Germany's Dying

With the understanding that the AP is a suspect organization and it's "stories" are often no more than tall tales, here is an AP story that validates Mark Steyn's often stated opinion on the demographic catastrophe overtaking Europe:

BERLIN (AP)--Germany's population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2006 and recorded the biggest drop since the country's reunification in 1990, the government said Friday, days after launching financial incentives designed to stall falling birth rates.

The number of births, meanwhile, was the lowest since World War II.

At the end of 2006, the number of people living in Germany stood at an estimated 82.31 million, 130,000 below the total at the end of 2005, the Federal Statistics Office said.

Germany's population grew in 2001 and 2002. But since then, a birth rate among the lowest in Europe has contributed to widening annual declines of 5,000, 31,000 and 63,000.

Last year, deaths outnumbered births by 150,000, compared to 144,000 in 2005, the statistics office said.

German officials have been reluctant to permit easier labor immigration, despite complaints from industry that they cannot find skilled workers for some jobs. Demographers and economists say the problem will only grow worse, and that an aging population will put serious strains on pension funding and on the economy for lack of workers.

A recent government study forecast that the population could fall as low as 69 million by 2050.

In 2006, births fell from the 686,000 recorded in 2005. The agency gave only a range of 670,000 to 680,000 for 2006. That would be the lowest since World War II and far below the 922,000 births recorded in 1946, when the country lay in ruins after its defeat in World War II.

The population decline was also caused by a drop in net immigration, from 79,000 in 2005 to between 20,000 and 30,000 in 2006.

Starting Jan. 1, the parents of newborn children are entitled to share up to 14
months of leave from their jobs and receive about two-thirds of their net salaries in a bid to encourage couples to have more children.

The move, designed particularly to help working moms have more children, follows similar moves in other European countries concerned about their aging populations.



(END) Dow Jones Newswires

01-05-07 1351ET

Copyright (c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.- - 01 51 PM EST 01-05-07

Mark Steyn: What We Need in New Year is Some Resolution

This is the part that boggles my mind:

I mentioned the old New Year's resolution up above, but in fact that's what I wouldn't mind seeing in 2007: a bit of resolution. There wasn't much in evidence last year. Take another little vignette that'll look good in the movie version:

Mustaf Jama, a Somali ''asylum seeker'' in Britain wanted for the murder of a policewoman, fled the country by taking his sister's passport, wearing a niqab (the full Islamic head-to-toe get-up that covers everything but the eyes) and passing unhindered through the checkpoints at Heathrow.

How about that? It turns out we are profiling after all, but we're profiling everybody except Muslims. Your wizened l'il ol' gran'ma on a Yuletide break to London is bent double and out of breath struggling to take off her coat and shoes. The officials sternly scrutinize her passport to check that the picture matches her flustered and bewildered face. All around her hundreds of women are doing the same, mutely shuffling through the scanner in their stocking feet. But Britain's most wanted man is breezing through because he took the precaution of dressing as a Muslim woman. And it would be culturally insensitive to expose them to the same scrutiny as your gran'ma.

The Kwanzaa Monster

Want to know who created Kwanzaa and how he did it?

Click on the link.

Oh, like Fidel Castro, he had the very useful help of the NY Times.

Religion of Peace

Well worth the read.

Nowadays, when I hear someone say that Islam is a religion of peace, it reminds me of a line from Tim Burton’s disturbing comedy, Mars Attacks: “We have come in peace, please surrender the planet immediately!”

Free Speech Continues Under Siege

The recent decision by a three judge federal court left open the possibility that Americans may have the right to criticize politicians before an election.

McCain-Feingold,otherwise known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act made that an issue.

Captain's Quarters has a good discussion,

Imagine, if you will, the Founding Fathers who wrote and established this amendment. The young Republic had failed in its first incarnation under the Articles of Confederation and had just created a Constitution that gave far greater powers to the federal government. The Bill of Rights came in reaction to that increase in power, and first and foremost came the protection for speech and religion in order to counter the power of federal officials. Do you suppose for a moment that they intended the federal government to act as an approving agent for political speech -- or do you think they intended free speech to check federal power?

The fact that a sitting jurist could calculate such a reversal of the intent and meaning of the First Amendment should shake Americans to their core, if we hadn't already been inured to the sight of judges arrogating powers to themselves and the bureaucracy. However, it does point out the erosive effect of the BCRA and how the "reformers" would eventually send us into an autocracy where the very act of writing this blog could be construed as illegal.

As does George Will. A Retreat on Rationing Free Speech?

