Is Demography Political Destiny?

Michael Barone is the savviest political guru of overall trends with the possible exception of Kevin Phillips, who has slipped recently. Barone's political bible The Almanac of American Politics is ubiquitous in DC and if Barone were a Democratic pundit, he would be invited onto every Sunday morning talkfest bar none. In today's WSJ, Barone does some future mapping that is bad news for the Democrats.

The gist of Barone's analysis is that the southward and westward internal migration of the previous decades has been altered to migrations from the East and Left Coasts inland. The link above has the details.

Domestic inflow has been a whopping 19% in Las Vegas, 15% in the Inland Empire (California's Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, where much of the outflow from Los Angeles has gone), 13% in Orlando and Charlotte, 12% in Phoenix, 10% in Tampa, 9% in Jacksonville. Domestic inflow was over 200,000 in the Inland Empire, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Orlando. These are economic dynamos that are driving much of America's growth. There's much less economic polarization here than in the Coastal Megalopolises, and a higher percentage of traditional families: Natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) in the Interior Boomtowns is 6%, well above the 4% in the Coastal Megalopolises.

He goes on to say that Florida will probably have the same number of electoral votes in 2012 as New York, Arizona will have 12 to sixteen for Barone's native state of Michigan. All in the last sixty years. And besides domestic inflow, the "natural increase" of children being born is far higher in the internal heartland areas which are predominantly Republican.

Finally, a quibble. Barone puts Miami in the coastal megalopolis category, but Miami has an outflow of 2% and an inflow of 8%, making it perhaps the only coastal city to thrive over 2000-2006. Since they switched parties in the past decade, Florida and Texas are fast becoming natural Republican bases, if Barone's analysis is correct and voting patterns persist. And both will get more CDs---hence electoral votes---when the 2010 census verifies the various data bases Barone employs for his article.

Meantime, I am looking for the latest edition of Barone's Almanac of American Politics which is the single best book for understanding the rich variety of America's political base.

Noose Tightening on Pasqua and Chirac?

The belly-aching in the US media about Halliburton is non-stop, it seems, but at least the US media works to uncover seamy relationships between Government and business. In countries with no real First Amendment rights like France, the process of unraveling the sordid political bonds twixt political protectors and big oil is much harder to uncover. Take Oil-for-Food and Iraq, for instance.

When I was living there, the French government was discovered to have put a "table d'ecoutes," or bug, in the conference room of Le Canard Enchaine, a satirical journal much like the Onion or the Tatler, only much more widely distributed and respected as telling the truths which must not be uttered in the marketplace of public discourse. When the scandal erupted, the government simply threatened to raise the price of raw paper for newsprint, and in the press and electronic media, utter silence ensued.

But French courts are more independent than the supine French press, and now the rocks are beginning to be turned over and the exploits of former Senator and Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, whom all observers know as Chirac's fixer and bagman, ["tuyau" in the local argot], are being increasingly exposed. Over a year ago, Le Monde courageously buried Pasqua's indictment for Oil-for-Food below the fold deep in its daily. There was no follow-up anywhere by the tame and complicit French press, nor none overseas, as the MSM in the US views Chirac as an ally in its campaign to destroy GWB.

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece with a graph demonstrating how Total, a company notoriously in bed with the French political elites, no matter who wins the national election, is just one of many big foreign oil operations trying to pay off the mullahs to get into Iran's oilfields at the expense of US majors.

Read the piece, and the next time you drive into a Shell station, remember that you are helping the mullahs and their little madman Ahmedinejad in their campaign to destroy Israel and eventually, the Western Civilization most Americans treasure.

Ann Coulter Hits a Four-Bagger

You love her and you hate her and you can't help watching and reading her because
Ann Coulter is smarter and sharper than any fever-swamp denizen on the lefty roster of the bloggerati. Read her SHOOTING ELEPHANTS IN A BARREL and get your blood pumping at the simple silliness of Sandy Bergler stealing/destroying documents which the 9/11 Commission needed to make its judgments and walking away with the drastic punishment of picking up litter in Virginia parks. Then note that a witch-hunt by a political assassin named Fitzgerald catches Libby stumbling in nonsensical memory games---after FitzFong knew the leak had been to Novak by Armitage before he started his show trial. And that Plame was not a covert agent, as Ms. Toensing points out in her lucid professional fashion. Just another Vishinsky-type purge by rabid apparatchiki of the left peddling their agitprop.

