Thursday, September 13, 2007

This looks like a must-see

 
Unfortunately, I don't get Truther TV on my cable system, so I'll have to miss out on the latest Bush-Zioneocon-Halliburton-Steel-Melting scandal. 42% of Democrats agree with Dr. Rosie O'Duncell, who I believe is a Ph.D. in both Metallurgy and Civil Engineering.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Israeli raid on Syria may have targeted nukes

 
HotAir points to a New York Times article highlighting ominous developments in Syria.

Officials in Washington said that the most likely targets of the raid were weapons caches that Israel’s government believes Iran has been sending the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah through Syria…

...One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria...

An Israeli Arab paper asserts that the target may have been a Syrian missile base funded by Iran. A confidential source -- since the Israelis aren't talking -- says that they're "very happy" with the op.

The AP reported earlier today that:

A US government official has revealed that Israeli aircraft in northern Syria had targeted weapons meant to be delivered to Hezbollah...

On Wednesday, a Lebanese paper reported that since the attack over Syria, there have been "severe disturbances in Lebanese communications systems and cellular frequencies."

Let's hope said comm problems extend to some major prank calling of Syria's dictatorship.

Brave, Brave Sir Biden

 
The New York Daily News reports on a touching gesture by Sheiks in Anbar province:

When members of the government of Anbar Province met with President Bush last week, they presented him with a letter dedicating their success in wiping out Al Qaeda here to the victims of Sept. 11...

The letter, which was obtained by the Daily News, was signed by Anbar Governor Mamoun Sami Rashid, Provincial Council Chairman Abdul-Salam Abdullah, and Sheik Sattar abu Risha, the sheik credited with beginning the Anbar Awakening.

"In the month when the terrorists attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, we dedicate the victory of Anbar Province to the families of the victims who suffered that criminal act," the letter said, which was addressed directly to Bush... "With the help of the president of the United States, we pledge to continue to cooperate and communicate with you to continue to get good results," the letter said...

Last week, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer (L-NY) paid his usual compliments to the troops by calling them incompetent.

The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al-Qaeda said to these tribes, "We have to fight Al-Qaeda ourselves." It wasn't that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.

Not to be outdone, John "Genghis" Kerry issued his own unique slander slant:

It's really important that people in quick visits to Iraq don't get, uh, sidetracked by what's really at stake here. Anbar province is Sunni violence, eh, by Al-Qaeda against -- it was originally Al-Qaeda, and -- and -- and the Sunni sheiks decided they were tired of seeing their daughters raped and their sons beheaded and violence in their villages, so they took advantage of this moment, and they've decided to cooperate with us in order to protect Sunni within their pruh -- essentially Sunni province...

And, in his usual quest for C-SPAN face-time, Slow Joe Biden squeaked out a caustic retort to Gen. Petraeus' testimony -- before he'd even testifed:

I think [Petraeus is] dead, flat, wrong. The fact of the matter is that there is -- that this idea of the security gains that we've made have had no impact on the underlying sectarian dynamic. None! None! Whatsoever.

As all of us know, Biden's qualifications for making these statements include his seemingless endless career on the public dole, including his prestigious service on the Wilmington, Deleware city council.

* * *

Quick quiz. Which doesn't belong?

a) Harry Truman
b) John F. Kennedy
c) Franklin Delano Roosevelt
d) Joe Biden*

* Substitute any of the following -- Durbin, Feinstein, Kennedy, Kerry, Kucinich, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer for Slow Joe Biden -- and repeat test

The mission of the modern Democratic Party? Demoralize and smear the troops -- with plan B out-and-out surrender. That's a platform that should really resonate with the American people in 2008.

Hat tips: Prairie Pundit and Larwyn

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Transcript: Gen. Petraeus' testimony and Sen. Clinton

 
The overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in eight of the past 12 weeks, with the number of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.

