Pickled-brain Russian Colonel Blames Poland for WWII

Maybe it's the vodka, but Russian strategic thinking often verges on the phantasmagoric when it comes to bizarre out-of-the-box thinking. Col. K. published one of these wild and crazy apologies for the Molotov/Ribbentrop Treaty of August 1939 thusly:

The paper, titled "Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR's Role On the Eve of World War II," recounts how in the run-up to Germany's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler demanded that Poland turn over control of the city of Danzig as well as a land corridor between Germany and the territory now known as Kaliningrad.

"Everyone who has studied the history of World War II without bias knows that the war began because of Poland's refusal to satisfy Germany's claims," he writes.

Kovalyov called the demands "quite reasonable." He observed: "The overwhelming majority of residents of Danzig, cut off from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, were Germans who sincerely wished for reunification with their historical homeland."

Of course, there is a method to this loony-tune history, part of Tiny Vlad The Empoisoner's Rehab of Soviet history so we can all fantasize once again along Comintern lines:

The Kremlin presses a campaign to recast Russia's 20th century history in a more favorable light, [and] a research paper published Thursday on the Defense Ministry's Web site blamed Poland for starting World War II.

The unorthodox reading of history appears to be the latest effort by Russian historians to defend the Soviet Union and its leaders, especially their role in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Poland condemned the research paper.

Russia has angrily rejected claims that a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine amounted to genocide, and Russia's Supreme Court recently turned down an appeal to reopen an investigation into the massacre by Soviet secret police of Polish military officers and intellectuals in Russia's Katyn forest during World War II.

The generally accepted view is that Poland was a victim rather than the aggressor in the conflict, and that Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland marked the start of the war.

The fact that this factitious counterfactual appeared on the Defense Ministry website makes it a semi-official expression of what passes for "strategic thinking" at the highest rungs of the neo-Soviet madhouse being reconstructed by tiny Vlad. Although the Colonel in the Poland-bashing article can't hold a candle to Igor Panarin who predicts civil war and subsequent martial law across the US later this year [2009], a breakup of the USA into six "rump-states" by 2011, and the happy occurrence of a Russia/China "New World Disorder" shortly thereafter.

Panarin [is] a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, [whose thinking] meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End"—when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control. Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

I suggest that Igor and Col. K lay off the "little water" for a while and detox enuf to get off Mini-me Vlad's alternate-universe for a short breather before sloshing back into Vlad's vodka & fish roe hallucinations.

Gallup Shows Cheney more Favorable Votes than Pelosi

Pelosi is becoming a byword for empty-headed chronic ditzy moves. My personal favorite was a couple of years ago when this Italian-American actually thought the Democratic slogan for the national elections should be "Contract On America." Yeah, and that's coming true so far as herself, Reid, and Obama are destroying the fabric of American life as surely as a mafia hit man makes his bones.

Perhaps this is a signal that the American people are now beginning to pay attention to what lies behind the unceasing propaganda of the liberal left, which includes the networks, especially Bowing Brian & Kiss-Up Katie, bashing Cheney at every turn for lies and insinuations about attacks on the Constitution. Compared to standard-issue methods of interrogation in the Middle East, waterboarding is NOT torture. And if it was done on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and personal murderer of Daniel Pearl, I personally would like to administer it myself.

More to the point, Cheney has been the object of ceaseless attacks which are dishonest and unmerited. Nancy Pelosi on the other hand has been idolized by the knuckle-dragging morons on the non-Fox cable networks and the Bowing Brian/Kiss-Up Katie networks.

So it's beginning to sink in that Nancy is really way above her skill set in the House, and Harry Reid parenthetically is a total joke in the Senate. Obama's IQ is probably the equal of both of his colleagues, but his moves so far to improve the economy are going to result in Carter-style 10& inflation and 20% interest rates before long.

Hopefully by 2010, so we can have a realignment of forces in the House and Senate to remove the current clowns from endangering our way of life any further.

Obama in Cairo: Welcome Back, Carter?

Obama made a decent enough speech in Cairo, though projecting a false equivalence between Israeli democracy and Arab cowardly autocratic regimes on the West Bank, which he claims has seen Israel holding Arabs "hostage," whereas it was the Arab cowardly autocratic regimes which held the Palestinians in refugee camps after their humiliating defeats in the '47-48 wars.

Threatening Israel with destruction--or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews--is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people--Muslims and Christians--have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations--large and small--that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Taranto's followup in the WSJ is appropriate:

Obama presents a false choice: between seeing the conflict "only from one side or the other" and treating Palestinian complaints about "the displacement brought by Israel's founding" and Israeli ones about "the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond" as equivalent and offsetting.

In truth, Israel's founding was not sufficient to bring about Palestinian displacement. Also necessary for the latter was the Arab states' violent rejection of the former. And the perpetuation of the Palestinians' plight is far more the fault of the Arab states (joined recently by Iran), not only for refusing to permit Palestinian immigration but also for giving both material and rhetorical support to Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

Probably it would have been diplomatically unwise for Obama in Cairo to put the matter as bluntly as we have done here. But no real resolution of the conflict is possible so long as the Arab states remain major players and are held to no standard of responsibility for their own actions.

The Arabs always prefer the Jacques Shh-Iraq stiletto/vendetta route, the craven stab-in-the-back that cowardly nations perform when they are too weak or lacking in male prowess to do the job on the battlefield. Roula Khalaf of the FT lauds Obama for avoiding the "terror" word. Comically, the Dems won't allow any use of the word "terror attack" on the cowardly murder of US Army Recruiter Long in Little Rock, and Obambi wouldn't want to spoil his debutante's ball in the Middle East with confronting terror in his own homeland.

Yep, James Earl Carter tried it once and failed resoundingly. Getting conned at Camp David. Maybe now that Terrorist Arafat is gone, the Palestinians will be more sensible. Oops, there's Hamas, guess not.

This little boy pretending to be President might make the same mistakes, though unlike Carter, he does have charm and an articulate way of putting things.

Maybe that makes him more dangerous than one-term Jimmy.

NPR & Obambi Ignore Terrorist Jihadist Murder of US Army Recruiter

Obama is too busy talking about Iran's right to go nuclear [despite having the world's largest natural gas reserves and no energy need for atomic energy] to notice or comment on the murder of a Little Rock Army recruiter by a jihadist Yemen-trained terrorist.

Nor does NPR think the religious "orientation" of the Islamist terrorist important.

At the same time, a creampie-fanny buffoon rants about "Christianist" murder of an infanticide mass murderer, supported by a nasty beotch recently named Sec of HEALTH!

Jeffrey Goldberg calls it "Death by Euphemism." I'd call it moral [political] cowardice by Obambi and the death of journalism by a statist socialist publically-owned propaganda network.

Saad Ibrahim Pleads for Real Democracy in Egypt

Sa'ad Ibrahim was a professor at American U. of Cairo in the mid-90s when I was at Amoco, the foreign company at the time with the largest assets in Egypt, second only to the Suez Canal Organization, a state-owned entity. I visited him at his Cairo suburb Ma'adi residence several times----the Amoco HQ was in Ma'adi just down the road [and the tallest building in the suburb, where I was on the top floor when a big earthquake hit in '92]. Sa'ad reflected the plight of educated westernized Egyptians faced with a choice between an autocratic praetorian regime and an Islamist Ikhwan party more vicious and misogynist than most Taliban-type Sunni zealots. Think of Zawahiri and Qutb.

As a US State Dept Arabist in the '70's, I was an "Israel Basher" of the first order, and much later became good friends with Chas Freeman, US Amb. to Saudi during the First Gulf War [I see the two GW's like episodes in a Hundred Years War]. Although I do know and am aware of the Israeli Lobby's strength [after leaving State, I was John Anderson's MidEast Advisor in the "80 Campaign & discovered most of JA's funding was from "Jewish" organizations], I am now glad the Lobby helped excise the Carter wart from the US govt's nether regions. Carter was a serial eff-up and now hates Israel because between Teddy K. & John A., their lobby spearheaded his loss to Reagan, whom they saw as more compliant & pro-Israel in the fundamental sense of pro-democratic.

As an Amoco Strategic Planner, I got invited by Shimon Peres to a three-hour "lunch" on the Dead Sea & I was strongly rebuked the next day by the Israeli Oil Minister Chacal, who doubled as the Police Minister & had bugged Peres's hotel room on the Dead Sea Riviera!!! I was escorted by the head of Shin Bet because the Israelis were mad about getting their own oil & gas from Amoco in the middle of the biggest oil patch on Earth.

It took a long time for me to understand the essential difference between a democracy, untidy as it is, like Israel, and the brutal misogynist oligarchies in the Islamic crescent surrounding the small island of semi-sanity called Israel.

9/11 sealed the deal for me, and since then I regard well-meaning guys like Chas Freeman as a "Fifth Columnist" in a campaign to justify the unjustifiable aggressive nature of "The Straight Path." War & Aggression are built in the DNA of Islam, and my long stays in both India & Pakistan also convinced my of the almost unviable nature of "Islamic Democracy." The Indian elections last week again proved that a sloppy democracy is better than a clan-dominated praetorian Islamic hodge-podge like Pakistan.

Or even the relatively docile Egyptians, whose age-old collective wisdom and significant Shi'ite and Coptic minorities have long been respected more or less in the political spectrum, though not given much leeway in the public forums available to them.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for the "Fertile Crescent," which Egypt anchors on its southwest arc. The murder of the US recruiter in Little Rock is another indication that Islamic violence and terrorism, invented by "The Old Man of the Mountain" in the twelfth century, still employs assassination as its normal method of operation.

