FBI & Anthrax: Cold Case Files or Al Qaeda?

Steven Hatfill was the unfortunate victim of the Keystone Kop bureaucracy investingating the anthrax murders [one of which occurred just two miles from my home here in Boca Raton]. Here's the WSJ editorial:

FBI psychologists and handwriting analysts drew up a behavioral profile concluding that the assailant was a domestic loner without links to terrorist groups. But a Unabomber in a shack wouldn't have the sophistication to produce what were believed to be near weapons-grade biological weapons. So the FBI decided the attacks must have been carried out by a military scientist or someone with access to a U.S. defense lab.

Suspicion settled on Mr. Hatfill, a bioweapons expert and former Army microbiologist. The FBI began a relentless pursuit, including constant surveillance and a high-profile raid of his apartment in hazmat suits. It drained an entire pond near Washington in search of incriminating evidence, at a cost of a quarter-million dollars. Mr. Hatfill maintains his innocence.

The FBI's mad scientist theory also fit the agenda of the political left, which didn't want the trail of evidence to prove state-sponsorship of terror – particularly by Iraq. (Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times pushed the Hatfill theory of the case especially hard.) But the possibility of a foreign source should never have been downplayed. Saddam Hussein had deployed chemical attacks in the Iran-Iraq war and against the Kurds. In 1995, Iraq admitted to U.N. weapons inspectors that it had added thousands of liters of anthrax and other toxins to its biological arsenal.

In 2006, the FBI revised its assessment of the anthrax powder. While it was of exceptional purity and quality, scientists now say it lacked signs of the special milling process necessary for weaponization. In addition, the particular Ames strain of the anthrax used in the attacks – a clue seeming to point to a domestic source – has turned out to be far more common than originally believed, appearing in laboratories world-wide, including nations of the former Soviet Union.

So the FBI needed to cast a wider net all along – which still remains urgent. In 2007, 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told a military tribunal he was "directly in charge" of "managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others." The 9/11 Commission reported that al Qaeda has had an "ambitious" bioweapons program. Though there's no evidence that al Qaeda operatives succeeded in manufacturing weapons-grade agents, the anthrax case proves that such high-level production isn't necessary for an attack. And there's no telling what's floating around out there.

So Mueller's gang-that-can't-shoot-straight neglected interrogating KSM while following weird NYT columnists like Commissar Kristof in their doomed quest to find another Lee Harvey Oswald.

The USA is permeated with a political class unwilling or unable to assess national security threats that don't fit their narrow agenda---to stop demonizing Islamic terrorists & divert attention towards the "military-industrial complex" defending the US from its hostile opponents. Large elements of the GWB administration, including the Justice Dept, fell into the mindset of the loony ultra-left personified by the paranoid ravings of a Kristof or a Seymour Hersh. [Kristof in a recent column on Israel managed to rant about Hebron's poor Palestinians without mentioning ancient Hebrew inhabitants since 1000 BC nor the infamous Arab massacres of Jews there in 1929---like a Joe Friday inversion, no facts necessary for Commissar Kristof, just an Arab victim playbook will do.]

It speaks encyclopedic volumes when an anthrax attack on the US government [Congress & the SCOTUS] is answered by an FBI-profiler witch hunt rather than an overall assessment of who perpetrated the attacks. As long as Osama lives and the anthrax attack remains unsolved, 9/11 remains a live issue that cries out for resolution.

Nutjob Archbishop of Canterbury Declared Heresiarch!

60 Million Anglicans out of the world's estimated 77 million declared in effect that they were in schism with the gay vicars of London & the Church's original homeland.

Of course, they papered over the actual rupture of relations with "church within a church" flimflammery, but Rowan Williams continued idiocy and ridiculous doctrinal silliness caused previous strains to finally crack the Church in a North-South divide.

In the US & Canada, the battle will be materialistic, with precious real estate like St. Bart's on Park Avenue just one example of how valuable Episcopalian assets are in the USA. Who controls the churches will vary, but traditional Christians will predictably give the zany New-Ager gays a good run for control of the American church.

Catholics may have a similar problem, but noone anywhere in the Roman Church is nearly as disruptive as thoughtless Rowan W. and his coterie of catamites.

Letterman Ratings Tumble as His BDS Mounts

Hard-line ultra-left Late Night host David Letterman had his lowest ratings since his show began in 1993. Letterman is so pitifully low in the ratings that he tied Nightline, even though Nightline had more viewers.

And the margin between CBS's loo-zer leftie and Jay Leno widened to the greatest margin ever.

I'm looking forward to NBC begging Leno to stay on, paying Conan a huge penalty fee, and then losing Leno to ABC or Fox!

Making GE & moron Zucker look even dumber.

Sweeeeet!

The Ideology that the MSM Dare not Speak of, but Support by not Condemning

Gigi Geyer dares to mention the reason that Zimbabwe is mired in such inflation that one U.S. dollar acquires $15 BILLION Z-dollars [yes, you read that right, at least according to ABC-TV's undercover reporter in Harare.

Of course, ABC-TV would never mention that Robert Mugabe considers himself a Marxist dictator---although educated by Jesuits & calling himself a Catholic, he has slaughtered every democratic movement aiming to supplant his brutal arrogant rule.

Sort of reminds one of N. Korea & Kim Jung-Il, Cuba & Fidel/Raul Castro, Iraq & Saddam Hussein, Syria & Bashar Assad, Burma & its "military junta" standing for the "Socialist Party of Burma."

Also, of course, the ultra-left wing of the Dem Party like Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and expectant daddy-ex-marriage John Edwards.

And perhaps Barack Obama, for all we know.

Answer to Rising Oil Prices---Drill!

Daniel Yergin spent 45 minutes last nite on Charlie Rose's show evading the question whether or not to drill offshore & in ANWR. The cagey Yergin, who yearns for a top job with the Obamanation crowd, simply avoided, evaded, and sneaked around every query by Rose on actually increasing US oil supply.

Slippery as an eel, this particular oil expert is more of a politician than an economist. His career started out with a book I read in the late '70s, a revisionist view of the Cold War. Yergin morphed into an "economist" and has written well on oil issues, but now fancies himself ready for high appointive office, judging from his performance on the Charlie Rose show.

And that would not be in a Republican administration.

Sun King Rules Still Apply in French "Journalism"

UPDATEShrinkwrapped has a good piece on the Al-Dura Con and in this case, a fraudulent NYT reporter named Nicholas Kristof. American journalists are a long line of silly superficial ideologues in general, but Gigi Geyer and many other veteran reporters on the Middle East are not the agitpreppie frauds that a Kristof or Jon Randall represents.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet has a tooth-grinding article in The Weekly Standard concerning the notorious Al-Dura Affair, back in the beginning of the 2000 Intifada [staged by Arafat to cover his disgraceful refusal to accept the Clinton/Barak Compromise on Palestinian Statehood].

The tape of a small boy cowering in his father's arms while caught in crossfire in Gaza became a mantra of oppression. But now evidence has surfaced, gone to French court, and been upheld, that the whole affair might have been staged by Palestinian stringers.

Of course, we all remember the fighting between Israel & Hezbollah after Israeli soldiers were kidnapped along the Lebanese border. Photo-shopping & mysterious dead children were appearing in AP and other "reputable" wire services with alarming regularity---showing that a cottage industry of fakery may be helping spread canards about them mean Izzies. In the words of Newsweak editor Evan Thomas concerning the Duke lacrosse "rape" case, the narrative [rich white college boys & poor disadvantaged black stripper [oops, "exotic dancer"] is perfect, too bad the facts don't quite fit.

In fact, Evan, in France journalistic corruption is even further evolved than in Newsweak, CNN [which still has ogress N. Grace doing her emo gig nightly], and CBS [forced to jettison serial-faker Dan Rather & his 60 Minutes posse], as Anne-Elisabeth's great article above delineates in excruciating and thorough detail

My two-year stint as Vice-Consul in Lyon was served with Peter Tarnoff, who had just been the first American to go to ENA, the finishing school for French elitist snobs---government issue. Watergate was busting out all over and the Lyonnais marveled at the inability of Nixon to squash these impudent journalists at the Washington Post like bugs. After all, Le Canard Enchaine had recently been forced to retract a [true] story about "tables d'ecoutes" by an outraged French government caught wiretapping in flagrante delicto. The French hierarchy of top down dictatorship was so ossified in almost every segment of society, I learned, that when I was offered the job of junior political officer in Paris, I turned it down for a stint studying Arabic in Beirut. Working in the Paris Embassy was good training as a socialite [or socialist], but otherwise more or less being asst. curator in a museum.

What I did learn in Lyon from Peter & the Lyonnais was the abiding elitism of the French political/social/cultural landscape. The second lesson was the persistent anti-Semitism in the French mindset. Anne-Elisabeth outlines both, though inferentially vis-a-vis anti-Jewish sentiment, in her Weekly Standard article:

two years ago, after one Karsenty op-ed too many about the "arrant hoax" of the al-Dura affair, France 2 sued him for libel. In a country where judges are civil servants, their first ruling surprised few observers: They ruled for the national institution, France 2, and ordered the outsider, Karsenty, to pay one euro in damages to the plaintiffs, a fine of 1,000 euros, and another 3,000 euros in costs. Even accounting for France's relatively moderate legal rates, this was a slap on the wrist. Taking a gamble, Karsenty appealed.

