Steyn on the Obama Gaffe

From The Corner:

Hicks nix clique's shticks [Mark Steyn]


I'm about done with Obama over this mill-closures-drive-small-town-losers-to-guns-and-God business. If you're running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you've got to be very careful not to give the game away - especially when the game turns out to be the usual cliched elite disdain for the great unwashed. I mention in the current issue of NR how odd it is that Michelle Obama is in many ways more condescending on the stump than Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now her husband's at it, too. As Ed Driscoll says:

Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry's Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect.

Quite. I had a ton of fun covering Kerry's awkwardness with Americans but, in fairness, it was essentially a consumerist snobbery: he preferred the Newburgh Yacht Club for lunch over the local Wendy's, he'd rather be windsurfing off Nantucket than rednecking at Nascar, etc. Obama's snobbery seems more culturally profound, and unlike Kerry he can't plead the crippling disadvantage of a priviliged childhood. Rather, Barack's condescension reveals a man out of touch with the rhythms of American life to a degree that's hard to fathom. As Michelle says, they "chose" to "leave corporate America", and Barack became a "community organizer" and she wound up a 350-grand-a-year "diversity outreach coordinator". I've no idea what either of those careers involve, and most of us seem able to get along without them. But their remoteness from the American mainstream perhaps explains why the Obamas seem to have no clue how Americans live their lives.

And yes, I'm a foreigner. But it takes one to know one, and this guy seems weirdly disconnected from everything except neo-segregationist Afrocentric grievance politics and upscale white liberal condescension. Not much of a coalition.

For those who have not seen what the fuss is all about, this is Obama speaking to a gathering of San Francisco fat cats talking about small town voeters in Pennyslvania:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The Obamas see themselves as enlightened ones, the kind of people who are chosen to lead the poor, ill educated rubes with the wrong ideas out of their humdrum lives, away from their misguided faith, and into the bright new world that they will create. Michelle Obama has said as much.

[Barack Obama]...will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. [Barack Obama] will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Well, as Mark Steyn said

I hate to sound like I’m walled up in the Shed of Cynicism, but the constitutional right to be “uninvolved” and “uninformed” is one of the most precious, at least if the alternative is being “required” to work at coming out of your isolation and engaging with fellow members of the uninvolved, uninformed masses as we push ourselves to move out of our comfort zone.

There is more than a hint of the Nazi here. Remember one of their slogans "Work makes free." I am not looking for a "Great Leader" or "Dear Leader" or "Big Brother." I do not want to dance to the tune of the "Enlightened." I want them to buzz off and leave me and all the people around me alone.

We'll call you if we need you, otherwise go away.

WHO SAID THIS?

From Bracepundit:

"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States."

Barack Obama on George Bush? Or was it Jack Murtha? Nancy Pelosi, perhaps? Could it be Michael Moore?

No, it's a Chicago Times' editorial. From 1863. Reacting to the Gettysburg address.

Another interesting tidbit:

The Times was founded in 1854, by James W. Sheahan, with the backing of Stephen Douglas. In 1861, after the paper was purchased by Wilbur F. Storey, the Times began espousing the Copperhead point of view in supporting Southern Democrats and denounced the policies of Abraham Lincoln. General Ambrose Burnside suppressed the paper in 1863 because of its hostility to the Union cause, but Lincoln lifted the ban when he received word of it.

There you go, another similarity between Abe and Bush: both crushing dissent and stifling free speech!

Read the rest.

The McGovernization of Obama

Victor Davis Hanson

I still believe that by August, Obama, the half-term rookie Senator, will have become the second George McGovern. Cf. his latest declaration to the Marin County faithful (coming on the heels of the crazy anti-Semitic rant of Rev. Eric Lee, a prominent LA Obama supporter):

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Let us count the ways that this is a disastrous declaration:

1. “Nothing’s replaced them”? As someone who lives in a small rural town that saw a lot of closed plants and farm depression in the 1980s, a lot has “replaced them”—explaining why for much of the last decade the national unemployment rate has been below 5%.

2. “They”. This evokes Michelle’s similar “they” (as in the “they” who raised the proverbial bar on the Obamas), and likewise suggests both hostility and a certain us/they contempt for a slice of America that the Obamas apparently know very little about—but for the first time in their lives are rapidly discovering.

3. “They cling to guns or religion”. This is revealing for two reasons: one, Obama has been trying to finesse his position on guns to appeal precisely to gun owners and thus we start to see that his repositioning is cynical to the core; two, “cling to religion?” No rural Pennsylvanian clings to religion more than Obama himself, who for 20 years sat silent in the pews, while a hate-spewing minister damned his country and most everyone else. The question is not why Pennsylvanians “cling to their religion”, but why do the Obamas still cling to the Trinity Church that seems far more extreme than anything I’ve seen in rural America.

4. “antipathy to people who aren't like them”—as in the case of Rev. Wright’s views of Jews, whites, Italians, or Americans in general? In short, Obama accuses rural Pennsylvanians of a racism that they haven’t expressed while contextualizing the racism that his own Rev. Wright has.

5. “Anti-immigrant sentiment”? As in wishing that drivers’ licenses are not issued to those here illegally, or that we insist that those who immigrate to the U.S. do so legally?

6. The worst hypocrisy, of course, is Obama’s charge that these small towns in Pennsylvania express “anti-trade sentiment.” It was not George Bush or John McCain, but Barack Obama himself who tried to salvage Ohio by demagoguing NAFTA and opposing a free-trade agreement with Columbia. His entire campaign is predicated on showing more anti-trade sentiment that the Clintons.

7. Let me get this straight: Obama goes to the Bay Area to an affluent liberal enclave to give a condescending take on the supposed poor fools that he is currently trying to court. This is not just hypocritical, but abjectly stupid. All of Pennsylvania surely is asking today what is so hip and sophisticated about the Trinity Church and Rev. Wright?

So here we have the essential Obama, a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright. For free trade or anti-free trade? For 2nd-amendment rights or not? Post-religious or pious and fundamentalist? For public campaign financing or not? A uniter of various groups or someone who sees America in terms of “they”? Straight-talking or someone who evokes "context" to explain away the inexplicable?


Again, we will see more and more of these condescending statements of the Michelle Obama strain, more and more of Revs. Wright, Meeks, Lee and others peddlers of division like them, and more and more clues to a long hostility to Israel—in what will eventually become the most disastrous chapter in recent Democratic history.

And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won't give up?

Another take:

"Anti-Trade Sentiment" [Stephen Spruiell]

Dems to Petraeus: Can we still surrender?

JohnHuang2 does a magnificent essay on the latest goings on inBasra, Iraq and Washington.

Democrats are desperate to hand Iraq over to al-Qaeda and Iran -- change we can believe in! Nut Pelosi and Harry Reid have tried over 50 times to force Bush to lose the war for them, and failed. So desperate are libbies, they're now busy concocting imaginary victories for the enemy out of whole cloth, just as they did during Viet Nam. Approximately 10 minutes after the crackdown on Shia militias began, the press proclaimed the crackdown had failed. Yet, if the goal of the mighty "Mahdi Army" was to get its butt kicked, it succeeded swimmingly.

Days after the press declared Iraqi forces defeated, Iraqi forces had captured almost 500 Mahdi Army fighters, killed almost 600 of them and wounded nearly a thousand of Napoleon Sadr's forces. In response, the AP said Nouri al-Maliki was left "politically battered and humbled" by the Madhi Army's superior forces. Al-Maliki then battered and humbled his way into regaining control of the ports in Basra after driving the Madhi Army off the streets of Karbala, Kut, Hilla, Diwaniyah, Najaf, Nasiriyah, etc. The 'victorious' Sadr (in Iran during all of this) then begged for a ceasefire, since this is what winning armies always do -- beg for a ceasefire to halt their own advances. Maliki pressed on, which prompted renowned military expert Frank Rich to complain that the fight in Basra was "a mini-Tet that belied the 'success' of the surge," the idiot forgetting that The Surge was in Baghdad and Anbar Province, not Basra.

