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

Category: Society

  • What I’m reading today

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    Stolen from The Jungle Hut

    I must be getting old – I’m only reading other people’s brilliant thoughts today from the blogs that link here.

    People like Van at Kesher Talk who is convinced that McCain will tap Lieberman for VP.

    People like my friend Kamangir the Archer – the most visible moderate Iranian I know – who rationally opposes Wilder’s Fitna. As opposed to the irrational Dutch moonbats who apologize for Fitna as reported by Gateway Pundit and Weasel Zippers. If you’re like the two or three people on the planet who haven’t see it yet, Moonbattery and Say Anything have it up on their servers. The Jawa Report writes that the Islamic Republic has summoned the Dutch ambassador – I wonder what they want now?

    Folks like my buddy Skye from Midnight Blue who climbed back up on the horse yesterday after being attacked last weekend by an irrational moonbat in Chester County.

    I got an email tip from the Milblogs this morning about the upcoming Bad Voodoo’s War from PBS and Andi’s got the teaser video.

    If you’re wondering what I think about the recent uptick in violence in Iraq, it’s best described at Neptunus Lex. The Iranians are trying to upend our elections with total disregard for Iraqi lives. al Sadr finally realized it this morning. Rick Moran at the Right Wing Nut House questions Maliki’s judgement. McQ at Q&O dissects the events leading up to the Basra battle and provides links. Haystack at Redstate catches the LA Times painting al Sadr as a poor victim in the latest flare up. The Lonely Sandpiper blames the Brits. I think it’s just Maliki’s version of the Whiskey Rebellion.
    The only woman with whom I agree all of the time (except my wife and my Mom), Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy posts John McCain’s first national campaign ad.

    Marooned in Marin (who is actually marooned in Northern Virginia these days) examines the rumor that while super-delegates decide between two candidates, the Democrats are plotting to throw all of the primary voters under the bus and just pick their favorite loser of all time. So much for the democratic part of their party. Mike Tippet at Wake Up America is thankful for the democrats’ biggest loser.

    Bob Parks at Outside the Wire examines a survey that declares there’s no indoctrination at our schools.

    In case anyone is wondering, Snapped Shot is still behaving himself.

    Solomon reviews and dissects the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” at Solomonia.

    Spanish Pundit writes that Palestinian Christians are being harrassed by a fundamentalist Islamic mafia in the Holy Land.

    Wordsmith at Sparks From the Anvil writes about an Iraqi translator who was denied resident alien status.

    The Avid Editor claims (and rightly so) that we’re already at war with Iran.

    Wolf Howling has more links to other blogs for something different.

    Chicagoan Marathon Pundit, who seems to have something against an Obama Presidency, writes about Obama’s latest embellishment.

    And just go visit The Jungle Hut and Don Surber because they both exhibited exceptionally clear judgment by adding me to their blogrolls last night.

  • 3d Anniversary Freep at Walter Reed

    A little over three years ago, the Code Pink freaks began a death vigil outside of Walter Reed Army Medical Center every Friday night to greet the weekly bus bringing in casualties from the war against terror. After their first Friday night a group of local people who frequent the Free Republic forums decided that Code Pink shouldn’t go unchallenged. They organized a weekly counter-demonstration.

    Code Pink had their group on the southwest corner of the main entrance into WRAMC, the Freepers got permits for the other three corners and it became a weekly stand-off. Code Pink coerced the unions into swelling their ranks for awhile and Freepers enjoyed sporadic reinforcement when Gathering of Eagles and Eagles Up folks came to town. Memorial Day weekend saw participation from Rolling Thunder folks. I don’t know how many times I’ve read other blog and read about bloggers who happened to be in town would just show up and join in. I remember last March, Michele Malkin wrote about the great time she had out there with the folks before the first Gathering of Eagles.

    Well, tonight marked the 3rd anniversary of the Walter Reed Freep – every Friday night, in rain, snow, sleet, blistering heat for three years, Code Pink has had to face counter-protesters. I was told tonight that Code Pink lost their permit for the front gate recently when Concrete Bob, a frequent visitor here and blogger at DC Protest Warrior kept a close eye on Code Pink’s permit and the day that it expired, he went down and secured their corner. Now Code Pink is exiled down at the end of the block and the Freepers own all four corners.

