This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Democrats surrender to President

    As I’ve been saying, the Democrats woke up to reality and discovered that pandering to the vocal, but tiny rush-to-surrender minority of the far Left isn’t getting them anywhere among voters the Washington Post reports today;

    Democrats gave up their demand for troop-withdrawal deadlines in an Iraq war spending package yesterday, abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home and handing President Bush a victory in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.

    Bush, who has already vetoed one spending bill with a troop timeline, had threatened to do the same with the next version if it came with such a condition. Democratic leaders had moved ahead anyway, under heavy pressure from liberals who believe that the party won control of Congress in November on the strength of antiwar sentiment. But in the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override a presidential veto and could not delay troop funding.

    So all of that blather about “the will of the American people”, falls by the wayside as reality strikes a bitter blow. But, all of the Democrats are still in Leftist dreamland, according to S.A. Miller of the Washington Times;

    “It’s the president’s legislation, not the Democrats’,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, California Democrat and co-founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus. “It’s going to take Republicans to pass it.”
        Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and one of the chamber’s loudest antiwar voices, called the benchmarks “toothless.”
        “There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action,” he said.

    Political comfort, Russ? How about political reality.

    So I figure the jihadists next move to try and defeat our political will, you can bet, will be a strike here in this country. Shouldn’t be hard to volunteers, according to AP via Fox News;

    One in four younger U.S. Muslims said in a poll that homicide bombings to defend their religion are acceptable at least in some circumstances, though most Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reject the tactic and are critical of Islamic extremism and Al Qaeda.

    So I guess a quarter of the guys I eyeball on the subway here in DC are willing to accept terror. It’s probably inevitable that it’ll happen, but I think the jihadists are, once again, miscalculating the reponse they’ll get from Americans.

    For a comparison of how the media is spinning this poll to suit their particular agendas, see Bloodthirsty Liberal’s research results here and here.

  • China trade spigot II

    Sunday, I wrote about the low quality control on Chinese imports and today, by way of the Drudge Report, I find this from the New York Times;

    Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of “Mr. Cool Junior.”

    * * * * *

    Government investigators arrived here [in Panama] just days after customs officials in Panama said that they had discovered diethylene glycol in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste. The toothpaste was being sold under the English brand names Mr. Cool and Excel.

    And the Chinese response;

    “We didn’t do this; we didn’t make the bad stuff,” said Shi Lei, a manager at Danyang City Success. “It was probably someone else.“

    So why are we trading with these backwards bumpkins? Would Americans tolerate that behavior from our domestic companies? Then why do we tolerate it from our “trading partners”?

    In other news from China, the peasants are revolting;

    The violence appeared to stem from a two-month-long crackdown in Guangxi to punish people who violated the country’s birth control policy. The policy limits the number of children families can have legally.

    Corruption, land grabs, pollution, unpaid wages and a widening wealth gap have fueled tens of thousands of incidents of unrest in recent years, many of them occurring in rural areas that have been left behind in China’s long economic boom.

    The central government, expressing concern that unrest could undermine one-party rule, has alleviated the tax burden on peasants and sought to curtail confiscations of farmland for development. But China’s hinterland remains volatile compared with the relative prosperity and stability of its largest cities.

    They treat their own people with indifference, why should we expect them to be honest traders with the rest of the world? The problem is that no one is willing to make the Chinese pay for their uncivilized behavior – it’s up to the American consumer to avoid Chinese imports.

  • Gore discovers 20/20 hindsight (Updated)

    Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV, Al Gore is back and on book tour for his latest act of public mental masturbation “Assault on Reason” – a more apt title I can not imagine. From ABC News;

    On the one hand, Gore has written an un-nostalgic look back at the previous six years that lays out his case as to how the world might look today had the chads fallen another way — a world where U.S. troops would not be fighting in Iraq, Abu Ghraib would just be a town’s name and the nation would have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina, global warming, and, yes, perhaps even Sept. 11.

    Funny but I saw an episode of Family Guy last night that touched on the same subject. Without going into detail, Al Gore becomes the President in 2000 and the cast comments on how he hunted down and captured bin Laden himself (bin Laden was hiding out amongst the cast of MadTV) and cars all ran on vegetable oil. I wonder if the show’s writers had a sneak peak at Gore’s book.

