Juan Williams an Antidote to Fawning Obsequious MSM Obama-Worship

CNN is a channel on one of the several I can see from my exercise bike in the fitness center I am currently spending a lot of time in---the crawler captions denote the utterly clueless and seemingly unending flood of Obama worship this mediocre network has been peddling for the last fortnight.

In particular, the airhead ditzes named Costello and Frederika LNU have exceeded all boundaries in their silly spew of compliments, interrupting their hagiography only occasionally to chastise "Obama Nay-Sayers," those unenlightened enough to display skepticism about the coming Apocryphal Age of Obama. For a few minutes, I noted the same on "The View" as Crone-in-Chief Walters rapped the wrist of Elisabeth Hasselbeck for daring not to employ the standard encomiums with reference to "The One."

Juan brings a little sane perspective to this downpour of banality and third-rate silliness on air at the moment. The MSM is obviously under the impression, partly true, that it was their complete devotion to Obama which got him the prize.

Evidently, Global Warming, despite the coldest winter in decades, is the next item on the agenda of mindless hype, as a piece by a formerly respectable PBS science program named NOVA failed to mention the fact that a majority of the scientific community is unconvinced about man-made Global Warming.

Al Gore is the pied-piper leading the low-IQ lemmings over the cliff on this one. Someone in the media should remember his utter lack of qualifications, including a bogus Nobel, to even write about a subject which is far beyond his limited intellectual capacities.

Pilgrim over at Redstate sums up the coming debacles through a close examination of the Inaugurate Conception Speech weaving dreams that are cloud-cuckoo bizarre. His readers' following comments are also worth a look...

Guantanamo Prisoners 333 & 372 Return to Terrorism & Make their TV debut.

Two reasons why Barry Hussein Obama should take his time releasing the remaining 240-odd prisoners at Gitmo popped up on an Al-Qaeda video today. Sixty-one released prisoners have recidivized [!?] to terrorism so far.

This won't bother terrorist-enablers on the left wing of the Dem Party, but Americans worried about national security should be careful before letting the rats run loose back into the sewers.

Another question: why did the Saudis release 372 after his return from Gitmo in 2007? Are the Royal Family truly the allies of the US in the fight against terrorism?

Is David Paterson Even Dumber than SNL Portrayed Him?

The clumsy maneouverings of visually-disabled and mentally-challenged Gov. Paterson may exceed the bumbling, attention-grabbing rendition of the accidental guv portrayed by the SNL regular who had him wandering around the set bumping into cameras and generally acting like a total moron. Here is the bumbling "newspaper of record" displaying the normal state of NY Democrats--- corrupt confusion:

According to a person who spoke with her, Ms. Kennedy called the governor, who will choose a successor to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, to tell him that she was no longer interested in the post. Two other Democrats said they were also told Wednesday that Ms. Kennedy’s candidacy was in doubt. The news appeared to catch the governor off guard, throwing the Paterson administration into confusion and setting off conflicting news media reports. [my emph.]

Anyone who has worked in NY state for the Democratic Party, as I did in two campaigns during the last century, understands that chaos, cross purposes, and corruption are an endemic chronic state of affairs in the clowns [led in the House by corrupt incompetent Rangel] and in the Senate by braying ass Shumer. Paterson combines both the corruption of Charlie and the attention-whore Chuck's relentless search for the nearest mike, but as an additional schlag of whipped cream on the caffeinated brew, adds his own inimitable stupidity.

SNL had this feckless blind black version of Jimmy Carter down perfectly in its skit last month.

Norwegian "Diplomat" E-Mails Comparisons of Israel & Nazi Germany

Norwegians supported Adolf's Master Plan for the Master Race, and Herr Quisling famously was Hitler's Prime Minister buddy in Oslo during the war.

In the upper Middle West, Norwegians are deemed dumber even than "dumb Swedes," and this female envoy to Riyadh [where I'm certain she feels right at home in that hive of anti-Semitic Jew hatred] demonstrates the continuing hypocrisy of the Scandanavian countries that supported Hitler's Germany during the Second World War, yet now posture and point fingers at country's that don't coddle and abet terrorists as they do.

I wonder if Olaf Palme's murderer was ever really caught? The Swedes are too stupid to really be sure. Ditto the lutefisk-eating clowns that allowed Al Franken to steal a Senate seat in MN, where these double-digit IQ types infest the northern plains.

Signs of Decline: The Passing of Time & Newsweek

Once Upon a Time there was a saying: "Life Magazine is for people who can't read and Time is for people who can't think." Now that almost everyone can't think, Time & Newsweek are planning to become a sort of Pravda and Isvestia for the "elite" reader, and Jon Meacham is honest enough to admit that the rags are both pitched to "liberals."

Time, of course, is regarding itself as centrist, a hilarious solecism revealing just what they think of their average reader.

Chief Global Warming Hoaxer Warns that Sky is Falling

A so-called "scientist" is repeating the 19th c. Millerite end-of-days hysteria, only this religious fraud calls himself a scientist and punches a timecard at NASA.

Perhaps Hansen will be given historical credit for the biggest hoax ever perpetrated, though most discerning observers realize that the GW Hoax gives cover to a world government which will end up taxing the very air we breathe.

If the high priesthood of political hacks and "climatologists" can last out the winter, that is....

Vapid Female Columnist for WSJ Asks Readers to "Suspend Disbelief" About Obama

After Ms. Noonan spent a considerable amount of time during the recent campaign trashing Sarah Palin for being pro-life and having a child to term with Down Syndrome [what I posit are her real reasons for hating Palin], this specimen of Upper East Side hauteur gushes over Obama after supping with the PeOTUS at George Will's home in Chevy Chase.

This leads me to ask myself, what is the difference between the Republican elites and the Democratic elites besides the size of pie slices they divvy up every two years? I agree with Ms. Rodriguez that Ms. Noonan has a way with prose, but sorely lacks substance or even gravitas in her fawning over this candidate largely elected by the "drive-by media." Perhaps the most telling statistic of the '08 election was the fact that Obama garnered 40K fewer votes in Ohio than John Kerry did in '04 against GWB! [McCain simply was a RINO and most Ohio Repubs wanted a real one.]

Noonan's columns about Palin showed Peggy's nasty shallow side. Her pre-emptive sycophancy with Obama demonstrates Peggy's opportunistic shallow side!

Rush Limbaugh has a much different POV on the incoming POTUS.

George W. Bush a Better Than Average President

Andrew Roberts of the Daily Telegraph commences his sum-up of the GWB presidency with a request by the usual airhead ditz American motherhood-hating "feminist." Then he puts a cap in the ample butt of the European and American corrupt and self-absorbed "elites," aided and abetted by a servile leftist media more corrupt than its entitlement-crazed masters.

The funhouse mirror-view of the print and electronic 24-7-365 news cycle has brought superficial celebrity hysterics to a new level, the level of political analysis, and Roberts approaches Christopher Hitchens Olympian perspective on what fools these media-crazed intelligentsia-enamored progressives be. Then he rationally recites a list of accomplishments:

The decisions taken by Mr Bush in the immediate aftermath of that ghastly moment will be pored over by historians for the rest of our lifetimes. One thing they will doubtless conclude is that the measures he took to lock down America's borders, scrutinise travellers to and from the United States, eavesdrop upon terrorist suspects, work closely with international intelligence agencies and take the war to the enemy has foiled dozens, perhaps scores of would-be murderous attacks on America. There are Americans alive today who would not be if it had not been for the passing of the Patriot Act. There are 3,000 people who would have died in the August 2005 airline conspiracy if it had not been for the superb inter-agency co-operation demanded by Bush
after 9/11.
The next factor that will be seen in its proper historical context in years to come will be the true reasons for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in April 2003. The conspiracy theories believed by many (generally, but not always) stupid people – that it was "all about oil", or the securing of contracts for the US-based Halliburton corporation, etc – will slip into the obscurity from which they should never have emerged had it not been for comedian-filmmakers such as Michael Moore.
Instead, the obvious fact that there was a good case for invading Iraq based on 14 spurned UN resolutions, massive human rights abuses and unfinished business following the interrupted invasion of 1991 will be recalled.
Similarly, the cold light of history will absolve Bush of the worst conspiracy-theory accusation: that he knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. History will show that, in common with the rest of his administration, the British Government, Saddam's own generals, the French, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies, and of course SIS and the CIA, everyone assumed that a murderous dictator does not voluntarily destroy the WMD arsenal he has used against his own people. And if he does, he does not then expel the UN weapons inspectorate looking for proof of it, as he did in 1998 and again in 2001.
Mr Bush assumed that the Coalition forces would find mass graves, torture chambers, evidence for the gross abuse of the UN's food-for-oil programme, but also WMDs. He was right about each but the last, and history will place him in the mainstream of Western, Eastern and Arab thinking on the matter.
History will probably, assuming it is researched and written objectively, congratulate Mr Bush on the fact that whereas in 2000 Libya was an active and vicious member of what he was accurately to describe as an "axis of evil" of rogue states willing to employ terrorism to gain its ends, four years later Colonel Gaddafi's WMD programme was sitting behind glass in a museum in Oakridge, Tennessee.

