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

Category: Politics

  • No taste

    Decades ago, I used to watch syndicated “Star Trek” episodes in the afternoon after school (I’m no “trekkie” – don’t get that idea), but one episode in particular always stuck with me. Since I’m no fan, I can’t tell you the number or title of it, just the gist of the story.

    Some lonely guy on some distant planet had been observing Earth for years and copied the culture and behavior from he saw through his telescope. Well, anyway, he somehow lured Kirk and Company to his planet and captured them. To entice them to stay, he laid out a sumptuous banquet of meats and vegetables he had manufactured from what he observed of earth.

    Well, when the crew sat down and started to enjoy the meal, they were shocked to find that the food had no taste because their captor/host had copied what he’d seen, but because of the distance, was unable to replicate the taste or smell of the food. The Democrat candidates remind me of that fellow.

    John Edwards wants to learn about poverty, so he wrangles and advisory job with a hedge fund company. Most people, if they wanted to learn about life in poverty, would work at a soup kitchen, or a battered women’s shelter, but John Edwards can’t get too close to the poor to get a taste of the life, so he observes poverty from a 80-story corner office.

    Hillary Clinton wants to “strengthen the middle class” according to her website. How? By making healthcare affordable, lowering energy costs, protecting homeowners from foreclosures, making college affordable and raising the minimum wage. Are those even attainable goals, or are they just window dressing?

    How do you force healthcare to be more affordable than it already is – especially when most of the workers with no healthcare don’t see a value in investing in their own well-being and don’t pay the employer-supplemented premiums?

    How do you make energy costs lower without people conserving energy and without making the necessary commitment to tapping our own energy resources, wile China helps Cuba tap resources available to us?

    How do you protect homeowners who don’t pay their mortgages from foreclosures? Why does everyone need to go to college and why does raising the minimum wage for a tiny percentage of workers improve everyone’s condition?

    She’s never been middleclass. Since we’re close to the same age, I can say with some authority that middle class kids didn’t get to go to East Coast Ivy League Schools like Hillary. We went to Community colleges and public schools if we were lucky – or we joined the military. She’s not one of us, no matter how hard she tries to prove otherwise. 

    Generally, these are just BS statements meant to make Clinton look like she really cares about the middleclass – plenty of good looking red meat, with no taste.

    And then there’s Barack Obama. Since he’s made a career out of being Black, how Black is he really? Aside from the obvious problem that his mother is white and his father is actually African, the fact that he was mainly raised outside of the United States and went to law school, what could he possibly have in common with an American Black person raised in the innercity? Again, it’s just his appearance, not his substance that we’re supposed to see.

    I can already anticipate my email – Republicans candidates aren’t middleclass either. Well, right, they’re not. But then aren’t trying to pass themselves off as middleclass, are they?

    Remember the 1992 campaign when Bill Clinton promised a middleclass tax cut? Remember the outcome of that? He came on TV and told us that he’d worked harder than he’d ever worked in his life, but, sorry, he just couldn’t find us a middleclass tax cut – so instead he was raising our taxes more than they’d ever been raised before. He raised taxes on working families, on retirees and he made it all retroactive so that even people who’d been dead had their taxes raised.

    All appearance, no taste.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • How do we win?

    Exactly how do Democrats think that playing politics with funding for the war will end well for this country? S.A.Miller and Jon Curl of the Washington Times write today;

    The House last night ignored a veto threat and passed a bill to ration war funds, hours after President Bush for the first time offered to negotiate Iraq benchmarks with the Democrat-led Congress.
        The bill, which would fund the war in two-month installments and sets up a possible troop withdrawal in August, passed in a 221-205 vote, with Democrats backing the bill by 219-10 and Republicans opposed by 195-2.

    With incremental funding, how do the Iraqis know they can depend on us to protect them while they build a fledgling government? How can Democrats think this helps?
    Elsewhere in the Times, Sharon Behn writes that the troops are working hard to convince Iraqis that giving US forces information on terrorists is a safe practice;

     “We’ve seen a small increase of individuals willing to talk to us on what they perceive as terrorists. That has led to a couple of people being captured or put into Camp Cropper,” he said, referring to a detention center located on one of the U.S. bases. “The tips we’ve been getting seem better.”
        In one instance, during a several-hour-long patrol in a largely Shi’ite community, U.S. soldiers were called back to a house down a side alley to speak to a man who said he had been beaten by members of the Mahdi Army militia. Deep purple bruises covered his legs, and he said they had tortured him with electricity on his feet.
        After a lot of reassurance, the man gave the soldiers the location of a Mahdi militia member, although it was clear he was terrified.

