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

Category: Politics

  • Troop deployment curb killed

    Yesterday, Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel, the two turncoats with no cause, failed to run a play around the Administration’s flank and curtail deployment of forces into the two largest conflicts in the Middle East. S.A.Miller of the Washington Times;

    Senate Republicans yesterday blocked a bid by Democrats to restrict troop-deployment schedules for a second time, saying it would impede the ability of President Bush and generals to wage the war in Iraq.

    “The majority has brought this back in order to reduce the numbers of fully trained and combat-experienced troops available to our military commanders and thus to force an accelerated drawdown of troops and units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let’s be honest about this,” said Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and presidential aspirant.

    The troop-deployment measure, which would have required troops to get “dwell time” at home equal to time deployed overseas, died 56-44, falling four votes shy of the 60 needed to pass, according to a previous agreement.

    Anyone who has ever read a page of Tsun Tzu or Clauswitz knows it’s a bad idea for the legislature to restrict deployment of troops into combat. That’s why we have a commander-in-chief – we can’t fight a war by committee. The 9-11 report is proof of that. So I guess that means Webb and Hagel are behind the youngest plebe in West Point in their reading. Of course, the Washington Post doesn’t see it that way;

    Senate Republicans yesterday rejected a bipartisan proposal to lengthen the home leaves of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, derailing a measure that war opponents viewed as one of the best chances to force President Bush to accelerate a redeployment of forces.

    Republican Senators came to their senses;

    Reading between the lines, Republicans detected another aim. By limiting the pool of people who would be eligible for deployment, they believed that Democrats were attempting to force the troop reductions that they had failed to bring about legislatively.  

    So because of the failed measure, the Post concedes that it’s still Bush’s war;

    The vote offered the most vivid evidence yet that the Bush administration still controls Iraq war policy, despite months of congressional debate, the war’s persistent unpopularity and a summer-long effort by activists to pressure Republicans.

    Despite the fact that Harry Reid tried to change it;

    “Our Republican colleagues are more interested in protecting our president than our troops,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said moments before the vote, when defeat appeared certain. “This is Bush’s war. Don’t make it also the Republican senators’ war.”

    The Times reports that Reid thinks of himself as a warrior;

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, vowed to keep pushing to end the war, even though Mr. Webb’s amendment was the lone war-related measure considered to have a chance for passage.

    “We will not stop waging the hard-but-necessary fight to responsibly end the war,” he said.

    Imagine that – he’s willing to fight long and hard to ensure our defeat in the Middle East. It’s too damn bad he can’t summon the testicular fortitude to turn that same perserverance towards the enemies of the country he’s sworn to protect and defend.

  • Democrats and tax cuts

    Everytime I hear a Democrat presidential candidate mention how they want to give the middleclass a taxcut, I remember Bill Clinton’s 1992 promise to give the middleclass a break – which he completely abandoned in 1993. I remember his excuse that he’d worked harder than he’s ever worked in his life and still couldn’t find a way to toss the middleclass a coupla bones. Then he proceeded to hike our taxes – all of us, even people who were dead.

    Well, now I’m listening to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards promising tax cuts to the middleclass. Even their proposals are weak – Obama is promising a $500 tax credit. A $500 tax credit shakes out to a whopping $41/month savings – $82 if you’re in a family. $0 if you don’t pay taxes – most of the people who don’t pay taxes can thank President Bush who raised the minimum income level for filing taxes. He eliminated 16 million workers from the tax rolls in 2001 by that simple swipe of the pen. And now Obama is buying their vote with $0 tax cut (how much is $0 from $0?).

    To his credit, Obama is proposing elimination of seniors with an income under $50,000 from the tax rolls. I’d go along with that – I like simple tax cuts.

    But the Wall Street Journal reports the bad news;

    The changes will be financed in part by raising the tax rate on capital gains and dividend income to as much as 28%, a level last seen in 1997. That is a higher amount than the campaign had endorsed. Earlier this year, the Obama campaign said it would raise those rates to 20%.

    Earlier this year, Mr. Edwards said he, too, would raise the capital-gains tax rate to 28% from 15% and boost income taxes on those making more than $200,000 to finance tax cuts and other benefits for middle- and lower-income families.

