was able to get my own picture alongside this Ahmadinejad fan.

Even as some deny the Holocaust, they equate modern Israeli Jews with their victimizers, a staple of anti-Semites worldwide. One young boy held a sign condemning, “Israhell: The New Nazis.” Several demonstrators held signs with such messages as, “Stop the U.S. Sponsored Holocaust in Gaza.” A Muslim woman dressed in a chador called Operation Cast Lead “Holocast [sic.] in Gaza.” Like the male protester, at first she refused to have her picture taken. She later agreed, as long as her face was covered by the sign. Was her reticence a sign of embarrassment over her extremist message, or Islamic hatred of female flesh, especially the face?

The crowd demonstrated outside CNN headquarters for more an hour before taking its protest into the street. In addition to the “genocide” chant, protesters sang such pithy slogans as:

• “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”;
• “Gaza, Gaza don't you cry, in our hearts, you'll never die”; and
• “Not a penny, not a dime, Israel out of Palestine”

As if to counter the ISO’s thesis that Palestinians were not born with the hope of becoming terrorists, many protesters brought along their children, some dressed in Palestinian terrorist gear. Many youngsters could be seen chanting and waving signs and Palestinian flags alongside their family and friends, with protesters of all ages wearing the keffiyeh. One young boy, clad in keffiyeh, waved a Palestinian flag, while the man next to him paraded baby dolls splattered with imitation blood. (How child-friendly.) Others used their own children as examples of the civilians Israel is supposedly targeting – a claim even Palestinian television cannot support. A young girl presented herself as an Israeli target, holding a sign saying, “I am not a terrorist.”

Protesters placed two coffins draped in Palestinian flags along with a white sheet wrapped around a “body” on the street in front of a huge banner reading, “Remember the Children of the Occupation.” The sheet had a red target symbol over an image of a young girl in a dress releasing a balloon in the shape of a heart.

IAC, et. al., chose the CNN location in hopes of generating media coverage, and in this it succeeded; however, the radicals hope to have a far more mainstream impact. An e-mail from the Atlanta IAC encouraged everyone to “Register your outrage with elected officials and mainstream media.” To reinforce this campaign, call sheets were handed out during the protest listing local and national media outlets, politicians, and the Israeli consulate.

In addition to Ahmadinejad, protesters showed love for another political figure: President-elect Barack Obama. The campaign to end “the Israeli Occupation” handed out postcards with the iconic picture of Obama and the slogan, “Yes, we can,” with the added plea, “End U.S. military aid to Israel.” These postcards featured a pre-typed message, alleging that U.S. money is being used to “enforce its [Israel’s] illegal military occupation of and commit human rights abuses in the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.”

Divestment of Israel was a popular theme. A young man wearing an Obama t-shirt and Obama embroidered pullover held a sign that said, “Stop dropping U.S. Bombs! 71% of Americans Oppose Intervention.”

They reached at least a few government workers during the protest. Some bus drivers of MARTA – Atlanta’s public transportation system – honked in support of their cause, as demonstrators held up “Honk for Gaza” signs.

There was not one condemnation of Hamas in the course of the rally. However, the protesters regularly pilloried CNN. There were signs saying, “CNN – Tell the truth, bombing Gaza is a crime.” Individual demonstrators screamed, “Screw you Andersen Cooper!” and “Screw you Wolf Blitzer!” (Wolf Blitzer, a Jew, wrote a book on the Jonathan Pollard spy scandal, Territory of Lies. The New York Times described his depiction of Israeli government officials as “harsh.”) The irony that they were protesting the most pro-Palestinian broadcast outlet since Peter Jennings’ death was lost of them.

A similar tone held sway at the December 30th rally in front of the Consulate General of Israel. Again, the protest was arranged by the Atlanta branch of the International Action Center. They had a permit from 4:00-5:30 p.m. to demonstrate in front of the Israeli consulate which is in midtown Atlanta. Car traffic was heavy the entire time, and there was a constant flow of people into the demonstration. Women were coming with their young children in strollers and older people wrapped in keffiyehs came and set up chairs.

Representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) were on hand, as were Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Georgia Tech and Emory Advocates for Justice in Palestine. CAIR has a lengthy history of association with terrorists, and the Georgia Tech branch of SJP directs its readers to Electronic Intifada, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, and recommends books written by Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi. At 5:30 p.m. on December 20, police announced the mob must leave the premises, so its members marched into the street – walking against the flow of traffic – shutting down the street entirely, and establishing themselves about a quarter-mile away.