The appeals court convened last month and asked for-gasp-evidence, namely the famous 27-minute France 2 unedited master footage, which not even Enderlin had seen when he filed his item for the evening news. (His Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu Rahmeh, had sent him by remote link about 6 minutes from which to make the news segment.) France 2, dragging its feet, eventually produced 18 minutes of film. (There is practically no such thing as "contempt of court" in such circumstances in the French judicial system.) The showing of this film made for an eerie moment at the trial, when the hitherto blasé judges sat up and started watching with more attention, then took a recess, after which they asked for all of France 2's footage. It would prove to be the turning point in the proceeding.

Karsenty came to court loaded for bear, with trolleyfuls of documentation, including a 90-page ballistics report. Out of it all, the court also trained its sights on a telling 2005 Le Figaro opinion piece by two establishment journalists, Denis Jeambar, then editor in chief of L'Express (France's answer to Newsweek), and Daniel Leconte, head of news documentaries at the state-run French-German cultural channel, Arte (a kind of French-German PBS), both unlikely participants in this undignified scrum. Jeambar and Leconte, egged on by a former Le Monde journalist, Luc Rosenzweig, who had taken a great interest in the case and started writing about it for the small Israeli news outfit Mena, asked France 2 as early as 2004 to show them the original raw rushes. Acknowledging Jeambar and Leconte's weight in the French establishment, France 2 had done for them what it had refused to do for countless others and had shown them, and Rosenzweig, the 27 minutes of film.

What happened then was typical of the cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof behavior even powerful French figures display when faced with any kind of violation of the unspoken but well-understood order of precedence obtaining among the elite here. While Jeambar and Leconte took their time to ponder what they'd seen, Rosenzweig had the nerve to file a piece for Mena describing the tape's scenes of staging just before the fatal shooting. You could see Palestinians being carried on stretchers into ambulances, then coming out again unharmed, all in a kind of carnival atmosphere, with kids throwing stones and making faces at the camera, despite what was supposed to be a tense situation. The tape showed occasional gunshots, not continuous firing. From the general horsing around captured on film by Abu Rahmeh, Mena concluded that the whole scene must have been staged.

The kangaroo aspect of the French judicial process is legendary. The very fact that the appeals court in this lengthy "limited-hangout" tactic by France2, a network packed with leftist mountebanks who make PBS socialist-totems like Bill Moyers look like centrists, is remarkable.

In France, you always print the legend rather than the grimy reality underlying the downfall of a great nation since the French Revolution, if one takes the long view. Recently a Paris Gallery hosted a collection of color photos taken during the German Occupation, again revealing what every Lyonnais knows---the French collaboration with the Nazis was as prevalent in Paris as it was in Vichy. But I digress. Anne-Elisabeth's piece should be read from top to bottom to understand the concrete-wall solidarity of the French elites even when confronted by massive proof or wrong. Even French Jews hesitate to rock the boat:

At the other end of the scale, there was the rather intimidating star lawyer Theo Klein, getting on in years, who 20 years ago had been the president of CRIF, the official umbrella representative body of French Jews. I called him and reminded him that he'd been kind enough to invite me to his 1989 French Revolution Bicentennial party. (His office was on the Champs-Elysées, and it was the dream vantage point from which to watch the Jean-Paul Goude-designed parade and listen to Jessye Norman, draped in a giant French flag, belting out the "Marseillaise.") Theo Klein took my call pleasantly and dove into the thick of the matter.

"Well, perhaps the bullets were not Israeli after all, but if something was set up, I'm sure Charles had nothing to do with it. He is a remarkable journalist. I respect him, and I'm sure this matters more than whether a bullet came from the right or from the left. After all, many Palestinian children have been killed in the Intifada. You know, the Israelis haven't made half the noise about this that some French Jews have." He was outraged, outraged by the court ruling.

The daughter and granddaughter of lawyers myself, I gently reminded him that it wasn't done in France to criticize a court ruling. He changed the subject as if stung. "Really, I find deplorable that people are hounding Charles Enderlin like that. He has suffered, really suffered. And his poor wife.  .  .  .  They wanted to emigrate to America at one stage, do you realize?"

Well, I suggested, Americans were actually rather big on correcting reporters' mistakes.

"Surely not after so much time?"

Even after a long time. Corrections were duly appended to stories on the websites of newspapers, to prevent the eternal metastasizing of factual errors. Maître Klein marvelled for a moment at such thoroughness. It seemed, I could tell, a little pointless to him: He, like almost everyone else I'd spoken to, rated facts far below reputation. Still, I decided to go over that ground one last time. Wasn't there some doubt about the actual fatal shot? Why sign this text?

"My dear," Theo Klein said, in an infinitely weary voice, "I'm not a journalist. I haven't read this petition. I have macular retina degeneration. I can no longer read."

Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to revive a moribund corpse from centuries of comatose nostalgia punctuated by moments of sheer panic & occasional bravery.

With all its faults, American journalism can dismiss a fraud like Dan Rather & his 60 Minutes inner posse.

That would never happen in state-controlled French electronic [& to a great extent, print] media.

Obama & McCain Pander---Barry on Principle & Johnny on Policyy

John Dickerson has an update on his previous piece which moved me to blog on the usual one-sided MSM take on Dem/Repub chicanery---Repubs are at fault, Dems not mentioned. Now John gets it right on the panderfest---McCain on the existential policy change re offshore drilling, Obamessiah on the essential character defect of breaking a promise on public funding::

But the two changes of heart this week illustrate that there's a difference between changing your policy position and breaking a promise. McCain's altered stance on drilling (and the windfall profits tax) opens him up to charges that he's pandering and has no core principles. The damage his drilling plan might do to the environment recedes as a secondary critique. When Obama first reacted to McCain's proposal, he never mentioned the environment, but framed it as a weakness of leadership: "It's another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil."
But if these flip-flops reflect character attributes, then it's Obama who emerges more vulnerable. Breaking a promise is a problem of a higher order than changing a policy position. Our mothers told us not to break promises; they were silent on the question of drilling.

Read the whole piece to understand how Dickerson believes that Barry Hussein-O is an opportunist rather than an agent for REAL change.
WaPo's Krauthammer has a less benign view of Barry & this crushing verdict on a squishy-soft mainstream media puppy-love infatuation with Obama:

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.

Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.

Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.

True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.

As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

Re Obama, the MSM has accepted the two Communist mantras that old-time SDS Commie Mark Rudd told me when he was my houseguest in Ann Arbor almost forty years ago:

"No Fault on the Left" and

"Dare to Cheat, Dare to Win."

Barry has certainly assimilated that Marxist/Leninist catechism verbatim.

Pelosi Shoots Off Mouth, Hits Own Foot.

Nancy Pelosi is simply stuck on stupid. This vapid vacuous airhead bimbo simply should keep her mouth shut. She is ignorant and even more ineffective a Speaker than Hastert, as though that were possible. But she did the impossible---she's dumber than dumb Dennis!

Congress's approval rating is about half of GWB's. She & Harry Reid are largely responsible for that amazing feat of incompetence.

McCain/Obama Slugfest Promises Long Hot Summer

Dan Balz laments that the early stages of the '08 Final Two show little evidence of any high-minded political discourse which some were hoping for. Instead, the same old political punch-out death-cage zero-sum matches that characterized previous Repub/Dem campaigns.

And the nutroots are disappointed that Obama is not following the Pied Piper's evacuation summons their lemming-nature rodenthood instinctively follows----over the cliff & into the fjord.

Same-old same-o, as we used to say in Vietnam.

Could McCain Lose on "Comprehensive" Immigration Issue?

Mickey Kaus notes that perhaps the most Republican Congressional District in the country has seen six-time incumbent Chris Cannon lose in part because:

outside interest groups excoriated Cannon for his relatively moderate views on immigration

John McCain simply is not gaining traction with the Republican base, which Karl Rove believed was the pivotal key to winning in 2000 & 2004.

As Obama moves toward the center on issues such as FISA & the "Fairness Doctrine" from the left, McCain simply looks a bit like a "me too" Mugwump straddling the center which both candidates covet. But if the rock-ribbed Republicans reject this lukewarm approach of McCain, what are the chances that he will surmount the challenge of change and enthusiasm that Obama brings to the fight?

The primary in Utah may indicate that the huge poll majorities against the comprehensive immigration reform & amnesty last summer when McCain was fashioning his compromise still may be out there, waiting to be energized.

Illegal immigration may be McCain's only chance to stir up the Republican base, which wants no part of yet another amnesty fiasco.

Olberboy Ready for the Dumpster or the Porcelain Bowl---the Choice is Clear

Autistic Narcissistic MORON Keith Odorboy made Page Six of the NY Post:

MSNBC blowhard Keith Olbermann couldn't even control his temper at a memorial reception for beloved Tim Russert.
Network sources told Page Six Olbermann was furious last week when MSNBC didn't get him a first-class ticket to Washington, DC, for a private service honoring the "Meet the Press" anchor's passing.
The source said Olbermann was screaming into the phone on Tuesday because there were no first-class train tickets available for that day, and he wanted to make sure he would ride first-class on Wednesday. According to the source, Olbermann berated a staffer who was coordinating Wednesday's Kennedy Center memorial by yelling, "You better hope to God there is a first-class train ticket tomorrow."

Our insider elaborated, "MSNBC was dealing with who could come to the private ceremony Tuesday and who couldn't, among the hundreds of people who worked with or for Russert - and Keith was ranting about not getting a first-class ticket."
We're told Olbermann didn't get to Tuesday's ceremony, and went to Washington by car to broadcast from outside the Kennedy Center the next day. An aghast witness there said, "As guests were making their way into the memorial, Keith went apoplectic because there were no ketchup packets at the Kennedy Center....."