    The underlying message of the Democratic candidates’ plans — that wealthier people should pay higher taxes and lower- and middle-income people should pay less — echoes the theme many Democrats in Congress have adopted.

    Double the capital gains tax – which reduces investments and hinders the economy. Oh, and they don’t mention that doubling the capital gains tax also affects what you pay when you sell your house.

    What Democrats don’t know, don’t understand or don’t care is that half of Americans are invested in the economy – raising taxes on capital gains eventually effects us all. I suspect that Obama wants to lower taxes on seniors because he knows he’ll make it up by doubling the taxes on their dividends and capital gains. One way or the other, people will have less money invested in the economy to save taxes – that only hurts the economy.

    But the Big Brother aspect of this reported by Bloomberg;

    The plan would also simplify tax filing for many Americans by having the Internal Revenue Service provide pre-filled tax forms using financial data it receives from employers and banks. The service would be available to filers without complex taxes, or those with only wage and bank-interest income.

    Yeah, I’d like that. I got a bill from the IRS a few weeks ago telling me that I owed them about $4000 from 2005 because of information they received from one of my financial institutions. After I spent a few harrowing weeks proving my innocence (because with the IRS, you’re guilty until you can prove otherwise), they sent me a letter apologizing for the inconvenience. Yeah, so I’m going to let them pre-fill my tax forms. Nice try, Obama.

    The Washington Post quotes Obama;

    “In our new economy, there is no shortage of new wealth,” he told the Tax Policy Center. “But wages are not keeping pace. . . . This isn’t the invisible hand of a market at work. It’s the successful work of special interests.”

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics would disagree; wages are up. They’ve been going up, and unemployment is down to the lowest and longest sustained rate in history. But it seems that Democrats are determined to end that – then blame the economy on Republican policy that has saved this economy.

    Instead of taxhikes and faux-taxcuts, lets see spending cuts. Democrats are real good at telling us how WE can do more for government – for a change let’s see if they can make government do more for us with less money like we have to do everytime they slap a tax hike on us.

  • Chavez takes over the school system

    Hat tip to Atlas Shrugs for alerting us that Chavez is doing to the school system what he did for television in Venezuela – and just like when he warned private communication companies, he’s warning private schools;

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened on Monday to close or take over any private school that refuses to submit to the oversight of his socialist government as it develops a new curriculum and textbooks.

    Not bizzare enough for you? How about this quote;

    “Society cannot allow the private sector to do whatever it wants,” said Chavez, speaking on the first day of classes.

    Beautiful, huh? AP reports;

    But one college-level syllabus obtained by The Associated Press shows some premedical students already have a recommended reading list including Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and Fidel Castro’s speeches, alongside traditional subjects like biology and chemistry.

    The syllabus also includes quotations from Chavez and urges students to learn about slain revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Colombian rebel chief Manuel Marulanda, whose leftist guerrillas are considered a terrorist group by Colombia, the U.S. and European Union.

    So I guess the students’ education won’t focus on the three “r”s. Bloomberg writes;

    Teachers and academics may see the measure as an attempt to politicize the classroom, speeding up a brain drain that has been underway for years as educated, skilled workers move abroad to escape Chavez’s “Bolivarian” revolution, said Ercilia Vasquez, director of the school of education at the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Caracas.

    “This ideology is very strong,” she said in a phone interview. “We’re going through a process where a lot of people are looking for other alternatives outside the country. This could accelerate it.’”

    The AP story continues;

    Venezuelan officials defend the program at the Latin American Medical School — one in a handful of state-run colleges and universities that emphasize socialist ideology — as the new direction of Venezuelan higher education.

    “We must train socially minded people to help the community, and that’s why the revolution’s socialist program is being implemented,” said Zulay Campos, a member of a Bolivarian State Academic Commission that evaluates compliance with academic guidelines.

    “If they attack us because we’re indoctrinating, well yes, we’re doing it, because those capitalist ideas that our young people have — and that have done so much damage to our people — must be eliminated,” Campos said. 

