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

Category: Politics

  • Chavez the facist

    Jewish Venezuelans are worried about the Venezuelan government, according to an article in the Miami Herald this morning;

    Venezuelan government intelligence services twice have raided the country’s most important Jewish center in a vague, ultimately unsuccessful search for weapons. Publications of the government’s cultural ministry run articles entitled ”the Jewish Question,” along with a Jewish star superimposed over a swastika.

    “The Jewish Question” for Pete’s sake. I guess we can assume that Chavez will begin to blame the Jews for all of the poverty in Venezuela and send his chavistas into the streets for Noche de Cristal, a tropical version of Kristal Nacht.

    The government-controlled press even gets in on the fun;

    One 2006 article in El Diario de Caracas debates whether it will be necessary to ”expel [the Jews] from the country.” Another article in the Diario, VEA accuses Jews of being involved in the murder of a government prosecutor.

    What about the other 12,000 murders in Venezuela last year? Did the Jews commit those, too? I think it’s instructive to see how Chavez shifts blame around to every group without a little introspective look at his own leadership. His cabinet “shake-up” presents no chance for change in Venezuela. According to Daniel, of Venezuela News and Views, “there is nothing “new” in this cabinet“. The Devil’s Excrement writes that Chavez has finally taken notice of his murder rate;

    First of all, last Sunday, in his Sunday variety shows, Hugo Chavez mentioned for the first time the crime problem. Yes, after exactly 86,452 homicides since Hugo Chavez took over, he mentioned a problem as important as that for the first time. Here is a guy that has found time to call Bush the devil, spent weeks and resources on rescuing Colombian hostages and has traveled all over the world “solving” the world’s problems, and he finally dared mentioned the problem that is the number one concern of all Venezuelans: Crime.

    I’m sure the murder rate will fall now that it’s caught the attention of Chavez, but if I were a Venezuelan Jew, I’d be stretched out on Panama’s Playa Coronado while Chavez cleans up the streets.

    Pravda reports on Chevez’ latest interview with airhead Naomi Campbell;

    Campbell and Chavez did not talk about politics only. The model asked the Venezuelan president to name the most stylish world leader. Chavez chose Cuba’s Fidel Castro. “Fidel, of course! His uniform is impeccable. His boots are polished, his beard is elegant,” Chavez said.

    Well, Castro can afford the best mortician in Cuba to do him up, I suppose. I’ll bet Christina Kirschner is a little jealous. The stubby little mariposa must have all of his mirrors covered in the palace;

    Campbell asked if Chavez would appear topless in photos as Russian President Vladimir Putin has done. “Why not ?” he said. ” Touch my muscles !”

    And of course, what article about the Hollywood knuckleheads and Chavez would be complete without the knuckleheads’ expert political analysis of Chavez;

    “I found him to be fearless, but not threatening or unreasonable,” she wrote. “I hope Venezuela’s relations with America will improve in the immediate future.”

    I hope Chavez’ relations with his own people improve in the immediate future.

  • We’re winning the war at home, too (UPDATED)

    I got wind a few weeks ago that ANSWER was planning a protest in DC on March 15th. So my immediate reaction was to check the Gathering of Eagles forum – and they had already planned a counter-protest. Well, that was good news for me because protests always raise my traffic through here.

    Today, I went back to ANSWER’s website and there was no mention of the March event. Strange. So I went to GOE’s forum and lo and behold, ANSWER had cancelled their protest;

    Do you ever think that we’re spinning our wheels in fighting the America-hating moonbats? Well, consider this:

    A.N.S.W.E.R., MoveOn.org, and their affiliated purveyors of political puke have canceled their planned March 15th event! They are increasingly intimidated by the prospect of us and our allies confronting them in the streets wherever that might be, in Hometown, USA, or Washington, DC.

    Accordingly, we will not have the “Americans Standing Up” rally in DC on the weekend of March 15th, as there will be no opposition to confront, and you KNOW we love to intimidate those misguided souls and their anti-American leaders like Cindy Sheehan and George Soros!

    In a nutshell, WE ARE WINNING THE BATTLE! And we will win the war for the soul of America!

    Now you have to remember these clowns had anti-war protests in DC planned BEFORE 9-11, and now they’re canceling events during the war. They just might be getting it that they’re not accomplishing anything.

    Adam Kokesh and the IVAW haven’t gotten the news yet apparently because they still plan to have their John Kerry-style theatrics called Winter Soldier II. But it may just be that they’re is too lazy to update their websites. When I hear more, I’ll post more.

    UPDATE: Gathering of Eagles is planning on being in town for the Winter Soldier II thingie, so your blogger will be there, too. Good excuse to take a coupla days off from work. You up for it, Kate?