Another "Maunder Minimum" Mini-Ice Age in Store?

NASA proves again that there is science and then there are scientists and finally there are NASA "meteorologists," who evidently do their dartboard predictions after a few pints of Guinness. And here is a cogent argument from Canada's only sane newspaper east of the Rockies.

Not until the end of the usual boring bureaucratese BS do the NASA frauds get to kinda sorta the point:

From a research point of view, that's good news because solar minimum has proven to be more interesting than anyone imagined. Low solar activity has a profound effect on Earth’s atmosphere, allowing it to cool and contract. Space junk accumulates in Earth orbit because there is less aerodynamic drag. The becalmed solar wind whips up fewer magnetic storms around Earth's poles. Cosmic rays that are normally pushed back by solar wind instead intrude on the near-Earth environment. There are other side-effects, too, that can be studied only so long as the sun remains quiet. Meanwhile, the sun pays little heed to human committees. There could be more surprises, panelists acknowledge, and more revisions to the forecast.

For more on the "Maunder Minimum" and the possibilities, check out more ata non-bureaufudge version of the above. Here's an anecdotal tidbit:
During the Maunder Minimum

During the Great Frost of (1683–1684) in England, the River Thames was completely frozen for
two months, the ice was 11 inches thick at London. Sea ice was reported along the coasts of
southeast England, and ice prevented the use of many harbors. The sea froze, so that ice
formed for a time between Dover and Calais, joining England and France. (It is more likely that
the shorelines froze and a great mass of densely packed icebergs, some 11 feet thick, built up
along the coastlines fusing into a semi-rigid structure that may have connected the two
shorelines together.) The Thames was recorded to have frozen over at London during the
years: 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1667, 1684, 1695, 1709, and 1716. [Sources: River Thames
Frost Fairs and Historical Weather Events 1650-1699] [See also: The Great Frost of 1683-4 and
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide]

Not that Samuel Pepys or other highly-literate observers can tell the NASA Anthropogenic Global Warming Cabal about quack science. As Richard Feynman predicted in his famous talk on "Cargo Cult Science," the NASA quacks are now in control and have Nibelungs like Frank, Waxman, and other genetic freaks toiling on their behalf.

Biden Stains Air Force Academy Graduation with His Antics

"5 Deferment Joe" avoided military service with the same assiduous cowardice that his predecessor Dick Cheney displayed, but the DEEPEST-throat Drive-Bys never mention that when the


Remember, this clown said that Hezbollah had been "kicked out" of Lebanon during his laughable campaign---the doofus actually made fun of Alaska's small population during his attacks on Palin---the drive-by DNC arm called the media neglected to notice that Delaware itself is two senators representing a population the size of an average Congressional District.

Laughingly, a commenter named izi seriously maintains the Biden was adroitly making fun of himself when he made one of his trademark gafferoos concerning a teleprompter. If anyone thinks the BozoVeep was making a reference to anything approaching subtle humor, I have some well-watered land about 20 miles west of Boca I'd like to sell them.


Another commenter named Pom Pom Girl makes some very direct points outlining just what a dishonest coward this jerk actually is:

Since Joe Biden has been selected by Obama to oversee the implementation of the Stimulus plan, I thought it would be good to refresh our collective memories on Joe Biden.

In September 1987, Joe Biden's Presidential campaign ran into problems when he plagiarized a speech by Neil Kinnock, who was then-leader of the British Labour Party.

It was also discovered that, when he was a law student at Syracuse Law School, he had plagiarized a law review article. While the then-dean of the law school, as well as Biden's former professor, played down the seriousness of the incident, they did find Biden drew "chunks of heavy legal prose directly from" the article in question. Biden said it was unintentional due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, (after 4 years of college one should know the rules of citation) and Biden was permitted to retake the course after receiving a grade of F, which was later dropped from his record.

When questioned by a New Hampshire resident about his grades in law school, Biden had inaccurately recalled graduating in the "top half" of his class when he actually graduated 76th from a class of 85, and he also falsely stated that he had received a full scholarship, and had earned three degrees. The truth is that he had received two majors, History and Political Science, and a single B.A degree, as well as a half scholarship based on financial need, not academic achievement .

When he was confronted with these truths, Biden withdrew from the nomination race on September 23, 1987, saying his candidacy had been overrun by "the exaggerated shadow" of his past mistakes.

He has since revealed his own bunker hideaways location, made racist remarks on Indian 7eleven owners in his distrect and even called Obama clean cut articulate etc..
When you get to know him you'll know why those in his district less than kindly refer to him as slow joe.

Another instance on when this moral leper BS-ed about his exploits [in the Oval Office, brave boyo!] is recounted on a good summary of just how incredibly stupid is the enfeebled brain of this moron-in-chief who was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Cte without learning any foreign policy.

P.S., for all you people wondering about Lebanon, Hezbollah was not "kicked out" of that country, but is assassinating itself into the dominant power in Beirut---not that Joe Squarepants would notice.

NBA: Refs Mean Cleveland Plays 8 Against Orlando's Five?

Joey Crawford appears to be following the Tim Donaghy rules when it comes to calls in Game 3 of the Orlando/Cav game, in which Dwight Howard was given no leeway at all [and called for a couple of Ben Wallace flops plus a LeBron drive which grazed the King's hip as DH tried to get out of the way]. LeBron can charge, but get a blocking foul on the Magic almost at will. OTOH, Dwight is being short-sheeted on playing time by refs who call him for no-foul flops by the likes of Williams and Wallace [and don't forget the time Williams threw a ball at Howard with no technical call].

I'll bet Magic fan Tiger Woods is glad he is his own ref more or less in PGA rules USGA golf. And watching good-friend Dywane Wade see Dwight get a ridiculous lack of respect from crooked refs must make him cringe.

It's crushingly obvious that the NBA's "hidden" agenda is becoming glaringly visible---the big Vitamin Water and other Corporate Masters want their puppet Stern to dance the Finals into a LeBron/Kobe confrontation. There's a lot of ad money riding on it.

When Coach Van Gundy says that the NBA Finals aren't like College Football voting for top game, he must have had his tongue in his cheek. And when a reporter asked him about the reffing, which makes any fan gag, he told the guy to write about what he himself couldn't say without a $25K fine! "Just write about what you saw." I'll bet Stern and his Gang of Deputy Commishes are wondering how to punish Van Gundy for excessive candor....!

And if it takes technicals like the one Joey Crawford called on Dwight to scare the Defensive Player of the Year into mediocrity, and dozens of loony calls like the perfect block of LeBron's three-point attempt at the end of the Fourth Quarter being called a foul on Dwight, well then that's what it takes. Damn the spectators and their lyin' eyes! Looks like the zebras are following the orders of Stern, who obviously takes his cues from former car-salesman Baseball Commish Selig [who sold my dad a '59 Fairland in Milwaukee a century ago] who IN TURN takes HIS cues from Larry King.

A bunch of old geezers who probably admire Bernie ["Made-Off"] Madoff.

Bring back Donaghy, he can't do worse than Crawford & Co. pushing the Cavs toward the Finals.

UPDATE A blog by Matt Yglesias was brought to my attention and this commenter seems to have voiced my thoughts on Commissioner Stern much better than I did above:
As with just about everything he does, Stern is acting like a high-handed, venal little shit. The NBA could have let this pass under the radar, but by protesting too loudly, all it does is once again place attention to the fact that to many fans the NBA is barely more credible than the WWE..
Agreed. I saw this on display during an interview with Stern regarding the suspension of a player (I believe it was Pierce's "menacing gesture"). The sideline reporter asked Stern about the player's appeal, and Stern smirked and said something like, "he can appeal all he wants, but I am the one deciding his appeal, so..." The announcers got a good chuckle out of his answer.
The obvious implication was that the appeal process was meaningless and that Stern is the final word on such matters, period. In my opinion, Stern is arrogant enough to think he can "correct" problems with officiating in the playoffs by making sure refs know what would please or displease him in a given series. To Stern, this wouldn't be him "fixing a game" - it would be him "improving the product."
When you put someone who believes he knows best in charge of an organization with no checks or balances, bad things tend to happen.

NYT Reporter's Foreclosure Book Leaves Out a "few details"

Megan McArdle of The Atlantic [h/t: Mangan's Miscellany] has discovered that the widely touted [on PBS Evening News & NYTimes Magazine] author who wrote a sob story about his home being foreclosed has a couple of bankruptcy skeletons in his marital closet. Seems his second wife is a serial filer and the seamy details reveal once again that the NYT is the least reliable source of news for honest and sincere factual analysis in the USA, if not the entire planet. Sort of like Pravda when Stalin was its Managing Editor [who was succeeded by Molotov, I believe, whom Pinch Sulzberger uses as his beau ideal of an overall redactor----hence Bill Keller.]

TPM Compassion for Failed Terrorists

The Treason Left is well represented by this specimen of hard-left human garbage named Roth who empathizes with the four arrested terrorist wannabes and detests the FBI for having used some undercover techniques to entice the group into doing what they wanted to do---like Rev. Wright and his acolyte for 20 years---hate America and destroy it and its values.

Pelosi and Sphincter and a creepy ex-Senator from FL named Graham all hate the CIA. I guess the left is now targeting the FBI for its zeal in protecting America from the left's terrorist allies.