    Here’s a picture I took of the Code Pink protesters three years ago;

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    This is what Code Pink’s corner looks like tonight;

    Concrete Bob and Tom the Redhunter (also a frequent visitor here) invited me down tonight, so I stopped for awhile and took these pictures.

    The Freepers’ cars have signs that warn of the Code Pink folks ahead.

    The Freepers love telling the story of the night after the bus of wounded troops passed through the gate, it stopped and the door opened and one lone soldier, barely able to walk, limped back to the counter protesters and thanked them all for welcoming him home.

    The reaction from people passing the intersection surprised me, so I video’d it so you can experience, too (Editor’s note: OK, the videos are fixed now – thanks for being patient. There’s two of each video – I’m trying out Google video in case I run into problems with YouTube like I did last night);


    Those stalwart folks from Free Republic and Protest Warrior deserve our thanks for braving the elements for us.

    Welcome Free Republic readers – feel free to stay and look around. Especially the Protests/Counterprotests category – you’ll see some friends there.

    UPDATED 4-2-08; Tom the Redhunter put up an excellent post about the history of the FReep at Free Republic and at his blog The Redhunter.

  • Dreary theater

    I noticed the other day, and today on Drudge that Oliver Stone, one of the few directors who can make me walk out on a movie every single time, is making a film about George W. Bush – probably as good as all of the other movies he’s made that I couldn’t get through because of the blatant mistruths and perpetuation of conspiratorial lies. I’m probably the only infantryman in our history to ever walk out on “Platoon”.

    I was reminded again of the dreary state of art in the country while reading Warner Todd Huston at Stop the ACLU this morning;

    On the 25th, the Washington Post served up a lament for Hollywood’s dismal box office returns for the many Iraq war pictures it has churned out over the last several years, wondering why they have all failed so spectacularly? The whole article amounts to the Post just not understanding why moviegoers have stayed away in droves from these dark and dismal movies. But with the anti-Military, anti-American point of view depicted in every single one of these movies, it is no surprise that Americans have ignored these self-denigrating flicks.

    Now, I love a good war movie, but there hasn’t been one since “The Great Raid” which was doomed at the box office by limited release, however it took me months to find a copy on DVD.

    I won’t waste my time watching some drivel written by hacks and acted by drug addicts that preaches to me about how I should feel about war. War movies are about the men that fight in them, not about some director’s political leanings or about elevating a mere actor to the level of some sort of intellectual giant.

    In the 1938, Vsevolod Meyerhold, gifted Russian director, said to Stalin’s Committee on Art Affairs (as quoted in Martin Ami’s Koba the Dread);

    I, for one, find our theaters pitiful and terrifying. Go on to the Moscow theaters and look at the colorless, boring productions which are all alike and differ only in their degree of worthlessness. In your effort to eradicate formalism, you have destroyed art.

    Of course, four days later Mr. Meyerhold was in prison for the remainder of his life, but I’m pretty sure he’d be distressed to learn that his words still apply today – but to the American theater.

  • See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil

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    Photo from CNN

    The images of the three monkeys leapt into my mind as we’re all treated to a replay of the three Congressmen standing on the roof of Saddam Hussein’s palace and preaching to us ignorant Americans that Hussein was more trustworthy than our own president. from the Weekly Standard;

    The controversy ignited on September 29 when Bonior and McDermott appeared from Baghdad on ABC’s “This Week.” Host George Stephanopoulos asked McDermott about his recent comment that “the president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.”

    In an interview with CNN’s Paula Zahn, Bonior was asked if he trusts Saddam Hussein;

    ZAHN: Representative Bonior, do you trust Saddam Hussein?

    BONIOR: Well, of course, Saddam Hussein has committed some very bad atrocities while he has been in public office, and we all know that. The question is not whether or not I trust Saddam Hussein. The question is whether I trust impartial observers, like Mr. Blix from the United Nations, to come in and make a good judgment.  

    So we shouldn’t have questioned the trustworthiness of Saddam Hussein, but it was fine to mistrust the US President. Sweet. Apparently, Hussein’s money for propaganda was well spent. I’d remind the reader that the actual invasion of Hussein’s Iraq wouldn’t happen for another five months after this trip – in the “rush to war”.