The hyperventilating exhalations of the delusional left [and a lot of spineless center-left fellow-travelers] spew endless quantities of calumny and obloquy on George W. Bush, projecting their cartoonish exaggerations unabated by any respect for reason or actual research---only polemics are allowed in the salons of the delusional truffle snuffers in the left-wing media. Actually, George W. Bush, despite jokes by clowns such as Leno and Letterman about his supposed illiteracy and ignorance, is a vastly read consumer of biographies and historical memoirs. Very unfashionable nowadays in this age of solecisms and ignorance of even elemental history on the part of the cable-news mafia on the Left. But GWB was also betrayed by former "allies," including the perfidious and corrupt president of France, who was a long-time friend of Saddam H. and who was almost certainly taking large payments [in gold specie as preferred by French politicians] from Saddam's half-brother, the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN complex in Geneva. Jacques Shh-iraq had already betrayed Valery Giscard D'Estaing and his own party by helping Mitterand defeat VGD'E in 1981, a fact Mitterand fessed up to on his deathbed. All so that Chirac himself would be POTRoF after Mitterand's socialism had worked its mischief for a dozen years---and Chirac himself was saddled with a socialist Prime Minister after botching up the Gaullist Party in the mid-'90s. But Chirac reserved his greatest incompetent treason for the Iraq situation, while the bullion arrived from Geneva to keep him on the side of tyranny and genocide [Kurdish, that is]. As his countryman Bernard-Henri Levy frequently shouts from the rooftops, Chirac was on the side of the demons by protecting Saddam and his Operation Anfal from eventual retribution. More from Roberts:

With his characteristic openness and at times almost self-defeating honesty, Mr Bush has been the first to acknowledge his mistakes – for example, tardiness over Hurricane Katrina – but there are some he made not because he was a ranting Right-winger, but because he was too keen to win bipartisan support. The invasion of Iraq should probably have taken place months earlier, but was held up by the attempt to find support from UN security council members, such as Jacques Chirac's France, that had ties to Iraq and hostility towards the Anglo-Americans.
History will also take Mr Bush's verbal fumbling into account, reminding us that Ronald Reagan also mis-spoke regularly, but was still a fine president. The first
MBA president, who had a higher grade-point average at Yale than John Kerry, Mr Bush's supposed lack of intellect will be seen to be a myth once the papers in his Presidential Library in the Southern Methodist University in Dallas are available.
Films such as Oliver Stone's W, which portray him as a spitting, oafish frat boy who eats with his mouth open and is rude to servants, will be revealed by the diaries and correspondence of those around him to be absurd travesties, of this charming, interesting, beautifully mannered history buff who, were he not the most powerful man in the world, would be a fine person to have as a pal.
Instead of Al Franken, history will listen to Bob Geldof praising Mr Bush's efforts over Aids and malaria in Africa; or to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, who told him last week: "The people of India deeply love you." And certainly to the women of Afghanistan thanking him for saving them from Taliban abuse, degradation and tyranny.
When Abu Ghraib is mentioned, history will remind us that it was the Bush Administration that imprisoned those responsible for the horrors. When water-boarding is brought up, we will see that it was only used on three suspects, one of whom was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda's chief of operational planning, who divulged vast amounts of information that saved hundreds of innocent lives. When extraordinary renditions are queried, historians will ask how else the world's most dangerous terrorists should have been transported. On scheduled flights?
The credit crunch, brought on by the Democrats in Congress insisting upon home ownership for credit-unworthy people, will initially be blamed on Bush, but the perspective of time will show that the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with the deregulation of the Clinton era. Instead Bush's very
un-ideological but vast rescue package of $700 billion (£480 billion) might well be seen as lessening the impact of the squeeze, and putting America in position to be the first country out of recession, helped along by his huge tax-cut packages since 2000.

More importantly, GWB showed exceptional moral courage when he backed Gen. Petraeus's daring plan to increase US troops in Iraq, the so-called Surge. Despite grandstanding by the likes of the cowardly Hillary Clinton and thedespicable NYT which allowed a cabal of treasonous whack-jobs [MoveOn.org] a discount in printing a manifesto the day the esteemed General testified in front of Congress, the Surge worked and girly-men like Harry Reid have had to eat their treasonous words about the war being "lost." If they had any sense of honor, they would feel shame, but they are shameless and without conscience.

Sneered at for being "simplistic" in his reaction to 9/11, Bush's visceral responses to the attacks of a fascistic, totalitarian death cult will be seen as having been substantially the right ones.
Mistakes are made in every war, but when virtually the entire military, diplomatic and political establishment in the West opposed it, Bush insisted on the surge in Iraq that has been seen to have brought the war around, and set Iraq on the right path. Today its GDP is 30 per cent higher than under Saddam, and it is free of a brutal dictator and his rapist sons.
The number of American troops killed during the eight years of the War against Terror has been fewer than those slain capturing two islands in the Second World War, and in Britain we have lost fewer soldiers than on a normal weekend on the Western Front. As for civilians, there have been fewer Iraqis killed since the invasion than in 20 conflicts since the Second World War.
Iraq has been a victory for the US-led coalition, a fact that the Bush-haters will have to deal with when perspective finally – perhaps years from now – lends objectivity to this fine man's record.

Roberts and The Telegraph demonstrate, as does Bernard-Henry Levi, that not all Europeans have succumbed to the collective hysteria engendered by the continent's loss of real power on the geopolitical stage.

Russia Blames US for Gas Pipeline Eff-Ups

Gerhard Schroeder must be getting extra kneepad time in front of his Empoisoner Master Vlad Putin, as the Kremlin laughingly blames US skullduggery for the Ukraine inability to wheel its gas to needy Balkan countries [Bulgaria & Romania]. In the meantime, Belarus, which has been on kneepads in front of dwarf Putin for over a decade, pays a price roughly one-third the exorbitant fees the Dwarf is trying to impose on the Ukraine. The Dwarf wishes to bitch-slap Ukrainian nationalists into submission with gas overcharges.

The FT headline has the EU "baffled" by the natural gas contretemps. Why don't we just say "muzzled" to make the situation clear. The clown named Medvedev in charge of Gazprom notes:

Gazprom had declared “force majeure” on its gas exports to Europe and warned it would unleash its “entire legal arsenal” against Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Stern, who used to hum during long IAEE conferences we both attended during the late eighties [he explained to me that he is an amateur musician] and now head of Oxford Energy's gas research, summed it up with the observation that Russian & Ukrainian statements were

“all smoke and mirrors”

Perhaps a musical metaphor like "andante" would better fit this deathmarch toward a frozen destiny befitting the Dwarf Second Napoleon now guiding Moscow's policies.
.

Hamas Leaders Hide in Hospitals, UN Schools, Mosques

The Rabid Rabbits who comprise Hamas leadership are displaying their underworld nature by using human shields of various sorts.

Ten years ago, I was short-listed for the UN job of UNRWWA chief in Gaza, which would pay handsomely but require me to live in the arms-infested hellhole Hamas has made Gaza into. I thank God every day that this cup passed from my lips, and I did not drink the "cup of poison" Ayatollah Khomeini spoke about. Subsequently, on one of my trips to Israel while working for Amoco, I met and befriended one of the former heads of Shin Beth. Here is what another ex-Shin Beth chief said:

Hamas is using Gaza's Shifa Hospital as a meeting place and even distributed salaries to its operatives there over the weekend, Public Security Minister and former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Avi Dichter said Monday morning.


SLIDESHOW: Gaza op, Day 17
Speaking on Army Radio, Dichter noted that "on Saturday, January 10, which is the day salaries are distributed in Gaza, several Hamas commanders who cannot come out of hiding were given their salaries at their hiding places. But those commanders who can move around Gaza made their way to Shifa Hospital to receive their wages."

Regarding Israeli intelligence reports that the Hamas leadership had taken refuge in Gaza's Shifa Hospital, Dichter said that the "Shifa Hospital has long ago ceased to be just a hospital, just as the UNRWA humanitarian and health services in Gaza long ago ceased to be just humanitarian services providing food and medical services."

"UN schools in Gaza long ago stopped being just schools," the minister said. "All these services and places are refuge for Hamas terrorists and commanders."

Daniel Pipes [whom I hired to come to Amoco to explain the FIS phenomenon in Algeria in the mid-nineties] is very pessimistic that Israel is bloody-minded enough to do the necessary in Gaza.

Polls: Minnesota Style

Really Cold Winters freeze more than the brain, but a "poll" which comes to the conclusion that "Coleman should concede" also comes to the following conclusion:

Only 38 percent of Minnesotans surveyed said they view Coleman favorably. 44 percent have an unfavorable view.
Franken scored similarly with 37 percent favorable and 45 percent unfavorable.

Don't check your eyeglasses. If the morons at the site actually could write, they might have noted that "Franken scored even lower, rather than use the word "similarly." But being Vikings fans, their thinking processes are probably a bit out of kilter!

Once again, it's just those zany folks in Minnesota, the dumbest collection of loo-zers in the USA [except maybe for the state of Washington, whose current governor stole her seat just like Franken did in the Land of 10,000 toxic waste dumps.]

US Tops World in Innovation Rankings

Despite economic convulsions, the US "remains the world's most most innovative economy, with unrivalled business sophistication and competitiveness, according to a new study by INSEAD, the Paris-based business school," according to the Financial Times.

The United Kingdom – also mired in recession – is the world’s fourth most innovative economy, ranking behind Germany and Sweden, the study found.