  • Tears of a clown

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    Hillary finally used her ultimate weapon yesterday. Acting like a big sissy girl, she summoned up some crocodile tears during a talk in a small cafe in New Hampshire (Washington Post link);

    The trigger: a friendly question from a voter about how she stays so put-together on the campaign trail.

    “My question is very personal, how do you do it?” asked Marianne Pernold Young, a freelance photographer from Portsmouth, N.H. “How do you, how do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?”

    “You know, I think, well luckily, on special days I do have help,” Clinton said, initially responding in an upbeat manner. “If you see me every day and if you look on some of the web sites and listen to some of the commentators they always find me on the day I didn’t have help. It’s not easy.”

    But that rare moment of sympathy — in contrast to the beating she has taken in recent days — seemed to then get to her. “It’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do,” Clinton said. Her voice broke, and her eyes appeared to well up with tears. “You know, this is very personal for me. It’s not just political. It’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it.”

    Does anyone believe that crap? She’s had plants in her audiences that posed well-rehearsed questions to her before she responded with well-rehearsed answers. Does anyone really think that this is any different?

    In the Australian Herald Sun, the female reporter chalked it up to a grueling campaign;

    AN exhausted Hillary Clinton fought back tears as the pace of US presidential campaigning took its toll on the former First Lady.

    Now, oddly enough some guys hold up an “Iron my shirt” sign, which gives Hillary a chance to announce that sexism isn’t dead. Michele Malkin calls “BS!” and I tend to agree. SeeDubya at Junkyard Blog has the same guy holding up the same sign (almost) five years ago. It’s just way too convenient for this sign to show up while Clinton is plummeting in the primaries and she’s suddenly victimized by the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

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    She’s trying to drag out the old “victimized Hillary” mask that got her through her Senate campaign in 2000 when mean old Rick Lazio charged across the stage at her.

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    It’s the same “victimized Hillary” that declared a vast right wing conspiracy was out to get her husband, and the same victimized Hillary that stood by her man through impeachment. I guess she’s gonna go with what muttonheads who believe that stuff want. As Pam Meister at BlogmeisterUSA wrote;

    She’ll be dealing with tough and often unscrupulous men (think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, for starters) who do not have time for tears and would interpret them as weakness. We cannot afford to have a weak occupant in the White House. Remember Jimmy Carter?

    Not to be outdone, though, the AP stumps for Obama by running a picture of a woman crying at an Obama speech;

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    Photo from Associated Press

    Is this what this campaign is coming down to? It’s been about issues that really don’t matter for more than a year – and now it’s about how many cryin’-ass women each candidate can drag out for the cameras.

    Do we want a president who’ll cry when she’s tired? When times get a little rough? The campaign ain’t shit, Hillary – wait’ll you have to face a crisis thousands of miles away against REAL peckerhead misogynists. You, know, the guys that do this;

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    Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has another post up about REAL misogynists won’t stop at holding up signs, too. I guess this latest bit of theater ties into my post this morning about Bret Stephens’ Great (American) Expectations.

    Do you think the mullahs are going to cave to you, Hillary, because you’re a widdle sweepy and your voice gets a little weepy?

    And as for you, cryin’-ass Obamafan, that’s called emotions. Emotions have nothing to do with common sense. If you vote for Obama because he made you snivel and snork snot, you’re a bigger dumbass than Barack.

    Update: Gateway Pundit writes that “Bubba Comes Unglued“

  • O’Malley’s job approval lower than Bush

    In today’s Washington Times Tony LoBianco and Seth McLaughlin write that O’Malley’s tax hike battle has cost him politically;

    Maryland residents say Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, is doing a worse job than President Bush, according to a new poll released yesterday.
    Marylanders gave Mr. Bush, a Republican, a 36 percent job-approval rating, just slightly more than the 33 percent they gave Mr. O’Malley, according to the Fox 5/The Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports poll.

    A separate poll in Virginia shows 51 percent of residents approved of the work Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, is doing, while 46 percent approved of Mr. Bush’s work.

    The Times continues;

    Mr. O’Malley’s approval rating slipped 1 percentage point from October, before he called lawmakers back to Annapolis to raise $1.4 billion in taxes. But respondents who said he was doing a “poor” job increased from 30 percent to 37 percent.
    O’Malley spokesman Rick Abbruzzese declined to comment.

    Yeah, wait’ll Marylanders start paying that tax and see how unpopular he gets.

    (Crossposted)

  • What needs “change”?

    Yesterday I wrote about Europeans who expect us to bow to their whims when we elect our president this year. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes about the world’s perception of Americans as a naive race in his Great (American) Expectations;

    Barack Obama, still fresh from his victory in Iowa last week and confident of another in New Hampshire tonight, has as his signature campaign theme the promise to “end the division” in America. Notice the irony: The scale of his Iowa victory, in a state that’s 94% white, is perhaps the clearest indication so far that the division Mr. Obama promises to end has largely been put to rest.