It is important to recognize that Saturday’s rally was not a singular event or an isolated incident, but rather part of a sustained and calculated effort on their behalf to influence government policy and public opinion. Many of these people feel empowered with the recent election of Obama and show no signs of backing down, but rather of intensifying their efforts. Similar protests have occurred around the world, but the extreme anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, and anti-American sentiments being expressed in the U.S. to this degree are alarming. These enemies of Israel – and America – are making their message and ultimate goal clear in their vitriolic preaching and advocating of death and destruction. Their actions must serve as a wake-up call and motivate us in our current support for Israel and the United States.

One of the RCP protesters held a sign demanding, “Stop Thinking Like Americans!”

The protesters have long since put that into practice. They clearly think like our enemies.

This is 2000’s America, ladies and gentlemen. Just remember that.

Welcome, Alpha Inventions readers!  Feel free to browse the VM archives and leave comments when it suits you.

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (1/7/09)

First, to whet your appetite, Mac Johnson at Human Events has a tongue-in-cheek endorsement of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg for NY Senator. Read the whole thing if you have time, but here are the most delicious morsels:

Caroline Kennedy: The Best the Dems Have To Offer
by Mac Johnson | 01/07/2009

I hereby offer my full endorsement to Caroline “You Know” Kennedy to be selected as the next Senator from New York. This may surprise my regular readers (thanks to both of you, by the way) as I tend to lean a bit right of center. Also, more than a few people have pointed out that she is absolutely without qualification, ability, experience or appeal. But on the plus side, she’s a Kennedy, and what’s not to like about that! (Other than the booze, manslaughter, heroin, opposition to windmills, collaboration with Hugo Chavez, DUI, open borders fanaticism, taxing, spending, and the unearned wealth, privilege, and sense of entitlement, I mean.) […]

… Caroline would represent an important first for New York in this year of so many important political firsts—the first woman to inherit a New York Senate seat without sleeping with Bill Clinton. Such self-made women are to be appointed as role models for all women. […]

And not only is eloquent royalty like, you know, Caroline, you know, um, you know Kennedy exactly what a true democracy is all about, but she is the perfect candidate for high rank in the Democrat party. I say this because the Democrat Party is essentially a coalition of the paternalistic and the infantile: a union of an elite that believes you must be taken care of like children with a voting block that wants to be taken care of like children. [I love that! That is such a perfect description of the Democrat Party! This is my new favorite quote.] Looked at that way, who better than, you know, Caroline?

If some self-made person were to get hold of high office, they might expect others to make a little more of themselves—and we can’t have that. […]

Caroline Kennedy is exactly the sort of leader New York and America needs: connected to Washington and detached from Middle America, simultaneously part of the establishment and totally inexperienced. We can count on her to be a reliable and inspirational rubber stamp for the most high and holy Dalai Obama as he ascends to office in the coming weeks. Isn’t the fawning mainstream media check and balance enough upon Obama? Do we really need to burden him with a confident, competent and independent Senate as well? […]

Next, Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center exposes the hypocrisy of liberal mainstream media for attacking Ann Coulter and her brand new book, “Guilty,” while openly inviting and encouraging left-wing hate and mean-spiritedness. Case in point: Yesterday, Ann was bumped by left-wing mean-spirited flame-thrower Rachel Maddow. The Bush-bashing, Obama-worshiping interview is here.

Coulter vs. the Counter-Coulters
By L. Brent Bozell III
CNSNews.com | 1/7/2009

... The so-called “objective” media clearly feel threatened because they are the very liberals Coulter is attacking. If they weren’t liberals, none of her mockery of liberals would bother them. Oh, they might not appreciate her style, as some conservatives don’t. But they wouldn’t have pitched debates inside their walls about how they will savage her in interviews – and I defy the networks to deny this – or how they would remove her from their airwaves altogether.

Those rumored bans have been demanded by the leftist lobbyists for the Censorship Doctrine – people who say they oppose “conservative misinformation,” but clearly want conservatives tossed from the radio and TV airwaves before “misinformation” or just plain conservative thought spills out. They have pressured the networks to stop helping Coulter sell books.

Freedom of speech is truly a dangerous concept when conservatives exercise it.

But liberals who claim to oppose “inflammatory rhetoric” on television when it comes from conservatives have no problem with uncivil liberalism. Or 100 percent hate-filled left-wing character assassination. Take NBC, which could not look sillier if it ever seriously banned Coulter for being hyperbolic, when vicious, hyperbolic liberals (Olbermann, Maddow, and Matthews) dominate MSNBC.

It’s easy to run down a list of inflammatory liberals who are welcomed on the TV morning shows. Start with Kitty Kelley’s wild “investigative” books on the Reagans or the Bushes. Or Michael Moore’s kooky conspiracy theories. Or Al Franken suggesting Karl Rove and Scooter Libby should be executed over Plamegate. (NBC’s Matt Lauer and his off-camera crew laughed at that.)