    Typical communist rhetoric – and it’s becoming too late to stop to stop Chavez. The left is so adoring, so emotional over the idea of an oil-rich communist empire that they forget the 100s of millions who’ve already been sacrificed at the altar of Marxism. Venezuela is beginning to look more and more like the Lord of the Flies. 

    From The Devil’s Excrement, a Venezuelan’s view of Chavez latest endeavor;

    But much like in Hitler’s Germany, Fidel’s Cuba or Franco’s Spain, Venezuela will now have official textbooks for all subjects, guaranteeing no impure ideas get through to the kids and all information gets the imprimatur from Bolivarian officials. I wonder if they will be signed by a Bishop or a General as a sign of approval or by the autocrat himself maybe.

    Because according to the autocrat, texts used to preach the theories of the Empire, whether the North-American or Spanish one (Did Chavez look up pre-1724 textbooks?), but then the ranting got better when Chavez truly and really said:

    “First, it was an ideologic education, the euro-centric vision, colonial, which taught us to admire the conquerors and then the cult to the animated characters of Superman, Mandrake or the Phantom, denying us the knowledge of Guicapuro, Negra Hipolita or Sucre”

    Jeez, I wonder where he heard about these, as I do not recall learning about any of these characters in school, but I do remember learning about Guicaipuro, Negra Hipolita and Sucre, and was always taught a very negative view of the Spanish conquerors which cost me quite a few expulsions from class when I lived in Spain.

    So where’s Jimmy Carter now that Venezuelans really need him? He’s busy bashing Jews and Israel on public access – apparently Chavez is off his radar now that Carter has insured Chavez’ employment for life. I’ve asked before – where are the human rights Democrats? Where are these so-called socially liberal conservatives?

    Well, they’re all for taking education out the hands of the public sector, too. They want to indoctrinate students into Marxism – more overtly than they can now. The left wants to shut down news sources that they think oppose them. They want the wide latitude that Chavez enjoys – he’s running their dream nation where the only choice is the choice they offer.

    But Chavez’ choices will be bathed in blood eventually.

  • DC vote advocates pressure Senate

    The Washington Post reports in “11th Hour Pressure Applied on DC Vote” that DC advocates are putting pressure on the Senate to pass a measure to allow consideration for a vote giving DC a voting member of Congress;

    Facing a critical Senate vote today, supporters and opponents of the D.C. voting rights bill made impassioned speeches and lobbied on Capitol Hill in a last-minute push on the District’s efforts to get its first full member of Congress.

    The motion coming up on the Senate floor would merely clear the way for lawmakers to consider the bill. But if supporters fail to get the necessary 60 votes, the legislation will probably be doomed for this year, according to senators and staff.
     
    Both sides expect a close vote. So, in an eleventh-hour offensive yesterday, advocacy groups launched a nationwide call-in campaign to senators’ offices. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), meanwhile, joined the District’s nonvoting House delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), at a rally in which they recalled the Senate’s notorious history of filibustering civil rights legislation.

    “Not since segregation has the Senate blocked a voting rights bill. And this is a voting rights bill,” Fenty declared outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Behind him, about 60 activists waved signs reading “I Demand the Vote.”

    Now, personally, I think everyone should have representation in Congress – every single human. If residents of DC are really so upset that they don’t have a voting representative, they should move – it’s only ten miles from Maryland to Virginia across the District, so no DC resident is moving too far to get the vote they covet, if they really wanted to vote.

    It’s not like Congress just up and changed the rules recently – it’s always been like that. There’s no one in DC who had their voting rights taken away – well, except maybe Eleanor Holmes Norton – she might have been living here when the Constitution was written.

    Why am I against DC having a voting member in Congress? Well, DC voters are morons, for one thing. They’ve elected a cracksmoking whoremonger to the Mayor’s Office after he was released from prison and then voted for him to sit on the City Council while he’s being investigated for tax evasion. When the District elected a straw Senator a few years ago, who’d they elect? Jesse Jackson, an Illinois resident who has never claimed residence in the District.

    The previous mayor was found to have hired people who falsified his filing documents for reelection and was denied entry into the election on the Democrat ticket – he ran as an independent and won anyway – despite his record of surrounding himself with known criminals and incompetent numbskulls.