Why Newspapers are Going Out of Business

Doug Ross is up with the original editorial the Sac-ofS**t Bee had up after the voters roundly trounced the Five Propositions the Elitist Faineants at the Bee had supported:

Sacramento Bee: "You did it! Uh, so what now?"

Good morning, California voters. Do you feel better, now that you've gotten that out of your system?

You wanted to show the state's politicians just how mad you are at them. And you did. Boy, did you ever.

Proposition 1A with its taxes and its spending limit? Too much of one and not enough of the other, you said (or was it the other way around), and voted it down. Never mind that the taxes go into effect anyway. You showed 'em.

Proposition 1B? That was a tougher call.

Proposition 1C? No way. You like the lottery just like it is. And all they were going to do with that extra $5 billion was spend it.

Propositions 1D and 1E? Forget it. You had already voted to put money into preschool and mental health programs. You're not taking it out now.

And 1F? Heck, yeah! Let's not pay our legislators if they can't pass a budget on time. So what if it likely won't have any effect, or that this year they actually passed a budget months earlier than they needed to? That's not the point.

The point is that you're sick and tired of all this political mumbo-jumbo. So you showed those politicians who's in charge. You. You're now officially in charge of a state that will be something like $25 billion in the hole for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

So, now that you've put those irksome politicians in their place, maybe it's time to think about this: Since you're in charge, exactly what do you intend to do about that pesky $25 billion hole in the budget?

Lay off some state workers? Which ones? And how many? Remember, the entire state payroll is about $25 billion. You could lay off every last one of them every Highway Patrol officer, every prison guard, every state firefighter, every health inspector, every professor in the UC and CSU systems, every DMV employee and every nameless, faceless paper-shuffling bureaucrat and the state would only be barely in the black. But if you want to do that, go ahead. You're in charge, remember.

Wait, how about taking money back from the counties? Great idea. Not that it will be easy. Most of them are already in the red and getting ready to lay off cops, prosecutors, probation officers and clinic staff.

Let's see. What about laying off more teachers? Shortening the school year? Releasing prisoners? Selling some of the state's real estate holdings? Borrow billions to tide the state over until the economy improves

What's that? Few of these ideas sound like what you want to do? Well, that's OK. You really don't have to do these things yourself. You just have to figure out what you want done and tell the Legislature to do it.

They'll surely hop right on it, now that you're in charge. Just keep in mind that your suggestions have to keep the state solvent and able to meet all its legal obligations. And you know how complicated things get when the lawyers get involved.
You say it'll take you awhile to figure this stuff out, that you'll need a little time to get up to speed on the details? No problem. You've got until June 30 to get it all straight.

That sounds a lot like work, you say? Sorry, no whining allowed. You asked for this job. Now you've got it, so get on it. Oh, and remember. The entire nation is watching to see how you do now that you're in charge.

No pressure or anything. Just thought you'd want to know.

The comments from readers rightly expressed disgust and dismay at a newspaper that eviscerated taxpayers who dared to turn down an out-of-control government bureaucracy run amok. Here's the replacement op-ed.

E

ditorial: Time for reform - not for blame

NOW VOTERS HAVE JUDGED LEADERS; HOW WILL LEADERS TAKE THE REBUKE?

Good morning, members of the California Legislature. Good morning, Governor.

Feeling bruised and abused this morning? Well, you can't say you didn't see it coming. The polls have been saying for weeks that voters were going to do just what they did on Tuesday: Conclusively reject your slate on the ballot, Propositions 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D and 1E.

Today, on the morning after voters kicked around your best effort at fixing the state budget as if it were a deflated soccer ball, you face a decision.

You can blame the voters for reacting with uninformed and misplaced anger.

Or you can look in the mirror and admit you had it coming. And you know you did.

Over the last couple of decades you and your predecessors in both parties created an environment of cynicism that poisoned Californians' faith in democracy. You have insulated yourselves from the electorate. You have rigged elections by drawing noncompetitive districts. You have discouraged turnout with negative campaigning. You have catered to special interests across the political spectrum.

As the state's fiscal situation grew more and more dire, you responded with years of gimmicks and stalling followed, finally, by secret negotiations to produce what turned out to be (at least in our estimation) an acceptable compromise.

But by then, the problem was too big to be solved so easily. And it was too late to make your case to the voters, who were tuned out and disengaged, which is exactly how most of you wanted them.

There is no simple recovery from this disastrous state of affairs. First, there is that huge budget deficit - $20 billion? $23 billion? $25 billion? - to deal with, and quickly, before the state runs up on the rocks of insolvency.

But after that, a much harder task awaits: Restoring citizens' faith - not just in government, but in the possibility that they can trust their elected representatives to act responsibly and honorably to solve common problems.

There is only one way to do that: Work to reform California politics. Not just simple reforms, such as requiring only a majority vote to pass a budget, but larger ones, too: more transparency in the Legislature and the Governor's Office; less ballot-box budgeting; more accountable schools, cities, counties and special districts; modernized and more efficient government, including pay and benefits for the reality of life in the 21st century. In other words, make Californians feel they are getting their money's worth from the governments they pay for.

If that sounds difficult, well, it will be. You're starting from a deep hole, one that you've dug yourselves.

The first step is to stop digging. Don't blame voters, no matter how much you may want to. Accept their verdict with good grace. Acknowledge that even if they don't have a mastery of all the details of the state budget, their judgment about your performance is not subject to your approval.

And at bottom, that was what this election was about: Not the fine points of governing, but the judgment of the public on your performance. You have been judged and have been found wanting.

For the sake of California's future, here's hoping you respond with a commitment to regain the voters' trust and restore their faith in representative democracy. If you can't do that, this state has a problem too big to be measured in mere billions.

If ever an editorial board could execute a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree midair turn, that was it.

The original op-ed was up from early morning (12:30AM PST?) to around 10:00AM, at which time the response convinced editors to (*ahem*) edit the content. The stated rationale?

Note to our readers: Many of the comments below refer to an article that was posted in error. That article was a draft prepared for internal discussion among members of The Bee's editorial board. Such discussions are a routine part of our work, and frequently lead to editorials that are considerably different from writers' first drafts.

That's what happened in this case. After discussion, we decided that our initial editorial about the special election should take a different tack. The result was the editorial that now appears on this page. This editorial is the only editorial about the special election that appeared in Wednesday's editions of The Bee.

David Holwerk, Editorial Page Editor, The Sacramento Bee

Once again proving that the only way to separate the mainstream media from big government Democrats is with a crowbar."

I would add Bertholdt Brecht's famous observation after the German "Democratic" Republic complained after the 1953 Berlin Riots that the German People were undeserving of the delights of worker-paradise Communism. Brecht is supposed to have remarked, "Then why doesn't the GDR choose a new people?"

California voters have the right to vote in a new collection of rascals, but given the gerrymandered collection of CDs, and other electoral districts in CA, perhaps a Constitutional Convention, a la 1878-9 would be in order.

Things You Just Can't Make Up

THE FLUMMERY DIGEST is a delightful collection of the absurdities the mindlessness pervasive in the MSM seems to produce on an hourly basis. The wonderful dude in Beantown who started this gallery of nitwittery must have been inspired by the "stupid criminal" videos that are on TRU TV and other cable networks for our late night entertainment.

Now we can understand how a freak like Joe Klein can emerge from the woodwork and, like the proverbial termite, consider himself the lord of the manor he is eating into long-term mulch. Some precious masterpieces:

In March, British artist Tracey Emin—whose depiction of her own unmade bed sold for £150,000 and was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize—offered a reward for the return of her missing cat. However, all of the reward flyers she posted on London streets were quickly removed by art lovers eager to possess one of her original works, and the flyers were soon valued at £500 each. A spokesman for Ms. Emin offered a clarification in the London Times: "It's simply a notice to alert neighbors. It's not a conceptual piece of work and it has nothing to do with her art."

The site is an adornment to any blogroll, but one can't resist citing Joe Klein's Godfather in the absurdity business, a true gift from journalism that decade after decade, keeps on giving. I present, the inimitable Fox Butterfield:

[6/4/02]Reporting on crime statistics once again in the New York Times, Fox Butterfield writes that "the increased number of criminals put behind bars has not been an effective deterrent to crime." Instead, a Justice Department study shows "the rate at which inmates released from prison committed new crimes actually rose from 1983 to 1994." Butterfield explains the distinction as follows: "Criminologists generally agree that the prison binge of the last 25 years ... has helped reduce the crime rate, but largely by simply keeping criminals off the streets."

Fox should be displayed in The Smithsonian alongside John Dillinger's pickled penis and other strange sports of nature.....

I'm sure Fox has a deep and thoughtful take on what The Won should do with Gitmo... Perhaps he and Frank Rich should team up for an Off-Off Broadway presentation on "political vaudeville." Paula Abdul could do the commentary offstage....

Herbert Meyer Understands History and the Democrats

This pretty much sums up a lot of what is going on in the hidden agenda the Democrats are trying to soft-sell the average American into buying into. Herbert Meyer is a distinguished student of history who understands that countries lose their liberties by frittering away the rights of individuals vis-a-vis the central government. Schwartenegger has just given California's debt to Washington and as he did with the banks, Obama will take it. Let's see the lotus-eaters get back their rights, if they even care about them any more...

Like the banks trying to give back the TARP money, the conditions attached will cripple them.