Or recall Bill Maher on his HBO show in 2007 suggesting Arianna Huffington shouldn’t ban commenters on her website wishing Dick Cheney had died in a terrorist attack in Afghanistan. “That’s a funny joke,” Maher said. “If this isn’t China, shouldn’t you be able to say that?” He added that Cheney’s death by suicide bomber might be a public service: “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.”

Harry Smith hosted Maher on CBS just months ago on his faith-mocking movie “Religulous” and didn’t say one discouraging word to him about his caustic remarks about Cheney or his hateful anti-Christian bigotry. Not one word.

But when Ann Coulter speaks, the brass knuckles come out. […]

Call Coulter outrageous, call her a bomb-thrower, even state she goes beyond the pale of civility, if that’s your read. But do not assign that label to Coulter and then present your on-air love and kisses and giggles to all the public leftist hate-spewing that far exceeds any perceived incivility by Coulter. That is utterly transparent liberalism, and utterly transparent hypocrisy.

Next is a ballsy piece by the always thought-provoking John Stossel. About the Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal: Small potatoes. For the country’s biggest Ponzi scheme, one need look no further than your own paychecks: Medicare and Social Security. The “Madoff” in this scenario: Your federal government.

Here’s the article, practically in full:

Madoff is a piker
By John Stossel

… Political leaders say Madoff’s alleged crimes show what’s wrong with the country. President-elect Obama said the “massive fraud that was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball”. Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid added, “[R]egulators have been asleep at the wheel”.

Politicians go on and on about Wall Street “greed” and “irresponsibility.”

But Madoff’s scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.

By now we all know the government does not invest our payroll taxes and pay our benefits with the profits our money earns. In the beginning, writes economic historian Charlotte Twight in “Dependent on D.C.”, Americans were told Social Security was an insurance program. But the government was unable to sustain that bald lie.

In reality, our money, rather than being invested and kept in an actual “trust fund,” is immediately given to current retirees in Social Security benefits or to their healthcare providers in Medicare benefits. The government’s promise to pay for your retirement pension and medical care is just a promise. And a lie.

In theory, the promise could be kept by raising taxes on future workers, but there won’t be enough of them. Changing demographics are destroying the programs. A large working class can support a relatively small retired class, especially when life expectancy is 61 years and benefits don’t begin until 65. That’s how things were in the early years of Social Security. But when life expectancy grows to 80 and a large generational group — the baby boomers — retires expecting to be supported by a far smaller working class, that’s trouble.

Ten years after Social Security passed in 1935, there were almost 42 workers for each retiree. Five years later, the ratio slipped to about 17 to 1. Now it’s about 3.4 to 1. Thirty years from now, the ratio is projected to be 2 to 1.

Think of the burden on those two to three workers who’ll have to support one retiree for 15 to 20 years.

The money just won’t be there. In the next 75 years Social Security and Medicare have a combined unfunded liability of $40.3 trillion. Social Security’s problems get most of the attention, but Medicare will be the killer. At present it accounts for all but $4.3 trillion of the unfunded liability, and as we aging boomers keep demanding new, improved and more expensive medical care, the deficit will only get worse.

Soon government will have to say what Madoff said: Sorry! The money’s gone.

The government has no legal obligation to make good on its promises. Twice the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Americans have no contractual rights regarding Social Security benefits. In 1960 (Flemming v. Nestor), the court said, “To engraft upon the Social Security system a concept of accrued property rights would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever changing conditions which it demands”.

Get that? You have no “accrued property rights” under Social Security. It’s a welfare program that exists at the politicians’ pleasure.

The government will either stiff us outright or, more likely, cowardly politicians will pretend to honor their promises by printing so much extra money to write the checks that the dollar will be worth pennies.

If Bernie Madoff tried to foist Social Security and Medicare on us, he’d be arrested, prosecuted and thrown in the hoosegow.

There’s one thing I can say on behalf of Madoff: He never forced anyone to participate in his scheme. That’s more than I can say for the government. Through taxation and inflation, it forces us to pay for all its schemes.

By the way, it might come as no surprise that on Meet the Press this past Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called a “wonderful program” and “one of the best programs ever developed to take care of sick people.” Yeah, who cares if it goes bankrupt long after you’re dead and millions of Americans who paid into it for decades get zilch? At least you got your votes, right? In the same interview, Reid also called W. Bush the “the worst president we’ve ever had,” and accused him of “destroying” Social Security.

Joe Biden, according to The Great One, Mark Levin, was the dumbest man in the Senate. Now that Biden is off to screw up the country from the White House rather than the Capitol, it’s safe to say that Harry Reid now occupies that lofty position.

Finally, an important question from Jonah Goldberg to all those anti-Israel protestors out there. This is one frightening article:

Who are the real Nazis?
Jonah Goldberg

“Go back to the oven! You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

This is what one young woman thought passed for acceptable discourse during an anti-Israel rally last week in, of all places, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Other chants were similarly unlovely. You can watch it on YouTube if you like.