A three-judge federal court recently tugged a thread that may begin the unraveling of the fabric of murky laws and regulations that traduce the First Amendment by suppressing political speech. Divided 2 to 1, the court held -- unremarkably, you might think -- that issue advocacy ads can run during an election campaign, when they matter most. This decision will strike zealous (there is no other kind) advocates of ever-tighter regulation of political speech (campaign finance "reformers") as ominous. Why? Because it partially emancipates millions of Americans who incorporate thousands of groups to advocate their causes, groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association.

I am amazed that no one and no group has run a campaign against what has to be the most egregious violation of freedom that has occurred in my lifetime. That is perhaps as ominous as the passage of the bill itself. But perhaps the dogs that claim to speak for us and would be expected to bark - the MSM - is exempt from the law. In fact, but shutting down much of the opposition, the law has made the press more powerful at the expense of the people.

Day By Day on Senator Kerry

AP Contradicts Itself - One Day Apart

AP poll: Americans optimistic for 2007

Poll: Americans see gloom, doom in 2007

Tastefully Covering Saddam's Execution

In From the Cold:

According to Reuters, the major broadcast networks are already discussing how to handle Saddam's date with death. Iraqi officials reportedly plan to tape his execution, raising the question of how to handle those images, if they're offered to western media outlets. Earlier this week, the Iraqi government released video of the mass hanging of 13 convicts, an event some described as "gruesome." In regards to airing Saddam's execution, "taste" has become the operative word on broadcast row:
[snip]
A slight correction, if I may. Al-Jazeera has never aired the execution of a deposed Arab leader, convicted of murdering his own people. But the Qatar-based channel has shown lots of terrorist video of IED attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, depicting the murder and maiming of U.S. soldiers. Ditto for the U.S. networks. Go to their websites and run a search for "video of IED attacks" and you'll get dozens of hits, with links to their stories on that subject. Many of those reports contain footage of IED explosions, or their aftermath.

In other words, it's perfectly acceptable to show a blast that shreds a HUMVEE and kills American soldiers inside, but it's somehow distasteful to air video of Saddam swinging from the end of a rope.

Give me a break.

I wonder if Linda Mason, CBS's arbiter of broadcast news "taste," is concerned about the impact of those HUMVEE explosion on "children who might be watching," particularly those with a mother, father or other relative fighting in Iraq? The answer to that question is apparently "no," because CBS (and its competitors) have made IED blasts a staple of their coverage from Iraq, even if the victims are often Americans, and their pain and suffering is palpable to the U.S. audience. Such hypocrisy from the networks is galling--yet utterly predictable.

Mark Stey on Saddam Hangs

And to have convicted, sentenced and executed the dictator is a signal accomplishment for the new Iraq. When I was in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, shortly after the war, a young boy showed me his schoolbook. It was like my textbooks at his age - full of doodles and squiggles and amusing additions to the illustrations. With one exception: the many pages bearing pictures of Saddam were in pristine condition. Even a bored schoolboy doesn't get so careless that he forgets where not to draw the line. When the cowardly thug emerged from his hole, it was a rare moment: in the fetid stability of the Middle East, how often do you get to see a big-time dictator looking like some boxcar hobo and meekly submitting to a lice inspection by an American soldier?

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn: DISLOCATED DINING

Scroll down for the entire article: Excerpt:

Miss Righter was one of the first to experience an admittedly minor consequence of September 11th but nonetheless a widespread phenomenon: dinner party dislocation. Every few weeks in the British press, you could read some columnist or other announcing that he could no longer bear the company of his friends: progressive lefties bemoaning the way old friends had gone over to the side of the Pentagon warhawks; old-school Marxists who’d campaigned for unilateral nuclear disarmament outside US military bases 20 years ago disgusted at the way their pals were now defending regimes that brutalized women and executed homosexuals. I found myself estranged from many friends in London, including most of my colleagues at The Spectator, wary small-c conservatives for whom the Atlantic alliance has always been a mixed blessing and who couldn’t help feeling, faced with all this “axis of evil” business, that maybe in his frightfully vulgar way Osama had a point – the issue was America, nothing else.
[snip]
It’s not just who’s pro-war and who’s anti-war: in London and even more so in Paris and Berlin and Rome, there’s a third group fighting vainly the old ennui – they can’t understand why chaps who used to be such amusing company are suddenly so bloody primal all the time. Not long ago I found myself sitting next to a cool Nordic blonde who turned out to be the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh. Ms Lindh wanted to know why the Americans present were so “hung up” on war and terror. Why, it was absurd and prevented any normal conversation on the real issues facing the world – welfare, health care, etc. We agreed to disagree. I flew on to Iraq and had a grand old time in the Sunni Triangle. Ms Lindh flew back to Stockholm and was stabbed to death in a department store by an anti-Euro fanatic.
[snip]
In the days after September 11th, I ran into no end of college students eager to lecture me on the “root causes” – poverty breeds despair, despair breeds anger, anger breeds terrorism, terrorism breeds generalizations – yet unable to name the capital of Saudi Arabia or find Afghanistan on a map.