    How long can the Iraqis trust our troops to stay when they’ve watched us pull out before? We left the Iraqi Shi’ites to Saddam’s henchment in 1991, the Somalis in 1993, the Haitians in 1996 and on-and-on. Why should the iraqis trust to stay and help them when the Left is so bound and determined to surrender to Code Pink and the jihadists? Why would an Iraqi stick his mortal neck out to provide the troops with vital information when we might not be around in a few months and the guys he rats out come back for revenge? Why should they trust us to stay when we’ve given the world no reason to believe we’ll see a war through?

    The Washington Post reports today that Democrats are still under the mispreception that they’re doing the work of the American people;

    “The president has brought us to this point by vetoing the first Iraq Accountability Act and refusing to pay for this war responsibly,” declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “He has grown accustomed to the free hand on Iraq he had before January 4. Those days are over.”

    The final tally came just an hour after antiwar Democrats mustered 171 votes for far tougher legislation that would all but end U.S. military involvement in Iraq within nine months. The 255 to 171 vote against that measure meant that nowhere close to a majority backed it, but the fact that 169 Democrats and two Republicans voted for it surprised opponents and proponents alike.

    “I didn’t think I was going to get anywhere near 171 votes,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the withdrawal bill’s chief author. “This is proof that the United States Congress is getting closer to where the American people already are.”

    If the American people were ready to surrender, the President couldn’t veto – there’d be throngs of everyday guys like me outside the White House. We ain’t out there, Jimbo, so you’re delusioned into believing that all of America thinks like your idiot constituents. If that were true, if we thought like your idiot constituents, we’d be talking about President Kerry right now. 

    I understand the old saw that the “squeaky wheel gets the oil”, but in this case the squeaky wheel is a bunch of morons in pink feather boas – shouldn’t we take that into account when our legislature tries to formulate half-baked foreign policy?

  • Diplomacy by other means

    Some Republicans warned President Bush that they don’t have the testicular fortitude to defeat terrorists, according to the Washington Post this morning;

    House Republican moderates, in a remarkably blunt White House meeting, warned President Bush this week that his pursuit of the war in Iraq is risking the future of the Republican Party and that he cannot count on GOP support for many more months.

    But the meeting between 11 House Republicans, Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, White House political adviser Karl Rove and presidential press secretary Tony Snow was perhaps the clearest sign yet that patience in the party is running out. The meeting, organized by Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.), one of the co-chairs of the moderate “Tuesday Group,” included Reps. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), Michael N. Castle (Del.), Todd R. Platts (Pa.), Jim Ramstad (Minn.) and Jo Ann Emerson (Mo.).

    “It was a very remarkable, candid conversation,” Davis said. “People are always saying President Bush is in a bubble. Well, this was our chance, and we took it.”

    A bubble? The President lives in a bubble? After the grillings he gets from the press corps and the media’s 24/7 coverage of every malcontent in the country protesting Bushitler? Well, I could tell these linguini-spined Republicans were RINOs as soon as they placed the Party before our national security. That’s what Democrats have been doing for the last five years. It only stands to reason that RINOs would begin caving soon. Gutless cowards.

    Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that Defense Secretary Gates told Congress that the debate over Iraq is aiding al Qaida (as if Congress didn’t know that already);

    Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday told Congress that al Qaeda will establish a stronghold in Iraq’s Anbar province if U.S. troops pull out prematurely and that the group is reacting to the war debate in Washington by stepping up attacks.
        Furthermore, the entire war effort will be disrupted unless Congress quickly passes an emergency funding bill acceptable to President Bush, he said.
        Mr. Gates’ testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee preceded today’s scheduled House vote on a bill that the White House promises to veto because it rations war spending and sets up a July vote to cut off funds if progress in Iraq is inadequate.
        “If we were to withdraw, leaving Iraq in chaos, al Qaeda almost certainly would use Anbar province as another base from which to plan operations not only inside Iraq, but first of all in the neighborhood and then potentially against the United States,” Mr. Gates told the committee.

    But Congress is only concerned about it’s members job security.