But why bother? The Fort Lauderdale outburst is just one window on the upside-down world of Israel hatred. Across the Islamic world, and in too many points West, it is still considered a penetrating and poignant insight to call Zionists the “new Nazis.” For instance, in Sunday’s Gulf News, Mohammad Abdullah al Mutawa, a sociology professor at United Arab Emirates University, penned an essay titled “Zionists are the new Nazis.” He began: “Today, the whole world stands as a witness to the fact that the Nazi Holocaust was a mere lie, which was devised by the Zionists to blackmail humanity.”

At a Saturday protest in New York against Israel’s military assault on Gaza, some carried signs that read: “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” “Holocaust by Holocaust Survivors,” “Stop Israel’s Holocaust,” “Holocaust in Gaza” and “Stop the Zionist Genocide in Gaza.”

Type “Israel” and “Nazi” into any news search engine and you’ll be rewarded, or punished, with a bounty of such statements from just the last week or so. Gaza is the new Auschwitz, the Israeli Defense Forces are SS troops ... I find myself tempted to simply write “et cetera” because it’s all so familiar by now. But to do that is to dismiss, and therefore accept, such grotesqueries as trivialities, when in fact such charges are deeply revealing—just not about Israel.

First, let us note that if supposedly all-powerful Israel is dedicated to exterminating the Palestinian people, it is doing a bad job. The Palestinian population has only grown since 1948. There are more Arab citizens living in Israel proper today than there were in all of Palestine the year Israel was founded.

Perhaps one reason Israel fails at genocide is that it isn’t interested in genocide? That would explain why Israel warned thousands of Gazans by cell phone to leave homes near Hamas rocket stockpiles. It would clarify why, even amid all-out war, it offers aid to enemy civilians. It would even illuminate the otherwise mysterious clamor from Israelis for a viable “peace partner.”

But no. For millions of Israel haters, the more plausible explanation is that the “defiant” Palestinians have miraculously survived Israel’s determination to wipe them out.

Meanwhile, calls for the complete extermination of Israel are routine. The Hamas charter, invoking the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as justification, demands the destruction of Israel. Hamas exists solely because it is dedicated to the complete obliteration of the “Zionist entity.” Remove that “principle” and Hamas is meaningless.

A sick mixture of Holocaust envy and Holocaust denial is the defining spirit of Hamas. Indeed, Holocaust denial passes for a scholarly pursuit not just in Gaza but throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world.

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, literally earned a doctorate in it. His doctoral thesis became a book, “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” in which he denounces “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed.” In Hamas’ eyes, Abbas is an incorrigible moderate.

It’s Palestinian Islamists who have ideological and political ties to Nazism stretching back to the days of “Hitler’s Mufti,” Haj Amin al-Husseini, a happy warrior for the Nazi cause.

So why the obsession with casting the Israelis as the new Hitlerites? One answer is surely that critics know such charges are painful to a country largely born of the Holocaust and marked by its scars. It also grabs attention, galvanizes radicals, vents legitimate frustrations and anger, and helps demonize the enemy and, hence, justify the murder of “Zionists everywhere,” as Hamas often declares in its communiques.

But I think the desire to cast the Israelis as Nazis is fueled, deep down, by the haters’ need to see their own hatreds and ambitions mirrored in their enemy’s actions. Hamas has an avowedly Hitlerite agenda. The only way to make such an agenda defensible is to convince yourself and others that the Israelis deserve it. Hence, Hamas and its allies insist that when they aim rockets at grade schools and playgrounds, they are resisting the “new Nazis.” It brings to mind Huey Long’s reported prophecy that if fascism ever came to America, it would be called anti-fascism. Well, with Hamas, Hitlerism comes to the Middle East wearing the mask of anti-Hitlerism.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the Israel-haters, where the Left and the Islamo-fascists converge.

Opening of the Sh*t House Congress

Just caught some TV coverage of the opening of the 111th Congress. San Fran Nan got coronated again, as expected. And Dingy Harry Reid got in front of the mikes to defend the Senate’s refusal to accept Roland Burris’ nomination to fill Obama’s empty seat. Charges of racism are flying everywhere. The circus is quite amusing.

Just to clarify, I have no reason to believe Reid or this Burris decision were racially motivated. But it’s sure fun watching Democrats getting a taste of their own medicine.

My father, of blessed memory, was an avid bowler. Even played in some tournaments in his college days. One of the slang terms he passed down to me was that a score of 111 was called a “sh*t house.” (Not sure why. Probably has something to do with the fact that you can draw a little house starting with the three vertical 1’s.)