Despite having 'won' the battle, al-Mookie announced Tuesday that he was canceling his own Million Imam March -- too many of his followers found dead after 'winning' so well -- and is "raising the prospect of disbanding his Mahdi army" (AP, 4/7), more proof he won! The offer strangely came hours after al-Maliki issued an ultimatum to disband or get banned from provincial elections. Al-Maliki hadn't gotten the memo that he lost and to 'Run! Run for your life!'

Gen. Petraeus noted during the hearing Tuesday "the destructive role Iran (via its Quds Force) has played in funding, training, arming and directing the so-called special groups" allied with Sadr, the Democrats' conquering hero. "Iran has fueled the violence" and the "nefarious activities by (Iran's) Quds Force have continued . . ." Iran -- you know, the same Iran the Iraq Study Group insisted wanted so much peace and stability in Iraq. Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

Responding to Gen. Petraeus, Hillary Clinton shocked the world by announcing that "it's time to begin an orderly process" of withdrawal. 'YES!' shouted Obama, pumping his fist in the air. But she wasn't talking about her campaign.

Read the rest.

Mark Steyn: Mrs. Obama’s America

Michelle, ma belle: These are words that go together well. She looks fabulous, like a presidential spouse out of some dream movie — glossy hair, triple strand of pearls, vaguely retro suits that subtly remind you she’d be the most glamorous first lady since Jackie Kennedy.

Michelle, “fear,” “cynicism”: These are words that go together more problematically. Mrs. Obama is most famous for declaring, about her husband’s candidacy, that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.” Just a throwaway line reflecting no more than the narcissism and self-absorption required to mount a presidential campaign in the 21st century? Possibly — were it not for the fact that almost every time the candidate’s wife speaks extemporaneously she seems to offer some bon mot consistent with that bleak assessment.

‘YOU MUST WORK,’ DECLARES DEAR LEADER
And when she stops looking back across the final grim despairing decades of the 20th century (“Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime”) and contemplates the sunlit uplands of the new utopia, it doesn’t, tonally, get any cheerier. Pretend for a moment that the name of the candidate had been excised from the following remarks. Would it seem part of the natural discourse of a constitutional republic of citizen legislators? Or does it sound more appropriate to the leadership cult of Basketkhazia or some other one-man stan?

“[INSERT NAME OF MESSIANIC LEADER HERE] will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. [LEADER] will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

The above words were his wife’s vision of life under the administration of Barack Obama, the transformative presidential candidate offering change you can believe in — or else. I hate to sound like I’m walled up in the Shed of Cynicism, but the constitutional right to be “uninvolved” and “uninformed” is one of the most precious, at least if the alternative is being “required” to work at coming out of your isolation and engaging with fellow members of the uninvolved, uninformed masses as we push ourselves to move out of our comfort zone.

Fortunately, none of that seems to mean anything in real English, though it has the makings of a totalitarian therapeutic rewrite of “Put on a Happy Face”:

Gray skies are gonna push off
Move out your comfort zone
Barack will work your tush off
Move out your comfort zone
Give up your gloomy lives so uninvolved
It’s not allowed
Barack requires every one involved
So join the crowd . . .

I’m willing to cut presidential spouses a lot of slack. When Senator Obama said Jeremiah Wright was like a goofy uncle, it was pointed out that your relatives are a given but you get to choose your pastor. It’s true that you also get to choose your wife, but, unless you’re particularly far-sighted, you don’t always choose with a presidential run in mind. I found Teresa Heinz’s tone-deafness to the rhythms of democratic politics one of the more charmingly genuine features of John Kerry’s phony-baloney populist campaign. Who wouldn’t love a woman who, shanghaied into lunching at Wendy’s, demands to know what “chili” is and has to have it explained to her by the clerk that it’s a meat-based food dish widely consumed around the United States?

Oddly enough, despite being a couple of decades younger and several gazillion dollars poorer, Mrs. Obama has a tin ear even Mrs. Kerry must marvel at. Addressing a group of struggling women in economically torpid central Ohio, Michelle Obama eschewed the usual I-feel-your-pain shtick and invited her audience to feel hers, lurching into a long riff on the expense of extracurricular activities for her daughters, piano and dance and summer camp, and somehow she and Barack are expected to figure out how to pay for it on a combined salary of 500 grand a year, not including his book royalties and her corporate directorship. (Nor the house they bought for $1.6 million.) Mrs. Obama’s plaint was worryingly reminiscent of the time the Prince of Wales, attempting to bond with some of the British Army’s black recruits, said that he too knew what it was to suffer prejudice: At his boarding school some of the boys had been prejudiced against him because he was a prince. (“The people in my dormitory are foul,” he wrote to the Queen in 1964. “They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows.”)

Part of the article from National Review. Will try to find the rest.

How to Finance Road Construction: Tax the Virginian Pilot

Here's a modest suggestion for improving the roads in and around the Hampton Roads area. And it's an idea that I'm sure will appeal to the cracked staff at the local papers who are constantly advocating one tax after another to pay for our road construction program.

My brilliant idea: A sales tax on the Virginian Pilot.

Ta...daaaaa!

Now before you click away from this page let's run the numbers. The Virginian Pilot has a paid daily circulation of about 200,000. Let's say that a sales tax of 50 cents per paper is imposed. That would bring in over $36 million dollars a year! That's more than $3.5 billion over ten years!

Who could possibly object?

Wouldn't you pay an extra 50 cents a day to line your birdcage or wrap your fish?

Say YES!

And the beauty of this idea for the Libertarians among us is that the tax is purely voluntary. If you don't buy the Pilot, you won't pay the tax. Do you like it?

Say YES!

And the people at the Pilot can't possibly object because they don't have to pay the tax and they are in favor of new taxes to pay for new roads. Is this idea brilliant or what?

Say YES!

Thank you!!!!

SMURFICIDE

Mark Steyn:

Sometimes war is worth it
from The Daily Telegraph, October 18th 2005

I yield to no one in my disdain for the United Nations and all its works, but I did find myself warming up to Unicef the other day. Last week, on Belgian television, the UN children's agency premiered the first adult movie featuring the Smurfs. By "adult", I don't mean it was a blue movie. Only the characters were blue. But it was an adult movie in the sense that the Smurfs were massacred during an air strike on their village, until, in the final scene, only Baby Smurf is left, weeping alone surrounded by wall-to-wall Smurf corpses. It's the first Smurf snurf movie.

Well, I thought, say what you like about the UN, but any organisation that wants to bomb the Smurfs can't be all bad. Instead of those wimps at Dudley council banning Piglet like a bunch of nancy boys, why couldn't they make some blockbuster video nuking the Hundred-Acre Wood and leaving Pooh to die in a radioactive Heffalump pit?

My mistake. Apparently Unicef made the short film as a fundraiser to highlight how children are the principal victims of war. As Baby Smurf wails amid the shattered ruins, we see the words: "Don't let war affect the lives of children."

Oh, well. It's not clear from the Smurf carnage whether their village is a sovereign jurisdiction - the ultimate blue state - or whether they're merely some hapless minority within a multi-ethnic nation, the Kosovars to Spongebob Squarepants' Slobodan. But either way the warplanes come and blue body parts are exploding all over the village.

Good luck to Unicef and all. But I can't help thinking that, if you are that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict is like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of west Africa, air strikes are few and far between. Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of Eutopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly low-tech, non-state-of-the-art ways.

In 2003, Charles Onyango-Obbo wrote a fascinating column in the East African musing on the resurgence of cannibalism, after reports that Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo were making surviving members of their victims' families eat the body parts of their loved ones.

"While colonialism is bad," he said, "the coloniser who arrives by plane, vehicle or ship is better - because he will have to build an airport, road or harbour - than the one who, like the Ugandan army, arrived and withdrew from most of eastern Congo on foot." Just so. If you're going to be attacked, it's best to be attacked by a relatively advanced enemy. Compared to being force-fed Grandfather Smurf's genitals, having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.