GWB is either too compliant or, in the case of last year's elections, preaching ceaselessly about Iraq when he should have been non-stop touting the best economy ever. He either gets wobbly like his Poppy or stubbornly butts his head against walls. Why doesn't he realize that the MSM will never forgive him for defeating Gore in 2000? The game is fixed, and Coulter does well to remind the ridiculous flaps about chasing DeLay while a crook like Cong. Jefferson gets appointed by Pelosi to Homeland Security, with its fungible secrets that Jefferson will trade for more cold cash to the highest bidder. Pelosi is a machine politician more crooked than DeLay ever was.

The outcome is rigged, and if Billy-Jeff can pardon a mega-criminal like Marc Rich in return for massive contributions to his library and some fleshy face-time with Marc's wife Deborah, then Libby can get pardoned for faulty memory in a kangaroo court plumped up in the media by mendacious reporters like Tim Russert. And Chris Matthews.

Hardy Perennial: Saudis Running Out of Oil---Not!!!

One of the most predictable news stories recurring every six months or so has surfaced again. It usually takes one of three forms: the Saudi Royal Family is on the verge of collapsing and will be taken over by the military, by religious fanatics, or by religious fanatics in the military. Take two: the Saudis are on the verge of running out of oil. Take three: the Saudis are going to force the price of oil down to help the USA elect a Republican president, or alternatively the Saudis are going to let the price of oil rise to punish the USA for its Middle East policies.

The Oil Drum is a variant of number two. The logic of the link above, despite impressive-looking graphs, doesn't hold much water.

First, Oil Minister Ali Naimi did say in November that the Saudis would go along with OPEC production cuts, a factoid the author neglects to mention. The reason for this might be OPEC solidarity, including Persian/Arabian Gulf regional politics. This Gulfie perspective includes the first visit in living memory of an Iranian highest-level official [President Ahmedinejad] to Saudi Arabia. Not even in the days of the Shah did an Iranian head-of-state or senior official visit Saudi Arabia. Indeed, I don't believe that this has happened for centuries. Of course, The Oil Drum neglects to mention this tidbit while sententiously intoning

The entire "production cut" may be a public relations exercise to disguise other processes.

So it may be a political move to keep a nasty war in Iraq from expanding, and increasing Saudi influence in the region by enticing the President of Iran to the Kingdom, using the production cuts as an agreed precondition, rather than an elaborate ruse cunningly contrived to cover over oilfield deterioration. A Saudi/Iran relationship automatically increases the influence of the Saudis in any overrall Middle East scenario.

Just a quibble, but one must remember that an entire cottage industry has developed over the decades of those who write like one commenter:

Saudi [sic] went deep into the heart of the Rub al-Khali to find this little patch of oil. The “Rub al-Kaali [sic] represents one of the most extreme areas in the world with summer temperatures shifting from below 0ºC at night to over 60ºC at noon. Dunes can reach heights of more than 300 metres.” Needless to say this is one of the most inhospitable places in the world to drill wells and to lay pipelines. Yet this represents the extremes Saudi will go to in order to produce just a little more oil. But they are said to have 264.2 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Proven reserves means they know exactly where this oil is. To produce it, they would just have to go to a spot they already have plotted on the map, sink a well and produce more oil. Yet they do not do this, they instead go deep into the Rub al-Khali, search for years, (they were exploring the Rub al-Khali when I was there over twenty years ago), until they find a tiny patch of oil, then crow about it to all the world. Something here just does not make any sense.

First of all, the "term of art" is "proven recoverable reserves." Recoverable means at a rate that is within the boundaries of current technology. Second, the tendentious paragraphs above neglect to mention that Saudi Aramco has found dozens of oilfields in the Rub' Al-Khali. The Saudis have another quarter-billion "probable" reserves, according to Al Jumu'ah. And another indeterminate amount of "possible" reserves, so draw your own conclusions. The only thing that doesn't make any sense is making a big to-do about something the Saudis have been doing for decades. [Note the semantics of "crow about it to all the world." The announcements of new finds in the Rub' al Khali have been taking place since the mid-seventies. As well as finds elsewhere in the Kingdom. The only reason the Saudis don't go into production is because of something these cottage-industry Saudi-bashers always overlook: economics.
The Oil Drum neglects to mention that Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where the marginal barrel is the least expensive barrel. It costs around $3/barrel to extract a barrel of crude from Ghawar, which is a lake of oil over 120 miles in width. Why extract from the Empty Quarter at $30/barrel when Ghawar produces it for $3?