    My opinion has nothing to do with the District’s political leanings – Utah would balance that out -it has to do with their electoral boobery. Why should the rest of the country suffer DC’s fools gladly. Aren’t Jim Moran and Chris Van Hollen enough?

  • Vietnam Memorial vandalized UPDATE

    Last week I wrote about the Viet Nam Memorial vandalization and the Park Service brushed it off as a cleaning accident. I thought it was a little odd that a cleaning crew would even bring a potentially damaging material near the Wall, but without the Park Service’s admission, it was pretty much a dead end.

    Well, Michele Malkin broke the Park Service’s admission that it was indeed vandalism yesterday afternoon (I updated last week’s post with the news). Last night, the local DC Fox broadcast channel ran this story on the 10 o’clock news broadcast – the story has been updated this morning.

    The funny thing is this; in the lead-ins to the 10 o’clock news, the news team said they had video of the perpetrators, however this video of the perpetrators never aired and it’s not included on the video clip on their website, so I wonder if it was just a teaser to get me to watch the news or if someone dumped the idea.

    Robin at Chickenhawk Express has all of the pertinent statements andd links prior to the admission of vandalism and since.

    I just think that it’s a little disengenuous of the Park Service to call it an accident until the Gathering of Eagles and ANSWER leave town – then suddenly it becomes vandalism. There were also rumors of an arrest at the Viet Nam Wall on Saturday, the day of the protest. I can’t speak to those rumors because I was two miles away at the Capitol, and the rumors were forgotten in the shadow of the IVAW charades. So I don’t know – if anyone has firsthand knowledge, please let me know. 

    The Washington Post tries to explain the reticence of the Park Service to call it vandalism;

    The unidentified substance that was found splashed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial earlier this month was the result of vandalism, the U.S. Park Police said yesterday.

    Sgt. Robert Lachance, a Park Police spokesman, said that a detective made the conclusion but that officials would provide no more details because the investigation is continuing.

    Lachance said the case would involve a long-term investigation. “It’s a terrible crime, and we want to solve it,” he said.

    Yeah, well, why didn’t the media display that same caution before the Haditha incident. I’m sure Red-White-and-Blue patriot, John Murtha, Viet Nam veteran and Marine for 30 years (and not one moment more than 30 years) will at any moment decry the vandals as criminals – and demand justice. Waiting with unabated breath here.

    And the Left is spinning the story – apparently, it probably wasn’t someone from the Left neccessarily because the anti-war protest this weekend crossed partylines – according to the koolaid drinking sheep.

  • A week of action; mental masturbation to reach zenith

    If you think that the ANSWER/IVAW protest last Saturday was the a big waste of time, they have a “Week of Action” planned reports the Washington Post;

    Dozens of war opponents, including some who were among the 192 arrested Saturday, spent yesterday training for this week, which will be “the most intense week” of planned actions since the Iraq conflict began, said Brian Becker, national coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, which organized Saturday’s rally and march and many of the other large antiwar events across the country.

    Apparently, being a dumbass pest takes training – a whole day, so I guess it’s not a long journey. But first of all they needed to get out their horror stories from their arrests this last Saturday;

    Activists came to four training sessions held at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs yesterday, many trading stories from their arrests or from clashes with several hundred war supporters who lined the march route.

    Yeah, their harrowing ordeal or their arrests best recorded by Jack Langer of Human Events;

    Then, one at a time, around a dozen antiwar veterans of the Iraq War jumped over the wall. The cops grabbed them as they went over, cuffed them with flexicuffs, and marched them away. Emboldened, other protestors hopped the wall. Soon, the cops had scores of protestors lined up, with their hands tied, waiting to be carted off to jail. A kind of collective frenzy overtook the crowd. Old women from Code Pink went over the wall. College kids jumped over. At times there were so many of them that they were left to mill around for a few minutes before an officer became available to cuff them. Altogether, I’d say around 150 protestors were arrested.

    The police showed great restraint. When older protestors or women went over, the cops offered their hand and gently assisted them down off the wall. But after about an hour of this, the cops had had enough. They began pushing back would-be wall jumpers with their riot shields. Then, when two young men danced a little too long for the crowd on top of the wall, the police hit them with pepper spray. Blinded and choking, they went over the wall anyway. A protestor taunted the cops, yelling “Ha-ha, they won.” I suppose if you define “winning” as getting gassed and arrested, then yes, the two men won.