Why would Unicef show such an implausible form of Smurficide ? Well, whether intentionally or not, they are evoking the war that most of their audience - in Belgium and beyond - is opposed to: the Iraq war, where the invader did indeed have an air force. That's how the average Western "progressive" still conceives of warfare, as something the big bullying Pentagon does to weak victims.

But this week is a week to remember that there are worse things than war that "affect the lives of children". If I were Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want Baby Smurf to grow up in Saddam's Iraq. I don't mean just because we'd be the beleaguered minority of Smurfistan, to be gassed and shovelled into mass graves.

Even if we were part of Saddam's own approved class living in the Smurfi Triangle, it's still a life permanently fixed between terror and resignation, in which all a parent's hopes for his children are subordinate to the whims of a psycho state.

That Iraq is gone now - not because of Unicef and the other transnational institutions that confer respectability on dictatorships, but because America, Britain and a few others were prepared to go to war. As the Guardian harrumphed on Saturday: "People who opposed the war in Iraq will find it hard to stomach attempts to present the referendum as a triumph."

Fair enough. For my part, I find it hard to stomach the degrees of support offered to the "insurgency" by George Galloway, John Pilger, Tariq Ali and Michael Moore. But it's not about what I or the Guardian find hard to stomach. Peripheral though they may be to the concerns of the "peace" crowd, it is in the end about the Iraqi people, and, as with all the previous will-they-won't-they deadlines, at the eleventh hour they managed to rouse themselves and pull it off.

Sixteen out of Iraq's 18 provinces - including Sunni-majority ones - voted for the most liberal, democratic, federal and pluralist constitution in the Middle East. Sorry to make the Guardian throw up, but that is indeed a "triumph".

Whatever the Americans got wrong, they got one big thing right - that, if you persevered, Iraq had the potential to function as a free society in a part of the world where no such thing has ever existed.

That was a long shot, and much sneered at, not least by British "conservatives". But Washington judged correctly: given the radicalisation of the Arab world, and the Arabification of the Islamic world, and the Islamification of much of the rest of the world, in the end you have to fix the problem at source.

In his book The Clash Of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington has a section on "Islam's Bloody Borders". "The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts," he writes, "have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims."

That looping boundary is never not in the news. Last week, it was Nalchik in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, where the Islamists killed more than 60 people. The week before, it was Bali, again. Different regimes on the looping boundary try different strategies: in Indonesia, appeasement; in Chechnya, the Russians have reduced Grozny to rubble and still not got anywhere. Pushing back the Islamists on their ever expanding margins will never work. Reforming the heart of the Muslim world just might.

Sometimes war is worth it. And, if you don't think so, look at the opening scenes of that Unicef video - Smurfs singing, dancing, gambolling merrily - and try to imagine living in a Smurf enclave in a province that wants to introduce Sharia

What Happend in Basra, Volume 2

The Ayatollah Sistani has sent a message to the Mahdi Army: "the law is the only authority in the country". The question of whether Sistani would pull Sadr's chestnuts out of the fire in the same way he saved him in his earlier adventures has been answered: not this time.

There are still some parts of the MSM and the brain dead Left who claim that Sadr was the winner in the Basra conflict. We need go not father than today's Virginian Pilot which had an editorial cartoon showing the Iraqi army fleeing and Tom Teepens' op-ed announcing the supremacy of Sadr in Iraq.

Here's the cartoon by Pat Oliphant.

Forget about the racism exhibited in this cartoon. To be funny, a joke has to have some relation to the truth. Why the Left keeps trying to make the side that lost in the recent fight the winner, defies rationality. I have always thought of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) as a metaphor. Now I'm beginning the believe it's a genuine mental disease.

Did I mention Tom Teepen?

Recent fighting shows the mission in Iraq is still not accomplished

Now there's a news flash.

Isn't this what General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker has been testifying to on Capital Hill? Why yes. they're saying it will take more time to make Iraq secure against a take over by Islamofascism (although they will not use that term). But according to Teepen it's Sadr, the guy who called for a truce and who is in the process of disbanding his militia who is the winner in the fighting.

Sadr, who wants the U.S. military out of Iraq, has emerged from the fray politically stronger and with enhanced military credibility. It was he who arranged the cease-fire and set its conditions.

Yes sir-re-bob, it's the guy who called off the fight, asked for a truce, laid down his arms and is disbanding who is the real winner according to the "reality based community." Too bad General Lee did not have Tom Teepen around at Appomattox or we would be whistling "Dixie" as our National Anthem.

Virginian Pilot: "We Will Decide Where You Can Put Your Christian Cross, Comrade."

The Virginian Pilot has decided that displaying a Christian cross crosses the free speech line. Free speech must allow nude dancing and sex shows because if we close them down, we are on the slippery slope to Fascism.

But displaying a cross? Horrors! People will get the idea that anything goes regarding that First Amendment.

Let’s read that once again:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

According to the Solons at the Pilot, that part about the free exercise of religion and free speech was really put in there to allow women to dance nude and is a rock solid protection for peep show operators and internet porn providers.

You can read it right there, can’t you? I’m sure you can; read it again, and again, and again. That’s right there in the original contract between the American people and it’s government.

Still can’t see it? What are you? Stupid? It’s right there!!! They can see it, why can’t you?

But if you are not wise enough to see that’s the true, inner meaning of the first amendment, the Pilot’s cracked editorial staff has a suggestion for what you can do: stick that cross up …, well, here’s how you can exercise your free speech rights and a way that’s acceptable to the censors at the Virginian Pilot:

Hide your religion and get in the food assembly line.

Rather than erecting a giant cross in the park and standing beside that symbol of faith, they might consider taking a spot at the grill

But make sure that no one knows you’re a Christian because who knows where that could lead. After all this is Chesapeake and we have to make sure we know our

…limits that Chesapeake must observe to be respectful to all believers and non-believers.

Especially the unbelievers. Because the unbelievers may be offended by the cross of Christ. And you know that “Free Speech amendment” cannot be an excuse to offend unbelievers.

Just read it again … it’s right there!

UPDATE: Welcome Freepers. Click on "Home" and look around.
And you can reach the Pilot at 757-466-2989.
Letters to the editor: letters@pilotonline.com

Wall of silence broken at state's Muslim public school

Combine political correctness, multiculturalism and fear and what you get are taxpayer funded religious schools for Muslims.

Katherine Kersten is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and has written several columns about the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) which, if it were a Christian school would have been shut down in a heartbeat.

Her first one was titled : Are taxpayers footing bill for Islamic school in Minnesota?

After being denied entrance to the school to conduct her own research, she found a substitute teacher who describes the religious activities in the school.

Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.

Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day's schedule included a "school assembly" in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform "their ritual washing."
Afterward, Getz said, "teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day," was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man "was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered."

"The prayer I saw was not voluntary," Getz said. "The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred."

Islamic Studies was also incorporated into the school day. "When I arrived, I was told 'after school we have Islamic Studies,' and I might have to stay for hall duty," Getz said. "The teachers had written assignments on the blackboard for classes like math and social studies. Islamic Studies was the last one -- the board said the kids were studying the Qu'ran. The students were told to copy it into their planner, along with everything else. That gave me the impression that Islamic Studies was a subject like any other."

After school, Getz's fifth-graders stayed in their classroom and the man in white who had led prayer in the gym came in to teach Islamic Studies. TIZA has in effect extended the school day -- buses leave only after Islamic Studies is over. Getz did not see evidence of other extra-curricular activity, except for a group of small children playing outside. Significantly, 77 percent of TIZA parents say that their "main reason for choosing TIZA ... was because of after-school programs conducted by various non-profit organizations at the end of the school period in the school building," according to a TIZA report. TIZA may be the only school in Minnesota with this distinction.
…

Until recently, TIZA's website included a request for volunteers to help with "Friday prayers." In an e-mail, Zaman explained this as an attempt to ensure that "no TIZA staff members were involved in organizing the Friday prayers."
But an end run of this kind cannot remove the fact of school sponsorship of prayer services, which take place in the school building during school hours. Zaman does not deny that "some" Muslim teachers "probably" attend. According to federal guidelines on prayer in schools, teachers at a public school cannot participate in prayer with students.

