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

Category: Society

  • New Converts to the Truthers

    I’ve bumped into a couple of foamy-mouthed conspiracy-theorists in my day, most recently at the anti-Israel demonstration a few months ago. The 9-11 variety are an especially heavily-spittled breed – probably because their theories are so outside of the realm of probablity that they figure emotion can replace actual facts.

    Well they’ve gotten some notable converts to their cause recently.

    Kamangir reports that the official Iranian government’s position is that it was an inside job. And they didn’t arrive at that decision without some hefty credentials;

    Fars News writes “130 American Experts: 9/11 was an inside Job.” Quoting an unknown Russian “expert”, the website writes “It is not imaginable that Muslim terrorists have been able to prepare in six months”

    Well, a Russian expert – that cinches it. Them Russians know stuff.

    Sweetness and Light’s Steve Gilbert reports that Fidel Castro is also a recent convert to the “Truther” cause;

    “Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation,” wrote Castro…

    “Studying the impact of planes, similar to those that hit the Twin Towers, that had accidentally fallen on densely populated cities, one concludes that it was not a plane that crashed into the Pentagon,” Castro said.

    “Only a projectile could have caused the geometrically round hole that allegedly was made by the plane,” he said.

    Science from a guy who has locked his country in a time warp that can’t progress past 1959. Babalu Blog’s George Moneo quips that the 4200-word dissertation is pretty ambitious for a guy who can’t summon the good health to appear in public for more than a year.

  • Vietnam Wall defaced; consider that shark jumped (Updated)

    SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR UPDATE 

    My first task every morning (after a Winston and some coffee) is to check this corner of the internet for comments to my posts. This morning I found one from Robin at Chickenhawk Express who left this;

    Jonn – I don’t want to fire you up to much but you REALLY need to see this;

    The Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC Has Been Defaced

     

    Well, I went into a funk that I really can’t shake this morning. After I sent the links from Robin’s post and the post from tgslTakoma at Free Republic to several bloggers to get the word out, I tried to write on another subject but I just can’t assemble a coherent thought. I checked the Gathering of Eagles website and they have a link to the Free Republic report. 

    I’m writing this in hopes that the word gets out, I haven’t seen anything on the local news or in the local papers. This should be the death knell of the anti-war movement. This what they came to town to do back in March, and they finally got their opportunity before the Patriots came to town. I suspect that it was those idiot Black Bloc creeps – but really any of those cretins on the Left are capable of such sociopathic behavior.

    Redstate’s Bluey interviewed some park Service employee who claims the damage may be permanent;

    I spoke to a National Park Service employee who was livid that someone would vandalize the memorial. “It’s like defacing a grave,” he told me. When I asked if there were any clues as to who was responsible, he told me videotape was being reviewed. It is believed the damage was done on Friday night. Because the monument never closes, it could have taken place late in the evening when no one was around.

    I remember the email I got back when I covered the Gathering of Eagles I in March from some little immature weasel who claimed that the Left had a right to do what they want to the Vietnam Memorial because it was their monument, too. There are no monuments to cowardice in this country and there are no names of draft evaders or protesters on the Wall.

    As I predicted yesterday, the Left is pulling out all of the stops. They’ve begun their disparaging of the troops – it began this past weekend with our honored dead, and our hallowed ground. This weekend on Pennsylvania Avenue between 12th and 7th Streets, this crap ends. 

    UPDATE: Michele Malkin has an update that the Park Service has admitted that the Wall has been defaced. Funny how they denied it before the protest this weekend and then suddenly, the protest ends and they fess up.

  • Londoners get 1/2 price fare while VZ children scrounge for centavos

    I actually wrote about this a few weeks ago, but I got tipped to this blog story from Kate of A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective. It’s from a blog called Las Armas de Coronel – a relatively new blogger – who posted these two pictures yesterday;

    I’ll let the author explain the pictures;

    The text on the London bus is a bit hard to read but you can probably see how the Mayor of London and the “Bolivarian” regime of Hugo Chavez have joined forces to subsidize the “poor” people of London. For this initiative Venezuelans will always be “grateful” to Mr. Alfredo Toro Hardy, the Chavez Ambassador to England, one of the most sycophantic followers of the dictator. In the other picture a small Venezuelan child cleans windshields in a Venezuelan city to get a few coins to survive. There are thousands of abandoned children in my country who lack the most essential protection but Chavez is giving away money to rich nations to play the global defender of the poor for the uniformed populations of Europe and the United States. I find this a crime against my country, against decency and against principles. since the motivation behind the subisidy to Londoners is not altruistic but one of political propaganda. This is one small example of the disaster Chavez has rained on Venezuela.

