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

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Eighth century justice

    According to an AP story on the Fox News Channel website, al Qaida in Iraq explains that they abducted the three US troops this weekend in retaliation for a rape and murder of an iraqi girl last year;

    “You should remember what you have done to our sister Abeer in the same area,” the statement said, referring to five American soldiers who were charged in the rape and killing of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and the killings of her parents and her younger sister last year.

    Now, keep in mind that none of these troops are involved in the case, the three who were involved have pleaded guilty. So what the Hell is this about? Just an excuse.

    Let American forces treated every Iraqi, or every Arab, as if they were al Qaida, imagine the outcry. And I’ll betcha that al Qaida would do their share of murdering of young Iraqi girls given the opportunity.

    al Qaida has also made a demand that the US forces stop looking for their captured brothers immediately. Here’s why;

    [One Iraqi man] said the fighting began at about 3:30 a.m. and lasted for about 30 minutes. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said the coalition’s search operation in the region has detained more than 100 suspects. The U.S. military did not immediately comment on the report.

    Just like their judgement of the result of the 9-11 attack, the 8th century barbarians misjudged our reaction to this ambush and abduction. This statement indicates that they don’t realize that Democrats aren’t in control of ground operations in Iraq. The generals wouldn’t stop the search even they were ordered to stop – I guess al Qaida missed the part of “Black Hawk Down” where no one was left behind.

    The Washington Post reports that;

    About 4,000 U.S. soldiers, backed by Iraqi troops, searched homes, palm groves and farmland on Sunday for the three missing American soldiers. The attack occurred in an area, known as the Triangle of Death, that has long been considered a breeding ground for Sunni insurgents.

    Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, told CNN that “indications are that al-Qaeda and its affiliate organizations are responsible for this attack.”

    So I wonder if Nancy Pelosi, et al. are willing, at this point, to admit that al Qaida might actually be in Iraq.

  • Happy Mother’s Day

    To my mother, my wife (mother of four), my oldest daughter (a widowed single mother) and my youngest daughter (a mother-to-be) I wish ya’all the happiest of Mothers’ Day.

    It’s really hard to politicize a day like today, but of course, the Left can do it at the drop of a hat. So I thought I’d join in, too. 

    Code Pink is doing it today. Using the Mother’s Day theme, they’ll be in front of the White House demanding an end to the war in the name of mothers. I went last year, but I think I’ll avoid it this year. Mostly because I have trouble being near true hypocrits.

    There was a group of women last year holding a giant banner that proclaimed “Mothers Against the War”. When I asked them how many were actually mothers, out of the eight, there was only one – the other seven happily pointed at her as if she gave the banner (and the group) some credibility. When I asked her if she had a child in the military, at first she answered that yes, she did. I said “Really?” She answered sheepishly that she didn’t. So, what the banner should have really said was “Grotesque, barren old bags against the war”.

    A guy approached me with his three-year-old daughter on his shoulders and screamed “Do you want to send her[his daughter] to war?” I answered that I’d spent twenty years in the Army, that my son is in the Air Force and (at the time) my niece was on her way to Iraq in the Army Reserves – and that her Marine husband had already done a tour over there. I added that my family had done more to secure his daughter’s future than he would ever do. He shuffled away speechless. So that was enough for me - the Park Police escorted me from Lafayette Park

    The good old Washington Post takes an opportunity to politicize the day, too. Somehow, we should all be excited that motherhood can be subsidized by the government. In an oddly titled piece called Pushing the Motherhood Cause (as if motherhood needed it’s cause pushed), they trumpet an organization that purports to support “a motherhood agenda”;

    They are an outgrowth of MomsRising.org, founded a year ago to bring mothers together as a force for change in public policies that affect their everyday lives.

    More than 90,000 people have registered, galvanizing around six main issues: family leave, flex time, health insurance, child care, fair wages and children’s activities, such as better after-school programs. Their proposals are not new, but together they create a “motherhood” agenda that has attracted a fresh enthusiasm.

    “They have struck a nerve, or maybe they have just sharpened the debate,” said Love, 37, who said her generation of friends is consumed by the tug between work and family. “Literally, these issues are all we ever talk about.”

    Of course, their first legislative victory was getting paid family leave passed in Washington State. What an accomplishment – government-subsidized sloth. An unfunded mandate on employers, another enticement for mothers to abandon their families to government child-care facilities. Another burden on taxpayers which will induce even more mothers to abandon their families just to pay the tax increase and the increased cost to employers.