A good man in evil times

Pat Buchanan makes some good points about the presidency of Gerald Ford. For those who are too young to know, this is the most important thing I remember about his presidency:

Partly because of the pardon, the GOP suffered a loss of 48 House seats that November. In January 1975, a radical Congress was sworn in, determined to end all aid to our allies in Southeast Asia, bring about their defeat, then tear apart the CIA and FBI.

In April, Hanoi, with massive Soviet aid, launched an invasion of South Vietnam. Ford went to Congress to beg for assistance to our embattled Saigon allies. His request was rebuffed. Two Democrats walked out of the chamber.

Within weeks, South Vietnam and Cambodia had fallen, and Pol Pot's holocaust had begun. By summer, tens of thousands of Vietnamese had been executed, scores of thousands put into "re-education camps," and the first of hundreds of thousands had pushed off into the South China Sea, where many drowned and others met their fate at the hands of Thai pirates.

Watergate, the Nixon resignation and the political upheavals that accompanied it were not merely a domestic US affair. Thanks to these political events, millions of people died. They may have been little brown people and their deaths may be disassociated from the radicals and the Leftists who rioted in the streets, and that is how history is taught - for now. But the reality is far different. And when the people who still control the textbooks and the newspapers are dead and their grip on "reality" is loosened, this is how they will be remembered. The New York
Times and Walter Cronkite will be identified - with "Der Sturmer" - as accomplices to one of the greatest bloodbaths in the 20th century.

Post Mortem on Saddam

This is profound:

That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.

Time for Duke spotlight to shift to Nifong

From the San Diego Union Tribune:

The players' accuser – a troubled young woman with a history of mental health problems – had given wildly conflicting accounts, variously saying she was gang-raped by two, three, four, five or 20 players. No one – including another stripper at the team party the night of March 13 – corroborated her account. Medical records also didn't back her claims.

So how could Nifong prop up her credibility? By having her identify her attackers – in a police lineup made up solely of Duke lacrosse players. As defense lawyers said, this amounted to “a multiple-choice test in which there were no wrong answers.” As it turned out, one of the players the accuser named – Seligmann – had an airtight alibi. But still Nifong proceeded. He simply didn't care.

This isn't just bad judgment. It's a shocking abuse of power. Given his plain motive – Nifong won re-election by depicting himself as the crusader who wouldn't let privileged white kids get away with brutalizing a young black woman – it is also despicable in its raw demagoguery. All this is why we look forward to the Durham DA having his own day in court.

Watching coverage of Saddam's execution on CNN.

From Countercolumn:

Tape after tape of Saddam speaking to adoring throngs, of him smiling at a conference table, of Saddam demurely being poked and prodded by an American medic shortly after his capture.

Noticably absent:

Mass graves
Screaming Kurds and Shia
People being forced to blow themselves up.
People being thrown from high buildings while handcuffed.
People who had their hands cut off by his jailers.
People having their tongues cut out on camera.
Halabja.
Any interviews with Saddam's victims.

You speak not for us

From EU Referendum, the one who exposed "Green Helmet Guy."

The European Union has condemned Saddam Hussein's execution, despite it being carried out with a delicious sense of justice inside one of his former torture centres.

One top EU official has even called it a "barbaric" act that could create an undeserved martyr.

And here is our response: you speak not in our name, nor in the name of the peoples of Europe. You were not elected by us and we did not appoint or authorise you to speak in our name. Nor in the name of the former citizens of Halabja, now deceased, and the hundreds of thousands of others lying in mass graves. We are with the people of Baghdad, shown here today (below), celebrating.

General Mattis clearly isn't clued into the latest leak of classified information from hardened combat insiders like Thomas Ricks.

The brave reporters from the MSM vs. the General. Who are your going to believe?