    The Washington Times also tells us that Bahrain is warning against our withdrawal from Iraq;

    The U.S.-led war in Iraq has damaged America’s image in the Arab Middle East, but a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would make the situation worse, Bahrain’s information minister, Muhammad Abdul Ghaffar, said yesterday.
        “We all know the situation is not easy, but militarily speaking it is not wise now simply to withdraw from Iraq,” Mr. Abdul Ghaffar said during a luncheon with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.
        He acknowledged growing questions over the U.S. commitment in Iraq after the Democratic takeover of Congress in November, but said Iraq’s various factions and ethnic groups still need time to create a workable national government.
        “There is still much work to do on real national reconciliation, and without reconciliation we will not have a stable Iraq,” he added.

    If a third world backwater country can recognize the importance of staying the course in Iraq, why can’t the over-educated members of Congress? It’s also a view that Mohammed of Iraq the Model shares;

    We must keep fighting those criminals and tyrants until they realize that the freedom-loving peoples of the region are not alone. Freedom and living in dignity are the aspirations of all mankind and that’s what unites us; not death and suicide. When freedom-lovers in other countries reach out for us they are working for the future of everyone tyrants and murderers like Ahmedinejad, Nesrallah, Assad and Qaddafi must realize that we are not their possessions to pass on to their sons or henchmen. We belong to the human civilization and that was the day we gave what we gave to our land and other civilizations. They can’t take out our humanity with their ugly crimes and they can’t force us to back off. The world should ask them to leave our land before asking the soldiers of freedom to do so.

    Meanwhile Hugo Chavez, the self-proclaimed new Simon Bolivar, is urging the Latin world to support Iran;

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is encouraging his Latin American allies to expand ties with Iran, which is offering trade concessions and financial incentives and winning influence in the region.
        During two recent visits to Venezuela, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad signed more than $17 billion worth of economic agreements with Mr. Chavez.
        Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega last month received Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki while Bolivian President Evo Morales announced a new trade deal with Iran.
        “The struggle for justice and truth in the framework of economic development is the principle objective of the government in Nicaragua and of our friends in Iran,” said Mr. Ortega when Mr. Mottaki arrived after stopping in Venezuela for talks with Mr. Chavez.
        Mr. Ortega called Iran a “victim” of the U.S., which he accused of “supporting terrorism.”

    Hezbollah in Paraguay, anyone?

    So weak-kneed Republicans who put party before our national survival, pick this point to start looking to jump ship. The Administration has stopped several attacks on our soil mainly because the terrorists are disjointed and not able to coordinate support for cells abroad due to al Qaida’s focus on Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorists have had a decade to build their support structure from Afghanistan unhindered and it’s crumbling into a few weak attempts like a guy trying to light a bomb in his shoes with wet matches.

    We are provably winning worldwide with small steps forward, but apparently the politicians don’t have the wherewithall to see it through to the end. They don’t have the guts to write our future like the politicians in our past have had. Can you imagine today’s RINOs during the years of steady losses during our Revolution? I doubt they’d have the courage to even sign the Declaration of Independence.

  • There is no terrorist threat

    In Michael Moore’s latest “book”, Dude, Where’s My Country, Moore writes this paragraph;

    There is no terrorist threat.You need to calm down, relax, listen very carefully, and repeat after me:
    There is no terrorist threat.
    There is no terrorist threat!
    There… is… no… terrorist… threat!     

    Well, yesterday we all became aware, if some of us hadn’t already, that isn’t entirely true. According to the Washington Post;

    A group of would-be terrorists, allegedly undone after attempting to have jihad training videos copied onto a DVD, has been charged with conspiring to attack Fort Dix and kill soldiers there with assault rifles and grenades, authorities said Tuesday.

    Five men — all foreign-born and described as “radical Islamists” by federal authorities — allegedly trained at a shooting range in Pennsylvania‘s Pocono Mountains to kill “as many soldiers as possible” at the historic Army base 25 miles east of Philadelphia. A sixth man was charged with helping them obtain illegal weapons.

    Sounds like a terrorist plot to me – no matter how whacky it sounds.

    The Wall Street Journal also reported that the Brits arrested four more suspects in the 7-7-05 bombing yesterday;

    British police arrested four people Wednesday in connection with the suicide bombings that killed 52 bus and subway passengers in London in 2005.

    Two men and a woman were arrested in West Yorkshire, Metropolitan Police said, and West Midlands Police said a 22-year-old man was arrested in Birmingham. All were arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism and were being taken to London for interrogation, police said.

    Searches were under way at two flats in Birmingham, and at five addresses in West Yorkshire — two houses in Dewsbury, two houses in the Beeston neighborhood of Leeds and one house in Batley, police said. Mohammed Sidique Khan, identified as one of the four London bombers, was a resident of Dewsbury and had grown up in Beeston.