One reason for the decline in incidence is that coalition and Iraqi forces have dealt significant blows to al Qaeda Iraq. Though al Qaeda and its affiliates remain dangerous, we have taken away a number of their sanctuaries and gained the initiative in many areas.

We have also disrupted Shiite militia extremists, capturing the head and numerous other leaders of the Iranian-supportive special groups, along with a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative supporting Iran's activities in Iraq --

I have a question...

Yes, Madame Senator?

Petraeus, are you a liar???

Excuse me?

Is it true your real name isn't Petraeus? That it's Betrayed-us??

Do you really think you can get away with just reading Bush's talking points??

Madame Senator, I don't -

I'm sorry, I'm sorry... so very, very sorry...

...my deepest apologies.

...that's the MoveOn.org money talking, that's not me.

Dammit, she used all of my questions!

Photo credits: Yahoo News (Jason Reed of Reuters)

Hillary outsources her questions for General Petraeus

 
Check out this photo of Hillary Clinton from today's testimony by General David Petraeus (hat tip: Yahoo News and Jason Reed of Reuters). Shockingly, I didn't Photoshop it.

You can click to zoom it. A few of the legible notes:

* Any ideas about... questions? --- hmmm, that's a bit disturbing. Hillary appears to be soliciting questions because she doesn't have "any ideas" about what to ask. For Democrats who accused General Petraeus of simply mouthing the President's talking points, this is a tad ironic, no? Outsourcing a strategic discussion on a global war seems a skosh vacuous for a presidential candidate, but -- then again -- she is a Democrat.

* Good bites -- i.e., good sound-bites. But I suppose the Clintons have never worried about constructive questions or advice, just sound-bites and triangulation.

Now that I think about, this note isn't at all surprising. When I think "Hillary Clinton," I really do think: "no ideas and sound-bites."

Monday, September 10, 2007

Countdown to General George Soros

 
8. Democratic lobbying arm MoveOn:org is funded in large part by foreign billionaire George Soros, who a Democratic Senator calls "so negative, so critical, and so often anti-American."

7. After the 2004 elections, the group's PAC Director said, "...it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." And in a recent email to its members, MoveOn.org asked for donations to defeat candidates who do not support surrender to terrorists.

6. The New York Times reports that Democratic leadership aides participate in daily conference calls with MoveOn:org.

5. MoveOn:org runs full-page newspaper ads attacking U.S. generals and troops, including the integrity and honesty of the top mililtary commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, during his testimony before Congress.

4. Democratic leaders respond by saying nothing, thereby tacitly approving of these scurrilous attacks on the U.S. military and its leadership.

3. Harry Reid calls our military "incompetent."

2. Barack Obama says that the U.S. military is "air-raiding villages and killing civilians."

1. Now the Democrats' far left wing funding vehicle, MoveOn:org, proclaims that Gen. Petraeus is "cooking the books" and will "betray us" and the Democrat leadership stays silent.

I'm no sociologist, but there might be a pattern emerging here. Something about George Soros controlling the U.S. military through a proxy called Congressional Democrats, but it's still fuzzy. Perhaps we should just call him General George Soros.

Line o' the day: the Editor/Geniuses

 

It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late.

Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact.

-- Robert E. Lee, 1863


Hat tip: Lucianne

Sunday, September 09, 2007

The new Sonic Blast system is boomin'!

 
If you happen to see this web ad (ostensibly for a powerful sound system), click on the Crank it button a couple of times.

It's pretty entertaining.

But I'd wager the people at Mercedes aren't too happy.

An an aside, someone needs to build a website where people can save and link to entertaining Flash ads. Call it AdTube or something. Talk about a viral marketing opportunity...

9/11 Troofers: Bin Laden Lied, People Died

 
A new Zogby International poll reveals that 42% of Democrats believe George W. Bush either caused 9/11 or knew about it beforehand and let it happen.

Let's briefly summarize the mental contortions required to come to this conclusion.