Read the whole thing, but here is something telling about the MSM and the accuracy of its reporting:

I was talking to a lieutenant in Haditha, he told me that because they are now all connected nowadays in their FOBs, he could read stories about Haditha. He said, 'I guarantee you there has not been a reporter in Haditha in my last two and a half months here.'
We're seeing, I think, an unwitting passing of the enemy's message, uncritical, unwitting passing of the enemy's message because the enemy has successfully denied the Western media access to the battlefields.

I'm not sure what Lloyds of London is charging now, I think it's over $5,000 a month insurance for a reporter or photographer to go in. But the murder, the kidnapping, the intimidation means that, in many cases, we have media folks who are relying on stringers who are Iraqi.

Now you can have any kind of (complaint) about the American media or Western media you want, but there is at least a nod, an effort toward objectivity. The stringers who are being brought in, who are bringing in these stories, are not bringing that same degree of objectivity.

So on the one hand, our enemy is denying our media access to the battlefield, where anything perhaps that I say as a general is subject to any number of interpretations, challenges, questions, but the enemy's story basically gets there without that because our media is unable to challenge them. It's unwitting, but at the same time, it can promote the enemy's agenda, simply because there is an apparent attempt at objectivity.


Sheesh. Can you believe this garbage? Now who are you going to trust - this yayhoo, or the word of a reliable anonymous source leaking classified material he swore never to divulge to the press on the condition that they conceal his identity, lest he be fired and prosecuted for breaking the law?

Yeah. I thought so. The man obviously doesn't know a thing about war. Now where are those Thomas Ricks and Carl Woodward articles, so I can read 'real Washington insiders' tell me how the White House doesn't listen to the Generals?

The Imperative Of The Age

Francis Poretto reminds me that I have not made any New Year resolutions. Truth be told, I never make New Year resolutions. But this time it’s different. Thanks to the threats we face in the world, I will make two resolutions.

I am going to get a copy of the Koran and read it. As Francis points out, few people know what it contains first hand. Given that the Islamofascists and their willing accomplices in organizations like CAIR seem to be guided by the Koran, it’s useful to know exactly what the Koran instructs Muslims to do. I have Jihad Watch on my list of favorites. I intend to read it regularly.

I am going to sharpen my shooting skills. It’s a fact that the police have no legal obligation to protect you wherever you are. They have the obligation to try to arrest those who leave your lifeless body bleeding on the ground, but protection? No really. Besides, there are too few of them; they are not my or your personal body guards. Self reliance and personal protection have been an American tradition.

By all means, read Poretto’s essay. It may make you make a few New Year’s resolutions.

Video of Saddam Hanging

Scroll down

Taxi Driving in Seattle

Roger Simon recounts a surreal experience with a Somali taxi driver in Seattle.

We found one quickly. It was driven by an African guy. We had to instruct him about the location of our hotel; it was new. In the course of this I asked him where he was from. Kenya, he said. But then quickly added he was Somali. Many Somalians live in Kenya.

Ah, Somalia. Immediately the three adults in the car perked up. We acknowledged we knew there was big trouble in that country, the attack from Ethiopia on the ICU, etc. To our surprise, our driver immediately launched into a vitriolic attack on Al Qaeda. They were evil violent men, hijacking Islam across the globe. He had details of their infiltration of Somalia from a phone call he had made the previous night, how they were using Saudi money, etc. Thousands of people were being murdered by these Wahhabis for no reason. He was obviously following the situation closely. Al Qaeda was a danger to all mankind, he said.

It was a refreshing to hear this view from a Moslem taxi driver in Seattle. He was obviously pleased that we recognized the travails of his people too. So he continued with his explication of what was behind this terrible situation - how the Moslem religion could have been taken over by these violent forces. Someone was behind the rise of this Saudi Wahhabism . The answer, he said, was Israel. It was all an Israeli plot. They were behind the Wahhabis.

Suddenly our hearts sank. How could a man who seemed so reasonable, so knowledgeable, say something so obviously crazy?

Just then we were at our hotel. Sheryl and I left the cab, stunned. I phoned Gerard from the airport. What had the man said on the way to his place? Gerard - wisely - had let him continue. There was no point in fighting with a man like that. Better to learn how his mind worked. Gerard simply inquired why the Israelis would want to back Al Qaeda when Al Qaeda was sworn to destroy Israel. The man replied by talking about his childhood, his Islamic education. He had learned about the Jews from the Koran. That was the truth, of course.

Taxi driving in Seattle. So it goes.

Katrina and the Government

Scott Ott, editor of Scrappleface gives a non-satirical answer to a question of regarding the REAL Katrina tragedy.

I can't do it justice, you have to read the whole thing.