And look what we have: Congress #111. Democrat House. Democrat Senate. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Dingy Harry Reid as the majority leader of the Senate.

Sure looks like a sh*t house to me.

Liberal Lie #1: Conservatives Are Racist

Over the weekend I was debating my favorite self-described commie pinko Facebook friend. We were discussing what she considered the supposedly typically racist Republican “Barack the Magic Negro” song. (I posted on this last week.) Alas, in this post-racial era we are currently in, even NY Times’ Paul Krugman can’t help spin that broken “Republicans are the racist party” record once more, writing in last week’s editorial:

Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

Racial backlash? Aw, geez Louise. So the whole alleged demise of the Republican Party which was heralded by the election of the Golden Calf is because of race. I guess you have to be a NY Times writer, Upper West Sider, or some Ivy League liberal arts graduate to believe that. In such venues one doesn’t learn history unless distorted through a very thick left-wing lens.

But William Tucker at the American Spectator has something to say about this. He takes Krugman to task and gives him a much-needed history lesson [highlights mine]:

Krugged Again

... Did you know that in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviets, welfare reform, budget deficits, international trade, immigration, Islamic terrorism and financial meltdowns, all we’ve really been talking about is race? (It you want to find a race-obsessed tribe you could do no better than to look among Krugman’s editorial-page staff at the New York Times, but that’s another story.)

How to deal this argument? Here’s one approach. The other day I came across a bio of Larry McDonald, the five-term Georgia Congressman who died aboard KAL Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets in 1983. Here’s what Wikipedia says about him:

Larry McDonald was known for his conservative views, even by Southern standards. [O]ne study named him the second most right-wing member of either chamber since 1937. He … considered [Communism] an international conspiracy…a view later echoed in the words of President Ronald Reagan who called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire”. In another sense, McDonald [was] a precursor of the Reagan supply-side revolution … An admirer of Austrian [Really? How Nazi-esque] economics, he was an advocate of tight monetary policy [and] a passionate advocate of laissez-faire or market based policies.

His staunch conservative views on social issues attracted controversy. For instance, McDonald is noted for using amendments to stop government aid to homosexuals. He also advocated the use of a non-approved drug Laetrile to treat patients in advanced stages of cancer.

Now here’s something else interesting about McDonald. He was a Democrat. In fact in 1983 just about every Congressman from Virginia to Texas—the boundaries of what was once called “The Old Confederacy”—was Democratic. On economic, social and foreign policy issues they were probably the most conservative constituency in the country. Yet all of them voted with the Democratic Party and had been doing so for over 100 years. Why? The explanation comes in one word — r-a-c-e.

The “Solid South,” which gave the Democratic Party its most reliable base from the last half of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century was there for one reason—because the Democrats had fiercely defended the Confederacy during the Civil War. After 1865, the Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion”—meaning the anti-prohibitionists, the city immigrants, and the former Confederacy. The Solid South gave Woodrow Wilson the Presidency. (Wilson, originally from Virginia, was virulently anti-Negro.) It formed the biggest electoral bloc of the Roosevelt Coalition and gave the Democrats control of the House of Representatives for half a century from 1954 to 1994. All this was payback for the Democrats supporting the South during the Civil War. Most Democratic governance during the 20th century would not have been possible except for this historic anomaly.

What happened in 1994 was that—under the guidance of historically conscious Congressmen such as Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm—white Southerners finally forgot their Civil War allegiances and joined their natural constituency in the Republican Party. As Gingrich said at the time, “the Civil War is finally over.”

White Southerners differ little in their political preferences from the residents of Idaho or Alaska. They are rural and small-town conservatives—which is why Sarah Palin played so well there. The only thing that makes them different is that they live amidst a vast African-American population that votes heavily Democratic. This makes Southern politics highly competitive. Blacks hold many elective offices in the contemporary South and Presidential elections can be breathlessly close, as it was in Georgia last year. The only wild card in this alignment is that blacks tend to be socially conservative and are not always willing to follow their liberal brethren on issues like gay marriage and paying obeisance to the ACLU. Still, all this is a great improvement from the days when the South was a one-party region with Southern Democrats keeping African Americans off the voter rolls.

A few years back, trial lawyers began suing insurance companies and other large corporations for supposedly supporting slavery by once doing business in the antebellum South. I wrote several articles suggesting they sue the one American institution that had benefited most from its support of slavery—the Democratic Party. The trial lawyers, being the deepest pockets in the Democratic Party, could pay the bills. No one took me up on it, however, and I am willing to let bygones be bygones. The same is not likely for Krugman and company.

The main political division in the country is now urban versus rural, with educated suburban voters playing a swing vote in the middle. Race has nothing to do with it—except perhaps that African Americans vote 90 percent Democratic, the most lopsided commitment by any major ethnic constituency. [Jews are probably a close second in that race.] Still, all this is not likely to prevent people like Krugman from beating their chests in self-congratulations and declaring anyone who votes differently from them a racist.