    So let’s hear the Left defend Chavez from this abomination.

    Since I get traffic from Venezuela on occasion, they’ll appreciate this picture of chavistas I also got from Coronel’s blog;

    In the meantime, Fuerzas Aliadas PANAMAX 2007 finished up yesterday (h/t Western Hemisphere Policy Watch);

    More nations than ever teamed together in Fuerzas Aliadas PANAMAX 2007 to ensure the continued security of the Panama Canal , signs of both the multinational cooperative spirit and the importance of the waterway to worldwide commerce, high-ranking officials said Sept. 7.

    The participants exclude the Bolivarian Socialists;

    FA PANAMAX 2007 participating nations were: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Canada, Columbia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Honduras , Nicaragua, Netherlands, Panama, Peru, the United States and Uruguay.Â

    Three nations acted as observers: El Salvador, Mexico and Paraguay.

    Well, Equador is in the mix – but I guess they’re not so Socialist that they want to chance trade with the US East Coast being cut off by the closure of the Canal. The exercise turned real on September 4th;

    PANAMAX this year demonstrated the real-world interoperability of the multinational civil and military forces, Stavridis said. Brazil and Peru Task Force Commanders took over command and control responsibilities when USS Wasp (LHD 1) was diverted to the coast of Nicaragua to offer humanitarian assistance after Hurricane Felix made landfall Sept. 4.

    I wonder if they brought the Hondurans the ever-essential Chavez brand tuna.

    But the best Chavez picture today comes from Jungle Mom at The Jungle Hut;

    She gets the Saturday Award for best chavista quote, too;

    There will be room for the opposition participation and feedback in the discussions on the proposed changes to the Constitution. However, “nothing expressed by the opposition is constructive or in the people’s interest.”
    Cilia Flores, chair of the Venezuelan Congress

    From the picture of Sra. Flores on The Jungle Hut, she looks like Nancy Pelosi, too.

  • VA town shuts “day labor” center and KKK leaflets muddy debate

    The controversial “Day Labor” Center in Herndon, Virginia will be closed by the Town Council finally, according to the Washington Post’s Bill Turque;

    The Town of Herndon announced yesterday that it would close its 21-month-old day-laborer center next week instead of complying with a judge’s ruling that the site must be open to all residents, including those who might be illegal immigrants.

    The decision to close the site, which became a flash point in the national debate over immigration, was reached late Tuesday by Mayor Stephen J. DeBenedittis and the six-member Town Council after a 2 1/2 -hour closed-door session. It brings the western Fairfax community virtually full circle in its attempts to regulate — critics say drive out — its large population of Latino day laborers. The center was established in late 2005 as an alternative to the streets for laborers and prospective employers to come to terms.

    Judges are idiots. Period. This country was a much better place before judges started making idiot decisions based on emotion instead of law;

    At issue was an ordinance the council approved in 2005 as a legal companion to the day-laborer center, barring workers and motorists from striking deals for employment on the streets. The courts have generally required that communities barring public solicitation for work — a form of speech — must provide an alternative venue for that speech, such as a hiring site.

    As the town enforced the anti-solicitation ordinance, many residents grew resentful of the center. Reston Interfaith, a group of religious institutions operating under a grant from Fairfax County, did not require workers to document their immigration status. Opponents of the center said the town was essentially abetting illegal immigration.

    Of course, no rational discussion of immigration can’t exclude the completely irrational KKK;

    Dozens of Ku Klux Klan leaflets calling for a ban on “all non-white immigration” were distributed last weekend in Manassas, where a dispute over illegal immigration has raised tensions in recent weeks.

    The leaflets, dropped at night into mailboxes and on driveways along one street, urged “white Christian America” to stand up for its rights. Smatterings of racist literature are distributed in communities throughout the region every few weeks, but this incident struck a raw nerve in Manassas.
     
    Klan officials, who are based in Arkansas, said yesterday that Virginia residents had asked them for Klan literature to deliver in Manassas.

    It sounds like a set-up actually. I’m pretty sure that the pro-illegal-immigration-at-any-cost crowd planted these leaflets in oder to make the debate about racism than about rule of law. I’m fairly sure that no half-way rational person who truly wants to end illegal immigration into Northern Virginia would think that KKK literature would strengthen support there. If I had to pick out the organization most likely to use racist literature, I’d pick an organization with a racist name – like “Mexicans Without Borders” or “La Raza”. In fact it didn’t take long for them to start marginalizing the opposition;

    “Any time lawmakers pass initiatives that . . . single out a segment of the population and try to drive them out of the community, they are laying the foundation for increased bigotry and hatred,” Mexicans Without Borders said in a statement issued yesterday in response to the reports of Klan leafleting. They said a recent wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric had “opened the door to racist organizations.”