In addition, schools cannot favor one religion by offering services for only its adherents, or promote after-school religious instruction for only one group. The ACLU of Minnesota has launched an investigation of TIZA, and the Minnesota Department of Education has also begun a review.

TIZA's operation as a public, taxpayer-funded school is troubling on several fronts. TIZA is skirting the law by operating what is essentially an Islamic school at taxpayer expense. The Department of Education has failed to provide the oversight necessary to catch these illegalities, and appears to lack the tools to do so. In addition, there's a double standard at work here -- if TIZA were a Christian school, it would likely be gone in a heartbeat.

TIZA is now being held up as a national model for a new kind of charter school. If it passes legal muster, Minnesota taxpayers may soon find themselves footing the bill for a separate system of education for Muslims

Let’s discuss principles. As a Christian, I have no objection to schools run by religious orders. In fact most religious schools provide a superior education to our state run public schools. But the government has, in its wisdom, decided that sectarian schools should not receive public funds. The failure to enforce its own rules with regard to Muslim schools is not inexplicable. It is all too easy to explain. But it is an outrage.

Rockefeller Smears McCain, Fighter Pilots

From the CBS website:

Rockefeller supports fellow Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for president. He made the comments in an interview published Tuesday in The Charleston Gazette in his home state of West Virginia.

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues," Rockefeller said.

I have long contended that you learn more about public figures by observing their friends and enemies than you do by listening to them. Public figures, by the time they become prominent are well schooled in the art of telling you what you want to hear. There are few who are as good at this as Obama. Thomas Sowell says it well:

Whenever I see one of Barack Obama's smooth performances, it reminds me of a saying from my old neighborhood in Harlem: "An eel is like sandpaper compared to you."

I don't know Obama personally, never met him, probably never will. So I am learning about him from his friends and enemies. Right now his friends include a racist anti-semite named Wright and a the ultra-wealthy heir of an oil fortune who, in effect, calls McCain - and all military pilots - cold blooded killers.

Meanwhile he asks for the resignation of a woman who called some disruptive kids playing in a tree "monkeys." That is also telling. Obama's "racial sensitivity" apparently equals that of his spiritual mentor: the Reverend Wright.

Thomas Sowell again:

Nothing is more fraudulent than calls for a "dialogue on race." Those who issue such calls are usually quick to cry "racism" at any frank criticism. They are almost invariably seeking a monologue on race, to which others are supposed to listen.

The same people who have gone ballistic when some prominent figure is found to belong to some all-male social club are full of excuses for why Barack Obama remained a member of a racist and anti-American church for 20 years.

What happened in Basra?

The MSM’s account of what’s happening in Iraq appears to have little relationship to reality. It could be the media version of the blind man describing an elephant. Or as the Weekly Standard puts it: The Press Botches Basra.

The Iraqi military was able to clear one Mahdi Army-controlled neighborhood in Basra and was in the process of clearing another when Sadr issued his ceasefire. The ceasefire came on March 30, after six days of fighting, and was seemingly unilateral in the sense that the Iraqi government made no apparent concessions in return. By that time, 571 Mahdi Army fighters had been killed, 881 wounded, 490 captured, and 30 had surrendered countrywide, according to numbers tabulated by The Long War Journal. Thus, an estimated 95 Mahdi Army fighters were killed per day during the six days of fighting. In contrast, al Qaeda in Iraq did not incur such intense casualties even during the height of the surge.

The Iraqi security forces were at their best in the smaller cities in Iraq's south. The Mahdi Army suffered major setbacks in Hillah, Najaf, Karbala, Diwaniyah, Amarah, Kut, and Nasiriyah. The security forces drove the Mahdi Army off the streets in those cities within days. The casualties taken by the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, Basra, and the wider south surely played a role in Sadr's tactical decision to call a ceasefire. An American military officer serving in southern Iraq told us, "Whatever gains [the Mahdi Army] has made in the field [in Basrah], they were running short of ammunition, food, and water. In short, [the Mahdi Army] had no ability to sustain the effort." Time's sources in Basra paint a similar picture. "There has been a large-scale retreat of the Mahdi Army in the oil-rich Iraqi port city because of low morale and because ammunition is low due to the closure of the Iranian border," the magazine reported on March 30.

Here’s the NY Times in a theme that was faithfully repeated by the blind, deaf and dumb media even after the militia laid down their arms: Assault by Iraq on Shiite Forces Stalls in Basra.

CNN tells us: Analysis: Iraqis' Basra fight not going well.

A closely held U.S. military intelligence analysis of the fighting in Basra shows that Iraqi security forces control less than a quarter of the city,

NPR chimes in with it's well modulated tones that suggest, not very subtly, that the Iraqi government is out to lunch, referring to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's impulsive leadership style.

After a few days of fighting in Iraq's third largest city, NPR smells defeat for American and Iraqi forces:

The failure of Iraqi troops to crush the militias has raised fresh doubts about the ability of the Iraqis to take over their own security so U.S.-led forces can go home.

Back to the NY Times men, we get this first hand report from QAIS MIZHER, a Times reporter and former officer in Saddam's army. Firsthand Look at Basra Shows Value of White Flag

...by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.

So we have the NY Times telling us that the Iraqi army controls none of Basra and CNN telling us that the army controls a third of the city. And both telling us that things are going badly for the Iraqi army and Prime Minister Maliki. Who to believe? And why did the militia stop fighting? It's not usual for the victorious forces to lay down their arms.

It took the Leftist "The Nation" to give us the the fevered dream of the Left with this hilarious story:The Lessons of Basra

As the smoke clears over new rubble in Iraq's second city, at the heart of Iraq's oil region, it's apparent that the big winner of the Six-Day War in Basra are the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army faced down the Iraqi armed forces not only in Basra, but in Baghdad, as well as in Kut, Amarah, Nasiriyah, and Diwaniya, capitals of four key southern provinces. That leaves Sadr, an anti-American rabble rouser and nationalist who demands an end to the US occupation of Iraq, and who has grown increasingly close to Iran of late, in a far stronger position that he was a week ago. In Basra, he's the boss.

And Hitler is alive and well in Argentina, heading the re-birth of the Third Reich.

We don’t even have to reflect on the way the media portrayed the recent assault by the Iraqi army on the Sadr militia which was reported as a decisive Sadr victory and defeat for the Iraqi army. Except for the fact that Sadr’s militia, not the Iraqi army, sued for peace. And Sadr is now saying he may disband his militia. And Sadr is not actually in Iraq but Iran. But to hear the MSM tell it, the Maliki government was discredited and things were going to hell in a hand basket and the surge was a failure and etc., etc., etc. The Weekly Standard again:

But none of the journalists bothered to ask one simple question: if Sadr was so successful, why end the fighting? If Iraq's army was being beaten and Maliki politically weakened, why not press the fight and make the government collapse? As an American military officer serving in southern Iraq told us, "Claiming a 'victory' and then withdrawing from the battlefield is the tactic of someone that is losing."

Of course this interpretation of events in Iraq is nothing new.

Here’s what was supposed to be going on in Basra last year, after the British pulled back. Google "Basra" and you get this headline from the Washington Post As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates

For a totally different report, try Reuters: Iraqis say Basra quieter after British troop pullout

From the Christian Science Monitor we read As British leave Basra, militias dig in.

The International Herald Tribune (11/25/2007) In Basra, violence is a tenth of what it was before British pullback, general says

Attacks against British and Iraqi forces have plunged by 90 percent in southern Iraq since London withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, the commander of British forces there said Thursday.

The presence of British forces in downtown Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, was the single largest instigator of violence, Maj. Gen. Graham Binns told reporters Thursday on a visit to Baghdad's Green Zone.

"We thought, 'If 90 percent of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?'" Binns said.

Britain's 5,000 troops moved out of a former Saddam Hussein palace at Basra's heart in early September, setting up a garrison at an airport on the city's edge. Since that pullback, there's been a "remarkable and dramatic drop in attacks," Binns said.

Well, yes, pulling your troops out of the battlefield would reduce your casualties.