The Global Innovation Index – released in New Delhi on Tuesday – looks far beyond traditional indicators of innovation such as the percentage of gross domestic product spent on research and development, numbers of engineering graduates, and numbers of patents obtained and scientific papers published each year.

Instead, the index seeks to measure an economy’s potential for a broad range of innovation – including social, marketing, and business innovations – by assessing its institutions and policies, infrastructure, and business and market sophistication as well as people’s skills.

The study also assessed wealth, competitiveness and knowledge in the overall rankings of 130 nations.

The link above has many details, including a comparison between China and India:

China ranks higher for innovation and 37th globally, compared to India, ranked 41st. However, the rankings also show striking differences in the strengths and weaknesses of the two Asian giants.

China ranks 48th globally in terms of its infrastructure – including telecommunications infrastructure – far exceeding India, which is ranked 76th. China is ranked the 5th most competitive economy in the world.

However, India’s human skills, ranked 28th globally, outperform China’s which are 38th.

“China has a tremendous ability to delivery on infrastructure fast,” said Prof Dutta. “But India is leveraging its human capacity into competitiveness.”

Some more interesting details emerged from the massive study:

Within Asia, the Global Innovation Index judged Singapore the region’s most innovative economy, ranking it fifth globally, followed by South Korea, which ranked sixth in the world. Singapore was judged second in the world – behind Finland – in its institutional and policy environment, while South Korea topped the global list for knowledge production.

Japan, the world’s second largest economy, lagged behind, ranked third in Asia and ninth globally, faring poorly on measures of its institutions and market and business sophistication. Hong Kong ranked 12th globally overall, with its markets judged the most sophisticated in the world, but its human skills ranked only 26th globally.

How long the US can maintain its premier position, of course, is unknowable, but as the entire world economy stumbles, it appears that the US will be hit less hard than a lot of more vulnerable economies, the FT opines.

Seattle P-I and Red Star Tribune Approach Termination

Two States which have recently committed massive fraud overlooked by local press, Washington in getting a bi-yotch guv in 2004 after a half-dozen vote frauds to deprive the Repub candidate, allowing the RICO scheme/scam to continue in Seattle, and of course Minnesota, which followed a pro wrestler for guv with a cheating porn comedian for Senator, the latter after recounts until he overcame a lead by Repub Coleman.

The Red Star Trib will only be missed by commissars awaiting the next party line, but they can get that from the NYT after the RST ceases publication. The NYT continues to gush red ink and if the hemorrhaging continues, in a few years will be reduced to an on-line presence. The Silent Majority doesn't want or need birdcage bottom material delivered to the door any more.

Happily, the WSJ is gaining circulation.

Why Waziristan and its Neighbors Should Keep Us Awake at Night

CSIS has issued a shortish study [pdf] on Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas where a host of baddies dwell, at least from time to time, and Osama's presumed place of residence, if a cave can be deemed a dwelling.

I did a year-long stint at CSIS in the early eighties, at a time when both Kissinger and Brzezinski had office space in the think tank. Here's the opaque prose that serves as the Executive Summary:

Increased militancy and violence in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan known
as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan has brought FATA into sharper focus, as
U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani leaders attempt to find solutions to the problems underlying the situa-
tion there. This most dangerous spot on the map may well be the source of another 9/11 type of at-
tack on the Western world or its surrogates in the region. Should such an attack occur, it likely will
be spawned in the militancy that grips FATA and contiguous areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan
today. The principal actors are the Taliban, in both countries; their allies—former Soviet-era mu-
jahideen commanders including Gulbadin Hekmatyar of the Hezbe Islami and the Haqqani group
(headed by Jalaluddin and his son Siraj); Sunni militants from Central and Southern Punjab; and
al Qaeda, which benefits from links to most of these insurgents. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar
is suspected to be hiding in southwestern Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan. The Taliban
are engaged in a struggle against foreign forces inside Afghanistan and now against the military
in Pakistan. Hekmatyar has spoken against the Pakistani government but has not yet taken up
arms against it. The Haqqanis have also not provoked a battle with the Pakistani forces as yet. The
Punjabi militants, however, have become franchisees of al Qaeda and have been linked to attacks
on the Pakistani state and its army.
While many ideas have been put forward for tackling the issues facing FATA, too often they
rely on longer-term plans and solutions. This report attempts to define the conditions that spawn
militancy and violence among the Pakhtun tribesmen that inhabit FATA and suggest practicable
ways of approaching them in the short and medium term. Concrete actions by the principal
actors—the U.S., Afghan and Pakistan governments and the U.S. and Pakistan militaries—are sug-
gested. These will need to be underpinned by a national debate in Pakistan, in particular, on the
nature of the country’s polity and the need to tackle terrorism and militancy as domestic issues.
But the debate will need to be rooted in a clear consensus among the civil and military leadership
on the nature of the Pakistani state and society and how to tackle the growing militancy inside
the country and in broad-based support from major political parties and the general public. The
United States needs to forge a longer-term relationship with Pakistan and its people, shifting from
a transactional relationship to one built on strategic considerations and respect for Pakistan’s political
and development needs. Failure to bring peace and to restore a modicum of stability to
FATA will have widespread repercussions for the region and perhaps the world.

Arnaud de Borchgrave has a nice intro with one immortal sentence:

How does one deal with members of Pakistan’s parliament who asked Gen. David M. McKier-
nan, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, “Why did you Americans come to Afghanistan
when it was so peaceful before you got there?”

For a quick visual glimpse on why Pakistan is a powder keg which will explode or implode, depending on the scenario, unless of course, it becomes involved in a [nuclear?] war with India beforehand, check out pages 3-5. Bear in mind that the tribes and colored areas on the map are the loci of immemorial feuds and death squads from times out of mind, both internal and external. Alexander the Great encountered these folks and grudgingly admitted their fighting capacity, as did the British colonials 2200 years later. Even today, the government of Pakistan has less than complete control of many of the areas in FATA, the NWFP and Baluchistan. Also, adjacent regions in Afghanistan are out of Kabul's control as well, giving the entire mini-region an aspect of barely-contained anarchy. My one visit to Peshawar during one of my many sojourns in Pakistan back in the '80s was an instructive lesson [narrated by local experts with the sharp humor that Pakistanis maintain toward their own foibles] in the intractable resilience of long-held disputes. I was even dined at the Officer's Mess where young Winston Churchill drank between expeditions into the countryside potting away at hostile tribesmen.

In case anyone is inclined to become complacent, pp. 9-10 discuss events under the heading "The Rising Militancy" thusly:

he balance has been swinging in favor of the militants and terrorists inside both Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Afghanistan is now facing a dramatic change from insurgency to civil war, with the
NATO- and U.S.-supported government losing control of larger swathes of territory.8 Pakistan too
has lost its ability to manage FATA to its ends as it did in the past and is fighting desperately to
regain control even over parts of the NWFP where home-grown militancy has created a parallel
government of terror.

All this in a region where backyard smelters turn molten automobiles and scrap iron into AK-47s and larger armaments with their munitions with perfect simulacra of the Soviet era. Read the entire 44 pages to depress your mood, or just dwell on a Chapter called Basic Perceptions and Realities in FATA—a most dangerous place:

Certain basic perceptions and realities emerge from the experience of the United States in Afghan-
istan after 2001 and Pakistan’s foray into FATA:
■ The United States went into Afghanistan without a comprehensive plan for winning the war
beyond the military ouster of the Taliban (evidenced by its shift of focus to Iraq), or for the
socioeconomic rehabilitation of the country after decades of war.

■ The United States failed to see the proactive need to help Pakistan transform its own army and Frontier Corps into a counterinsurgency force or help equip and train them for that purpose; It
has been in reactive mode ever since 2001.

■ Afghanistan has shown no willingness to address the grievances of the Taliban against the
excesses of the Northern Alliance forces in the wake of the U.S. invasion. This keeps the anger
of the Taliban and their Pashtun supporters alive.


■ The United States cannot win the war in Afghanistan without the full and willing participation
and support of Pakistan, its army, and the general population, especially with a new civilian
administration in place. It certainly cannot win by aligning itself to any one Pakistani leader,
political or military, as evident in the past reliance on President and General Pervez Musharraf.

■ The United States depends for more than 80 percent of cargo and 40 percent of its fuel in
Afghanistan on transit shipments via Pakistan; Uzbekistan has expelled the United States; and
Russia has the ability to block overflights to reach Turkmenistan or Tajikistan and then into
Afghanistan. The only other relatively shorter land route is via Iran from Chahbahar on the
Arabian Sea. But U.S. hostility toward Iran makes that an impossible alternative. This severely
limits the United States’ options in taking military action inside Pakistan that could provoke a
backlash, including the closure of this supply route into Afghanistan.

■ Pakistan, its army, and the ISI have maintained an ambivalent position regarding the Afghan
Taliban, based on the twin supposition that the United States would exit the region yet again,
perhaps after capturing or killing some key al Qaeda leaders, and that the Pashtun Taliban
would return to power in Kabul. They would rather have a neutral or friendly Pashtun govern-
ment in power, even if it is the Taliban.


■ On its part, Afghanistan fears a Pakistani desire to maintain control over Afghanistan because
of its land-locked status and as a “client” state.

■ Another powerful and persistent perception inside Pakistan is that rival India has chosen to
develop civil and military ties with Afghanistan and even to fuel militancy inside Pakistan in
retaliation for past (and perhaps current) Pakistani support for militants in Indian-held Kash-
mir. Many Pakistanis see a conspiracy to encircle and weaken Pakistan in the region.