* First, you'd have to believe that the U.S. Government -- seemingly incapable of keeping even mundane national security programs off the front page of the New York Times -- orchestrated a hermetically sealed coverup of epic proportions.

And that the silence around the operation, which must have involved hundreds or thousands of Government insiders, continues to this day.

* Second, you'd have to believe that Sandy Berger's destruction of classified 9/11 documents was unrelated to the Clinton administration's ignorance of and incompetence at deterring terrorists. Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor absconded with a variety of classified documents, the full inventory of which will never be known. Berger had access to National Security Council (NSC) numbered documents, printed copies of e-mails, and staff member office files (SMOFs). The SMOFs contain working papers of NSC staff members and their content is not inventoried by the Archives at the document level. The SMOFs given to Berger during his first two visits contained only original documents.

CNN reports that the Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee stated, "There is absolutely no way to determine if Berger [destroyed]... original documents. Consequently, there is no way to ever know if the 9/11 Commission received all required materials."

Thus, to believe that the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks ahead of time, the Troofer Cadre must pretend that a real and admitted Clinton administration coverup never occurred. Assume, for a moment, that Condoleeza Rice -- and not Sandy Berger -- had destroyed the 9/11 documents. The resulting firestorm of press coverage would have been staggering -- and made Watergate look like a campfire.

* Third, you'd have to ignore Usama bin Laden's self-proclaimed involvement with 9/11 and his assertion that the attacks caught the United States completely by surprise. In effect, you'd have to believe that bin Laden lied and people died -- all to benefit the Bush administration.

Bin Laden videotape from November 1, 2004:

...we know that freedom-haters don't possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 [9/11 hijackers] – may Allah have mercy on them...

...I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind...

...we... agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Ataa, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration notice...

Bin Laden videotape from September 7, 2007:

...despite America being the greatest economic power and possessing the most powerful... military arsenal... and despite it spending on this war and [its] army more than the entire world spends on its armies... despite all of this, 19 young men were able -- by the grace of Allah, the Most High -- to change the direction of the compass...


* * *

Maybe the troofers can go back to working on the Kennedy "hit" and hunting for the Apollo mission's sound stage.

Buckley reviews Podhoretz's World War IV

 
William F. Buckley's review of Norman Podhoretz's new book -- World War IV -- is startling in its clarity (hat tip: the invaluable Dr. Sanity).

What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?"

A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:

"-- A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

"-- A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

"-- An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.

"-- An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians."

Add to the above "a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived."

Recognition, then, of the scale of the pretensions of the Islamist enemy has to precede substantial measures against it. In the matter of Iraq, for instance, the ambiguity of our engagement and the enlarging political cry against it would alter dramatically if one accepted the premises of the Fourth World War so ineluctably spelled out in Podhoretz's little volume, which takes time here and there to demolish such arguments as were mounted in protest against President Bush's mention in his 2003 State of the Union address of yellowcake hunting in Niger.

Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Hsu's for Hillary!

 
Hillary's webmaster must be on sabbatical. Her Hillraisers website proudly lists Norman Hsu, ex-fugitive, as one of Hillary's top backers.

Call me a dreamer, but maybe one day the press might actually start covering some of the bizarre coincidences involving Hillary. From cattle futures, to the Rose Law firm records, to her brother selling presidential pardons, to the records removed from Vince Foster's office, to the pardon of the FALN terrorists in relation to her run for the Senate, to Travelgate, to the Peter Paul fundraiser, to Cisneros and the Barrett Report, the list just goes on and on.

And this is the Democrats' front-runner. That simple sentence says it all.

Update: Beautiful.


Second update: Michelle Malkin has the dirt on Sammy Rivera, noted "friend of Hillary" and the target of a Federal sting operation that netted 11 Democrats in New Jersey.