Olbermann was heard saying outside the service, "this place is going to hell," because his Washington staff couldn't find ketchup packets for lunch at the Center.

Of course, Odorboy has reached that plateau of "grandiosity" where everything is always "all about him..." as many colleagues in the MSN noted while preserving their anonymity----among those non-admirers were reportedly NBC personnel....!

It's apparent that Keith-O began his journey round the bend with terminal BDS around the time the surge started working in Iraq and his saliva-flecked spews called "Special Comments" went from from Ed Murrow gravitas to Adolf Hitler hyperventilating hysteria in NO TIME FLAT! He rapidly is assuming iconic status as egomaniac lurching into megalo-monster solipsistic self-referential, semi-psychotic......oh well, you get the picture.

The people at his former home at ESPN can attest that K-O was the biggest asshole in the world during his stint at the sports network---only Dan Patrick decided K-O is a useful idiot & got K-O a Sunday night football gig. Even KO's high school buddy Chris Berman can't stand this raving-psyho uebertroll any more.

MSNBC is about 40th in the cable ratings with FoxNEWS at sixth & CNN about 16th. NBC is a train wreck about to happen, and GE had better unload before NBC becomes another CBS---ruined by Larry Tisch's micromanagement & Dan Rather's garbage & lies. KO is the highest peak in this low-lying collection of duds---he gets the same adulation as Air America used to get from the ultra-moron wing of the nutroots, the Greenwald/Kossack Krowd.

Let's hope Odorboy achieves Randi Rhodes status soon & [P]MSNBC belatedly realizes that GE's brand is being smudged by this lunatic.

"Fairness Doctrine" Supported by Pelosi & other Socialists.

A commenter named Jerry asks "Do you think the "Fairness Doctrine" aimed at the free markets would apply to the government funded NPR and Public Television?"

The Free Market & marketplace of ideas is anathema to the Commissars in the Democrat [there's nothing "democratic" about it] Party. The OIC [Islamic Conference] is also adamantly against any western press or electronic media saying anything about the brutal savagery of Muslim "culture" so dear to the multiculti crowd of earnest imbeciles.

Obama says he does not, but does anyone recall the quickly-buried turnaround Obama did on public funding?

I do.

Hey, Ohio, How You Like Them Endives with Brie Spears?

Overweening Arrogance Matched with Absolute Ignorance typifies the Hollyweird Liberal----whether it's Babs Streisand sending misspelled misquotes from the Bard into the blogosphere or high-school dropouts like Sean Penn peppering the airwaves with obscenities.

Obama's Hollyweird whackjob supporters may have the same effect on his candidacy as Nicholson, Di Caprio & ilk had on Kobe's Lakers---a feeling of entitlement sadly out of focus with reality.

Tom Bevan is right on the money---Obama 'd better scarf down dawgs & suds with the Reagan Democrats or he may lose Ohio, and maybe even Pennsylvania---full of them bitter folks clinging to outmoded flyover concepts like religion & guns.

Kosinski Disgusts even the LA Times

Disgusting PervMag [warning: link has disgusting ads flashing on side of article] castigates the LAT for being too boringly legal! To praise Judge Kosinski for recusing himself in a case where "the values he has fought for all his life" are in jeopardy, according to DPMag, is vewy, vewy wong.

I think everyone reading this piece agrees that the Ninth Circus Court is an acid trip gone horribly bad. And Kozinski is in charge of distribution of bad acid to that Cuckoo's Nest, so any humiliation & bring-down of this egregious Court Jester is well-earned. Nurse Ratchett is sorely needed for cases like Judge K's.

Sadly, it shows just how out of synch CA has become---no longer a bellwether, but a belfry full of bats.

Indonesia Persecutes Liberal Muslim Sect

The Ahmadiyah back in the late seventies when I was Political Officer for Internal Affairs in Saudi Arabia vexed the Ulema in Riyadh no end. The somewhat heterodox liberal sect boasted the only Islamic Nobel Prize in science at the time [and perhaps even today?] and in Pakistan was gaining in influence. The Ulema forbade Ahmadiyah to enter Mecca and the Kaabah, denying that it was orthodox & therefore "haram."

The Saudi religious leaders have had billions to spend in Dawa over the ensuing decades & have now established the puritan Wahhabi brand of Islam as paramount across the vast panoply of Islam from Sub-Sahara Africa to the Uighurs of western China. The rabid zealots of Wahhabism are besieging Ahmadiyah mosques in Indonesia after the country's president issued an edict forbidding the Ahmadiyah to "disseminate" their religion, effectively declaring it haram in a semi-secular context. Bizarre as that sounds, it only encourages the zealots in various parts of Indonesia, including Aceh in northern Sumatra, to depart from their peaceful ways---religious tinder has a tendency to flare easily even in the languid humidity of Indonesia.

The Saudis have a triumphalist streak and this capitulation to Wahhabism by the Indonesian president could have blowback on other aspects of Saudi policy, including a not very benign influence on boosting oil production---who knows?

In any event, religious intolerance is rampant in Muslim lands and the article rightly asks if Christians are next.

Dems Now Believe Politics is Illegal---when Conservatives Practice it.

Eric Lichtblau has an article about the "illegal" hiring of Justice Dept lawyers who are, hold your ears & close your eyes, CONSERVATIVE.

As with about a dozen process crimes uncovered by zealous morons like Daniel Patrick Fitzpatrick [who was aware the Plame leak was from the State Dept before he launched his Special Prosecutor prove that snared Scooter Libby in a meaningless process crime], the Dems are overinfested with cretinous vicious creatures called lawyers, who chase ambulances and their own tails to find something to occupy their useless lives.

Janet Reno is a prime example, and due to this swamp creature's zealous pursuit of Elian Gonsales, Florida went for GWB in 2000. So the Dems keep shooting themselves in the foot, and when McCain wins in November, you can bet that double-digit IQ idiots like Barbara Boxer will call for the Ninth Circus Court to review the voting in Ohio.

BTW, the Dems started the "spoils system" back in the days of a criminal POTUS named Andy Jackson, who overruled SCOTUS by not enforcing laws & decisions, including the eviction of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma. There's a clown that should have been impeached.

Politics & the spoils system is only wrong when the Republicans practice it.

The Ninth Circus Court Sends in More Clowns

The Wall Street Journal notes that collection of silly judges sitting in SF has had two more of its zany decisions sent to SCOTUS where adults will survey the latest pranks these kiddie-korps-victims of bad acid have played on the US judicial system.

The first puts judges rather than admirals in charge of the US Navy in order to protect the whales.

The second berates a corporation for charging TOO LITTLE for bandwidth online.

These pernicious monkeys with their porn sites online should make moot the concept of contempt of court---since this court is contemptible!

Obama's Broken Campaign Funding Promise? Not Worthy of Mention.

John Dickerson manages to get an entire article in Slate about McCain changing his mind and policies without breathing a word about the colossal reversal that Obama made after over a decade of praising the virtues of public funding. This cynical machine pol was counting on a degenerate corrupt MSM to glide past and ease over the gigantic reversal of his lifelong interest in reform. [To give credit where it is due, Mark Shields & Bob Schieffer are in full hue and cry.]

Pretty boy Dickerson has no ethics, morals, or shame when it comes to journalistic fairness. Here is the entirely plausible first paragraph:

I felt as though I were in a time machine as I listened to John McCain's aides detail how to run against Barack Obama. I could have been on the phone with Bush aides in 2000 talking about McCain: He survives on the strength of his rhetoric; the press that follows him each day doesn't challenge him but serves merely to record his historic rise; the standards of coverage for the two candidates are different.

And in the second and all succeeding paragraphs, Dickerson demonstrates his total adherence to the truth of the words in italics above. In the background as I write this is a repeat of Bob Schieffer's dressing down of Bill Richardson as BR whores after the VEEP job & Carly Fiorina sounds much smarter and more articulate than Richardson, whom this campaign has diminished greatly in my and the public's mind.

I wonder if any of the Democratic candidates this year have ever participated in the public marketplace except as manipulative politicians? All the Dem candidates are/were lawyers and are simply dishonest to the core, as Chris Dodd revealed last week [interestingly Dodd's Senator dad was CENSURED by the Senate for dipping into campaign funds back in the day when Senators had a sense of ethics and accountability].

BTW, the word "lawyer" is cognate with "liar."

What if McCain had Attended a David Duke Rally?

The American Spectator does a "thought experiment" about the reaction to a hypothetical McCain visit to a David Duke rally and imagined the hysterical reaction of the ultra-left MSM.

However, Louis Farrakhan is regarded as the black mirror image of David Duke by many observers---his anti-Semitism is notorious and unbridled. Barack Obama attended his "million-man march" in 1995 and has been given a pass and completely "forgiven" by the MSM, which doesn't mention nor even bother to investigate what might have been a serious dalliance with the Jew-baiting demagogue Farrakhan.

Read the article, and one more instance of the complete lack of professionalism by the MSM, which has not investigated Obama & has given him dozens of free passes, as they have his wife, who complained on 60 Minutes in 2007 that her husband might be killed because he was "a black man and black men get killed every day going to a gas station," words that weren't brought up when Hillary raised a ginormous firestorm by the Obamessiah MSM when she mentioned RFK's murder in '68.

The USA does not have a free press in any objective sense of the term.

Aside from a few outliers like FoxNEWS and the WSJ, the national media is completely in the tank for the Obamessiah.