    Maybe if more mothers stayed home and raised their families in the first place, there wouldn’t be need to inflict their personal problems on the rest of society.

    But the Washington Post decides to give us a blow-by-blow of  an activist mothers’ party of former Georgetown University grad students;

    The United States lags behind most of the world, the narrator said, and its lack of benefits puts it in a class with several third-world nations, a statistic based on a Harvard University study.

    Several women gasped.

    The film said the No. 1 reason highly paid women leave the workforce is to spend time with their families. It went on with stories about child-care problems and family health-care calamities.

    Funny how the US lags behind the rest of the world in every Leftist activist cause, but we have the strongest, most resilient economy in the world, isn’t it? I wonder if there’s a correlation there.

    And of course women leave the workforce to be mothers and spend time with their families – what the Hell is wrong with that? Of course, what’s wrong with it is that it makes the hairy-legged, Leftist man-haters feel guilty about their empty lives.

    Of course, there was no surprise when I read;

    MomsRising stands out for its working-mother focus and also as an example of new-style, online community organizing. Co-founder Joan Blades also helped launch the liberal group MoveOn.org.

    Leave it to the Washington Post to glamorize liberal, absent-parenthood – on Mothers’ Day.

  • Fear of teaching; another education rant

    Last month, I went off on teachers and education administrators. I got several emails from teachers whose general theme was “not all teachers don’t care”. That may be true, but my general experience with modern “educators” is that enough of them don’t care so that it reflects on the entire profession. Yeah, it’s a stereotype – but most stereotypes are rooted in reality. Just like so few Muslims actually speak out against Muslim terrorists, it’s difficult to not equate one with the other.

    But, this is about teachers. What set me off this morning was a Paul Greenberg piece in the Washington Times this morning about an education superintendent named Roy Brooks in Little Rock, Arkansas;

    “In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him.”
        So much for the chances of a fair and impartial hearing for Mr. Brooks, the hard-driving school superintendent who came here three years ago with the avowed aim of making this the best-performing urban school district in the country. So he has been slicing away at a bloated bureaucracy, sifting resources to the classroom, trying to raise academic standards and in general educating kids instead of just going through the same old motions.
        All that has shaken up the dead wood and stirred up those who miss the status mediocre quo, notably the teachers’ unions.
        When the union-backed members of the school board became a 4-3 majority after last fall’s elections, it was only a matter of time before Mr. Brooks would have to fight for his job. Because when a man comes to town with a dream, it doesn’t take long for the killers of the dream to appear, too.
        This isn’t really a fight over race but over power. It’s a fight over what education ought to be about: learning or political patronage.

    There’s more to this story, of course. Some of the school board members have been threatening other administration principals with the loss of their jobs if they continue to support Brooks and his reforms according to an AP story;

    Brooks said in his lawsuit Mitchell had couriers deliver letters to nine administrators telling them their jobs might change as the result of hiring a new superintendent and she asked them to refrain from acting to undermine the board’s charges against Brooks. Daugherty talked to Mitchell about the letters that day, according to the lawsuit.

    Eisele said he could not determine Mitchell’s intent in sending the letters, but called it “objectively threatening.”

    In her statement Thursday night, Mitchell defended sending the letters.

    “Intimidation was never my intent, but quite the opposite,” Mitchell said.

    And why would this problem crop up this year? Well, political power;

    This year, a federal judge also found the district could be released from court supervision, as it was substantially complying with a 1998 desegregation plan. That comes along with the 50th anniversary of the Central High crisis, when then-Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to stop nine black students from entering the school. President Eisenhower ultimately nationalized the state troops and sent the 101st Airborne to enforce a court’s order.

    Brooks is reducing the number of union positions in his administration and increasing the amount of money being spen on actual teaching – that doesn’t sit well with the unions, of course. They (the unions) want their newly elected majority on the school board to have more say in how the district’s money is spent – the same kind of administration that caused the federal courts to supervise the district nine years ago. 

    This kind of goofy crap happens everyday all over the country. New York State, thirty years ago, had the best education system in the country – high school graduates breezed through most colleges after getting a new York State education. I’m no rocket scientist, but after graduating from the New York education system in 1974, I CLEP’d out of my first year of college without a lick of studying. Now, 15% of New York high school graduates spend a portion of their first year of college in remedial writing, math and reading courses.  Even Little Chuckie Schumer recognized this problem back in 1999;

    Beginning this school year, New York high school students will be required to pass Regents exams in English in order to graduate. Had those exams been implemented last school year, roughly 25% of New York twelfth-graders would have failed to graduate from high school.