    Well, now it turns out that the trip was financed with profits from Hussein’s corrupt manipulation of the Oil For Food program – meant to feed Iraqis affected by the UN’s 1991 sanctions against the country. The money from the Hussein regime flowed through his agent in the US, Muthanna Al-Hanooti. Ed Morrisey of Hot Air writes;

    Bonior, Thompson, and McDermott apparently didn’t know about Al-Hanooti’s connection — but they don’t appear to have asked, either. Instead, they got snookered into a ploy by Saddam to buy some American dissent at a time when our nation still reeled from the deaths of 3,000 people in a terrorist attack. Wouldn’t the possibility of exploitation have crossed their minds — and shouldn’t the three Congressmen have asked the FBI to check out Al-Hanooti at the time?

    Al-Hanooti appears to be an official of CAIR, according to Debbie Schlussel and Michele Malkin. From Ms. Schlussel;

    Today, Al-Hanooti, a former chief of CAIR-Michigan was indicted for acting as a spy for Saddam Hussein in America. (And–shocker–he has a second wife and family in Iraq.) To me and anyone who followed the story and read a newspaper, that isn’t news. In fact, the indictment is far too little, far too late. The indictment says that a trip taken by three Congressmen–liberal Democrats Jim McDermott, David Bonior, and Mike Thompson–to Iraq in 2002, was funded by Saddam Hussein, using a third party to arrange the financing, and Al-Hanooti to put the trip together. Again, not news, since I wrote about it repeatedly on this site and also in The New York Post as far back as 2003.

    Baldilocks says this explains why George Galloway was in an extra-pricky mood when he was being questioned by Norm Coleman about the Oil-for-Food Program – he knew he wasn’t the only dirty politician who’d benefitted from Iraq’s new-found largesse. I’ll bet that if anyone ever shakes that fig tree, we’ll be up to our necks in corrupt politicians who benefitted from that “humanitarian program” administered by the UN.

  • End of leftist discussion boards

    Well, technology is finally keeping up with the needs of intelligent discussion on the internet (from the Wall Street Journal);

    Though frequently compelling, online message-board discussions can also be inane. Gabriel Ortiz thinks this is a problem, so he has a simple proposition: Ban stupid comments from the Web.

    Specifically, Mr. Ortiz wants Internet users to be able to block out stupid comments in much the same way they use spam filters to sift useless email from their inboxes. He has turned this idea into a project called Stupid Filter. After months of fine-tuning, Mr. Ortiz has begun sharing his software code with others and says he hopes to turn the idea into a business.

    Ortiz compared YouTube comments to literature to define “stupid”.

    Here’s how the process works. Mr. Ortiz compiled a library of more than 225,000 comments gleaned from YouTube. His volunteers—he says he has 800 of them—view comments and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most stupid. (Example of a 5: “This song was sooo sick at projekt rev.”) While no single volunteer could wade through all those comments, Mr. Ortiz says he hopes to have each one in his library rated at least twice.

    Once rated, these sample comments are then compared to “smart” text from a body of work on sites like Project Gutenberg, an online catalog of great world literature. Mr. Ortiz says he took snippets from classics by such authors as Jules Verne and J.D. Salinger to serve as a baseline for “the edited English language.”

    Well, you can bet Democratic Underground won’t be installing it – there are no budding Jules Vernes over there.

  • The Grim Milestone

    Just do a news search on any search engine this morning using the terms “grim+milestone” and see how may results you get. On Yahoo, I get 430 results at 7:30 Eastern Time. Of course, all of these “grim milestones” refer to the US casualties reaching the 4000 mark. It was the first thing I heard on radio this morning when my alarm went off at 5am, it was at the top of Drudge.

    Yesterday, the Associated Press pushed it’s “US casualties near 4,000 mark” headline across it’s web presence – it’s almost as if AP set the IED that took out the magic 4 troops this morning so they could have their story and headline.

    Yes, it’s a cryin’-ass shame that 4,000 US troops have died in Iraq – I really mean it. I take offense at the “pro-war” label that’s applied to me. I’m certainly not for war. I take offense that the Veterans for Peace imply that I’m a “veteran for war” because I won’t join their broke-dick organization.