Stuck on Stupid, and preachy when their hype and agitprop is exposed, that's the MSM.

Iraq Oil Fields Ready for Expansion

Iraq is beginning to assign contracts to extract oil from existing fields. Many of these contracts will be more political than economic in their selection. The problem of virtual Kurdish autonomy must also be addressed, but the completely disarming of the Sadr battalions in the south has been completely ignored by our MSM which is completely investing in American failure & is in total denial about the success of the surge [read the bleating of moronic NYT Op Ed theater critic Rich about the dearth of photos of dead American soldiers.]

Actually, the major enterprise facing the Iraqi Oil Ministry is drilling for new crude in the Mesopotamian Foredeep, perhaps the richest lode of untapped high-quality crude in the world. While International Editor of the Oil Daily, i interviewed a senior geologist of the Iraqi Ministry at the World Geological Congress held in DC about 15 years ago. This gentleman said that his Ministry geologists didn't do seismic in the desert areas outside of the rich southern fields because "they didn't like roughing it."

Test boreholes did bring up late Jurassic GASOLINE & other super-high quality crudes, he told me, but the holes were capped until they could be exploited later. He did say that the deeper they drilled, the higher the quality. That was using '70s technology, as SOMO & the Ministry hadn't upgraded their equipment or technology due to other priorities. [Remember that Iraq was a Socialist government with a militarist culture led by Saddam.]

I sure would like to be the company that gets the contract to explore the virgin fields in the Mesopotamian Foredeep.

It's all everybody's fault, except for the victims.

The WaPo DNC Talking Points has an article which pre-emptively blames America if Obama should happen to lose. The fingerpointers inside the Beltway note that there is a high rate of "racism" out there that the social engineers haven't been able to eradicate. Could it have anything to do with the cult of criminality propagated by hip-hop black musicians---naw! that would be realism and the fact that so many blacks are behind bars is because of flaws in everything except the black community and its perverted values.

Laura Ingraham had a double-digit IQ moron as a guest, a radio talk show host from Portland, OR. She didn't slap his silly assertions silly as I would have, but with a quiet sardonic tone simply shredded this clowns cred to pieces.

The Dems are going to lose this election again because of their flawed view of politics, which is based on identity and micro-managed hyper-nerd flimflammery. Plus their flawed view of human nature, which is based on Rousseau's Panglossian kumbaya schmaltz instead of the intrinsic evil nature of humans without strict governance.

Unless McCain lurches even further into silly second-rate attempts to sidle left until he becomes unpalatable for anyone with a backbone. One of which he used to possess.

Dems Ready to Plunge Into Insanity---Lies, Damned Lies, and "Progressive" Degeneration

Kimberley Strassel sounds the alarm about the demise of the New Democrats, the centrist reaction that I would argue started with Jimmy Carter until he botched everything he touched, then had a renaissance with Bill Clinton, who implemented many centrist reforms while stumbling into perpetual personal peccadillos.

Carter was a reaction to McGovern's antinomian candidacy [which still survives on the Dem ultra-left lawyerly illegality wing] and Clinton an attempt to apply post-Cold War isolationism [except for Kosovo] to a New World Order that GHWB couldn't implement. As a result, Islamic terrorism burgeoned as the botched WTC 1993 attempt gave the Al Qaeda the impression that they could get away with another attack on the USA [after warmups on Al Khobar barracks, the '98 attacks on Nairobi & Dar Es Salaam Embassies & the USS Cole elicited no Clintonian response worthy of the name].

But the USA has been systematically dumbed down by a combination of corrupt unions, litigious lawyers working a corrupt judiciary, and special interest groups with no higher view of the national good [Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, ACLU, etc.] than to cede to international organizations our remaining sovereignties and entrust our safety to the UN. Our failing public schools are aided and abetted in their efforts to weaken the national fiber by diminishing males, outlawing contact sports, and teaching ridiculous nutjob social engineering theses rather than the "Three 'R's." The corrupt judiciary watches the back of the corrupt teachers' unions who are donating millions to Obama's campaign to free them from restraints and protect them from vouchers to schools that disseminate knowledge rather than impose ideologies. Here's Kimberley:

Mr. Obama calls for an immediate pullout of troops from Iraq, no matter what the consequences. His foreign policy, to the extent it is one, flows not from strength, but from greater American accommodation in the name of diplomacy. Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have together held some 72 votes on Iraq, most devoted to cutting off troop money, blocking the surge, or forcing a pullout. Last year, all but 10 House Democrats voted for a withdrawal timeline.

Economic centrism? What's that? Even Mr. Clinton's wife disavowed his New Democratic legacy by trashing free trade and Nafta. Mr. Obama raised her bet, aligning himself with leftist trade populists. The Democratic leadership has held up deals with Colombia, Peru and South Korea. Big Labor is calling the shots, and Big Labor will suffer no new trade.

Mr. Obama is hawking a tax policy that would take the nation back to the effective marginal tax rates of the Carter days. He wants to further tax income, payroll, capital gains, dividends and death. His philosophy is pure redistribution. Congressional Democrats voted for a budget that includes the largest tax hike in American history.

About all that remains of the New Democratic economic agenda is the mantra of "fiscal discipline." But since taking power, Democrats have passed spending bills far beyond President Bush's limits, and broken their own "pay-as-you-go" rules. The party's Blue Dogs have fought its leaders on some spending, though not when it risks derailing, say, farm bills. Mr. Obama recently revealed that his plan for economic recovery was to spend the nation out of its doldrums.

The one place where New Democrats have made a more lasting mark is on the culture. The party leadership has seen the wisdom of relaxing litmus tests on guns and abortion, a change that in 2006 let them field candidates who won conservative districts. But even here, Mr. Obama is a skeptic. He's said he'd repeal the Defense of Marriage Act – which Bill Clinton signed. He's criticized the Supreme Court for upholding the partial-birth abortion ban.

As Obama shows that the "change" part of his agenda will likely mean a swerve to the farthest left that this country can assimilate without a reactionary repudiation in 2012, it is useless to murmur as some "hopeful" Repubs do that Obama is really only a Chicago machine politician with an intellectual veneer. Perhaps rather he is an intellectual with machine-pol brutal unaccountability. His spouse's egregious remarks in the past have revealed the undercurrent of Nietzschean perspectivism or post-modern contextualism infused with more than a tincture of old-fashioned vengeance that domestically will lead to class warfare. The envy of the unlucky & the incompetent toward those who have succeeded is one of the driving forces behind the revanchism of the ultra-left.

Self-destruction is another and we can rest assured that if Obama applies his policies, the US constitution will surmount his four years of misrule despite Dem attempts to shut down opposition voices---in the true tradition of international leftism---and a Republican will be elected in 2012. The four years of Carter-incompetence led to eight years of political sanity.

Or the Dems might overturn plebiscites and referendums with apodictic twaddle from the corrupt Ninth Circus Court where all the loons in the lower '48 file all sorts of zany petitions that laws or referenda are "unconstitutional." If Chief Judge Kozinski can pull himself away from his porn collection long enough to issue daffy rulings that will be overturned by the SCOTUS [unless Obama appoints a successor to Stevens as bats**t ca-raaazy 180 away from his track record as GHWB's appointment of Souter.] Whatever bad GWB has done, it doesn't approach the ninny status of his daddy's appointment of Souter. Wonder what lonely northwoods bachelor Souter's porn collection looks like.

So we know that Obama would try to institutionalize the corrupt ascendancy of teachers' unions teaching anarchy and abolish NAFTA & effectively oppose economic globalization while all the while refusing to defend American sovereignty from NGOs like the UN, which dearly wants to become a government, a World Government.

That's the only reason that I will, reluctantly, pull the lever for McCain.

This year's election is a Hobson's Choice.

Egyptian "Culture" Minister Equivocates on Book Burning, May Lose UNESCO Job!

Arabs have a big problem with knowledge. Their social/cultural tradition of first-cousin marriage has seriously diluted their brainpower over the centuries, much as has happened in the hills of KY, AR, & some other parts of Appalachia. Imagine this process working over ten centuries!

Seriously, for the UN to consider Egyptian "Culture Minister" Farouk Hosni after he publicly advocated burning Israeli books demonstrates once again how the UN is captive to the lowest common denominator of political chicanery. Of course, Mr. Hosni probably was engaging in the sort of demagoguery that characterizes the supremely degenerate Arab political world. Fanatical reactionary male supremacists who regard women as chattel [The Muslim Brotherhood] had confronted Hosni in Parliament, and Hosni demonstrated the spineless degenerate response that characterizes Egyptian politics.

Now he has recanted in various international forums, but the Brotherhood leadership has found this out, leaving Hosni with a foot in the boat and one on the dock while the boat drifts seaward. Lotsa luck!

Sadly, there are American politicos who believe that a president like Jimmy Carter, who debased himself by becoming the Israeli/Egyptian desk officers in NEA during the Camp David fiasco, is the precedent for more progress in bridging the gap between the Arab savages and Israeli nasties. A conflict between ignorance and rudeness.

The US is the only power that can protect Israel's sovereignty and simultaneously support Arab aspirations for an independent Palestine----but as Condi Rice demonstrated by insisting that a terrorist political entity like Hamas participate in the 2006 elections, presumptions of good faith are simply simple-minded.

And the UN is not the answer either. Mr. Moon may be a sincere and competent Sec'y Gen, but following in the footsteps of two failures in that job, he has a ginormous mountain to climb.