The Three Stooges: Reid Now Competing with Pelosi & Biden for Gaffer-in-Chief of the Democrats

Harry Reid may have Barack-O coming to Nevada to help him drum up a mountain of cashfor his Senate race in 2010, but BHusseinO didn't help Dingy Harry much with an offhand remark about keeping high-rollers out of Vegas recently. Now Harry has displayed the sort of cavalier carelessness that the puffed-up overconfident Democrats demonstrate whenever they have both houses of Congress under their thumb [plus a POTUS in the White House].

Reid went far beyond his brief on Guantanamo after routinely flubbing a couple of ground balls about the health of Sens. Kennedy and Byrd,

[manglingl his party's position on the congressional news of the day, that Senate Democrats would join their House counterparts in withholding the money President Barack Obama needs to close the Guantanamo Bay prison until Obama comes up with a plan for relocating its prisoners.
But Reid went further than saying he wanted to see a plan for the money before Congress approves it. "We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States," he said.
No one, of course, was talking about releasing terrorism suspects among the American populace. Imprisoning them, perhaps, but not releasing them.
"Part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States," Reid clarified but digging himself into a bigger hole by departing significantly from some of his colleagues and administration officials. "We don't want them around the United States."
Did the administration put Democrats in an awkward position, asking for the money before setting out how it would be spent?
"Not at all," said Reid.
"Yes," his deputy, Sen. Dick Durbin replied to the same question.
Even the post-gaffe handling of Reid's remarks was awkward. Spokesman Jim Manley, who previously worked for Kennedy for years, swept through the press gallery to clean up after his boss. He retracted Reid's assessment of Kennedy's condition. He clarified Reid's comments about the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The Three Stooges atop the Dem Party hierarchy may be joined soon by the Alpha-"Mutt" [by his own description] if Barack keeps his own teleprompter mishaps continuing the way they have recently.

Busted: Jon Meacham Brings Newsweak out of Closet As DNC Satellite!

John Podhoretz recalls the halcyon days when Time paid him a nice salary with many perks under Henry Grunwald's imperial rule. Those days as a profitable publication are long gone.

But Newsweak is finally announcing itself as an op-ed partisan rag as if its [poorly-hidden] agenda under the sheets had previously gone unnoticed. Although occasionally Eleanor Clift will reveal Joe Biden as a true clueless buffoon [again, as if we didn't know], Newsweak will now confine itself mainly to singing hosanna to the highest, the Chosen Won. The pseudo-religious Meacham [I read his shabby book on American religious beliefs and politics] gets a Pulitzer for a bio of Jackson [which should have been won by true scholar H.W. Brands Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times ], but nobody is fooled by this bantamweight who succeeds welterweight Evan Thomas. Thomas occasionally lurched into relevance or clarity, but Meacham is Best Boy in a B-List movie shoot.

Podhoretz delivers a good thrashing, though without my utter contempt at how far Newsweak has fallen.

Canadian Fascism's Struggle to Suppress Free Speech Thwarted

"The Internet Saved My Tongue" is an intriguing and gutsy story about how Canada's only conservative magazine survived attacks by a Fascist Brownshirt Squad named the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Islamist terrorists whined and the Brownshirts kowtowed in fear of their lives, gutless losers that they and their fellow countrymen seem to be. And the Brownshirts, as the following demonstrates, made a pre-emptive capitulation in deference to their Islamic masters:

The cartoons were published in September 2005, but they didn’t make international news until the next year, when a group of Danish imams went on a world tour to drum up Muslim anger against Denmark. The imams brought three additional cartoons along with the original dozen. Those three additions, which hadn’t been published in Denmark or anywhere else, were grotesque, including one showing Muhammad having sex with a dog. They were the imams’ own handiwork, added to the bundle in case the Jyllands-Posten efforts didn’t achieve the desired response. Up until that moment, the phrase cartoon violence had summoned to mind images no more harmful than Wile E. Coyote fighting the Road Runner. But after the imam tour in the spring of 2006, more than 100 people died in purportedly spontaneous riots against the cartoons. Half a dozen terrorist plots to avenge the artwork were uncovered across Europe. Demagogic governments from Tehran to Damascus seized the opportunity to deflect attention away from their own problems.

Every newspaper and TV station in the Western world covered the story of the riots, but almost none of them showed the original cartoons themselves. The media’s self-censorship was based on the same fear exhibited by Denmark’s illustrators. As a journalist, I was appalled by this cowardice masquerading as sensitivity. Western Standard editor Kevin Libin and I knew our readers would be interested in this story and would want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.

As our publication date drew nearer, we couldn’t help noticing that no other mainstream publication in Canada was planning to reprint the cartoons. We’d be the first, and possibly only, one. We sent the magazine to our printers on Friday, February 10, for printing over the weekend. The next day, word of the deed somehow leaked. By Sunday our decision had become national news, even though no one except our staff and our printers had seen the spread.

If you think Obama's deep curtsey to King Abdullah was a disgusting display, catch the surrender-monkey Canadian version of how Liberal Fascism is eroding that country's right to call itself a democracy by reading the rest of the Reason article linked above.

Hitchens Notes Sykes and "Over-ripe" MSM Relationship to the Won

Sykes' second-rate performance at the WH Correspondents' Affair is roundly sent up by Hitchens. He notes:

When comedians flatter the president, they become court jesters, and the country becomes a banana republic. There are probably even people who would wish to misconstrue that last phrase of mine if they felt "sensitive" enough. In which case they can take a number, get on line, and ask to suck my thumb

.
And also the bare-faced truth:

Still, the president did intermittently grasp the main point of the evening, which is that any humor must in some way be at the expense of the guest of honor: namely and on this occasion, himself. He showed he understood this when he opened with a gag about his famous reliance on teleprompters and when he told his audience, deadpan, "Many of you cover me. All of you voted for me." The whole point of self-deprecation is that it disarms: You do not have to be a masochist to know how to practice it.

But the most interesting insight CH has concerning the POTUS:

President Bush used to tell jokes about his weaknesses, the most salient of these being his tragic struggle with grammar, itself quite possibly rooted in dyslexia. Many of President Obama's jokes, his speechwriters should take note, were at the expense of his strengths—"I might lose my cool"—and were thus bordering on the narcissistic. (If I have a fault, and I'm the first to admit it, it's probably this: I am too sweet and too patient and too tolerant of the mistakes of others.)

Sykes sucks, in the end. But Obama is dangerously taken with himself. And that is much more dangerous than a second-rate comics' egregious suck-ups.

Pakistan and its Nukes: The More the Merrier?

Michael van der Galien has a response to Adm. Mike Mullen's response to Sen. Webb [with whom I had a conversation in a urinal at the Washington Times HQ eons ago before Webb went over to the dark side] concerning Pakistan's multiplying its nuclear arsenal. Michael had some points [in quotes] as to the reason for the Paki weapon expansion program to which I am responding below:

Back in the ’80s, I was working for Denis Neal [who figures prominently behind the scenes in Charlie Wilson’s War, the book,] as a Pakistan lobbyist and had occasion to visit the country and meet high-ranking Pakistani govt. & military officials. My friend Arnie Raphel was Ambassador and as an ex-FSO I had a lot of chances to get behind the stated policies of Pakistan by conversations with US Embassy personnel and other in-country assets. Michael's points are well-taken:
“1. [Pakistan] still fears a major war with India, and believes that you cannot possibly have ‘enough’ weapons of mass destruction”

This is true, but since India’s rapid economic development, there is less fear of an Indian pre-emptive attack and from my several visits to India, the Indians have an extremely high opinion of Paki fighting prowess (”one Paki is worth 5 Indians” was how an Indian put it

). And even in the '80s, the DepMinDefense of Pakistan told me that Paki and Indian generals would meet and fraternize in London as they were "batch-mates" at Sandhurst and other British military schools back in the day. The two countries have gone in different directions, largely because the Pakistani Army was used as the bricks and mortar of the new state in '47 and usurped power in the aftermath. India had the Gandhian legacy and used the vast railway system and other engineering and educational institutions as well as adopting an above-it-all stance in foreign policy.
“2. It fears Iran’s rise and nuclear program”

Yes and No. The Pakis have a significant Shi’ite minority and Benazir Bhutto’s mother was Iranian. Also many Pakis told me that eventually Pakistan might break up into its constituent parts, some of which would orient toward Iran. Back in the seventies, there was a Turkish/Iranian/Paki “Mutual Defense Pact” which disappeared after the fall of the Shah, but which might be partially revived as a bulwark against the Taliban [who hate the Iranian Shi'ites as much or more than Christian or Jewish infidels]

“3. It wants to give / sell some of these bombs to other, befriended states”

J.Q. Khan has already sold N. Korea & Iran the formulae and other construction secrets, and my guess is that an anti-American government might try to sell the finished product, though the US would do a lot to prevent that. The US did construct one of the nuclear reactors which produces the enriched uranium, I believe, [to counter Soviet influence in the sixties], and has a lot of intelligence & presumably some sort of a failsafe plan in place.

“[The US is] aware of every single nuclear weapon in Pakistan and it is therefore developing more so as to confuse the U.S. / make it virtually impossible for Washington to keep track of every single one of these weapons”

Not really feasible as the ISI is so completely penetrated by the US CIA as well as other foreign agencies who “trade baseball cards” and the Pakis notoriously are unable to keep secrets.

“5. Scary idea: something with Taliban and nuclear weapons”

This would be when Israel and India would finally have to make some sort of reconciliation. The US might even be a second-tier player if the Taliban got hold of nukes, and would have trouble restraining Netanyahu.