    But, I’d take this “grim milestone” stuff a whole lot easier if only the Associated Press, the LA Times and Denver Post, the New York Times and Reuters, and all of the rest of these sorrowful news organizations which suddenly care about US casualties had been reporting the progress in Iraq all along.

    But the whole truth is this; if the news organizations AND the Veterans for Peace – and all of the rest of these pinhead anti-war-at-any-cost hadn’t been turning this country into a bunch of pansies over the last forty years, the war would have ended after the first three weeks. If the anti-war crowd, the anti-US media and the anti-Republican politicians in Congress had let us go to Baghdad in March 1991, before Mogadishu, before the Clinton aspirin factory bombings, the bombing of the USS Cole, the US embassy bombings in Africa, before the taliban, we wouldn’t have had to go to Afghanistan or Iraq in this century.

    The only reason we’ve lost 4,000 troops in Iraq is because the American Left is a pack of cowards who can’t summon the intestinal fortitude to deal with foreign policy problems as soon as they occur. They’re bound and determined to make the US a third world country.

    The most laughable comment I’ve heard today was on the ABC News broadcast on my radio this morning at 5 am when some pinhead newsreader tried to imply that US troops in Iraq are thinking seriously about voting for Obama because he’s consistently been against the war – and that we need change that Clinton and McCain don’t represent. I’d like ABC to show me those troops, currently engaged in Iraq, who think it’s a good idea to throw up their hands and leave Iraq.

    Show me or stfu.

    Jammie Wearing Fool noticed the same proliferation of the “grim milestone” nomenclature.

    Gateway Pundit reminds us of a milestone that the media could be reporting if they had an ounce of integrity left.

  • Preaching to the choir

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    Everyone seems surprised about Rev. Otis Moss III, Jeremiah Wright’s replacement at the Trinity United Church of Christ, who compared Wright’s forced removal from Obama’s campaign this last week to a public lynching, as written about at Sweetness and Light;

    Sunday’s sunrise sermon, delivered by Rev. Otis Moss III, was called “How to Handle a Public Lynching” and focused primarily on the media firestorm that has focused international attention on this Chicago ministry, which is the church attended by the Democratic presidential candidate.

    Moss did not directly mention his spiritual mentor by name, but implied to the congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ that Wright, who has delivered sermons in which he likened the U.S. to the Ku Klux Klan and said it is damned for its state-sponsored terrorism, is facing the same challenges Jesus did.

    “No one should start a ministry with lynching, no one should end their ministry with lynching. The lynching was national news.

    Everyone seems surprised that he called NPR National Publican Radio, as reported by Newsbusters‘ Mark Finkelstein;

    The lynching was national news. The RNN, the Roman News Network, was reporting it and NPR, National Publican Radio had it on the radio. The Jerusalem Post and the Palestine Times all wanted exclusives, they searched out the young ministers, showed up unannounced at their houses, tried to talk with their families, called up their friends, wanted to get a quote on how do you feel about the lynching?”

    But the problem with Wright and the problem with Moss is not their sermons – it’s their audience. Saner people who aren’t convinced that all of their problems were made by someone besides themselves have left the congregation.

    It’s the hyper-partisan, hyper-victims (the same types that were perched on their roofs in New Orleans cursing George Bush for not personally plucking them from their predicament) that are left in the church that need a preacher to stroke them every Sunday and tell them that the stuff they were involved in on Saturday isn’t their fault. That’s the problem, see, Moss is just preaching what those small-minded, irresponsible cretins want to hear. The customer is always right.

  • Counterprotest in Berkeley

    Eagles Up emailed me the link to pictures of yesterday’s counterprotest at the recruiting station in Berkeley at Protest Shooter.

    These are from Saturday, March 22nd, at the USMC Officer Selection Office in Berkeley. There was a massive pro-troop rally. Eagles Up paid for the permit (code pink has one for free from the city council), but there were members from a variety of organizations including Move America Forward, and the Patriot Guard Riders. There were also regulars, like a group of Berkeley High School students who come by regularly to support the troops, and local folks active on conservative forums like Free Republic.

    It looks like being an anti-war protester is losing it’s luster. Good job, folks.

    More photos and narrative at Melanie Morgan‘s blog. Michele Malkin calls it “The Counterinsurgency in Berkeley” . Skye at Midnight Blue is still holding back the hippie hordes in West Chester County, PA.