    Meanwhile, in Kenya last week a mob surrounded a church in which, according to an Associated Press report, “hundreds of terrified people had taken refuge.” The church was put to flame, while the mob used machetes, Hutu-style, to hack to death whoever tried to escape. The killers in this case were of the Luo tribe, their victims were of the Kikuyu, and the issue over which they are bleeding is their own presidential election.
    [Barack Obama]

    When foreigners assail Americans for being naive, it is often on account of contrasts like these. A nation in which the poor are defined by an income level that in most countries would make them prosperous is a nation that has all but forgotten the true meaning of poverty. A nation in which obesity is largely a problem of the poor (and anorexia of the upper-middle class) does not understand the word “hunger.” A nation in which the most celebrated recent cases of racism, at Duke University or in Jena, La., are wholly or mostly contrived is not a racist nation. A nation in which our “division” is defined by the vitriol of Ann Coulter or James Carville is not a truly divided one — at least while Mr. Carville is married to Republican operative Mary Matalin and Ms. Coulter is romantically linked with New York City Democrat Andrew Stein.

    Someone let me know when Ann Coulter inspires her acolytes to herd Democrats into a church. But, probably the largest point of Stephen’s piece is that during this presidential campaign, Americans are getting twisted up in knots over the plight of the “poor” who can barely afford sky-rocketing cable TV access, the disparity in wages – wages that only one-half of one percent earn, more government regulations to protect homebuyers – these are the problems of a rich nation. Stephens makes an excellent point to wards the end of his piece;

    There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

    But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.

    It’s those chronic complainers that have the microphone during this election. If we don’t support Hillary Clinton, we’re misogynists. If we don’t support Barack Obama, we ‘re racists. If we don’t send our money to Ron Paul, we’re not really conservative (got news for you pauliens – a real conservative, or libertarian, wouldn’t run for political office).

    The Democrats are always pointing out what’s wrong with this nation – and how they’ll fight for us and change the country. Anyone out there prepared to ask them in public what exactly needs (NEEDS) to be changed? Aside from the mind-numbing whining from the various classes of manufactured victims.

  • Euro-clowns and US politics

    Last Friday, GI Jane at The Foxhole wrote about a European lady in the “Die Staandard” who declared that Europeans should be allowed to choose our president in the next election with this specious reasoning;

    American presidential elections are not “home affairs.” American decisions have repercussions all over the globe. The American mortgage crisis affects banks in Europe. The insatiable American demand for oil makes the Arabian sheiks rich. The American refusal to care for the environment causes the North Pole ice to melt and coastal areas in Asia to flood. A weakened dollar and an immense budget deficit affect the global economy.

    Well, aside from the fact that we have a Constitution that precludes non-citizens from voting, there are cases like this story in the International Herald Tribune proclaiming German support for Barack Obama, which is all well and good, except for their reasoning;

    An editorial in the Frankfurter Rundschau went one historic president better with a headline that read simply: “Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama,” adding that “hope and optimism” are “the source of the nation’s strength.”

    Obama’s newfound popularity among Germans underscores not only the breadth of his appeal but also the opportunity he might have as president – though he is still far from the White House, much less his party’s nomination – to mend fences abroad as well as at home.

    “There are similarities between JFK’s time and today,” said Karsten Rossow, 49, of Berlin, who was visiting the small Kennedy Museum by the Brandenburg Gate on a dark, snowy afternoon Sunday with his wife. “People are ready for the politics of change.”

    The Germans like Kennedy because he said “Ich bin ein Berliner” – that’s sweet except that the whole reason the Soviets built the wall around Berlin and across Europe was they knew Kennedy and the West were so weak, they wouldn’t stop the Soviets from erecting that 30-year scar that imprisoned half of the European world.

    But the Germans don’t stop at the comparison of Obama to Kennedy – they have another reason for supporting him – he’s Black;

    Despite the fact that Obama is not associated with Europe in general or Germany in particular, he has “a cultural record that the rest of the field does not have, a better international and intercultural record,” von Marschall said.

    His race also plays well here, according to Uwe Andersen, a professor of political science at Ruhr University in Bochum: “In Germany, there is great sympathy first for Native Americans and second for black Americans.”

    You’d think the Germans would be a bit more sympathetic to Jews, the French and Eastern Europe since they’re so sympathetic to Indians and Blacks. What the Germans did to Europe from the Franco-Prussian War until 1945 should give them more shame than what they think happened to Blacks and Indians in the US two centuries ago.