    The anarchists really disappointed me. None of them jumped the wall. They portray themselves as the most militant wing of the antiwar movement, but they didn’t even have the guts displayed by the Code Pink grandmas. The anarchists claim to want a revolution, but apparently not a single one of them is willing to risk a misdemeanor arrest to achieve that glorious goal.

    What a soft nation we’ve become when the police are polite and helpful while aresting people – where were the slobbering dogs and the riot batons, for cripes sake. I wonder if the Iranian or Chinese police would that polite. Oh, but I digress – the week of action…

    The Post story goes on to tell us about this action-packed week;

    They are calling today National Truth in Recruiting Day, during which war opponents will try to reach young people in particular, as well as anyone considering joining the military. Activists said yesterday that they planned to visit area recruiting centers, schools and other places young people might go and that war opponents would be doing the same in such spots across the country.

    “You have to ask the right questions, find out what’s motivating them, share with them the truth and dispel myths,” Adam Kokesh, co-chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War, told the crowd, which included local college students as well as older activists, many of whom had traveled from outside the District. “My reasons [for volunteering] were patriotism; I wanted to put my life on the line for my country.” But in hindsight, “I could have been convinced that there were better ways to further democracy in the world.”

    Other strategies include trying to eat up recruiters’ time by calling and visiting centers and pretending to be potential recruits.

    So I guess the recruiters will be harrassed for a week by a bunch of goofy kids making crank calls. Well, September is a good time for that – recruiters have already made their mission for September from last Spring’s high school graduates, so this mastermind Kokesh is just engaging in mental masturbation – he’ll feel better about himself, but will have accomplished nothing.

    As long as Kokesh is talking about the truth, let’s hear him tell us the truth…that he’d been to Iraq and volunteered to go back on another tour, but it was discovered that he’d smuggled an Iraqi pistol back on his first tour and was denied his coveted second tour. He was busted from Sergeant to private for his crime and that’s the reason he hates the military and the war – because he’s a sociopath who can’t follow the marine Corps’ simple rule to not smuggle firearms back from a war.

    While he’s at it, he can tell us how he hadn’t been discharged before he illegally wore his uniform to protest the war last Spring, as he had claimed to the ignorant and pliant press. In fact, he still had his military ID card and used it to gain access to military bases in Germany during the investigation.

    I find it somewhat disengenuous of Kokesh to tell these lies and lying about the numbers of the participants in last Saturday’s protest, yet demanding “truth in recruiting” – as if recuiters aren’t being truthful about military service.

    More from Michelle Malkin’s “The Left’s seditious war on military recruiters“. Tacobell at SandGram gives you a real soldier’s reaction to Kokesh and his merry band of attention whores. He also mentions a record deal for Kokesh – is that what this is? Publicity for a garage band?

  • Gathering of Eagles vs Moonbats (Updates)

    UPDATES: As I sift through my photos, videos and other blogs, I’ve been updating this post since this morning. Just scroll through and you’ll see. Whew! I think I’m done. Enjoy!

    Editor’s Note: If you don’t see the photos, it’s because your system is behind a WebSense internet filter and it blocks Photobucket.

    Well, not unlike the stupid hippies that they are, they were HOURS late. They were supposed to start at noon, but they didn’t get to the Capitol until 3 pm. While we were among them at Lafayette Park, one of the event organizers complained over the loudspeakers that people were having trouble showing up because, mysteriously, Metro had shut down the Blue and Orange Lines (from Virginia and GW University) so they weren’t going to kick off until one o’clock.

    But my friend had arrived moments before on the Blue Line from Virginia – it hadn’t been shut down – so another moonbat lie.We figured they were making excuses for their pitiful numbers.

    By the time they got to the Capitol, the general consensus was that they had less than 4,000 people, there were rumors of only 2,000 – but I’m pretty sure there were more than that. Most of them were moving towards Union Station before the die-in started, so their numbers shrank by about half within 20 minutes of their arrival at the Capitol. In a city of a 1/2 million where a good 10% are college students with little to do on a Saturday afternoon the first few weeks of the semester, a few thousand is a pretty shabby turnout.