    According to Dan Fromkin in the Washington Post Gore claims;

    “‘History will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy (Iraq) as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd.’

    “He does not flatly state that Sept. 11 would not have occurred during a Gore administration. But, he writes, ‘Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes.’”

    Look, Al, you and your country-ass hick master had eight years to do something about al Qaida and Hussein, you did nothing – only because you needed something to distract the American people from your constant failures and they made nice, easy targets at which to fire off cruise missiles. And finally, when they did strike, we had no choice – thanks to you, dimbulb. And what did the Clinton Administration do to protect New Orleans from Katrina. Have you forgotten that you were Vice President for eight years?

    As for the title, I’m sure that everyone will agree that you assault reason just by writing your crybaby crap – thinking that any rational person would have the slightest interest in what you would have done if only we’d had your hindsight as foresight.

    I had a girlfriend like Al Gore once – she never let me go. To this day, she still emails me after 35 years and tells me how wonderful our life would have been if I’d married her instead of my wife of 30 years. And then she complains that I don’t answer her email.

    Al Gore, you’re America’s pathetic ex-girlfriend.

    UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico has a “User’s Guide to Gore Fever”.

    A fawning EJ Dionne professes his non-sexual man-crush on Al Gore in his Washington Post column “Free to be Al Gore“;

    Gore, to his credit, won’t talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

    I guess it’s easy to be declared right when it’s impossible to prove whether it’s true or not. Apparently, even some on the Left aren’t buying Dionne’s deranged hug-fest.

  • It takes an idiot

    According to Fox News Channel, Hillary Clinton, unsurprisingly, is coming for your children. Since you don’t know how to raise your own kids, she’s proposing a Federal pre-kindergarten for your 4-year-old. At a cost of 10 billion bucks;

    “I want every 4-year-old regardless of parental income to have access to high quality pre-K because it not only enhances their academic preparation, they stay in school longer, they have fewer behavioral problems,” the New York senator and former first lady said.

    Clinton said she would pay for the program by closing tax loopholes and eliminating Bush administration programs she disagrees with.

    “There is a lot of evidence that this saves money over the long run and economists and others have validated what experts in early childhood education have told us for a long time,”

    And those “experts” are just slobbering all over themselves thinking about that 10 billion bucks and all of the experimental useless bells and whistles they can buy with it and all of the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face research they can fund with it. We’ve been hearing for years how all our classrooms needed for kids to learn better was computers – and we’re still surrounded by post-pubescent want-wits.

    Now we find out that the real reason kids are so stupid is because we raised them ourselves for four years without a government program. How the Hell did we reach this point in our history without pre-K – I’m surprised we’re aren’t so damn stupid we’d all fall off the planet.

    Why did I stay in school without pre-K? Hell, my mother didn’t even got to kindergarten – how did she make it through life? I wonder how many of those “experts” attended pre-K.

    It’s been my experience that everyone who ever called themselves an “education expert” is generally a moron. All of the real education experts I’ve ever known were teachers who knew how to shove knowledge into my hermetically-sealed brain-housing-group – and none of them would have considered themselves experts by any measure.

    And I certainly wouldn’t take child rearing advice from Old Elephant Ankles. She raised ONE kid sporadically, and with the assistance of Arkansas State Troopers and the Secret Service. What does she know about parenting or a child’s education? And why should we listen to the old bag? Cuz some journalist once called her the smartest woman in America? I wonder if that journalist went to pre-K.

    The education system in this country is turning out illiterate morons every year and inflicting them on the employers who paid for their shortchanged education. Why should we throw more money down that dark hole and give them more time to indoctrinate our kids into a culture of dependency?

    Mike Bates at Townhall says the same and brings the numbers without all of my emoting.

  • White House; Carter “increasingly irrelevant” (Updated)

    Former worst US President in my memory, Jimmy Carter, feeling left out of limelight lately, took time to bash the President on BBC last week, while taking a glancing blow at Tony Blair, according to the Washington Post;

    The former president also lashed out at British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Asked by BBC Radio how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, Carter said: “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient. And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.”