■ Yet neither confrontation nor capitulation by Pakistan to U.S. interests in Afghanistan and
FATA is the right approach. Rather, engagement and a joint effort to eliminate the militancies
inside Afghanistan and Pakistan is the best approach.

■ The Pakistan Army is seen as an alien force inside FATA. The Frontier Corps has lost its effi-
cacy over the years. Both the army and the FC are ill-equipped and ill-trained for counterinsur-
gency (COIN) warfare. Compounding their difficulty is the fact that they are operating inside
their own borders against their own people.

■ The traditional system of governance inside FATA involving the government’s political agents
interacting with largely compliant tribal maliks, who are on the official payroll, has been sup-
planted by a freer system under which renegade leaders have emerged and the religious leaders
have taken on greater import. The old system cannot be restored in its entirety nor for the long
run.

■ No plan for FATA will work unless it involves the local people and they are given a responsible
role in its implementation. However, all efforts will need to be made to ensure that the tradi-
tional “leakage” of funds or resources to the privileged few is prevented or reduced and that
there is equitable sharing of opportunities and finances.

I once spent half-a-night discussing with the Agriculture Minister of NWFP his complete and total conviction that Pakistan would eventually split into two parts, the Pushtun and Baluchi parts devolving into Iran while to the East, the Punjab and Sindh would revert back to India. This was a minister in the NWFP government, mind you.

I can see why this gentleman would have many reasons to believe that things would get worse [this was around 1985] in the surrounding areas, and so far his pessimism seems amply justified by ensuing events.

Harry Reid Spirals Downward in the Porcelain Exit Tunnel

This link sums up the epic and serial incompetence of a compleat dodo, who makes a gaffer like Joe Biden look like a genius. [Good thing those pesky Hezbollah have been chased out of Lebanon!]

If the people of Nevada don't realize that Harry Reid makes Jimmy Carter look relatively [!] sane and competent [see my previous post], then they should re-elect this girlie man with a squeaky voice in 2010. He makes Pelosi look relatively [!] good.

Jimmy the Cuckoo Clock on His Monthly Quacking Rant---Hamas' Best US Buddy

Some Questions assert themselves on reading this WaPo exhalation from this specimen of halitosis birdclock crying cuckoo...

"defensive tunnel..." and Jimmy the Gasbag knows it was defensive...how? Most arms and missiles reaching HAMAS arrive underground, doesn't the quarterwit anti-semitic failed peanut farmer [also failed in another job, this a DC stint] know that? But if Israel bombed the tunnel, it must be defensive, because a terrorist told him so.

And those 17 mosques? The AIS? Why doesn't James Earl Flatulent not cite the Israeli allegation that the HAMAS terrorists employ mosques, schools and private residences as launching pads for missiles and arms caches for terrorist cadres? Isn't that an acceptable alternative explanation, since it occurs so often in S. Lebanon, Iraq, and other countries where this aggressive hostile-to-the-west religion has its fanatical suicidal maniacs at large?

And last week, over 100 Iraqis, including tribal sheikhs in a conference in Kirkuk trying to iron out differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites, and mostly women & children in an open marketplace, were killed by Islamic terrorists. But not a peep or a scowl from those high-minded UN observers who scold Israel every time it kills a "defenseless" civilian in Hamas while a terrorist often uses said civilian as a human shield.

Why no cry of outrage from this terrorist-loving, anti-semitic, over-the-hill drooler?

Because this gullible geezer believes anything Hamas tells him and hates Israel, that's why...

He really believes he's still a player, when he's always being played...

Brave Hamas Fighters Use Human Shields in Gaza

The inbred race of cowards running Gaza are employing schools and mosques, often filled with civilians fleeing the fighting, to launch mortars and rockets.
And of course, when the Israeli military retaliates and the civilian human shields are killed, Reuters and AP note the civilian deaths, but only mention the circumstances far into the story....

Sound familiar? Hezbollah played the gullible quarter-wits in the press two years ago in Lebanon, staging photo-ops that the ignoramuses in Reuters and AP lapped up like the puppy dogs they are.

And the inflammatory press reports fuel anti-Semitic outbreaks in Denmark and France, among other neo-Nazi and Islamic terrorist havens....
UPDATE Q.E.D. France's Channel 2 Public TV [which is run by the government and reflects Elysee sentiments] has footage from a 2005 militant munitions truck explosion with dozens of dead bodies scattered which France2 claimed were from this week until FOUND OUT or expose!!!

This at the very time that crazy Muslim terrorists are attacking synagogues and French Jews in the streets. The French have a term for such behavior, and France2 is obviously acting as an agent provocateur.

Coulter "Banned for Life" at NBC nutwork in cunning marketing ploy

Wizbang notes how the nutroots are echoing NBC's clever promotion campaign for Coulter's book! NBC brilliantly canceled a long-scheduled Coulter appearance on the Today Show to show ideological solidarity with the young woman who will certainly benefit from the free publicity.

But from another perspective, it’s wonderful to see the NBC nutwork continuing its elaborate seppuku rituals as a buffoon named Zucker tries to dumb down the moronic collection of clowns on Today even further. Ann Curry will hopefully pluck at Perez Hilton's garments while he is doing Deep Thoughts to replace Coulter, demonstrating NBC's new policy of getting leftist intellectuals on the early morning gabfest, and Perez certainly fits their idea of intelligentsia heft!

Going back, this is reminiscent of NBC's cunning market move to see how hockey makes it instead of the NFL on weekend sports in the Fall/Winter slot,, though that brilliant idea was hatched back in the ’90s. Now they’ve got Leno in prime time 10PM and when that doesn’t work, Conan will destroy their Tonight Show just like the Today Show is swirling round & round in the porcelain exit chute….

Commissar Zucker is demonstrating the failure of capitalism, one corporate unit at a time!

20 Most Annoying Liberals

Although Bernard Goldberg has a more exhaustive survey [100] of the corrupt gaffe-prone morons who comprise the ultra-left human sewer in U.S. politics, I can't argue with Right Wing News in its top twenty. Although Hillary shouldn't really be on the list and Obama isn't THAT annoying [give him time, he'll get there], the rest richly deserve all the contempt and contumely they receive on Right Wing News' annual sum-up.

And Mrs. Andrew Sullivan makes Markos the Guinea Greek look like a sane person!

Dingy Girlie Man Harry Reid Should Put a Sock in it.

The Senate Majority Leader continues his high-pitched whining about President Bush, whom the historians will rate far higher than the querulous loo-zer who proclaimed in early '07 that "the war is lost" just before Bush and Petraeus won the war with the surge.

Occasionally, Pelosi acts like a human being, but the odds are that Dingy Harry will lose the next Nevada senate election in '10.

Especially if he keeps on making a fool of himself, like the link above demonstrates, in a non-stop fashion....! Does this fool really think that most Americans are even dumber than he is?

Washington State Proves Democrats are Becoming a RICO Enterprise

Washington Huskie football isn't as bad as the state's rotten corrupt political system, which the WSJ writes at length about to demonstrate how Minnesota, another rotten sewer as politics goes, rapidly is devolving into a Washington-state wannabe.

Democrats have more lawyers by far than Republicans, and these lawyers are predisposed to win at any cost. Plus as Illinois demonstrates, the old machine politics of the early 20th century has now for all practical purposes evolved [or devolved] into a business/political criminal enterprise. Obama may be the lotus flower, but Blagojevitch and Emanuel are the mud and goo out of which Obama flourished.

The Democrats are still whining about how they were unable to cheat the buffoon Gore into the White House in Florida in 2000. Numerous recounts and Gore's own stupidity made it clear that the nation was better off with a three-digit IQ male in the Oval Office than the Gore-bot and his lockboxes.

But if there is one resolution that 2009 should engender, it is to turn around the disturbing tendency of ultra-left Democrats to abandon completely any ethical, moral, or even legal [as happened in Washington in 2004] boundaries to achieve what these unhappy people---who have no other codes in their lives---regard as victory.

Jake Tapper of ABC gets the Soros-Move-On-bot MN SecState's knickers all twisted up in the creepy functioonary's pathetic justification of stealing a senate seat for the stupidest state among the 50 allowed so far in the USA.

"Religious Intelligence" is an Oxymoron for Brain-Dead Anglicans

Fuckwits rule the Church of England, as everyone with a scintilla of gray matter knows. Read the link above to understand why in England and the U.S., where gays and pervs run the Anglican & Episcopal Real Estate Companies, no one attends their services on prime real estate. And why their adherents [in the U.S.] have dropped from 3.8 to 2.5 million in the last decade. In the U.K., it is a government operation, so no one cares if the facilities are used or not.

In the rest of the world, where Anglicans actually practice religion and have some basic moral and spiritual values, the Church is actually expanding. Maybe the Perv-in-Chief in Westminster Abbey should go a little down-market.

Murdoch Biographer Torched by NYTimes Book Reviewer

Michael Wolff is easily the most repulsive creep on MSNBC or anywhere else, and SNL had a good time torching him and the ineffable cretinous excretion named Olberboy [played by Ben Affleck] when syncophant Wolff didn't quite lick the shoes of Keith-of-a-Thousand-Special-Comments with enough tongue action and cringing deference. Wolff must do something ineffable with Graydon Carter to merit a Vanity Fair job, since his writing style is more lavishly narcissistic than even Hitchens, who in addition has a brain. Here's a few snippets on Wolff from David Carr, the NYT cultural reporter:

Murdoch, for all his lack of an inner life, at least in this book, is an extremely engaging man to listen to. At investor conferences where other media titans drone on defensively, he is far and away the most fearless and factual. But not here. Wolff, who has the columnist’s tic of being far too struck by the fragrance of his own prose, draws attention to the Boswell at the expense of the Johnson.