This cottage industry regularly churns out alarmist predictions about the Saudis, and by extension, the entire world's oil production industry, on a metronomic basis. Sort of like global warming or global cooling. Back when I was first in Saudi Arabia, global cooling was all the rage. Last time I was there, global warming was the favorite sky-is-falling trope/meme. The metronome again.

Finally, the writer neglected to mention two salient facts about the current industry. The Iranians are losing much of their production capacity due to inefficiency and incompetence and they need higher oil prices to finance their ambitious weaponizing of their developing nuclear capacity. Second, the Iranians have to import refined products, again due to poor planning and incompetent maintenance of their own refineries.

My bet is that the President of Iran might be visiting the Saudis to ask for an allocation of refined product from the Shell Export Refinery at Jubail, which I have visited on a couple of occasions. This would alleviate expensive imports from alternative sources, which are gouging the Iranians in expensive crude/refined product swaps at the moment.

The Saudis may be lowering their production, but they will retain a large cushion of excess capacity and the ability to increase production for decades to come. In any event, the Saudi production cuts are not the result of diminished production capacity, though some eventually will occur.

As for the world running out of oil, the head of the Iraqi Geological Survey at SOMO in Baghdad told me in 1988 that Iraq had 200 million barrels of proven reserves, but not recoverable at present prices [back then in the teens of dollars] and he also told me that the Mesopotamian Foredeep had not been extensively explored because his geological teams did not like going out into the desert! So Iraq could possibly have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, but no one really knows!

Clinton Pardons Redux

In regard to the recent Clinton-Obama kerfluffle, there is a short reminder of the consequences of a second Clinton dynastic reign that includes a list by
Newsmax.

Geffen went ballistic when he learned that President Clinton issued pardons to wrongdoers like Rich and 139 others in his final days in office. Among the pardons that sparked the most controversy:

# Marc Rich was indicted on tax evasion, commodities fraud and other charges in 1983 and fled to Switzerland. After Clinton pardoned him, a House committee probing Clinton’s pardons sought testimony from Rich’s ex-wife Denise, who had been a major contributor to Democratic causes – including Hillary’s Senate campaign and the Clinton Presidential Library. Denise Rich invoked the Fifth Amendment.

# Almon Glenn Braswell was pardoned of his mail fraud and perjury convictions after paying about $200,000 to Hillary’s brother, Hugh Rodham, to represent his case for clemency. He later returned the payments, but he too invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Congressional hearing.

# In 2000, Clinton pardoned Vonna Jo Gregory, owner of the carnival company United Shows International, and her husband Edgar for a 1982 bank fraud conviction. After the pardon, the company gave Hillary’s brother Anthony Rodham $107,000 in "loans” that he has never repaid.

# On his last day in office, Clinton pardoned his old friend Susan McDougal, who had already completed her sentence for her role in the Whitewater scandal.

# Clinton also pardoned his brother Roger on drug charges, and former Housing secretary Henry Cisneros, who was convicted of lying to the FBI about payments to a mistress.

# Clinton slashed the prison sentences of four men convicted of stealing millions in federal grants. The men were from a community of Hasidic Jews in New Square, N.Y., which voted 1,400 to 12 in favor of Hillary Clinton in her first Senate race.

# Clinton also commuted the sentences – over the objections of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office – of 11 members of a Puerto Rican nationalist group that set off more than 100 bombs in the U.S. The large Puerto Rican community in New York City supports Democrats.

Hagel Cranky on Stephanopoulos ABC Morning Show

The Dems have their own
problems, but two Republican Senators who may run for president were on the ABC Sunday Morning Show and though I missed most of McCain [except his somewhat impolitic endorsement of the Colts over the Bears in vote-rich Chicago], Hagel came across as querulous and defensive on his answers to GS's pointed questions about "what exactly are you for?"