Well said.

I believe there’s a saying that goes something like, “A conservative is a liberal who’s been Krugged by reality”

Top 20 Most Annoying Liberals of 2008 (Right Wing News)

Right Wing News has the 20 Most Annoying Liberals of 2008.

Highlights:

18) The View: If you’ve never seen The View before, picture your water cooler at work. You walk up to it and for a moment, you think you’re about to have a great conversation because Elisabeth Hasselbeck is standing there. Then, you realize that everybody else around the water cooler is a gossipy left-wing yenta whose mouth moves faster than her brain. At that point, you just say “screw it” and go buy a soda from the machine. That was a smart decision because you missed something so dumb that just hearing it might have lowered your IQ a few points—like this,

Defining quote: “Should I be worried about being a slave, about being returned to slavery because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change?”—Whoopi Goldberg to John McCain

17) Joe Biden: After selecting Joe Biden as his Vice-President, Barack Obama was soon shocked to learn the man who had once referred to him as the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” turned out to be gaffe prone.

In fact, it got so bad that for the last few weeks of the campaign, Obama had to hide Joe Biden in Dick Cheney’s old bunkers. Although there’s no shortage of Biden bloopers to choose from during the campaign, my personal favorite is when Obama’s “foreign policy expert” talked about some sort of alternate universe where the U.S. and France (!) got together and ran Hezbollah out of Lebanon.

“When we kicked—along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know—if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.’” […]

16) Cynthia McKinney: The woman from Planet Moonbat started the year running for President on the Green Party ticket and pulled almost 160k votes—which admittedly, is pretty good for a lunatic.

She capped the year off by boarding a boat that tried—and failed—to run an Israeli blockade to take supplies to the Palestinians.

In between, she unleashed the bizarro-world defining excerpt that insured that she would make this list,

Defining excerpt: “In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I had a woman, I’ve never really said this in public, out loud, in front of a lot of cameras, and there’s a lot of cameras in this room now. I had a mother to call me because her son had a very gruesome task. Her son’s charge by the Department of Defense was to process 5000 bodies that had received a single bullet wound to the head—and these were mostly males. And her son was afraid to talk because he signed a silence agreement. So, he only complained to his mother. But, the date about these individuals was entered into a Pentagon computer and then reportedly, the bodies were dumped in a swamp in Louisiana. This is as a result of the tragedy of hurricane Katrina.

Now I have no...no...I have verification from insiders who wish to remain anonymous, at the Red Cross, that this is true. I suspect that these were prisoners. And so, you know, this investigation of the whole prison industrial complex is extremely important. And it should not end with just a question of the nature of prisons in our country, but these five thousand souls also need some justice too.”—Cynthia McKinney

14) Charles Rangel: Do you know what irony is? It’s Charles Rangel, the head of the Ways and Means Committee, who’s responsible for writing tax code, being caught cheating on his taxes.

Incidentally, that scandal is in addition to his shady involvement with AIG. Rangel was “trying to raise money from AIG, the troubled insurance giant, money to finance a government school at CCNY in his name, at a time when the company has business before his committee.”

Then there’s the allegation that Rangel “protected an oil drilling company from a big tax bill when the head of that company pledged a $1 million donation to a college center named after the congressman.”

We also can’t forget the controversy that has now come to light involving Rangel’s son,

Between 2004 and 2007, Rep. Charles Rangel steered nearly $80,000 in campaign cash to an Internet company run by his son - paying lavishly for a pair of political Web sites so poorly designed an expert estimated one should have cost no more than $100 to create.

Again, this isn’t some random Congressman; this is the Chairman of the most powerful committee in Congress and he’s not even being asked to step down while the ethics committee whitewashes the whole scandal. It’s bad enough that the Democratic Congress has gotten so crooked, so fast, but it’s really bad form to make so little effort to hide it. […]

10) Bill Maher: People like acidic atheist Bill Maher are what’s wrong with politics today. He’s shallow as a kiddie pool, intolerably rude, and insufferably smug. But, because he’s outrageous, has a knack for delivering an insult, and is good at playing to the crowd, he can make a living as a professional @sshole talking head.

Maher is a perfect example of how a human being can be intelligent and eloquent enough to make a living talking about the issues even when he’s wrong about almost everything that matters.

Defining quote #1: “Why couldn’t, uh, why couldn’t have (Rush Limbaugh) croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?”—Bill Maher

Defining quote #2: “At least half of the [Ten] Commandments are stupid!”—Bill Maher

9) Barney Frank: Frank is a prissy, snide, obnoxious creep who has been neck deep in the mortgage crisis that tanked the economy. Frank pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make bad loans while blocking attempts at reform, perhaps in part because his live-in boyfriend was an executive at Fannie Mae. This is after another one of Frank’s boyfriends ran a prostitution ring out of his living room. Given his track record, either Barney Frank should stop dating or quit Congress, whichever he prefers.

