Category: Society

  • Separatist movements; adios muchachos y hasta la nunca

    Just yesterday, I was on someone’s blog (forgive me for not remembering which because I read every blog that links here everyday and it’s hard to keep them straight) but I found myself agreeing with some Leftist somewhere who included in their rant that they wanted the US to free Puerto Rico. Let ’em go. Ciao, baby.

    They threaten that they’re going to leave us, well, who needs ’em? They don’t have anything we need – even their rum is pedestrian. It costs us more to administrate that tiny island than it’s worth. I guess we got it for beating the Spanish in Cuba – OK, well we don’t need a coaling station for our ships anymore.

    I’ll betcha there’s twenty or thirty islands in the Caribbean that would gladly trade places with those ungrateful little turds.

    Well, I’m reminded of yesterday’s discussion because apparently there’s a separatist movement afoot in Hawaii according to Michelle Malkin – let ’em go. We don’t need them either. I’m sure Hawaii is a great place – but there’s hundreds, no thousands, of great places.

    If Hawaiians want to censor satirists, as Michele describes in her post, they don’t really want to be Americans anyway. We can buy pineapples from anyone – and probably cheaper, too. The Panamanians sell a better volcano-grown coffee, too.
    So, adios, or the “aloha” that means “goodbye” (I’ve heard aloha means hello and goodbye, so I wanted to be specific). No one state or territory is so essential to this country that we can’t do without it. So immediately shut down all US government taxpayer funded activities in those two places and cut ’em loose.

    When those out-rigger canoes start landing on California beaches we’ll consider Hawaiians a problem.

  • Judea Pearl speaks out

    Great opinion piece today by Judea Pearl who lost his son Daniel to Islamist extremists six years ago this week. Today he excoriates the media in the Wall Street Journal, The Daniel Pearl Standard;

    One of the things that saddens me most is that the press and media have had an active, perhaps even major role in fermenting hate and inhumanity. It was not religious fanaticism alone.

    This was first brought to my attention by the Pakistani Consul General who came to offer condolences at our home in California. When we spoke about the anti-Semitic element in Danny’s murder she said: “What can you expect of these people who never saw a Jew in their lives and who have been exposed, day and night, to televised images of Israeli soldiers targeting and killing Palestinian children.”

    At the time, it was not clear whether she was trying to exonerate Pakistan from responsibility for Danny’s murder, or to pass on the responsibility to European and Arab media for their persistent de-humanization of Jews, Americans and Israelis. The answer was unveiled in 2004, when a friend told me that photos of Muhammad Al Dura were used as background in the video tape of Danny’s murder.

    Al Dura, readers may recall, is the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly died from Israeli bullets in Gaza in September of 2001. As we now know, the whole scene is very likely to have been a fraud, choreographed by stringers and cameramen of France 2, the official news channel of France. France 2 aired the tape repeatedly and distributed it all over the world to anyone who needed an excuse to ratchet up anger or violence, among them Danny’s killers.

    The Pakistani Consul was right. The media cannot be totally exonerated from responsibility for Daniel’s murder, as well as for the “tsunami of hate” that has swept the world and continues to rise.

    We can toss in a few hundred other examples of that, too. Starting with “flushed Koran” story, the hundreds of staged photos that AP and Reuters have unashamedly posted around the world, the intentional exclusion of the terms “Arabic” or “Islamic” when describing criminal acts. Purposely avoiding the use of the word “terrorist” and replacing it with the more benign “militant” unwilling to make the distinction betweeen criminal acts and acts of liberation.

    Mr. Pearl mentions these, too;

    The press and media has indeed become more polarized and agenda-driven. Journalists today are pressured to serve the ideologies of those who pay their salaries or those who supply them with sources of information. CNN’s admission, in 2003, that it concealed information about the Iraqi regime in order to keep its office in Baghdad is a perfect example of this pressure. In the recent Gaza chaos, Western news agencies have willingly reported Hamas propaganda stunts as truth.

    Mr. Pearl recommends we use The Daniel Pearl Standard of selecting our media;

    …to distinguish true from false journalism, just choose any newspaper or TV channel and ask yourself when was the last time it ran a picture of a child, a grandmother or any empathy-evoking scene from the “other side” of a conflict.

    Of course, if everyone used that standard, there’d be no more media.

    Thanks to Bloodthirsty Liberal who pointed out that Judea Pearl is Daniel Pearl’s father and not his wife, saving me some measure of embarrassment..