[emph mine]
And another:

Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Here's another Carr introduction to one of Wolff's many lapses in accuracy and honesty:

Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong.

And then proceeds to shred any scintilla remaining of Wolff's "integrity as a reporter," of which he famously has none.

The reason for Wolff's persistent nitwittery and inaccuracy becomes clear in a later graph:

And Wolff also writes that The New York Times canceled a series on Murdoch after two articles were attacked by News Corp. Only two articles were scheduled, and none were canceled, according to the paper’s editors. Wolff prefers the purity of his constructs — one of which is that The Times is a deeply flawed artifact that is doomed to be crushed by the more nimble, less morally constricted Murdoch.

Und so weiter und so fort. Wolff's yapping lapdog attacks on Murdoch are effortlessly put down by Carr and the link above will demonstrate that the NYT, despite many lapses, still has enough self respect to impale an impostor like Wolff despite the fact that Murdoch is no friend of the Times. Wolff will predictably reply by saying that Carr is cadging for a job with Rupert's flagship newspaper in NYC, but I applaud the Sunday Book Review editor for putting Carr's putdown of the scurrilous narcissist Wolff right on the front page.

Che Guevara's [Only] Lasting Legacy

Humberto Fontova has a great article on the shallow little upper middle-class playboy-adventurer named Che whose exploits are invented and exploited by ultra-left degenerates everywhere.

Fontova displays in great detail the many incredibly inane eff-ups CG managed to get himself in before being cornered by CIA gunmen in a Bolivian jungle begging for mercy because "I'm worth more to you alive than dead" and then getting his just desserts from several automatic rifles that terminated him "with extreme prejudice."

Good riddance to bad rubbish, but one story in a local Miami newspaper a few months back on the sports page caught my attention. The paper was reporting that Cubans still on their island prison were hoping that Raul's taking power would mean that Cubans could play golf again. The backstory is that Che playfully challenged Fidel to a golf match, but forgot to lose. Che was an upper-middle class Argentine who could shoot a mean tee-to-green game, but after he beat the Bearded Whoremonger by many strokes, the upshot was that Castro closed all the golf courses on the island except one for diplomats. The Hairy Megalomaniac [who reportedly screamed at Khrushchev during the Cuban Missle Crisis to initiate a nuclear war regardless of the consequences] was, is and ever shall be one of the most autistic moral lepers on the planet, and if he couldn't play golf well, no one else on his Prospero's Cell would play at all---or so the Herald or Sun-Sentinel reporter attests.

I would have loved to interrogate CG after his capture in the same manner that he employed on Freedom Fighters caught by Castro's criminals. But of course, that would make the ultra-left whiners and loo-zers [Harry Reid, etc.] run to Amnesty International and the UN and file a lawsuit with putty-headed judges somewhere on the two Left Coasts.

But to my mind, a higher law dictates direct action.

What Passes For Analysis in the [Once and Future?] USSR

Igor Panarin has the ear of Vlad The Empoisoner Putin, I'll bet, with his frightful predictions of the imminent demise of the USA. This is not the first time that ignorant Eurotrash has predicted the US is a house of cards, since the rigid and sclerotic statist mentality cannot understand American freedoms, mistaking them for anarchy. Read the WSJ article for a few chuckles and raising-eyebrow exercises!

Free Republic prints the original Novosti article with this delicious extended hallucination:

Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions."

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all."

On the fate of the U.S. dollar, he said: "In 2006 a secret agreement was reached between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit. This could signal preparations to replace the dollar. The one-hundred dollar bills that have flooded the world could be simply frozen. Under the pretext, let's say, that terrorists are forging them and they need to be checked."

and then notes at the end:

Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare. [my emph.]

Looks like Tovarich Panarin needs to reassess his basic information input sources before fantasizing in public, but it should be a warning that know-nothing nudniks like Panarin are actually in positions of influence in Putin's attempt to Stalinize Russia after a KGB elite completes its takeover.

And that is less fantastic than Professor Panarin's lucubrations.

RIP: Samuel P. Huntington, a Political Science Giant Among Pygmies

Huntington is famous for a number of ground-breaking perspectives, well annotated and roundly criticized by ultra-left airheads like Edward Said, on the shifting realities on the ground of global political movements. PC leftists and "new" Democrats routinely castigate Huntington, who worked in the Carter NSC, for not reciting their rote anodyne nostrums and signing on to bogus "Davos Man" elitism. [SPH coined the term of the other-worldly haute politique of detached condescension practiced by the EU faineants [and their obsequious allies in the US MSM like Tiny Tom Friedman].

Most recently, Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order was a dose of realism and his knowledge of the persistence of ancient codes and antagonism into the post-Cold War order, contrasting with Francis Fukuyama's sunny and blithe Pollyanna tome, The End of History and the Last Man. 911 blatantly punctuated Huntington's thesis with a bloody exclamation mark!

SPH's masterful writings on The Third Wave and Hispanicization of parts of America earned him the enmity of know-nothing ultra lefties who will dutifully trash this Magister Ludi of late twentieth century political thinking.

Another Brain-Dead Column by Friedman, this one on gas tax hike

Tom Friedman is a total con man, writing books about the obvious while peddling snake oil and BS. His latest canard is a gasoline tax hike, to make our country more like the Europe this buffoon should move to. TF forgets, or is too effing stupid to know, that large countries the size of the USA, Australia, Canada [even Canada!], and Russia all have low gas taxes because of large distances to be travelled to keep the wheels of commerce turning. Such a practical thought would never enter the tiny mind of Arab-bashing Jew-boy Friedman, who brings the Saudis in as the comic book villain. He cites a left-wing moron to make his point:

There has to be a system that permanently changes consumer demand, which would permanently change what Detroit makes, which would attract more investment in battery technology to make electric cars, which would hugely help the expansion of the wind and solar industries — where the biggest drawback is the lack of batteries to store electrons when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. A higher gas tax would drive all these systemic benefits.

The same is true in geopolitics. A gas tax reduces gasoline demand and keeps dollars in America, dries up funding for terrorists and reduces the clout of Iran and Russia at a time when Obama will be looking for greater leverage against petro-dictatorships. It reduces our current account deficit, which strengthens the dollar. It reduces U.S. carbon emissions driving climate change, which means more global respect for America. And it increases the incentives for U.S. innovation on clean cars and clean-tech.

Which one of these things wouldn’t we want? A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum. “A gasoline tax would do more for American prosperity and strength than any other measure Obama could propose.”

Although the above paras are chock-a-block with received opinions and fixed ideas such as the totally discredited Global Warming Hoax, Friedman finally goes over the top to cite Mandelbaum's little socialistic tax-hike to boost "prosperity" when gas price rises have historically hindered prosperity and caused the economy to slow down.

Not that one of the prime freakshows on the NYT's Op-Ed page featuring cretins like Krugman and Herbert and the occasionally readable Dowd ever really thinks about anything. Read his recent line about the Jetsons and the Flintstones which trope he has used, according to WSJ debunker James Taranto, at least a half-dozen times in the last three years.

Always wrong, but never in doubt, Friedman sells books to half-educated housewives and males with housewives' brains.

Every con man has his day, but Friedman is the Bernie Madoff of journalism.

RIP: Global Warming Hoax [1988-2008]

Christopher Booker announces the demise of the late and unlamented Global Warming Hoax, because

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

such as the sudden disappearance of the Late Middle Ages Warming Period when French vines grew all over southern England and wine was produced in northern locations which now are sadly consigned to grain brews like beer and vodka! A fiddling with the statistics produced a hockey stick graph showing ever-increasing warming trend since the beginning of historically recorded weather observations. All this was engineered by politically-active "scientists" like a NASA fraud named Hanson and his Stanford colleague, demonstrating the havoc that can be wrought by snake oil salesmen with PhDs.

These two pranksters collected a cohort of conniving grant-hounds who were given money by moronic politicians like the buffoon Al Gore, who got a D+ on his only science course, one he took in Divinity School!! The Gore-bot is actually dumber than he sounds [if that were possible!], but clever enough and advised by political Ponzi scheme cabalists that if a critical mass of "climatologists" and other usual suspects could be suborned, the hitherto peripheral attacks at corporate capitalism might be forged into a frontal assault at capitalism itself, under the guise of "saving the planet." The dumbest people in the world, Norwegians, agreed and gave the Gore-bot a Nobel Prize for his illiterate windpuffery such as "the science is settled." Gore fits in with the crowd that in the '70s was howling at the moon about a new Ice Age and the advance of the glaciers---which will probably occur in about 10,000 years according to honest scientists, as we are now in the middle of an interglacial warming spell.

Don't count on clowns like the UN and the EU and "media pundits" to back off from the fake "science" that the Global Warming hallucination represents.