Of course, there is an overwhelming sense to the Pakis that India has now become more important to the USA than they themselves are. Intangibles like the unlikely popularity of "Slumdog Millionaire" and Manohman Singh's impressive recent election victory make Zardari's tawdry little political machine based on his late wife's legacy appear almost as incompetent and feckless as it really is. His democratic opponents, though anti-Taliban, dislike him almost as much as they do the Islamists, whose real political power in the countryside is almost nil, being based almost exclusively on intimidation and coercion [though, like Mussolini, they do make local utilities and transportation run on time and have cleaned out a lot of corrupt political appointees in the judicial system]. But the downside is no school for girls, acid in the faces of females not wearing purdah, a police composed of religious vigilantes and the other appurtenances of a brutal male machismo even including Iranian-style hanging judges. The population is fleeing the Taliban just as the Afghanis flooded Peshawar in the '80s before the Soviet onslaught [I visited the refugee camps run by relief agencies and the numbers were overwhelming their capabilities.]

India has its problems, and the main reason Obama wisely elected to remain in Afghanistan while changing the modus operandi with the installation of Gen. McChrystal was because of the threat a resurgent Afghani Taliban poses to Pakistan. I once spent most of a night talking with the Agricultural Minister of NWFP in Peshawar who frankly believed that his wild and wooly province would eventually become part of a Pushtun Afghanistan or a great Persia sometime in the future.

I wouldn't be too afraid of the Taliban filching a bomb unless they got the codes and the personnel from the Paki nuke facilities to make it work. Even then, they would have to get it to Iran or other customer or even some enemy target in a delivery protocol which wouldn't be intercepted.

All the makings of a James Bond movie. Wasn't "Octopussy" something along these lines?

UPDATE
"US Intelligence Sources" reveal that contingency plans to remove nukes are in place, though the news item notes that "rogue elements in the military and intelligence services" might try to deliver said nukes or some of them to the insurgents. McChrystal's appointment was largely due to his heading the JSOC combined operations out of Fort Bragg which would protect the nukes from enemy [yes, "enemy"] hands.

Odormann Ready For Clinical Committment---Outpatient or Long-Term?

Ben Affleck was on sport-of-nature Maddow's show and Keith-O the Recessive-Trait SuperStar of [P]MSNBC reacted in his accustomed calm and sober manner. Tonight, BOR mentioned that FOX in the Morning now gets better ratings than obnoxious oaf Odormann in his 8PM slot. Could it be the unkind words Alec Baldwin recently voiced about his being hurt by Odormann's intemperate froth-at-the-mouth Adolf imitations?

Ben did a great send-up of the Odorous One on SNL a while back---even the ultra-lefties are beginning to tire of this hatefest ranter night after night.

What did Nancy Know and When did She Know It?

The Hindenburg approaching that New Jersey landing strip is what Nancy Pelosi appears to resemble. She keeps pouring gasoline on a fire that she's trying to put out and pretty soon the entire episode what is left of her credibility as a political actor with any real suasion on the Hill.

Her strong-arm Queen Bee-nery assault on Jane Harman, her much more competent successor as Ranking Member on the Intelligence Cte, a job which she herself is now revealing that she fouled up, as her increasingly flustered interpretations of what she was told, when she was told it, and so on are suddenly turned into accusations that the CIA "lied" to her.

Only a serious case of PMS can account for this woman's increasing ineptitude, or perhaps it derives from a big-city hack being put in a sensitive position with international responsibilities. Jane Harman should have been the Chair of the Intel Cte in 2006, but the B-List mind of Pelosi couldn't handle having a much smarter female in a job she herself flubbed up. So a barely literate ESL hack named Reyes was named, and Silvestre couldn't even tell what a Sunni or a Shia was despite many years on the Intel Cte.

Maybe Steny Hoyer should take over. The Speaker's job isn't one for amateur second-raters.

"Religion of Peace" and Stoning Women

The Stoning of Soraya M opens in 10 cities in June and my bet is that froth-at-the-mouth jihadists will righteously make death threats that will cow many theater owners into thinking twice about showing such a graphic film.

The article linked above describes the film and more recent stonings, including one of a 13-year old Somali girl just last year.

Clockwork Orange as the Droogs Take Over England's Streets

Claire Berlinski has a column on British crime that should serve as an admonitory signal to the US as it slouches toward Socialism. The British Ministry of Justice trumpets that statistically crime is decreasing in England and Wales, while the media and the public report anecdotally that British streets are not safe, especially in the public housing tracts that spawned The Droogs in Clockwork Orange, the famous novel and movie about post-socialist England written in the '70s and immortalized by Stanley Kubrick's stunning film classic starring Malcolm McDowell as a very convincing juvenile delinquent gangsta leader.

Berlinski compares today's London to 1980's New York City, which I visited on a monthly basis for weeks at a time during the period and well remember the lawless grunge that Democrat administrations had permitted ever since Kitty Genovese famously bled to death in Kew Gardens because fifty-odd neighbors refused to call the police. Rudy Giuliani was elected, busted subway and broken window cheats and suddenly found that most crimes were committed by very young hooligans who never before were challenged by flaccid, soft-on-crime Democrat administrations since Lindsay in the sixties. Berlinski takes the feckless Jacqui Smith, the fatuous Minister of Justice and her criminal-pampering colleagues in law enforcement to task in the article attached. First, CB proves the old adage, "lies, damned lies, and statistics," is particularly true with crime stats.

To understand why the dark figure of crime escapes exact measurement, realize that for a crime to be officially recorded, three things must happen: someone must be aware that a crime has been committed; someone must report that crime; and the police must accept that a law has been violated. But each link in the chain is easily broken. People may be unaware that a crime has been committed because they view it as normal or trivial behavior: in some neighborhoods, it would seem perfectly natural to settle a dispute with a good brawl, while in others, this would be seen as assault. Other crimes may go unrecognized because the victims are unaware that they have been victimized—either because of the nature of the crime, such as fraud, or because the victims are drunk, mentally ill, or otherwise incapable of understanding what has happened.

But that is only the beginning of the cascade of conditions which prevent crimes from being reported. CB ticks off a long list of reasons that even when victims recognize a crime has been committed, crime goes unreported.

immigrants who don’t speak the language well enough to explain what happened to them. Rapes can go unreported because the victims are ashamed. So-called victimless crimes involving sex and drugs also go unreported, of course, because the criminals have no motivation to inform the police that they are hiring prostitutes or shooting up. Crimes can also go unreported because victims fear reprisals. Above all, crimes can go unreported because victims feel no confidence in the police and see reporting a crime as pointless. Even if a crime is reported, it will not necessarily be added to the official statistics. The police may conclude, for example, that there is insufficient evidence to believe the report. Moreover, poorly performing police departments have an incentive to stop recording crimes: it makes them look more successful than they are. For these reasons and many more, criminologists commonly posit that the dark figure of crime is far larger than the official figure—perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude. And there is good reason to believe that in Britain, the dark figure is unusually high.

Berlinski points out the silliness behind the rosy stats Jacqui advances to justify her competence, which most observers believe is lacking in all sorts of areas due to her loony Janet-from-another-Planet Napolitano stance toward political dissidents. [Patriots are a threat because they wish to defend the country from Islamist terrorists---ala Napolitano.] Smith's MoJ policy of not prosecuting serial offenders or letting them off with token "fines" which are never paid has resulted in a great leap of violent crime and a reluctance to report petty crime by Londoners and others due to slack enforcement practices:

[Note] the even grimmer picture painted by police records of violent crime. Sure enough, when the rules changed in 1998, the total number of violent crimes recorded jumped from 231,000 to 503,000. But then, even after the switch, it continued to rise sharply, hitting a peak of 1.06 million in 2006. That number has since declined only slightly: in 2008, the number of police-recorded violent crimes stood at 961,000. When it comes to violence, in other words, Police Recorded Crime actually confirms the public’s general view.

Further, the recent decline to 4.95 million total crimes recorded could well mean that the public has lost faith in the criminal-justice system and no longer believes that reporting crimes will result in the punishment of the perpetrators. Support for this hypothesis comes from a British Federation of Small Businesses poll indicating that 60 percent of businesses in London had been victims of crime in the past year. But proprietors reported to the police only half of the burglaries, vehicle thefts, and assaults that they suffered—and not a single case of arson. They didn’t think that the offenders would be caught and punished, they explained. Going to the police just wasn’t worth their time.

And the methodology of the British Crime Survey is severely flawed in that respondents are selected from among homeowners, and not renters, skewing the statistical base away from poorer neighborhoods where crimes usually take place. One of the designers of the BCS, a "criminologist" named Hough, exemplifies the unaccountable nature of the small-time bureaucrats who shrug their shoulders at the fact that the BCS overlooks the vast majority [only 5 million of 26 million crimes are reported] by the classic rejoinder of "triviality," suely the time-honored favorite dodge of the bureaucrat.

"Are the revised crime estimates significant? It is “true but trivial,” says Mike Hough, a criminologist at King’s College London who has helped design the BCS since it began in 1981, that if you include all crimes, “an astronomical amount of crime is committed.” Surely nobody is really in a panic about petty crimes, he adds."

But this may be false logic, or a sort of deliberate avoidance of the basic problems facing enforcement---a feeling among petty criminals that even if they get caught, they get off with a slap on the wrist.