Now that Iran is illegally creating an atomic device while the cringing IAEA moron Mohamed Baradei knowingly collaborates with the Islamic Republic in getting this device constructed without international interference, it is time for Israel to grasp the nettle and do what the US did in Iraq, enforce a treaty by military means when it is broken [in this case, the NPT].

I hope the exercises over the Mediterranean were a prelude to another Osirak raid. Iran & Syria are attacking Israel through its catspaws Hezbollah & Hamas. Retaliation at the source is appropriate. Just as Israel knocked out the nascent reactor in eastern Syria, the time has come to destroy Iran's centrifuges.

After a successful attack by Israel, the ensuing claptrappery from the UN & the EU-nuchs [who fancy themselves acting as intermediaries to entice Iran away from nuke-building] is to be expected. It is as unimportant as it is ineffectual.

Norah O'Donnell, do you still think Obama stands for "Change?"

Barry Hussein-O has changed his mind [?] on public funding, after fulsomely projecting vaporous exhalations on how important public election funding was and promising to adhere to public funding.

Now he piously proclaims that the higher road would be to combat the evil Repubs by "small donations" in a private manner.

If this wasn't such a pious hypocritical fraudulent example of opportunism, maybe Norah of MSNBC could still maintain that Barry H-O was the candidate for "change." At least that's what higher minds [meaning almost all minds] have instilled in this gullible young woman.

Just to compound the felony, I'm watching the Dems mincing and prancing in their futile attempts to lobby against offshore drilling [& ANWR]. This after the bleats of GWB that it would really be nice if the Dems allowed drilling offshore. They keep saying that new drilling in the US will not bring prices down [wrong, the speculative surge in NYMEX & the hedge funds would reverse immediately if the US announced drilling] and that it will take years and years to get [the Dems are the party of instant gratification, personified by POTUS #42] and that alternative renewable sources will appear, like a deus ex machina, to save our energy butts.

The problem is that although energy drilling would be a perfect policy plus for McCain, he is apparently becoming tone deaf, clubfooted and has simultaneously developed an alarming facial tic masquerading as a smile while doing spectacularly silly things like praising NAFTA in Canada. The guy is irrepressibly wrong-footed since he wrapped up the nomination.

Karl Rove, where are you when you are really needed?

So don't expect McCain to press his advantage on energy or the few other policy areas where he is ahead of Obama. I think that somewhere along the line, an old-people gene kicked into gear and is now afflicting him as he pushes forward into full campaign mode.

I watched Bill Richardson, whom I used to consult when I was International Editor of The Oil Daily {Richardson was on the Commerce Cte which oversaw energy issues] whoring after the vice-presidency on FoxNEWS by lubriciously lusting after drilling on land [New Mexico, a major oil producer?] while denying the necessity of drilling offshore or in ANWR.

Bill, it ain't worth it. You used to make sense on energy issues---you actually understand the need. Charlie Crist did the same in FL in whoring after the VEEP slot for McCain, but two wrongs don't make a right!

But Barry Hussein-O sure is showing that wrong might be more useful politically.

Has GWB Finally Lost His Nerve?

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial which highlights GWB's hesitant push for offshore drilling & ANWR. Which reminds me of something that Rush Limbaugh said yesterday about why Bush is so unpopular even with Republicans. Rush noted that when Bush is attacked, he simply goes into hedgehog mode and does not retaliate. Whether this is from a turn-the-other-cheek version of Christianity or because he is so inept in articulating counterattacks. Either way, he has become a punching bag.

And just as he is constitutionally unable to retaliate against countless slanders and attacks, he is also unable to project any sort of confidence or vision of an alternative to the socialist nonsense of the ultra-left morons attacking him.

Sadly, even after almost eight years, Bush has not asserted himself as a true political player. He inspires no fear, but for some reason, does inspire extreme loathing on the left----although this might be projecting their own evil onto others.

Sadly, he is in a quarterback job, but appears to have never graduated beyond his cheerleading role in prep school.

And his own pusillanimity has dragged the Republican Party into an intolerable mess.

EUtopians see Irish vote as hiccup---the EU-tards are intent on ruling by diktat

Theodore Dalrymple points out the political class ruling the enslaved serfs of continental EUtopia simply are not going to cease and desist just because no one votes them into power. In a recent blog I mentioned the corruption of New Orleans, but at least in Louisiana, votes and plebiscites have jurisdiction. [Though not in a California increasingly ruled by the Ninth Circus Court and its porn-loving Chief Judge]. Here's Dalrymple:

Is the European Union heading for a Yugoslavian-style denouement? It sometimes looks as if its political class, oblivious to the wishes or concerns of the EU’s various populations, is determined to bring one about. The French and the Dutch voted against the proposed European Constitution, but that did not deter the intrepid political class from pressing ahead with its plans for a superstate that no one else wants. To bypass the wishes of the people, the politicos reintroduced the constitution as a treaty, to be ratified by parliaments alone. Only the Irish had the guts—or was it the foolhardiness?—to hold a referendum on the issue. Unfortunately, the Irish people got the answer wrong. They voted no, despite their political leaders’ urging that they vote yes. No doubt the people will be given an opportunity in the future—or several opportunities, if necessary—to correct their mistake and get the answer right, after which there will be no more referenda.

The European political class was briefly taken aback. What could explain the Irish obduracy? Several explanations came forth, among them Irish xenophobia and intellectual backwardness and the malign influence of the Murdoch-owned press. The narrowest economic self-interest was also said to have played a part. Having been huge beneficiaries of European largesse over the last 30 years, the Irish—who have the second-highest per capita GDP in Europe after Luxembourg—are now being asked to pay some of it back in the form of subsidies to the new union members from Eastern Europe. Ingrates that they are, they don’t want to pay up, especially now that their own economic growth rate has slowed dramatically in the wake of the financial crisis and the economic future looks uncertain.

Another explanation for the Irish “no” vote was that Irish citizens had been frightened by the proposal of the French finance minister to equalize tax rates throughout Europe, thus destroying unfair competition (all competition is unfair, unless the French win). No prizes for guessing whether the high tax rates of France or the low rates of Ireland would become the new standard. Ireland’s golden goose would find itself well and truly slaughtered in the process.

Not to worry, the European political elites soon recovered from the shock. Ireland, they pointed out, is a small and peripheral country, and not a founder-member of the European Union. Anyway, what does it really matter if referendum after referendum, in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland, defeats the proposals of the European political class? The proposals can always be enacted regardless, by other means. What does it matter if two-thirds of Germans regret monetary unification, as do the French and the Italians? What does it matter if prime minister Gordon Brown refused to hold a referendum on the treaty in Britain—having previously promised one—once he realized how roundly voters would reject it? As European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said after the Irish vote: the Lisbon Treaty is not dead, it is living. What the people of Europe want is completely irrelevant.

For the moment, all is peaceful and quiet. The political class, which loves the unitary European state precisely because it so completely escapes democratic or any other oversight (let alone control), and for whom it acts as a giant pension fund, holds the upper hand for now. But tensions and frustrations in Europe have a history of expressing themselves in nasty ways.

When the day of reckoning comes about, I hope the lampposts of Brussels and Strasbourg are decorated with suspended bodies of faceless functionaries who attempted to rob European Everyman of his essential political and human rights.

1984 can be averted by some old-fashioned "direct action," if the languorous Euroweenies can bestir themselves.

Cedar Rapids Versus New Orleans: A Tale of Two Cities:

A blogger who was a long-time resident of Cedar Rapids IA, which was recently hit hard by flooding, has these observations [h/t: Mangan's Miscellany]

I write because I grew up in Iowa, lived in Cedar Rapids for a while, and cannot help but notice the differences in flood preparation and response between Iowa and New Orleans....and because you might be one of the few people who care about my observations! Anyway, here is what I see in Iowa and what is making the response to the flooding there so efficient, and how it is 180 degrees different than the disaster in NOLA:


Iowa: Cooperative and can do spirit and pride and compassion for the fellow citizen
New Orleans: fighting with and blaming of police and all authorities

Iowa: A sense of humor and optimism
New Orleans: bitching and hostility and insistence that government and the Corps of Engineers are out to get them

Iowa: Trust and willingness to follow orders from police and civil defense authorities -- this includes everything from evacuating homes to cutting back on water use. The authorities' urgings to reduce household water use have been so successful that Cedar Rapids will have more water services available, and sooner, than they had hoped. This trust and willingness has contributed to ZERO FATALITIES from the floods.
New Orleans: stupidity, inaction, lack of preparedness

Iowa: Willingness to work hard for nothing (eg, sandbagging, a job that can be struck from the list of "jobs that Americans won't do")
New Orleans: not much willingness to do much of anything to help except point fingers

Iowa : ZERO looting
New Orleans: looting galore

Iowa: organization, well organized news conferences, people following orders
New Orleans: chaos, finger-pointing, racial tensions, blacks and racist media thugs daring to point their fingers at whites and an "evil" government

Iowa: well run, orderly, well prepared shelters even though they are not really set up to house flood victims
New Orleans: chaos, unprepared shelters, Superdome a living hell for whites (ie, racism), even though New Orleans has a well publicized and well known Gulf hurricane threat every year

I could go on, but the preparedness and capability and cooperation and functionality and success of white Iowa stand in sharp contrast to Mayor Nagin's dysfunctional chocolate city.

Of course, the fact that New Orleans was run for a century by crooked Democrat politicians, who in the 1950s wrested levee and dike construction & monitoring from the hands of the Corps of Engineers, has a bit to do with it. For the last six decades, the crooked Dem politicians have controlled the maintenance & upkeep of the system of levee/dikes with predictable corrupt mismanagement.