More rejected Hillary campaign slogans

 
"Still Not Indicted As Of 2007!"
"Vote for Hillary: Satan compels you"
"It's Mourning Again in America"
"Keep America weak through surrender and taxes"
"Help eradicate Capitalism in our time"
"No penis = no problems"
"Death to America!"
"Socialism and Surrender!"
"Democrats will never lose a war: We’ll just refuse to fight!"
"Building a bridge to September 10th"
"I'm with Chubby!"
"Isn't It Time You Were Disappointed By A Different Clinton?"
"Why Work? Vote Hillary"
"Kneel before me, foolish humans! -- Hillary for Empress 2008"
"Vote Hillary. It’s Easier Than Thinking"
"If you like the service at the DMV and Post Office, you’ll love our health care plan"
"Keep racial tensions alive!"

Hat tips: Anvari, IMAO, PlanetMike, Top Five

Le Monde commemorates 9/11 ahead of time

 
¡No Pasarán! reminds us why we sometimes find ourselves despising the French.

The airplane is labeled "American mortgages" while Cécilia asks, "Should I go to Prada, yes or no?" and Sarkozy responds, "Wait a second, dear."

Last year, the same political cartoonist -- Plantu -- used an identical motif.

Stunning creativity, Plantu. I guess we won't need to read Le Monde next year at this time because we already know what the 'toon will depict.

Don't tell the Clintons about China's slavery problems

 
Each year, the Bush administration has admirably called attention to modern-day slavery. A million -- yes, "progressives," that's a million -- or more men, women, and children live this very day in slavery. The Midnight Sun points us to a story that recently disappeared from the "Internets": China's systematic abuse of slaves in support of its economic expansion.

The People’s Republic of China has got to be the shame of socialist/Communist/Leftist ideologues everywhere but this latest story to emerge from the hellhole takes the cake. It’s a story of slavery, of 1000 children (many abducted from their parents) and mentally impaired adults amongst the vast numbers. Stories have emerged of at least one of the ’slaves’ who was beaten to death, while others have been burned, maimed and subjected to other inhuman treatment.

The plight of these slaves was ignored by police, local Government, trade unions and the Communist Party officials who were told. Finally a journalist went and secretly investigated, filming the horrors there and the whistle was blown. President Hu Jintao, no doubt embarrassed by the media attention, ordered a token inspection and named a few scapegoat brick work bosses. However, the story has been removed from the website it was hosted on and this journalist has now been silenced and refuses to comment.

Time Magazine has more information about countries recently added to the US Human Trafficking Blacklist.

Rest assured that you'll never hear a peep about China's slavery problems from most of the "progressives." Folks like the Clintons have certain ties -- names like Hsu, Riady, the Lippo Group, Huang, and Chung come to mind -- that preclude Hillary speaking from her mind.

Because if she did, certain -- er -- funding streams might dry up.

Hat tip: the Astute Bloggers

Organized labor claims more casualties: NFL veterans

 
Mens Journal offers a poignant article on the tragic mistreatment of injured NFL veterans by the league and the players' union (hat tip: Tax Man blog).

...the men on the field who generate those billions are real; they bleed; they break; their brains cloud. The nature of their injuries, particularly the mind-dimming concussion, has dominated the off-the-field news of late. Post-mortem exams of Andre Waters (suicide at 44), Terry Long (suicide at 45), Justin Strzelczyk (car crash at 36), Mike Webster (heart attack at 50) -- showed staggering brain damage in men so young and affirmed that football is no longer a contact sport but real-life Mortal Kombat in cleats. Stunningly no one in the sport has stepped up to address the scope and depth of the injuries -- not the teams, not the owners, and certainly not the one organization charged with looking after the athletes, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA). In a game expected to take in $7 billion this year and that exceeds all others in causing bodily harm, fewer than 3 percent of the men who played in the league succeed in getting disability benefits. Worse, the players union turns away ailing vets despite a pension fund with $1 billion in assets...