Is it stupidity, ignorance, blinding bias or a combination of all of them that causes such incredible mistakes?

So what's the latest in Basra? Well, CNN reports Iraqi city appears relatively calm

Security forces in the southern Iraqi city of Basra hunted militants Wednesday in a stronghold of a powerful Shiite militia.

But the violence that paralyzed the oil-rich city last week has died down, with one politician describing the city as "relatively calm and stable.

And Sadr is still in hiding somewhere in Iran. But the MSM hasn't retracted a word about Sadr's "remarkable" victory.

We'll give the Weekly Standard the last word:

It isn't entirely clear why the media leapt to the conclusions that it did about the Basra operations. Perhaps impatience coupled with a lack of knowledge about military affairs was the biggest factor. Perhaps, tired of six months of generally positive reporting about the surge, journalists were gleeful to announce that the situation on the ground was deteriorating. Or perhaps a negative angle was irresistible in light of General David Petraeus's upcoming congressional testimony.

Too hot for New York Times Radio

NY Times owned radio station refuses to carry the following comment:

Fifteen seconds. Imagine you had fifteen seconds to find shelter from an incoming missile. Fifteen seconds to locate your children, help an elderly relative, assist a disabled person to find shelter.

That's all the residents of Sderot and neighboring Israeli towns have.

Day or night, the sirens go on. Fifteen seconds later, the missiles, fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza, hit. They could hit a home, a school, a hospital. Their aim is to kill and wound and demoralize.

Imagine yourself in that situation.

The sirens blast. 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The time to seek shelter has ended. The missiles hit.

This is what Israelis experience daily. But, amazingly, they refuse to be cowed. Help us help those Israelis. Visit ajc.org.

Find out why.

It has to do with

”hemorrhoid cream or sexual potency pills.”

Wanna know where Jodi Kantor lives? She's married to Ron Lieber

Ron Lieber is a writer for the dead tree media. He's a fairly stupid person, but there's nothing in that that distinguishes him for his brothers and sister in the media.

The woman who cohabits with him, Jodi Kantor, specializes in exposing the people who, like John McCain's son, is a high value target in Iraq.

Ron demonstrates the total cluelessness of his understanding of the relationship between the client and his financial advisor in the article here, in which he castigates UBS and hails the whore monger Eliot Spitzer. I wonder if they hired the same sex toys?

The issue he raises is one of my pet peeves. I had a number of clients who paid me fees in lieu of commissions. I prefer that arrangement because it removes the major conflict of interest in a brokerage relationship: transaction costs.

What is more valuable: a broker who suggests a trade so he can get paid, or one who recommends against it because it is not prudent? I believe both are equally valuable. In fact, the data shows that fewer fewer trades are better for the client in the long term. Yet I take as much time advising clients against a trade as advising them to make a transaction. Is my time telling someone not to do something worthless? Do doctors or lawyers not bill when they tell their clients to avoid doing something?

Yet the whore monger Spitzer and his lick spittle acolytes like Ron Lieber worked to eliminate these kinds of accounts.

Don't cry for me. I do all right. But I'm sorry that there are people like Jodi Kantor who may get John McCain's son killed on their way to a Pulitzer.

Murtha: Congressional Corruption on Parade

UPDATE: I had to watch the report again after I received the following e-mail from a reader:

A key word was missing from that CBS report. I'll give you a hint, it starts with a "D".

Indeed, it's true. I just watched twice, and apparently there is no mention of his party affiliation whatsoever.

Congressional Ostriches

Bearing Drift's J.R. beats a horse that died decades ago. The post is the kind of thing that "moderates" write. The commenters try to shift blame, when they are not making silly suggestions to "solve" the problem.

There is something very pleasant for a great many people when the government takes over some of the larger responsibility in their lives. That is the theme of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism." The kind of society evolving here: Fascism with a smiley face.

These problems will not be resolved until a crisis is reached. In this case, it will be a financial crisis.

Which reminds me, tax time is here.

Oh, Those 43rd District Democrats

From Seattle's 43rd District:

Further proof of this: There was some time to kill as multiple tallies of the delegates and alternates were done, and when the time-killer of taking audience questions had run its course and the idea of teling jokes had been nixed, someone suggested doing the Pledge of Allegiance to pass the time. (Are you listening, right-wing bloggers? This is going to get good.)

At the mere mention of doing the pledge there were groans and boos. Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the Pledge of Allegiance up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted down. One might more accurately say the idea of pledging allegiance to the flag (of which there was only one in the room, by the way, on some delegate’s hat) was shouted down.

Redefining patriotism one pledge at a time.

Basra offensive a key step towards reconciliation?

Getting the tribes of Iraq to agree is a big deal.

Wars are not won in a day.

The hand-wringing over the Basra operations launched by Nouri al-Maliki may have missed the bigger picture, according to an analysis by the AP. Maliki’s efforts to rein in rogue Shi’ite militias have been received with enthusiasm from Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq and have strengthened efforts at national reconciliation. Leaders of both groups have issued statements of support for the Iraqi Army operations to regain control of the nation’s second-largest city

This by the AP?

The MSM has been brain dead about Iraq since day one. It is not a country like the US. It is composed of rival tribes with thousand year histories. It's leaders are hereditary. It's religion is foreign and violently sectarian. It is at the epicenter of Islamofascism. Iraq is "Normandy" in the battle against the new caliphate. It's not a war from which we can withdraw; it will follow us home. If we try, it will last many generations and lead to worldwide misery and death.

The strange thing, is that it's a war that can be won without mass mobilization and on the cheap. That's why withdrawal is seen as the preferred route of Liberals who don't care to think of the consequences. Besides, they have their own domestic agenda and the war distracts from that.

As I said, the war can be fought and won without a repeat of World War 1 or 2 mobilization and regimentation. Unless we retreat. Then the cost will be immeasurable.

I told you so.

'Rocky' Was Just A Movie?

Having fun with words.

It isn't Genocide When You're Killing a Class of People

Jonah Goldberg comments on the Russian Duma's defense of the mass starvation of Russian farmers in the Ukraine in 1932-33. They deny claims of genocide by saying that the millions who died were of all ethnic classes.

"There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country," the Russian State Duma resolution said.

Liberals would and do agree.

In America and the West generally, vast numbers of leftist intellectuals forgave Stalin, Mao and others for murdering people who stood in the way of Progress — and historians continue to do so today. Indeed, "modernization" was one of the great excuses and rationalizations for murder, theft and, yes, genocide in the 20th century and, I fear, people will be going back to this intellectual well for a good long time.

The AP article notes that ...

Renowned writer and Soviet-era dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn backed the Kremlin line on the divisive issue, dismissing Ukrainian claims that the famine was genocide as a "fable."

If true, this distresses me because I view Solzhenitsyn as a hero of mine. I cannot believe that he has a benign view of the murder of millions by starvation.

Special Forces Fight in Sadr City

Driving While Polygamous

Mark Steyn on NRO:

When it comes to avoiding a ban for speeding, the courts hear every excuse in the book.

But yesterday one motorist offered what must be a unique reason why he should keep his licence.

Mohammed Anwar said a ban would make it difficult to commute between his two wives and fulfil his matrimonial duties.

Read the rest.

He got off.

Whoremongers

Mark Steyn at NRO:

Over in the Geraghtistan province of the National Review ummah, Jim asks:

How did we reach the point where Air America calls Hillary a 'whore'?

Indeed. Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name. Yet the first is "a f***ing whore" and the second is "David Duke in drag" merely because they disagree which Democratic senator would make the best president. The people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.

There's something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who've been on the receiving end of the left's vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you're all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left's Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.

At Ed Driscoll:

...the GOP "may be the stupid party, but they're also the decent party." His comments remind me of the contrast in tone that Steven Den Beste highlighted immediately after the 2006 midterms:

2000, Democrats: "We wuz robbed!"
2002, Democrats: "We wuz robbed again!"
2004, Democrats: "We wuz robbed yet again!"
2006, Republicans: "Bummer. Oh, well, we'll do better next time."

Oh, and the Randi Rhodes explosion?