    The only racism here from the groups who support lawbreakers merely because they happen to have a certain skin color  – against people who want the law enforced who happen to have lower levels of melanin pigment.

  • ACLU; US Military hides attrocities in plain sight

    Yes, the AMERICAN Civil Libeties Union is busy bashing our troops again. I emphasized the AMERICAN part of their moniker because they’ve lost sight the fact that their stated purpose is to protect AMERICAN civil liberties, yet they want to interject themselves into Iraqi civil rights. From an Associated Press article;

    New documents released Tuesday regarding crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a troubling pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.
     
    The documents, released by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

    Wow! 22 incidents and 10,000 pages – that’s a lot. And the government is hiding this from us? Well, no.

    In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man’s head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a “stress position” they insisted was an approved technique.

    Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush following a January 2006 court-martial that received wide media attention due to possible CIA involvement in the interrogation.

    Oh, so he was convicted in a publicized court martial. That’s hardly being secretive.

    But even after his conviction, Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents show.

    “The simple fact of the matter is interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information,” Welshofer wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. “To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation — it is a conversation.”

    Oh, I see it’s the government’s fault because this fellow didn’t know that the military frowned upon strangling people. I guess he’s the first person in history to deny culpability in his actions by appearing to not know the difference between right and wrong.

    Considered against recent cases, including soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division convicted of killing detainees in Samarra, Iraq, last year and the ongoing courts-martial of Marines accused of killing 24 civilians in Haditha, these new examples shed light on the frequency soldiers and Marines may disregard the rules of war.

    Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the documents also show that theres an abundance of information being withheld from public scrutiny.

    Oh, so how do I know about the incidents in Samarra and Haditha if this is all being witheld from public scrutiny WHILE THE INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIALS ARE ALL ONGOING, you pinheaded dorks? Oh, and by the way, most of the Marines in the Haditha incident have been cleared of wrong doing – I guess you just failed to mention that for the sake of space, huh?

    “The government has gone out of its way to hide the human cost of this war,” Bargzie said. Releasing the documents now “paints at least a part of that picture so people at least know what’s going on,” she said.

    They’ve gone out of their way? Then why are they releasing the documents to you? Seems they didn’t can’t go far enough out of their way, does it? ACLU must be having a fund drive this month and they can’t find any US citizens being abused so they’re fishing for some Iraqis to represent.

  • Trust; our most valuable commodity

    Ya know what, I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. In my world, although I surround myself with modern luxuries and gadgets, it’s still the 1950s. My friends are all people who say what they mean – no matter whose feelings are hurt. Our discussions revolve around truthfulness and realities, not around polite niceties. There’s no sugarcoating in my world – things are what they are. If someone lies to me once, I never trust them again. If we’re in the middle of a job and a coworker flakes off on me, they never work with me again. That’s the world I grew up in and the way I know things really work successfully.

    So why that paragraph? To illustrate a principle; that being trust. I’ve found that people who lie to someone else, will usually lie to me. People who behave badly, reflect on me when I associate with them.

    The reason I held Bill Clinton in such low esteem was because his family couldn’t count on him to be there – ultimately, the country couldn’t count on him to be there when he was getting gratification from a fat chick while his duties in the Rose Garden suffered.

    I used to like Newt Gingrich alot – before the 1994 Republican Revolution - but his personal exploits while he was Speaker soured me on him – eternally. I’ve crossed the room to avoid him.

    I met Dick Morris socially one time and we talked for a few minutes, but I heard hardly a word he said because that voice in my head kept repeating “Toe sucker! Toe sucker!”

    And now, there’s Larry “Wide Stance” Craig. What he was doing was pretty disgusting all by itself – but the fact that he did it while he was a US Senator makes me question his judgement. He was bold enough to make all of the gestures so common in men’s rooms across the country, that I have to believe that this wasn’t his first time. And he was fairly persistent.

    I don’t care what his politics are, how valuable his occupation of his Senate seat is to Republicans, or even how staunchly he supports every one of my issues – I don’t trust him because he has poor judgement.

    That’s what separates us from the Democrats – they’re willing to continue to put their trust in morally bankrupt, corrupt, murdering, racist, lying, raping thieves (I know my readers can name a Democrat to fit in each category I’ve listed so I won’t) – but we Republicans have principles.