    Of course, this a foreign policy critique from the guy who not only aided the mullahs’ rise to power in Iran by abandoning our tradition ally the Shah, but he also facilitated the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan by being such a spastic creampuff that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan during his Presidency without fear of retribution (except that we boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics – that must’ve really stung, huh?).

    Well, according to the Post (Reuters Wire service story), the White House fired back at Carter yesterday;

    White House spokesman Tony Fratto had declined to react on Saturday but on Sunday fired back.

    “I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless personal criticism is out there,” Fratto told reporters. “I think it’s unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.”

    Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday’s sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.

    Yeah, well Reuters forgets that former Presidents have traditionally kept their stupid mouths shut on policy, too. Especially when they’re talking to the foreign press. Carter has been a non-stop, yammering goofball since Clinton left office and the new administration has ignored him.

    Of course, Clinton sent Carter to negotiate with the Haitian Generals and North Korea (look how well those worked out for us) and he went to insure that Hugo Chavez won his re-election in Venezuela. I’m surprised he had nothing to do with his favorite Commie’s election in Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega, by the way).

    Carter, during his interview, went on to blather;

    In his interview with the [Arkansas] Democrat-Gazette, Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having “zero peace talks” in Israel. Carter also said the administration “abandoned or directly refuted” every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts, by other presidents.

    Look how well all of Carter’s negotiations have worked out for us – yet he thinks that there is something negotiate over in the Middle East. Hey, dipstick, Arabs don’t want to negotiate – they want to kill us all. Especially YOU.

    Carter went on to ignore history;

    “We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,” Carter said.

    I guess Carter forgot that every other nation on Earth has waged pre-emptive war on us in the last century. Remember the Zimmerman Telegram? The sinking of the Lusitania? How about Pearl Harbor? And ya know what – the Carter Doctrine was a pre-emptive, unilateral move by your administration to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.

    Don’t you think it’s time we stopped sitting still like ducks on a pond during opening day? Or would you prefer that we just sit by and wait for terrible things to happen like the embassy seizure in Iran?

    No, of course you don’t think we should get ahead of our enemies – that’s why you got to be the last President who could walk the mile down Pennsylvania Avenue on your inauguration day. By the end of your administration, you’d made the world so dangerous that every President since has had to ride in a bullet-proof limo.

    The RNC wasn’t so gentle with Carter as the White House;

    “Apparently, Sunday mornings in Plains for former President Carter includes hurling reckless accusations at your fellow man,” said Amber Wilkerson, Republican National Committee spokeswoman. She said that it was hard to take Carter seriously because he also “challenged Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War.”

    Carter’s been wrong about every one of his foreign policy criticisms and attempts over the last 35 years. Why should anyone think he has something substantial to add now?

    UPDATE: Fox News Channel (with an AP contribution) reports that Carter claims he was misunderstood;

    “My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted but I wasn’t comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking about anyone personally,” Carter said in an interview Monday when asked to explain.

    The comments “were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between [President Richard] Nixon and this administration, and I think that this administration’s foreign policy compared to Nixon’s was much worse. … I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations throughout history but just with President Nixon’s,” he told NBC’s “The Today Show.”

    What a doofus. In his quote above, he used the word “worst” which means he was comparing this administration with at least two other administrations, otherwise he would have used the word “worse” which would be used in comparing two administrations (Nixon versus Bush). Language means stuff.

    Oh, and he admits that he’s irrelevant;

    Carter…said he doesn’t “claim to have any relevancy” on the Iraq issue, though he has sent reports for the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his personal activities monitoring elections around the world.

    Well, he finally got something right. The old coot needs to go back to Plains, sit on the porch of his mansion and rock himself further into obscurity.

    Editor’s Note: I know I’ve said much of this before, but I feel it bears repeating. This a form of self-flagellation over the guilt that my first vote in a Presidential election went to Jimmy Carter. I regretted it within days after his inauguration when his first official act was to give amnesty to draft dodgers. And the main reason I’d voted for him was because he’d promised, during the campaign, to not surrender the Panama Canal (where I was stationed at the time) – we all know how that turned out.

    Later, I spent weeks on Green Ramp in Fort Bragg waiting for the signal to run a Soviet combat brigade out of our Hemisphere – that of course never came to fruition, to our great shame – but our equipment at the time had been manufactured during the Vietnam war and there were no parts available and mostly failed to work – none of us were surprised when Desert One ended because of maintenance failures.