You know the secret of Rush Limbaugh's success? Simple: he's funny. He laughs. He jokes. He has "more fun than a human being should be allowed to have." Listen to any runner-up talk show host, none are as entertaining; none are having as much fun as Rush evidently is having.

I've long had a theory about why prayers are answered,

God is not just a little more powerful, not even a lot more powerful, he is not comprehensible. That is why arguments about the existence of God are so futile.

Here is VanderLeun with some worthwhile musings.

We don't know much about God. Indeed, there are many among us who make it a point to know even less -- until they are proud, damned proud, to know nothing at all. Once they achieve this brainfade, they encourage the rest of us to follow suit in a paroxysm of self-willed ignorance. Today there are fresh new scriptures attesting to this revelation. There are traveling preachers of this gospel. There are even congregations, support groups, jewelry, and t-shirts. It's a religion. Of sorts. A religion in which you collectively as individuals agree to worship Zero, and to carry the gospel to others. Seems like a waste of life to me.

In fact, we are probably not yet wired to know much about God. If the Smart Monkey survives itself, evolution (Great and brilliant tool of God that it is.) will probably finish the deeper neural nets of our brains at some point in the aeons to come, and we will slowly come to descry the faintest shadow of a clue. About all that is. About the fundamental nature of the miracle. For the present, most of us remain in shadow, looking at the noema from without; running on the insights of the genetic spiritual sports that appear on Earth so rarely that their lives are remembered forever.

At the present time, most of what we know about God comes from assumptions built on revelations. These are backed-up with a sheaf of incomplete, poorly translated notes from chance encounters.

The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that, to date, our record keeping is spotty and our storage methods poor. If you think that any future chance meetings or memos are going, in the long run, to be kept any better than the Dead Sea Scrolls, please tell me what's on that six-inch floppy disc at the bottom of the fourth box to the left on the third shelf from the top at the back of my garage.

Nope. The problem is not knowing the will and laws of God. They are pretty simple, straight forward, and seem, for the most part, to be embedded in the cerebral cortex of most before birth. In addition, there are lots of memos in every language and no shortage of interpreters -- AM/FM/SW; network and cable; 24/7/365, forever and ever, amen, can I get a witness? Even so there have to be thousands of memos that, although sent, we just didn't get. Indeed, even working with the memos that we did get, you'd have to admit that we are very poor at carrying out the policies they announce. It probably has to do with us not being finished just yet.

I like this: Prayer is not a vending machine:

It is only recently that I've come, in my dotage, to see that prayer -- even unheard or unanswered -- can be a powerful intellectual force in one's life. And by this I mean prayer in its most personally humiliating and elevating form: down on the knees and speaking out loud. Daily. Very abasing and very uplifting at one and the same time.

For most of the time, answers come there none. But that's the way of prayer. If prayer were the vending machine of God, we'd spend all our time on our knees between meals and lovemaking and let basic maintenance of roofs and refrigeration go to Hell. Nope, prayer as a constant begets random answers, and not always the straight-forward ones we were looking for, because we are a very simple Smart Monkey.

Ohio Hospital Contests a Story Clinton Tells

From the NY Slimes:

Over the last five weeks, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has featured in her campaign stump speeches the story of a health care horror: an uninsured pregnant woman who lost her baby and died herself after being denied care by an Ohio hospital because she could not come up with a $100 fee.

The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was stillborn at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured.

“We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story,” said Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System.

How many stakes can you drive through this woman's heart and still not kill her?

Since this is the NY Times, I am not vouching for it's accuracy or even its truth.

Mark Steyn: That poor woman down the street

More on the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Even in an ersatz legal system with a 100 per cent conviction rate, and none of the traditional demarcation lines between plaintiff, prosecutor, judge and jury, plus a serial plaintiff who is a former employee of the prosecutor, and no due process or otherwise objective procedures, even with the deck stacked overwhelmingly in its favour, the Canadian Human Rights Commission felt its "case" against Marc Lemire was a little weak. So they resorted to entrapment, telecommunications fraud, and identity theft. And at no point in their fun 'n' games did anyone think, "Whoa, I wonder if this is in compliance with our procedures." Why would you? How can you be in breach of your procedures when there are no procedures? You can do whatever you like to whomsoever you like.

So, in order to goad their target into saying something just a teensy-weensy bit offensive, both the chief investigator, Dean Steacy, and the "complainant," Richard Warman, began logging on to Mr. Lemire's site under their respective aliases. I say "respective aliases" but at one point Mr. Warman was logging on to Internet "hate sites" under Mr. Steacy's secret identity, "jadewarr." He'd misplaced some "hate message" or other, and so strolled over to the commission and was allowed to use the government's computers, passwords and covert hate-site membership ("jadewarr") until he'd found what he was looking for. Richard Warman is supposed to be a private citizen who has filed a "complaint," yet he's allowed full access to the state's investigation. If Mr. Warman got mugged, would he be permitted to wander into the Ottawa police forensics lab and fiddle around with hair and fibre samples from the scene? Dean Steacy denied in court that there was any collusion between the CHRC and their lone plaintiff, and one can see his point: who needs to "collude" when Mr. Warman enjoys open access to the system?

Does every Canadian citizen have the right to monkey around the CHRC computers on complaints they've got an interest in? If so, I'll be in at 10 a.m. next Thursday to poke around the files relating to the Maclean's case. If I need to bring two pieces of picture ID, do let me know.

When Mr. Steacy began posting messages on hate sites as "jadewarr," he was sufficiently Internet savvy not to leave any ISP information that could be traced back to the CHRC. He didn't want Marc Lemire looking at his server logs and noticing any unusual interest from anything ending in "gc.ca." So Mr. Steacy disconnected himself from the office Internet, and looked around for alternative wireless connections. He found one belonging to a young lady whose apartment is a block away from CHRC headquarters in Ottawa. Without obtaining a warrant, he connected to her server, and in effect used her as his cover for his "jadewarr" postings. Last week, a representative from Bell Canada named the lady in open court, since when her name has been reported in the newspapers. Let's say in 10 years' time, this woman applies for a job in, oh, Sarnia or Moose Jaw or Des Moines, and her prospective employer decides to Google her name, and what comes up is all very complicated and hard to follow but she seems to have something to do with some white supremacist investigation back in 2008.

No, she doesn't. She's a blameless woman moved into the line of fire to cover Dean Steacy's tracks. If I were her, I'd be contemplating one monsteroo lawsuit against the CHRC for their appropriation of her identity.

Read the whole thing...

Mark Steyn: Looks like last call for Hillary

Mark Steyn says it's curtains for Hillary. The problem is that the Democrats nominated two spectacularly unqualified candidates so we may be saddled with the smooth talking racist instead of the female fascist.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, in the real dark night of the soul, it's always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. And so it goes in the real dark night of the Clinton campaign, day after day. When Hillary got into her wee spot of bother over her concoction of the corkscrew landing under enemy fire in Tuzla, she wiggled out of it by putting it down to sleep deprivation. Is she spending too many nights up at three in the morning? In the latest ad, when she picks up the phone at 3 a.m. to take the emergency foreclosure breaking-news update, she's got perfect hair and makeup, and she's immaculately dressed. Is having to get up at 2 a.m. to put her face on for the 3 a.m. campaign ad causing her to retreat into Bosnian war fantasies?

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt drew my attention the other day to a BBC report on Hillary. Asked about the candidates' experience, Sen. Clinton replied: "I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

Helping By Not Helping

A thought provoking essay on the crippling influence of charity.

Once upon a time, there was a southeastern African nation called Rhodesia. It was one of the most prosperous and tranquil places in Africa. Though the majority of Rhodesians were black, it had a largely white government, and maintained ties to Great Britain, whose colony it once was. But under pressure from Britain, the white government radically changed the franchise laws -- most importantly, they removed the requirement that to vote, you had to own land -- and was ousted in favor of the Marxist Zanu-PF and Robert Mugabe. That was when the country changed its name, becoming one of Africa's "Z" nations.