In for a penny, in for a pound..... the crooked politicians are blind being led by one-eyed "climatologists". Clear-eyed 20-20 scientists without special interests in grabbing grants for specious spurious pre-cooked chicanery financed by crooked pols and bogus organizations like the Democratic Party. And gullible RINOs like McCain, the fool who was so repellent that he allowed Obama to win Ohio even though Barack won Ohio with 40,000 FEWER votes than John Kerry, who lost the state to GWB by over one hundred thousand votes.

But John-Boy is now joining the great GW daisy chain to keep alive his slot on late-night talk shows and the occasional cameo in comic movies. I think this bozo has finally found his true niche, a stand-up comic.

So far, Obama isn't doing too badly, but if he listens to Robert Kennedy Jr., another political fraud, he is bound to be misled. Thank God he appeared to distance himself from Clinton's odious Veep.
UPDATECanadafreepress.com has a list of the worst Global Warming Whoppers among the lies and disinformation disseminated by the lying Luddites of the ultra-left GoreWhores:

“2008 will be the hottest year in a century:” The Old Farmers’ Almanac, September 11, 2008, Hurricanes, Arctic Ice, Coral, Drinking water, Aspen skiing

We’re now well into the earth’s third straight harsher winter—but in late 2007 it was still hard to forget 22 straight years of global warming from 1976–1998. So the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted 2008 would be the hottest year in the last 100.

But sunspots had been predicting major cooling since 2000, and global temperatures turned downward in early 2007. The sunspots have had a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s thermometers since 1860. Today’s temperatures are about on a par with 1940. For 2008, the Almanac hired a new climatologist, Joe D’Aleo, who says the declining sunspots and the cool phase of the Pacific Ocean predict 25-30 years of cooler temperatures for the planet.

“You could potentially sail, kayak or even swim to the North Pole by the end of the summer. Climate scientists say that the Arctic ice . . . is currently on track to melt sometime in 2008.” Ted Alvarez, Backpacker Magazine Blogs, June, 2008.

Soon after this prediction, a huge Russian icebreaker got trapped in the thick ice of the Northwest Passage for a full week. The Arctic ice hadn’t melted in 2007, it got blown
into warmer southern waters. Now it’s back. (Reference)

Remember too the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. Polish climatologist Rajmund Przbylak says “the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s” based on more than 40 Arctic temperature stations.

“Australia’s Cities Will Run Out of Drinking Water Due to Global Warming.”

Tim Flannery was named Australia’s Man of the Year in 2007—for predicting that Australian cities will run out of water. He predicted Perth would become the “first 21st century ghost city,’ and that Sydney would be out of water by 2007. Today however, Australia’s city reservoirs are amply filled. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun reminds us Australia is truly a land of long droughts and flooding rains.


“Hurricane Effects Will Only Get Worse.” Live Science, September 19, 2008.

So wrote the on-line tech website Live Science, but the number of Atlantic hurricanes 2006–2008 has been 22 percent below average, with insured losses more than 50 percent below average. The British Navy recorded more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes in the last part of the Little Ice Age (1700–1850) as during the much-warmer last half of the 20th century.

“Corals will become increasingly rare on reef systems.” Dr. Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, head of Queensland University (Australia) marine studies.

In 2006, Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg warned that high temperatures might kill 30–40 percent of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef “within a month.” In 2007, he said global warming temperatures were bleaching [potentially killing] the reef.

But, in 2008, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said climate change had not damaged the “well-managed” reef in the four years since its last report. Veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen no heat damage to the reef at all. “The only change I’ve seen has been the result of over-fishing, pollution, too many tourists or people dropping anchors on the reef,” he said.

No More Skiing? “Climate Change and Aspen,” Aspen, CO city-funded study, June, 2007.

Aspen’s study predicted global warming would change the climate to resemble hot, dry Amarillo, Texas. But in 2008, European ski resorts opened a month early, after Switzerland recorded more October snow than ever before. Would-be skiers in Aspen had lots of winter snow—but a chill factor of 18 below zero F. kept them at their fireplaces instead of on the slopes.
*Sources:

Predictions of 25-30 year cooling due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation: Scafetta and West, 2006, “Phenomenological Solar Signature in 400 Years of Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere Temperature Record,” Geophysical Research Letters.

Arctic Warmer in the 1930s: R. Przybylak, 2000, “Temporal and Spatial Variation of Surface Air Temperature over the Period of Instrumental Observation in the Arctic,” International Journal of Climatology 20.

British Navy records of Caribbean hurricanes 1700-1850: J.B. Elsner et al., 2000, “Spatial Variations in Major U.S. Hurricane Activity,” Journal of Climate 13.

Predictions of coral loss: Hoegh-Guldberg et al., Science, Vol. 318, 2007. Status of Coral Reefs of the World 2008, issued by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, Nov., 2008.

Aspen climate change study: Climate Change and Aspen: An Assessment of Potential Impacts and Responses, Aspen Global Change Institute, June, 2007.

On to 2009 and we will hear once more from the Gore-bot that "the "science" is settled, but obviously Gore's mouthful is not sitting well judging from his flatulent orifice [his most productive one].

Anne Applebaum on Greek Mindless Violence

Greece remains the moral leper colony of the EU, and that's saying a lot given the caliber of cowardly insouciance normal to countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and France under Chirac [not omitting Deutschland with its sausage-eating cannibals]. She sums up the Greek situation vis-a-vis the EU:

...the riots' relative absence from European and North American front pages proves that—the rhetoric of European unity aside—not all European countries are taken equally seriously. Although they are members of the European Union, the Greeks' major contribution to European foreign policy is their stubborn insistence (for reasons truly too complex to repeat here) on blocking international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia unless it changes its name to FYROM—the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—an acronym that everybody else finds laughable. On the domestic front, the Greeks are best known for having faked the economic data they needed in order to join the euro currency.

I once spent an evening at dinner with the son of Greek PM Papandreou, head of PASOK, while he was Prime Minister and young Nikos explained to me and my Greek-heritage wife the way a system of corruption worked throughout Greece from the smallest town to the large regional capitals. He said the country was completely balkanized [Robert Kagan alludes to this in his book The Balkans and not in a federal sense or even local loyalty sense. Just atomized.

Applebaum elaborates:

There may also be other, more local, explanations for why these riots feel as if they are taking place so far away from mainstream events. Greek political scientist Stathis Kalyvas argues brilliantly that they are facilitated by Greece's unique political culture: In the years since it overthrew military rule, the Greek political class has come to treat civil disobedience, even violent and destructive civil disobedience, as "almost always justified, if not glorified." Rioting is a "fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage"; the anarchist subculture that thrives in central Athens is "abetted, and in some instances endorsed" by Greece's left-wing parties and mainstream newspapers.
And yet—even if Greece is unserious, even if anarchist subculture has uniquely deep roots in Athens, even if Greek corruption and youth unemployment are unusually high—it's a mistake to dismiss these riots as altogether peripheral. If nothing else, they show what can happen to a highly developed, post-ideological society where organized politics no longer interests large groups of people. One sympathizer says the rioters can be divided into three groups: communists, anarchists, and "younger people who like to think that they are anarchists but … don't know what they stand for. They are the ones who have been looting … they feel the only way to make themselves heard is to do these things."

Another describes the anarchist world of Exharia, approvingly, as "a parallel society with parallel values and parallel ideas." Yet another told a reporter that the tiny shops near the university deserved to be looted because they represent "the corporate machine." The thinking here isn't exactly sophisticated: This is a revolution, among other things, being conducted to the strains of Pink Floyd ("We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control"). Some are also blaming the weakness of Greece's mainstream social democrats, who, like social democrats elsewhere in Europe, have lately lost ground to the further left and are having trouble attracting young people. But I'm guessing the problem runs even deeper: The fact is that political parties in general are weak everywhere, and democracy is therefore weak, too.

The center cannot hold and a motley moron group like Pink Floyd floats like a pig over rioting looters exhibiting "Rage Against the Machine."

Happily, even the EU comical cavalcade of clowns is above the silliness of Greece devolving into its mindless constituencies. Wonder if Victor Davis Hanson can update his War Like No Other to update Thucydides on the civil strife going on now in the EU's leper colony.

Phony Joe and Spouseroo Jill Feed Homeless after $369 in annual donations to charity

Hairplugs eat away at politicians' brains and Joe The Fraud Biden is no exception....this tightwad with donations marched his poor wife to a homeless shelter to fake concern for the homeless. The fact that this dolt is ten times dumber than Sarah Palin is eventually becoming slowly evident and the MSM will have another reason to be ignored in the future.

Biden's phony smile and lying mouth both typify the Dem hypocrisy.....even the NYT's gasbag do-gooder Nicolas Kristof had to admit last week that the average "liberal" is just as phony as Biden, pretending concern for the poor and powerless while donating zilch. They want to get their hands on other people's money, for charity, for taxes, for their hedge funds like Bernie Made-off and will do anything to try to trick the voters into thinking they actually care.

And sometimes their chicanery actually works....! The Dem constituency is either barely literate or completely puffed up with the pretensions of academicide. The stupids won this time. Or, as in Minnesota, the criminal judiciary and criminal state government is stealing an election in broad daylight while the feckless Guv'nr Pawlenty sucks his thumb.

About Time to Pull the Trigger?

Read this link and ask yourself if it isn't time to eliminate not only the so-called "rogue" elements, but the entire superstructure of the Gaza genocidal enterprise whose feelings for the Jews and Israel mirror the Channel 4 "Christmas" spokesperson invited to spew vomit on a Christian celebration.