    There was no fuel or money to train; we practiced jumping from the tailgate of moving duece-and-a-half trucks to simulate assembling on the drop zone. When I got promoted to Sergeant from Corporal, my raise was an whopping $22/month.

    So yeah, my beef with Carter is personal and will last until one of us dies. Expect one of these posts everytime he opens his stupid yap.

  • Rolling Thunder/Gathering of Eagles Rally II

    I know I’ve mentioned this before, here and all over the internet, but next Saturday, May 26th from 1100 – 1500 (that’s 11am to 3pm for ya’all civvies) at the Lincoln Memorial, Rolling Thunder and the Gathering of Eagles are jointly conducting a rally in support of our troops. I’ll be there and try to get some picures for ya’all.

    But this weekend, the GOE organization in New York City countered some moonbat Guantanamo theater in Times Square. I guess they had the lunatics frightened.

    Urban Infidel captured the moonbattery with her camera.

    Spree at Wake Up America declares “War Protesters Not Welcome“.

    Conservative Thoughts demonstrated their support for Navy, Marine and Army recruiters in my old stomping grounds in Canadaigua, NY as members of the Gathering of Eagles’ Operation Recruiters Appreciation.

  • Shut off the Chinese import spigot

    China is a bad trading partner. I know it’s hard to remember before 9-11-01, but China knocked one of our recon flights down and held the crew hostage for 11 days. That’s how they began their dealings with this administration. After 9-11, they went through the motions of fighting terrorists, but only as the term could be applied to their enemies, not in the interests of the civilized world.

    The Chinese have since then amassed a fortune by counterfeiting everything they could get their grimey little paws on – usually at the expense of US manufacturers. As an example, from BusinessWeek;

    General Motors Corp. execs would agree with that — which is why they’re apoplectic. GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co., the Korean subsidiary of GM, says the QQ is a knockoff of its own Matiz minicar, sold in China as the Chevrolet Spark since 2003. “The cars are more than similar,” says Rob Leggat, vice-president for corporate affairs at GM Daewoo. “It really approaches being an exact copy.” Same cute, snubby nose. Same bug-eyed headlights. Same rounded, high back. And most components in the QQ, Leggat says, can easily be interchanged with parts on the Spark. So on Dec. 16, GM Daewoo filed suit in a Shanghai court alleging that Chery Automobile Co. stole its trade secrets to make the QQ. Chery declined to comment.

    This isn’t the first time a foreign auto maker has felt ripped off in China. In 2003, Toyota Motor Corp. sued Hangzhou-based Geely Group Co. for copying the Japanese company’s logo and slapping it on Geely models. Toyota lost the case. Yet Honda Motor Co. (HMC ) in December won a ruling that bars Chongqing Lifan Industrial from selling motorcycles under the “Hongda” brand. Honda is also suing Shuanghuan Automobile Co., saying the Chinese company’s Laibao SRV is a copy of the Honda CR-V sport-utility vehicle. “Chinese car companies still have limited [design] capabilities,” says Jia Xinguang, an analyst at China National Automotive Industry Consulting & Developing Corp., a consultancy. “That is why so many [of them] copy bigger car companies’ models.”I still don’t know why the idiots at GM thought buying Daewoo was a good idea, nonetheless, the Chinese ripping off their designs, similarly naming vehicles and mounting misleading trademarks on cars is not the act of a good trading partner. 

    I still don’t know why the idiots at GM thought buying Daewoo was a good idea, nonetheless, the Chinese ripping off their designs, similarly naming vehicles and mounting misleading trademarks on cars is not the act of a good trading partner.  In Panama, Chinese drug manufacturers managed to kill 51 people by lacing cough syrup with antifreeze (in some cases some as much as 99%). From an AP story;

    A Chinese company that sold a batch of diethylene glycol, a chemical cousin of antifreeze that killed at least 51 people in Panama, had no license to sell pharmaceuticals, the government said Tuesday.

    Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said an investigation into the source of the deadly medicine revealed that the Chinese company that originally sold it, was authorized to sell only chemicals for industrial use.