That was 28 years ago. Anyone who pays the slightest attention to the news knows what Mugabe has done to that once beautiful country. He's maintained power by imprisoning or killing his opponents, seizing the property of white farmers and handing it off to his cronies, and stealing every so-called election since he rose to the presidency.

Well, this past week Mugabe didn't quite steal enough votes. If the reports can be trusted, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) defeated him soundly. If the results of the election were respected, he'd be on his way out of power within weeks. But Mugabe doesn't intend to respect those results. He's ordered his bullies to round up all foreign journalists, and to ransack the MDC's offices under no published rationale.

It couldn't be clearer that Zimbabwe is being raped by its tyrant and his henchmen. We Americans, who hold that election results are sacred, should be appalled by these events. But what should we do about them? Diplomatic pressure? Troops? A bombing campaign?

No. Nothing. Nothing at all. The people of Zimbabwe created this monster; it should be left up to them to slay him.

Well worth reading the whole thing and pondering. Also advice on what to do in Iraq.

Muslims Leaving Islam in Droves

Let us hope that this is true.

Interviewed by al-Jazeera in 2006, Ahmad al-Qataani, leader of the Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, explains the decline:

Islam used to represent … Africa’s main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non-Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150 million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century.

On the other hand, the number of Catholics has increased from one million in 1902 to 329 million 882 thousand (329,882,000). Let us round off that number to 330 million in the year 2000.

As to how that happened, well there are now 1.5 million churches whose congregations account for 46 million people. In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed.

One of the problems is that the secularists in the West don't wish to see this conversion take place. In their view, all religion is equally evil.

The baptism of Allam also comes in the midst of papal “dialogue” with Muslims. The dialogue began unpromisingly with the catcalls from Islam and its secularist allies which greeted the now-famous September 20, 2006, papal address at the University of Regensburg. In October, 138 Islamic leaders presented the pope with “A Common Word Between Us and You” — nailed by critics as a craftily written call for conversion. On March 4, Pope Benedict approved formation of a permanent “Catholic-Muslim forum” scheduled to meet in November. And now he has thrown his own call for conversion into the discussion. Islam’s secularist allies were quick to echo Muslims, calling the baptism “provocative.” While accepting the Islamic death penalty for apostasy as a given, they complain the pope’s action could set back dialogue.

British Muslims 'planned to kill thousands by bringing down SEVEN transatlantic airliners in one go with liquid bombs'

A gang of British Muslims planned to blow up seven planes within hours in the biggest terrorist atrocity since 9/11, a court heard yesterday.

Two thousand passengers would have died in the plot by eight fanatics working "in the name of Islam", the jury was told.

It could have involved up to 18 suicide bombers. And they were almost ready to strike.

The jets they targeted would all have been bound from Heathrow to cities in the U.S. and Canada, it was claimed.

Can we go in for profiling now?

None, NONE, NOT ONE of the people who I have seen pictured as a terrorist or terrorist wanna-be looks like the typical American being told to put their belt, shoes, watch, camera, handbag, jacket and respirator onto the grey bins at the screening line at the airport.

The Color Stupid: My ongoing problem with Alice Walker is not her crappy writing

Dead newspapers still insist on putting their idiots online where, like the hidden turds in a bank of stained February snow, they melt out with Spring.

I try to step around these little gifts strewn on my path through the Internet. But every so often, there is a shit sculpture so exceptional that no matter where you go, no matter how you try to avoid it, you still step in it. You step in it because it is so stunningly stupid it is linked everywhere. And then, because it sticks to your mouse, you drag it back to your home page. Sorry about that.

Case in point -- the recent squeezing of that Novelist Laureate of Loonies, Alice Walker.

The racism of the leading lights of the Black community is now ceaqwling out from under it's rock and standing tall in the full light of the sun:

But enough of these slabs of pap, Ms. Walker. Let's get on to your real reason for loving Obama and feeling he's fit to serve -- he's black. That's really the only qualification he has and it trumps all others. It especially trumps Hillary Clinton who is, according to you, a racist simply because of her birth.

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man". One would think she is just any woman, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in the US in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to try to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

So, Ms. Walker, at the end of the day you hold that Clinton is not a viable candidate for President because she cannot be "innocent of her racial inheritance?"

I hold no brief for Ms. Clinton, Alice, but can you please explain to me why your statement is not one of the most racist remarks to date in this doleful and deeply racist campaign?

Read the rest.

Truth, Put Your Boots On

How one stupid misquote can get traction in the media. Doesn't anyone do any checking?

OBAMA'S DIMESTORE 'MEIN KAMPF'

Ann Coulter tells us about a book that I will not be reading.

If characters from "The Hills" were to emote about race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father."

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read "Mein Kampf" ...

Nearly every page -- save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life -- is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was ... in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Obama tells a story about taking two white friends from the high school basketball team to a "black party." Despite their deep-seated, unconscious hatred of blacks, the friends readily accepted. At the party, they managed not to scream the N-word, but instead "made some small talk, took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor."

But with his racial hair-trigger, Obama sensed the whites were not comfortable because "they kept smiling a lot." And then, in an incident reminiscent of the darkest days of the Jim Crow South ... they asked to leave after spending only about an hour at the party! It was practically an etiquette lynching!

So either they hated black people with the hot, hot hate of a thousand suns, or they were athletes who had come to a party late, after a Saturday night basketball game.

In the car on the way home, one of the friends empathizes with Obama, saying: "You know, man, that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties ... being the only black guys and all."

And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! He actually writes that his response to his friend's perfectly lovely remark was: "A part of me wanted to punch him right there."

Listen, I don't want anybody telling Obama about Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain" line.

Wanting to punch his white friend in the stomach was the introductory anecdote to a full-page psychotic rant about living by "the white man's rules." (One rule he missed was: "Never punch out your empathetic white friend after dragging him to a crappy all-black party.")

Obama's gaseous disquisition on the "white man's rules" leads to this charming crescendo: "Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger."

For those of you in the "When is Obama gonna play the 'N-word' card?" pool, the winner is ... Page 85! Congratulations!

When his mother expresses concern about Obama's high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother's hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: "It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."

First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama's entire presidential campaign. But moreover -- he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: "Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning." Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?

The man is stark bonkersville.

He says the reason black people keep to themselves is that it's "easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you."

Here's a little inside scoop about white people: We're not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it.

In college, Obama explains to a girl why he was reading Joseph Conrad's 1902 classic, "Heart of Darkness": "I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. I helps me understand how people learn to hate."

By contrast, Malcolm X's autobiography "spoke" to Obama. One line in particular "stayed with me," he says. "He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged."

Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- Wright is Booker T. Washington compared to this guy.

Buy "Outside the Wire"

See what's really going on in Iraq and show that a pro-troops documentary beats an anti-troop documentary.

Turner: Global Warming Will Cause Mass Cannibalism, Insurgents Are Patriots

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder:

On not taking drastic action to correct global warming:

Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state -- like Somalia or Sudan -- and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there'll be no more corn grown.

Are these people sane?

Keep talking Ted!

Ann Althouse Opines:

Ted Turner has become a deranged old man.

Moral posturing and the death penalty

Today the death penalty is discussed in two places and the hypocrisy of its opponents is nauseating. At Bearing Drift, we have a post that asks whether the people that elect them or the Democrats who get elected are more at fault when they break their pledges to not raise taxes and to enforce the death penalty.

The very first comment from a moral cretin named J. Tyler Balance calls executing a convicted murderer of a police officer “Murder.” Not to put too fine a point on it, he equates the actions of a cold blooded killer with the actions of someone who kills in defense of his life or the life of another. It murders the language and destroys the meaning of words which are designed to allow people to differentiate between, for example, pushing and old woman to mug her or to get her out of the path of an oncoming bus.

In a fit of moral on-upmanship he put the State in the position of either God or the church when he writes:

I believe that life without parole is the humane solution that would punish the guilty, yet permit the redemption of their souls.

The redemption of the souls of murderers is now the role of the State? This from a resident of the state which finds its holy writ in the writings of Thomas Jefferson who famously penned the words “separation of church and state” which led to the virtual elimination of references to God in schools except as part of a curse?