Hagel almost resented the question, and when GS prodded him for specifics, started to retort in a three-octave range that made him sound like Dennis Kucinich. Truth is, Hagel has no answer to the NIE report that American withdrawal will leave Iraq and the whole region in a complete shambles and perhaps region-wide war.

And Hagel mentioned "McCain" several times in a somewhat disrespectful way, not calling him "Senator McCain," while giving other Senators their due as "Senator Clinton" and "Senator Biden." Not to mention Hagel's evasive answers to GS's points, which he answered by "read the [Levin/Hagel] proposal," without spelling out the specifics which would answer GS's queries. Methinks this gruff and unready persona won't play well in a national contest for pres, which GS asked Hagel about and which Hagel dodged. Could be a one-hit wonder.

And the Dems refuse to answer this elephant-in-the-living-room question. Yes, we are in the middle of a civil war [or several civil wars, as Iraq devolves into a Hobbesian war of all against all], but the implosion of an early American exit would bring in overt Iranian support for the Shi'ites, Saudi/Egyptian/Jordanian support for Sunnis, and a possible Turkish incursion into Kurdistan. The US "occupying forces" are now actually desired by most Iraqis, if only to avert an even worse situation. A recent poll studiously ignored by the ultra-left MSM demonstrates that most Sunnis and half the Shi'ites and all the Kurds support the US presence.

And a participant in the NIE exercise told me he spent months in hammer-and-tongs robust debate in the composition of the Estimate, classified Top Secret, only to see not only the unclassified but some highly classified material on the front page of the Washington Post on Friday morning. The Post, of course, emphasized the negative half-empty glass. For its ultra-left reasons, the Post avoided mentioning much about the catastrophe awaiting the region should the US heed the Kucinich/Edwards wing of the Democratic Party.

Groundhog Punxatawny Phil Versus UN IRGC: Phil Wins!

It's Groundhog Day and the movie with endless iterations reminds us that the Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still working overtime, as global freezing in the '70s morphs into global warming as the latest Chicken Little delirium tremens the MSM and UN scammers are foisting upon a besotted public opinion.

The attached article has the Methusaleh Groundhog evidently living since before 1886, but this old specimen of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore will almost certainly be more
accurate
than the hilarious pontifications of a super-special 113-country UN study which blames it all, like the Time Man/Person of the Year, on YOU!

So start feeling bad right now, sell the SUV, and ride a bike to the local grocery [I Tactually have two Taiwanese e-go electric bikes which I and spouse ride to the foodstore with, except both now have flat tires which are virtually impossible to re-inflate---just another design flaw]. My thoughts on Phil's commonsensical accuracy were pre-empted by Argggh! from the freezing Iraqi hinterlands. I will plagiarize myself from January 4th here:

may have ended up in the dustbin of history, but the tradition of political commissars has not ended. One with the ludicrous name of Rockefeller and the other a transgendered Republican have sent Exxon a threatening letter saying that the debate on Global Warming is hereby over.

The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."

What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:

environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Often wrong but never in doubt, say the IPCC doctrinal heirs to political commissar Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.

Actually, Canadian Prime Minister Harper may have the goods on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science by majority, in this case a tyrannical majority, which is comprised of go-along-to-get-along "climatologists" and other bureaucrats and petty functionaries of the mind. The rest of the world, Harper divined back in 2002, hates the USA for its continuous economic ascendancy and wants to drag it back down into the pitiful Keynesian nitwittery paint-by-numbers economies in their own squalid backyards.

Free markets ala Milton Friedman would deprive these functionaries of their raison d'etre. Their government meddling and taxes are what pays them and their scientific panels to measure, calibrate and subsequently cry out that the sky is falling!

Even non-socialist crony-capitalism countries fear truly free markets. The economic growth of the USA, which is perhaps 23% of the entire world economy, is what galls the Davos crowd [h/t: Dennis Mangan] and other senior functionaries from getting their meat-claws on American assets in order to tax the squat out of them. The IPCC reminds me of the "North-South Dialogue" of the seventies, which had whinging poor countries in the southern hemisphere guilt-tripping the industrial north for all sorts of freebies and emoluments.

The other night I watched Sens. Boxer and Inhofe on Larry King and Inhofe kept referring to statistics while Boxer referred constantly to drowning polar bears and King's Man-on-the-Street outtakes had people telling the camera "how bad they feel" that Katrina was the result of AGW.