But, the real kicker is that Barney Frank, one of the people most responsible for the mortgage crisis, is also one of the people who has been put in charge of fixing it and of course, he has been blaming anybody and everybody but himself for the financial disaster he helped inflict upon the country.

“Last week in this space, I made a jocular reference to a global economy ‘so vulnerable that only the stalwart action of Barney Frank stands between it and ten years of soup kitchens.’ I tittered too soon. It turns out the entire planetary meltdown is due to Congressman Frank’s sex life.”—Mark Steyn

7) John Murtha: At some point, you almost wonder whether you should put guys like John Murtha on this list or the constituents who keep sending them back up to Congress, no matter what they say and do.

In Murtha’s case, not only is he nasty tempered, incompetent, and corrupt, he was sued by one of the former Marines he unjustly smeared as a murderer,

A former Marine sued Rep. John Murtha for slander on Thursday, saying the congressman damaged his reputation by saying he and his comrades killed women and children “in cold blood” in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005.

...”(Lance Cpl. Justin) Sharratt, in being labeled repeatedly by Murtha as a ‘cold-blooded murderer,’ and by Murtha outrageously claiming that the Haditha incident was comparable to the infamous (My Lai) massacre of Vietnam, has suffered permanent, irreversible damage to his reputation,” the lawsuit states.

Sharratt, 24, of the Pittsburgh suburb of Canonsburg, was initially charged with three counts of premeditated murder but was exonerated after a full investigation and a hearing. He was honorably discharged last year.

To top it all off, John Murtha insulted his own constituents—more than once—and was still easily reelected over a well funded, competent challenger despite Defining quotes like these,

Defining quote: “This whole area, years ago, was really redneck.”—John Murtha

Defining quote #2: “There’s no question Western Pennsylvania is a racist area. The older population is more hesitant.”—John Murtha

5) Nancy Pelosi: What a year it was for the first female speaker! Under her leadership, the deficit exploded, corruption in Congress increased, the political atmosphere became even more poisonous, and the economy fell apart while she did nothing—well, to say she did nothing is unfair.

She did funnel money to her husband’s PAC. She also came out in favor of censoring her political opponents via the Fairness Doctrine. That’s in addition to the fact that she gave credit to the Iranians for the success our troops fought, bled, and died to achieve in Iraq,

“And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians-they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities-the Iranians.”

Of course, what else could you expect from General Pelosi, a military genius who said,

Defining quote: “...twice...that Iraq ‘is a failure,’ adding that President Bush’s troop surge has ‘not produced the desired effect.’”

4) Al Gore: The more thoroughly global warming is discredited, the more desperately the Chicken Littles, led by Al Gore, shriek that we must make draconian changes right now, before it’s too late!

Of course, being the leading proponent of a silly global hoax may make you look like a jackass when the history books are written, but Al Gore will be able to console himself with his Nobel Peace Prize and the big stacks of cash he makes by fleecing suckers who’re falling for the whole scam. The one thing Gore proves is that no matter what the scientific evidence may be, if you keep screaming “IT’S SCIENCE” in the name of a politically correct cause long enough, people will beat a path to your door to hand you money and awards, no matter how scant your proof may be.

Defining quote #1: “New evidence shows ‘the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us. This is a planetary emergency. There has never been anything remotely like it in the entire history of human civilization. We are putting at risk all of human civilization.’”—Al Gore

Defining quote #2: “If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”—Al Gore […]

3) John Edwards: Whatever you think of Elizabeth Edwards, she has been remarkably dedicated to her husband. After being diagnosed with incurable breast cancer that went right down to the bone, most women would have gone home to rest, spent time with their children, and focused on staying healthy as possible—but, not Elizabeth Edwards. She did campaign appearances, interviews, and even allowed well wishers who sent her emails to be added to her husband’s fund raising list.

How did John Edwards repay his wife’s loyalty? By carrying on a long running affair with Rielle Hunter, whom Edwards brought on to the campaign and paid a hefty fee to make a few videos. The web of lies surrounding the whole affair was never fully penetrated, but the preponderance of the evidence seems to suggest that Hunter had Edwards’ love child and that he arranged for her to be paid off handsomely to stay quiet.

Cheating on your wife is sleazy. But, cheating on your cancer stricken wife who was working for you on the campaign trail even though she undoubtedly didn’t feel like it? You have to be a legendary sleazebag to do something like that.