    We need to send a message to all of the other Republicans who might have a wide stance that we don’t tolerate deviant behavior in our party (public bathroom sex is deviant, I don’t care who you’re doing it with). Craig has to go. Now. No discussion, no statements, no apologies. Just. Go.

    Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire reports that Craig has lost his committee positions, but that’s not quite enough – get gone, Lar. Crotchety Old Bastard lists other dastardly deeds committed by Democrats for whom we’re still waiting letters to resign. But it’s only a partial list – trust me.

  • Census data shockah; DC has lots of poor people!

    Life in this intellectually vacant city, Washington, DC, isn’t made easier by idiot social scientists. In today’s Washington Examiner, the District’s government announced that *shockah!* there’s a disparity in incomes in the District;

    Nearly 80 percent of the 108,100 District residents who live below the poverty line are black, according to the figures for 2006 released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

    The data show the District has the second-highest poverty rate in the country at 20 percent, far above the national poverty rate of 12.3 percent. It trails only Mississippi, where 21 percent of residents are below the poverty level.

    In a city where Blacks are nearly 70% of the population, why is anyone surprised that 80% of any particular data grouping is Black? And why are 20% of the District’s population below the poverty line? Because the District can’t provide basic services like snow removal, downed-tree removal and street repair.

    The drainage systems explode, the water is only barely potable, the streets are strewn with trash and panhandling hobos, the police can’t seem to find the door handles of their cars until shift changes, the council passes laws they don’t expect to be enforced and pass out money hand-over-fist to any “research” organization that asks. The schools are beyond repair as well as the education system itself. City officials are corrupt and inept.

    Why would anyone with any money stay in the District? The people with the means to leave (except the HillaryClintonJohnEdwardsJohnKerry-types who all have mansions in the Georgetown and Southwest area) leave. The people without the means to leave stay for the handouts. The most amazing part of the Examiner article;

    If recent trends continue, this disparity will continue to grow. Median income for whites has grown by 10 percent since 2004, while black income growth has been stagnant.

    Wait for the money shot;

    “It certainly suggests that the city needs to be going the extra mile to reach out to [poor black] residents,” Lazere said.

    350,000 people in this city of a half-million residents are Black. The city government is run largely by Blacks - nearly half of the City Council is Black. All are supposedly residents of DC. How are they just now noticing this?

    Outside Washington, median incomes were among the highest in the country, while poverty rates were well below the national average.

    Wonder why? Federal employees don’t want to expose themselves and their families to dangerous and poor living conditions. About 500,000 people come to work in the District everyday and then leave before nightfall. Most of the crimes in DC happen after nightfall. I don’t need census data to tell me why.

    How is this a shocking revelation worthy of a headline? Who’s really to blame about the poverty here? The voters – they keep sending the same incompetent boobs year-after-year (a fine example), for superficial reasons, to run the government into the ground and drive away more income-producing residents, which lowers the tax base and makes the government even more incompetent, which drives the tax basis down…. 

    Stevie Wonder could see it from space f’pete’s sake.

  • Economic boycott in Prince William County

    This debate over immigration has become so diluted with inuendos and lies, it’s hard to tell who is who anymore. But, here, I’ll try to explain it in terms anyone can understand.

    Residents of Prince William County, Virginia, a fairly upscale area in Northern Virginia, has decided that their county government went too far when they built, with tax payer dollars, a “day labor” center in Lorton so they forced the county to begin checking each “day worker” for their immigration status. It only makes sense – why should tax payers fund a gathering point that encourages law breakers to break the laws that protect taxpayers?

    Well, the supposedly “legal” Latin population of PWC are staging an economic boycott this week to demonstrate their economic power. Funny, but the Washington Post can only find legal residents to quote;

    Rivera, the hotel worker who attended the demonstration at Potomac Mills, said she was also a legal resident but was angry at the proposals aimed at driving out illegal immigrants. She said she decided to participate after hearing about the boycott through her church.

    “They don’t want our children in the schools. They don’t want people renting to immigrants. They want to ask for families’ ID cards in parks. This is wrong, and we do not accept it,” she said.

    If you’re a legal resident, chica, why are you worried? I have to show my passport and immigration papers when I travel in Central America – so does the rest of the world. I get stopped in malls, parks, the liquor stores and asked for my ID all of the time. If I threw a hissy everytime I was “profiled” (being a pale white guy with a noticable American accent in my Spanish) I’d probably get tossed in some dank cell on an island prison somewhere.