    But Chuckie’s solution was to throw money at teachers – more money to pay them for a job they should already be doing. If they won’t do the job at $20/hour, why would I expect them to do it for $30/hour?

    We are losing entire generations of children every year that this piss poor process continues. Schools don’t teach, they create drones that mouth empty platitudes and demand respect (that they don’t have to earn – just like their grades) and high-paying jobs (at which they suck).

    The District of Columbia spends nearly $20,000/year/student, and they’ve created a generation of security guards. The most sought-after jobs in the District is that of rent-a-cops to harrass people trying to conduct business in the countless Federal buildings with mindless searches (one guard tried to prevent me from entering a building because I couldn’t get a dialtone on my cellphone a few days after 9-11 – how many cell phones have dial tones?).

    John Stossel wrote last year in RealClearPolitics;

    The unions use their clout to fight against the interests of the best teachers. Union leaders make sure the teachers who work hardest don’t get raises or bonuses. Everyone with the same seniority and credentials must be paid the same. That guarantees that no teacher will take home a dime for making extra sure that students learn. Joel Klein, who as New York’s schools chancellor runs the country’s largest public-school system, put it this way: “We tolerate mediocrity, and people get paid the same whether they’re outstanding or whether they’re average or, indeed, whether they’re way below average.”

    Klein said that out of 80,000 teachers, only two have been fired for incompetence in the past two years.

    That’s tolerating mediocrity – and that’s what keeps our kids from getting the education they need – not the lack of money. Teachers who don’t join the unions are just as guilty – the only way to change the unions’ grip on our children is from the inside since we can’t depend on the courts and the feds (in the form of the union shills at the Education Department) to protect us.

    Honestly, I do think it’s racist that white Leftists have trapped Black innercity families in a cycle of dependence with a half-education system. And teachers, across this country who’ve bought into the mediocre performance of their so-called profession, are at fault. Generally, teachers are on the bottom performance rung of college graduates, they love those long vacations and those four-hour workdays. Please, don’t bother boring me with that “all the work I have to do at home grading papers, blah-blah-blah”. Everyone works more hours than they’re paid – that’s life when you call yourself a “professional”. But teachers don’t know about life, do they? They’re so sheltered from real life, they even marry each other.

    And they think that getting a student to put a condom on a banana is fulfilling work. If teachers really cared about children, children would be better educated. There’d be no excuses, there’d be productive citizens and I wouldn’t have anything to write about today.

  • Congress gets low approval, too

    Associated Press has released a recent poll result that indicates that Congress shares the president’s low approval poll numbers;

    People think the Democratic-led Congress is doing just as dreary a job as President Bush, following four months of bitter political standoffs and little progress on Iraq and a host of domestic issues.

    An AP-Ipsos poll also found that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a more popular figure than the president and her colleagues on Capitol Hill, though she faces a gender gap in which significantly more women than men support her.

    The survey found only 35 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job, down 5 percentage points in a month. That gives lawmakers the same bleak approval rating as Bush, who has been mired at about that level since last fall, including his dip to a record low for the AP-Ipsos poll of 32 percent last January.

    Of course, there’s a couple of ways to interpret that fall in numbers, and Democrats, of course, blame the President;

    People are unhappy, there hasn’t been a lot of change in direction, for example in Iraq,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of House Democrats’ campaign effort.

    Yes, that’s my idiot Congressman, the perpetual Bush-bashing automaton. If VanHollen had half-a-brain and could think for himself beyond the Democrat caucus’ talking points, he might consider that maybe the American people (who still sent a large number of Republicans to Congress, effectively hamstringing the Democrats so they can’t over-ride the President’s vetos) are tired of the Democrats’ version of political performance art – sending pre-vetoed legislation to the President to make intellectually-vacant and nebulous statements instead of cooperating with the White House and doing the job they were elected to do.

    But VanHollen isn’t the only illiterate buffoon in Washington, but at least this former Clintonista halfway understands;

    “People wanted change in Washington” on many issues, not just Iraq, said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., a member of the House Democratic leadership. “I’m not surprised about where people are. They’re hearing only about Iraq.”

    Oh, yeah? Maybe that’s because you dolts thought you won elections because of the war, when in fact, Republicans just decided not to vote in the last election and that’s how you children got the majority. Democrats have been shouting from the rooftops that dead troops = a majority in Congress. You’ve threatened to cut off funding for the troops, you’ve called them murderers and SS prison guards. How do you expect the American people to react?