    This first picture is an upside down flag in Lafayette Park. But they still love this country, right? But the remarkable thing about it (and it wasn’t the only upside down flag) is that all of the flags the moonbats carried through the march were right-side up. So that tells me that someone made a conscious effort to tell all of the upside down flag guys to right their flags – and you know it was for their image, not because of their ideology;

    Another of the upside down flags in front of the White House that mysteriously righted itself before the march;

    Robin from Chickenhawk Express asked me to get photos of folks in uniform, so here’s one;

    An Arty officer from the 24th Division – I’m pretty sure the 24th Division was inactivated before President Bush became president – so he’s making a vacuous point.

    This fellow has more money than brains – he’s way too old to have been issued that uniform by the Army;

    And this Veterans For Peace stuff really cheeses me off. It hints that I’m a Veteran For War because I don’t belong to their testoterone-deficient organization. I’m not “for” war – I’m “for” national security and given the current enemy, war is the only answer. If you think war isn’t the answer, you didn’t understand the question.

    And by the looks of his scraggly ass, he was probably a chapter case anyway.

    If you don’t have a uniform to wear to the event, well, just wear your yacht skipper’s hat;

    Too many signs and not enough moonbats;

    This guy stalked me until I took his picture, so it should make him happy that he made the blog;

    I guess he’s madder at Israel than he is at Bush. But, if you wanted to take a whacky picture with the President, they had cutouts;

    This is my personal nemisis, he stalks me at every event, I have a video of him today in which he calls me “an enemy of peace” (Actually, I’m thinking of changing the name of the blog to Enemy of Peace – it has a nice ring to it, ya know). He’s wearing the same pretentious “Peace” shirt he wears at every event, too. What I did to piss off the Travelocity Roaming Gnome, I’ll never know.

    I’d like for this fellow to name one instance where nonviolence worked to solve anything when dealing with babarians;

    The real rockstars of this rally, though, was supposed to be Adam Kokesh and his IVAW crowd. But I didn’t see them – well I saw them, but only as shadows moving around inside their rockstar bus away from the crowds and adoring fans;

    Apparently, they’re not so hot on attacking Iran, either;

    Well, we left the moonbats behind and went to the Gathering of Eagles down on the National Mall.

    A much more lively group. Here’s a video of a Gold Star father’s speech to the crowd. (I’d embed this stuff if I could figure the darn thing out.

    And the highlight of the day for me, was meeting Michelle Malkin;

    You’ll notice the jumpwings on my cap are on a 1/325 AIR flash – I wore it today to honor the son of my good friend, COBDanny, who happens to be in Iraq while assigned to my old Battalion, the Red Falcons – the spearpoint of the surge. Hooah!

    The funny thing is, I took this picture of Michele Malkin just prior and didn’t even recognize her;

    The GOE group had better signs, too;

    When the Moonbats finally started their parade of fools – THREE HOURS LATE – our side was out in front of them;

    And this is the only sign that I saw that really expressed the moonbats true feelings;

    In this photo, the protesters stretched a huge red banner across the road to keep the protesters bunched up so it looked like a bigger crowd. But it took about five minutes for them to pass as this video shows;

    As this video attests, they thinned out pretty quickly. And this video shows how many they ended with at the Capitol – hardly the hundred thousand that’s being bandied about the web. And it hardly looks like the tightly compressed crowds that the media has been showing in their photos.

    This is a video of Leftist fellow recruiting for the Army. And this ugly cow kept mooing the same thing over and over – “Take your ass to Iraq”. That’s the only response they have – “Go to Iraq”. Why? So we won’t be here to hold you accountable for your intellectually vacant yammering?

    This is a video of a Gold Star father confronting a protester.

    Meet Jake. His right forearm and hand are missing from an IED attack. I found him standing with his friend outside where the die-in was going on. I talked with him a while and I asked him how he was holding up, rockhard troop that he is. He answered, “This isn’t what I went to war for, dude. These people suck.”

    They sure do, Jake, they sure do.