Not to be outdone, the Virginian Pilot has decided that the unilateral decision on the part of Timmy Kaine to halt the death penalty is not based on his personal preferences (or theirs) but simply the right thing to do. It makes it so much easier to do the “right thing” when its something you want to do all along. But then, hypocrisy never takes a holiday at the Virginian Pilot.

A necessary halt in state executions
GOV. TIM KAINE'S decision to stop executions until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of lethal injection was a prudent move, not a political one.

Yeah, sure.

Pull the other one.

Holy Brothel

Micael Yon reports from the real battle front.

The writing on his chest says “Mujahadeen Tal Afar.” American soldiers told me this image was captured in a raid. The ring and watch on his right hand and wrist indicate he is a “holy warrior,” although his beard might have been shaved as cover. Officers told me this guy was killed, but they had no ready confirmation. In any case, it would be interesting to see the faces of al Qaeda financiers in places like Saudi Arabia, if they saw how their money is being spent. And that’s the truth about al Qaeda.

Rudyard Kipling unburdened

I have long considered Rudyard Kipling one of the great poets of all time. His mastery of language, dialect, meter, rhyme, and truth combine with the fact that his poetry is transparent. It does not require someone’s explanation or interpretation; it’s accessible to anyone who can read English.

At the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, the pinnacle of artistic achievement was assigned to “artists” in various media (in paint, in poetry, in music and in sculpture) whose work needed an instruction manual. Obscurity was praised even as it hid a total lack of talent.

And most of all, Kipling was politically incorrect and the art world hated him for it. Good. You can often tell more about a man from the enemies and friends he makes than from the man himself. Barack Obama is a case in point.

Enjoy the article from the New Criterion.

Here’s my favorite Kipling poem. "Recessional," written for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and attended by all of Europe’s royalty. The last time they would ever get together until World War 1 ended their time in history.

Recessional
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Response to Jonah Goldberg

Jonah,

Like your Liberal reader, I also have gotten about half-way through your book “Liberal Fascism” and it’s a great read. Your response to him is also very good.

But I have one concern and it was triggered again by what you said here:

Which brings us to the second complaint, that it’s just icky to talk about modern liberals like Barack Obama as somehow fascistic. I sympathize (really). But I think this has a lot to do with how we’ve (understandably) demonized the word fascist to simply mean “evil.” I think I’ve gone to enormous lengths to insist that is not how I’m using the word. And so if it makes you feel better to use some other word or phrase – totalitarian, socialistic, collectivist, “political religion” or even “progressive” – that’s fine. But I actually think that if people can get beyond the superficial and emotional connotation of the word “fascist” there’s a very strong case to make that it’s more appropriate than most of the others.

You make the point brilliantly that Fascism is a Left-wing movement. But you may be trying too hard to disarm your opponents on the Left by trying to disassociate Fascism from evil.

The reason we should be on guard against Fascism is because it is opposed to the free expression of individual liberty as we lead our lives. Fascism in all its forms attempts to put us in a straight jacket, always and everywhere “for our own good.” It not only tells us an innumerable number of things we can’t do, but also tells us an equally long list of things we must do. That is not the concept behind the founding of America. In fact, it is a subversion of the American ideal.

But if we remove the taint from Fascism by implying that Fascism is morally neutral, are we not making the same mistake that apologists for Communism have historically made: that it’s a great concept that really has not been tried yet? For them, all past Revolutions were hijacked by unscrupulous men, and we should try it again with better people in charge.

The problem with all collectivist ideologies is that they are premised on a mistaken view of human nature. The genius of America’s founding is that those who created the constitutional checks and balances understood the inherent fallen nature of man very well, seeing in themselves the flaws of all humanity.

Fascism is evil because it is the opposite of freedom. It should be demonized.

This is Zimbabwe

Keeping up with the Zimbabwe elections.

Another Obama Deception: "I don’t take money from oil companies."

From The Corner at National Review

Big Slick [Stephen Spruiell]


Obama puts out another deceptive ad. Factcheck.org calls him on it:

In a new ad, Obama says, "I don’t take money from oil companies."

Technically, that's true, since a law that has been on the books for more than a century prohibits corporations from giving money directly to any federal candidate. But that doesn’t distinguish Obama from his rivals in the race.

We find the statement misleading:

Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses.


Two of Obama's bundlers are top executives at oil companies and are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the presidential hopeful.

New McCain Video

Honor.

Evolution of religious bigotry (The Darwin Fish)

There is a person in my office who has exhibites a “Darwin Fish.” I found it mildly offensive but was at a loss to explain why. Jonah Goldberg has the best explanation I have ever read.

Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXOYE, which not only means fish but serves as an acronym, in Greek, for "Jesus Christ the Son of God [Is] Savior." Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt with a stick or a finger as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren't alone.

In America, the easiest place to find this ancient symbol is on the back of cars. Recently, however, it seems as if Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you've seen these too. The fish symbol is "updated" with little feet coming off the bottom, and "IXOYE" or "Jesus" is replaced with either "Darwin" or "Evolve."
...
As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. "Namely: It's acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with 'Shalom' written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with 'Usury' written inside the same symbol would be an outrage."

But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It's a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap.

Goldberg's article is about the film FITNA and the courage of Geert Wilders vs. the "brave" people who put up their bumper stickers or office signs.

Whatever the faults of "Fitna," it ain't no Darwin fish.

Geert Wilders' film could very, very easily get him killed. (He's already guarded around the clock.) It essentially picks up the work of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a jihadi for criticizing Islam.

"Fitna" is certainly provocative, yet it has good reason to provoke. A cancer of violence, bigotry and cruelty is metastasizing within the Islamic world.

It's fine for Muslim moderates to say they aren't part of the cancer; and that some have, in response to the film, is a positive sign. But more often, diagnosing or even observing this cancer -- in film, book or cartoon -- is dubbed "intolerant" while calls for violence, censorship and even murder are treated as understandable, if regrettable, expressions of well-deserved anger.

It's not that secular progressives support Muslim religious fanatics, but they reserve their passion and scorn for religious Christians who are neither fanatical nor inclined to use violence.

The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

Sadr’s Triumphant Surrender

From Dean's World

The media appear to be unanimous: by getting his butt kicked, surrendering control of Basra, and being mocked as an Iranian catspaw Sadr has… succeeded.

This is bizarre. It’s beginning to sound like the Drive-by-media’s version of Hillary’s great Bosnia adventure.

The reporting all has a Baghdad dateline. The people actually on the ground and feeding this line to tools like the NY Times include a former Captain in Saddam’s army, [Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion] Qais Mizher.


If you look at the NY Times website you will note that there are 313 reports that include this individual. So we are getting the view of a former member of Saddam’s officer corps as our window into what’s happening in Basra.

Many Iraqi politicians say that Mr. Maliki’s political capital has been severely depleted by the Basra campaign

Really? The same Iraqi politicians who were so opposed to Sadr they boycotted talks aimed at a peaceful resolution, calling it a “law and order” issue, thus preventing a quorum?

and that he is in the curious position of having to turn to Mr. Sadr, a longtime rival, for a way out.

Yes, how strange that he would talk to the enemy when negotiating that enemy’s surrender. Bizarre, yet. Perhaps even unique in the annals of war.

I have written a parody of the reporting in the Times as how they would have reported the battle of Gettysburg HERE.

UPDATE:

Michael Ledeen opined on this, which is a useful backgrounder for people who wonder what is going on and why.

The Shi’ites are killing one another all over Iraq, most notably in Basra. Jules Crittendon, as always, has a fine roundup of the (mis)coverage from the MSM, delivers all the right insults (I particularly enjoyed watching the back of his hand slap the unctious Tony Cordesman) and asks all the right questions. What kicked this off? Who’s fighting whom? Who’s gonna win? Is it good for us or bad for us?

Read the rest.

The Tall Tale of Tuzla: Hillary Clinton and her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia

Christopher Hitchens spares no adjectives in explaining why Hillary's lies about her visit to Bosnia is worse than you imagine.