Take out Londonistan while you're eliminating the nearby terrorist enclave run by Hamas. You've got my vote.

UPDATE The lepers in Cairo are fuming that Israel answers incessant rocket attacks with overwhelming force. Why didn't the feckless impotent shemales in the Arab League do anything to curb Hamas? I see the EU and the UN are among the hyenas circling Israel as the culprit. Hope Obama stays as strong as GWB on defending a democracy living among oligarchic praetorian elite-run totalitarian states.

Palin Praised by Margaret Thatcher's Special Advisor

John O'Sullivan has been exiled to Radio Liberty in Prague, but writes about the media-assassination attempts on Sarah Palin, with Mrs. Andrew Sullivan leading the knickers-in-a-twist mafia and follows with a comparison:

They are far from identical; they rose in different political systems requiring different skills. As a parliamentarian, Mrs. Thatcher needed forensic and debating skills which her training in Oxford politics and as a tax lawyer gave her. Mrs. Palin is a good speaker, but she needs to hone her debating tactics if she is to match those of the Iron Lady.

On the other hand, Mrs. Palin rose in state politics to jobs requiring executive ability. Her successful conduct of the negotiations with Canada, Canadian provinces and American states over the Alaska pipeline was a larger executive task than anything handled by Mrs. Thatcher until she entered the Cabinet and, arguably, until she became prime minister.

Funny how Palin got bombarded while a cretinous hair-plug refugee who claimed Hezbollah had been evicted from Lebanon escaped all MSM scrutiny---even as he inserted his foot in his mouth with metronomic regularity.

I hope O'Sullivan's article helps the WSJ recover from having bi-yotch-in-chief ambassadress to the Upper West Side Noonan's ridiculous display of feminist bitchery. Yeah, and her pen-pal ditto-head K. Parker can insert her head up a place where the sun never shines!

Public Space Between Family Privacy and Government/State

The Pursuit of Glory is one of those rare history books which has a delight on every page, like Braudel's The Mediterranean. Author Tim Blanning quotes Marxists like Eric Hogsbawm and Walter Benjamin often, but doesn't show some leg except a bit with the papacy and the Catholic Church, but as a Brit, that can be excused. Early on, the author does note that medieval concepts of [what he calls "messianic"]time were slowly evolving from the old "Fortune's Wheel" which always returns to where it began to "the arrow of time" relentlessly going forward in a "progressive" don't-look-back mode. The inventions of watches and timetables in Holland were beginning to make time a commodity.

A quote from a review brings up the novel introduction of "public space," which began in England as public opinion separated the privacy of family from the overweening interference of the state [with forced labor in England and corvees in France, to name a couple of examples of the tax-with-impunity interference which rarely returned actual benefits from the state.

""Blanning, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, has performed the miracle of balancing and blending traditional political and diplomatic accounts with the newer fields of social, economic and intellectual history. A prime example of this is the author's treatment of the impact of the new "public sphere." As people discoursed through coffeehouses, Masonic organizations or periodicals, "a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion." Countries where this public sphere was left free, as in Britain or the Dutch Republic, tended to be more politically stable than, say, France, where suppression ended in bloody revolution."

The book only covers 1648-1815, but the French Revolution introduced the "concierge" in each building in Paris to vouch for the political correctness of its inhabitants during The Terror and other revolutionary inventions. An early example of "public space" monitoring the opinions of the citizens of the state even in the familial household.

Nowadays, we see "privacy" becoming a rare commodity itself, as public space continues to invade the family in one way or another. However, "Time's Arrow" does not move forward, as we have seen many times since 1789, and that wheel of fortune keeps disobeying the Eric Hobsbawm and the other disciples of the worst economist in human history.

UPDATEReading Erich Heller's The Importance of Nietzsche, I was struck by the point Heller makes on p. 5 about the "Death of God" which Nietzsche called "the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger," as Heller puts it. EH goes on to say:

Note well the paradox contained in these words. He never said that there was no God, but that the Eternal had been vanquished by Time and that the Immortal suffered death at the hands of mortals."

Perhaps this is a paraphrase of the mini-thought above that "medieval concepts of [what he calls "messianic"]time were slowly evolving from the old "Fortune's Wheel" which always returns to where it began to "the arrow of time" relentlessly going forward in a "progressive" don't-look-back mode." Heller goes on to quote Nietzsche's Will to Power to state:

The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries...For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intesity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection....Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist." [no. 2, 57]

And Nietzsche ain't talking about Global Warming or some natural catastrophe, a force majeure of nature. Heller expatiates on Nietzsche's vision of the aftermath of the Death of God and the seizure of power by "reformers of society."

...Men have become enemies, and each his own enemy. From now onward they will hate, Nietzsche believes, however many comforts they will lavish upon themselves, and hate themselves with a new hatred, unconsciously at work in the depths of their souls. True, there will be ever better reformers of society, ever better socialists, and ever better hospitals, and an ever increasing intolerance of pain and poverty and suffering and death, and an ever more fanatical craving for the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. Yet the deepest impulse informing their striving will not be love and will not be compassion. Its true source will be the panic-struck determination not to have to ask the question "What is the meaning of our lives?"---the question that will remind them of the death of God.....Rather than allowing that question to be asked, they will do everything to smooth it away from the face of humanity.....For they cannot endure it and yet they will despise themselves for not enduring it, and for their guilt-ridden inability to answer it; and their self-hatred will betray them behind the back of their apparent charity and humanitarian concern. For there they will assiduously construct the tools for the annihilation of human kind. "There will be wars such as have never been waged on earth," says Nietzsche in Ecce Homo and in the notes to Thus Spake Zarathustra, "I foresee something terrible, Chaos everywhere. Nothing will be left of any value; nothing which commands: Thou shalt!"

[emphasis in original text]

Heller goes on to say that the fragments above from the notes of his late years "give a surprisingly full diagnosis of what he termed nihilism, the state of human beings and societies faced with a total eclipse of all values." As Stephen R.C. Hicks correctly notes frequently in Explaining Postmodernism, although regarded as a hero by shallow postmodernist nihilists, Nietzsche is a deep humanist and abhors the destruction of values and even calls the clever nihilists "waeklings" and victims of a "slave mentality," as they rationalize their inferior positions in society [professors, journalists, petty functionaries, actors, community organizers, etc.] whose "curdled bitterness" curls up and lashes out at the strong, i.e., those whose values permit them to be happy and generous [read Nicholas Kristof's NYT editorial] instead of weakly whining that wealthy people should be impelled to give through taxes that which these weak hypocrites are unwilling to give themselves, although beating their puny sunken chests in self-praise of their own generous intentions. As Hicks notes:

Socialism is the historical loser and ... socialists...hate that fact, they....hate the winners for having won, and the ...hate themselves for having picked the losing side. Hate [as Nietzsche noted above,my comment]is a chronic condition [that] leads to an urge to destroy. ........ Postmodern thinkers hold that...everything has failed....

[p. 194, Hicks, op. cit.]
My guess as Obama keeps a centrist course in the current crisis, the ultra-left nihilists will continue to maintain their Chicken Little jeremiads as they display their slave mentality and their weakness, the weakness of loo-zers! Though they believe they are launching a crusade, their Pied Piper is the New York Times and they themselves are appropriately the tiny rodents being musically herded out of Hamelin [Gotham City]!

Caroline Kennedy the Elite's Sarah Palin?

Caroline Kennedy is regarded as unqualified to be a senator by 63% of New Yorkers, unless the poll which says only 37% think she is also has the usual "don't knows" to offset the skeptics. Only 16% believe that name recognition has nothing to do with her candidacy.

Sarah Palin was pilloried by the elites because the Upper West Side punditry which the Me Too boondock editorial hacks mindlessly echo whenever Pravda on the Hudson signals the Party Line feared and detested the Will of the People, which in poll after poll has demonstrated is against Open Border and for Offshore Drilling. Ditto Californians who are against gay marriage, but are opposed by "Those Who Know Better" and seek to overturn the popular will by judicial tyranny---the new tyranny of the minority now in fashion. The Oprahfied Nanny-crat Elites fear and hate any real will of the people.

I just finished a long set of bios by Graham Robb on the lives of Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo [and Arthur Rimbaud]. In chapter after chapter, whenever politics in France reared its head, Paris went left and the provinces went right. But the provinces, numerically ten times more populous than Paris, never seemed to have its will made writ of the land.

Methinks the USA is becoming a monarchy-without-a-king as our Founders feared, just like France and the backward autocracies of Europe.

So much for the US being a "democracy."

RINO Colin Powell Vents Colon on Rush Limbaugh

Colin Powell and F. Zakaria had a cabal out loud and C.P. outed himself as just another ex-Oreo.

I wonder if this doofus ever listened to Rush L. in the first place. Limbaugh is a symbol of what spineless libtards hate, and they never listen to his pearls of wisdom, preferring their own socialist bromides----proved by history not to work in any country with more than 20 million people. And where does this bogus RINO come up with his demographic delusionary predictions, unless of course he's counting [hoping for?] on a flood of illegal immigrants.

Zakaria is a clever fellow whose book is clogged with unforced errors due to reliance on dubious stats gleaned from a dishonest media. The guy should dig deeper before pontificating on issues like the Global Warming Hoax. No moral character, just a smart version of Al Gore.