And of course, when the dikes broke, the fault was all GWB's.

Only the big lie called the MSM could concoct such a calumnious lie. And get away with it because of a corrupt Dem political machine in DC. Headed by Pelosi & Reid. And soon to be aided and abetted by Barack Hussein Obama, unless the country recognizes the clear and present danger of the RICO career bureaucracy, staffed completely by Dems who never met a payroll & who are infested by crooked lawyers from top to bottom.

The ridiculous human offscourings inhabiting NO resemble Lagos more than an American city. Corruption rules.

La La Land ==Lazy LA Lakers

The Celtics win and basketball is the better for that fact. Happily, Kobe Bryant will never be compared with Michael [or rather will be with the glaring inconsistency of MJ's record in the NBA Finals, where MJ went six for six and never let the Final Series get past six games.]

Kobe in his post-Shaq incarnation so far hasn't got past six either, as the June 17th debacle demonstrates, and in the worst possible way for Kobe.

Let's just say that Kobe has leadership problems, and with a bunch of talented morons like Rad & Vuk on his squad, will continue to be ignored in key situations when he should be the point person. Read Keown's article linked above for details.

Venezuela's Chavez a Serial Bungler

The Economist has a story named "Hugo Chavez: Master Tactician or Serial Bungler?" After ten years, the empty shelves in the cities and abandoned farmsteads across the country leave little room for doubt---Hugo is a titanic catastrophe for the country and either a democratic revolution from below or a military coup may be necessary to lance this carbuncle from the top of the Venezuelan menagerie.

When I worked for a major aoil company, I found that the basis for a civil society was far more advanced in Venezuela at the time than in Mexico, another country on my entry-strategy concerns [Mexico had a bloated oil workforce in "ghost jobs" that comprised 20% of the country's labor force]. But since his mini-coup, Chavez has become a traditional cacique with his own populist claque clamoring for goodies & begging for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. That large mass of lumpenproletariat Venezuelan society is about 40% of the country, almost all packed into urban favelas.

Unfortunately, people keep pouring into Venezuela's cities relentlessly because of the oil wealth, which is distributed more in large urban venues. And Colombians comprise about 20% of the Venezuelan population, according to the country's official Chief Demographer. Economic immigrants from other countries nearby are also numerous, making Venezuela the Latin equivalent of the USA.

Chavez's chief problem is that he really cannot trust the main body of the military, which even after a decade of his misrule, has remained impervious to much of his tinkering. The biggest problem of all, I was told by then-president Carlos Andres Perez, is that the country itself is governable only by corrupt bargains with local caciques who comprise a bunch of oligarchies spread across the country. The corruption is endemic, but the system works, he said, if democracy allows some sort of arena for compromise. But the Economist reminds us that this zany freak continues to aim for a complete socialist takeover by the left, as his "Fairness Doctrine" coup demonstrated early this year:

Amidst an economic slowdown, annual inflation of around 30% and an unprecedented crime-wave, his prospects of avoiding another humiliating defeat look slim. A new drubbing at the polls would be likely to dash any hope of reviving his plan to evade the constitutional ban on his re-election in 2012. A reaffirmation of the expiry date of his presidency would, in its turn, fire the starting gun of the race to succeed him, thereby further undermining his authority.

Some pundits argue that the recent spate of U-turns simply reflects a populist president's desire to avoid alienating the electorate. The more conspiratorially minded believe that the introduction of unpalatable measures, followed by partial retreats, is a deliberate strategy. They suggest that Mr Chávez is seeking to unsettle the political climate to such an extent that he retains the option to suspend the November elections if the polls look adverse.

A simpler reason for Mr Chávez's many U-turns may be that he has a habit of making policy mistakes, which then require correction. A few months ago, for example, the government announced a series of measures to prevent the economy from overheating. But it overdid the course-correction. In the first quarter of this year, the annual growth rate slowed by around four points, to 4.8%, in comparison with the same period last year. On June 11th, in yet another about-turn, the president announced that some of the measures in the original package would be reversed.

Still, amid all the tactical confusion, Mr Chávez does not appear to have lost sight of his two main strategic goals: the installation of a “socialist revolution” in Venezuela and his own indefinite re-election. After his defeat in the December referendum, a huge billboard went up on a building not far from the presidential palace. “Por ahora” (“For now”), it read.

That should be a warning. His foes have learnt the hard way that it is dangerous to underestimate Mr Chávez. He is fond of citing the battle of Santa Inés, in the war for independence from Spain, when a feigned retreat led to victory. As November's election approaches, he is working hard to make sure that he holds on to as many as possible of the 20 states (out of a total of 24) that are currently in chavista hands. He has repeatedly told his followers that if important states were to fall to the opposition, his own future would be in doubt—even going so far as to suggest that in such an event “there would be war”. It is too soon to count him out.

Sadly, Chavez is a near madman, closer in mentality to Cindy Sheehan and High-School dropout Sean Penn than to the advanced technocrats I dealt with in the Oil & Foreign Ministries. He is a dangerous uneducated fool and has no use for democracy unless it can further his advance to one-man rule.

The drama may have several more acts to go.

NBA Exciting as Refs Fail to Throw Game to Lakers

Larry Stern doth protest too much. My title above is only a bit facetious as the first quarter appeared to be going the Lakers' with a bit pf assistance from the calls by the ref.

Then I saw Paul Pierce get called on a dubious defensive foul and then immediately hit again on a dubious offensive foul, as if the refs were trying to keep him from completely the amazing comeback the Celtics had been fashioning against the Lakers. But finally my paranoia eased a bit when I realized that Kobe was also being called for fouls, though his were pretty obvious.

Finally, I realized that some games are played at such a superior level that refs can't really influence the outcome. Thankfully, the Celtics played at this level the second half and now I can hope that Boston will get its 17th Championship.

Jim Johnson Shows Obama Not Ready

Mickey Kaus has James Johnson's number and deserves to be quoted in full as to the perspicacious insights that Mickey has amassed on the serial bungler Johnson [except Mickey doesn't mention Johnson's Target CEO/Chma experience, perhaps because Target is still above water, unlike Fannie Mae & everything else JJ has withered with his purple thumb]:

Obama's Friend of Angelo: Barack Obama's choice of Jim Johnson to vet his VP prospects is already embarrassing his campaign, thanks to a WSJ story reporting that Johnson (according to the NY Sun)
took at least five real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corp. through an informal program for friends of the company's CEO, Angelo Mozilo. ...

Mozilo and Countrywide were deeply enmeshed in the subprime meltdown, of course, and Mozilo has been denounced by Obama for his business practices and multi-million dollar compensation. ...

a) Always trust content from kausfiles!

b) Obama's response suggests these were "completely above board transactions," which is a little different from saying they were "arms-length" or "market-rate" transactions. Why would Johnson avail himself of Mozilo's "friends of Angelo" program unless he got some kind of special deal, better than the deal Joe Citizen would get? (And if it's so difficult to tell "the factors that went into these arrangements," as the Obama camp contends, then how "above board" were they?)

c) Johnson headed Fannie Mae. If Fannie Mae was really "the biggest buyer of Countrywide's mortgages," should Johnson really have gotten enmeshed as a consumer with Countrywide, particularly if it was hard to tell if he was getting a special deal or not?

d) I don't know if Mozilo is a benevolent genius or evil. I saw him at a conference once and he's clearly an impressive person. But it's also quite clear that Obama has made him a symbol of the subprime mess, as McCain has noted. Update: As the RNC has been pointing out, Obama's campaign previously attacked Hillary strategist Mark Penn because he did some P.R. work for Countrywide--and attacked Hillary's campaign because it took contributions from representatives of Countrywide. ** (Now-embarrassing self-righteous David Plouffe quote below.)

e) Johnson was an atrocious, tin-eared choice on many other grounds. He's a symbol of old Democratic elites--the Mondale Restoration!--and of Beltway business as usual. He's gotten obscenely rich off of public service while pursuing a failed liberal antipoverty theory (community develpment) and taking credit for spreading around other peoples money. He failed to catch Geraldine Ferraro's problems before they blew up on Mondale. He helped lead Fannie Mae into a multi-billion dollar debacle (even though he let his successor catch most of the blame). He said Mozilo's firm had "done a brilliant job of insulating itself for the down cycle" shortly before Mozilo's firm was clobbered in the down cycle, eventually selling itself to Bank of America for about a tenth of it's former value, according to the Sun.

Although Mickey left out Target & the sleazy use of unions and other Dem resources to bash Wal-Mart, Target's biggest rival, there is a lot of chin-scratching as to why this veritable poster-boy for old Dem moral sleaze & ethical laxity was the HEAD of Obama's VEEP search.

Did Obama not know of Johnson's reputation as a behind-the-scenes bag man for various Dem causes, a sort of George Soros precursor? Or lets let Mickey continue in his own words, and the bold sentences are in the original:

Why would Obama, in his first big personnel decision, choose a paleoliberal greedhead with a track record of failure? You tell me! He's described Johnson as "a friend." It looks as if he was at best highly susceptible to amicable overtures from someone he about whom he should have retained some critical perspective.
f) Is Obama really going to let this story drag out all week? Are Johnson's allies so powerful he must be protected--the way Rev. Wright was protected, for a time? Why not say "This is not the Jim Johnson I know" and throw him overboard? Remember the Parable of the Band-Aid. ...
**--From WaPo back in March:
"Obama aides also said Clinton is in no position to stiffen oversight after taking contributions from mortgage industry lobbyists, including funds from representatives of Countrywide, which has been at the center of the mortgage meltdown. 'If we're really going to crack down on the practices that caused the credit and housing crises, we're going to need a leader who doesn't owe these industries any favors,' campaign manager David Plouffe said." [E.A.]