But not all the repeat crime is petty: according to Farrell and Pease’s study, if calculated correctly, violent crime would be 82 percent higher. The BCS figures, on their own terms, show substantial drops since 1995 in “acquaintance” and “domestic” violence, but “stranger” violence and muggings—the kind of violent crime that really terrifies people—remain at their extraordinarily high mid-nineties levels.

The limp-wristed excuses of the smug petty functionaries in the MoJ and their academic co-conspirators contradict the incessant complaints of law enforcement police on the beat:

Officials at every level of the British criminal-justice system—detectives, judges, prison officials, probation officers—complain that too few criminals are caught and that those who are caught rarely receive sentences that will function as a deterrent. Lack of resources and a massive bureaucracy hamper police efforts: the average time to process an arrest in London is over ten hours, and the number of forms that must be filled out averages about 35, according to various analyses. Home Office figures released in 2007 show that police officers in England and Wales spend only about 13 percent of their time on patrol—and 20 percent on paperwork.

One London cop in the Criminal Investigation Division blames the police’s ineffectiveness on the unintended effects of community policing. “There was a perception that there weren’t enough beat cops—people who knew the local area,” he remembers, which led to sending extra cops to problem spots. “But in practice, they ended up going to community meetings and liaison. They’re not actually dealing with minor crimes. If they were answering emergency calls and dealing with minor crimes instead of doing community liaison, that would indeed take a huge load off the system, but they’re not. So in practice, what this means is that when I started working as a police officer, there were 25 people on staff answering 999 calls”—the British equivalent of 911. “Now there are 15.”

Perhaps as a consequence, more than two-thirds of burglaries reported to the London police are never investigated, according to police figures released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by the Daily Telegraph. Under 10 percent result in an arrest. And even if an arrest leads to a conviction, it’s unlikely to include real punishment. The London policeman adds that it’s common for a burglar to be arrested 30 times a year, taken to court 20 times a year, and punished with nothing more than a fine—“which is meaningless, because they can’t pay. There’s no chance that with minor-level crimes you’ll go to prison.” A London magistrate clarifies: “It’s not that they can’t pay, it’s that they won’t—and the system doesn’t push the point.” Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former prison doctor, tells me that he recently met a burglar on his 57th conviction. The burglar was fined 50 pounds, to be paid in five-pound installments—considerably less than someone in a legitimate business, making a comparable amount of money, would pay in taxes.

Dalrymple is a medical doctor who has served in the British Public Health Service and in WHO around the world. He has written a number of books on the seedy underworld of the socialist nightmare infested by criminals and politicians who tax the rich to in effect subsidize and aid/abet the crimes of the poor. As Berlinski notes, the habitual underreporting of crime, the lackadaisical policework following a crime and the general hopelessness concerning less-than-serious crimes has produced a clone of New York City before Giuliani applied tough love to clean up the streets:

The situation in Britain, then, resembles that of 1980s New York, whose crime problems were routinely called insoluble. What the British government fails to understand is that the majority of serious crimes are committed by a small cadre of criminals, who are also, disproportionately, the authors of minor crimes. If you lock these criminals up—reliably, and for a long time—crime will drop precipitously. The reason Broken Windows policing works is not that it is inherently important to jail every petty thug who breaks a window; it is that the window-breakers tend to be muggers, rapists, burglars, and murderers as well. If you get them off the streets, the rate of serious crime will fall. To dismiss as “true but trivial” the finding that “an astronomical amount of crime is committed” in Britain is only half right. The British people know this full well, even if their government does not.

The rise in hooliganism and violent crime might be obscured by statistical hocus pocus wielded by self-serving functionaries wishing to obscure colossal failure of a social model for political reasons. But hopefully, the historic common sense of the British people will overcome the preposterous rubbish their government attempts to peddle in order to re-elect a Labour Party gone seriously off the rails.

Holbrooke and Haqqani, a Matched Pair?

The NYT's "Saturday Profile" of Pakistan's Ambassador Haqqani gives a glimpse into the weird and bizarre world of Pakistan, a country which I worked on as a registered foreign agent in the '80s, even getting an anonymous nod in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War." Back then I was familiar with Jamshid Marker, another Pak ambassador fluent in English, though with a toney British accent and rather elegant continental style.

Haqqani has the distinction of being kidnapped by his own country's intelligence agency [or, rather, agents thereof, who could have been working for anyone!]

But the NYT's vapid journalism reveals its underside when the source of the article, the NYT's own paladin Richard Holbrooke, makes the front page for the umpteenth time in a laudatory mode.

[Haqqani] speaks several times a week with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who calls him “one of the most skilled ambassadors I have ever seen.” He figures he has met with 90 members of Congress. And he is a fixture on CNN, the op-ed pages of newspapers and at research groups around Washington.

But critics say Mr. Haqqani is a quick-change artist who cozies up to whoever is in power. Before he left Pakistan in 2002, after falling out with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he had worked for both his country’s leading political figures — Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto — switching from one to the other with dispatch, depending on whose fortunes were rising.

Which reminds me of the funniest Holbrooke story I've ever heard. Seems that staunch Democrat Holbrooke was seen in Henry Kissinger's parlor up in NYC skulking and slinking about when Henry the K was John Connally's chief foreign policy honcho [and Connally was a "shoo-in" for the Republican nomination that Reagan finally won] and Kissinger was left to pursue his private sector goals while Richard, "a quick-change artist who cozies up to whoever is in power," had an unsuccessful attempt to switch parties go awry.

Holbrooke was still parking his motorcycle in the guest quarters of Averill Harriman in the '80s on N St., N.W. in Georgetown, perhaps servicing nympho Pamela while the old Crocodile, Stalin's nickname for the US Amb to the USSR during WWII, was dozing in senectitude in his sumptuous living quarters nearby. Pam was working a scam called "Democrats for the Eighties" while Ronald Reagan was winning over the hapless Carter. RH also had visitors Diane Sawyer and WSJ Editor Karen Elliot House tiptoeing over to Holbrooke's N Street pad to "strap their thighs around his engine." Among other groupies.... [I admit I'm jealous!]

But if Holbrooke can pull off a Paki rescue mission, he does deserve a great deal of kudos. His goal of becoming the second FSO [Larry Eagleburger was first] to attain the cabinet post of Sec'y of State might be attainable were Hillary to ever make it to the White House or something happen to Obama. Holbrooke has legions of enemies [myself the very least among them, dating back to a couple of lunches in Lyon France while I was Vice Consul under Peter Tarnoff & Holbrooke Moroccan Peace Corps chief in the midst of a messy marriage break-up].

My own half-dozen stays in Pakistan date to the eighties and the country is simply almost impossible to not rend itself asunder due to what are always called "fissiparous tendencies" in the jargon of diplomats. In other words, half the Pakis hate the other half, or various slices of the demographic pie are wanting to peel off into Iran [Benazir Bhutto's mother was Iranian and the Baluchis consider themselves Iranian rather than Pakis] or in the Punjab, get away from Sindhi influences like the PPP of Bhutto and Zardari. Singh's ardent opposition is as much Punjabi localism as anything else. Lahore is more part of India than many Moghul fort cities elsewhere.

And Pakistan's American allies, including Chris Dodd and John Kerry, both of whom voted with the Republicans for a huge arms increase to Pakistan in the '80s [re: Charlie Wilson's War], prodded by Denis Neal's donations to the Democratic Senate Campaign Cte,, will dutifully remain watching which way the wind blows, with their palms outward for more baksheesh.

Human Louse Rudd gets book reviewed in NYTimes

The NYT Sunday Book Review won't give bestsellers like O'Reilly and Mark Levin reviews even though they have been best sellers for weeks. Mark Rudd's effort is destined for the remainder bin, but gets a full-fledged summary in the zampolit broadsheet telling Upper West Side halfwits what to read. Here is a piece I wrote a while back about the former Columbia BS artist [I wonder who ghosted the book?]:

I had the dishonor of hosting one of the miscreants, a fellow named Mark Rudd, back in 1969 in my apartment in Ann Arbor, where he smoked all my ganga while dropping nuggets like "No fault on the left," and "Dare to cheat, Dare to win." Later, I went to Cornell at the invitation of Chip Marshall to organize for SDS & was there for two weeks before I realized that these dudes were total cons whose reason for inviting me was to get possession of my VW microbus. They wanted me to work in a factory in Syracuse while they cavorted around the state of New York. But I digress.
The Columbia protests were led by Mark Rudd, whose idea of a bon mot was "Up against the wall, motherf-----!" From Columbia's relationship to a Pentagon-affiliated think tank and its plan to build a gym on a city park, Rudd's compatriots concluded that the school was irredeemably militaristic and racist. They occupied university buildings and took a dean hostage before being cleared out (none too gently) by the cops.

Elsewhere, university officials gave in to their tormenters, most notoriously at Cornell a year later. When black students occupied a university building - ostentatiously arming themselves - and demanded that disciplinary action against three black students be dropped, the faculty initially stood its ground. When the students escalated their threats, the faculty reversed itself in a signal act of cowardice.

The parents against which the students rebelled - as represented by the college administrations - buckled. College presidents who were the finest flowering of post-World War II liberalism gave in to the radicalism, politicizing American higher education and trashing its standards. "The maturation of the student protest movement turned out to be part of the infantilization of the American intelligentsia," Kimball writes.