    But having said all that, I hope this serves as a reminder to Europeans as to why we don’t allow the effete snobs of Europe to choose our President. Maybe if they put a little effort into reforming the UN that might wean them off of wanting to tell us how to vote.

    Update: Welcome Flopping Aces and Sparks from the Anvil readers. Thanks for hooking me up, Wordsmith.

  • NY Times; unemployment rate surges

    According to the New York Times, the fact that the unemployment rate “surged” to 5% last week indicates we may already be in a recession;

    The unemployment rate surged to 5 percent in December as the economy added a meager 18,000 jobs, the smallest monthly increase in four years, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

    Economists viewed the report as the most powerful indication to date that the United States could well be falling into a recessionary downturn. Evidence of widening unemployment heightened anticipation that the Federal Reserve would further cut interest rates this month, perhaps by an unusually large half a percentage point, in a bid to prevent the economy from sliding into the muck.

    Well, yes the unemployment rate rose to 5% in December, it’s .4% higher than it was a year ago. That’s hardly a surge. And it’s .4% lower than it was in October 2001 – the month after 9-11 attacks.

    New York Times, characteristically misleads it’s readers with a faulty definition of what constitutes a recession;

    “This is unambiguously negative,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “The economy is on the edge of recession, if we’re not already engulfed in one.”

    A recession is typically defined as an extended period of at least several months during which economic activity shrinks and unemployment rises.

    Investopedia (from the Forbes Company) defines a recession as;

    The technical indicator of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as measured by a country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

    “Two consecutive quarters of negative growth” is a bit more precise than “an extended period of at least several months”. If we are “engulfed” in a recession, where’s even one month of negative growth?

    The closest event to a recession we’ve had in the last decade happened at the end of President Clinton’s term and at the beginning of President Bush’s (according to Wikipedia);

    The U.S. economy shrank in three non-consecutive quarters in the early 2000s (the third quarter of 2000, the first quarter of 2001, and the third quarter of 2001). Strictly speaking, the U.S. economy was not in recession during this period — the common definition being “a fall of a country’s real gross domestic product in two or more successive quarters.”

    Those using a less traditional definitions of the term deem part or all of this period to have been a recession and there remains some debate over the start and end dates.

    The New York Times must be using the same “less traditional definitions” to write their story. But then the media uses terms they don’t understand to describe a lot of things these days – especially when they’re trying to influence public opinion against Republicans during an election.

    Like when James Carville pronounced “It’s the economy, stupid” in the 1992 campaign, although Clinton admitted two years later that his staff knew the economy was recovering and they were afraid to lose an important issue to The Truth.

    Similar to the laws of gravity, the laws of economics are governed by simplicity. When the stock market indexes reach new highs, they’re due to come down. When unemployment reaches new lows, it’s bound to go up. When interest rates are at historic lows, they’re going up soon. How hard is that to understand? Record highs and lows are records for reason.

  • Two terrorists make grave threats

    Everyone has heard that pudgy little Adam Perlman has threatened the president of the United States in his latest video message from his mom’s basement (ABC News link);

    American Al Qaeda leader Adam Gadahn told his followers to welcome Bush “with bombs and traps” upon his upcoming visit to the Middle East this week.

    “The occupied territories are awaiting their first visit by the crusader Bush and the mujahideen are also waiting for him,” said Gadahn, a California native and now an Al Qaeda spokesman.

    Gadahn is the star of the latest al Qaeda propaganda video to be posted online by the group’s media wing, As Sahab.

    Jammie Wearing Fool comments that it sounds like Harry Reid wrote this latest screed from the terrorist with a Jewish-sounding name.

    But much more frightening, is the story that George Clooney may boycott the Oscars (Times Online link);

    THE Hollywood star George Clooney is being credited with inspiring an actors’ boycott against film award ceremonies that threatens to reduce next weekend’s Golden Globe Awards to a shambles and is jeopardising the most important event in the Hollywood calendar, next month’s Oscars.

    This weekend the Screen Actors Guild announced that the 70 actors shortlisted for awards at the Globes will not be attending the ceremony in sympathy with scriptwriters who have been on strike for two months.

    Officially, television network NBC, which splits millions of advertising dollars with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, organiser of the Globes, says the show will go on. Both bodies said on Friday they were in “an extremely difficult position” and would try to woo the actors back.

    Behind the scenes NBC is split between those who are in despair seeking to salvage the festival and those raging at the “disloyalty” of actors.

    Neither of these individuals are aware of the realities of their threats. The best thing that could happen to the war against terror is if the President were attacked. The best thing that could happen to the movie industry is for those millionaires to boycott their own pat-on-the-back ceremony.

    Both will probably make Taranto’s “Bottom Stories” list.