Hmmm...... Wright was "a friend." Johnson was "a friend." Rezko is "a friend."

With friends like that, Obama needs no enemies. Indeed, he's his own worst enemy.

Porn on Public Website of Chief Judge of 9th Circus Court of Appeals

Alex Kozinski must have been appointed by Bill Clinton as a bad joke or for doing standout pimping duties while Bill was in LA [when he wasn't getting a $400 haircut on Air Force One in the middle of a runway at LAX].

Famously, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "I know it when I see it" concerning porn.

Sign of the times: Chief Judge Kozinski of the Ninth Circus---infamous for bad rulings that are routinely reversed by SCOTUS---thinks that naked women on all fours painted to look like cows are "funny."

His personal porn collection was posted on his public website "by mistake."

Just like almost all of this loon's rulings, a "mistake."

WSJNBC Poll Omits Blacks, "Bradley Effect"

The Wall Street Journal has a sane commentary on the latest poll it did in concert with in-the-tank-for-Obama NBC.

Interestingly, the poll lists every ethnic, gender and economic subgroup in the country: whites women men Hispanics suburban bluecollar, etc, except one:

THE BLACKS who are 99% for Obama.

Funny how they left that out.

And of course, being PC means that political realities in polling such as the so-called "Bradley Effect" in which pollsters are dishonestly told that a voter will vote for a black candidate because of a desire not to appear bigoted----that is too real for the ephemeral cloud-cuckoo methodologies of pollsters, whose main goals are often to elect the candidate of their choice---in NBC's case, Obama.

NBA Continues its Charade of a "Championship Finals"---The Fix Is Obvious to Everyone.

Disgraced Ref Tom Donaghy may be discredited in his officiating, but I believe his letter that the 2002 NBA Finals were fixed by refs who called dozens of fouls against the Kings & many fewer against the big network eyeball drawing LA Lakers.

The NBA is all about money. I watched a Heat game last year in which Donaghy called a foul two seconds AFTER both teams were returning to the other court after a rebound. This was one of the fouls that raised suspicions that Donaghy was in the tank. The letter alleges other series were affected:

Donaghy also claims that a 2005 playoff series was improperly influenced, saying that referees were instructed to call illegal screens more strictly on a particular player after an opposing owner called to complain after falling behind 2-0 in the series.

Though the document again does not name anyone specifically, Mark Cuban did complain to the league that year about the officiating after his Mavericks fell behind 2-0 in their series with Houston. Dallas went on to beat the Rockets in seven games.

Then-Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy claimed at the time that an official — who was not working the playoffs — informed him of the plan.

"I didn't think that really worked in the NBA, but in this case it has," Van Gundy told reporters after the fourth game of the series, according to USA Today. He was later fined $100,000, a record sum for a coach.

The document also described other alleged infractions, including league officials telling referees that they should withhold calling technical fouls on certain star players because doing so hurt ticket sales and television ratings."

Sleaze-ball Cuban has been right up there with RICO conspirator Stern in the action, it appears.

How anyone with eyeballs couldn't see the flagrant foul LA Laker Fisher inflicted on Spur Barry at the end of Game 5 [I believe] in San Antonio---the foul wasn't called & Barry could have sent the team into overtime---is beyond me.

But obviously Stern & his sleazy greedy owners wanted the Lakers in the Finals so that a larger market would be drawing eyeballs. Where is RICO now when we need it? Ditto with the third game of the LA/Celtics game when the refs called a dozen dubious fouls on Boston after LA coach Jackson complained about the officiating in game 2.

I have watched pro b-ball sink to a level so that an unconvicted, unindicted rapist is compared to Michael Jordan---this game is swirling in the porcelain bowl ready to exit ingloriously to where it belongs.

At least World Wide Wrestling doesn't pretend to be above board.

ESPN has more, including reminding me that when the unindicted rapist above shoved & elbowed Mike Bibby, BIBBY WAS CALLED FOR THE FOUL!!! Here's more from ESPN:

• "Tim explained the league officials would tell referees that they should withhold calling technical fouls on certain star players because doing so would hurt ticket sales and television ratings," the letter adds. "As an example, Tim explained how there were times when a referee supervisor would tell referees that NBA Executive X did not want them to call technical fouls on star players or remove them from the game. In January 2000, Referee D went against these instructions and elected a star player in the first quarter of the game. Referee D later was privately reprimanded by the league for that ejection."

• In addition to game-altering allegations, Donaghy's letter claims that many officials carry on "relationships" with team executives, coaches and players that violate their NBA contracts. For example, it said, referees broke NBA rules by hitting up players for autographs, socializing with coaches and accepting meals and merchandise from teams.

"Tim described one referee's use of a team's practice facility to exercise and another's frequent tennis matches with a team's coach," the letter says.

• The letter also alleges that during a 2005 Rockets-Mavericks playoff series, "Team 3 lost the first two games in the series and Team 3's Owner complained to NBA officials. Team 3's Owner alleged that referees were letting a Team 4 player get away with illegal screens. NBA Executive Y told Referee Supervisor Z that the referees for that game were to enforce the screening rules strictly against that Team 4 player. Referee Supervisor Z informed the referees about his instructions. As an alternate referee for that game, Tim also received these instructions."

Mavs owner Mark Cuban did in fact complain after his team lost the first two games of the series, and Dallas went on to beat Houston in seven games. Jeff Van Gundy, then the coach of the Rockets, said that an NBA official had told him about the league's plan to closely monitor moving screens by Yao Ming, and Van Gundy was ultimately fined $100,000 for his comments regarding the situation. Van Gundy later backed off his comments.

Documents

• Tim Donaghy, right, claims that other referees were involved in altering NBA games.
• The Donaghy legal team addresses the NBA's claim that he must pay $1 million restitution.
During halftime of the Lakers-Celtics game on Tuesday, Van Gundy, a commentator for the game, said that while he still thinks Yao was unfairly targeted, he does not lend any credibility to what Donaghy has to say.

Lester Munson appears somewhat sympathetic with Donaghy, demonstrating that this hornet's nest burst open after greedy sleazeball Stern demanded $1 million from Donaghy for compensation in "investigating" the crooked ref's ethical infractions. This demand was to get Donaghy more jail time as he appeared ready to get out of jail free for his revelations about other improprieties. If Donaghy couldn't repay the NBA for its "investigation," then more time in the slammer. But as Munson demonstrates, D's lawyer cleverly turned the tables on the NBA, demanding access to the Investigation Papers & proof that said probe actually cost $1 million. Thus demonstrating the stupidity of the NBA front office, if that had to be shown again.

This also demonstrates again that all the get-along-to-go-along guys like Ted Van Gundy, who was fined $100K for protesting the ridiculous game where Yao was targeted, will not get sleazeball Stern & his greedy ownership pals out of this jam. Munson on the caving to Cuban by Stern:
Stephen Smith also hints that the NBA shot itself in the foot by demanding reimbursement for its investigation. Smith bravely brings up other scandalous on-court behavior by refs in other games---some refs are human shitholes, as we all know, and have their particular bete noires.

Stephen Smith now says that the "Dream Season" is turning into a nightmare right in the middle of the NBA Finals---when two great teams are suddenly spotlighted by past misbehavior that may have helped them win close games. I know that if I were a rabid Spurs fan, I wouldn't be happy right now. I wasn't happy last year when two Suns players were kept out of a game for leaving the bench after a flagrant foul by SA Spur Robert Horry, a habitual thug on the court. I was happy to see the Pistons lose, but unhappy when a ref threw Rasheed Wallace out for staring at him.

And I am still unhappy because the unindicted, unconvicted rapist keeps not getting technicals called on him when he protests calls that go the other way. He is kept in the game just as Divac & Pollard in 2002 were sent to the bench---and Bibby is called for a foul after suffering multiple contacts from the unindicted unconvicted rapist---who isn't fit to tie MJ's shoes.

The Lakers are in the finals because media-whores like Stern love to see Jack N. & other Hollyweirdos in the Staples Center, where TV cameras pan frequently to catch them gazing on their boys in yellow. As for me, screw the Lakers and screw the NBA.

Consumption Over Production Equals Decline

The "Almighty Dollar" of yore has fallen on hard times because of one thing---the loss of the basic American values that made us the wealthiest country in the world, since about 1880 if you read the economic historians. Of course, the Americans still produce over 25% of the world's goods & services [The Economist has 28% in a cover-special about a year-and-a-half ago], We are not going to hell in a hand-basket as liberals continually howl at the moon about. But David Brooks, who on politics is about as mushy centrist as Andrew Sullivan used to be before he switched sides [As did Arianna Puff-Huff who was a ranting conservative a decade ago] has a real point in his Op-Ed in Pravda-on-the-Hudson:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

Sixty-two scholars have signed on to a report by the Institute for American Values and other think tanks called, “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture,” examining the results of all this. This may be damning with faint praise, but it’s one of the most important think-tank reports you’ll read this year.

The deterioration of financial mores has meant two things. First, it’s meant an explosion of debt that inhibits social mobility and ruins lives. Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said.