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

The victims of academicide pile up year after year and matriculate bearing delusions indoctinated into their uncritical minds by spurious purveyors of academentia. But after the mayhem not reported by the compliant leftist electronic and print media, there was and remains a happy ending:
If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

And while I dabbled in SDS, I also met Ayers and his beautiful consort Diana Oughton, who shortly thereafter immolated herself in a Greenwich Village basement making a bomb to attack Fort Dix across the Hudson. He was a dork-wad, she didn't deserve a wretch like him who now prospers purveying academicide nostrums to unsuspecting victims at UofIllinois Chicago. My friend Rashid Khalidi got me an Academic Associate Card at the University of Chicago, a respectable institution. But whether they are genuine humanists like Rashid or loathsome loo-zer parasites like Ayers, the left remains slouching toward Bethlehem.

Rudd and Ayers survive because the Left, though wrong throughout the twentieth century, does not have any principles except as cheap slogans such as "No Fault on the Left" and "Dare to Cheat, Dare to Win."

A gangsta culture for middle-class sissies.

"Moderate" Taliban

The NYT Op-Ed today has an interesting article on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's hard nowadays to remember way back in the fifties and sixties when Afghanistan was developing in a rapid manner in modernizing the country, giving equal rights and education to women. Almost fifty years later, it seems like the country has moved five centuries backwards.

The Op-Ed piece by Hassina Sherjan notes Obama's fatuous search for "moderate" Taliban thusly:

shortly after Mr. Obama raised the subject of reconciliation, the Taliban rejected his proposal, stating there were no extremists or moderate groups within their ranks. On this point at least, the Taliban are right. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, put it very clearly: “The Taliban were united under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar. All the fighters follow and obey orders of one central command. The existence of moderates and extremist elements within the rank and file of Taliban is wishful thinking of the West and the Afghan government.”

What can be the purpose of talks with the Taliban? These men deprive women of their rights, throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, reject religious freedom and oppose constitutional democracy. They also threaten to kill any Afghans who have worked with Western militaries and nongovernmental groups or had other contact with foreigners.

Is it possible, as some have said, that the Taliban have mellowed since being toppled in 2001? Muhammad Ibrahim Hanafi, a top Taliban commander, answered that question in an interview in March with CNN: “Our law is still the same old law which was in place during our rule in Afghanistan.”

This attitude also holds true, mutatis mutandis, for neighboring Pakistan and Pres. Zardari's sad attempts to meet the Taliban halfway in the Swat Valley, which will simply be regarded as a sign of weakness and engender further pushes toward Islamabad. The Taliban know that if they keep pushing and using local terror tactics, the old New York bargaining mode of "what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable" will deliver more chunks of territory into their hands. Pattycake diplomacy will not work, and Richard Holbrooke may not be tough enough to get the Paki government to do the necessary.

The naive, childlike projection by Obama of his own good intentions onto the vicious, medieval mindset of the Taliban would be laughable, were it not so pitiful. These are the criminals who aided and abetted Osama bin Laden in his attacks on the WTC and Washington, DC, which the liberal intelligentsia are trying to erase from our national memory. The Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan & Pakistan find a western echo in Hamas in the Gaza Strip and their Shi'ite counterparts in Hezbollah and Iran are just as remorseless, relentless, and single-minded.

Ms. Sherfan raises her voice, but it is unlikely that the Upper West Side readership of the NYT will find her admonitions welcome. They are ostrich-like in avoiding any confrontation with evil and the wishful thinking of the liberal mindset simply does not operate in the Islamic World. Her final plea is heartfelt, but likely to be ignored:

The only “reconciliation” strategy that is going to work is one between the Kabul government and the Afghan people. The key is making changes at the community level. Many local mullahs and citizens who have tolerated the Taliban in the past are open to working with a government that can protect them and help them find livelihoods. The government and its allies can best weaken the insurgency by better protecting the population, organizing local citizens’ groups to cooperate on economic development, and hiring more people from every part of the country into the growing Afghan Army and police force.

This is the only way that the reconcilables will be separated from the irreconcilables. We need to understand where Afghanistan’s true moderates are to be found, and not look for them in leadership positions of one of the most repressive organizations on earth.

Ditto for the Taliban in Pakistan, and their Shi'ite counterparts in Iran.

Gallup Chief Notes Gore's AGW Hoax Sinking into the Ooze of Quicksand

Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport notes the mega-hoax of Anthropogenic Global Warming is simply losing any credibility among the public:

Newport says that some 41 percent believe global warming claims are exaggerated, and "that's the highest we've seen." Ask people to name their biggest concerns, and just 1 percent to 2 percent cite the environment. "The environment doesn't show up at all," says Newport.

Although the Chicken Little Crowd will froth at their howling mouths, the fact is that despite a bunch of UN Political Commissars' attempt to impose ecological and environmental caps on HIGHLY ADVANCED WESTERN ECONOMIES to give the General Assembly and its sweltering hellhole denizens some sort of "comparative advantage," the political common sense residing in the sucker countries who would be fleeced in this gigantic con is far higher than the "beggar thy neighbor" jeolousies of retarded socialist entities like Nicaragua and Venezuela, who wouldn't be penalized for the silly sanctions imposed by the UN. Nor would the two largest polluters on the planet, China and India.

Now, the new SCOTUS nominee might support international law over US legalities on this issue, but she would still remain in the minority. And also, Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science will remain one of the wisest Nobel Prize winners' admonitions. And of course, so will Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," a book demonstrating that Victorian common sense is still stronger than fuzzy-wuzzy mumbo jumbo.

Jesuitical Thinking at its Worst

James Taranto points out the hypocrisy of a Boston College Theology Professor who criticizes a Harvard Law Professor being awarded a medal at Notre Dame. Mary Ann Glendon declined the honor because she would be on the podium with Obama, prompting morality-muddled moron Kenneth Himes, the chair of the BC theology dept., to declaim:

"There are some well-meaning people who think Notre Dame has given away its Catholic identity, because they have been caught up in the gamesmanship of American higher education, bringing in a star commencement speaker even if that means sacrificing their values, and that accounts for some of this," said the Rev. Kenneth Himes, chairman of theology department at Boston College. "But one also has to say that there is a political game going on here, and part of that is that you demonize the people who disagree with you, you question their integrity, you challenge their character, and you brand these people as moral poison. Some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue, and, consequently, they have simply launched a crusade to bar anything from Catholic institutions that smacks of any sort of open conversation."

But there is another side to this forked-tongue Jesuitical thinker's mouth:

Nearly 100 faculty members at Boston College have signed a letter objecting to the college's decision to award Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree.
The letter entitled "Condoleezza Rice Does Not Deserve a Boston College Honorary Degree," was written by the Rev. Kenneth Himes. . . .
"On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice's approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College's commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university's work," the letter said.

Looks like Rev. Himes flunked Moral Theology on his way to getting the dubious post of chairing the BC Theology Dept. Or maybe he's just a shallow, jesuitical thinker. And as a final fillip, the following sentence was in the AP article concerning the Condy Rice article:

The theology department said nearly 100 have signed it, but declined to release their names, The Boston Globe reported Wednesday.

Given Himes' transparent insincerity and lack of moral principle, should we take it on his word that "nearly 100 have signed it?"

Kowtowing Nets Carry Obama Live---Except for FOX!

ABC, CBS, & NBC [Pravda, Isvestia, & TASS for the Uninitiated] will predictably froth at the mouth as FOX not only becomes the top cable news network, but the top entertainment channel as well. Hilariously, FOX will carry a TV fiction show called "Lie to Me" while the other three carry a reality-show version of the same thing, a live Obama news conference.

My guess is that FOX will top the combined net audience just as FOXNews tops the combined audience of CNN & MSNBC.

Botox Smiling Pelosi Lying to America---Again.

"Liberal Amnesia" is what a polite WSJ columnist calls Nancy Pelosi's lies about her not being told about waterboarding when she was Ranking Minority Member of the House Intell Cte [putting a lying cretinette in that position defines Democratic perv politics] and one of four members of Congress given a briefing:

"For more than an hour," the Washington Post reported in 2007, "the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

"Among the techniques described," the story continued, "was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder."

Don't expect the dying dead-tree libtards to call the brain-defective and morally retarded Speaker on this issue, just as Harry Reid hasn't been reprimanded for saying two years ago, during a time of great moral hazard to our soldiers as the surge kicked in: "The surge has failed, the war is lost."

Now a hair-plug morally retarded carpetbagger in Pennsylvania is switching parties because he would fail to get the Republican nomination for Senate next year. At least one party in the US has some sense of accountability in choosing its members. As for Specter, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Gore's Sci-Fi Comedy Show to Congress

Cowardly Democrats refused to let Lord Monckton, a distinguished climate expert, testify for the Republicans on Capitol Hill Friday, after a surprise 'celebrity' witness by the Dems named Gore-bot.

Obviously, a learned climate expert like Monckton would make the D+ Science Student Albert the Bore look even sillier than he normally does. Instead, Newt Gingrich will do some grandstanding.

JournoListers Align to Support "Internet Neutrality" as Run-Up to "Fairness Doctrine"

Brad O'Leary will be on Glenn Beck Monday at 5PM to talk about the Obamaniacs' Plan, aided and abetted & supported by Obama's friend from Harvard Law named Julius Genachowsk, to impose Internet Neutrality, the launching pad for a Stealth Plan to impose the Fairness Doctrine, quick-like-a-bunny, before the Republicans can profit by the backlash of real Americans in 2010 and elect a GOP House & Senate. With Dem leadership vacuums like Pelosi & Reid, this is entirely possible, but in the interim, the Dems are going to ape Leftist Parties the world over---Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is the most recent example---and attempt to hamstring or even eliminate the opposition.