..."It's criminal," says Ditka at an upstairs table in his huge, clamorous steakhouse in Chicago. "There's so much money in this goddamn game, and no one gives a shit about these guys. Bill Forrester's attached to a feeding tube, Joe Perry has to choose between eating and pain pills, and here's this Upshaw, with his $6.7 million salary, saying there's no dough left to help them out. That's greed talking, and nothing else."

He is speaking, or more like it, shouting about Gene Upshaw, the long-serving chief of the players union, who's become the white-hot focus of some veterans' rage. "The NFL is the worst-represented league, on the players' side, in pro sports," said Joe Montana in a 2006 newspaper survey of Hall of Famers. DeLamielleure, the anchor of the Buffalo Bills line that blocked for O.J. Simpson, turns red as a fire ant when asked about Upshaw. "I won't stop until that bastard's gone or in jail. He's a disgrace to every player, past and current..."

Upshaw -- one of the highest-paid officials in the history of organized labor -- refused to be interviewed for the article and "happened to be" out of the country when Congress held a hearing on the union's treatment of injured vets in June.

The billion-dollar question, of course, is why. Why have the pleas of DeMarco, Mosley, et al., been met with indifference, even hostility? Why has ex-Pro Bowler Conrad Dobler been denied five times for disability, despite 13 operations on one leg? Why is Willie Wood, the gallant Green Bay safety, unable to pay for his assisted living facility? Why is Mercury Morris, the fleet tailback who fractured his neck as a Miami Dolphin, still fighting in appeals court to overturn the pension board's decision, 20 years later? Why did Johnny Unitas, the onetime face of the NFL, die embittered by the league's callous treatment of his teammates?

[The NFL's] existing bureaucracy -- a six-man board of trustees, made up of three reps from owners and players apiece -- a screening committee was added with the power to approve or reject claims. Confusing new rules and categories were added, and retired players were reduced to one kind of claim, football degenerative injuries. But unless they could prove that their health woes were caused by football, they stood no chance of ever collecting the $9,000 a month. And most of those who won claims had to win them over and over again, as the board sent them to doctors every second year to recertify their debilities. "That's the trick they pulled on me," says Mosley. "They shopped and shopped till they found a quack doctor who would cross me off the list..."

[The greatest] outrage, by far, is what [Upshaw] hasn't accomplished. He failed to win guaranteed contracts in bargaining, failed to get his players long-term health insurance, and failed to get as big a percentage of total revenues as union chiefs have in other sports. Baseball, which took in $5.1 billion in revenues in 2006, provides 10-year veterans a maximum annual pension of $180,000; football, by contrast, which grossed $6 billion last season, pays 10-year vets only about $50,000 a year. On a yearly basis, according to figures provided by union critic Parrish, baseball pensions average three times the NFLPA's (roughly $36,000 to a sub-poverty $12,000). Some of the greatest men who ever played the game receive pensions of a couple of hundred dollars a month.

Many decades ago, unions played a vital role in assuring reasonable treatment for workers.

Those days are long since past.

Friday, September 07, 2007

The Latest Bin Laden Transcript... Illustrated

 
The Iraq war is one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld…

You permitted Bush to complete his first term, and stranger still, chose him for a second term, which gave him a clear mandate from you -- with your full knowledge and consent -- to continue to murder... in Iraq and Afghanistan...

President Bush's words echo neoconservatives like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle...

People of America... you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there...

There are two ways to end the war... The first is from our side, and it is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you... ...The second is to do away with the American democratic system of government... It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations...

Noam Chomsky is among one of the most capable of those from your own side. Just a few days ago, the Japanese observed the 62nd anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by your nuclear weapons.

Your denial of global warming and the Kyoto accord are evidence of your crimes.

To conclude... I invite you to embrace Islam. There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.

* * *

Now that I think about it, Bin Laden's platform is a bit better than that of the Democrats. A 2.5 percent flat tax? Woo-hoo! Do I need to convert for that?