Our buddy, Zombie sends us the latest photo essay from Southern California in “SEIU drops mask, goes full commie” Zombie’s coverage of their May Day celebration. All of the pictures were taken by our buddy Ringo who has more coverage at his place;
A sample;
Russia TV interviews Kevin Zeese who complains that the media doesn’t cover hippies when hippies get upset and protest. Of course, according to Zeese, it’s because of the ‘corporate media” not because we’re tired of seeing their selfish, unimportant demands;
He claims that the “corporate media” covers the Tea Party because it’s in their interest, but it might really be because it’s the first time conservatives have been moved to organize against what they think is potentially damaging to the country. On the other hand, the hippies protests are nearly weekly events – a “dog bites man” story.
I remember that the hippies had a protest scheduled against George W. Bush for October 2001 long before 9-11 happened and they just retooled it to be against the war at the last minute. It doesn’t help the left that they wave Soviet Union and Chinese flags at their protests and cozy up to socialists and communists wearing their Che Guevara T-shirts. Who wants to associate with people like that?
Thanks to one of my ninjas for the video.
The CIA Director has admitted that, to a point, “harsh interrogayion methods” were used with some success in the bin :aden operation. According to the Washington Times, Panetta said;
CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said some threads of intelligence among the multiple origins came through the use of harsh interrogation.
“Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees, but we also had information from other sources as well,” Mr. Panetta said on NBC News.
Asked to deny that waterboarding was among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to the successful mission, Mr. Panetta said: “No. I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees.”
The CIA director also said that “the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.”
That must drive the Anthony Camerino crowd crazy since Camerino has spent thousands of George Soros dollars to preach to us about how useless “torture” and being generally mean to Islamists doesn’t work as an interrogation technique. Not to mention the President.
How tough can waterboarding be if a giant pussy like Matthis can voluntarily tolerate it?
Added: “Torture lover” Uncle Jimbo on the subject at Blackfive and on Russia TV. Somehow Jim thinks that yellow suit he wore last week looks good on TV, too.
John Stossel asks the same question that we here at TAH have been asking since 2008 “Where Did All the Anti-War Protestors Go?“;
…the war in Afghanistan ramped up after Obama was elected. American fatalities shot up in 2009 and 2010.
The protesters have remained silent over Libya.
And I’m struck by the hypocrisy of the supposedly “anti-war” politicians who voted against Iraq, like Nancy Pelosi. Since Obama was elected, she has voted to continue the war in Afghanistan … and supported the attack on Libya.
After the anemic Code Pink/IVAW/ANSWER protest in March of 2008, we asked where the protesters have been. It seems that they weren’t really anti-war at all, but more anti-Bush. The fact that the Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands (VFP) are still trying to impeach Bush (and Nixon apparently) more than two years after he left office is proof.
TSO sent me this link, and I really don’t know what to make of it. It’s from a survey conducted by the Institute for Economics and Peace and it ranks the most “peaceful” States. Some how, the peace index has something to do with the correlation of the number of police officers and the increase of crime in the States;
New York experienced the most significant increase in peace as a result of decreases in violent crime and the homicide rate.
Conversely, South Dakota saw the largest decline due to a steady rise in incarcerations and the number of police without a fall in the incidence of homicide or violent crime.
But, South Dakota is #14, so things can’t be too bad there. New York is #29. Funny how the highest ranking States are generally liberal Northeast States.
The USPI also finds that a state’s ranking is strongly correlated with various socio-economic factors including the high school graduation rate, access to health insurance and the rate of infant mortality. Significant economic correlants included the degree of income inequality and the rate of participation in the labor force. Meanwhile, factors such as median income and a state’s political affiliation had no discernable [sic] impact on a state’s level of peace.
I’ll bet if they included abortions in the infant mortality factor, it’d change the outcome significantly.
Generally, the South seems to fare worse in the index. In other words, states which have intrusive governments seem to have more “Peace” and States which generally leave their residents alone have less “Peace”. That couldn’t have something to do with the indicators the Economic and Peace Institute used could it?
Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades writes about a post that he found at Outside The Beltway which naively discusses this chart;
Gabriel Malor does a fine job of dissecting the author, Doug Mataconis, and his assumptions that there is no threat great enough to justify our military expenditures and that there is room for cuts in our military budget. But I’d like to add a couple of points;
When was the last time we were attacked, and what was the percentage of the world’s military spending of al Qaeda at the time of that attack? Where will the next attack come from? Aren’t we the target of nearly every mouse-sized government in the world and so our defense budget is nearly half of the entire world’s expenditures because we have to be prepared to defend our interests from half of the world?
Not only do we have to protect ourselves from every halfwit dictator and despot in the world, we have to do that without killing anyone, which would, apparently, improve the recruiting efforts of the forces arrayed against us.
We have to be prepared for artificially protracted campaigns because we allow our own citizens to give aid and comfort to all of our enemies at any given time. We have scores of dunder-heads who protect our enemies’ own war-making mechanisms with their scrawny bodies.
Not only that, we have to protect our defense facilities from the idiots in our own country who think it’s cool to interrupt our own security efforts. And we have to be non-lethal about it – a dimension not afforded our enemies and potential enemies.
Then factor in the fact that most of our allies won’t live up to their regional responsibilities unless they can put us in the vanguard so the the world has a convenient scapegoat in the case that the adventure wasn’t executed as expected.
In short, if the US wasn’t spending for defense like we are, the world would be a less-tolerable place to live. And just dick-measuring military spending doesn’t come close to telling whole story. Stupid hippies.
I found this at the Daily Caller. It is both pathetic and disturbing yet at times hilarious:
I think the author of the original Daily Caller post sums it up best:
In what my male colleagues have called an elaborate attempt to get laid, a group of feminist men has issued an apology to the world’s women for thousands of years of oppression.
This is a few years old, but it’s still circulating on the internet among the anti-recruiting, anti-war Leftists. How many of you believe this is a real recruiting video? [Language Warning!!!];
The Huffington Post believed it two years ago;
At a time when we are reconsidering every decision made during the Bush/Rumsfeld era, from torture to the invasion of Iraq to the speculation of adding a sixth side to the Pentagon (thank you Douglas Feith for floating THAT trial balloon!), comes a new, equally disturbing revelation. We all know that the Department of Defense was (and still is) desperate for new recruits in all branches of the military. What is less well known is a program that the Marines, in particular, had of trying to compete for today’s sex, violence and drug-obsessed youth. An apparently newly declassified video reveals one such trial effort.
A number of the commenters on the video mentioned that the “recruiters” are out of uniform, but that’s the least of the problems with this “recruiting video”. There’s absolutely no way the Marines or any other branch of the military is going to use this to recruit. That’s not the kind of recruits they want to attract. Sure they get that kind of recruit, but they’re not going looking for them.
The best way to look like you don’t know anything about the military is to give this video any measure of credibility.
And what the Hell is the Harding Institute?
This, however, might be a real Air Force recruiting video;
Thanks to one of my ninjas for the link.