The takeover of the Dem Party by feverish apparatchiki and cadres such JournoList tyros & MSNBC sports-of-nature betokens a strong Putsch against the US Constitution's Checks and Balances carefully written into law by Madison, Jefferson, Adams and presided over by Washington to ensure that a band of desperadoes do not attempt a coup de pouce or "micro-coup d'etat" because of a temporary ascendancy due to MSM hysterics and BHO opaqueness.

We have elected a pig-in-a-poke POTUS and now must defend the Constitution from elected Fifth Columns in the House and Senate.

Stopping "net neutrality" hocus pocus is the first order of business in retaining the First Amendment rights the Left so dearly wants to deprive us of.

Noonan Nitwittery Continues

Bland Affluence is the title of Noonan's latest excursion outside her Golden Ghetto in mid-town Manhattan & the Upper West Side Fantasyland the NYT aims its delusional screeds. Noonan is more a West Sider than ever, and she projects a sort of White Noise silliness in explaining how "All shall be well" in T.S. Eliot tones.

Noonan is an anecdotal fabulist, not a rational analyst, and like the funhouse mirrors that appear to surround Manhattan when it gazes westward, her mind is bent, twisted into grotesque curlicues and downright AWOL whenever she ruminates outside the asphalt & concrete sidewalks of New York City.

Noonan actually romanticizes the Boomer Generation, a collection of sodholes whose entitlement frenzies have bankrupted the US fiscally and morally. These feckless pursuers of material wealth while pretending to be on a spiritual quest are unintentionally satirized by this fulsome rubbish:

The baby boomers who for 40 years, from 1968 through 2008, did the grunt work of the great abundance—work was always a long-haul trip for them, they were the first in the office in 1975 and are the last to leave the office to this day—know the era they built is over, that something new is beginning, something more subdued and altogether more mysterious. The old markers of success—money, status, power—will not quite apply as they have. They watch and work as the future emerges.

Yeah, after Stalin was denounced in 1956 by Khrushchev, "the era they built" began to fade and "something new" began, but not "something more subdued and altogether more mysterious."

Noonan of course has it all wrong. The Greatest Generation did the grunt work and giants like George Kennan and Angus Deming and McCloy and others strategized the PostWar resistance to tyranny. This airhead has forgotten that what the Boomers did from 1968 to today was undermine authority and seek compromises which her former boss, Ronald Wilson Reagan, indulged in only when they fit into his all-in poker game to win the entire pot. The Russians and leftist Democrats who use the USSR as a template for their cultural overthrow of Western Civilization like to play chess. They hate it when GWB changed the rules on them and used their Stalinist organs to suppress his name and blacken the reputation of the USA.

Noonan is oblivious and clueless about all this, and had to get a piece in by deadline, which she did. I'm going out today to buy Liberty and Tyranny, a book which isn't a waste of dead trees like Patriotic Grace.

J. Edgar Napolitano Sweeps Aside Constitution to Protect Big Govt

Don Surber has a great list of how to identify a DHS "right-wing radical:"

But the more indicators a person has, the more likely that person is a member of the VRWC.

1. Pays his or her taxes on time and in full.

2. Meets his or her mortgage payment each month on time and in full.

3. Displays the flag.

4. Respects the U.S. military.

5. Stands up when the “Star Spangled Banner” is played.

6. Considered John McCain to be a moderate.

7. Never had tofu.

8. Thinks the Constitution protects the people, and not the government.

9. Thinks the Constitution protects Americans, not foreigners who attack our soldiers.

10. Thinks gun ownership is guaranteed by the Constitution.

As a commenter from The American Conservative Party notes, the Alien & Sedition Acts tried to limit criticism of the government and the SCOTUS almost let the First Amendment get fried. Obama's mindless myrmidons in the vast Fed Govt may soon want to make us carry IDs and will forbid politics if it isn't within the narrow socialist guidelines set forth by the Won & Nancy/Harry's numbnut brigades.

The zampolit are close to closing down dialogue. Restrictions on Talk Radio & limitations on free speech [What is "hate speech?] are already growing.

Salon Buttboy Greenwald Biyotch-slapped by WSJ

Faux-News Blogger Greenwald is the Jewish gay counterpart to Gentile Goyish hysteric hyperventilator Excitable Andy in making hilariously silly "comparsions" and illiterate falsehoods about their political opponents. Now the Brazilian boy-toy Glenn G. is taking on Obama as well, as he loves to load both his GI-tract orifices with cannon fodder. Here is Taranto's compleat slamdown of a tedious moronic poseur with no cred & less honesty:

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is a shrill, tiresome and undisciplined writer, but every now and then he unwittingly provides some entertainment. In an interminable post faulting President Obama for failing to keep his campaign promises to terrorists, Greenwald offers the following observation:

One of the things I always found so striking about debates over Bush/Cheney executive power abuses was that Bush followers who admittedly had no substantive arguments to justify those actions would nonetheless still find reasons to defend their admired leader: Bush knows more than we do and probably has secret reasons for doing it. Bush is a good person and well-motivated and there's no reason to think he's doing bad or abusive things. Rights for Terrorists pale in comparsion [sic] to other more important issues. Republican critics of Bush are hysterics and paranoids who are only criticizing him because they want to get on TV and sell books.
As of January 20, 2009, one no longer finds those claims at National Review, Weekly Standard, right-wing blogs and the like . .

.
Although we have plenty of substantive arguments to justify our views, it gives us pleasure to stipulate the following for the record: Obama knows more than we do and probably has secret reasons for doing it. Obama is a good person and well-motivated and there's no reason to think he's doing bad or abusive things. Rights for terrorists pale in comparison to other more important issues. Democratic critics of Obama are hysterics and paranoids who are only criticizing him because they want to get on TV and sell books.

More people read the WSJ than Salon, and when you factor in the fact that the readers of WSJ can read, think, and spell clearly about ten to one for the Salon dilettantes, then you know Glenn G. has bricked himself into his own little death niche, ala The Cask of Amontillado.

Palmerston Was Right---Go For the Hornet's Nest

The Beeb isn't always a supporter of feckless UN incompetence. Failed-state Somalia is rapidly becoming an HQ for Al Qaeda networking through pirates, including a "semi-autonomous" region known as "Puntland" on the tip of the Horn of Africa. Somali "political" types appear to be in cahoots with the pirates, and the witless morons of international patty-cake diplomacy [AKA Germans] are sending captured pirates to Kenya, where corrupt "politicians" and "judges" will auction the creepy terrorists back to Somalia to the highest bidders, sparking more piratical seizures to pay off the Kenyan "legal" system, infested with bigamists and drunks like Obama's feckless father.

Stop Making Sense, Say Postmodern Morons like BHO & the Billy Jeff

Randall Hoven in The American Thinker has a wonderful diagnosis of a world "where Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are in charge, and Libya gets the UN Chair of the Human Rights Commission."

In his elegant example employing clarity and logic, Hoven gives a very short course on why and how the lunatics took over the asylum, with loony-in-chief apologizing to the Euroscum about The Marshall Plan and America's victory in The Cold War.

A must-read, as Larry King would say. Although Larry wouldn't or couldn't possibly understand it.

Sunspots Say: Global Warming Hoax at Risk of being Trumped by New Ice Age

James Marusek has a good take on the highly suspect guilt of humanity on the global climate. Anthropogenic GW may go the way of the Edsel and other one-hit wonders.

GOP Elephants Never Forget: Ohio is key.

Karl Rove famously was kept out of the McCain Campaign. McCain himself was the MSM candidate for Republican. Once he was nominated, the NYT famously turned on him with the Iseman scandal and subsequent garbage from Darfur Keller and Pinch the Grinch.

The most salient polling statistic in the '08 election is one the JournoList zampolit MSM has suppressed completely. In the final polling in Ohio, Obama won 40,000 fewer votes in '08 than JOHN KERRY WON IN '04.

This means that a large number of Ohioans never voted Republican in '08 and stayed home because the silly RINO at the top of the Repub ticket was an Obama-lite.

Karl Rove was rejected by the senile moron at the top of the ticket because the MSM hated Karl and his successful courting of The Silent Majority, which still exists at a rate of 35% conservative to 20% libtard, among a dozen polls taken over the last decade.

In other words, in '08 the US was still a center-right country, though neither candidate was close to the center, with McCain center-left at his best and only correct on Iraq.

Mousetrapped, the GOP lost when Veep-Candidate Palin was pilloried from pillar to post unfairly---and still is by certified perv Excitable Andy. Her family is under an MSM microscope while Obama's relative is being exported from Boston under a media blackout.

The JournoList band of zampolitsya batter any defectors or laggards and spew lies endlessly about FoxNEWS & the WSJ.

The rest of the media is in the hands of Democrats while Harry Reid says that income taxes are "voluntary."

Spanish Court Claims Jurisdiction in GWB Foreign Policy?

After 9/11, only Spain has suffered a major terrorist attack, and unlike the USA, responded with abject submission to the terrorists by electing a compliant socialist government a few days later which virtually declared unconditional surrender to Islamic terrorists, which now use Spain as a jumping-off point for EU terrorism.

Read The Wall Street Journal article linked above for the tissue of lies, cowardice, and the kangaroo nature of Spain's court system.

It's one thing to cower before international terrorism. It's quite another to try to stymie attempts to counter the Islamic terrorist threat.