Sen. Peter Fitzgerald [R.] Got Patrick Fitzgerald the Fed Prosecutor Job

Mark Shieldson PBS Lehrer News had an interesting pair of contributions today. Despite his tiresome class-warfare bitchery, Shields told Lehrer and Brooks that the person to thank for Patrick Fitzgerald's MOR prosecutorial zeal was former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald [no relation] who insisted after the 2000 election of GWB that the chief Fed prosecutor in Chicago be an "outsider," citing the precedent of the fellow who finally nailed Al Capone, a guy named Eliot Ness.

In a strange coincidence back at the end of the nineties, my wife, daughter & I ran into Sen. Fitzgerald at a west-side gas station in Chicago on a trip to pick up a cat from a small town near Rockford where Dem superlawyer David Boies [who was to head the team that lost Florida on behalf of Al Gore in 2000] was born. I told Sen. Peter that my wife had worked for Sen. Sarbanes & told my nine-year old daughter, who is now studying Poli-Sci at UMiami, that the Cadillac SUV was being driven by a U.S. Senator.

Shields pointed out the honorable integrity of Peter Fitzgerald, a rare quality among Illinois politicians, and that Fitzgerald resigned on a matter of principle in 2004 and allowed Obama to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. Patrick Fitzgerald, of course, did indict and convict Scooter Libby on a jumped-up case in Plamegate, but now is distinguishing himself by outing the stupid crook Blagojevich.

Just how stupid is Blago-bitch? Despite being elected to three terms to the House of Reps, the autistic Illinois guv'nr believes he has the power to appoint the successor to Rahm Emmanuel. [In another obiter dictum, Rahm and my daughter shared the same baby-sitter, albeit thirty years apart! Chicago politics tends to be chummy!] No, Rod, Congresspeople are always chosen by special elections, almost as dumb as Donovan McNabb not knowing that you can have a tie in an NFL game!]

Shields did come up with an interesting suggestion---appoint Patrick Fitzgerald Senator to close out the term, he has no political affiliations and could actually be better than a partisan like Atty Gen'l Lisa Madigan, now far ahead of "Candidate 5" who happens to be J.Jackson Jr.

And it looks like the flap over Blago and his clumsy feckless behavior has effectively eliminated Caroline Kennedy's chances to be appointed to Senator from NY to take over Hillary's seat. Or Bill Clinton's chances, as he has a few skeletons in his closet!!

Putin's Police State Plays "Beat the Press"

Another Journalist lies close to death in the murderous campaign the Putin "Neue Ordnung" is arranging for the working press as Vlad The Empoisoner again demonstrates that his hero Joe "Stalin" Djugashvili inspires him to extrajudicial executions that the American MSM, obsessed with its dervish hashish dreams, ignores---Bushitler is obviously behind this, but the MSM still can't find that journalistic link.

Florida, Oklahoma Two Runaway Trains Primed for Collision

Thus Sayeth Pat Forde in his ESPN analysis of the BSC National Championship, which will pit the Heisman final two QB candidates against each other in a "fight, not flight" brand of football.

Given U. Miami's current slump, Florida is my default team and Tebow an overarching casting choice for real-life superman. But I'm reading Sally Jenkins' book "Real All Americans" about the 1903 game between Jim Thorpe's Carlisle Indians and Army. Football came out of the "muscular Christianity" movement of the post-Civil War Gilded Age shift from Parkman's 1890 loss of the frontier and the increasing mechanization and electrification of America. Walter Camp laid down the rules as "an exercise of social Darwinism and military science." Unlike rugby with its British honor system of self-policing, football needed referees as the unique American pushing the envelope required on-site adjudification on every play. In the 1890s, College football exploded into popularity in the same period baseball went big-time professional. But here's Pat Forde:

Thus we welcome two runaway freight trains to Titletown, where the head-on collision figures to be intense. Florida's average score since the Ole Miss loss: 50-13. Oklahoma's average: 60-29.

In addition to pairing two red-hot and dominant teams, there are some other juicy subplots to latch onto.

• Florida has played 1,053 games in its history, and Oklahoma has played 1,140. Yet they've never played each other. Let the two peacock-proud fan bases commence jawing.

• One coach, either Meyer or Oklahoma's Bob Stoops, will become the first to win a second BCS title.

Meyer returns to his second championship game in three years, continuing his even-year run as king of the football universe. In 2004, Meyer took Utah to an undefeated season and Fiesta Bowl victory, which earned him the upgrade to Gainesville. In 2006, his Gators trampled unbeaten Ohio State to win the crystal football. And now in '08 he's back again.

Stoops made his mark in the business sooner than Meyer, guiding Oklahoma to the 2000 national championship. Since then the Sooners have been annually excellent -- with the glaring exception of BCS bowl games. They've lost four straight, all of them with embarrassment attached.

• We could have a face-off of Heisman Trophy winners for just the second time. (Oklahoma was involved in the other one as well, when 2003 winner Jason White flopped against '04 winner Matt Leinart in a 55-19 USC romp.)

Bradford's ancestors may have had some of that Native American blood that made Jim Thorpe the greatest all-round athlete the US has ever produced. Tebow is a "one in a billion" combination of athlete skills and moral character. Alabama has a great team, and next year might bring a rematch, if both can survive the briar patch of SEC smashmouth defense and soaring offense. Oklahoma lives in a Big 12 where offense trumps defense and the there is a mismatch between the two conference divisions that, in Forde's words "(The only thing more lopsided than the Big 12 divisions is Quasimodo.)" Texas and Texas Tech and Oklahoma State all should be BCS contestants in a fairer world. I'll finish off with more from Forde:

"This," Meyer said, "will go down as one of the great wins in Florida football history."

It gives Florida a chance to play one more game of historic import this season, against an Oklahoma team that shares an attribute with the Gators. When faced with adversity, both chose fight over flight.

Franken Comedy in MN ain't funny

John Fund in today's WSJ has a short piece on how the dishonest porn lizard who commandeered Harvard students and used Harvard stationery to write one of his unfunny books [imagine if a Repub candidate had done that, he would have been Borked and Palinized by the ultra-left MSM right out of the race] is now in the race until a count of votes shows he's ahead, and then the recount stops.

Truth be said, Minnesota had two lousy candidates for Senator, both Jews from Brooklyn NY, and in a better world, the independent would have won. But between the two, Coleman is far less lousy than the putrid carrion-eating hyena [a female-dominated animal whose matriarchs are jammed full of testoserone] named Franken. Only a state who sent Jesse Ventura to the Governor's Mansion is loony enough to send a potty-mouthed libtard like Franken to the Senate, although this southern extension of Canada deserves one of the worst Senators in the country.

Revolutionary Road and Richard Yates

Richard Yates was Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s favorite American contemporary novelist. Vonnegut told me so in a booze-soaked party in Sag Harbor after I mentioned that I had a long conversation with Yates a few years before when he was academic advisor at Boston U. for my sister-in-law and somehow ended up with me and my mother-in-law in their Lincoln, MA basement talking about everything. Christopher Hitchens, with whom I shared many booze-soaked afternoons in the Iron Gate restaurant across from where I worked at the Middle East Institute, reviews the movie coming out this Christmas in The Atlantic Monthly.

My memories of Yates were of a guy who wanted to understand the people he was talking to and about while he chain-smoked. His big failing was not getting the academic postmark of a college degree or even time at school after his stint in WWII. But I read Cold Spring Harbor and found he was a natural observer of human nature in the raw circumstances of everyday life. Christopher H. remains a sort of Dirk Bogarde of the mind, endlessly facile and epigrammatic, but not very substantial, as his review of the book [and it is evident that he probably hasn't seen the movie] skips along the surface---which given the subject of suburban life, is probably appropriate.

Why Great Britain is getting less "great" as it sloughs off democratic tradition

L'affaire Damien Green indicates how far the UK has gone down the road to Bureaucratic Authoritarianism as it lurches toward Bethlehem to be reincarnated as a socialist nanny-nazi bureaucratic prison just like its continental EU partners in mediocrity.

Gordon Brown would resign if he had a notochord. This jellyfish keeps drifting like a Portuguese Man O'War toward symbiosis with Vlad [The Empoisoner] Putin in Moscow.

Plum-Voiced Deepak Chopra Blames, Who Else?, USA for Mumbai Debacle

The WSJ has an article by Dorothy Rabinovitch describing several CNN interviews of the noted Indian GI tract expert who points to the USA as the cause of the bloodshed in Mumbai.

......commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. [my emph] Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps?

Of course, Dr. Chopra has long ago abandoned complicated thought processes like "cause and effect" and of course, examining the fanatical religious woman-bashers and fundamentalist fascisms they adhere to. Perps' complaints and demands are never subjected by Deepak to the light of cold historical reasoning---that tedious obstacle to simplicity and reductionist Oprahfications on the road to Nirvana. Logic and reasoning hamper the good Doctor's serene reduction of complexities to a single unity. Larry King has already arrived at Deepak's end zone of continuous contemplation of the clash of opposites, always reducing such disturbances to the world's one and only source of evil, located in Washington D.C.

I for one believe Deepak should stick to cleansing bowels and ingesting garlic and ginger to facilitate our journey ere we shuffle off this mortal coil! Or perhaps he could be given a seat on Nobel Laureate Al Gore's meteorological Global Warming Cte. in the Obama Green Cabinet to help ward off the inevitable melting of the polar icecaps. Al needs all the advice and help he can get.