    Stop being a one-trick pony (or in this case, a no-trick pony) and do your damn jobs – for a change.

  • Just one question

    So, I’m just getting my daily diet of blogs and reading Michele Malkin’s report of Cuba defending Michael Moore’s schlockumentary “Sicko”. Apparently Moore went to Cuba to prove how much better the healthcare system is in Cuba than the US. Of course, given Moore’s record of manipulating the truth, I doubt anyone would believe Moore if he set out to prove rain is actually water.

    Regardless, I’m just wondering if anyone can tell me, if the Cuban healthcare system is so good, why did Castro need to import a doctor from Spain when he was stricken ill this last winter? Just wonderin’ that’s all.

    Read the rest of Michele’s post about real censorship and Rob at Say Anything on the same subject.

  • Where am I?

    OK, military buffs, can you guess where I am today? Notice the “undulating” terrain, all of you staffride officers.

  • The more things change…

    Boy, this article from Bill Gertz’ Inside the Ring column this morning in the Washington Times sure does bring back memories;

    According to the officers, U.S. troops are being forced to carry unloaded weapons on most U.S. bases because commanders are more worried about a “negligent” discharge than the very real likelihood of a terrorist attack by an insider on the base. The rule is all the more disconcerting because these troops are in areas where they receive combat pay.
        Defense officials say the fear of “negligent” weapon discharge is due to lack of training and is different from concerns about accidental discharge, which involves a mechanical malfunction that rarely occurs.
        “This selection of political correctness and safety concerns over force protection contrasts markedly with combat experience in World War II, Korea or Vietnam, where soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines were required to be armed — with loaded weapons — at all times,” one official said.
        “This is a gross failure of leadership, and in all likelihood has contributed to the U.S. casualty rate,” the official said.
        The officer in Iraq said the unloaded-gun rule is a symptom of bigger military leadership problems, especially in the Army.

    I remember patrolling the East German border, facing fully cocked and locked East German GAKs, with my magazines for M16 safely locked in an ammo can back on my vehicle 150 meters away.

    On the other hand, I remember the support weinie, in the Port of Jubail during Desert Storm while we waited for our equipment to arrive, that discharged his weapon into the clearing barrel right next to my head.

    Then, there we were in the desert in Saudi Arabia where we allowed to have only one loaded magazine (a hundred meters from the Iraq border) and it had to be in our ammo pouch. We weren’t even allowed to have an unloaded magazine in our weapon so our commander could see that our weapon was unloaded – within walking distance of the enemy.

    It truly is a failure of leadership that combat troops in a combat zone can’t be trusted to carry loaded weapons. I hope General Petraeus and his sergeant major can overcome that failure – with training. 

    In the meantime, Ace of Spades keeps us posted with a coming “grim milestone”.

  • Iraqis want a time schedule for withdrawal?

    That’s what you’d believe after a cursory glance at this story in the Washington Post this morning. Under the headline “Iraqi Lawmakers Back Bill on US Withdrawal“, the Post announces;

    A majority of members of Iraq’s parliament have signed a draft bill that would require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq and freeze current troop levels. The development was a sign of a growing division between Iraq’s legislators and prime minister that mirrors the widening gulf between the Bush administration and its critics in Congress.

    Oh, my! Then why are we there, if the Iraqis don’t want us there? But, wait! Read a few paragraphs down to;

    “We haven’t asked for the immediate withdrawal of multinational forces; we asked that we should build our security forces and make them qualified, and at that point there would be a withdrawal,” said Bahaa al-Araji, a member of parliament allied with the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters drafted the bill. “But no one can accept the occupation of his country.”

    (Emphasis mine)

    Oh, well, that’s no shocker that Mookey (Butterball) al-Sadr wants a time-scheduled withdrawal, is it? That way he can rest his militia up on the French Riviera and then have them locked and loaded when the last C130 leaves Baghdad airport.

    So what’s the Washington Post trying to pull here? I guess they’re running a screen for the Democrats – the Democrats know that if they keep sending pre-vetoed legislation to the president, they’ll start looking like Gingrich’s Republicans in the 90s when they tried to force Clinton to spend responsibly and the public will start blaming Democrats for prolonging the war.

    In comes the pinch-hitting press to cover for the Democrats. Take the heat off the Democrats by implying that the Iraqis support a timed withdrawal – and try to keep from mentioning al Sadr who has called the presence of American an occupation.

    Nice try, WaPo.