    “This morning we contacted the State Food and Drug Administration, which investigated the matter half a year ago,” said Jiang. “According to the investigation, the relevant company is not an enterprise for medicine production but is licensed to make chemical-grade material.”

    “The production of medicine and supplementary materials is strictly regulated in China,” she said.

    But the deadly concoction was exported, nonetheless. And the Chinese are not accepting any culpability, apparently. And now their indifference is affecting US imports. From today’s Washington Post;

    Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

    Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

    Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

    Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

    These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

    For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught — many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

    Now the confluence of two events — the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week’s resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China — has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that software piracy is down in China;

    Software piracy is still high by international standards: The study, conducted by research firm International Data Corp. for the Business Software Alliance, estimated 82% of software used in China in 2006 was pirated, down from 86% in 2005. That compares with a global average of 35% both years.

    Illegal software usage in China stood at 92% as recently as 2003. The reduction of 10 percentage points in China’s piracy rate over three years avoided $864 million in losses for legitimate software providers, according to IDC.

    Meanwhile, the size of China’s legitimate software market grew to $1.2 billion in 2006, an 88% increase from the previous year, said the report, issued yesterday. 

    But you can bet that the illegal software economy in China funds the legal software portion. Even if they stopped pirating today, the damage (and profits) has been done.

    The WSJ also reports that China has promised to improve on their exported food standards, too;

    The Chinese government said it is cracking down on dangerous domestic food-industry practices, in Beijing’s first top-level policy response to the recent storm over tainted pet food in the U.S. The response suggests Beijing is sensitive to the outcry, but the plan lacked specifics, an indication that its impact could be limited.

    As far as I’m concerned, it’s too late. They export inferior products and they’ve made money doing so. If I’d been treated the same way by a local merchant, it’s happen just once. I’d take my business elsewhere.

    The Chinese also have not been very useful in controlling their client, North Korea, either – probably for the same reasons they can’t control their economy – it doesn’t affect the Chinese government, so it doesn’t matter. As long as the money is rolling in and the US is more involved in quelling the world’s troubles than in combating illegal trade, the Chinese economy has been booming.

    Maybe it’s time we just pack up and leave them to their own devices until they can join the civilized world instead of acting like some third world goat ropers.

  • More Edwards hypocrisy

    The Wall Street Journal editorial board takes on John Edwards today in their Review and Outlook piece entitled “Pride of the Caymans”;

    Let us say right up front that it’s terrific that John Edwards lives in a country where he can lose an election and still land a $480,000 part-time job as a consultant to an investment firm that keeps its hedge funds in the Cayman Islands as a tax shelter for its clients. This truly is the land of opportunity.

    We’re also encouraged to hear that, according to the former Senator’s spokesman, “John Edwards is running for President to give every American the opportunities that he’s had.” While there may not be enough half-a-million-dollar-a-year part-time consulting gigs to go around just yet, the hedge fund industry is growing. And there’s always private equity if you find yourself, as Mr. Edwards described his 2005 circumstance, making $40,000 a year at an antipoverty think tank and wanting to learn something about “capital markets.” Thus did he turn, in his time of need, to Fortress Investment Group LLC, pride of the Caymans.

    So the editorial goes on tell us how the pretty pony railed against US investments being sheltered overseas in the 2004 campaign and today. How the Breck Girl told AP that he took the job to learn about the relationship between capital markets and poverty.

    How refreshing it would have been, then, for Mr. Edwards to have emerged from his toil in the crucible of high finance to explain that all is not moral darkness in the upper reaches of the investing class; that people who invest in businesses help alleviate poverty and make the economy strong; and that it is risk-taking that offers Americans their best — indeed, their only — chance to have “the opportunities he’s had.”

    It was not to be, alas. Mr. Edwards said instead that if he’s elected President he’ll still try to abolish offshore tax shelters. At least he’ll have already made his money.

    Well, on top of this bald-faced lie that he took the consulting job as a learning opportunity (how many companies take on consultants who are there to learn), the man who has never had a bit of soil beneath his nails is telling us how we should spend our Memorial Day this year “supporting” the troops by demanding that they surrender (from Crotchety Old Bastard).

    This is the Democrats’ Great Hair Hope?  Actually, I guess he’s no worse than their other choices.