Thoughts beat feelings, and while the MSM will act as cheerleaders for the ultra-left socialist agitpreppies at Davos, Paris, and other chic Comintern gatherings, I will bet against Sens. Snowe and Rockefeller and put my money on Punxatawny Phil.

Read Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson, for why I myself am a contrarian on AGW to the "consensus" of a tyrannical majority of "scientists."

Just a feeeeling I've got!!!

O'Reilly gets Fouled, Strikes Back and gets Called for Second Foul

Howie Kurtz at the Washington Post bemoans the condemnation and wrath Bill O'Reilly has displayed against NBC, which has scuttled leftward with the political winds. Kurtz knows his inside-the-Beltway audience shares NBC's leftish tilt, and panders to its delusion that NBC is "centrist" while he tries to deconstruct O'Reilly in his usual soft-pedaling manner.

He brings up Keith Olbermann, whose rants called "special comments" have been put on the blogosphere's most prominently ultra-left "media blogs" as audience-boosting ploys for the farthest reaches of the fever swamps.

As an obiter dictum, isn't it interesting that the favorite POLITICAL columnists of the loony left are failed Broadway critic Frank Rich, former Enron-consultant professor Paul Krugman and TV ex-sportscaster KOlbermann, who flunked out at his sports outpost by reportedly outlandish behavior and insufferable arrogance. Perfect job description for a ultra-left political observer, including the poor soul whom Kurtz chided O'Reilly for calling a lunatic, a New Age poster girl named Sansura Taylor whose mother must have had some bad acid while carrying little Sansura in the womb. Sansura's demented solecisms betray a City-by-the-Bay mindset so deranged that O'Reilly can't help himself and keeps inviting her on his show. Her IQ is such that he could be chided for cruelty to animals.

Kurtz's entire article is slanted pro-NBC and against O'Reilly, going so far as to quote:

Olbermann says O'Reilly's latest offensive "reeks a little bit of an attempt to get some attention," though the former sportscaster admits he started the feud as a way of raising his profile.

Just burying the lede as a final dependent clause, which is Kurtz's manner of writing. Let's say O'Reilly shook off the small dog biting his ankle as a more appropriate trope for the situation.

Kurtz quotes Joe Scarborough extensively, as though this recanted GOP congressman were a "conservative." Joe is tacking with the prevailing winds, though his cultural conservatism is still hostile to what he calls "Hollyweird."

Without defining the previous "layer of farce," Kurtz takes a cheap shot at BOR:

Adding an extra layer of farce, O'Reilly now regularly features a body-language expert, who said that Mitchell displayed "high level of uncomfortability" during her appearance on the show.

The fact is that O'Reilly did not condemn all of NBC as Kurtz deceptively implies, and actually praised the Today Show and Mitchell and some other relatively objective or centrist commentators. Though you wouldn't know this from Kurtz's hit-piece drive-by substance hidden by his soothing style.

But although Chris Matthews gets a free pass at saying Cheney "never passes up a chance to kill," an SF blogger can start a campaign against free speech from the left without any objection from the MSM, who will call right-wing comments that resemble Matthews' senseless rant against the VP "hate speech" and call for its abolishment---hang the First Amendment. Watch this blogger get on MSM and garner praise for trying to limit talk-radio, which is an outlet that entertains tax-paying working people on the job, obviously not a left-wing constituency.

Remember Alec Baldwin calling for Henry Hyde to be assassinated on network TV back during the height of the Clinton Impeachment for lying under oath? I do, but Orwell's memory hole has swallowed that up too.

And to switch from the prophetic 1984 to Animal Farm put it, some animals are more equal than others.

Both Libs & Conservs "Stuck on Stupid?"

Arnold Kling has a libertarian take on the fundamental hypothesis that only about 10% of the population invest any real energy in politics. And of that decimal, each of the paired-off opponents tend to give their own predilections an overwhelming bias in sorting out new information. As Kling succinctly sums up:

The masses' strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites' strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

So we have Matthew Arnold's "ignorant armies" on a "darkling plain." Or do we?

I believe in democracy because I distrust the elites. I distrust the elites because I believe that self-deception is widespread, and the elites are particularly skilled at it. Accordingly, I believe that it is important for those in power to have the humility of knowing that they may be voted out of office.