    Michele Malkin has more about GOE at Walter Reed and the Live blogging today’s event. More from Gateway Pundit and Robin at Chickenhawk Express with the view from outside – all the stuff I missed because I was alternately surrounded by goofuses and heroes. Redhunter was there with great report from the GOE crowd, too. One thing is certain – everyone got pictures of Michele Malkin. That little girl was all over this thing.

    The San Francisco Sentinel blog touts the ANSWER demonstration as the largest protest since January (which isn’t hard since all of the others were flops and January wasn’t so hot, either). ANSWER’s numbers are just over the top; they claim 100,000 marched with them – that’s just ridiculous. Even the AP story they use as a source only says “several thousand”. Like I said, there were less than four thousand that diminished to two thousand when the march ended. There were probably one or two thousand counter-protesters.

    Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has the news on the arrests at the DIe-in (Geez, I missed that part).

    More from Kate of A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective – another MM sighting. Age of Hooper catches the corpse of Ramsey Clark on parade. Keep watching the sky – I mean Skye at Midnight Blue. I met her there, too, so I’m sure she’ll have some pics up soon (she also got a picture with Michelle Malkin). Big Dog wandered into the moonbat crowd when they were at their slobbering worst, as Big Dogs usually do and comes out unscathed with a report of biting incidents.

    Powerline has pics of the Die-In and Victory Caucus has tons of photos and links to more blogs. Pam at BlogmeisterUSA and PC Free Zone has more pictures of the GOE side.

    For some reason, veterans getting arrested is more honorable than veterans who continue to serve their brothers and sisters in uniform. Some Leftists wish for the good old days, while others think we’re “scared little babies“.

    The Washington Post calls it “Dueling Demonstrations“, but it’s not really a duel when one side is has no clue what he’s doing. Bloodthirsty Liberal conducts a post-mortem on media coverage.

    The Washington Times provides a more balanced account than the Post or AP.

    Since Kokesh went out of his way to get arrested a week ago Thursday for putting up posters in a National Park with the press on hand to record his arrest, and since he also went out of his way to get arrested yesterday (Saturday, Sept. 15th) I gotta figure that they sense the failing support for their movement and they’re trying to whip up some outrage among the sheep. Like I said last week, we’re witnessing the death throes of the anti-war movement. Just like the American people are tired of hearing about the war, they’re also getting tired of hearing about the primadonnas of the anti-war movement.

    They ride in rock star buses, play to the echo chamber and jet off to another scripted event, and Americans understand that they’re just trying to make a living by not working.

  • Protest preview

    Well, tomorrow is ANSWER‘s and IVAW‘s “Mass” march against the war. They plan on meeting up at the White House at noon from all I can gather and meandering along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol for their “Die-In”. The Gathering of Eagles, Free Republic and Protest Warriors will be lining their route.

    GOE plans on a rally at 9am on the National Mall near 7th Street. Protest Warriors will be protecting the Navy Memorial from the same type of injustice that has been done to it in the past.

    Yours truly plans to arrive at the Farragut North Metro Station (on the Red line) about 10 am (after my morning bike ride and my SOS breakfast at the Walter Reed mess hall) and I’ll get ya’all some pictures of the hairy-legged crowd as I walk about a half-mile to the good guys. I’m trying to find an internet hotspot near the march route, but I’ve not been successful so far, so ya’all might hafta wait until I get home before I get the pictures up on the blog. But I’ll take my laptop just in case.

    On my quick recon around the city today, I haven’t seen the usual hippie-types anywhere. Usually I see them straggling in from the bus station and the train station all day long, but they’ve been noticably absent today. I get the impression that Kokesh‘s expectation for 4,000 die-in volunteers might be a little ambitious.

    I’ll grant that they may have lots of buses show up at the last minute, but, as I said, this pre-protest day is a whole lot quieter than the ones I’ve seen in the past.

    On the other hand, I have seen several motorcycles flying American flags cruisng the city. But anyway we’ll see tomorrow.

    If anyone is planning to link up with us tomorrow (I have two so far that have expressed an interest), you can catch up me at Farragut North Metro Station or at the Navy Memorial. I’ll email my cell number if necessary. Keep watching this space for photos!Â