Second, the transformation has led to a stark financial polarization. On the one hand, there is what the report calls the investor class. It has tax-deferred savings plans, as well as an army of financial advisers. On the other hand, there is the lottery class, people with little access to 401(k)’s or financial planning but plenty of access to payday lenders, credit cards and lottery agents.

Jesus said "The Poor Will Always be with Us." He might have mentioned the stupid at the same time. The Democrats remind me of the lottery sales pitches----higher taxes on the rich and everyone will be financially equal. Of course, no one except a Krugman-type could believe that----the wealth that the so-called "rich" invest leads to greater amounts of wealth for all, in an expanding pie. The Dems always want the socialist static pie with rearranged slice-distribution. Which never works, and you can check out Cuba, N. Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma for some recent socialist success stories. But Brooks' point is clear:

The loosening of financial inhibition has meant more options for the well-educated but more temptation and chaos for the most vulnerable. Social norms, the invisible threads that guide behavior, have deteriorated. Over the past years, Americans have been more socially conscious about protecting the environment and inhaling tobacco. They have become less socially conscious about money and debt.

The agents of destruction are many. State governments have played a role. They aggressively hawk their lottery products, which some people call a tax on stupidity. Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is starkly regressive. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income. Aside from the financial toll, the moral toll is comprehensive. Here is the government, the guardian of order, telling people that they don’t have to work to build for the future. They can strike it rich for nothing.

Brooks goes on to castigate payday lenders and credit card companies who boost interest rates through the roof with one late payment..... But the malefactors wouldn't thrive if there were alternatives, of which he hypothetically muses upon:

The list could go on. But the report, which is nicely summarized by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in The American Interest (available free online), also has some recommendations. First, raise public consciousness about debt the way the anti-smoking activists did with their campaign. Second, create institutions that encourage thrift.

Foundations and churches could issue short-term loans to cut into the payday lenders’ business. Public and private programs could give the poor and middle class access to financial planners. Usury laws could be enforced and strengthened. Colleges could reduce credit card advertising on campus. KidSave accounts would encourage savings from a young age. The tax code should tax consumption, not income, and in the meantime, it should do more to encourage savings up and down the income ladder.

There are dozens of things that could be done. But the most important is to shift values. Franklin made it prestigious to embrace certain bourgeois virtues. Now it’s socially acceptable to undermine those virtues. It’s considered normal to play the debt game and imagine that decisions made today will have no consequences for the future.

Sadly, once the irresponsible baby-boomers' opening of Pandora's Box made everything relative, there is little chance of getting that toothpaste back in the tube [metaphor alert!]

Bush Leaves NATO Stronger as Putin Seethes

Matthew Kaminski writes in the WSJ that GWB has shored up NATO in Europe by strengthening ties with our traditional postwar allies and by assisting new entrants who wish to escape the crushing embraces of the Russian bear.

Kaminski says that the bolstering of NATO over the last half-decade has several causes:

First came a political shift. Anti-Americanism, while a potent cultural and social phenomenon, turned out to be an electoral loser. Its most prominent European practitioners, Germany's Gerhard Schröder and France's Jacques Chirac, were replaced by politicians friendly to the U.S. such as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.

These two were different – let's say more "American" – in other important respects as well. Ms. Merkel isn't only the first woman chancellor, but the first German leader from the old communist East; her moral outlook was shaped by first-hand experience of Soviet totalitarianism. Mr. Sarkozy is the first French leader born after the liberation of Paris, to parents of Jewish and Hungarian stock no less. He doesn't carry Gaullist hang-ups about American power and France's shame about being occupied and then liberated by the allies during World War II.

In his first year, Mr. Sarkozy has pushed for a vibrant NATO and close ties with America – all in the name of strengthening Europe and France. Next year, he plans to bring France back into NATO's military wing more than four decades after Charles de Gaulle wrenched it out. His positive spin on trans-Atlantic relations contrasts with Mr. Chirac's reflexive efforts to check the U.S. at any turn. Mr. Bush has, like Bill Clinton before him, proved a staunch supporter of NATO. In response to the Sarkozy initiative, the administration dropped its skepticism about a common European defense and foreign policy, and backed efforts to get EU countries to pull their military weight. The U.S. has discovered that it needs help in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq anyway it can get it.

Of course, a lot of the above is a bit cosmetic. While working in France for the State Department, I was told that France had never changed its military codes after De Gaulle's ballyhooed departure from NATO's military wing. Thus France would be there in a DefCon Five situation even if Le Grand Charles could strut his anti-American shuffle to the delight of the Left Bank gauchistes whose incessant pangs of ardor for a totalitarian France were unrequited. But I digress.

Kaminski follows the Europeanist route that all American diplomats after World War II have secretly pined for:

Another quiet change since the Iraq war has been a trans-Atlantic convergence of outlooks. In their most recent security strategies, both France and the U.K. highlighted in gloomy terms the threat of terrorism and WMD. Differences remain on proper responses, but the leading Western powers are getting closer.

Finally, Europeans caught a strain of realism. Ironically, the emergence of "a multipolar world" – that great Gaullist dream – was what sobered the Continent's elites about their own relative weakness, and led them back to America. With the rise of non-American powers, Europe was supposed to push its unique brand of multilateralism. But two of the emerging powers, Russia and China, are authoritarian regimes with little time for Europe's utopian model of "permanent peace." The third, India, shows no interest in being allied with an EU saddled with low birth and growth rates.

Leaving its old default-buddy, the US of A. It's all about......guess what----the money!

Europe couldn't find its place in this world. Except, that is, as a partner to the West's leading democracy, the United States. Suddenly gone are the loudly voiced European anxieties going back to the Clinton presidency about an unwieldy "hyperpower." In their place come paeans to shared democratic values, a long common history and the world's by far most lucrative commercial partnership.

So the road ahead for NATO is fraught with difficulties that no American president can ignore. And the EUtopian urge to levitate on clouds of vapid cloud-cuckoo rhetoric always keeps its unpredictable politics a dodgy sort of whack-a-mole----who could have foreseen the sudden volte face of the Spanish electorate after the Madrid train bombing, a sort of collective rout of a once-proud nation into neutrality and passivity.

Barack Obama or John McCain can build on these foundations next year. Whoever takes over will also inherit from Mr. Bush the unresolved problems of Iran's nuclear bomb program, Afghanistan's fragile state, and an aggressive Russia – just for starters. The next president will look to Europe for help. So we'll soon see how much of a disconnect really exists between European rhetoric and political will.

Will Germany boost its support for the Afghan mission and prove willing to face down Russia over further eastward NATO enlargement? Will the EU unite around a muscular approach toward Iran (assuming America discovers its own muscle)? How much will France resent America's push to embrace Turkey as part of the West? What happens if al Qaeda strikes again?

The six decades of NATO kept the world free from totalitarian rigidity. The challenges ahead may not be as black-and-white, but the alliance is firm enough to withstand and confront whatever comes its way.

Thanks in large part to George W. Bush.

Poll Says: Media Sux. Next Question?

Rasmussen is about the only poll out there untouched by MSM leftist infectedness. Over 80% of those questioned across the board believe that the media is tilting one way or the other.

Which way depends on which media and your own perspective, but in 2006, a three-year study of twenty years of media coverage by the very respected journalism schools at UCLA & U. of Missouri concluded that the American media leans heavily in favor of Democrats, liberalism, and perspectives giving an advantage to left-wing perceptions of class warfare, poor being taken advantage of unfairly, conspiracies by powerful vested interests. Perhaps this could have some merit if the powerful interests pinpointed by the MSM were evenly distributed among the two major political parties.

Alas, the American networks, most cable news, a majority of newspapers and even the blogosphere tend to perceive the lion's share of the misuse of power in the Republican lobbyists and their nefarious manipulations of gullible politicians. FYI, I am copying an e-mail sent to me by a concerned citizen for your perusal:

Remember the election in 2006?
Thought you might like to read the following:
A little over one year ago:

1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high;
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon;
3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.

Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we have seen:

1) Consumer confidence plummet;
2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon;
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase);
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate (stock and mutual fund losses);
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars;
6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.

America voted for change in 2006, and we got it!

Remember it's Congress that makes law not the President. He has to work with what's handed to him.

Quote of the Day........"My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it." -- Barack Obama

Part 2:
Taxes...Whether Democrat or a Republican you will find these statistics enlightening and amazing.
www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html
Taxes under Clinton 1999 Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250

Both democratic candidates will return to the higher tax rates

It is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above think Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If Obama or Hillary are elected, they both say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people that fall into the categories above can't wait for it to happen. This is like the movie "The Sting" with Paul Newman; you scam somebody out of some money and they don't even know what happened.

PART 3:
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much?
Read this:
Boy am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments. Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. Verify at:http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. Verify at:http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. Verify athttp://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. Verify at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. Verify at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US . Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period." Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ." Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. And Obama promises to increase that number substantially!

Barbara Boxer is the Chief Nurse in the Dem Cuckoo's Nest. The Senate narrowly averted her hare-brained insane windfall profits tax fiasco from being included into an overall tax bill that would add trillions to American taxes.

She herself is a total loon, but many apparently semi-sane democrats are ready to follow this hormonally hyper lemming over the cliff---and if BHO is elected in '08---watch out!!!

Lil Johnny Mack thinks he can be bipartisan and sing in the Dem key without learning all the words.

Fuhgeddabouddit!! They will steal this country and every viable economic enterprises profits to a level that will equal EUtopia and its mandarin EUnuchate of Brussels faceless functionaries' plateau of economic stagnation.