    And if you think the reason that these suspects were planning attacks only against nations who are at war in Iraq, the Wall Street Journal also ran a story this morning about German police raiding offices of more suspected terrorists;

    Prosecutors said they were investigating more than 18 people suspected of organizing what they called a terrorist group that planned to carry out firebombings and other violent attacks. Some 900 federal and local police officers in cities including Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen searched about 40 premises used by several anti-globalist groups, they said.

    “The militant extreme left groups and their members are suspected of having founded a terrorist group, or of being members of such an organization, with the specific goal of staging fire bombings and other violent attacks in order to disrupt or prevent the upcoming G-8 summit in Heiligendamm,” federal prosecutors said in a statement.

    Last I checked Germany wasn’t a combatant nation involved in Iraq. Need another example? How about this report from the Washington Post of Islamic youths rioting in France;

    Though violence continued late Tuesday and early Wednesday, the third night after the election was much calmer than the previous two, Interior Minister Francois Baroin said.

    About 730 cars were burned nationwide Sunday night and 592 people were arrested. The following night, 373 vehicles were torched and 160 people were taken in for questioning across France.

    If mayhem committed against the civilian population of France isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is terrorism.

    Bill Gertz, in today’s Washington Times, claims that the Balkans are islamist’s latest recruiting and training grounds;

       “When it comes to extremists, we’re talking about very, very small pockets in Albania, as well as among the ethnic Albanian populations in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and other parts of the Balkans,” said one official with access to intelligence reports.
        The official pointed out that the Albanian government has been supportive of U.S. efforts to counter Islamic terrorist activities, including curbing logistics and financial aid, and working to prevent terrorists from receiving training and weapons.
        But a Congressional Research Service report produced in 2005 said instability in Albania during the 1990s gave al Qaeda a “foothold” there.
        “Poor internal security, lax border controls, and high rates of crime produced an environment conducive to terrorist activity,” said the report by CRS specialist Steven Woehrel. “Some foreign Islamic extremists used Albania as a safe haven and gained Albanian citizenship.”
        Balkan Muslims also have been targets of al Qaeda recruitment efforts because they have an easier time blending in or evading U.S. and European security measures and border controls, which often are geared to identifying Middle Eastern extremists.

    Don’t forget the post I wrote back in March about the ETA operating in Bolivia;

    Members of the Basque terrorist group ETA have been conducting financial and propaganda activities in Bolivia with the knowledge of President Evo Morales, according to Spanish intelligence reports cited by the Madrid newspaper El Pais and the local press.
        Officials in Bolivia have confirmed that six members of the Basque separatist organization traveled to Bolivia and met with high-level officials of the Morales government during the past year.
        According to these officials, Mr. Morales and his vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, have had relations with ETA members since 2005, predating Mr. Morales’ 2006 inauguration.
        ”Members of ETA have been purchasing homes and creating a new refuge for the organization in Cochabamba, where they move like fish in water,” according to El Pais.  

    What’s that about not calling it a global war against terror?

    How can Moore say, with a straight face, there is no terrorist threat? How can Congress not see the straight line between the war in Iraq and terrorist activities worldwide? How is it possible that Democrats don’t see a looming threat and ignore the fact that winning in Iraq is essential to our national security?

    Purely politics. Just because the American people elected Republicans instead of the mealy-mouthed, insolent children in the Democrat party.

    Moonbattery (h/t Curt at Flopping Aces) writes that the HuffPo crowd still thinks there’s no terrorist threat.

    Michele Malkin writes today about the Jersey jihadists and “the thanks we get”.

    Crotchety Old Bastard disputes the Jersey jihadists’ “homegrown” label.

  • Best stock market climb since Coolidge

    According to the Wall Street Journal, if today’s Dow Jones Industrials close higher than Friday, it’ll be the longest winning streak for the market since Calvin Coolidge;

    The Dow has closed higher 23 of the past 26 sessions, a feat not accomplished since 1944. If it finishes in the black Monday, it would tie the longest streak of its kind in the index’s history, achieved in 1927.

    Isn’t that just the opposite of what the Left meant in the 2004 election when they said that this economy is the worst since Hoover and when John Kerry said we had the biggest job loss since the Depression? I guess this is why Lawrence O’Donnell is the worst stock-picking guest on Kudlow’s show. The left wouldn’t know a good stock market if it hit them in their collective stupid face. 

    If we can’t trust them to judge the economy, how can we trust them to tell us that the Iraq War will be a failure?