  • Israel Embassy Protest; Dhimmis in DC

    I found out from Gateway Pundit yesterday about a protest planned at the Israeli Embassy in DC this afternoon, so I packed up my cameras and took a half hour off from work and slipped across town to Embassy Row.

    The first people I found was a small group of counter protesters, part of the same bunch that counter protest at Walter Reed every Friday night.

    They told me that before I got there, the protesters were pretty quiet, but the counter-protesters broke out their bull horn and got them all worked up;

    So they got their own bullhorn out;

    An arms race ensued;

    And they got ugly;

    But they were probably pretty ugly before they got there. Here’s a YouTube Video of the crowd. And another video of our heroes.

     

    The whole protest consisted of the moonbats shouting “Liars, liars, occupiers” while the counter-protesters tried to use actual ideas and substance to engage them. But they were more interested in shouting bumpersticker slogans.

    It was a real family affair;

    Then the usual self-hating Jews showed up;

    So guess who gets the press coverage;

    And what terrorist-supporting demonstration would be complete without the terrorist-hugging Code Pink contingent;

    Apparently they don’t like publicity;

    I should probably mention that this blogger, the mean, nasty, rich Republican came by public transportation while the Code Pink Hags arrived by taxi from about the same distance away from Embassy Row.

    Well, now that the gang was all here, it was time to leave;

    So we did (YouTube video link) . I don’t know where they went, but I went home (by public transportation) and got my blog fixed (by a wonderful Liberal, too – I know she’s reading).

    But like I said, the Left was more interested in being louder than the few counter-protesters. They were so preoccupied with shouting down the counter protesters, their shouting drowned out their own speakers who tried to speechify (You Tube link), but couldn’t over the “Liars, liars, occupiers” shouts. But that’s symptomatic of the Left; it’s not that they have anything of substance to say, just so long as they’re talking.

    Welcome Gateway Pundit, Atlas Shrugs, Solomonia and Weasel Zippers readers.

    Speaking of Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller has photos and an excellent report from the protest and counter protest in NYC on Saturday. Some samples;

  • What I’ve learned in the last 24-hours

    Back on January 16th, Curt at Flopping Aces posted a Pajamas Media poll that showed a 67% support for Fred Thompson among bloggers. I was one of them and I figured that with that kind of support on the internet, how could Fred lose? Well, he has quit now and bloggers on the Right are thrashing around looking for someone to support for President. Well, I learned the same thing that the Kos Kids learned when they tried to unseat Joe Lieberman last year – bloggers don’t have the influence to pick winning candidates that they think they do. Yet.

  • Pro Life march? When?

    Yes, yesterday tens of thousands marched in Washington, DC on the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. The Washington Times’ Arlo Wagner has the whole story including video of the Mass before the march. But if you’re a Washington Post reader, the only thing you can find is a 1:14 minute Associated Press video stashed away in the “Metro” section and “A Youthful Throng Marches Against Abortion” on page 3 – but to find the story online, you have to use the search feature – there’s no link on the front page. The only photo is from Reuters;

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    Who’d think a protest this size, a gathering of people that locked traffic and subways up for hours yesterday afternoon, wouldn’t even attract a single WaPo photographer. Even Telemundo covered the march better than WaPo did last night.

    But that’s more than you’ll find in the Washington Examiner. Searching the term “pro life” on the Examiner’s website returns stories about Heath ledger’s suicide.
    Every year thousands of people from across the country come to DC to protest the controversial decision, and every year it’s ignored by the media. The marchers have outnumbered nearly every protest against the Bush Administration since 2001, yet the Washington Post has videos and every camera-angle imaginable for anti-Bush movements and not a single photographer showed up for the anti-abortion march.

    Oddly enough, Michele Malkin, says the same things I wrote only much better.

  • Clinton, King and Johnson

    Photo from USA Today

    Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, some of us are still alive that lived in the ’60s and remember the Civil Rights movement. Last week she tried to make a point that President Johnson was a doer and Martin Luther King, Jr. was only a dreamer. She was trying to compare her record of doing stuff to Obama’s record of not doing stuff when she said;

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  • Democrats; give tax rebates to non-taxpayers

    Associated Press writes (in the Miami Herald) that economists and Democrats advocate giving tax rebate to people who don’t pay taxes;

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  • More DC government corruption

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    Photo from Washington Examiner

    This time corrupt workers in the Washington, DC government have committed a crime which may affect the entire country (Washington Examiner link);

    Law enforcement officers raided the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles branch in Georgetown on Wednesday, arresting one city employee and four other suspects on charges they set up a scheme to sell fake District driver’s licenses.

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