Defining quote: “Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter.”—John Edwards to ABC

Defining quote #2: “But a source told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER: ‘Now that it seems to have blown wide open, Rielle may get her wish - all she wants is for John to marry her and for them to live happily ever after with their baby. She’s tired of running and living a lie.’”—The National Enquirer touches on what is probably Elizabeth Edwards’ biggest nightmare—after her death, having Rielle Hunter become the new mother of her children.

2) Harry Reid: When the Senate Majority leader wasn’t bizarrely declaring that we had to grind our economy to a halt by refusing to continue to use fossil fuels...

“ That is, coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick, its Global Warming, its ruining our Country, its ruining our World. We have got to stop using fossil fuel.” —Harry Reid

[…]

Who’s #1? You’ll have to check out the list yourself. I’ve revealed enough already.

One figure who did not appear on the list, but I think should, is Chucky Schmucky Schumer. This complete nincompoop said in defense of the Fairness Censorship Doctrine in November:

I think we should all trying to be fair and balanced, don’t you? … Do you think we should allow people to put pornography on the air? Absolutely not, particularly on television and radio. … The very same people that don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC to limit pornography on the air. I am for that. I think pornography should be limited. But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you’re allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.

So this schmuck liberal (you know, they’re so protective of free speech—as long as it’s their own) first compares conservative talk radio to pornography, which is the logical equivalent of comparing, oh I don’t know, birdwatching to stalking. And then, using that unbelievably twisted analogy, he accuses conservatives of being consistent because they might be in favor of putting restrictions on the expression of actual pornography.

What the hell is this dangerous ignoramus doing in anywhere near the Senate? He’s a Stalinist, nothing less.

How’s that for pornography, you waste of sperm?

Anyway, good list, RWN!

Liberal Hypocrisy: The Obamas Send Their Kids to Sidwell While D.C.'s Public Schools Continue to Suck (REDUX)

Back to school, children. And that means the Obamas get to show how much they care about the "little guy" when they take the D.C. subway and drop their kids off at the public school, right?

Oh, silly me! We're talking about Democrats. They send other people's children to public schools, and spend other people's tax money to fund them. $13,000 per pupil if you're in the nation's capital. For that, D.C. students must be graduating at the level of, say, a Sidwell student. Oh, worst school system in the country, you say? Ah, well. Guess that "more money = better schools" formula the Democrats have been using since LBJ's Great Society days has a couple o' kinks in it. But just keep forking over the tax dollars anyway, or we'll accuse you of not caring about the children!

Gimme an effing break. Naturally, the Obama girls are going to the area's top school, Sidwell. And they're not taking the subway to get there. The subway is for other people, not elitist Democrat politicians.

In celebration of the Obama girls' first day at school in the capital of the downright meanest, most racist country in the world (Right, Michelle?), I'd like to recycle parts of a post I wrote back in November:

So, our president-elect and his wife have decided to enroll their children in the Sidwell Friends School. This would make perfect sense, since this school is the alma mater of the children of many Washington ultra-elite machers. But what’s wrong with the D.C. public schools. Taxpayers fork over $13,000 per pupil—the third-highest amount per pupil in the country; as the liberals keep telling us, “it’s for the children.” Right, Nancy Pelosi? But in reality, Washington D.C. public schools are among the worst and most dangerous in the country. How could that be??? Ask the teachers unions and D.C. administrators. [...]

So, where does the “it’s for the children” and “we care about the little guy” part come in? As long as big money for your party is at stake, it doesn’t.

Washington D.C. is the microcosm of what the entire U.S. could turn into now that we have a Democrat president and a Democrat majority in both houses of Congress. Think I’m kidding? D.C. is one of the highly concentrated Democrat areas of the country. And it’s a dump. Same with Detroit, New Orleans, etc. Is this the hope and change the American people really wanted when they pulled the lever for the Golden Calf.

Incidentally, the residents of Washington D.C. are far from innocent. Election after election they vote overwhelmingly Democrat. And their schools suck. Serves them right. Ya think maybe one day District residents would wise up? Let the suckers keep paying $13,000 per pupil. As long as it’s not my money.

I’m not saying the Republicans’ hands are completely clean in this; Bush’s well-intentioned No Child Left Behind wasn’t successful. But you know why? Because the Republican president was acting like a Democrat! There was nothing conservative or Republican about NCLB! It was big government on the loose. Why the heck do you think Bush brought Ted Kennedy on board to help him with it?

The ironic thing is that Democrats should have loved Bush for NCLB. But for the past eight years to be a Democrat has meant to hate Bush and oppose everything he strives for (The Democrats’ treasonous behavior during the War on Terror is even a better example of this.)

So spare me the “hope and change” garbage. More like just another Democrat giving his own children gold, while supporting policies that give the rest of the country’s children crap. Wake up, people.