    Last month I wrote the same thing in reference to the Pollo Rico bust – legal residents were busted for laudering cash ($7 million, in fact), and the government found illegal immigrants working in the restuarants – so the “legal” Latins were worried they’d get scooped up in some huge raid and get mistakenly shipped back to their jungle villages. The big raid never happened – in fact the Montgomery County police chief came on television and promised he wouldn’t enforce the law. But I didn’t have to wait in line for a haircut that weekend.

    Well, of course, since many of the illegal immigrants (re: lawbreakers) are of Central American heritage, suddenly it’s a race issue and not a rule of law issue. The Washington Post writes:

    “They used us Hispanics to build this county, and now they are trying to kick us out. It’s not fair,” fumed Padilla, 28, a legal immigrant from El Salvador. On the window of his restaurant, La Laguna, was a large green poster that read, “We Are A Pro-Immigrant Business. Rescind the Prince William County Anti-Immigrant Resolution.”

    Who is “they”, chica?

    I’m gonna tell you the truth; up until recently, I was one of the Americans willing to look the other way on immigration. It really didn’t affect me or my family directly, so I actually didn’t have a firm opinion on the subject – other than the Border Patrol needed to enforce the laws on the border and stem the tide as best they could.

    But that all changed last year when I watched thousands of Latin immigrants marching through the streets of our cities, here in this country with their bellies full and designer clothes on their backs with Mexican flags and upside down American flags. Of course the next times they came out for their rallies, the Mexican flags had disappeared and the American flags were right-side up – but too late. The first action someone takes, right or wrong, is the action that person truly feels strongest about. So even though they love the American dollar, the American lifestyle and the American opportunity, they’d prefer that this country was different – to suit them. OK, fine, be like that. That’s how you converted me into an anti-illegal immigration blogger.

    Even the Anglos aren’t getting it, according to the Washington Examiner;

    At a pair of family-owned Laundromats in Woodbridge and Dumfries, owner Ginger Trest is touting support for the boycott to show solidarity with the immigrant customers who make up about 50 percent of her clientele.

    “We do not agree with the resolution,” Grest said. “We feel it is discrimination directed toward one segment of the population.”

    One segment of the population whose very presence here represents a violation of Federal law. How hard is that to understand? I guess it makes Ms. Grest feel “enlightened” to embrace criminals. I guess it eases some of her liberal guilt.

    More “legal residents” speak to the Post;

    In interviews in Manassas and Woodbridge, several dozen Latinos said they supported the boycott, and some were indignant about the way they feel immigrants have been treated in the county. Only two or three said they did not know about the boycott.

    “I am only buying in Hispanic stores this week. I am a resident now, but I am still an immigrant, and it is not good what they are trying to do,” said Abel Santiago, 28, a Mexican restaurant worker who complained that he had been stopped and asked for identification recently. “We feel so much hate and resentment now. But we should have our rights, too.”

    Compa, I feel resentment towards you because you’re lying. No one is targeting you because you’re Latin, just like the troops in Iraq aren’t targeting terrorists because they’re Arabs. It just seems that there are alot of Latins who immigrate here illegally – the key word being “illegally”, f’Pete’s sake. Get over it and figure out why you’re here and not back in your own country. Because back home sucks and here it sucks a lot less.

    These “Mexicans Without Borders” pinheads have muddied the debate so badly with their charges of racism that I’m not surprised law enforcement is confused. So these racist dorks want us to change the laws in this country to accomodate them – then this country isn’t the same country they wanted to make their lives in, it won’t offer the same opportunities, the same quality of life. And by coming here, they’ve deprived their own country of a pair of working hands, working minds and conditions there get worse – and it becomes even worse, forcing more people to come here.

    It makes more sense that latins use their inherent ingenuity and work ethic to make lives for themselves in their own countries and make the lives of their families and neighbors better with their sweat and brains – and end this country’s decline into the third world. That’s why the President has been trying to get these trade deals with Latin countries through a resistant Congress and passed the corrupt trade unions and Big Sugar – to make lives for latins better in their own countries so we aren’t torn apart by small-minded racists in those oddly named “Mexicans Without Borders” and “La Raza”.

    Don’t expect a lot of help from wishy-washy Democrat governor Tom Kaine solving the illegal immigrant issue in Virginia. Washington Times’ Natasha Altamirano writes today;

    “The governor does not object to localities choosing to enter into localized agreements with [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” said Kevin Hall, Mr. Kaine’s spokesman. “He has concerns, however, about asking state troopers to assume primary enforcement of federal immigration responsibilities.”

    So he’s found a way to have his cake and eat it, too. He doesn’t have to enforce the laws, but he has no problem with underfunded localities enforcing the laws. Pure politics. How helpful is that to the discussion, Virginia?