Others believe in democracy because they are hoping to see the triumph of a particular elite. Many liberals want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good. I see government technocrats as inevitably embedded in a political system that inefficiently processes information. The more they attempt, the more damage they are likely to do.[MY EMPHASIS] Many conservatives want to see government used for "conservative ends." However, I believe that the more that government tries to correct the flaws of families, the more flawed families will become.

"That government governs best which governs least," said Honest Abe, before the onset of the colossal catastrophe which post-war American government has become. I thank God daily for Medicare, but a single-payer system would be Iraq times ten, a catastrophe which would make Canadian wait-times move from months to years, just to take one example.

I worked for the US government for over a decade, and dealt with it in one way or another for three on a working basis. The bigger government is, the worse it operates. When I was a Beltway Bandito working with Booz Allen Hamilton, I learned of an unpublished study concerning the Pentagon which had been sponsored and paid for by the military itself. It concerned how best to cut back the size of the military bureaucracy. [This was in the early days of the Reagan presidency.] My fellow consultant-informant told me that the study had suggested that ANY WAY that personnel would be cut back would be preferable to the overpopulation of military technocrats and bureaucrats now functioning in the DC area. Indeed, the suggestion was made in the study [never published] that in the interests of efficiency and economy, it would be better if one out of every three names, regardless of rank or position, would be randomly selected out of the Pentagon phonebook and dismissed from their job than it would be to let the bloated payroll/personnel size be maintained at previous levels. This was obviously meant to make a point and not to be carried out, but the study never saw the light of day. I wonder why and who killed it?

Urban legend?

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Welcome to the post post-modern world.

Hezbollah Racketeers Financing Hamas Rocketeers

The New York Post reports via the Jerusalem Post that

the AP/Reuters-backed crime syndicate Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors are rewarding Palestinian terrorists with thousands of dollars for each homemade rocket that hits southern Israel, according to Israeli intelligence. [Whether Hezbollah was printing these dollars in its south Beirut counterfeiting facilities or were getting Ben Franklins from Iran was still unclear. MY COMMENT]

The size of the payoffs depends on the number of Israelis killed or wounded, the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday.

Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based guerrilla group that fought a border war with Israel last summer, is smuggling cash from Iran into the Gaza Strip to pay off different terrorist organizations who launch homemade Qassam rockets into the western Negev region of Israel.

"Sometimes, they are paid before the attack and sometimes they submit a bill to Lebanon and the money gets transferred a short time later," a security official said.

The article goes on to note that Hamas is accusing Israel of arming the Fatah Party of President Mahmoud Abbas via Egypt:

Meanwhile, with Israel's blessing, Egypt has delivered a large arms shipment to forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, officials said yesterday - the latest Israeli attempt to boost the embattled leader in his bloody conflict with Hamas fanatics.

The Palestinians keep lurching down history's saddest narrative of missed opportunities to end up by electing a terrorist government. The one real chance for a state for themselves and a semblance of peace was passed up by serial embezzler Arafat because he believed three quarters of a loaf or more just wasn't enough. But a detached observer must give some credence to the argument that, like Castro, Saddam, Kim Jung-Il and a number of other entrenched socialist regimes in Africa, the corruption level of these workers' paradises does not permit change for the better.

Like billionaires Castro and Dear Leader, mult-millionaire Arafat thought the status quo of serfdom in an enclave better than a breakthrough to nationhood and peace. It would have hurt his investments, perhaps, and subjected him to humiliating processes such as genuinely free elections.

Ex-billionaire former Socialist leader Saddam Hussein was unavailable for comment.

Lacrosse Joke Coming to an End?

The NC Bar has filed a complaint over the incredible grandstanding a DA running for an office he had previously only been appointed to used to get the black vote in a racially divided town.

Not one MSM source has really dug into this case, as it reveals so much hypocrisy and class-envy and feminist attitudinist posturing.

Hopefully, the charges will soon be dropped, and the spectacle recedes of a drunken promiscuous stripper accusing silly frat boys of rape while her panties are full of semen from two or more non-lacrosse players.

The class warfare waged by crazies like CNN Ogress Grace and Wendy Murphy should get them thrown off the air.